All in the Mind (6)

I’ve had an American couple staying with us this past week, a lovely couple, warm, expressive and outgoing. I’ve stayed with them a number of times in the past and got to know the people in their church, again nice people, warm expressive and outgoing (mostly). I have been with my friend a number of times when we encounter strangers. He embarrasses me with his warm friendly greetings of perfect strangers – we don’t do that in the UK! 
 
So there we are two human beings, enjoying friendship but in many ways utterly different in the ways we think – because yes, it is merely a matter of the way we think. He’s expressive and extrovert and I tend towards being quiet and introvert. That’s a personality thing but how much of that is nature and how much nurture is always debatable.
  
When it comes to our leadership styles in church, again we are quite different. He is highly organised and structured and I tend to be much more laid back and let it happen. When it comes to preaching he prefers preparation and order – and so do I, but then I am also quite happy to preach without preparation and notes if that’s what God calls for on occasion, while he would consider that a nightmare scenario. When it comes to his people in leadership, he tends towards control and great planning, while I tend towards leaving my people to express their gifting without me leaning over their shoulder. Yes, we are very different – as we all are. And our differences are also a joy.
   
Those who look in on the church from their positions of unbelief, seem to convey an idea that they expect uniformity, yet that is the last thing they find, if they really look. Differences are, for many people, unnerving. Uniformity is safe, yet the reality is that God has created incredible diversity in this world and we, the members of the human race are equally diverse, and the wonderful news is that the Lord loves each of us with our differences. Those differences of thinking sometimes lead us to differences of spiritual experience. For some of us, belief is a struggle. For others it seems as easy as breathing. Some of us struggle with any outward expression of our piety, but for others praying publicly or giving a testimony publicly seem as easy as walking.
   
I am incredibly grateful that the Bible shows us that God accepts us as we are, that we don’t have to conform to some particular style of thinking or behaviour before He loves us. When the Bible says “God is love” (1 John 4:8,16) it means that He is ALWAYS love; He cannot express Himself in any way other than love. Many people struggle with how this is when you read the Old Testament and some wrongly jump to the conclusion that there must be two Gods.
   
No, I suspect that the truth is part of the way we perceive God and the way God reveals Himself to us, is to do with where we are in life. He’s always exactly the same; the difference is in the way we perceive Him or how He reveals Himself. The challenge therefore, becomes how we view what we find in the Old Testament. I find the signs of God’s love very obvious there so often. At other times I have to pause and reflect on what is going on, but then I come to realise that His different responses are to do with our different responses to Him. Love is selfless, sacrificial, unrestrained good will. That is what God always expresses to each of us, as different as we are.  HOW He expresses Himself is something else – but I’ll leave that until the next time I write. For the moment, will you just accept that God wishes to express towards you this same selfless, sacrificial, unrestrained good will. 
     

All in the Mind (5)

Two people. They don’t look alike, but we expect that. But look at their minds, what is going on inside their heads – utterly different!  Now that, you may think, is not surprising, but actually when it comes to the evidence for the Christian Faith, you might change your mind. Here is person ‘A’ who is challenged to think about all the evidence. Edith Schaeffer’s book, L’Abri, tells the story of the Schaeffer family back in the middle of the last century who felt called to go as missionaries to Europe, who ended up in Switzerland, of Francis Schaeffer, a pastor, who felt he had to completely rethink his beliefs but came through to the utter conviction that God is here and that if He is and had called them He would provide for them. There follow times of relying utterly on God to send the needed finances. There also follows a unique ministry for the time, helping students think through their various disciplines in the light of the evidence, also to be severely thought through. Person ‘A’ is a person who rigorously thinks through the evidence and comes to a strong faith based on the evidence.
  
Then we find person ‘B’ who cynically derides the evidence, doesn’t think it through, refuses to consider it with an open mind and maintains a hostile stance against Christianity and remains in blissful ignorance of truth, because they refuse to face it. True to Orwell’s ‘1984’ they distort and indeed reverse the truth and accuse Christian Faith of being mindless delusion which holding a mindless contempt of the Faith. They read the Bible but read with a closed mind that has already arrived at its conclusions. They are blind to the wonder of what is there and by selective use of verses standing alone they paint an utterly distorted picture of a ‘reverse-image’ God.
    
