Heart of Faith: Conclusion

Posted on April 16, 2015 by ehurst

Don’t live in your head.

Be on guard against simplistic reading of the Hebrew Scriptures. Yes, Jeremiah 17:9 says that “the heart is desperately wicked” in most English translations. Hebrew thinking is the antithesis of legalistic semantic wrangling. A fair translation in the context would be “consciousness” instead of “heart.” That’s because the context condemns reliance on human capability and turning your consciousness from obeying the Lord. Jeremiah works from the assumption that the mind and flesh are inseparable, but that the sense of self cannot be restricted to the mind alone, and that your heart can decide it will follow moral truth, dragging the flesh along behind.

Use your mind, but don’t trust it. Sure, when it comes to developing and following routines, the mind is great. It saves energy and resources when you don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel. But by the same token, your heart must keep an eye on things, looking down on the mental operations from the lofty perch next to God’s heart. It is for the heart to realize when something in the context has changed that demands the mind shift gears appropriately.

Much of our modern social confusion about moral questions starts with a sneaky trick, in which the activist or advocate refuses to address more fundamental questions of what constitutes good morals. So you’ll often confront condemnations that presume you already agree with the underlying moral ground. And we have been conditioned to respond without going back and checking those moral assumptions. “Everybody knows,” they say. Thus, a vast territory of hard wiring in our human nature is ignored or outright condemned without a fair consideration of whether we can even do anything about it. We are held accountable to an artificial and impossible standard. Of course, the purpose is to make you feel self-revulsion and remain helpless before the onslaught of manipulative propaganda.

False guilt is a very powerful disabler.

Most of the time it’s pointless to acknowledge, much less engage, such evil. When possible, we who walk in Christ by our hearts will simply bypass the whole noisy riot. But there is nothing wrong with analyzing these things from a pure heart. This requires that you reject first and foremost the entire range of Western Civilization and all the moral baggage that comes with it. I don’t mean that we should stop living with modern conveniences simply because they come from a decadent materialistic society. We accept what is; all things are tools for His glory, but making Him glorious includes how we handle propaganda.

In your own heart, at least, be aware of the truth. Your flesh is what it is — fallen and unguided by moral truth. Your intellect is part of that. What makes for good logic may have nothing to do with moral truth, but don’t buy into the nonsense that your mind is inherently good or bad. It’s just flesh and acts according to its nature. Thoughts are the product of this raw and untamed nature.

What our society condemns as racist or sexist thoughts are simply thoughts. If your mind is not in charge, then it really isn’t a big deal. There’s no need for frantic efforts to keep a magnifying glass on every suspicious nerve impulse traversing your brain. Truth? Racism is a highly conditioned response to the fundamental human need to spend most of our time with our own extended family. Sexism is a highly conditioned response to the very hard-wired recognition that male and female are not interchangeable in most contexts. Frankly, most of the problems arise from a perverted social mythology that preaches heathen moral values.

It does no good to inflict shame on yourself simply because something in your flesh desires evil. That’s not the same as saying there is no evil in you, but that the proper way to handle things is not how the vast majority of Westerners do it. Western mythology makes no room for the existence of your heart-mind, and denigrates God’s love and mercy as the grudging provision for weaklings. Thus, the desperate attempts at controlling the mind and all the various thoughts, with the demand you permit some outside force to do it for you. It’s the wrong force. God doesn’t work that way.

Solomon was reputed the wisest man in human history. His mind seemed boundless. Yet for all his great understanding, it didn’t keep him from acting foolishly (1 Kings 11:1-13) in the long run, and he passed that folly on to his designated heir. There was room for repentance; that was the whole point in the sacrificial ritual system. Holiness is measured as the desire of your heart, not whether you can compel your flesh to perform accordingly. But Solomon’s loyalty was divided, and he couldn’t bring himself back far enough to repent. That didn’t invalidate the wise advice in his writings, but served instead to prove that real wisdom is not in the mind, but the heart — reverence for the Lord.

The oft-repeated biblical phrase, “purify your heart,” is a figure of speech. Perhaps it would better translate for us as “clarify your commitments.” You have to live there in your heart in order to discern it. It’s not a question of nifty little exercises (implying control by the intellect) that help you move your consciousness into your heart. It’s more a question of teaching your mind to recognize something that already exists. The pace and manner of change is between you and God. Your sense of awareness may never change all that much for you, but the content will surely follow a new path. With that changed content comes an awareness of a powerful necessity, a drive that is greater than anything you could experience any other way.

This is what we mean by a heart of faith.

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Heart of Faith: Chapter 11

Posted on April 15, 2015 by ehurst

Chapter 11 — Testing, Testing

I propose a test. Teaching the mind to follow the leadership of the heart takes time, for those who have never tried it. The full flower is when a firmly held intellectual belief is trumped by the heart recognizing something more accurately reflecting God’s reality. Previously I noted that relying purely on reason and dogmatic assertions have led to some bad theology.

