Christianity Outside North America

Soul Man, Spirit Man – Part 2

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Too much of what passes for Christianity in the West is not of the Spirit but of the soul. It’s the Christianity of dynamic personalities, brilliant thinkers, assertive leaders, and so on. But little of it is of the Spirit of God. If you read my previous post on this issue, you’ll know what I mean

One of my favorite authors is Watchman Nee. He provides a uniquely Asian perspective untainted by Greek thinking. For that reason, he comes out of left field for many Evangelicals ill-equipped to process his writings. I think the following, from Nee’s The Release of the Spirit can be understood by anyone, though:

How do you react to this message today that your outward man seriously interferes with God and must be broken by Him? If you can begin talking about it freely and easily, it surely has not touched you. If, on the other hand, you are enlightened by it, you will say, “0 Lord, today I begin to know myself. Until now I have not recognized my outward man.” And as the light of God surrounds you, uncovering your outward man, you fall to the ground, no longer able to stand. Instantly you “see” what you are.

Once you said you loved the Lord, but under God’s light you find it is not so-you really love yourself. This light really divides you and sets you apart. You are inwardly separated, not by your mentality, nor by mere teaching, but by God’s light. Once you said you were zealous for the Lord, but now the light of God shows you that your zeal was entirely stirred by your own flesh and blood. You thought you loved sinners while preaching the gospel, but now the light has come, and you discover that your preaching the gospel stems mainly from your love of action, your delight in speaking, your natural inclination. The deeper this divine light shines, the more the intent and thought of your heart is revealed. Once you assumed that your thoughts and intents were of the Lord, but in this piercing light you know they are entirely of yourself. Such light brings you down before God.

Too often what we supposed was of the Lord proves to be of ourselves. Though we had proclaimed that our messages were given by the Lord, now the light of heaven compels us to confess that the Lord has not spoken to us, or, if He has, how little He has said. How much of the Lord’s work, so-called, turns out to be carnal activities! This unveiling of the real nature of things enlightens us to the true knowledge of what is of ourselves and what is of the Lord, how much is from the soul and how much is from the spirit. How wonderful if we can announce: His light has shone; our spirit and soul are divided, and the thoughts and intents of our heart are discerned.

You who have experienced this know it is beyond mere teaching. All efforts to distinguish what is of self and what is of the Lord, to separate what things are of the outward man from what are of the inward man—even to the extent of listing them item by item and then memorizing them— have proved to be so much wasted effort. You continue to behave just as usual, for you cannot get rid of your outward man. You may be able to condemn the flesh, you may be proud that you can identify such and such as belonging to the flesh, but you still are not delivered from it.

Deliverance comes from the light of God. When that light shines, you immediately see how superficial and fleshly has been your denial of the flesh, how natural has been your criticism of the natural. But now the Lord has laid bare to your eyes the thoughts and intents of your heart. You fall prostrate before Him and say: “O Lord! Now I know these things are really from my outward man. Only this light can really divide my outward from my inner.”

So it is that even our denial of the outward man, and our determination to reject it, will not help. Yes, even the very confession of our sin is for naught, and our tears of repentance need to be washed in the blood. How foolish to imagine that we could expose our sin! Only in His Light shall we “see” and be exposed. It must be His work by the Spirit, not our efforts of the soul—that is, not out of our own mind. This is God’s only way.

That so few Americans (or Westerners, in general) get to that stage of brokenness is one of the tragedies of contemporary Christianity.

Why do we run away from from the kind of brokenness that allows us to stop operating out of our soulish man and operate our of our spiritual man instead? A few causes come to mind:

We are too dedicated to making money and not so interested in growing in Christ. Yet to be spiritually mature, we cannot serve both God and mammon.

We love our way rather than God’s way because God’s way may ask more 'wasteland ii' © 2005 Jonathan Day-Reiner / groundglass.caof us than we care to surrender.

We don’t believe the Bible when it says that the life of the spirit trumps the life of the self.

We are too busy with foolish, perishing things.

We hate silence because the Lord may speak to us in a whisper and reveal how meager we truly are.

We don’t believe that the Body of Christ is necessary, that we need our brothers and sisters in Christ just as the eye, hand, and heart need each other. We would rather be unmovable, unteachable, self-sufficient islands.

We love our religiosity, even if it takes us away from God and leads us away from brokenness rather than toward it.

We treat the Holy Spirit as an optional, impersonal force rather than as a necessary, fully-vested person within the Trinity who differentiates the Church from the rest of the world’s religions.

We are unwilling to lead a life that depends on the Spirit of God for each second of our existence because such a life feels “risky.”

We fundamentally don’t believe God is real, that His promises are true, and that He offers a better way.

So we love our souls but not our spirits. Therefore, we live a sort of half-born-again life.

The cry of each man and woman’s heart must be “Lord God, break me down so that the light of Christ’s Spirit shines through me like a beacon. Not my will, but yours be done. Not my soulish effort, but the work of your Spirit. Let me be led by the Spirit at the cost of everything else in my life.”

