Let's Talk About Inner'ds and Out'rds

[HKHaugan]

Let’s Talk About Our Inner’d and Outr’d

 God of the ‘innerd’s’ and God of the ‘outrd’s’ as colloquially put, is a fact, the first part of which is avoided in the public sphere.  Jesus says it plainly, “God is Spirit and His worshipers must worship Him in Spirit and in truth (Jn.4:24).”  The innerd’s are spiritual.  The ‘you’ and ‘me’ are spiritual.  Our identity is spiritual.  Our birth, life and death, where we are headed, are all spiritually embraced.  The whole of existence both visible and invisible was spiritually intended, conceived and created.  Just logically it follows that how we approach life, the ‘outrd’s’, every day has to be spiritually assessed. 

 But that is not how we are conditioned by the non-spiritual world of people around us.  The very structures of human society are viewed from a physical security context.  Its laws, its educational, governmental and social institutions are run with a materialistically centered orientation.  Human society operates with a polite acquiescence to moral values and principles of behavior but driven by physical survival as its motivation.  Superficial cooperation, tolerance and reduced confrontation are the means of survival, the guarantee of continuing life while the undercurrent of unresolved individual inner restlessness remains. 

 This is where Jesus enters the picture to reveal that the first part, the innerd’s, are what really run the world that is human society.  His life was a mission.  It was a mission to deal with the innerd’s and expose the problem they present, the self-centered problem of sin, the spiritual infection that causes us to think of self-first, self-survival and whatever can provide self-security.  Everyone is born with it, but no one wants to face it.  Jesus offers a relationship with Him that counters the influence of sin.  Jesus shows that it is the individual as he believes, feels and is motivated, that really drives human existence. 

 History is a continual reminder of the importance of the individual and how that very thought is contrary to those who run the social institutions that gather individuals together.  It is those who rise to the level of leadership in them that are influenced by fear, a spiritual reality that defies outspokenness.  Those who run the social machinery have the same innerd’s which are mostly fear driven.   Jesus confronted the leadership of His time with the fact of sin and was executed for it.  The reason?  Simple.  If individuals can find an inner security to think and act apart from the human fears that govern them within and without, free from oppressors, yet submitted to a way of life that is non-threatening, they are by their nature a threat.  Leaders have no control, no leverage.  What they fail to understand is that God is the one who is in control of those innerd’s. 

 It is God who is fulfilling what He wanted in the first place, a human society that produces a spiritual reconstruction of peaceful and contributing people thriving in the Spirit.  Think of what might happen if science, economics, education and government were spiritually directed.  They would be discovering new ways to use the physical resources God has provided in His Creation.  Every field of endeavor would find ways to solve poverty, disease, bias and emotional distress.  Wars would end and people would see themselves as God’s family of images made to be like Him. 

 These are the things that Jesus brings to the table of human development.  Starting with a relationship Jesus offers, the mind, heart and spirit in the individual would be spiritually free and engaged in a productive activity.  This is the Kingdom Jesus taught us to pray for, a Kingdom of hearts relationally led to see God leading through His Son in the Holy Spirit (Mt.6:10).

 Here is why we pray, why we believe and why we try and show the love of God available to each person with whom we come in contact.  It is His grace that touches the heart and brings us together in Him.  The mission Jesus was given is the one He gives us.  “As the Father has sent me, that’s the way I am sending you,’ He told His disciples (John 20:21).  We were made to be ‘inner’d’ in order to be ‘outr’d.’