The Bottom Line

[HKHaugan]

The Bottom Line

 I can’t emphasize enough the spiritual dimension in which we live after we have accepted the Lord Jesus as personal Savior and Lord.  Consciousness of the spiritual dimension behind everything we see is the heart of life because that’s where real life, eternal life, is.  As we think spiritually, trust spiritually, and act spiritually, the result is the awareness of a life that goes far beyond any imaginative scenario we put into play.  The spiritual dimension has but one Lord, one God and one Spirit and they are One.

 Faith is the spiritual key, the entry point, where we see Jesus is the Door, the Gate, unlocked for us to pass through into His Kingdom.  What we live in, this world on this earth, is where we train, prepare and learn what lies in the Kingdom just outside our physical grasp.  Though we live in a universe of physical forces and physical surroundings including our bodies, we are internally invisible spiritual beings making our way through it driven by what can’t be seen.  The consciousness of being a person who thinks and feels and perceives, of being an ‘I’ who lives in the midst of other ‘I’s is searching for meaning and purpose, invisible goals from some inner drive within.  Everything we do is determined not be what we se but what we can’t see.  Our language may very well be physical sounds but every one of them has an invisible impression and meaning.

The only thing that makes navigating in this wilderness sensible is the faith to think and act in some way that gives us a good outcome and does away with what is bad along with the ability to distinguish the difference.

 Everyone is born with the ability of faith, but it immediately is a question begging an answer, in who and what do we place that faith?  If we have a purpose in being alive and a meaning supporting it that makes sense, how do we know we can rely on it, trust it?  No one is able to answer those questions unless they go outside of themselves for the answers.  The first step in exercising faith is to find the proper source.  There are a whole lot of systems of thought.  Most of them focus on survival physically and socially.  But it is the internal process of choice that has to be satisfied.  You have only two choices really.  You either trust yourself and survival or you reach beyond yourself and use what you find on the way.  Both of them can be dead ends literally unless the final reality of both, being death without meaning and purpose, is overcome by the offer of life that is lasting beyond death and that life available and functional now. 

 Herein lies the dilemma.  What is it that puts off answering the question?  In the spiritual dimension we find a whole lot of negative  forces at work.  The problem is they are within us before we start.  We don’t like the fact that I fear, I know I’m not perfect, I feel uncomfortable in circumstances I can’t control, I’m constantly anxious about surviving relationally and physically.  Inside I don’t want anyone else to know what is going on in me.  It’s my pride.  It’s my fear.  It’s my aloneness.  I avoid thinking about all that stuff.  If I have a decent job, raise a family and belong to the right people in the right place, everything will turn out OK.  But will it?

 Here is where faith faces fact.  No matter how successful at what I am doing and how I feel, it all ends and it ends abruptly.  The end can come in a relationship, a career, a friendship, disillusionment, disappointment, failure and just plain giving up.  What I put my faith in didn’t work or isn’t working.  People I counted on as strong turned out to be weak like me.  There is that nagging isolation and insecurity, questionable self-identity and a need to change environments, ‘get away from it all.’  But you can’t.  What has been described here is the individuality we all share that comes into the world and into the spiritual desert of aloneness and its cause, sin.  Sin is the dark spiritual isolating power from the evil one who manipulates it by temptation. 

 This is the struggle, the temptation struggle of personal control, that Jesus embraced as He, with sinless faith, bore every question with a confidence and future assurance that came from faith in His Father and His Father’s will and His Father’s Word.  He is the One person in history conceived in the flesh by the Spirit of God that came with nothing but Spirit-guided faith into everything we go through, the inner and outer wilderness, and making sense out of it.  He never faltered in His faith.  He never compromised for the sake of expediency or choosing to react based on security and social acceptance.  There was a perfection in Him that could not be evaded and for which He was executed.  His Resurrection from the imperfection that death promises revealed His true nature and the reality of spiritual perfection.  That spiritual perfection He offers us in the unseen dimension in which we all live.  Everything has a spiritual counterpart.  We live in the spiritual dimension within and what we do, the choices we make, the lifestyle we take on is unseen but more real than the physical dimension. 

 The spiritual choices we make are the life we live.  It’s spiritual, all of it.  You may do it in a physical body but the thought, the reason, the choices, the decisions and the motivations resulting  in action are all spiritual.  Trusting who and what influences you in this vast territory is spiritual.  Jesus died on a Cross and rose from death to say He is the source, the way, the truth and the life in the spiritual dimension. In every choice and decision a person makes there is a bottom line.  The life, death and Resurrection of Jesus makes the case to show He is the bottom line.