There are two things here that help convince me of the existence of spiritual realities. The first is this ‘wilful refusal’ to systematically consider the evidence with an open mind. I have an elderly friend who, many years ago now, came from an unbelieving background but started asking questions that he thought were unanswerable. As he now testifies, he ‘painted himself into a corner’ where he realised there was no escape. He would either face the truth and be transformed or live a life of hypocrisy knowing he had turned away from the truth and live a lie. Wonderfully he opted for the former and we now have the further evidence of a gloriously transformed life. This ‘wilful refusal’ is self-centred driven and what the Bible refers to as ‘sin’ and it is obvious in all of us in greater or lesser measure.
     
The second thing that convinces me of spiritual realities is the blindness that person ‘B’ and those like him exhibit. It may be a refusal to believe from the start, but it produces an inability to ‘see’. For the atheist this is totally frustrating for they are certain they are right and the Christian is wrong. Faced with a genuine miracle they will look for every answer possible other than it was a work of God. It becomes terribly important to them that it is not God. They refuse to examine the central evidence and focus on the misdoings on religious humanity, failing to see that an individual’s struggles to understand are often far short of the truth displayed in the evidence.
   
Belief comes, at the end of the day, not by examining the evidence – that so often follows later, although for a few it is the way, as I’ve indicated above. But no, belief comes to most as a desire to really know truth, to really find God (who IS there) – and then comes the confirming evidence on which to build faith. Jesus came bringing many ‘signs’ but the hard hearted were the ones who refused to acknowledge them – they knew better!
    

All in the Mind (4)

I have been pondering the human mind and roam on to think about faith. Faith is not just something confined to those of a religious or spiritual bent.  I’ve observed it in the lives of atheists. So often they will aver that it is possible for atheistic scientists to have a sense of awe and wonder in response to what they find in scientific discovery. No problem – apart from the fact that philosophically that is quite irrational if you hold an atheists viewpoint.  Why should the product of chemical and electrical interactions (dress it up and call it ‘biology’ if you will, but that’s what it is from a godless, reductionist perspective) have any sense of wonder at these things. They are merely chemical reactions surely!
    
Richard Dawkins confessed, at the beginning of his book Unweaving the Rainbow, that the result of his first book had been to create a sense of life being empty and purposeless. Indeed he quotes his friend Peter Atkins who is equally pessimistic. Having realised that this logical outcome of atheism was not producing a popular response, he then wrote Unweaving the Rainbow with the express intention of trying to show that it is possible to be an atheistic scientist and still have a sense of wonder and awe when examining Creation.
    
To achieve this he makes the tremendous ‘leap of faith’ that early existentialist Soren Kierkegaard spoke about. His whole writing fights against the nihilism which is the logical outcome of atheism, and the only way he can do it is by this leap of faith into ‘meaningful atheism’.  Like other atheists he uses language in a casual way.
    
For instance, he speaks of “a quasi-mystical response to nature.” The least religious shine on ‘mystical’ you can have, is simply mysterious, but usually mystical has a certain religious connotation to it. So it’s semi-religious or semi-mysterious. But why should a scientist have even this feeling when he is simply measuring or finding out information about simple matter.
      
The whole point is that he is making it less and less mysterious. No, be honest, the truth is that Richard and others find themselves with an awesome feeling when they find out some of the details of Creation. But why should it be awesome from their perspective, because it’s all purely by chance, purely accident, according to their doctrine. We don’t feel awe about anything else that we encounter that is pure chance. No, the truth is that there is something inside them that they are struggling with. They may desperately describe it in mechanistic terms, but they are still struggling.
     
In his letter to the church at Rome, in the New Testament, the apostle Paul wrote: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” (Rom 1;20).
     
