For This Reason 26

[HKHaugan]

When I became a Christian I became a conscious disciple of the Lord Jesus. It was not just the gift of reason that got me there. It was more than logical acknowledgment of the historical Jesus and His sublime character and effect on civilization. It was more than being involved in the institutional church, its creeds, services and theology. Lots of people have those things. I had all that but it wasn’t enough. I was itching spiritually but unable to scratch. It was the gift of the Holy Spirit that awakened me, enlightened me, made me aware of the spiritual reality of Jesus that lay behind the structure I had been given and blessed with. That’s when I actually asked Him to take the wheel. It was like I had been in a ‘driver’s ed’ class for years but now it was up to me to get real with God which, by the way, is a daily awakening.

After opening up to Jesus, His Word seemed to make more sense than it ever had before. It was the work of the Spirit. With Him came the gift of spiritual sensitivity that alerted me to the specifics of sin and its very personal complications in me and in my surroundings. The inner struggles of sin cannot just be written off as psychological disturbances I can treat with therapy. They are recognizable and discernible spiritual issues from which I can be delivered through prayer, sharing, repentance and forgiveness. Some require more intimate counsel, time and effort.

I was also alerted to the spiritual reality behind everything you see. The entire universe is a container of spiritual backdrops. That is, everything has a spiritual counterpart. Hebrews 8:5 talks about the sanctuary of the temple being a copy and shadow of what is in Heaven. I found that principle can be seen in behavior, in literature, drama and art. Movies are no longer movies but vehicles in which spiritual reality is being expressed. Music and lyrics reveal the spiritual nature of a society. Behind each experience of our five senses a spiritual reality is being revealed if we are willing to recognize them.

If we take behavior for example it is the spiritual condition of a person that dictates what they think and motivates how they act. Every conclusion a person makes about life, every opinion, choice and decision is spiritually shaped. This brings us to the issue of spiritual influences that can be either from God and the One Spirit or from a figure that is more real than the myth he carefully hides behind, namely the devil. Being spiritually aware you know he is for real. He directs a myriad of evil spirits ready to pounce on the weaknesses in our mind, heart and spirit. He pounds on our attitude, desires and weaknesses. In Jesus we know that the Holy Spirit is far more powerful than he and his minions are but that doesn’t stop him.

Here is where the context of a spiritual family comes in. It is where worship, Scripture study and open honesty build a foundation of Holy Spirit balanced reason, awareness and sensitivity that open us and free us to respond in faith regardless of the circumstance. Your reason is awakened and you can feel the difference when you sense the need to make choices for your best interest and the interest of others. You know there is a battle within when choices have to be made. You find yourself really aware of yourself and others being images of God, being sensitive to their needs and helping them before we help ourselves which is consciously giving away that which we have received. And many times that is a real struggle. Being part of a spiritual family builds our spiritual character. Therefore, it is important to be in that context as we develop these faculties given us by our Creator. Let’s look at them as part of the manifest in our spiritual giftedness. I’ll use Pauls’ teaching in Ephesians 4:17-19 as a backdrop.

Reason--- “So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of the their thinking (vs.17).”
Scripture gives us the ground for reason. Reason gives us the ability to define being an image of God, being human, being alone and having a body. Reason helps us sort out aloneness conceptually, organizing our thought process, our choices and decisions regarding it. Reason gets us to assess and order where we are in relationship to others. Its big questions are who, why, when, where and how?  Everything is configured in Jesus Christ.

Awareness---“They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts (vs.18).”
As that Scripture tells us, behind everything seen there is an unseen reality. It reveals that there is an endless spiritual dimension. Awareness gives us the entry into the unseen. There is more than what our reason can explain like the feeling of being alone and the feeling of being together, the heart behind the heart, of love and hate, how others like us have the same feelings and what aloneness and togetherness bring. It alerts us to its consequences both positive and negative. It may very well be one of our most avoided abilities since it takes us into the depths of our unknown self which is not always a comfortable experience. It alerts us to how much and how deep is our need for a Savior.

Sensitivity---“Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more (vs.19).”
Sensitivity centered in the Lord enables us to spiritually perceive what is happening around us in the unseen like sensing specific attitudes, feelings and spirits. It helps our reason to speculate about what might be going on in others and the world around us as well as the specifics of our own reaction to them. It enables us to identify strongholds, those emotional and attitudinal blocks to relational honesty. Sensitivity through the Holy Spirit enables us to sense the spiritual condition in others and minister to their needs.

Finally it is faith in Jesus that puts it all together and motivates our action after we have fully employed reason, awareness and sensitivity or at least were mindful of the need for their balance. The problem arises when one becomes dominant and is deified as truth in and of itself. Each one can become cultic, like many academics in our university communities that place the mind above the heart and spirit. It’s really putting the cart before the horse when we act solely on what the mind or heart or spirit alone direct. It is the balance that Jesus has and offers through His Holy Spirit that can cancels the power of sin and restores our balance.

What has happened to reason, awareness, sensitivity and faith when separated from God?

The Greeks were good examples of man making an idol by deifying reason. Much of Greek philosophy was centered in the mind which was considered a shadow copy of some perfect mind in the beyond. It was even called a god by some. Reason is what made life real for them. One modern atheistic philosophy based on Ayn Rand’s objectivism places reason on the level of worship causing one critic to say its followers spell reason with a capital ‘R.’ The heart and spirit are irrelevant. Everything and anything can be dealt with by reason. It’s the prevalent disease on secular college campuses today. When academic leadership has sought to deny the place of the heart and spirit in humanity they are in actuality denying their own humanity. Guess where that comes from. Absorption in academics, developing reasoning faculties becomes the main objective and leads to the worship of reason. Reason demands constant reevaluation of the mind which means the self becomes obsessively indulged. So one’s personal intellect is a personal minor god on the Mt. Olympus of Reason. See what I mean?

