So the apostles were writing about "the experience of Christ" in the NT? So, when Jesus said, "Get behind Me, Satan" to Peter, was that an experience of Christ? When Peter went out and wept in the darkness was that an experience of Christ? And if so, are the proverbial "goats" hearing, "Go into darkness, you who are accursed" having an experience of Christ?
If every possible experience is an experience of Christ, what does it add? I say, nothing. But, if we need strings of qualifiers to keep the idea from dissolving, what does it add? I say, nothing. If we meet together and simply try to say, "Today we're experiencing Christ", what are we looking away from, that we should be attending to? I say, a lot. That's why I say it's a vapor, a cobweb. It has the appearance of reality with none of the substance.
I think the following by
Igzy at least partly looks to my arguments on this thread:
Quote:
To me trying to eradicate every vestige of the LCM is a waste of time. How do you know doing so is really going to make you happy? I saw this transvestite today. He may have had a sex change, I don't know. He was moving into middle-age and he was one of the ugliest "women" I've ever seen. He had tried to eradicate all vestiges of being a man. But he couldn't do it. And he never will be able to. Eventually that has to result in unhappiness, or admitting such extreme measures are futile.
Trying to "get the local church completely out of [your] system" is a silly goal. How do you know when you've done it? When you hate everything about the LCM, including the idea of experiencing Christ? Is that how you know? And when you think you've reached that goal, what do you have? Do you have what God wants you to be? Is that really how you look at things?
Why not rather just seek God, and let him take away things and add them? Why declare war on your past? That's not the way to get where you need to be. Jesus's blood covers your past, you are saved by grace and fully accepted. You don't need to eradicate anything. You just need to focus on him and the positive and let him do the work of fixing you. None of us are wise enough to discern what needs to be eradicated. "Eradicate" sounds like one of those words Witness Lee would use. It's an extreme.
At some point you have to make peace with your past. Like it or not, it's one of the things which defines you. You don't have to run away from it..
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I have no doubt that I've written ugly and offensive things, and don't pretend to be perfected. I try not to be a quarrelsome know-it-all who assumes that everything I say is fully thought out, and clear. And I try to give the grace to others' deficiencies that I expect for my own. And that includes Lee and the Blendeds. But bad ideas are bad ideas.
Surely I've been insulting to some of the LC faithful, and to others as well. But at least I can say when I see a worthless idea. The argument for the "experience of Christ" doesn't look like it can hold up on its own. It doesn't matter who's holding it forth.
Igzy says we have to make peace with the past. I have the peace, today, to say that this isn't about me or Igzy or Witness Lee or the LC or my unresolved issues. It's just a bad idea. If there is such a thing, ontologically, as a "bad idea", then that of "the experience of Christ" as I've seen it put forth, both here and elsewhere, qualifies. It just cannot survive on its own. The more you look at it, the more it shrinks away to nothing.