We can agree that Jesus was the Son of God, the clearest revelation ever offered by the Father. Obviously the whole point is the Person of Christ, not merely some narratives of second-hand experience. We are accountable to those narratives because they are God’s provision for introducing His Son. Yet, the intent of the Gospels is that He should be born in your soul via the Holy Spirit. He is not confined by the Gospels, but outlined. You have to know Him as a Person, not as a collection of mere propositions. We know that His blood shed on the Cross satisfied all penalties for sin, and that His resurrection and return to Heaven did open the door for the Holy Spirit to come into our souls and live with us. When His Spirit enters our souls, our own spirits are brought to life.

It’s not as if people before Christ couldn’t connect with the Spirit of God, but they had to first go through the applicable Law Covenant — Moses for Israel and Noah for everyone else. And it should be painfully obvious that mere ritual observance was not sufficient (1 Samuel 15:22). Pharisaical legalism was the result of Hellenism perverting the ancient Hebrew approach, an approach common among all Ancient Near Eastern cultures. Everyone knew that you were personally obliged to commit your entire soul to desiring what your sovereign desires; that was presumed in every covenant. But in Christ, we can receive that spiritual birth before we dig into a long and heart-led study of the Law. We receive His Spirit first, then study the Law.

Up to this point, it’s likely that most readers with a Christian background are nodding their heads in agreement. But to show what an awful influence Western mythology has on Christian doctrine, let me pick out one story: the myth of Pandora’s Box. It’s part of a larger tale from Ancient Greece wherein Zeus gave Pandora a box (a jar, actually) containing all the evil stuff. She was tricked into opening it, releasing all that nasty stuff back into the world. As with most mythology, it’s designed to shape our view of reality itself. So we get this crazy idea that stuff we find unpleasant is somehow not from God. It’s a knee-jerk reaction you’ll see across the whole of Western Christianity, and it shows up in doctrine and theology.

The Pandora myth is entirely alien to the Bible, yet we read it back into Scripture unconsciously.

To correct this, we need to back up just a bit. Creation and nature are not fallen. You and I are fallen. Nature is under the Curse of the Fall because we are, and because we were created to be stewards of this universe. From the very beginning, poisonous snakes, biting insects, bacteria and viruses were always there, among other things. In the Fall, we surrendered our instinctive communion with nature along with the power to guide natural processes according to God’s moral character.

So when God told Adam the ground was cursed, He said it was because of Adam’s choice. We struggle now to understand nature well enough to stay alive, never mind exercise moral dominion over it. In our moral blindness, we continually place ourselves in a position to be vulnerable to everything that could potentially hurt us. On top of this, we struggle under an entirely false notion of imaginary “perfect health,” that getting sick from time to time is somehow not natural. Plenty of things we call “disease” are merely the body reacting as it should; it is part of the natural cycle of human existence starting in Eden. It’s as if all pain and discomfort is from Hell — what a pampered and entitled mindset! So we suffer from ignorance of what ought to be, and ignorance on how to avoid what ought not to be. At a minimum, we have to reclaim a connection to our hearts to even begin reclaiming what we lost in the Garden of Eden.

Please get this: Stasis is not a blessing. Reaching some ideal moment in your life and locking it in for countless years was never any part of biblical thinking. The human body might have once been able to live a very long time, but it was never meant to be eternal. It was built from the dust of the ground and must eventually return there. There is a higher realm of existence to which we belong and this flesh cannot go there. Don’t confuse Heaven and Earth. If you are going to insist that Eden was free of any human discomfort and aging, then it was never on this plane of existence and their bodies were nothing like ours. Adam could not have been made from dirt, either. Eternity is not “endless time” but timeless; the human mind cannot conceive of it. Constant change was a fundamental design feature of this universe from the start.

Nature does not need human reason to guide it. Nature is just fine as it is if reason is all you have. What nature does respond to is any individual who rises above mere reason and reconnects to their heart, because that is a step on the path of reconnecting to what Adam and Eve tossed aside in eating the Forbidden Fruit. Sickness, suffering and sorrow are not inherently contrary to the will of God. They are part of the Curse, but the Curse includes our ignorance of what is good and right. Christ on the Cross did not simply wipe away the Curse all at once; spiritual birth doesn’t grant you the privilege of healing and wealth just because you like those things and they make good logic. The Cross ameliorates the Curse and starts us on the path to redemption, which path doesn’t end anywhere on this plane of existence, but ends when Christ returns. Meanwhile, so long as you live in this fallen flesh, the Curse will remain at least partially in effect.

If nothing else, we remain under the constraints of time and space limitations. As long as you cannot fold up your house and put it in your pocket, space limitations effect you. So long as your body ages and you eventually die, time affects you. Despite using symbolic language, it’s pretty clear from Scripture that God and the Spirit Realm do not suffer space-time limitations.

Nor did Pandora release demons that hadn’t been there before. The Bible presumes you understand that demons are simply angels under Satan’s authority — John’s Apocalypse indicates it’s about one-third of the angels. Satan isn’t nasty and evil as Westerners imagine such things. Satan is a very high-ranking servant of God, His official Punisher. Every Ancient Near Eastern lord gave the office of Jailer to someone who was quite powerful. It could be very profitable to run the emperor’s prison. We can grasp that Satan took this position as punishment, a reduction from an even higher privilege (Isaiah 14:12-17; Ezekiel 28:11-19). We should avoid any notion that Satan is at war with Christ, the Divine Heir before whom he has ever been utterly helpless. That silly imagery of Satan attacking Christ is foreign to Scripture.