In other words, that intelligent man considered that everyone has this sense when they study Creation, that there is a Creator behind it. They are condemned because they overcome their inner feeling because they realise that if there is a God they will be answerable to Him. They ‘refuse to see’ not on logical grounds, but on the grounds that they don’t want to see. That is what Richard and others like him struggle with!
  
In his book ‘Jesus among other Gods’, Ravi Zacharias quotes Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy at New York University: “I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fear that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t that I just don’t believe in God and naturally hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”
   
Zacharias had just commented on Bertrand Russell’s complaint about lack of evidence and then observed, “The Scriptures categorically state that the problem with such people is not the absence of evidence; it is, rather, the suppression of it.”
    
What is it that suppresses the evidence and makes mystical leaps of faith to try and cope with it? It is, I suggest, the pride within us that dares not, perhaps fears not, allow there to be One who is supreme, who knows best. Thus we distort the Biblical truths and make black into white. Perhaps one of the best illustrations of this is Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy. Listen to this bit of dialogue:
    
“Are you one of the angels who rebelled so long ago?”“Yes, and since then I have been wandering between worlds. Now I have pledged my allegiance to Lord Asriel, because I see his great enterprise the best hope of destroying the tyranny at last.”

“But if you fail?”
“Then we shall all be destroyed, and cruelty will reign for ever.”
    
Did you see the language? Tyranny? Cruelty?  Listen to Psalm 2: “Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain? “Let us break their chains,” they say, “and throw off their fetters.” 
    
What a distortion of the truth the human mind conjures up, to portray the utterly good God as one who is oppressive. It’s a defence mechanism that flies in the face of the evidence, used to ward off anything that threatens individual sovereignty. And why should individual sovereignty be threatened? Because God tries to show us an alternative way to the holes we dig for ourselves, a way that is described by such words as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and gentleness. How convoluted the human mind gets!

    

All in the Mind (3)

The human mind can create bizarre ways of thinking and even more bizarre ways of behaviour. Superstition is something that humanists suggest will disappear with education. I wish! People will be good when they are educated has been a humanistic mantra for a long time, in fact right the way throughout the last century, yet historians tell us that it was one of the most bloody of modern centuries. A certain little German with a moustache had a set of ideas about a master race that resulted in the murder of over six million Jews and the deaths of millions more in battle and through bombing. A moustached soviet also had a set of ideas that resulted in the deaths, it is sometimes suggested, of over sixty million of his own people. Deaths for the sake of an idea.
    
If you really want to be emotive you talk about the deaths of millions of unborn children across the world by abortions. Again for the sake of an idea: my body is mine. Future generations may look back in horror. Politics is all about competing ideas – and so is personal behaviour. As Western countries in particular have cast aside moral absolutes, we are left with ‘anything goes’. The apostle Paul’s warning that “a man reaps what he sows” (Gal 6:7) is straight common sense one might say, but it is increasingly disregarded.
    
The story of Adam and Eve is often jeered at but the truth is to be seen nevertheless, when the serpent sowed the seeds of the first deception with his, “It will be all right!”  It frequently isn’t. The girl who listens to the plea of her boyfriend, “It’s all right,” frequently finds it isn’t and an unwanted pregnancy or an unwanted STD just proves the point. When finance houses invite gullible people to take out bigger loans with, “It’ll be all right,” the ensuing loss that many are now finding, proves that it wasn’t ‘all right’.
    
But have you noticed when we talk like this, we are accused of being scaremongers or killjoys. Why shouldn’t I do what I like, is a common attitude which continues to prevail despite a growing number of newspaper and magazine articles that pour out statistics showing the destructive behaviour patterns of modern societies. The evidence is piling up yet public perception refuses to accept it. Recently a survey suggested that a large percentage of people thought cohabitation or divorce were acceptable alternatives within modern societies, yet the figures mount up showing that both are severely detrimental to human society.
   
