Shadowing a Working God

We don’t deny instrumentality; we deny that it is the only principle at work.

The human intellect is a good servant and dreadful master. It can do a good job as long as it is not in charge; there must be a transcendent guide to set the course. There must be something within us that pulls and pushes from a source that the mind does not understand. We call that the heart, or convictions, depending on the context of discussion. We argue with the prevailing culture that says the heart is merely a repository of sentiment. The boastful pride of intellect is that it believes it can ignore the sentiments, but it never does. It builds from sentiment without giving due credit, and cannot see how it has nothing to work from without sentiment. Sentiment is just a strong affinity for certain parts of our human experience, the very foundation of our human sense of identity. Human reason has no point of reference except experience, so the starting point is to recognize it consciously.

Until we recognize what we are made of, it’s very difficult to move beyond that. The structure of our identity is the reference from which we build our conscious awareness. It is utterly necessary to recognize that our minds are not us, and we are not our minds. We must be able to abstract our true sense of self from the intellect, because the intellect is not entirely reliable; it is incapable of the objectivity it pretends and worships. The mind assumes the mythology of objectivity, as if it could reason its way to some referential structure that is bigger and better than it’s own individual experience. If we allow the mind to lead, it will create a false god, a false transcendence that is actually under its own unconscious control.

For us, the heart is the only faculty within us capable of touching the transcendent. It’s not as if there is no common reference point we can all share, but that it exceeds the capacity of the intellect to find it. Finding it requires recognizing that the conscious self is not restricted to merely what’s in the mind, and certainly not a mere matter of natural appetites. We aren’t forced to honor the false dichotomy of intelligence versus emotions; there is no real separation between those two in the first place. The only real alternative is recognizing a sense of conscious awareness that can stand aside from the mind and choose a higher level.

Because of where we stand historically and culturally, it is a monumental work to touch that higher level. And once we begin feeding from that transcendent level, we are fiercely beset by a whole world trying to pull us back down from it. But it’s not just for our own protection that we learn how to answer that attack. We also have a divine mission to help our attackers by shattering their frame of reference, so that they can also become open to a transcendent path.

It’s part of my divine mission to seek ways of expressing these things so that you have a conscious awareness of what’s at work. A major flaw in common thinking is that instrumentality explains everything. And while many good minds admit we don’t always know what mechanisms are at work, their goal is confined to just discerning the causal mechanism, under the false assumption that there are no other factors at work that we need to worry about. This is why something like evangelism is so messed up. It’s an attempt to bring down the miracles of God into a mere study of mechanisms.

What is behind this command from Christ to go into all the world and share the gospel? During one discussion on predestination, someone once told me, “You make it sound like there is nothing we can do.” In other words: What’s the point of evangelizing if the activity itself does not produce the results we hope to see? At that point, I realized that her whole mental orientation was on the matter of instrumentality, which is actually not at all in Scripture. How does evangelism work? Because if you don’t answer that question properly, you cannot possibly know how to go about the task itself. You might stumble upon a certain measure of effectiveness, but you’ll always be hammering away at the wrong thing, and you’ll never fully enjoy all the blessings that go with it.

The point of evangelism is being obedient. Being obedient means you are involved in what God is doing; you are placing yourself in the center of His will for you. You are engaged where His shalom stands waiting for you. Evangelism isn’t a separate thing from that; it’s a part of the same package. Don’t compartmentalize it. Personal redemption is a divine miracle; it is entirely the hand of the Creator. God is going to do that work, with our without you. If you obey Him, then you are like a little kid who delights in hanging around the Father as He works. He’s glad to teach you as much as He knows you can handle, and lets you in on the joy of getting these things done, but He doesn’t need you to do any of it.

So evangelism is best understood as an effect, a by-product, not a special thing we do. It cannot be separated from the bigger picture of obedience to Biblical Law. Being an “evangelist” is not properly a special vocational calling. Rather, it describes someone whose divine calling puts them in the place of seeing God work at harvest time. God decides who gets to experience whatever part of the process, but He calls all of us to obey Him regardless of the individual differences in His commission to each of us.

Furthermore, harvesting souls is not simply changing people’s minds to decide they want to be born again. Nobody is capable of choosing that, Paul says in Romans 8. Our evangelistic efforts will never breathe God’s breath into a dead soul. What we can do is appeal to the soul that God has already touched. Don’t assume the work of the Spirit registers in time and space according to our awareness. Miracles take place outside of time-space constraints; all we can see are the results in a specific time-space moment. It’s okay to mark the time and place you became consciously aware of the Holy Spirit in your soul, but don’t assume He wasn’t there before that moment. Our “harvest” of souls is simply a question of perception, not the whole reality.

So the whole work of our testimony is to awaken perception for ourselves and others. In essence, we are trying to bump our perception into a better conformity with reality as God created it. We hope the process puts us in place to celebrate with others who seek the same blessings. We don’t “get people saved” — we awaken their conscious awareness to the work God has already done.

It’s pretty hard for a fleshly mind to relinquish the pride of accomplishment. It’s whole nature is to seek a godlike control, to assert a claim to competence in deciding all things relevant to our existence. That’s the very nature of the Fall. Stop trying to get things done; stop trying to seize control of the processes. Rather, seek peace through obedience. Stand where you are supposed to stand and leave the rest to God.