If anything, the Wilderness Temptation shows that Satan did His best to keep Jesus from the Cross. He tried to tempt Jesus into avoiding any human suffering. Political power and magic tricks were a diversion from the reason Christ came to earth. Far better to let Jesus have mere earthly powers for earthly gain than to keep His eyes on the Spirit Realm. Our Savior came to suffer for us, not to take over the world in a political sense. We pervert His message when we use it as an excuse to get involved in human politics.

Satan is at war with us humans. Lucifer’s office in God’s court allows him to consume the labors of those who violate God’s divine moral character. Prison in the Ancient Near East was as much about slavery as confinement. Obviously, Satan wants to keep us in his slavery, and deception is a primary tool. It’s how he subverted Adam and Eve in the first place. It’s how Satan gained authority over humanity and took away our moral perception. He keeps us from participating in God’s glory and walking in God’s Law, which Law was originally offered as our best hope, our greatest benefit.

The same Law of God woven into Creation is binding on Satan, too. Jesus obeyed the Law, as well, in part because He was that Law personified. There is a sense in which our embrace of God’s moral character is all it takes to crawl out of that prison. Those who allow their hearts to awaken, who start down the path of letting the heart lead the mind, will progressively gain more freedom from the Curse. We reduce our Enemy’s legal authority and he consumes less and less of our lives. His ploy is to keep things confused so that people don’t find out how to escape. Does it not seem obvious that Western Civilization is one of the greatest tools to ever serve Satan’s purposes?

Just this little bit is probably a shock to many Christians. You don’t have to buy into everything I wrote here. However, if you found something inside of you unable to deny parts of this, despite being contrary to previous beliefs, then your heart may be awakened.

Religion in general, and theology in particular, are simply human constructs. They are the result of the human mind striving to respond to a divine imperative. There is plenty of genuine biblical doctrine that is pretty clear, but with much dispute over it because people keep reading their theological biases back into Scripture. In the long run, your heart should help you understand that theology is merely a matter of your own personal logical organization of how you intend to respond to that divine call. One man’s theology is as good as another, though some are far more eloquent, and even compelling, in their statements. Still, it remains nothing more than a human tool for organizing revelation, not revelation itself.

We have a long way to go unlearning our Western biases and relearning the intellectual background in which the Bible itself was written.

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Church of the Heart

Posted on April 14, 2015 by ehurst

We struggle to get Westerners to see beyond a single unitary universe. We further struggle to get them to see various levels within that one universe. The native conceptual instinct of Westerners is to see everything on the same concrete, factual level as everything else. They recognize metaphor as a means of abstracting reality for mental consideration, but the multiple levels of thinking native to almost every other civilization in human history is quite alien to the West.

The heart-mind operates essentially in the moral realm. This is not the same as the factual realm of human concrete thinking. Because of the moral blindness of those who smother their heart, they are unable to recognize the living sphere of the heart. Even when you explain, only those who already have some inkling of a separate faculty above the intellect can grasp it.

We could say that the heart-mind operates in a parallel universe, if that imagery helps you realize how the moral and concrete realms interlock, yet remain so completely separate. Don’t confuse this with the Spirit Realm, something utterly ineffable. That isn’t a universe at all, but ultimate reality, within which our artificial universe exists as a confined space. Then again, the moral sphere is the higher reality that morally blind people can’t see right here and now. It’s as if Westerners live in yet another, more constrained bubble of illusion.

At any rate, given the nature of Western intellectual limitations, we struggle to explain how this heart-led living works in the mainstream religious organizations. When I suggest a radically individual and voluntary religion, I seriously doubt you could actually build a literal congregation on that. Rather, that is how the heart-mind operates regardless of the contextual setting.

So on the one hand, you must obey the moral fabric in your heart, but what your mind actually proceeds to implement with that is highly variable. You can bring heart-led religion into any existing religious institution anywhere, but you can’t easily alter the organization to submit to this higher moral demand. The requirements are so radical and alien that you would have to usurp the organizational control. The resulting human outrage would destroy everything. All the more so when people invest so much sacred devotion in long-standing institutions. Yet, so long as you are careful to avoid upsetting the applecart, you can implement a parallel religion within any religious setting.

God is the one who calls us and who decides where we shall serve Him. Only a fool tries to place limits on His calling. For most of us, the demands of heart-led living simply cannot be made to fit in the old structures. You don’t have to leave your comfort zone, but you won’t belong to it any more and it will eventually cease being so comfortable. Heart-led religion will change you in ways we can scarcely describe.

For most of you, I recommend you prepare yourself to start something new. True religion requires only warm bodies for infrastructure. Nothing else matters so long as you can merge your heart-fields in spiritual communion. The rest depends entirely on how those involved want to manifest that faith. Scripture indicates some broad generalities such as music and teaching, but little else that could be concretely applied. There are pointers for specific rituals (Lord’s Supper and baptism) but few genuine rules.

