Spiritual direction, Christ in the perception

Truest religion, authentic faith, is a lived possession of the transcendent, to “know” God.  Anything else is merely shadow, pretence, hypocrisy, and it takes us worse than nowhere.

As Christians, we must continually challenge 
ourselves to experience Christ in our midst.

As persons of faith in Christ, we must attain the presence of the Lord that transforms our lives.  It is God’s work of transformation in us, as individuals, that is our most powerful testimony of God’s work.

How this power works most cogently 
is through how we love our neighbour.

This is not about friendships or love relationships, but these are included.  The outworking of loving our neighbour is how we treat those we do not know—THAT is the most powerful witness of the Christ IN us.  That, and then proving utterly trustworthy to our service of the other person—kindness, graciousness, love.

Central to this, of course, is losing our covetousness to idolatry, for we all have desires, both conscious and unconscious, that trap us in bondages to sin.  The only way we can love absolute strangers is if we have absolutely nothing holding us.

So just to be clear, how we receive the transcendent Christ is through our loving our neighbours in such a way as to compel them to see God at work in us.  The only way people see God at work in us is if we genuinely live the death of Jesus so they would see His life in us, and hence would have His life (the 2 Corinthians 4:10 principle).

We must cause people to ask, 
“Why does this person so selflessly give to me?” 
all the while receiving the blessing of God 
as He touches people through us.

The more we do not know people, the better the secret Christ encounters them, because motives are a mystery.  The more we can get beyond rationalisation for manipulation, the more authentically altruistic our attitudes, behaviours, and actions can be, the better.

Act in love with no strings attached 
— simply to bless, nothing else — 
and see what God does with it!

A WASTE OF OUR LIVES

We waste our faith lives living in the carnality of worldly living, insisting on justice, bargaining over what we get and don’t get, condemning ourselves to trajectories of bondage, when God wants to give us life in all its possible abundance.

God will give us the Kingdom, but we 
need to put Him first, or it’s a moot point.

When a person has experienced the fuller faith life in all its abundance, they do not turn back to pettiness that much of humanity is given to.  But we cannot go to these places without giving up the shards of the former life that feel safe and comfortable and even necessary to keep.

It is a waste of the new life in us to keep 
going back to the old ways that never worked.

If they only ever delivered misery and pain, how can they take us to the life that Jesus promises to give us?  If they only ever delivered a self-justification that made for no change, can we not see the hopelessness of such desires?  If those old default ways only ever delivered the same pretence of madness, why would we deceive ourselves anymore?

To go past the wasteland that can all too easily become our lives, we must be prepared to leave what leads only to death, to receive the life that God desperately desires to give us.

MASTERING JESUS IN THE PERCEPTION

It should be our greatest prayer to experience Jesus IN us—to feel God working through us.  Why would we otherwise be satisfied with any other form of living when we can transact in what is inherently transformational?

Mastering Jesus in the perception 
is living gallantly by faith. 

It is giving up what we cannot keep
to gain what we cannot lose.

And it does mean we will need 
to give up what promises much 
but delivers nothing of real worth.

Faith is the matter of Jesus in the perception.
It is seeing ‘riches’ in this life 
and turning the other way.

The spiritual life gives up the matters in the material life for something that the material life cannot give.  The spiritual life prefers to give away the hankerings of the material life, and therefore a person on such a quest is spiritually blessed by being free of the holds that the material life entraps people to.

The spiritual life is intrinsically blessed in every offering 
of graciousness, kindness, patience, and generosity. 

Indeed, the spiritual life IS the epitome of generosity.

The spiritual life 
— against the material life — 
is the way to Christ in the perception.