Quote:
Originally Posted by Mephibosheth
It's true, thousands stand in danger of getting sidetracked...but at the end of the day, how much of it all is really down to good, old-fashioned commonsense? It is actually more common than you might think. Actually, my educated guess would be that many more countless thousands have exercised their commonsense in relation to things spiritual than the thousands who haven't; sometimes to their profit, but sometimes to their loss (one doesn't enter the kingdom of God through their commonsense).
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I almost replied when you first brought this up. Your original comment seemed to be pointing at something that I have often said here.
At some level, it is reasonable to suggest that common sense will help you get through a book by Nee or Lee without becoming ensnared in the nonsense. But at the same time, a lot of people with really good common sense bought into it all for some period of time. And some still do.
And maybe getting rid of the really big stuff is good enough. But maybe not. The number of apparently innocuous things taught, like "just turn to your spirit" seem so harmless. And because of the words used, it is hard to say anything negative against it. But it is not my spirit that is the source of right and wrong. (And if there is a real issue with right and wrong, good and evil, that goes back to the fall, it is not that we ate the wrong tree, but that we took the responsibility of defining good and evil for ourselves rather than relying on God's definitions.) And while we refer to our spirit as regenerated, it is not God, or Christ, and is therefore not the correct source of revelation. In fact, what does it mean to "turn to your spirit"? To figure out how you "feel" about something? To pray? To say some words (even good words, like "Oh, Lord Jesus")?
Our concern here is not so much those who have never been hooked by Nee's and Lee's teachings. With a few exceptions related to a few of Nee's writings, no one is going to read either other them unless they join with the LRC. And those are the ones we are concerned with. They have already had a large helping of LRC Kool-aid. Their eyes begin with a fog in front of them. Their nostrils think the smell is normal but it is garlic.
And we were all there. The difficult thing is that there are little bits of nonsense stuck onto so much otherwise sound teaching. Human nature related to unlearning error was researched a little in recent years. What was discovered was that if something was learned in a vacuum and the result was that the meaning was not what should have been taught, when the context is introduced and the error becomes evident, over half hang onto the error as if it is still just as true as they thought before. In effect, we are prone to believing what we have already come to believe even when it is found to be wrong.
And while eliminating the tagalongs does not eliminate all of this kind of continued error, it at least helps. If you go in knowing that you are going to see something different, then there is a chance that you might see something differently. But as long as you keep looking in the same places, you will have little chance of finding something different.
And for that reason, I always suggest that you at least put your LSM library in boxes in the attic and don't get them out until you think you really understand things clearly without it. (Then it is probably better to just put it out with the recycling.)