The flavor is whatever works for you, for all those involved. Nobody gets to boss the others around, but it’s rare when folks in communion don’t figure out a way to put someone into leadership for certain purposes. The Bible separates organizational leadership from ritual leadership most of the time, so keep that in mind. It also says organization must take its cue from Ancient Near Eastern feudalism in the sense of families of people. I’ve written plenty about such things, so I only mention them in passing here.

Anything we might call “church” is like the rest of what we find here in this realm of existence: It’s just a tool for His glory.

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Heart of Faith: Insertion

Posted on April 14, 2015 by ehurst

(This was a delayed submission that will be in the book, inserted before my story.)

Jeanette’s Story

My parents were cold and unloving and had no idea how to prepare their daughters for living in this world. After I gave my life to Jesus at the age of seven, I too felt isolated and always ashamed because I never really came up to the expectations of the people around me. At 15 when my hormones began to rage I was in a hurry to get away from my parents and married the first boy who said he loved me. I soon realized I had not accomplished my goal in getting away from what was haunting me.

I spent the rest of my life running away from the situations I found myself in. In the process I gave birth to 4 youngsters and continued search. I read and studied everything I could find, never quite finding the answer I sought. I was socially isolated, which I always blamed on my husband and I sought solace in the arms of other men. I was always seeking a man to rescue me from my dilemma.

I was a very poor mother to the children I loved so dearly. I felt trapped and afraid to break free of my bonds because the Bible teaches that a Christian should not divorce another Christian. But one day, after a particularly ugly scene, God showed me that my husband was a hypocrite and a liar, not at all a man of God. This released me from my bondage. Once more I turned and sought the truth from God. As my son grew in the Lord and wrote of his journeys I too began to see the truth of what I needed to do. I divorced his father and began to return to the calling I had felt at the age of 13 yrs. I promised God that I would be the wife of a minister or missionary.

After prayerful consideration, I turned to Christian dating sites to find the mate He had for me. My two stated requirements were that he be Christian and have a loving heart. God found me the perfect mate. He was an ex-military man who had retired after 22 years of service and met the Lord. He was then called to be a missionary to Sri Lanka, a task that he pursued 15 years.

Oh, the peace that settled over me when I began to fulfill my calling. Granted, he is not in the mission field nor the pastor of a church. God didn’t say my husband had to be serving at the time, only what kind of man he had to be. Maybe we are too old to do those things. Time will tell.

— Jeanette Porrell

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A Voice Crying in the Wilderness

Posted on April 13, 2015 by ehurst

The text of my book Heart of Faith is essentially complete, but I’m not going to finalize it for publication until I’ve serialized the entire draft here. Meanwhile, I have time on my hands to pray and contemplate other things.

My special heart-mind gift shows up in my voluminous writing. As you know, it’s not a question of pretending to apostleship and writing Scripture. But there remains an awful lot of stuff in my head, and more coming into every day, and I yet struggle a bit to make sure the heart remains in the overwatch position. I’m not necessarily writing truth for you, but sharing what my heart tells me is true for me. So while others connect to nature and health far more strongly than I ever could, my heart is very busy helping my mind organize and process stuff I need to say. It really does offer a superior logic.

On the one hand, we simply cannot repeat the mistakes of the past. What drove me out of organized Christian religion was not bad people, but a bad system to which people cling because they just aren’t ready for anything else. Sorry for them, but I’m not waiting. I won’t wade through dream analysis here, but in my visions of the night, God told me I’ll never be at home in any part of that system again. I’ll always welcome church folks who want to talk, but the chasm between us is not small.

On the other hand, we cannot simply ape the trappings of the ancient past. Too much of their specifics were based on the context, and we are obliged to see past all that to they underlying moral requirements. We have to rebuild the life of following Christ for our own age, but with fear and trembling over how easy it is to stop listening to God when the human noise gets loud. But build we must.

This thing keeps growing in my soul. I’m praying for a vision of what I can do with that calling.

Here’s what I have so far. As you know, the current book — Heart of Faith — attempts to nail down the one essential element that drives all of my work. We have to grasp the full meaning of putting our hearts in charge over our minds. In a sense, that is the core objective. That’s because everything else is a matter of implications from that core position.

It implies you will strive to understand the moral fabric of reality — AKA: God’s moral character or divine revelation or biblical law. We understand that Jesus Christ was the ultimate expression of that reality, the Living Law of God. We might not really understand spiritual birth, because that’s as ineffable as the God who grants it, but we can just about grasp the notion of a heart-led pursuit of the character of Jesus.

We don’t dare subject this thing to the kind of organization most humans currently imagine is necessary. We have to find a way to do this so that hijacking is simply too difficult. (Granted that we understand the task never ends because eventually human scheming will figure out an attack and we have to starve the Beast again.) So a heart-led religion means we remove all the reasons people give for organizing as they do now. Current organized Christian religion has all kinds of objectives that are frankly not derived from the heart, but from the head.

