Spiritual Class Warfare

There's a belief that the closer you are to God the more good fortune we will have, but this is measured in terms of the world. This is not the case. God gives us blessings and sometimes they are financial but he does not spoil us even if we talk about Him all the time. Spoiled Christians are more like greedy kids that have justified their behavior by saying it is from God. This is like Spiritual class warfare were the closer you are to God the better off you are. Any good deception is partially true so it is with this as it is correct except how we go on to define closer to God and better off incorrectly. Closer to God is not doing more Church activities or studying the bible more. It's like saying he's a hard worker because he makes a lot of money it could be true but it may not be. Christians get closer to God through the cross in their lives and there is no other way. The cross is deep pain in our life that you attribute to God's work. This could be loss of money, friends or health. These are the very things that we wrongly use to track our relationship with God and others. We use labels as a way to define how we relate to others. For Christians the label should be brother or sister. We should behave as a healthy family not always agreeing but at the end of the day encouraging each other in our relationship with Christ and wanting the best for each other. Kids have to make mistakes to grow, sometimes the same one over and over and so do we. Likewise Christians grow from mistakes. It is not the same mistake for everyone or in the same order. You cannot judge someone's progress by the type or frequency of mistakes. But most of all you cannot judge your own progress as God seems to keep this a mystery from us.

Kids are driven to maturity over time by society to "act their age". It's not so clear cut for Christians. I think of it as a road that is typically noted by the cross and rest stops that God has set up for us to recover and enjoy His riches. It is a place where we are the closest to God as He has just shown Himself to us in a very real way on the road and He has taken us though it. But outside of every rest stop is a manmade place like a old hippie camp were the celebration continues long after God wanted us back on the road. This is a place where we regularly get high on past times with God. The rush of being with God fades until we pull in other travelers from the rest stop to renew the celebration. So at this point while we are praising and talking about God, we have actually started avoiding the cross and the revelation and enlightenment that comes from it. We have traded a direct line to God for stories about someone else's time with God.

The hippie camp is man controlled Spirituality and if someone wanders on to the road they are pulled back. Spiritual class envy keeps everyone in line. The cross is talked about but not often experienced. It has been replaced by things that are more controllable like theology, man's view of God. The church should have enough grace and empathy that it can hold those on the road and those at the rest stop at the same time. The Church tends to be like the farm were today the cross is avoided and past crosses are cherished.

What we need is revelation but we have lost our way and replaced revelation with knowledge. Our mind using knowledge is eager to control and prove what we like and disprove what we don't. When we count on our knowledge of the bible to be our guide then we are open to a merging of mind and culture with our understanding of the world. In my younger day I had friend at Church that saw God in every movie. This is zeal and imagination run wild. But every Sunday pastors all over the world are dismantling parables to extract more than the point the author had in mind. We treat the parable as holy and every good point extracted from it as just as holy. This is as bad as finding God in every movie. Theologians study history and Greek in order to separate culture and emotion from the pure Word. This gives us a truer sense of the Word, but not complete enough. It's just another way man replaces revelation with himself. Even Christ told the disciples that it would take the Holy Spirit to reveal to them what He was saying. Paul wrote his letters not to be revelation but to redirect them to the Church and Christ so they would be receptive to the revelations of the Holy Spirit. We should not be looking to the Bible for wisdom and guide lines to live a more Godly life, but as a way to free us and open us to the Revelations of God. We cannot teach revelation only open each other up to it.

 

 

Following The Church

Over time Christians have migrated from getting individual guidance from God through revelations to taking it all from history, the Bible and Christians leaders. The Bible can be a good guide to avoid the influences of the world. But without the revelation of Christ it is also open to the influences of the world. Many churches believe that revelation comes from the Bible and it's the Churches job to teach you revelation by teaching you the bible. Seminaries are based on this principal the better you know the original context and history the more revelation you will receive. But what is really needed is the mindset of the writer to understand the bible and that was a spiritual mindset. You have to learn how to seek God and find his mindset then you will get revelations from Him and His Word, the Bible. Otherwise you combine the Bible scholars, worldly logic and emotion to interpret; you end up with denomination as we have now for every combination of the three and its' possible spin offs. This is because it is a merging of the three. Everything in the world is tainted; Christians, the church and even the early churches. Paul even was pulled by the world at times. The only pure thing is revelation not the kind you have to steady for but direct enlightenment from God to you.
 

