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A personal relationship with God

A personal relationship with God

Postby Steve » August 20th, 2005, 12:19 pm

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Postby gskern » August 21st, 2005, 1:19 am

Did ANYBODY -- hope against all hope -- happen to SAVE the Thread we had started, on this topic, before the hacking? I liked it very much, and I will be disappointed if, ultimately, it is lost beyond all saving...

That said...

Steve, I liked what you said, especially the part about "personal but indirect"... What a succinct way to phrase something so hard (at least for me) to grasp...

And I have had musings along the same line as yours:
-- God is Omniscient, so He certainly knows everything about me
-- Indeed, the Bible says He knows the number of hairs on my head!
-- He made me for Himself, and precisely the way I am (sanctification notwithstanding)
-- He "delights in me with singing", the Bible tells us

So clearly, His awareness of ME is thorough, immediate, and profound... My awareness of Him, however, is much less certain, much less clearly defined. One part of the reason for that is my inability, as a mortal, to communicate with immortal spirits; another part is my sinfulness, which grieves the Holy Spirit and sets me at a distance (at least temporarily) from God; and surely another part is my relative immaturity in the things of the Faith... you rarely hear a mature Christian lamenting that "God doesn't seem real" to him...

In my orignial post, I was only thinking out loud about the language often used by some Christians, especially evangelicals, that seems to suggest that daily, LITERAL "face-time" directly with God is (or should be) somehow the "norm" for practicing Christians... I, for one, won't play "make-believe" and pretend that He does speak to me that way...

Not to say that it's not impossible! I'd love to hear more about the experience you say you had where God DID *literally* speak to you (if I understood you right)...

And I couldn't agree more about a literal manifestation making true Faith impossible; as I said in one of my posts on the Lost Thread, God's most earnest desire for us is TRANSFORMATION ("metamorphosis" is the word in Romans 12:2), which comes through the *process* of practicing the faith (the Disciplines)...
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Postby sehoy » August 21st, 2005, 9:10 am

cor meum vigilat
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Postby Áthas » August 21st, 2005, 7:50 pm

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My experience

Postby Steve » August 21st, 2005, 8:25 pm

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Some comments on gskern's thoughts

Postby Steve » August 21st, 2005, 10:08 pm

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Postby Adam Linton » August 21st, 2005, 10:52 pm

we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream
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Postby gskern » August 22nd, 2005, 12:58 am

Steve:

Thanks for sharing your story and your thoughts (and to the others, as well, thank you...)

Couple of things I want to add:

1. "Communication" is a two-way street, wherein the Speaker sends a message, and the Receiver receives it and gives Feedback in conjunction with the message. That 2-part "cycle" is Communication (or, at least, so say the books I studied as part of my Bachelor's in Communications).

This definition goes right to the heart of my troubles with this whole idea of personal interaction with God: I pray (out loud, using my tongue and teeth and lips and breath), and I hear a big BLANK in the room around me. And what I MIGHT suppose is God speaking to me, IN MY MIND, of course, could just as easily be explained as my Mind "responding" to itself.

2. But here's the deal:
Every single Great Saint, and Jesus Himself, has made Prayer a key component (perhaps even the most critical component) of their everyday lives; indeed, we're commanded to pray without ceasing -- non-stop! -- as easily as we breathe the air. Lewis himself noted somewhere that more than anything else about the Faith, Prayer baffled him the most. And yet there it is: We CANNOT be TRANSFORMED outside of the centrality of Prayer in our daily living.

And this isn't just about Prayer, although that is where I, personally, hear most strongly the deafening "silence" of God... It's also about a yearning to see, as Donald Miller says in his book, "Blue Like Jazz", "the lines in His face"... It's about the sop we hear from some Christians suggesting we can "walk and talk with God", as if one could ACTUALLY and LITERALLY stroll the City Zoo with Him in the shade of a Fall Sunday afternoon...

If there ARE Christians who have quite LITERALLY spoken TO and have LITERALLY heard back God's ACTUAL voice (and I've not met a single one, personally), then they are RARE indeed...

