HOW TO BE ALIVE AND ALIGHT
10/09/23 13:15
There are ways to enjoy excellent spiritual discernment. They are summed up in the New and Living Way. Any one bold enough to live from Christ our life, will excel in spiritual discernment to a degree that is impossible in a religious life.
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD
Walking in the Light, by which we mean spiritual discernment, is a function of a lived union with God. This means that spiritual discernment is dulled when we live in the separation of the law and nurtured when we live in the oneness of the incarnation. Additions to Christ, such as the law and moralism insulate us from direct communion with God so that we remain in separation and blurred comprehension of the Gospel when we actually have access to union with God and His Light.
However is must be said that a certain dullness of mind and lack of education tied to personal stubbornness and ego restricts know-alls to their own limited thinking.
KNOWING COMES FROM BEING
The Church Fathers in constructing the Nicaean Creed took the oneness of Jesus and the Father as the basis of ‘knowing and perceiving truth.’ Thomas Torrance wrote, “One of the most important passages they used was taken from St Matthew 11:27 and St Luke 10:22, which they interpreted along with parallel passages from St John. 'Everything is entrusted to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son but the Father and no one knows the Father but the Son and those to whom the Son may choose to reveal him.'
THE KNOWING OF FATHER AND SON
“What impressed the Church was the fact that in those words our Lord spoke of a mutual relation of knowing between the incarnate Son and God the Father, and in the Johannine parallels of a mutual relation of knowing and loving between Jesus Christ and the Father, which implied a mutual relation of being between the Son and the Father within which such an exclusive circle of knowing and loving between them was possible. The Father dwells in the Son and the Son dwells in the Father in a fully mutual relation of being and agency upon which the very substance of the Christian Gospel depends.” (1)
COMMUNION WITH GOD
To live in the incarnation is to live in the glory of the knowledge of God, since our living is of the same kind of oneness that Jesus and the Father enjoy. To live in Adamic/Mosaic separation when an interwoveness is ours, is to consign ourselves to blurred vision and poor spiritual discernment.
Thus, when Paul writes, ‘Christ in you the hope of glory’ he is in part alluding to the fact that to live gloriously is to see and discern in the mode of the sons of God. Living in the oneness of Jesus and Father, that Jesus prayed for and achieved in John 17 is living in the spirit of light and life that John announces in his prologue. Living from this oneness we insulate ourselves from false gospels and misguided assumptions concerning holiness and wholeness. We possess spiritual discernment that enables us to distinguish the Kingdom of Christ from religion.
(1) Thomas Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, P. 53,54.
