360 Homes in Home Religion
- This page is part of an ERW course: Home Church.
- By John Eagles, May 28, 2007.
What is the purpose of Home Religion? The purpose is that you as individual will restore yourself to find fulfillment in life and unity with God. You were created in the image of God, as a being with freedom and responsibility. It is your goal to make yourself a person in whom God's spirit can descend.
Though your goal of perfection in the love of God can only be reached when you as an individual go your course of development, you were not created to be isolated from others. We all live in relations. It is only in relations that we can express and receive love. God is not only your God but also the God of all people around you.
We need to restore ourselves as individuals, but we need to do this in relation to people around us. You can only give love to people when you as individual really have become a valuable and original person expressing the love of God. This is only possible when you have built up good relations to a certain group of people around you.
You or I am the center of the cosmos. This is so from an original viewpoint, considering the value that each person has for God. In deepest love for God, God is our parent and for parents each of their children has the same value, which basically is the same as the value of the parent. This is spoken about the ideal situation. In Home Religion the purpose is to restore this ideal situation.
In Home Religion you are the center of the cosmos. The cosmos was built according to exact principles and numbers are part of these principles. This is why in Home Religion we need to fulfill certain numbers in connection to certain tasks. The numbers have a logical meaning, though the numbers that i will give you for the practice of Home Religion were not logically calculated, but were revealed. I will give some explanation for these numbers.
When you restore yourself as an original being, you do this in relation to God and in relation to the cosmos of created beings and things. Because one individual cannot relate to all beings in the cosmos, in Home Religion the cosmos is represented for you by a number of people. This number is 360 homes or approximately 3,000 people.
There are 360 degrees in a circle, so the number 360 represents the circle of the cosmos around us.
What does it mean in practice? You as individual are committed to restore yourself to become someone united with God. This is a goal, not something that will be reached easily. It can also not be reached when you just isolate yourself as an individual. Though isolation may be very useful and necessary for some periods of our life, eventually we cannot ignore that we relate to people around us and that we are continuously influenced by them. What we want to reach is perfection of our love, first of all, and love is something that needs to be expressed and tested in relation to other people.
To make sure that your love can stand the test of love, you are going to develop your love in relation to the whole cosmos. Because you cannot really to relate to everyone in the cosmos, you choose a symbolical number of people, 360 homes, that represent the cosmos to you.
You must develop and prove your love in relation to these 360 families. These 360 families are not just people whom you picked because you like them. The 360 families need to be a fair representation of the world, so that your love can grow not only in relation to people whom you like but also in relation to people whom you find difficult to love.
In this way you are practicing yourself that your love becomes like God's love. God loves all people, not only those who believe in God, but also those who never heard of God. For God, all people are like God's children. Some may be elder, many be lost, but God's love is for each of them.
360 homes represent the world or the cosmos to you. They become the environment in which your love can grow. Your love grows by taking responsibility for people. As an individual you cannot take responsibility for all the problems of the world, but you learn to take responsibility for a representation of the world in your own 360 homes.
You make yourself the center of 360 homes, not externally by stating yourself as leader, but internally because of your commitment to take responsibility for these homes and by loving the people in these homes. It means that you will be confronted with all problems of the world. Your love for God and for people will be tested continuously. Through this testing, your love will grow and you can learn everything you need for your own religious and spiritual development.
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