Obviously, if the whole purpose is for everyone to develop their own heart-led existence, we don’t need any of the physical trappings. We don’t need much organization at all. We need only a way to build a connection to each other for regular fellowship and growth with the least possible formalities. For now, that’s pretty easy, since this whole thing is currently virtual. We would eventually hope to experience heart-field proximity with similar heart-led souls, but it has to build on what works at the minimal level.

In other words, it remains dynamic and voluntary all the way through. My leadership is only in your minds, for example. If you don’t follow, I’m not your leader in any way. But this leader demands you not follow too closely in the first place. Envision someone exploring the same territory, not exactly on the same path, but just a step or two closer to the next horizon. It’s like sheep scattered across the terrain and moving more or less along behind their shepherd, just keeping sight of him. If I don’t drop off the face of the earth, you can safely assume your path doesn’t lead to a cliff, either.

It’s very much like an ancient family household in terms of how we get along. If the whole thing isn’t founded on that heart of sacrificial love, it ain’t happening. If you can’t sense that kind of love from me, I’m not your elder; don’t watch me for clues. Sense a need to be a leader yourself? Take off on your path and see if anyone else wants to follow. If not, God is the only ear for your complaints. If you don’t already know how to lead like that, you can’t be a leader, anyway. You don’t get it.

Plus, unlike a shepherd I would never own the flock. The sheep are free to associate at will and at random. If the pastures I wander smell yummy, then come with us for as long as you get fed. In human terms, neither of us owes anything to the other. In moral terms, we owe it to God to be open and honest before Him, and to care with His care for each other. Care does not equate to mandatory association.

By now, we have so completely changed the meaning of religion that we would struggle to use the word “church” for what I propose we do. We can insist all we like that this fulfills the commands of the New Testament, and claim it is by the far the most accurate application of them, but it won’t change what the words mean for the rest of the world. I’m not sure what to call it.

I am quite sure it calls me.

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Heart of Faith: Chapter 9

Posted on April 13, 2015 by ehurst

Chapter 9 — My Story

God laid upon the family household the duty to provide children with a frame of reference, a structure that would include and enable a grasp of God’s moral Law. It’s a bias. To be human in this fallen world is to live in the grip of certain biases. The only unbiased mind is the dead one. The only question for the living is which biases they will hold. I maintain that it must be a conscious choice.

We know that Jesus was born unfallen. In other words, He was born fully integrated, with His Spirit in control of His heart, and His heart in control of His consciousness. In that sense, He was a moral genius, born fully developed in the ability to sense directly His Father’s moral character in all things. We see the biases of Jesus in the substance of His disputes with the Jewish leaders of His day. Objectivity is a myth; truth is whatever His Father said it was. For us today, truth is whatever Jesus taught.

We can do better than we have so far. We could construct a society with a solid moral frame of reference, even if we now have to make it a parallel society hidden in plain sight. The Hebrew nation had none our complications in that respect. They had a mandate and written revelation, given directly by the hand of Almighty God Himself, to occupy a certain territory with the blessings of God’s moral character. But they kept running away to other things. One wave of influence after another washed over them, and their own inherent rebellious nature made them suckers for it all. They didn’t cull much, swallowing everything. So when Alexander the Great marched through in 323 BC and offered them his own Aristotelian Hellenism, they looked it over. After a very short courtship, they married it. Like Esau, they traded their rich inheritance of ancient wisdom for a relatively new package of shallow nonsense. This nonsense killed the last vestige of divine moral influence in their nation. They placed their own reason on the throne, and bowed down to worship it. Then they put God’s name on it and viciously defended it against any attempt to correct.

Those who followed Christ were striving to go back to the ancient frame of reference. The world at large joined the assault against this. In just a few centuries, the structural organization of the Christian religion was hijacked. As previously noted in this book, the leadership were sucked into a new civilization rising on the ashes of Greco-Roman ruins, but with the fresh vitality of wild heathen German tribal society.

Unlike Christ, I was not at all born morally mature. Still, I was born with a powerful sense of pull from my heart, striving to gain mastery over my mind. I suppose the children around me had surely experienced it at some point, but for the majority of them, it was crushed between fallen childish nature and a social mythology that denied the heart. That my pull remained so strong made me very alien and alone.

It’s not as if I was such a wonderful little boy. I could be as self-centered as the rest of them. Still, the powerful pull from those unconscious forces would not allow me to fully participate in any social setting. I didn’t even dare to admit those forces to myself, because I was punished for talking about them. My whole life was one long string of emotional disasters because I kept trying to act according to a moral pull that was too often wholly inappropriate for the world in which I lived. I could never reconcile the conflict. A dominant theme of my youth was constant embarrassment and shame from a cruel world that had no patience with me. My family was wholly unsympathetic, and it seemed they couldn’t wait to crow and bully me over the next mistake. I suppose everyone needs a punching bag, and I felt like I was everyone’s favorite for such abuse.

