The Experience of Christ

[aron]

Originally Posted by OBW

I suggest that rather than saying something generic that forces the interpretation that it was clearly of Christ —without argument or consideration — we talk about what was actually experienced.

Instead of experiencing God's love, or peace, or redemption, we may try to "experience Christ", but without the specifics I don't see how the generic term adds anything helpful to the experience itself. If there's some meta-principle that fully casts all of our specific experiences into a new and bold relief, fine. But otherwise we risk being Jack Horners, sitting in the corner with our Christmas pies. We're happy with our newfound "plum" but really it's not connected to anything.

Originally Posted by OBW

what more could be gained from the realization that Christ was working in me through the Spirit to actually be different during the day than just saying I had a real "experience of Christ." But as "real" and as much as that is "experiencing Christ," we don't use that term for those things. And we expect that such an experience will be followed by a desire to jump and shout. If that is the case, then the most mature Christians should be constantly unable to contain themselves because they would constantly be reminded that so many events of the day would have been different in their old life. The fact that they don't even have to think about being different in so many ways is the ongoing "experience of Christ" that does not come with a need for exuberance. Instead it comes with the realization that we are still short of the glory of God.

Yes, there are times for joyous shouting, or some kind of equivalent. But the presumption that there is a need for it to be so ongoing and yet so indescribable that you can only say that you had "an experience of Christ" makes me wonder.

Going to the meetings and shouting "We are all experiencing Christ" was a kind of charismatic dodge... we got excited about something tenuously (at best) connected to the scriptural record. And our momentary excitement was taken as if it were the claimed experience itself. We thought that we were excited shouting "We are all experiencing Christ" because it was the experience (of Christ) itself, where in fact we were excited because we were jumping up and down, waving our arms, and shouting. We felt surely this was the generic and all-encompassing "Spirit" which was the generic, all-inclusive "Christ" which was therefore the "experience of Christ".

And we decried the "Denominations" for being in some holding pattern, waiting to go to heaven, while we were all experiencing and gaining Christ. But we were in our own holding pattern, with our rituals and habits and behaviors and concepts, which we thought were reality itself. Pray-reading, declaring, shouting, arm-waving, jumping, "prophesying" strings of buzz-words was taken as if it were the experience of Christ itself.

Now maybe I've already beaten this horse to death. So the LCM "experience of Christ" isn't ready to saddle up and ride. So what one is?