So why do we act like lemmings, abandoning common sense at every turn? The Bible speaks about something called ‘Sin’, the propensity to self-centred rebellion against authority (God’s especially), but of course many people would prefer to rubbish that concept. Once you do that all you are left with is the shallow comment, “The human mind is a strange thing!”  The tragedy of that is that it is an acceptance of what is, without there being any hope of an answer, and it keeps people locked into the mentality of “It will be all right” because, for them, there is no answer. Something new has entered the world called optimistic-pessimism. Think about it.

   

All in the Mind (2)

The human mind is indeed a strange thing. Scientists speak of electric charges running around this lump that fills our skull. All we know is that we speak of consciousness – awareness of being. We speak of intellect, the ability to know, to reason and to understand. We also refer to our mind, the seat of consciousness, thought, volition and feeling, but it is still all a mystery.  
      
What is an even bigger mystery is how this ‘mind’ of ours comes up with beliefs, things we take as truths about life. History shows us that beliefs are no guarantee of rightness. Once upon a time men believed that the earth was flat. I don’t know who said it, but one of my favourite quotations is, “The one thing that history teaches us is that history teaches us nothing.”  History is littered with ideas (beliefs) that had to be discarded. It is also littered with so many lessons about life that you wonder why we have learnt so little along the way.  
  
World religions are the peak of strange beliefs. Why do people still believe some of the things the major religions espouse? For many, I am certain, it is a cultural thing. The religion goes to the core of everyday life (culture) and if you removed it that life would be utterly different. I once read one commentator suggesting that if only the West would concentrate on ensuring that every man woman and child in Islamic nations were lifted out of poverty, the very religion would be completely undermined. This commentator based his suggestion on the belief that that particular world religion was so entwined with culture of the Middle East, and so often a culture of poverty, that if you removed the poverty you would remove the reason for being. It is perhaps a debatable point.  
    
Fear, I am also convinced, is also a driving force for much religion, superstitious fear that is based on no more than a ‘feeling’. I used to wonder why it was that with such a book as the Bible in existence, there is anyone left believing in this superstitious God of fear. Of course the answer is that considerable numbers of people have never read it, many who have read it have only read bits, and many others have only ever heard others expounding it, and expounding a version that is more a reflection of their distorted view of life in general than the truth of what is written.
    
I was led down this path of thinking the other day when I found myself reading the account of God coming to Abraham at the oaks of Mamre (Gen 18:1).  I observed that there was something quite significant there in the light of the world religions’ propensity to want us to do religious or spiritual things to be able to somehow make contact with God who otherwise is unapproachable, as they see it. God comes to Abraham without any fanfare and certainly without Abraham doing anything to win His favour. Abraham is just relaxing at home. This speaks of a personal God who comes to us and who doesn’t need appeasing (because He’s already sorted it!) and who obviously enjoys people.  
  
Now within that paragraph there are a whole set of beliefs revealed through that one incident that run utterly counter to the beliefs of millions upon millions of people in the world. Granted there are other incidents in the Bible where God appears with a greater sense of awesomeness, but it struck me that that incident reveals a picture of God that takes away all fears. Yes, He is holy, yes He is righteous and yes He does frown on sin, but for those who come with simple open hearts, desiring Him, they find One who draws near, makes His presence known and reveals His love.  
    
Read through the Gospels and observe Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as he moves among sinners and loves and accepts them and we begin to catch something of the wonder of the love of God. Read the whole of the Old Testament and you start to realise that He was there in all those years of history, just the same. There were not two Gods as some cults have supposed as a result of their careless reading of the Bible. Why, I sometimes wonder, do the critics of the Bible not read it with an open mind and see what is genuinely there. Perhaps that is asking too much. Many Christians don’t even do that, so why should the non-Christian sceptics have a greater integrity?  The mind is a funny thing!

  

All in the Mind (1)

 

Is there any experience that we can have that doesn’t involve the mind? I don’t think so. In that case the mind is incredibly important when thinking about experience. The mind is capable of deceiving us and so everything may not be quite as we might like to think. The whole of the Matrix films are based on this premise – that actually it’s all in the mind and nothing is real. Shades of Hinduism I seem to remember. Also shades of the stuff that students discuss; is this world real or are we dreaming it all.
   