It’s not as if there were no good times. I know they loved me, but my social background was lower class and generally brutal about such things. Precious few were the adults in my world who realized I had a powerful calling that demanded I not be like everyone else. My own kin seemed to feel threatened by the mere existence of anything different. So my life was filled with nightmares and demons because, while such were actually rather few, they were simply so overwhelming in their size and impact on my awareness.

At the earliest opportunity, I took solace in literature. I read voraciously because it was a safe escape and generally acceptable to others. Into adulthood I pursued Science Fiction, always hoping to find a key to a better world. At the same time, my personal faith continued to blossom. Perhaps you recognize the jarring discontinuity between the generally anti-moral Science Fiction world and my even stronger allegiance to Christ. But while I was too Christian for the other nerds, I was also too nerdy for my fellow church members. Early in my life I professed to what my family referred to as the call to the Gospel Ministry and went to college for it. Despite my strongest efforts to conform to that profession, no one ever took me seriously. I never got closer than volunteer staff positions. Still stumbling often and facing embarrassment daily, I managed to find a place somewhere on the fringe of the mainstream where I could exist. I even became somewhat famous locally at the peak of my efforts to conform while serving in the military.

But along the way, key figures planted the seeds of truth in my soul. The first glimmer was when I realized that the Bible was an Eastern document, and Christianity was an Eastern religion. I had heard it said pretty much in those words long before they came to life. So I went back to my academic religious training and dug into the more obscure elements of Antiquities and Comparative Civilization studies. The fresh jarring disconnect between the approved “churchianity” I had adopted versus what I was slowly discovering to be the actual background of Christ’s teaching nearly brought me to suicide several times. It was as if the whole world conspired to destroy my faith, even as I was beginning to discover what God made me to be.

Once I got past the danger and the attendant turmoil, I was able to explore vast stretches of forgotten faith. The more I pursued the Hebrew intellectual assumptions and moral outlook, the more at home I felt. This is where I have always belonged. This is also where mainstream Christianity has attacked me the hardest. Over the past decade, I have made it a point to forgive everyone, but completely left behind mainstream organized Christian religion. And while it was only recently I stumbled across the language to describe what’s going on with my heart-mind (thanks to Christine), I have been walking in the guidance of my heart more than ever. Lord knows, I understand how this is not for everyone, because it rests entirely on His calling. However, I refuse to be silent about what I’ve found.

I’m not a reformer. No part of me has an interest in replacing one orthodoxy with another. I’m willing to let the mainstream Christians continue on their path. But for those who sense a need for Christ outside that mainstream, I’m offering hope. Not in aping my path and resulting stand, but I want to encourage you in the task of finding your own path. Don’t allow religious leadership to steal your faith. Mainstream Christian religion has tried to bury the truth. It won’t matter what the motivations are, the leadership finds themselves condemned under Jesus’ own words: “You keep locking people out of the kingdom of heaven! For you neither enter nor permit those trying to enter to go in” (Matthew 23:13 NET).

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Working Heart

Posted on April 12, 2015 by ehurst

This business of heart-led living is hard work.

We aren’t designed for isolation; it’s not what God intended for us. We are hard-wired to live in extended family households. Anything else is hardly living. However, revelation says a covenant family is actually better than mere blood kinship. Then He sent His own Son to pull us together into islands of covenant sanity under His blood. There remains an undeniable deep human need for physical contact with people who genuinely love and understand us. The core fact of this sensory heart stuff is that our heart fields are limited to some 15 feet (4.5m), and the whole idea is to harvest the maximum benefit from consciously merging physical fields with each other.

As with all reality, there are levels of isolation. In one sense, there is the isolation of the spirit that only death can heal. Until you have returned to the Lord’s literal Presence, you’ll always feel the bite of isolation on the ultimate level. There are a lot of lower levels of isolation, such as missing human company. Of course, the wrong people can make you long for isolation again, but we remain social creatures by our very nature.

I find that the most difficult isolation is that of faith. In my close proximity here, there is only one person in walking distance who understands my religion and shares the deeper elements of my faith, and I’m married to her. Having worked for decades in the ministry of marriage counseling, I can tell you beyond all doubt that it is an indescribable blessing that my spouse shares my ultimate values. Still, there is no one else in geographic proximity. There are surely folks willing to listen to me talk about it, but none who really understand.

It’s not as if they are inherently dead and unable to get it, nor particularly unwilling. Believe me, I’ve tried to share this thing almost every day. Still, there is a certain amount of territory you have to cross before their minds are receptive and ready to process it. And it’s vast stretches of territory you don’t traverse over a few cups of coffee. It takes a lot of time for the mind to absorb the necessary elements before any of it registers. As you might expect, your average neighbor and acquaintance has too many other things to worry about, and has been conditioned by all the worst kinds of manipulative “evangelism” to avoid anything but the most frivolous chatter.

Indeed, some of them are conditioned to offer their own abusive forms of proselytizing. They have the words “sharing from the heart” but it’s only a figure of speech for them. Their hearts are, at best, asleep. For a lot of mainstream Christians, their hearts are bound and gagged in the damp, dark basements of their souls. Meanwhile, there is fierce competition in proselytizing each other.

