HOW NOT TO LIVE ROBBED
15/01/25 10:22
Some people are so open that they will believe anything. This is the kind of ‘openness’ we call naïve and gullible. It’s also the kind of openness caused by desperation – the casting about and grabbing onto anything that looks a plausible solution to that which has come about personally, in society or in whole nations as a result of the rejection of Christ as The Way. The current plague of populism is an expression of this desperation. Part of the confusion has been caused by the adoption of ‘false christs’ embodied in lame kinds of christianity that rely more on ‘what works’ rather than an incarnated Christ.
SEEING THE WAY
People have asked me how they can avoid being deceived in these times. We can do this by being grounded in the truth. Truth is the Person of Christ. We can be sensitised to truth and protected by error when we are incarnated with Christ. When Christ is our life we ‘know truth’ because truth and genuine life have become part of our being.
Because truth is ‘being’ seeing is the effect of correct being. This is ours in God, specifically in oneness with God in His incarnation of our persons.
TRUTH IS BEING
Jesus was The Light because He was one with Father, was the way, the truth and the life. Truth is less something the Believer is attached to and more what our being has become. Since Christ is the way, the truth and the life, we take on His nature by living His life rather than living the religion people have made about Him. This means being open to the truth and ready to lay down long held misconceptions.
TRUE KNOWLEDGE
“Benjamin Myers describes this openness well: “In true knowledge we are thus simultaneously involved in a movement of increasing openness to the object and in a subjective process of ‘self-renunciation, repentance and change of mind.”… We must remain open to reality, just as we must remove all foreign ways of thinking which do not conform to reality’s inner rationality. We must repent from a false understanding of God, but we must be careful to remain open to God’s self-disclosure in Christ by the Holy Spirit.” (1)
STRONGHOLDS OF MIS-UNDERSTANDING
A false understanding of God can lodge in compartments of our thinking, just as a it can manifest as an entire religion, community of belief and the spirit of the age. Anything that is not true originates from the father of lies, with the plan that belief in it will become the reality we make for ourselves. This is why it’s not sufficient to proclaim that we are the Body of Christ – particularly if we are an element of it that is diseased with unsound doctrine.
(1) Morrison, Stephen D.. T. F. Torrance in Plain English (Plain English Series Book 2) (p. 38). Beloved Publishing, LLC. Kindle Edition.