On faith … Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
~ CS Lewis, From The Screwtape Letters
If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ Who is your life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory… Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all. … The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct Him?” But we have the mind of Christ.
~ paul, The Least of The Apostles, in Colossians 3 and 1 Corinthians 2
Oh beloved, it is true.
In each of our lives, we come to a crisis of faith. And sometimes, if we are lucky, we come to many of them. Each of these crises push us further out into a zone where the decisions we make have a point of no return.
If, in our bitterness at the length and strain of the path He has put on, we decide to bail out. There is a point where we cannot be renewed to repentance. Oh, it is not that a brother of The Son is going to miss eternity in the family of G_d. But, we can be sure that there can be a time where we will receive a thunderous rebuke from our King. He will not send us away like He never knew us. No, it will be worse. We will endure the fire of His Fiery Presence, as it burns away the dross of our old man in some purgatorious bath of His wrath.
If anyone thinks they could endure the above, think again. This will not be a scolding. It will be a scalding and burning up of everything we thought we could bring with us into The Kingdom. Even our clothing (of our own “righteousness”) will be burned away, and we will be saved only through a terrible and cleansing fire.
However, there is another path.
Can we see it?
It is, perhaps, even more painful. Because, instead of one great gush of flame and pain, we do endure the ending of our own way of thinking. It is terribly painful. For the flesh in us does not want to give up. However, as much as the flesh wants to scream that it has a place, it doesn’t. Somewhere, and somehow it will be put to death.
There are three places for this death to occur, and the earlier it happens, the better. This death-to-self, in this life, is the path to the greatest eternal happiness. Oh, don’t take this as some sort of rant against our bad behaviors and sins. YES, those are terrible. YES, we can walk in victory. But, the issue at hand is our hand raised against the freedom our King can bring through His Spirit.
The flesh will scream that it is up to the fight, but when we put our minds to it, we understand that spirit always trumps flesh. Our spirit is that part of us that can interface with His Spirit, and this part of us opens up into unending, and infinite possibilities.
Actually, it is not even a fight. The lie is that if we live in the flesh, we will be free. However, instead of expanding our possibilities, we push ourselves further down to the place where there will only be a terminus, and a hellish existence with only us in it.
So, like this fool of a writer said earlier, the earlier we yield to the Spirit, the freer we will be. So it is vital to crash through our terrible old ways of thinking, and instead burst forth into our new mind. For, in doing this, we will find what we have truly been brought into: The very Family of G_d.
Tonight is your night. Time to think like Jesus: True. Real. Whole. Free. Loving. Strong.
Beloved, if your motive is love, if you are guided by hope, if you desire to possess Christlikeness, if you love humility and walk with an unoffendable heart, you will certainly find the thought-life of God. You are en route to possessing the mind of Christ.
~ Francis Frangipane