Up to now, all of those who share with me an active heart-mind are scattered across the planet. You would think we were dropped here like some invasive species, seeds wafted on the jet-streams until we are everywhere. Yet rarely do any two of us catch sight of each other without the aid of virtual communications.

We know that our hearts enable us to see the very character of our Creator in the fabric of reality itself. We sense that gentle yet insistent call to bring life to the image of His character, to breathe divine justice into everything we touch.

There is no one right answer, but there is a very important question: How do we bring divine justice to the earth? What do your prayers sound like when you address this holy privilege? What relief for our isolation can we hope to find?

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Heart of Faith: Chapter 8

Posted on April 12, 2015 by ehurst

Chapter 8 — More on Legalism

It seems odd that mainstream Christianity is so quick to nitpick over some passages of Scripture — what Christ called “sifting out gnats” from flour — and swallowing the camel on other passages (Matthew 23:24).

In 1 Corinthians 10:14-22, Paul warns against idolatry. He’s writing to Corinthians who were deeply immersed in a depraved idolatry that rivaled the ancient Canaanites. It’s hard to recapture the distaste, and leering smirk, that people in Paul’s day associated with the label “Corinthian.” It was an epithet slung at folks who might have never seen the city itself, but acted with complete insensitivity to any moral standard of any kind.

Most people see a connection between Paul’s admonition and the comment in Deuteronomy 32:17, along with a slew of other cross references. And how do they square this with Joseph and Daniel? Granted, Joseph was prior to the Moses, but if it means anything at all, then the moral principle remains the same. Abraham was under a covenant that excluded worshiping any of the other gods he had known in Mesopotamia. As best we can understand, Abraham knew a lot of them because he belonged to the scholarly pagan priest guild of Ancient Sumeria.

Try to understand this: Study and awareness of pagan mythology and other deities is not the same thing as idolatry. There won’t be demons hiding in the print, waiting to jump out and stake a claim on your soul just because you read the sacred texts of some non-Christian religion. Recognizing how certain pagan myths do promote some elements of God’s moral character is not blasphemy. All truth is God’s truth — your heart transmits a note of recognition to the mind because the heart discerns moral truth. We should rather be surprised when elements of God’s revelation aren’t found in pagan mythology.

It is the more degraded forms of pagan religion where revelation is missing. How hard is to imagine that “pagan” is not uniformly evil? How hard is it realize that the Norse and Anglo-Saxon pagan myths are more degrading and inimical to Christian revelation than an awful lot of other pagan backgrounds? I wonder why mainstream Christians see Jehovah in their minds portrayed as the grouchy old Norse deity instead of the wisecracking and pleasant Eastern nomad shiekh that God chose as His image. And yet we defend to the death our perverted brand of Anglo-Saxon “morality” by calling it “Christian” while rejecting a whole range of pagan stuff that is actually much closer to the Bible.

Do we forget so easily that Balaam (Numbers 22-24) accurately understood the proper rituals for getting God’s attention under the same context as Abraham? Balaam was a pagan scholar of religions, much like Abraham, a common occupation in Ancient Mesopotamia. Such scholarship was the primary path to government service in the several empires that occupied that land. It was mandatory for Daniel and his Hebrew buddies. And has anybody noticed in the narrative that Balaam seems unsurprised that his mount would communicate with him a divine moral truth? God didn’t hesitate to answer Balaam’s requests for revelation under the terms that applied to him.

This is the same God who didn’t hesitate to address a pagan Abraham and several other characters in Scripture who weren’t under the Covenant of Moses. Just because the Old Testament carefully focuses on a single thread of narrative does not justify excluding any of the ways God spoke to the rest of the human race. Did we forget about Jethro or Melchizedek, both recognized by God’s men as also being spiritual and moral peers?

Too many mainstream Christians are quick on the trigger to condemn anything different than what they think God requires for them personally. It’s as if they imagine God gave them alone some grand dispensation of truth on the Mountain of God with Moses. Even Moses understood that the Covenant was with Israel only, not binding on the rest of the world. And how easy it is to forget that Moses was highly influenced by his own Egyptian pagan education, and his father-in-law’s background in Mesopotamian (Abrahamic) religion. Moses was heart-led and recognized God’s truth within each of those sources, and his broader experienced resulted in a religion that was significantly different from that of Abraham.

This narrow legalistic reading of the Bible from a highly compromised frame of reference, like the Pharisees, serves only to keep us away from the richness of God’s full blessings. I note with great sadness how many Western Christians make the Pharisaical mistake of conflating their mental conception of God with God Himself, and worship their own intellect instead. This takes us right back to the Fall, placing human reason on the throne. This is precisely the problem we are addressing in this book.

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Psalm 45

Posted on April 11, 2015 by ehurst

The dedication line says this was written by a Temple cantor, one of the Kohathites. Some scholars note that this psalm cannot be associated with any historical figure. Rather, it sounds like an idealized image of a royal wedding. Our only clue is that the writer of Hebrews quotes a bit (Hebrews 1:8-9) and says it is messianic. So the Jewish scholars had concluded, as well.

