(This is the instructional portion of today’s message. The prophetic portion is in another blog post.)
Of course, I used the word “instructional” advisedly because it can’t be taught, only caught. Nobody can tell you much about how the heart rules the intellect; we simply assert that it does. If the heart does not rule, then it tells the mind almost nothing. Your mind has to be ready to accept a lot of things it cannot verify any other way.
Moral reality is like some invisible parallel universe; it’s the fundamental truth of our existence. What our minds can perceive and process is essentially a deception. This world is all shadows and smoke. I can’t recall how far back it goes, but I knew a lot of moral reality long before I was aware of my heart as the internal source. For the most part, the teaching of heart-led awareness is like any other moral truth: You either recognize it instantly as the truth or you don’t get it at all.
That has nothing to do with whether you will ever get it. The revelation of God indicates heart-mind awareness is universal by design, but there have always been at any given time folks alive destined to die without it. The rare exceptions prove the rule.
We cannot explain the mechanism, but there is a moral awareness that we all have burned into us by birth in this realm. You can appreciate the basic Christian teaching that God has not left us with no witness, but that Creation itself cries out to us that God is and that we are fallen. We are taught in Scripture to assume that everyone comes into that time in their existence when they become aware of their sin (we call it “coming under conviction”) and the need for divine redemption. Because this whole process is buried under false religious mythology in Western culture, it seldom bears the fruit of a conscious awareness of the heart-mind as the highest faculty of the soul.
So even before age 30 I was teaching that faith was not mere belief in orthodoxy, but a distinctly higher sense of awareness, like a sixth sense. Once I encountered the notion of the heart as a sensory organ of its own, the implications were painfully obvious. It aligned with my sense of conviction already in place. Among all the other amazing things your heart can sense independently of your five senses, your heart can discern that parallel universe of the moral realm.
Our toughest job as Westerners is discerning the subtle difference between the heart and the emotions. I won’t take up space here warning you how Western mythology is all wrong about emotions, just remind you that it is so. Emotions have their place, but it requires the primacy of the heart-mind to understand that place. So we struggle with a double whammy, having a false image of emotions even as we strive to sort out what is emotion versus that subtle voice of the Spirit of God in your heart.
What surprises many is that this struggle is at the center of why we continue living in this world. It’s not as if I could set up an academy of the heart-mind and teach some esoteric secrets and graduate a bunch of adepts. Graduation is when you die, for that matter. It’s not some thing we pursue as a concrete goal, but a lifelong mission that we enter into. The focus of all our spiritual warfare is internal; it’s how we engage other humans that manifests our faith. The issue is that we exercise our faith to keep us faithful.
So feel encouraged to explore this Land of Repentance, which is the moral realm of existence, but don’t expect to discover its far reaches. Don’t let that business of having a goal slip in like a lie from Hell. Get lost; you don’t need to know where you are going, only keep going. Take time to experience whatever you run across. Chances are, when you glance back at where you’ve been, you realize that there were numerous manifestations of faith already at work in your soul before you could verbalize it.
The best I can do in writing like this is break up the concrete reasoning so that your mind is receptive to living wordless truth.
