In this message I want to look at, amongst other things, why outside perceptions of Christianity are so negative - how something so wonderful
There are lots of people reading this who are being prayed for on a regular basis by lots of other people who are reading this. Prayer of that nature is, of course, an act of love and solicitude -unique in the sense that it is an unembellished desire for friends and loved ones to be the beneficiaries of a life-changing transformation - a transformation that will bring joy and blessedness to all who experience it. But the step through the door is a step that can only be made by the individual in question, not by anyone else.
One of the greatest dangers of being on the wrong side of the door is this; the real properties of good human qualities become abstruse, thus clouding our judgment about ourselves and our true position. Last time we touched on the subject of giving in to instincts, and what sort of people such submission creates. It is, of course, very true that those unbelievers who give in to all their instincts for pleasure will find it harder to be good people, but we should be quite wrong if we thought that mere goodness will be enough on its own, for being a good person does not necessarily mean that your goodness is more likely to bring you into contact with Christ. It is true that good people will almost always have happier and longer lasting relationships, but goodness, by itself, can elicit false perceptions about oneself, and, thus, lead a man further away from Christ.
Those who give in to their instincts do have one thing in their favour - one thing that can sometimes elicit in them an awareness of their need to surrender. It happens in those times when the wanting reveals itself to be better than the thing which is being desired. Lust, for example, shows itself to be, in anticipation. a megaphone to stir the sleeping inner-voice, particularly when we have subjugated it. Once we have seen lust for what it really is, we become aware that the badness which revealed the true identity was a whole lot clearer than the images of happiness which we created in anticipation of lust being stimulated. In other words, the real illusory nature of the supposed joy from having the ‘want’ scribbled out becomes a bigger reality than any experience that we expected to have, or had previously experienced.
This even works its way into very predominant aspects of relationships. A good example is when you have based all your feelings on false platforms - you see the real fragility of making a god out of sensory pleasures and aesthetics; after all, the same emotions which brought about a change in your feelings for your last boyfriend or girlfriend might just as easily reappear again in your current relationship if the relationship is based on such feelings.
Or much worse (for the stakes are higher), the fragility of the love is revealed several years hence; it reveals to you how much of your love was based upon his or her physical qualities (which are starting to diminish) and the novelty of loving him or her (which has been absent for some time). It is not always remembered that the Devil likes to become involved in human loves as well. The more of him that is involved, the less lovers will know about it. The same goes for your state of mind outside of love - the more he has of you, the less you will be aware of it; the less he has of you, the more you will be aware of him, and of the dangers of complacency.
Very often the sins that are leading us away from God are the sins that we do not think are very bad. I am sure we would all agree that a way of life which tolerates mindless murder must always be a way of life which has no respect for humans; yet people do not always seem to realise that it is the same for promiscuity and salaciousness - to have an abundance of either is to have a way of life which also disrespects humans (particularly women). When we feel that we have the right to another person’s body without waiting until God chooses someone for us, we are in danger of letting this feeling filtrate into other areas of our thinking. Sooner or later, we will live our lives believing that inalienable rights belong to man and not to God.
As our Creator, He has the right to guide us as He best sees fit. As I said last time, the strictures were created for our betterment, not for pedantry’s sake. If we ever reach a state where freedom of action prevails over all things, we shall be in a sorry mess - our civilisation will have become so Godless that direction will hardly matter anymore. But, thankfully, I do not think that that will happen; God’s word endures, it lives on in spite of our sinfulness. The best way we can repay His grace and faith shown in us is to grow in Him and help as many people to Him as we can.
The search for God does not really belong to nature - it involves stepping outside for a while. And this is what I think is causing confusion with many modern day atheists, particularly those who think that science renders Christianity unpalatable. They expect that if there is a God, the laws of nature or the things within nature, including their own ideas about things, can lead them to Him without any recourse to inner-change. But our process towards self-surrender is not really like that at all. In order to know God, we must step into His realm, we must, in a sense, play by different rules. We can throw the dice as many times as we like, but we will not get the first clue about what the outcome will be until we realise that the dice are, in fact, loaded.
Nature herself has been seized by something that is outside her own laws. And just as we cannot expect to deduce the likelihood of the virgin birth from our studies of physiology and biology, or the likelihood of the ascension from our studies of physics, we will not understand what it is like to know God, and to receive the Spirit within our own cognition, until we realise that the levels at which such impartations are operating are not, in fact, levels within normal human cognisance.
Christianity, far from being an antiquated piece of philosophy is, in fact, the elixir of life. Every part of beauty, charity, morality, grace and love is explained through it; in fact, all of creation was made so that each unique person could know God. All this modern day existentialist talk about creating new doctrines, commonalties within good governance, the friendly nature of the universe, and the free-flowing wind of industrial development and humanistic progressiveness, will amount to nothing in the end. The secular evolutionists have got it the wrong way round. The most refined things are not still to come - they have already happened. The real state of what is to come is already established in the Kingdom of God.
There will be no future earthly development which betters what Christ is offering us right now. Modern men and women have forgotten that Christianity, far from telling us men’s opinions about religion, actually tells us God’s opinions about us. It shows us how best we can have a full life by relying upon the One who knows how best to give us a full life. But self-reliance is almost equally congenial to the human mind (often more so, particularly if the mind is not focused properly). That is why so many people can find some semblance of pleasure from subscribing to all the heretical religions; for they all allow certain self-congratulatory and self-constructing flexibilities which Christianity does not.