May that be our prayer at all times.

I look around I see a Church in the West led by soulish people and not spiritual people. People who don’t know the voice of the Lord through the Spirit. People who are adrift for that reason, making it up as they go along, relying on their personalities and talents to minister. People who are destined to fail for that reason.

What breaks my heart is that there are so many of us.

Thoughts for a Rainy September Friday

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It’s one of those soggy days in southern Ohio that presages autumn. It’s also one of those days where my mind reels from a whirlwind of small thoughts, many inspired by the political season now upon us. So consider today a showcase. Maybe one of these will grow up and become a bigger post someday.

  • I’ve been thinking a lot about silence. (I guess if you perceive silence as a friend, you HAVE the ability to think.) If “Be still and know that I am God” is one of the hallmark verses of the Old Testament, what does it say about our ability to know God that we fill our days with noise and a blur of activity? I find it strange that I know adults, not children, who confess that they can’t sit in silence for a half hour without squirming and whining about it.

  • One other verse that strikes me as unknown in America 2008 is “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” If we treat fellow Christians who disagree with us like the spawn of hell, how is it possible that any of us could muster even a mustard seed of love for our genuine enemies? And why is it that we are so quick to disagree angrily yet so slow to pray for opponents? Notice, too, that I use the word opponents. It’s a long road from opponents to enemies. Someone please invite me to the next prayer meeting wherein Christians spend an hour praying for their enemies. I sadly suspect I’ll need a very expensive plane ticket to get there.

  • If Jesus is the Prince of Peace, why is it that American Evangelicals seem to have no concept of what it means to practice peace or work as ambassadors on behalf of it? Time and again, it seems to me that Evangelicals who discuss political issues are quick to include that they are “for the war effort,” yet NEVER, EVER say they are “for the peace effort.” Does a peace effort even exist in American churches outside of dead, liberal mainline denominations and a handful of Quakers?

  • Every year, the comment that “America is a Christian nation” loses more of its cachet. Consider that four people out of five in this country self-label as Christians and then ask a critical question: What would our nation look and act like if those four out of five were replaced by Christians from Palestine circa 70 AD? Am I the only one believes the difference in practice and influence would be a startling one?

  • What is the goal of an education? For much of the history of our country it was to create adults with a high, lasting understanding of civic responsibility. In that, education was never viewed as self-serving, but as a necessary means to strengthen society and the body politic. Now it’s viewed as only a pathway to greater amounts of personal income. Is it any wonder then that our nation is in trouble economically, socially, morally, and spiritually? When George Barna polls Evangelicals and finds that a greater percentage are worried about getting their kids into a prestigious college than ensuring they know Christ, then the wheels have not only fallen off the last vestiges of Christian education in this country, but the entire vehicle has burst into hellish flames.

  • It’s bizarre to me that people seem to be baffled by the denominational affiliation of Sarah Palin. Since when were the Assemblies of God considered to be a fringe group? This is what happens when all your political pundits are lapsed Episcopalians or Presbyterians-in-name-only.

  • An independent is running in the 2nd Congressional District in Ohio, my district. This has long been considered one of the most Republican districts in the entire country. Republican candidates have in the past won this district with nearly 80 percent of the vote. This has not been the case recently as the GOP has consistently let conservative voters down. In fact, when a real alternative was offered to the GOP incumbent now in office, game-playing by party reptiles snuffed out his candidacy. This is just part of the reason why I will be voting for David Krikorian (I). I think many other people will be voting for him also. That an independent has received the endorsement of the Cincinnati Fraternal Order of Police is astonishing to me in these days of party politics. The irony is that the GOP alternative candidate who was torpedoed by the GOP bigwigs in town had consistently garnered the Cincy FOP’s endorsement in the past in the local offices he held.

  • More than anything else politically, I long to see genuine orators and statesmen return to lead our country in the days ahead. I believe they will not be these men and women of privilege, these millionaires we keep electing, but average Joes and Janes of principle and conviction. Those people are out there. We just need to stop voting for the ones who keep them down. I think that every Christian in America needs to stop supporting parties and start support worthy candidates. If that means abandoning long-held party affiliations, then we must. Character counts, and too many people in office today are sorely lacking it.

With the local forecast for the next five days filled with clouds and rain, I suspect that I’ll be doing more thinking in the days to come.

What are you thinking?

The “Please, Someone Notice Me!” Generation

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When I was a teen, I was really into Aerosmith. I had all their albums. Nearly played the grooves off the LPs.

My father was an opera and classical music buff. His assessment of Aerosmith: “The music you kids listen to is complete crap.”

The irony of this is that I eclipsed my father in rank geezerdom by a decade and a half. For by the time I was a mere 30-years old, I was already mouthing his same words whenever I heard the latest rap artist coming out of the boombox of some 16-year old with his pants lurking at the outer limits of his glutes.

What a fogey, eh?

