Don’t Get Too Anxious

My first conscious awareness of the Spirit Realm came at age nine. That was my spiritual birth. I was over fifty when I came to the understanding of the heart-led way. I consider it an outright miracle that I’ve gotten this far. Each step along the way called for a radical shift in my thinking so that my mind could cooperate with the leading of my heart. I still remember some of the bigger shifts, such as when Dr. Starkey told our college chapel assembly that Christianity was actually an Eastern religion back around 1976. It wasn’t really news academically, but it was something that drove me as I explored the implications over the following years.

It’s not that historical Western Christianity is so wrong, but that it is woefully short of the whole message of Christ. And it is wrong also because it includes such a wad of crap that doesn’t belong, as that comment from Dr. Starkey made so painfully obvious to me. A Western approach is inherently wrong from the start because it builds on the Fall itself. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil represents the error of placing human reason on the throne of life, and rejecting mysticism as God’s chosen vehicle for revelation and redemption.

We are cultivating that Ancient Near Eastern mysticism and it’s a huge leap. People locked in a rational-cerebral orientation can’t make that leap. There has to be some miraculous call from God that leaves you open to such a thing. But if you make that leap, suddenly Scripture comes to life in a new way that cannot be put into words. The words I write cannot get you there, but God can use them to indicate something for those already touched by His Spirit. If you haven’t encountered Him already in a personal way, neither my words nor those of Scripture can help you find Him.

For example: How many of you worry because it’s so hard to “pray without ceasing”? How many of you struggle to keep your frontal lobe occupied on the task of forming words to hold a conversation with God? That’s the wrong approach. Sure, bring your mind to the task when the situation allows for it, but know that your brain is just along for the ride. It’s your heart that calls out with groanings the Spirit understands and groans on our behalf (Romans 8:18-30 — read the whole context). A distractable mind is not a flaw in God’s eyes, but is wrongly judged so by our Western culture. Ours is not a cerebral religion; logic and reason are not the highest faculties of mankind. Faith is a much higher faculty, and we must learn to focus on that, making the mind take a back seat.

Now we believe this is the divine truth of God, a vast treasure long hidden from those whom the Lord awakens to eternal life. We aren’t selling spiritual birth; that’s a divine miracle only God can do. We try to capitalize on it when the miracle of God’s hand comes to awaken your awareness of it. Our shared faith seeks to restore that hidden treasure of covenant blessings, the just inheritance of God’s children. Nobody else is taking this approach, so far as I can tell. While we could long for everyone to find this, we should be more surprised by the miracles of those few who do.

Going off in trust of human capabilities to spread this faith would be a huge mistake, taking us right back to the swamp of cerebral nonsense already keeping millions from their divine heritage. This is not something we can package and advertise. Do you realize roughly twenty years passed between our Lord’s Ascension and Paul’s First Missionary Journey? Getting the word out will not happen quickly. On top of that, we cannot use the methods of Paul and the other Apostles, because this is a different world.

But I will tell you the one focus that we know for sure was behind the New Testament message: You must become the gospel message. This is not about my writings; I’m just a messenger. So are you. If not a writer full of words like me, then it is for certain God has other gifts living in your soul. He promised that. So the real issue here is not that you spread my blather around, but that you find your own mission and calling, and let people read you as the living message. This is why I keep emphasizing that Jesus is the living Law of God; He is divine revelation. This is a question of transmitting the divine moral character of God from soul to soul, and the mind comes along later to serve this new living purpose.

You are the gospel message. Let me encourage you to incarnate Christ in your very being, but don’t depend on me to spread the Word. This is something that calls us for the long haul, and we should naturally expect things to be slow for the first generation of us. And we should be eternally grateful if the Lord somehow magnifies our commitment to touch others at His discretion. This is His mission, and we are along for the ride.