SEEING HOW TO SEE TRUTH AND LIFE

If we live from a deficit of spiritual discernment we would not know it. But those with the facility would.

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. Most ‘almost spiritualities’ live from dualism – a mistaken artificial division between God and ourselves. The prime example of this is living from religion to get to Christ when our treasure is to live from Christ to ignite religion with His spirit and 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 atonement/incarnation. Additions to Christ, such as the law, moralism and supposed distinctives, insulate us from direct communion with God. Cut us off, so that we remain in separation and in a blurred comprehension of the Gospel when we actually have access to union with God and His Light. Un-blurred sight means that we live in the fact that Christ has taken steps to us and we know that our inclusion in God is not the effect of self-effort.
 
However, is must be said that a certain dullness of mind and unwillingness to be informed that is tied to personal stubbornness. Pride 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 BECOMES YOURS IN CHRIST
 
“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) This is the effect of Christ your life in your person and your living for Christ in the everyday.
 
COMMUNION WITH GOD
 
To live in the incarnation is to live in the glory of the knowledge of God, since our living is of a similar 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.
 
‘When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” John 8.12 NIV. But sadly many Christians do live in darkness/confusion, fumbling about without ‘the light of life’. Why? Because the christ they are following is not the Christ of God but a false christ that is the product of a warped gospel.
 
But why lived warped when you have the Straight and Narrow Way? 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 for us cited 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. We have the mind and the eyes of Christ.
 
(1)    Thomas Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, P. 53,54.