Why We Need Spiritual Grounding

[HKHaugan]

Why We Need Spiritual Grounding

“Christ has set us free to live a free life. So take your stand! Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you (Gal.5:1 The Message).”

Let’s get down to it. What drives the secular world? Behind the scenes, underneath the glitter, the gloss and the glamor of what we can see, lies a sea of dark spiritual activity called evil. Add a 'd' to evil and you identify the source of all the world's personal and interpersonal conflicts. To name the contents of evil is to identify what fuels the engine of living without God.

We can list some: guilt, fear, pride, compromise, hatred, bitterness, unforgiveness, lust, envy, jealousy, idolatry, adultery, witchcraft, dissension, factionalism, denominationalism, addictions, greed, manipulation, worry, deceit, self-deceit, anger, false humility, stubbornness, self-righteousness, legalism, confusion, gluttony, obesity, hoarding, conceit, homosexuality, bestiality, cursing, shame, obscene language, covetousness, resentment, slander, false witness, murder, blame, drunkenness, selfish ambition, divination, sorcery, disrespect, laziness, sloth, lawlessness, quarreling, vindictive, vengeful, begrudging, judgmental, thievery, exploitative, hypocritical, violent, bad tempered, rebelliousness, inhospitable, gossipy, malicious, abusive, ungrateful, persecution, taunting, tempting, discouraging, demeaning, debasing, undisciplined, contrary, self-pity, plus others and the nuances of each. They are the developed hangups, the self-protecting attitudes that turn others off. The real hangup that develops is our hatred of the god we call religion which becomes our substitute for rejecting God since the real One God is not a religious god but a relational God who loves all the persons He created. That's who Jesus came to reveal.

But what do all these hangups have in common?

They alienate us from others and drive us into a lonely cave of self-justification and rationalization. They enslave our minds, our hearts and our souls. They rob us of our freedom. They make us distrustful, suspicious and constantly wary. They keep sending a single anxious message, ‘It’s all about me. It's all about me. It's all about me.’ We find ourselves cornered in the alley of ‘no-way-out.’ They are the paranoid equipment of the devil’s playground, the merry-go-round, the sandbox, the swings, the monkey bars and the see-saws of his game plan to isolate each soul from God. They are like life sentences that place us in eternal solitary confinement.

At any moment they appear in one form or another to keep us anxious and self-consumed. They limit our thought, imagination and creativity. Look at the movements of violence and disruption that increase day by day. Everything from terrorism, the 'occupiers,' the riots and 'picketeers.' Find a cause for venting anger. Find people we can get mad with. Find all the reasons to stay upset with the world around us. Movements give us a cause. Anger gives us our momentum. Anger and rage are spirits that consume us. They are the negative spiritual forces that come through the backdoor of our consciousness and inhibit our minds, clutter our hearts and tempt our souls. They are the products of that awful satanic disease called sin. When God said in Gen.2:18 “It is not good for the man to be alone…” He let it be known that aloneness was the primary condition the devil would exploit to separate us from Himself, from others and harden our hearts into a deeper aloneness within. You can be in a family, have lots of friends, be married, have the admiration of thousands and still feel alone. Pride, fear, remorse, regret and the depression that carries them would be our only companions in the darkness of our self-contemplation. The history of suicide is proof enough.

The really good news, the great proclamation, the incredible realization of God’s grace and love rescuing us, came in the person of Jesus who took upon Him our aloneness. Yes, He was raised in a family, grew up in a typical community and had His stepfather's occupation. When He chose to move on after making His mission decision, He knew from His birth that He would be alone in His body and that faith was His real contact not only in the horizontal world around Him but also in the invisible dimension of reason, choice, decision and action. His faith in His Father showed that by living a solitary life by that faith, He would never be alone. To live vertically for His Father by faith in His heart and to live horizontally alone in this world by faith in His Father's Will and Word, He demonstrated a new reality, something new takes place.

That something new took shape in Him. He showed that our aloneness is not a life sentence of lonely frustration with the uncertainties of life but an ongoing relationship with Him and others we share with. When we were consumed only in what we thought important and where we were never really understood by anyone, even those closest to us, He came to give us a way to live that opens us to the new reality of spiritual, relational and personal fulfillment. He would free us from the forces that exploit our aloneness; our frustrations, our fears, our need to find purpose, meaning and significance. He enables us to open our minds and be creative, expansive and see the broad horizons of spiritually thinking, spiritually sharing and spiritually relating.

In Jesus we leave the self-confinement of our horizontal fear and pride to the open and free range of the vertical through Scripture. There we can graze in the always-fresh fields of new insight where thought expands and the heart welcomes the fresh air of spiritual pondering. All of this changes the way we live day by day. Practical relational living, handling uncertainties, the unexpected and the necessary find a personal peace in their activity. We find in Scripture that there is a never-ending availability of new ways to think not only about single words but whole phrases and themes that open us to the breathe the oxygen of truth to clear the smog of self-centeredness from our spiritual lungs. When our hearts are changed by Him that part of the world in which we live can be changed by how He leads us day by day. It is one heck of a better way than being constantly upset, angry, frustrated and unfulfilled especially by issues over which we have no control.

“My counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated by God's Spirit. Then you won't feed the compulsions of selfishness. For there is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness. These two ways of life are antithetical, so that you cannot live at times one way and at times another way according to how you feel on any given day. Why don't you choose to be led by the Spirit and so escape the erratic compulsions of a law-dominated existence? (Gal.5:16-17 The Message)”