The underlying theme is that God has made all of this possible. The psalmist cites the awesome power of the vision that struck him, so he can’t help but write this hymn. He gave it his best artistry because one cannot take lightly the Anointed of God.

He describes a warrior king, wearing his fanciest armor. But make no mistake: This is the real stuff worn in battle. Anyone would be stirred at the sight. Indeed, “Nations fall at your feet.” His throne is eternal and His justice is the definition of justice for the whole universe. He is indeed the Anointed One. Could any palace house such a mighty One? His would be paneled in ivory, filled with music to melt the soul.

Among this king’s guests, those who are honored are honorable. To the bride, the psalmist reminds her to forget whence she came. Her real life is about to begin. How could she not submit and honor the groom as her lord? The wealthiest of the world will seek this king’s favor. Even the sight of his bride will make them feel humble. Her entourage is truly royal; anyone could see it. People would count themselves blessed beyond words just to catch a glimpse of such sights. The image is breathtaking.

And songs like this would never end so long as mankind lives on the earth, for his glory is eternal.

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Heart of Faith: Chapter 7

Posted on April 11, 2015 by ehurst

Christine has asked me to share her story second hand. She’s a marvelous writer but the timing of this book caught her tied up with a lot of her own moral responsibilities. What makes her story important for us is what keeps her from telling it herself.

Most children have a nascent ability to learn how to live by their heart-mind, but we’ve already noted how typical Western upbringing smothers the spark. Christine had the good fortune to live in proximity to some horses as her close friends and this peculiar setting fostered her awareness of Creation as a whole. I note in passing that those of us who live by the heart don’t merely carry a sensitivity to flora and fauna, but we sense that Creation at large seems to be aware of us. This is wholly consistent with Paul’s comment about Creation crying out to commune with us when we restore the full range of moral awareness. We should not be surprised that horses will foster a child’s moral development on that level.

Meanwhile, her family was deeply engaged in mainstream Christianity, same as I was. However, mine was not such a big hindrance as her situation was for her. She remembers it as one of the less salutary expressions of such religion. What she describes was a religion deeply stained with perverted Western mythology, not to mention a measure of hypocrisy, and quite confusing to her. It served to drive her away from Christianity. Instead, she undertook a study of various religious expressions because she couldn’t simply turn off the longing for a moral frame of reference.

Of course, what she found made better sense to her. She felt more at home with the pagan religions’ acknowledgment of a spiritual reality inherent in nature. However, what she found did not answer all the questions. She was still haunted by ghosts of her difficult childhood.

Here it becomes necessary to interject something editorially. It is a strange thing, indeed, that Western Christianity is notorious for a heathen fear of pagan religion. Typical Christian parents and church leaders panic at the idea that their kids might read something by Aleister Crowley, for example, and have built up a vast lore of confused nonsense about what he actually taught. Crowley didn’t like the church as he knew it, but it would seem all of his experience was with mainstream Western Christianity. He genuinely aimed at heart-led religion. Had he encountered a genuine heart-led Christian faith, he might not have chased so many external sources with such ardor.

The superstition against such outside sources is not from the Bible; it is a peculiar Western bias. Where it shows up in Judaism is due to Hellenized legalism. Old Testament religion did require some care to remain faithful to the Covenant, but the danger was confusing Jehovah with lesser deities, not in simply knowing about pagan beliefs. They couldn’t avoid knowing.

We have two major examples here: Joseph and Daniel. Both of them were obliged by their calling from God to expose themselves to a very massive lore of pagan religious materials. This was not from some special dispensation from God; such thoughts are alien to Scripture. These men weren’t harmed by their exposure to such stuff because it had no power on its own to pull them off track. While people do find themselves intrigued by some of the things written by the likes of Crowley, since he seems to have some awareness of certain spiritual factors in human nature, his stuff has no real power to destroy your Christian faith.

So instead of panicky restrictions on, say, your teenager’s exploration of such things, make sure you know enough to guide them through a natural period of curiosity. Not with the fearful prejudice common in mainstream Christianity, but trusting God to guide those who belong to Him. If your child departs from your particular brand of religion, it’s not because you somehow failed to enforce things, but because God had other plans for them.

Thus, while Christine found some sense in pagan religions, what really mattered for her was the open door to explore her vivid connection to Creation. Pagan religion is far more amenable to heart-mind living, something Western Christianity forgot entirely. She was able to develop a talent for discerning what God intended with all the vast quantity of natural provision on this earth. Provided you live in a place that sustains human life in the first place, she discovered that God had already granted within that ecosystem virtually everything needed to survive and prosper in good health. With a properly tuned awareness of Creation’s million voices of joy, you can expect to find growing on your doorstep what God knows you need. This is the way God created things to work.

When your heart is allowed to work the way God intended, He cuts His own path through your soul. His truth registers on your awareness as a moral necessity. Once Christine encountered a genuine Christian faith stripped of confusing Western mythology, it called her name. It wasn’t necessary to dump everything she had learned, but following Christ rearranged everything and brought His priorities to life in the complex of resources in her soul. All truth is God’s truth, and His divine Presence settles all questions.

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