[Cal]

Originally Posted by aron

I've seen some take the logical conclusion that Mary is the Mother of God. Because Jesus is God incarnate and Mary is the mother of Jesus. Logical.

Don't trust your experiences.

Reason (logic) and experience are the only tools we have to discern reality. We have experiences, we analyze them and we draw conclusions. Then we repeat. This is true at all levels, from the mundane to the sublime.

You can re-run the experiment, but Descartes already did it. He tried to reduce knowledge down to the basics of what he could confirm, and he came up with I think (an experience) therefore I am (a logical conclusion). You might disagree with him, but my point is that the basis of his conception of reality was built on two things: experience and logic. So if you are going to mistrust both, you don't have anything left to go on.

I know you don't mean to throw them out totally. I'm just saying you can't get along without them, so you'd better try to make friends with them as best you can.

I'm not "bent out of shape" about it, as you've said some here are.

I know you are not. You are not as opinionated as OBW, which makes you easier to converse with. You understand that discussion is a two-way street. You are proof that a little graciousness goes a long way, something some of us would do well to learn.

So simply opening our mouths is no guarantee that we either experience, or gain, the Christ of God.

In my experience any time we try to come up with foolproof technique for being a Christian it always ends up making us look like fools. There is no guarantee of anything, other than God is good. It isn't that God isn't solid, it's that he's always nudging us toward genuine reliance on him by taking away our substitutes.

The very act of trying to ascertain my position on the ledger sends me backward. I simply cannot ascertain, on a day to day or moment to moment basis, if and how much I am "gaining Christ". That will be left to the Bema. So I let it go. I have other things to pay attention to.

Don't get distracted.

I think that was OBW's message. Maybe he didn't phrase it nicely enough for some. But there was a point being made, there.

I told him I understood some of his point. I just disagreed with all his conclusions. I get it that anything can become a distraction. But that includes trying to formulate airtight cases in reaction to Witness Lee. OBW gets so caught up in building his arguments against Lee that he becomes unreasonable, and when you call him on it then he says you are attacking him. Anything but admit he could be mistaken. There's never an "Oops, my bad!" with him. It's always somebody else's fault when there is a misunderstanding.

OBW's reaction to Lee is to distrust spirituality. He thinks in terms of fruit. What he forgets is real fruit is of the Spirit. It's not just of our trying to be fruitful. You cannot produce the fruit being a good Christian without a relationship with God, which is by definition experiential and spiritual. So again, you'd better make friends with those things as best you can. Because if you dismiss them enough you'll eventually miss their benefits.

An analogy might be a liberal who distrusts capitalism, or a conservative who distrusts government intervention. Each will spend a lot of time bad-mouthing those things they don't like, as OBW repeatedly bad mouths "inner life" and "spirituality" and "experience of Christ." The more extreme the person the more he will bad-mouth the other side and give his side a break. But if both persons were truly honest they would admit and make peace with the fact that both capitalism and government intervention are necessary. It's a mistake to try to destroy the other side of an argument to try to prove your side. Emerson wrote that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Every rule has an exception, including this one.