Now let’s take awareness. Awareness for example has become for some a religious experience. It comes from our 60’s infatuation with Asian religious systems. When I say religious I mean it becomes a system of principles and practices based on the assumption that life in this world is suffering. The more the mind thinks, the more the heart feels, the more the spirit seeks, the more suffering increases. The objective is to be released from anything that causes suffering, to set one’s self in a mode of releasing the tensions and stress of living by denying their reality. This can be accomplished by meditative means until the sense of personal identity is lost and a sense of oneness with existence is reached. It’s taking the experiences of both memory and the moment and letting them fade until they have neither identity nor force. Personal awareness then, like reason, is spelled with a capital ‘A’ erasing the need for an identifiable objective point of reference. God, Holy Trinity, Scripture, sin and righteousness, become meaningless since the goal is “Awareness” itself. The assumption is that it must be right because you feel better through the release that comes from meditative practice.

There are four problems here: denial of self, flawed perception of the unseen, the need for repetition and the necessity of definition:

The first problem with awareness being the goal is that reason and sensitivity become unnecessary because reason is seen as blocking awareness and sensitivity because they define the unseen. Reason seeks orderly thought, concepts and conclusions. Order means definition and definition of anything is a distraction from being aware. Just my attempt right this moment to define an issue is a distraction that can and must be avoided. To undo the problem of definition you embrace self-contradictory concepts like knowing is not knowing, feeling is not feeling, hearing is not hearing and meditate on them. This leads to a process of de-identifying that of which you are conscious, the chain that binds, until you feel free of the constriction of its definition. You embrace the thought in order to experience freedom from it. For many it works. But notice how self-centering this becomes. Personal release, denial of the self becomes the objective and the goal until awareness of not being is reached, a very lonely and self-indulging end.

Denial of self sounds Christ-like but that is the point. It’s trying to be Christ-like without Christ. The purpose of Christ-like thinking is first, a defined dependent relationship with Jesus, secondly, a conscious obedience to His Word which leads thirdly, to a defining love and service for others. It is Jesus who gives us a clear awareness and sensitivity of and for the entire spiritual dimension as in Heaven and hell, good and evil, light and darkness, righteousness and sin, moral and immoral behavior, the Holy Spirit and evil spirits and their sources.

The second problem is how can you be sure that what you perceive in unseen reality, the spiritual dimension, is ultimately good for you since human perception is imperfect? Awareness alone brings one into a state of suspension where you are open to whatever lies in wait to take you further into its dragnet, whatever ‘it’ happens to be. Perhaps a spirit of false assurance that appeals to our rationalization and serves some personal weakness or self-satisfaction. Just feeling more peaceful, less burdened, devoid of tension and stress is an emotional détente, not a final reality.

The third proves the second and that is the need for repetitive practice which means that awareness is never fulfilled. Since release is temporary the repetition is a process that never ends. Repetition increases the need for denial. But being a disciple of Jesus means we are aware of sin and expect repetition because sin needs repentant attention. It is not to deny it but to embrace it and be forgiven specifically for allowing its intrusion by our self-centered behavior. Then, knowing we are forgiven, we are free to be open to the next moment of possibility instead of being trapped in the self-induced guilt sin produces.

A fourth naturally follows and that is how do you live in a world where definition is the essence of daily living as in family living, personal interaction, physical needs, professional activity, social experience, research and development in every field in a world where definition is on the increase? All these demand action based on definition.

This is reality.

Rather than denial of identity it is necessary to clearly identify that of which we are aware both in the seen and the unseen, the physical and spiritual dimensions. If anything we need to pray for discernment in regard to the specifics that seek to destroy the person in us. This is the aim of the secular and religious atmosphere in which we are presently being assaulted. Pray for the intellect to be sharpened by the Word that spiritual reason prevails, that our awareness of both the physical and spiritual dimensions is increased and that our spiritual sensitivity and discernment are developed.

When sensitivity takes over as the sole means of analysis, reason and awareness take a back seat. We are now in the province of psychology, sociology and psychiatry. They assume that what can’t be seen is all bound up in the emotional nature driving any individual, group and society. Every action and reaction is influenced by a pleasing or corrupted emotion. Whatever is called a spiritual experience is really an emotionally based conclusion. Freud called it in the title of his book, The Future of An Illusion. His summary conclusion is that all thought and behavior is sexually oriented. Reason for him became the tool to reorder his emotional file system. Of course these psycho-social fields have certainly developed far beyond his primitive emotional accounting but there still remains the dominant idea that integrated emotionality can be accomplished by therapy and psychotropic drugs.

Where the world was once a more simple place to define goals and dreams we are now far beyond life being simple. Whether in academia or the daily world we live in, the expansion of every field of thought and activity are so divided into all kinds of specialties that no one is without the complications they impose. It is not a world we are called to escape from but rather one in which a defined relationship with Jesus is the only answer to gain stability and a ‘toe up’ on the ladder of existence. If ever there was a time that needed Him it is certainly now.

The key to any and all issues is the foundation with which we approach them. Since life is based on relationship in every field of human activity it is the foundational relationship we have with God in Jesus that gives us the way to be a person through the truth of His Word and the Spirit of life to motivate us into action. Pauls’ reaction and conclusion to the complicated multi-religious world and philosophy of the Roman Empire was this, “By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as an expert builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should be careful how he builds. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ (1Cor.3:10-11).”