HOW TO SEE LIGHT/TRUTH

A friend once told me that he was unable to perceive ‘parallels’ in Biblical history. Some are naturally concrete thinkers, and we can be thankful for them because they are excellent at the things they make and the things they mend. Yet unless we have some understanding of our humanity and the humanities, we are limited in our discernment of spiritual realities – particularly in social discernment and the ability to separate appearance from reality. It’s not chance that David was poetic, that Paul wrote excellent prose and that John was lyrical in his expression of the Gospel. They knew God. Knew themselves and knew life.

You will do better as person if you get your truth from those who know the truth, rather than from those who know nothing or who are disciples of ‘mangled truth’. Richard Rohr observes that real awareness (seeing) is seeing how to see.

DISCERNING LIFE FROM DEATH
The spiritually confused can think those who have discernment are judgmental – and they are to an extent. They can judge what is life and what is death. Lack of perceptive ability may surface as an inability to ‘join the dots.’ With such a deficit of perception we can be blind to dysfunctional aspects of our community. Blind even when such anomalies are obvious to those with the ability to see these realities as clearly as if there is a crocodile on their front porch.

BLURRED VISION
Lack of spiritual discernment is often be the effect of a wrong gospel – a distorted lens in which we imagine separation from God and thus experience separation from ourselves and others. We are blinded to reality as it is rather than it appears. Visions and dreams are not spiritual discernment. Knowing the Light and seeing in it is spiritual discernment. Spiritual discernment is knowing how to see.

Our real status is that we are included in God. Our atonement is complete. We do not have to finish it off ourselves or add to it by some work of positioning of the self because Christ has positioned us in Himself in God.

WHEN NORMAL IS BENT
One can live in in a dysfunctional family and not know that this is abnormal because it is our normal. One can live miserly when we are not poor because this was the ‘normal’ our parents gave us. Many people are fortunate enough to outgrow the bonsai attitudes in which they were raised. They outgrow them because they have a passion for life and they become exposed to a ‘normality’ of openness, generosity and progress. They become people of vision.

LIFE IN A THIMBLE
Some carry the past and small-mindedness into adult life like a poverty mentality. But they are far from poor physically and not un-intelligent. But they live like a man who is a peasant. Peasants are poor and ignorant because their attention is absorbed in scarcity and survival. Others cling to the past because they fear the future and as a result have a vested interest in stagnation. These are persons who can be wise, yet they have a ‘g-clamp’ on their mind.  They live from an imagined and false reality – like the Dwarves in Lewis’s Last Battle who called good food slops.
FALSE FACT/FALSE REALITY
We can be like this spiritually if we have been raised in ‘another poverty gospel’ that strands us in the sparse existence of the law and the knowledge of good and evil - even as many other Christians live in the grace of life in the Spirit. We might even imagine that the aberration that cripples us has merit and gives us an advantage over other Christians. But it does not occur to us that they have done exceptionally well without our perspective.
Jesus warned, ‘Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me’ Matt 10.37 NIV. This is to say that in such a self-centred mindset, we have made the choice to be not worthy of life to the full.
BUT WE ARE
But the fact is that all are worthy of life to the full even though they have been travelling on a crooked road. This is why we preach this Gospel of the Kingdom, which is the Gospel of Jesus and the apostles. Not some self-concocted gospel that results from a decay into legalism and misguided prophecy. The result of ‘bent’ is always a false christ and a false us. This is why we are ministers of the new covenant and not the old. It’s why we are not sheltering under an inverted cross.
COMPULSIVE OBSESSION
A stubborn person may be glued to her own ideas out of ego and ignorance. They reject the truth not because they are right, but because they lack the ability to join the dots. Or more bluntly because they are more comfortable with their lie than Christ’s Truth. The result is that they prefer death to life.
STUBBORN AND IGNORANT
I spent my early years in proximity to some whose stubbornness surprised me even as an eight-year-old. No one forced them to be ignorant. But they became that way because they did not read, despised knowledge that was not their own and had armour plated egos. Not particularly intelligent they could have been more so. The mind feeds on ideas and informed knowledge. It can grow and mature. The spirit can be ignited and the soul can be come healthy and positive. If one is open to life. Not if one is obsessed with hanging onto their stuff.  
CULTS AND FELLOW TRAVELLERS
A characteristic of a cult is that its inmates have an answer for everything. The lens by which they interpret reality is formed by their key ideas. The result of this leathery coating that surrounds their minds is that they become immune to truth and automatically generate fictions that insulate the truth from their hearts. According to Paul this is the culture of garbage and dung.
DRIP-FED BRAIN WASHING
Such people are by no means ignoramus’s and boof-heads. Not all of them. They can be well educated, intelligent people who from childhood have been brain-washed in an alternative religious reality. They can unconsciously and skilfully invent reasons to persuade themselves that they belong to the Body of Christ when the corpus of belief that is theirs is contrary to the Gospel of Jesus and the teaching of the apostles. Any gospel that makes the law the key issue of salvation and kingdom is a perverted gospel.
CORE ISSUES
What is the issue of life? The issue is that Father is completely trustworthy and that in Jesus Christ we are the sons and daughters of God. This implies the undoing of the lie that Father is holding something back, that we are not enough in God and that we remain separated from God and that the Christian misguided project is the overcoming of separation from God and Christ that no longer exists.
The reality that Christ has come in our flesh and that as a result He could not be any closer than He is – woven into 0ur being. As the church we are the expression of Christ and the Representation of the trinity as the sons and daughters of God.
MADE ONE WITH GOD
Thomas Torrance observes that, “In the incarnation the eternal Son assumed human nature into oneness with himself but in that assumption Jesus Christ is not only real man but a man.
He is at once the One and the Many, for in Jesus the Creator become man, all human nature has been assumed.
The point for our consideration here is the fact that it is in this union of the human .. and the divine .. that Jesus Christ is the personalising Person whose saving power is brought to bear directly upon us.
In him the incarnate Son and Word of God, Creator and creature, divine and human nature, are united in one Person, so that in Jesus our human being is radically personalised and indeed humanised, and as such is brought into intimate union with God and into the Communion of the Holy Trinity.” (1)
In Christ we become one with God.* This is the truth of the Lord’s Table and the instruction inherent in this scripture,  ‘Realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20. This and not observance of the law is obedience in the post cross age.
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (p. 161). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
* But we do not become God. We are sons of God but never deities.