You will spend your whole life unlearning.
The call to faith is the song of the heart, crying out to God for redemption. It’s the song that pulls us back to Eden. This path we follow is the whole thing; the sole mission from God is changing ourselves. We must accept things as God says they are and embrace the demands that arise from that understanding.
The biggest single lesson to unlearn is the false idea that there is anything of significance we can do to fix this world. That notion is the biggest lie we face. Once you get rid of that false instinct, everything else is an easy, downhill ride from there. It’s not that we do nothing in this world, but that everything we do has that otherworldly focus. The meaning of everything is rooted in a world our senses cannot perceive.
This truth is like a sword that cuts through all the crap. But the other edge of that sword is that we must learn how to discern things from the heart. We belong to a kingdom that exists in our hearts. It’s not a kingdom of this world. It’s not that we cannot trust our senses, but that we cannot trust them very much. We learn to be cynical about the fleshly nature because we know all too well it is filled with lusts for things we should not have, things that bring death. We have to keep turning that sword of truth on our fleshly natures, so we can expose the boundary line between what is eternal and what is mortal.
There are sure to be similarities between us as a covenant family of faith, but there are also elements in this that are totally unique to each individual. One man’s essential is another man’s garbage. The variation should teach us to doubt impressions and perceptions, to run them through a filter. It should draw us together in our mutual uncertainties so we can focus more on the certainties we share in our convictions. The whole mission of a faith community is learning how to handle the ever-changing dynamic and interplay between our lives in this fallen world, as we each struggle to discern what is actually required.
Because we remain in this prison of the flesh, much of what we do must be understood as approximations. We get used to parables, to parabolic thinking and symbolic packaging. We express the truths of our souls, our encounters with the divine plane, in terms of what we experience in the flesh. Nothing elevates your IQ like having the heart take command of your existence, because it teaches you to think far more deeply about the meaning of things. The intellect is never more powerful than when it serves the heart, when it discovers its true purpose from God. And nothing makes our human interactions sweeter than heart-led communion that we struggle to put into words.
We struggle to find words for that heart level of perception. It’s more real than real, but we are often at a loss to tell about it. Some part of us recognizes this invisible realm with a clarity that leaves us speechless at times. It sets us on fire with joy unspeakable, full of glory. Our flesh is embarrassed at its poverty and instinctively shies a way from sharing such things.
Frankly, some of it cannot be addressed. Paul warned that there are things we simply are not permitted to share (2 Corinthians 12:1-10). He expresses serious doubts about whether he was even still in his fleshly body during those experiences. This is the man who spent three years in the Arabian wilderness in a prolonged encounter of the risen Christ, rather like a disciple of Jesus out of sequence, but with the same length of exposure as the others. We piece the story together from Galatians 1:10-19 along with the reference in 2 Corinthians. We know so little about it because Paul was warned to keep some of it to himself, and the rest was simply beyond the range of words.
Do you feel envious of his experience? You won’t know what God can do in your life until you make yourself available the way Paul did. Not that you should have the same mission and calling, but that you are faithful to your own. But you have to know that a big barrier is the cultural distance between us and Paul. Our Western culture is strongly perverted against that kind of thing, and it does take some time to unlearn that. I can’t promise that you’ll experience what Paul did, but if you start down the path toward Eden, you can never predict what God will show you.
So our biggest problem is unlearning what hinders us taking that path.
