Let's Talk About Spiritual Destiny

[HKHaugan]

Let’s Talk About Spiritual Destiny

We’ve been talking about the Kingdom of God, its presence amongst us and the impact it has on us.  It is why we were created by God.  He desires out presence in it.  We can taste some of its quality now. His grace, His love, His truth and the relationship we have with Him through His Son Jesus.  The entry way, the gate, the door if you will, is that relationship.  We may know that personally and made that decision but there are many around us who haven’t. The following is written to give disciples of Jesus a ground for sharing Jesus and why He makes sense in the midst of a world in spiritual chaos.  It is brief but pointed.  It comes along side the unbelieving mind and its usual objections to anything spiritual.  But that’s where we start with our premise.

The first and foremost experience of God is in a mirror, the face of Jesus.  When we see Him, we see the exact image of God.  We also see something else, His gaze fixed on us to show that we were made in His image to be like Him.  We know as we gaze upon Him, we are far from being like Him because of our self-centered nature arising from the sin we inherited from Adam.  But that face is always accepting and loving.  When we read His Word, we see more than words because of the inner imagery that emerges as we read it.  The Word of God causes all kinds of reactions.  It is meant to.  Think of them.  Think alongside those who have trouble believing.

There is implausibility for their minds.  How could the miracles and events in the Bible happen, the floods, delivery through the parting of the Red Sea, Jonah and the whale and of course, the whole Adam and Eve saga?  C’mon.  Then Jesus’ life of doing the impossible, changing water into wine, raising people from the dead, walking on water and Him dying and being raised.  It’s too much for the mind to grasp much less believe.  Yet there it all is in His Word.  The images to be imaged are our imagination gone wild. Yet the leap into their acceptance, crossing the wide gap between the searching mind and its satisfaction is the one we were made for.  It is looking at what appears to be an unyielding distance and a distance we are drawn to resolve within, of all places, our mind and heart.  The inner challenge to a mind set in the blurring agony of a divided world outside and the inner agony of sickness, disease and death, the endless need to just survive.  What is the truth about life in this world?  What is its purpose?  How do we prove the unproveable?

But there’s more than the mind.  There’s the heart and its influence on the way we live, the way we feel about ourselves and others, act out our lifestyle from day to day.  The relationships we have, the aloneness of living in a body that requires more than upkeep.  The heart is aware of its aloneness and its need for others.  It feels what others feel.  It harbors our relational attitudes as it grasps for words to describe its unwordable experience.  We may use our mind to explain it but what the heart seeks is beyond explanation.  Yet there in its depth it is the heart that defines our being and controls the way we live.  It’s there in the heart that our fears, yearnings, attitudes and emotions are the trip wires that determine our outward responses in the outside world of people.  The heart is how and where we are wired.  The heart uses our mind to rationalize and justify us.  Its defense is pride and fear.  How do we resolve the heart?

There’s still one more part of us, our spirit.  Our spirit is what drives us.  It uses the conclusions we make with our minds, the attitudes we use to relate to others and drives us to act because of them.  Our spirit is our built-in motivator.  It is the engine that moves us from still to start to go, the spark igniting our choices and decisions.  Our spirit energizes the mind and heart’s determination to be a someone going somewhere doing something to be a somebody.  It is the spirit in us that identifies us in the world.  The spirit in us depends on the mind and heart’s input.  Our spirit knows, reacts within and obeys our inner compulsions which means everything from fear to love to hate and just being. Our confidence, our reticence, our ambition, our hesitancy, our desperation, our needs, our desires all find their drive in our spirit.  Just what are we using to feed our spirit?

The one thing that marks every person’s self-imagery is aloneness.  No one comes into this world at one with anyone, ready to have an open honest relationship and be a confident fearless human being.  We are born alone into a life of struggle for identity, meaning, purpose and action.  Even our families, our closest relational experiences, are fraught with conflict as we all know.  Marriages and friendships are an attempt at reconciliation, but they too are unsettled and unsettling.  Is there any way to overcome this muted and hopeless condition?

We have an answer.  Not everyone will accept it but whatever people come up with has to meet the three-fold nature that we possess.  So, where do we begin?  Let’s start with the nature we were given at birth.  We have a mind, heart and spirit with basic functions.  The mind believes, the heart trusts and the spirit acts in faith.  Everything we do is based on how these three work together.  From birth we learn from parents and our surrounding culture a set of goals that are used to give us purpose, meaning and an acceptable identity.  Choice and decision making is our life process.  The question therefore is who and what we choose to believe to direct the process after we leave our parents, schools and their conditioning.  What do we do when we are on our own, when our life is ours to determine and when we face the inevitable inner, relational and professional conflicts?  This is when we leave the nest of home and its early securities. 

Our answer is timeless.  It is God our Creator who has designed us with this three-fold nature that is an image of Him.  We are made in His image and likeness and His Son Jesus is the visible reality of His presence.  From His birth to His death and Resurrection He lived a human life with the same human image, the three-fold image we have.  A relationship with Him meets our mind, heart and spirit needs.  He fills our image full when we choose to let Him direct us.  The reason is that we are spiritual beings having a human experience.  When we see this invisible reality is the one our heart is yearning for, then and only then do we see that what we are temporarily in this world finds its resolution eternally in Him and where He is in the spiritual Kingdom of Heaven.

What else in this world in any philosophy, religion or political system can measure up to what Jesus brings to Wthe mind, heart and spirit of a human being?  This is not only a question for the present and getting through this world.  The consequence of our choice goes on after we die.  It’s aloneness or a spiritual family.  Each of us was created by God to exist eternally with Him and His family.  Would you bet your eternity on something else?   Remember this, eternity is a long time to be wrong.