The overwhelming majority of us, then, must bear the burden of our deep and intense desire for God every day until we finally DO see Him, finally DO hear His literal voice, and finally ARE compelled to kneel and bow and (with fear and trembling) be "inspected" by Him...

Until then, I can think of at least ONE application for this intense longing for God: The moment of Temptation. When The Deceiver is "whispering in my ear" (not a literal voice, mind you), I need to RECALL that intense longing for God, and to once again dwell on the GLORY He made me to reflect... I need to remember, in that moment, that my strongest and deepest Joy lies in being "as a dog before its master", as Lewis said, having "pleased [Him] whom I rightly loved and rightly feared"...

No direct, immediate, personal, LITERAL experience with God? No bother; it's most definitely coming, and in the mean time, I am absolutely COMPELLED to believe in the FACT that God is, indeed, in this room with me at this very moment, and that He delights in me... In ways I cannot quite understand, I believe He is changing me, directing my thoughts, responding to my requests for Wisdom and for Provisions and for the Needs of others, preparing me to be "a real ingredient in the divine happiness..."

I must be patient in the midst of the process.
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Postby Air of Winter » August 22nd, 2005, 1:52 am

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Postby gskern » August 22nd, 2005, 4:46 am

And here's another thought:

Since I cannot escape the Skeptic in me (that for so long kept me AWAY from the Faith), I try often to answer its criticisms and questions, as if someone outside the Faith was asking me things... For example, I frequently have this urge to blurt out, "Yes, all this talk of 'spiritual change' is well and good, but it's still ME who's doing all the work!!"

Really? Ephesians 3:5&6 tell us that we are saved by Grace through Faith, and that even that Faith is a gift from God! SO, in the moment of temptation, I might very well say, "hey, it's ME who's doing the turning away... it's ME (all by myself!) that is 'trying to obey'... where's GOD??"

I can ask myself this: Why do I want to obey God in that moment?? If my answer is that I'm afraid of God's wrath if I give in, we can fast-foward to the end of the story: We already KNOW that we cannot be "good enough" to escape God's wrath! Our only HOPE is Jesus and our only MOTIVE for pursuing God is GOD HIMSELF.

Brothers and sisters, once we SEE the Living God, Holy and Lifted Up, sitting on His Throne -- and the very instant that His piercing Gaze whips through us like a razor blade -- everything else we've ever come to know as "Reality" will seem like a dream...

As A.W. Tozer says, it is GOD who moves first, putting even the DESIRE to follow Him in our hearts. The PAIN of that desire unfulfilled (for now) is just something I'm going to have to get used to; but to deny that God somehow (in a way I do not understand) PUT it there is to deny the very redemptive act of God in my life.

And perhaps a mere "taste of heaven" here and there ("heaven" being defined as being in God's presence), which sends me back to the Disciplines with a renewed sense of devotion, is precisely how God wants things, for now...
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A musical expression of the "personal/indirect" re

Postby Steve » August 22nd, 2005, 2:35 pm

I just thought this morning that this song by a band called BarlowGirl really applies to this domain of what our relationship with God is really like.

I waited for you today
But you didn't show
No no no
I needed You today
So where did You go?
You told me to call
Said You'd be there
And though I haven't seen You
Are You still there?


I cried out with no reply
And I can't feel You by my side
So I'll hold tight to what I know
You're here and I'm never alone

And though I cannot see You
And I can't explain why
Such a deep, deep reassurance
You've placed in my life

We cannot separate
'Cause You're part of me
And though You're invisible
I'll trust the unseen

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Postby sehoy » August 24th, 2005, 6:19 am

cor meum vigilat
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Postby sehoy » August 24th, 2005, 6:37 am

cor meum vigilat
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Postby sehoy » August 24th, 2005, 6:40 am

cor meum vigilat
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Postby magpie » August 24th, 2005, 4:02 pm

"Love is the will to extend one's self in order to nurture one's own or another's spiritual growth."
M. Scott Peck

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