I have gone through a huge paradigm shift over the last couple years when it comes to seeing and experiencing God. This hasn't only been an intellectual overhaul, but an experiential one as well. I have always thought of God as being 'out there'. What do I mean by that? I mean that I have primarily interpreted by thoughts, emotions, and experiences as originating in myself; and therefore since I start from a place of independence, any interaction and pursuit of God has to be towards a God that is 'outside of myself'. Does that make any sense? Believing I am alone; I have prayed and worshiped and interpreted my experience from the standpoint that God is 'out there' somewhere and I want to get Him in with me and my life.
The reason I have thought that way is why we all do. First off, I often feel separate from God! We are all such natural control freaks governed by shame and anxiety, that our experience tells us that we are alone. I often feel alone, feel like everything in me and in my experience originates primarily from myself. I have a very self-centered perspective, the world must revolve around me right? Everybody is so aware of who I am and what I do. . anyone relate?
Unfortunately the feeling of being alone is validated in our lives by theology that tells us we are alone. Christian teachers affirm our 'feelings' by telling us we are excluded by God, that we are separate from Him and He from us. We are told that Jesus made a way for us to 'get' to God, and now it is up to us to put in the right amount of effort in order to do so. Get to God. . . a God that is 'out there', beyond us, and removed from my experience. Like I said in the beginning, my perspective has taken a rather large shift.
First off, I am already extremely self-centered; if I am told that God is 'out there' inviting me to include Him in my life, where am I going to start trying to do that? Through my own behavior of course! I am going to navel gaze, to fall into introspection, and try and figure out what I can do right to get God involved. My faith is going to start with me, what do I need to do in order to get Jesus into my life/heart/whatever you want to call it. As Baxter Kruger so succinctly puts it, "If I need to ask Jesus into my heart then I will spend my whole life trying to get Him in, and the rest of it trying to convince myself that He is actually there."
The idea that God is 'out there' makes a whole lot of sense to my experience; and since I am so used to anxiety and fear, it seems normal to interact with God through that lens of will power and selfishness. That is until I realized that I what I have been trying to make happen has been true all along, I have just been blind to it!
You see, Jesus united Himself to me, to you, and to the whole world. The whole point of Him coming was that we couldn't 'climb the mountain' to 'get to Him'. Jesus, talking about when the Holy Spirit would come said, "on that day you will know, that I am in my Father, that I am in you, and that you are in me (John 14:20)." Wait, what did Jesus just say? He said that the Holy Spirit was going to reveal to us that Jesus is already inside of us! Woah! Take a look at when the apostle Paul was reflecting on encountering God, he sad, 'God was pleased to reveal His son in me.' Wait, so Jesus was already inside a man that was rampaging around killing Christians! Apparently so. Furthermore Paul's mission was to 'reveal Jesus in the Gentiles (Galatians 1:16).' God was in Christ reconciling the cosmos to Himself, Jesus universally represents us all, and included us in His life death and resurrection! I am not separate from Him, Jesus has brought me in, He is inside of me, closer than my next breath!
What does that mean for our faith, for walking out this whole Christian thing? First off, we aren't looking 'out there' for Jesus, we are looking to see Him already with us! That means we have to reinterpret all of our experiences of separation, distance, and exclusion, because they aren't true. Yes you heard me right, those experiences are not what is true in reality. Jesus has always been united to us, always been speaking to us, sharing His life with us, and guiding us. It is our shame, hurt, and pain that blinds us to it; and yet it is actually at the deepest places of our hurt that Jesus united Himself to us! He died for us while we were dead in our sins. It is there, in our hurt and pain where He is doing His redemptive work, that is where He is pouring out streams of living water.
What do we need to do? We need to ask the Holy Spirit to open the eyes of our hearts so that we can see Jesus there. We need to let go of our pretense and shame to actually get deep enough into ourselves to experience the God of life that has been sustaining us all along. We need to learn to recognize how anxiety, fear, and shame influence our perception and decision making. We aren't made to live from those! We need to fight against the lie of separation by calling it a lie. We need to speak the truth so that our minds can come into alignment with reality. I am not separated, I am in union with Jesus. Now I start coming to terms with the contradictions in my experience, the hurt that I feel, and the lies I believe. Now we ask, since Jesus is in me, how has He been at work in my heart and in my life? How is Jesus sharing His life with me in this situation, what is He speaking to me? These aren't questions that make us look outside of ourselves for the answer, but in. He is already with us, already leading and speaking to us. His way is the one of hope, truth, and love; look for how that is taking effect in your life.
We need to interpret our life from union not from separation like we normally do. If I start with separation, the responsibility still rests on my shoulders to get to God; therefore I start from insecurity and remain self centered. If I start with inclusion and union, I learn to let-go of my efforts and to sink into a place of trusting and seeing how Jesus is already holding and sustaining me. In this way my faith starts with Him not with me.
"Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them (John 7:37-38."
Today's My Utmost for His Highest is based on some of the same insights. I think it would be helpful to find points of agreement with classic or respected Christian scholars and teachers like Oswald Chambers and then, in some way (not sure how) have a conversation with the leaders of some seminaries and Bible schools to see whether there can be a revolution in the preparation of the next generation of Christian teachers. Or is it best to just be "a voice crying in the wilderness" like you are now?
ReplyDelete"The Bible does not say that God punished the human race for one man’s sin, but that the nature of sin, namely, my claim to my right to myself, entered into the human race through one man. But it also says that another Man took upon Himself the sin of the human race and put it away— an infinitely more profound revelation (see Hebrews 9:26). The nature of sin is not immorality and wrongdoing, but the nature of self-realization which leads us to say, 'I am my own god.' This nature may exhibit itself in proper morality or in improper immorality, but it always has a common basis— my claim to my right to myself. When our Lord faced either people with all the forces of evil in them, or people who were clean-living, moral, and upright, He paid no attention to the moral degradation of one, nor any attention to the moral attainment of the other. He looked at something we do not see, namely, the nature of man (see John 2:25).
Sin is something I am born with and cannot touch— only God touches sin through redemption. It is through the Cross of Christ that God redeemed the entire human race from the possibility of damnation through the heredity of sin. God nowhere holds a person responsible for having the heredity of sin, and does not condemn anyone because of it. Condemnation comes when I realize that Jesus Christ came to deliver me from this heredity of sin, and yet I refuse to let Him do so. From that moment I begin to get the seal of damnation. 'This is the condemnation [and the critical moment], that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light…' (John 3:19)."
http://utmost.org/the-nature-of-degeneration/