Quote:
Originally Posted by Ohio
Your struggles as a CK reminded me of my own as a child trying to figure out how old God was. Exhausting.
|
In my case, it was as a 16 to 17-year-old suddenly having a brief glimpse of the vastness of eternity. It was quite impactful. (This was pre-LC by a year or two.)
Now I think of it in terms of the kinds of things that are talked about as "experience" in the LC or even what little I remember of some inner-life teachers prior to the LC. And the goal seems to be to keep having that experience as if it is somehow the thing that will hasten the day of the New J.
But for that one experience, while it has left some permanent impression, I have never tried to recreate that "experience" or felt the need to keep trying to out-do my prior consideration of how overwhelming the notion of eternity is. It was as if a little of the mystery of God was like a curtain that I was directed to a small opening to peek through for a moment.
It is the hint that was enough for me. I have faith for the rest. I do not need to continue to have emotional experiences of this kind to know and believe. To me, the experiences are too often a kind of fanciful "proof" that then requires no faith. If you can keep getting experience, then we must have gone beyond faith into some level of "tangible" proof. I guess not really tangible since it is only a feeling and not like a mathematical formula. Though that is what we too often treat it as. This is the empirical evidence that there is God. I can read from his scripture and these feelings will come. Even overtake me in some cases.
Faith is the evidence of things not seen. Not feelings. And that evidence is only observable in the changes to one's life, not like matter under a microscope. I recognize that isolating yourself, going to a lot of meetings, and having pep-rallyesque experiences is likely a change of life. But I do not see that anywhere in scripture as a relevant or meaningful activity or goal. Instead, it is the living in this life according to the righteousness of God that will happen when we walk according to the Spirit (among other ways it is described).
I note that Jesus spent a lot of time talking to the disciples and also to the crowds, and on occasion to specific ones who came to him. While the disciples continued to follow, and on occasion, he told others to follow, when talking to the crowd, he did not talk about actively following him on his journeys with the disciples. He told them how to live and then sent them home. Not to "experience Christ" or to go to a lot of meetings to exercise their spirits., but to live according to what he had taught.