Quote:
Originally Posted by Igzy
It's hard to have this experience now on Sunday morning because most church-goers don't know to try to draw near to God. They just show up and hope he shows up. But I do experience it on retreats and other gatherings when the attendees are of a more serious cloth. In the LCM we experienced it all the time, back then anyway.
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Maybe it's hard to have that experience on Sunday morning for other reasons. Maybe experience is less important than we learned in our past. The people that I meet with in a rather vanilla Bible church do not have, or at least speak of, "experiences" like we think are so important. Is that because they are somehow deficient in their Christian living? Or because we are still hanging onto a form that was necessary to survive in the place that we speak of as run by overbearing masters and leavened throughout its theology? And a form that was useful in keeping us in line. Because if we had these experiences in the LCM, then it must be the place to be to gain God's favor.
Do most church goers really not know how to draw near to God? Or have we created a narrow rule as to what it means to draw near to God? One that is possibly as narrow as Lee's definition of God's economy as stated in a single sentence in the first chapter of the book by the same name.
Did we draw near to God with more intensity? Or did we need something that was not able to be provided in the normal ways, so we narrowed our attention in a spiritual v secular view of life on a very "spiritual" set of activities that provided feelings and from that the conviction that it was confirmation of what we were about.
Is the Christian life really about experiences of God in a spiritual context where spiritual is so removed from secular? Or is the very existence of the spiritual-secular divide a falsity itself that should inform us of a different kind of sickness. I believe that true experience of Christ is mostly in your living because that is most of your life. If you are not "drawing near," whatever we think that includes, a lot of the time, then the result is a life of a variant on the "get saved, backslide, get saved, backslide get . . . " but on a weekly or even daily basis. As long as we are pointing at the experience as the cure for the backslide, we will convince ourselves that we need a better, stronger experience the next time around. A variant on dispensing theology.
Instead we need to experience (without the need for feelings) drawing near when we write code, drive the car, buy groceries, read tax law, cook dinner, go to a baseball game, fix the toaster, etc. To eliminate the spiritual-secular divide and instead live all of life seeking God, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, making peace. In short, living a life of love for God and of neighbor as self.
And there are actually a whole lot of those "church goers" that you still look down on just a little that are actually doing that. It is not demonstrably true because of a burning desire to jump up in a meeting and "prophesy." It is demonstrably true because of the lives that they now live. Oh, you can say some that are not doing that. As the one parable said, there are tares planted by an enemy. And there are some that have barely sprouted from seed.
But our learned version of spiritual maturity that looks like an LCM member without the LCM on their back is a false image of the true believer. The one who was spoken of over 3 or so chapters beginning in Matthew 5. And when I look at chapter 5, I see evidence speaking strongly against the one who helped muddle our view of true seeking for God, and true righteousness. More reasons to simply reject him and his predecessor and those that are following. To seek my spiritual instruction elsewhere.