For This Reason 28

[HKHaugan]

For This Reason 28

When Paul says “You must no longer live as the Gentiles do in the futility of their thinking (Eph.4:17)” he is addressing the wide gulf that exists between faith and non-faith. There are many we run into in our everyday world who are in either a no-Christ or semi-Christ condition.
This is far more common place than you may think so we need to be spiritually alert in our casual encounters which just, by the way, may happen to be God’s work given to us as an opportunity to witness. What could that thinking look like?

When we worship we worship the God that is. When atheists worship they worship the god that isn’t. The foundation of unbelief is belief in unbelief. It is a foundation built on negating reality. Everything is approached not based on what is but on what isn’t. Its effect on the mind is to begin by negating everything and seeing nothing as the object of adoration, which is nothing with a capital N. What is left is the individual in all its aloneness whose negativity is the methodology of life.

The god ‘Nothing’ negates the need for morality, to live only for self and to find trust in others based on their agreement to worship and serve Nothing. When any unseen reality appears it is negated as unreality. So, love, hate, freedom, good and evil are all negative terms in the religion of unbelief. To be good is to not believe. To be evil is to believe, that is if those words are permitted entry into the world of unbelief which is really an atmosphere of anti-belief which is a very aggressive belief system.

The problem here is it is absolutely impossible not to believe. Every human being is built to believe. You will believe in something even if it is as wild as not believing. If you retreat into the ‘I-don’t know’ phase known as agnosticism (Gk.,agnosia-not knowing) it is simply worshiping the god called apathy on the internal altar of ‘I-don’t-really-care-one-way-or-the-other.’

In order not to asphyxiate its followers with positive appraisal one has to practice non-belief by accepting a working negative methodology which includes de-evangelizing (repudiating spirituality), demythologizing (denying spirituality) and destroying (aggressively attacking) existing spiritual belief systems, first in the self, then in extending that thinking into the arena of relationships.

The irony is that one has to believe in not believing in order to take on that process. It breeds a morality all its own. Spirituality is immoral and anti-spirituality is moral. You can see where this leads when it comes to behavior in relationships and business. Spiritual realities like trust, love, compassion and moral judgment have no foundation since they are irrelevant due to them being immoral by unbelieving standards. Why obey laws and have any value system?

Recently an atheist applied to become a military chaplain. He will inevitably have to teach his followers how to not pray to nothing, find comfort in being nothing and building a fellowship arouind nothing. The interesting thing about unbelief is if spirituality and God are non-existent then why all the fuss? Why be anti-spiritual? Why all that energy spent on ‘Nothing?’ That takes faith beyond the beyond of nothing.

In my own experience of meeting those who have this ‘belief in unbelief’ position I have found both an emotion based hostility fueled by anger, a determined obsession with putting believers on the defensive and exposing hypocrisy as intellectual proof for arguing against positive belief. There is no question in my mind that it is a spiritual obsession, a stronghold, which only prayer and a persistent calm approach can penetrate. This is where a loving heart places the need of that person above one’s own urgency to bring them to belief. This is being aware that belief comes with God’s timing through the work of the Holy Spirit both in the heart of the believer and the unbeliever. It is a simultaneous test for the believer and a spiritual offering for the unbeliever whether or not it is accepted. Here Paul makes real sense, “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouth, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen (Eph.4:29).”

Paul’s teaching here gives us three salient points to consider when dealing with ‘faith challenged’ people: unwholesome talk, being helpful and the listener.

First, unwholesome talk.
We usually look at this as crude joking and obscenity but if you see the root ‘whole’ here that extends its meaning to include any comment that narrows the love of God in a conversation. If we allow ourselves to become defensive along with the emotion that it can produce it does not help our message of faith nor does it respect the God image in the person we are addressing. That adds the ‘un’ to whole and it becomes unwholesome. This can also be said for gossip which is essentially bearing false witness. The call to us is to be open to any and all comments and ready to be led to the open moment for a Spirit-led response.

Second, helpful building up.
Are we listening spiritually? When someone who is not a believer goes on a rant or has good intellectual points or tends to give flippant replies are we listening to the spirit behind what is being said? Everyone has strongholds that trigger their responses. Many are based on an emotional pain that has caused them to build a defensive wall. Our responses to what we hear have to be helpful, based on patient listening, sensing spiritually and offering a willingness to absorb whatever is being said. The goal is to assess what their real needs are and give a helpful response that will build them up

Third, are they listeners?
If our goal is to be helpful then we have to be alert to whether or not they are really listening to the responses we are offering. Sometimes people listen and sometimes they don’t. A person who is willing to listen can be helped but if they are the kind just intent on maintaining their position of self-pity or hostility or just plain resistant, the call is patience. For some you just have to ‘shake the dust off your feet’ and move on. Think of it in Paul’s terms of someone who plants, someone who waters but later it is God who does the real work. It is as important to plant as it is to water but in the end God has His will done. If you plant or water and there seems to be no result---remember, God’s Word never returns void (Is.55:11).”.