Beyond Belief & the Holy Spirit

[Warning: ramble ahead.]

Beyond Belief
Hebrews 6:1a, Romans 1:17, Philippians 1:6
words/music by Bob Hartman, from the 1990 Petra album Beyond Belief
lyrics acquired from www.PetraRocksMyWorld.com

We're content to pitch our tent
When the glory's evident
Seldom do we know the glory came and went

Moving can seem dangerous
In this stranger's pilgrimage
Knowing that you can't stand still, you cross the bridge

(Chorus)
There's a higher place to go, beyond belief, beyond belief
Where we reach the next plateau, beyond belief, beyond belief
And from faith to faith we grow
Towards the center of the flow
Where He beckons us to go, beyond belief, beyond belief

Leap of faith without a net
Makes us want to hedge our bet
Waters never part until our feet get wet

There's a deeper place to go
Where the road seems hard to hoe
He who has begun this work won't let it go

And it takes so long to see the change
But we look around and it seems so strange

We have come so far but the journey's long
And we once were weak but now we're strong

L.M. and I have been on a spiritual journey for the last several years - one where we are beginning to realize and experience the truth that if we want live and experience the life that Christ describes and invites us to, we must go beyond mere belief.

“God said, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer’ – but we have turned it into a Bible ministry!”

Bible study is not an end in itself. Most churches would agree, but many function as if they don't. I just found this quote from some random blog I stumbled on. The author (I think) means it as an expression of humility, "Personally, I don't have the guts to follow Jesus, so I often settle for being a Christian." My problem is, I'm not willing to settle. We aren't called to be Christians, we're called to follow Jesus; to be "little Christ's." "Christian" no longer means those things.

I'm convinced that "Christianity" as we generally know it America – high church or low church – is not what Jesus had in mind when He talked about people living in the Kingdom of heaven on earth. I'm not blaming anyone for the situation, I'm just saying that we've more or less lost the Plot. That all sounds ridiculously arrogant, I know. Maybe it is, but either way it's not all that inconceivable that it's true. It seems to me that what He had in mind was us living together with God through Him in the power of His Spirit in such a way that we become transformed into the kind of people we are intended to be. Sounds rather dynamic and experiential and completely life-altering to me. That is a far cry from merely ironing the wrinkles out of our doctrinal panties every Sunday morning. The life Jesus invites us to is not one where we merely figure out how to behave properly by tweaking everyone's theology and philosophy and forming doctrinal and behavioural support communities. We should have learned by now that you can't have an effective "Ministry of the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice" if you aren't willing to threaten people with imprisonment and/or death. To have a hope of controlling outward behaviour through outside influence - washing the outside of the cup first, rather being transformed from the inside out - we'd have to either employ Taliban-type tactics or control the entire entertainment/news media. No wonder our N. American churches are in general so ineffective at facilitating substantial life change of the kind Jesus spoke and displayed! To paraphrase Isaac from Ghana: if we rely on our education and effort we get what education and effort can do. If we rely on God, we get what God can do. Most of what we have in many (most?) church communities can be attributed to human effort - including the average person's personal growth. We've just gotten really good at 'giving God the credit' (and weaselling out of blame) for the results of what we do. I'm not saying God shouldn't ultimately get the credit for everything we have the ability to do. It just seems to me that more often then not 'giving God the credit' is really us attributing self-serving significance to our own actions and events.

There is a difference between controlling people so that they think and behave properly and transforming people so that their thoughts, feelings, and actions are the natural result of who they are becoming and the God they live with. Controlling or influencing people is something we do; transforming is something God does. The results of our attempts at transforming people are, well, the results of what we can do. Acts 2 was pretty significant is to the lives of the 12 Disciples, who become Apostles.

After three years of following Jesus around, seeing and hearing Him teach and work miracles, seeing Him killed, seeing and feeling Him bodily resurrected from the dead, they are still (understandably) thinking Mid-East politics: "Now are you going to kick the Romans' butts and make Israel into a great nation again?" Three years in the Jesus Theological Seminary and what do they do when Jesus gets arrested? They (understandably) run and hide. He gets killed, and they (understandably) lock themselves in a room. I say their actions are 'understandable' because we can hardly expect to do better in their place. It's not like we got three years hands-on training and lectures direct from God Incarnate. But Jesus comes back resurrected and appears before them and what does He say, "Go change the world"? No, He says, "I don't care if you got your three-year seminary degrees direct from the Sovereign Creator Himself. You aren't going anywhere – yet. Stay here and wait."

You'd think that three years of personal training from the Saviour of the world would make one well-equipped to get out there and kick some spiritual tail. But it wasn't enough – it wasn't even close to enough. Three years of experiencing Jesus’ own direct teaching from within their own cultural and historic context wasn’t good enough for Jesus to send them out. Where do we get off thinking that our education could do better? No offence, but as highly as I esteem most of my profs, they aren't exactly on par with Jesus. The Disciples' "before Acts 2" photos and the Apostles' "after Acts 2" photos should make this obvious. They go from abandoning Jesus and hiding behind locked doors to revolutionizing the known world and staying faithful through torture and death. The Holy Spirit is a nice fancy theological thing to posit but He doesn't factor in for squat in any functional way when it comes to how we are trained to live and operate post-college. I see a functional difference in the way the Disciples operated and who they were pre- and post-Acts 2.

At what point in the past did I unconsciously agree to buy into the fearful, spineless, snobbishly prideful, control-obsessed idea that it's perfectly acceptable to take a "no Holy Spirit" option on life with God through Christ? Merely thinking what we’re supposed to think and learning good people-management skills is not enough. Aren't we invited into a dynamic relationship that is not supposed to function as mere theory or sentimental re-interpretation of an otherwise ordinary human experience?

Just stuff we're chewing on...