Now despite 25 years in the tech field, I’ve got to say that I simply do not understand some aspects of the popular social/relational technology of our time.

For instance, to this day, I have never once seen the need to send an instant message via AIM or its clones. I see no reason to text anyone by cell phone (phone being the defining usage). Baby goes web surfingThe appeal of MySpace, Facebook, Orkut, Virb, and most of the other social networking sites is lost on me (though I can see some purpose in the business-oriented site LinkedIn). And I am utterly baffled by Twitter. Utterly.

Because I was being screamed at by every blogging guru to get a Twitter account, I did. As of today, I have yet to post anything through Twitter. Frankly, I still don’t get it. Why is anyone interested in knowing that I just took the trash to the curb or that I gave the dog a bath? In fact, if I were a criminal, Twitter and its mimics would be a gold mine. I mean, when some Twit tells the whole world, “Hey, I’m leaving tomorrow to go reef diving in Australia for the next month,” isn’t that akin to “Burglars, please break into my vacant house and rob me blind”?

A bunch of friends have all decided to join Facebook recently. I’m not on Facebook because I hear they sell every last bit of demographic info that you post there—like I need more spam or hopeful authors of books on dealing with incontinence (from a Christian perspective, of course), who beg, “Review my book on your blog and I’ll let you keep it.”

I guess some of you might wonder what the whole point of this blog is then, but the blog was never intended to be about me. It really is supposed to be about us and how we can be a better Church.

One of those new-to-Facebook friends sent me a screen capture of all the accumulated friends who posted on his Facebook page what they were doing or thinking (à la Twitter, sort of negating the point of Twitter, at least as I see it). The more I looked at those comments, the more I thought that we have become a generation of people who are dying for someone to notice that we exist. And we’ve taken that into the most impersonal venue possible, the Internet.

I find that reality soul-crushingly sad.

Several years ago, I read a book by John Locke called Why We Don’t Talk to Each Other Anymore that was prescient in its arguments that we are becoming a relationally-disconnected society through the use of technology. Locke’s arguments were astonishingly accurate for 1999, a date that preceded all the relational techno-ware by which we connect to others today.

Locke notes the loss of nonverbals such as body language, which scientists have found make up the large majority of communication signals we send through social interaction. The result is a generation of people who mangle interpersonal, face-to-face communication because they are too inexperienced in reading other people’s nonverbal communication. Worse, they fail to develop their own nonverbals as a result, which means that even people who are skilled at this type of communication find them to be perpetual blank slates.

In some ways, we are becoming a society of autistics, lacking the basic communications skills that define us as human.

Yet the cry of the human heart to be known and to know others remains. Our problem is that the means by which we choose to do this are fundamentally impoverished. The friend who sent me the screenshot of his Facebook site  was someone I’d seen face-to-face just hours previously. The amount of interpersonal information that we shared in the three hours we were together most likely dwarfed the sum total of emails we have sent each other in the twenty years we’ve been friends. How many people, though, find the majority of their relational cachet bundled up in deficient resources like Twitter, AIM, or even Second Life? I suspect the numbers are larger than we might believe.

I mentioned Joe Myers’ book The Search to Belong a few weeks ago and the startling statement he makes that it is too much to ask of people to come to our homes and visit for an evening. Too many people find this to be a complete nervous freak out, evidently. Is it any wonder? They’ve lived their entire relational life texting to “friends” or Twittering their lives away. How then would you relate face-to-face with flesh-and-blood people in their personal space?

Still, that nagging desire to be noticed by someone, anyone, grips people. When you’re reduced to a jagged avatar on an LCD screen with a couple burned-out pixels, life seems a little less meaningful.

Sadly, most people addicted to this stuff can’t see how they’re losing out. They keep screaming to people digitally to take notice, yet all the while there’s people right next to them they’re ignoring. (For the irony of this, consider the interactions of humans in the movie Wall-E.)

I’ve got to think the Church in the West MUST begin addressing this problem now or we may be too late. We’re inviting people into a relationship with God, but if they cannot relate to other people normally, how will they deal with the God of the universe? He’s never Twittered, as far as I know.

That dire call for attention becomes a roar when billions of people cry out at once. Are we listening? Are we going out to the byways and calling in the ones huddled under their bedcovers trying to get in one last texting from the Blackberry? Or are we, too, trying to type out “NE1 THER?”

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UPDATE: The friend mentioned in the post sent me a  link to a New York Times article that completely rebuts everything in my post. I didn’t know about the article when I wrote this, but I disagree with many of its points. I find it odd that the fact that face-to-face time is suffering (as I said) is mostly glossed over and explained away. I’ll let you all decide the merits of the article, “I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You“, and its comments afterward. BTW, the same friend informs me that hyperextroverts like me seem to be the only people who are put off by all these social networking sites. Evidently, introverts are just eating this up because it allows them to hop in and out of the networks so as to keep a toe in the social networking pond without having to dive in and hold one’s breath underwater for hours.