Sometimes it is hard to make the change, after all, initial perceptions of Christianity say nothing about how helpful and essential it is going to be to you in the long run. All the best things seem difficult and time-consuming at first. The initial surprise when something special reveals its deep nature breaks upon you like the surprising delight of discovering Leibniz when you had only known Spinoza. But you must not expect the best things to be as instantly accessible as some of the things to which they are inferior.
The boy who is getting to grips with Harry Potter is still several stages of mature growth away from appreciating Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. At school he is going to have to sift through lots of the boring ‘basics’ before he can appreciate all the good parts of learning. But this negative impatience does not in any way suggest that the rewarding stages are going to be untrue or misleading.
And if God has given you great natural abilities for any particular thing, it is going to be, at first, bothersome when compared with the freedom of full expression. The most naturally talented sportsmen are often the ones who are troubled into self-destruction because it all seems so easy for them. The genius who excels at his studies of psychology is very often reluctant to step into the nexus of high-powered self-perception, because he is perennially frustrated with the superficiality that he observes on a daily basis. Those whose musical prowess far exceeds that of ordinary men and women are the ones who like to go beyond simple chord structures, into a whole new stratosphere of raw and visceral innovation.
The identified nature of any great facet of ability is always at first vexatious to our most impassioned inclinations; for it reveals itself to be the real custodian of our better potential. Christianity is no different. Outside perceptions will nearly always reveal to us a pedantic impediment to the freedom of our fullest expressions and natural talents. But as soon as one steps inside, ready to absorb every stage of growth, Christianity will reveal its true nature - its stupendous life-transforming nature. I know very well from my own experiences how stifling Christianity seemed to me to be from the outside. I was looking into a murky lake instead of looking into an ocean.
And this leads us to one of the most important questions we can ever ask if we are going to make the right impression and have a good impact in this world. Why, if Christianity is so wonderful, does it often look so insipid from the outside? Well, in the first place, I think it is because there are many Christians who are not shining Christ’s light in the way that He would wish us to. But there is, I think, another reason why our initial perception from the outside very often shows Christianity to be quite uncongenial to our present thoughts and wishes. I will tell you what I think it is like.
Let us suppose that a man is trying to teach a hypothetical bonobo - a savant king of intellect among other bonobos - what the Internet is like. And let us suppose that he is given enough human intellect to understand all the things that can be observed through the Internet - in fact, the greater part of the world. And let us suppose that the bonobo must now go and convey to other bonobos (ones who have some intellect but less than he) what he has seen. Far from thinking of the World Wide Web as a stupendous array of previously unknowable facts, they would see it as something rather unappealing. In seeing that our social groups are very different and that we do not, in fact, eat insects, groom each other, and use twigs as tools for survival, they would conclude that human existence is less appealing and has less potential than that of a bonobo. But we know, in the grand scheme of things, that in the great multitude of atoms that is ‘nature’, bonobos are, in fact, limited to understanding things within their own species; that there are glorious things that a bonobo’s limited cranial capacity cannot experience.
The situation between the non-Christian and the Christian is a little like this. Christian men and women all over the world have intuitively experienced God in their own cognition - that is, they have had a little bit of the divine made tangible within their own cognisance. Being in the vicinity of His presence, they have seen that His reason, His wisdom, His grace and His love were, all the time, the very things that created mankind in the first place. Those who do not know Christ cannot possibly see how the things that we ascribe to ourselves, in fact, the things with which we formulate inceptive opinions about Him, are indeed mere parts of the whole Christian picture.
The energy which comes out of us has, all the time, been put into us by Christ. The part of us which repels Christianity because of its seemingly hindering elements is the central part of us which, if accorded properly, will reveal to us all the wonders of the divine. It is because we have interchanged two parts of the same reality - we have, due to our own subliminal wishes, attempted to reconstruct the divine part of us into a mere subversive intrusion which is intent on destroying our self-controlling discipline.
We turn the positives into negatives - in fact, far from inviting the splendour of the divine into the face of our own thinking, we ascribe anthropomorphic principles to Him in a way that makes all of His seemingly stupendous qualities become foreign invaders into our already existent and finely balanced system. The process is just the reverse of what happens when we become Christians, for when it is done properly, the human system is disassembled to make way for new divine parts to form a new machine. We are, every year, updated to a new model so long as the recognition for change and developments remain at the forefront of our consciousness.
As young children, we think that a poem which does not rhyme is not a ‘proper poem’. But as we grow older we see that real beauty when transferred into art or verse has none of the restrictions that we first envisaged; that true expression does not follow in the footsteps of circumscribed stultification, for in fact, it races ahead - leaving everything in its wake. The Christian faith does exactly the same. Far from being something which merely accords with our personal perceptions and desires; far from being a mere sub-division of life - it is so much more - in fact, it is every part of life. The whole clay of nature and of mankind is in His hands; and Christ is speaking to us with everything that is in His hands. You can see Him not just in all those who know Him - you can see Him by the absence of the divine in those who do not know Him.
All the claims against the Christian faith are easily refutable; they are an imprudent mixture of half-truths and falsehood, cobbled together as a result of perennial disappointments and broken dreams. But for those who can see through the haze, for those who can detect the cheat, for those who really do want to know God, you can be assured that if you seek with all your heart you shall find true blessedness. I want to encourage you to explore further the claims of Christ; for in doing so you will begin to see the real nature of blessedness. It does not come from earthly things; earthly things are merely the media through which heavenly things descend.