Some get a revelation from God and live off of it for their whole life. Revelation is meant to take you further down the road not to the end. At some point you are to wait for more and not build on top of what He gave you.

Terrible Twos

God has a spiritual relevance and perspective that we cannot map into our reality. So like a child with God as our parent we try to map our reality onto God's. Because moving a child to maturity is a process, we allow and give toddlers things early in the development that would be wrong later on in development. Similarly God is working with Christians. He does not want to destroy you only keep you moving to spiritual maturity.

So even if we could get a perfect picture of Spiritual maturity it would be wrong for us to try and copy it, just like in society worldly maturity is based on a process of emotional scars and those without them are called spoiled. Likewise spiritual maturity is based on the cross, which is the realization that God is allowing and sometimes orchestrating pain in our lives to bring us from our spiritually childish ways towards his maturity where we can enjoy His riches.

We have to let God move us on from early childhood, which is more difficult without many examples. Churches have spent all their training on birthing and the "terrible twos" thus are little help to us at this stage. The letters to churches in the bible are to churches going through the "terrible twos" it is not a complete guide to Christian maturity but a guide through the early stages.

God and the Holy Spirit have a custom plan for each of us just like our parents did for us. He does not want carbon copies so don't look to follow someone else's journey. Don't get tied up in time frames as this is also relative to your age. This is why days go slower for kids then for adults. Our minds view time as a perspective of what we have lived. God sees eternity so our whole life is very short to him, but His patience for us is also viewed in the same way. So waiting a life time for us to figure it out is not that long to God.
For those that have not had a two year old or maybe forgotten, they have not learned how to be grateful. They have decided they "need" much more and that the world is unfair. We as adults understand that hours drag on forever for someone that has only lived two years and that in some aspects the world is unfair. But over time they will have an opportunity to have many enjoyments, candy, toys and fun. We understand some times are good and some are bad and we are looking to make the best of both. We also understand that they can grow emotionally from the bad times. Spiritually we often see God as the same unfair as our kids see us. Kids try to rationalize rules to their advantage. But many of the rules are to keep us safe until our reason and logic develops. Hold an adults hand when crossing the street and don't talk to strangers are for kids not adults. For Christians it to keeps us from the childish delights of the world so that we can develop a relationship with the Holy Spirit. A child has to mature to know when it is best to cross the street or how much candy to eat before it is a problem. It's the parent's responsibility to let them make mistakes that are not too costly without any real damage to the child. Each kid has his own personality and background and requires a customized approach to parenting. God and the Holy Spirit are doing the same with each believer and Church.
God is working on developing the bride which is currently outside of our grasp of understanding. He gives us spiritual gifts and blessings in order to mature the bride.

What a Spiritual Relationship is not

It is not really possible to explain what a spiritual relationship with God is like and define it. It takes spiritual experience to know the spiritual. It's about like a cat chasing his tail. You can not get it from the bible, because it is not written to you. I believe it is written to the Holly Spirit who is our translator. We base most of our Christianity on emotion or worldly wisdom of the Bible. The mind can not grasp spiritual concepts, but study enough and it will think it has found spiritual enlightenment. How do we know when the Holy Spirit is speaking to us and not our mind? Two ways I have learned the voice of God by only focusing on thoughts that do not seem to be ones that are logical and by asking god to show me what his voice is like. An example of this in my life was about 15 years ago the singles group I was in at church had decided to go to Cancun for a long weekend. The first night we hit the party seen and everyone was having the time of there life, but I kept having this overwhelming sadness sweeping over me like a wave I would brush it aside and it would come back. It just felt like something very bad had happened. I resolved to disregard it and seek God in the morning about it. I was awakened at dawn and went out to ask God for answers. All I could come up with was something bad was about to happen and I should get ready by grieving with God now. It was another day of this before it happened. Two men on the trip drowned, one of them had been my room mate. I was not overwhelmed with sadness when it happened because I felt like it was out of my system and I knew it was in God’s control. I was free to deal with the tasks at hand and to help the others.
If you read the bible and hear echoes of past Sunday school lessons or sermons then it is probably not the Holy Spirit but your mind. Your mind takes events in life and tries to make them spiritual. Your mind will create spirituality to fell the void and stay in control. God’s wisdom is an uncommon wisdom. His wisdom makes sense, but it is uncommon and often outside of our though patterns.