Our Crazy Ancient New Religion: Introduction

Another series? Yes, I’m crazy and you have to live with it — or stop reading this blog.

What’s the difference between a fresh revelation from God versus a coalescence of focus from knowledge you already had? There is no functional difference. Your heart already knows everything God can tell you, because it’s not a matter of repository knowledge, but exploring stuff already open to you. Please, drop the mythology about how prophets knew they were called to prophesy, and how they got their messages from the Holy Spirit. They were called and got the message. The promise that we could all access the same repository of prophetic truth is ancient:

And it shall come to pass afterward
That I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh;
Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
Your old men shall dream dreams,
Your young men shall see visions. (Joel 2:28 NKJV)

Peter quoted this in Acts 2 regarding the first Christian Pentecost. Don’t overly mystify the miracles of God; that’s a lie from Satan designed to keep you from seeking the full power and benefits of God’s mercy and love, His vast blessings poured out after the Fall. The power of the Holy Spirit isn’t something that resembles inexplicable “magic.” You might not manifest everything flashy from the Bible, but you can know the power of God in your life.

But you can’t know it from your head. Your intellect is fully incapable of “escape velocity” into the moral grasp of God’s ways. It requires you awaken the link we all could have between the intellect and brain in your chest. The heart has its own independent nervous system and brain to process it. The heart has a sensory field that crosses time-space boundaries to see reality as God made it, in light of His divine moral character. So the biggest task we have is teaching our minds to submit and learn from the heart-mind.

Faith is a moral commitment of the heart to that higher realm and the God who made all things. Religion is the human response to the demands of faith. One man’s religion is another man’s headache. Faith will surely distill into a range of common response, so we can share some of our religion with each other. However, as you all know, I assert that Western Christians draw religious boundaries entirely too close to the individual life. You’ve read the sermon lots of times here. What Western Christian religion looks like frankly denies the power of God to work in the heart by insisting that religion must first and foremost follow reason and ignore the heart where they conflict. It’s religion with a lot of dead faith.

Yet, it’s not as if you can just make stuff up that amuses you and hold it forth as normative. That in itself indicates a fatal flaw, a disconnection between faith and religion. That brand of creativity is mere petty arrogance. Genuine faith seeks; it calls on God for guidance and looks for ways to meet other people of faith where they are. We seek common ground, but it does require discernment to distinguish between breaking false boundaries without transgressing very real boundaries drawn by God. It’s more art than science, but an art of the heart, not mere human talent.

So here’s the deal: I’m going to propose some religious ideas. They aren’t really description, but more characterization. You decide which of them your mind recognizes as consistent with your own heart. Then you get to decide how much it matters, in terms of the distance you might want to keep between us so that our missions from God don’t conflict.

That in itself is a religious idea, so we’ve already started. This series should at least be amusing, in nothing else.