The human tendency is to reduce all things to parts. For example, we say "part of my job," "part of my life," "part of my body." But in identifying our life and being as having "parts" we are inadvertently subjecting ourselves to various material beliefs regarding partition: breakage, dislocation, malfunction, division, loss, weakness. This concept of life as made up of parts is based on the premise that substance is material.
Actually, substance is whole, complete, safe in God, as Christ Jesus proved in his resurrection and ascension; it is spiritual, not material. If we understand and apply this primary distinction that substance is spiritual, we can rescue every good and useful aspect of our lives from the destructive consequences of the erroneous belief in material fragmentation. In Ecclesiastes the Preacher expressed his concept of spiritual wholeness this way: "I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it."Eccl. 3:14.
In Jesus' parable of the prodigal son related in Luke's Gospel, the younger son took his portion of the inheritance from his father. Subsequently, through a lack of wisdom, he lost it. His father, however, was able to restore to his unwise son the true substance of his inheritance. He was also able to reassure his elder son, "Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine."Luke 15:31. Not half, but all. What an extraordinary sense of the wholeness and indivisibility of substance Jesus illustrated in the father's response to his sons!
