SOS Discipline - Daily Proverb and Red Letter Reader
Evil will kill you. Evil is inaccurate. cf Pr. 11.19
It’s always the right time to speak in Jesus’ Name. cf Mt. 10:32
The Road to Nowhere
But the righteousness based on faith says, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’” (that is, to bring Christ down) (Romans 10:6)
There are two main problems with this mystic pursuit of God through feeling. The first (and the biggest for Christians) is that Jesus never actually taught it. The Bible never tells you that the path to finding God lies hidden within positive experiences. It’s not that Jesus has a problem with hearts or emotions in general. After all, He created them. But He didn’t create them in order to speak to us through them. That was why He created words.
The second problem with believing that we can find God in our hearts is that human emotions always have an unintended side effect: they wear off. Feelings can come with extraordinary strength. They can be as real and potent as the sun warming your face. They can fill you with confidence, conviction, and daring. They can motivate you, get you to turn your life around, and press you to achieve things you never thought possible. But they inevitably also do what emotions always do. They change.
One week you wake up to discover that the methods once so good at helping you feel God last week—the songs, the advice, the practices, and all the other things that gave you such strong comfort and assurance—suddenly they don’t quite lift you up the way they used to. They feel muted. The experience is dulled, if only slightly. At this point, the trained mystic begins seeking, casting about for a new source of feeling better—a catchier song, a more vintage or innovative practice, some new, compelling advice. It really doesn’t matter what.
This is precisely where Mysticism is the most dangerous (and a little scary). Once you’ve given her your heart, she is more than content to show you God’s presence in just about anything. She knows a time is coming when seeking God in your emotions will start to build up a tolerance. She knows you will start to shift from feeling lifted up to feeling tired, from being purposeful to being worn thin, and from experiencing conviction to experiencing a nagging hint of betrayal. After all the work she has done to get you this far, the last thing she wants to do is risk that in your moment of weakness someone else might tell you the mistake you have made is trying to find God in your heart. So she’s ready, right there beside you, to whisper her lie, only spiced with different colors.
“This is the moment we’ve been waiting for,” she says. “You weren’t ready totrulyexperience God before. First you had to grow and learn. Butnowyou are ready. All of this is just a test you are facing because you have come so far. Now is the time to take finding God in your heartto the next level.”
That next level might still include the name “Jesus,” or it might not. It might come with a few verses quoted from the Bible, or it might not. It doesn’t matter so long as you dig into the pie and start practicing the new practices, applying the new methods, and putting your trust in the new promises that you will and can find God in what you feel. “This time it will be for real. This time the feelings will last. This time you will really, really learn to experience God.”
Just a few years ago in Philadelphia two high school girls threw themselves in front of a train because their boyfriends had dumped them. They weren’t thinking that day. They were feeling. They were doing exactly what they had been taught to do: follow their hearts. The dark side of Mysticism wasn’t sleeping, even while the rest of us were. With The Lie spiced just right for the moment, Mysticism was waiting to whisper to those heartbroken children, “This is the next step. This is the path to feeling better. This is how you get to a better place. Just follow me. Just jump.”
But the dark side of Mysticism isn’t always such an early tragedy. For many, Mysticism dances with them through decades of church attendance, purposeful living, and chasing after a successful life. For many it isn’t until they’re sitting alone in a nursing home, forcing down fifteen pills a day, and hoping for a visit from anyone, that the despair and doubts about God buried beneath endless rays of sunshine come flooding back as the perfect storm of a broken life. Sometimes it’s later, sometimes it’s sooner, but it is inevitable that the lows tip the balance back from the highs. How many times can feelings fix the real questions of faith? What about after the divorce, after the layoff, after the bankruptcy, after the sin?
Though he will rarely admit it to himself, the Mystic Christian wakes up every day feeling a little bit weaker, needing to try something a little bit newer, in order to recover the emotions he was convinced he had finally captured in a bottle the day before. Too tired to go seeking yet another emotional proof, unwilling to force feed himself yet another quest for experience at yet another new church, fed up with believing that this next trick will work when all the others have been such limited failures, many a man will conclude that his problem is God.
This is exactly what Mysticism is waiting for. This is her plan.
He has tried with all his heart and all his mind and all his soul to feel God, and as a direct result he now feels with utmost, experiential certainty that Christianity is the most untrustworthy religion in the world. What will he try next? Maybe a nice, safe religion that promises a better walk with God through healthy living, with some regular stretching and breathing exercises.
This is the great danger of Mysticism. She is terribly powerful. Once you’ve believed the lie she tells—that you can find God in your heart—she is capable of convincing you to try anything.