There are certain people who espouse this unreality and try to kid the rest of us that they genuinely believe this, but I notice they always enter rooms through doorways and never walk through walls. I also notice that they still use lifts or elevators and don’t fly down. I notice they still get ill or have accidents and then groan and moan about their condition. It may be a dream but a dream with very fixed rules and those rules are quite different from the ones we find when we do genuinely dream.
   
I’ve also noticed that we CAN control our minds. Yesterday I went to write a blog and felt quite unhappy about what I had written and so changed my mind and went back and wiped it. It was a conscious decision based upon rational thoughts.
  
The apostle Paul wrote to his young associate, Timothy, “For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline.”  (2 Tim 1:7). I find that interesting because it suggests a blend of spirit, mind and behaviour. A timid person is one who is “easily alarmed or shy”. Timidity, therefore, starts in the mind. It is about what we think about ourselves, others, and life in general. What we think then translates itself into retiring behaviour.

So I watch as a person becomes a Christian and God unites His Holy Spirit with their spirit, and suddenly there is an assurance that feels strong, feels full of love, and feels completely in control. (Well that’s how it should work!) The transformation of the mind that has been impacted by Spirit, results in a transformed life.
  
Book shops have shelves filled with self-help books, and those that deal in self-esteem start by addressing the way we think. We’ve learnt a lot in recent decades about the mind. I’ll talk about this in the blogs each day in this week ahead. In these sorts of books there is always a blend of truth and deception, and I’ll explain that as we go through the week. May it be a good week! It’s a fun area to think about.

   

Friday

Friday, the end of the working week and precursor to the weekend. I started writing this post twenty minutes ago and speculated on what people do on Friday nights and at the weekend, and found my writing becoming jaded and superficial, and I want to do neither jaded nor superficial, so I wiped it.  I don’t want to moralise either about the antics of the escapist society at the weekend. That just sounds pompous, and there’s enough of that in the world without me adding to it!

I go on Face-book to see what people I know are doing and saying. I find it an encounter with the very young at heart, and no longer being young, I find it best to be a mere observer. But I came across a girl I know – young lady, call her what you will – who has just changed her photo to one where she is lying back and sticking her tongue out. I wanted to weep. Why?  Because I know this girl, or to be more precise, I know a little of her and she is beautiful and has a wonderful voice but everything about her now screams, “Life sucks!” and that is tragic. I believe I know something of her potential, of what she could be, and that makes it even worse. To add to that she became a Christian but a Christian boy falling off the rails did her no favours and she too ‘fell off the rails’ and fell into materialistic hedonism, to use the language, a chaser of pleasure. However, when you do that so often you loose perspective in many different ways, and she made a bad choice of a man who eventually almost destroyed her.

Alcohol now seems to play quite a large part in her life and the tragedy continues. She won’t let anyone close and so those whose hearts are filled with love and concern for her are kept at arm’s distance. To watch this ongoing drama is not like a TV soap, for this is real and if a TV soap upsets you, so much more should real life. Hollywood hasn’t been bad over the years at producing films with the message, “the truth will set you free.”  It was Jesus who said, “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free” (Jn 8:32) but few people seem to know the context:  ”If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know ….”

The context of those verses show us that the listeners did not understand as so often they don’t today.  He had just been speaking about his death, about who he was and why he came. That is his teaching which so-called disciples of his need to believe, that God loves us each so much that He has reached out through His Son to deal with the source of our pain – our guilt and our shame – and He seeks to draw us into His loving arms where we can feel secure and loved and comforted and healed and encouraged and accepted by Him. THAT is the teaching Jesus refers to and that is the truth that sets us free.

When we know that we are utterly love, we are transformed. Tonight thousands who do not know that they are utterly loved, will try to compensate for that in their Friday night out. Perhaps that why Friday night out ought to be called tragedy night.  Should you stumble across this Blog and see yourself on this page, read the paragraph above once more and know that that describes God’s love for YOU.  Ponder on it before a painful life drives you out into who knows what tonight. Be loved.