Paul Anderson Walsh just did a short video on Facebook commenting on the phrase
In Him was the light of men. He was flagging up the way Christians perceive non-Christians.
I replied that this is one of the biggest changes that take place as we move out of Christian childhood/youth (1John2) and into Fatherhood. We now see with a single eye. We don't divide God up into Christendom and nonChristendom, secular and spiritual.
Why? In the second level, and for many of us this has been a Holy Spirit and me secondlevel experienced in the charismatic realm, we divided everything up into born again and non-born again. We made crass and hurtful judgments based on human perceptions and assumptions drawn from the simple intellectual equation: if a person is not born again then their contribution in this world is decidedly iffy.
All religions do this. And this is the irony. Christianity is meant to be different. We claim that Jesus is the Life. So therefore there must be some evidence in the form of a new way of behaviour. If not, we just sell up now...become a Baptist, a Methodist, a Catholic or an Anglican and just acquiesce to the particular religious form surrounding us.
In the third level we make some extraordinary discoveries.
We learn that we are spirit.
But we learn that this spirit is variously expressed like a lamp or lightbulb through the lampshade of soul and body.
We learn in Christ we change spirit at new birth. But our lampshade remains pretty much as it was....except that now it manifests good fruit of the Spirit and positive actions.
So we come to the next bombshell. We realise that all the people that surround us whether Christian or non Christian, are at one level, the more surface levels , unable to change from their God-given selves...their flavours, their giftings....all that changes...and this is after all the real change...is one at their spirit centre when they move from darkness to life in new birth.
This is what is known as "circumcision of the heart" . But even in the natural realm, what is circumcision but a removal of a tiny bit of skin at the tip of the reproductive organ? When we look in Christ, and see no man after the flesh:
We see a man or woman moving in / not moving in the Spirit of God....but either way we see their souls and bodies pretty much how God made them to be.
And I think that is what Paul Anderson Walsh is trying to get over.
We honour the God- created in each individual. And we meet everyone in this positive way. Even if we came face to face with Al Capone! And on the foundation of what they have already we seek to communicate the spiritual need to turn round from darkness to light at their spirit centre. Not in some Dalek process that evangelism has been guity of in the past: having a sub agenda....I will only like you if you convert. But this time loving from that Other Lover that is at our spirit centre whose name is Jesus....and will go on loving whatever another person chooses to do.
But apart from the Spirit falling in meetings, this only seems to take place on a daily basis as we get fixed in the third level revelation of Christ living His life as me.
Here is an extract of CS Lewis that Norman Grubb uses in his final book "Yes Iam" at the end of Chapter One.
**C. S. Lewis, in Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer ver (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), chapter 13, makes several statements which distinguish monism from pantheism:
"On the one hand, the man who does not regard God as other than himself cannot be said to have a religion at all.
On the other hand, if I think God other than myself in the same way in which my fellow-men, and objects in general, are other than myself, I am beginning to make Him an idol.
I am daring to treat His existence as somehow parallel to my own.
But He is the ground of our being.
He is always both within us and over against us.
Our reality is so much from His reality as He, moment by moment, projects into us .... Arnold speaks of us as 'en-isled'from one another in'the sea of life.' But we can't be similarly 'en-isled' from God. To be discontinuous from God as I am discontinuous from you would be annihilation ....
"We must, no doubt, distinguish this ontological continuity between Creator and creature which is, so to speak, 'given' by the relation between them, from the union of wills which, under Grace, is reached by a life of sanctity.
The ontological continuity is, I take it, unchangeable, and exists between God and a reprobate (or a devil) no less than between God and a saint.'Whither shall I go then from thy presence? If I go down to hell, thou art there also.' .. .
"In Pantheism God is all. But the whole point of creation surely is that He was not content to be all. He intends to be 'all in all' " (pp. 67-71).
See also: Ephesians 4:6, Acts 17:28 and Romans 11:36.
Paul Anderson Walsh also wears other hats
This was the show clip that shows what it was about: Truly inspirational
