14 February 2022
I'm hardly alone. I'm not the first person to come up with this peculiar approach to faith and religion. You'll find traces of it throughout the history of Christianity. All I've done so far is follow where my heart has led me. It became a matter of slowly migrating from a bunch of ideas asserted by "experts" to a different set of ideas that were obvious to my convictions. My heart of faith defines its own logic.
The thing about this path is that it precludes me pushing my ideas onto others. I'm not now a new expert with a new set of ideas that I am selling to others. Rather, it's the approach that I'm advocating. I want you to do what I'm doing; I want you to start on a new foundation and rediscover what God wants for and from you. In the final analysis, we do not rely on any human expertise. If my approach to faith and religion appeals to you, it's only because that's how God speaks in your own heart. This is not a matter of my expertise; it's the living Word of the Lord in your own soul.
As my buddy likes to say, "Reality is fungible." The reality of the universe God created is that there are multiple threads of reality, and you can choose which one is for you. One reality is just as valid as another. There is no objective reality that we all share. The notion of "objective reality" is itself a false bubble of reality. Reality is best understood as a living being, a person with all the quirks and variations we would expect from even the most perfect of persons. And as any real person, reality treats no two of us just the same. With all the threads of events and experiences winding through our lives, no two of us experiences reality in precisely the same way.
Every human has their own bubble of reality. That includes all the experts and authorities. Anything they might have accomplished in developing their talents is a matter of inflating their own bubble. There is no objective reality to discover out there. Yes, God does limit the range of variations in threads of reality to some degree, but those limits are not as hard and narrow as Western assumptions make them out to be. Your reality is as valid as mine. Getting a substantial number of fools to agree with you doesn't validate yours over mine. All it does is keep all of you from pressing forward in faith. Your faith and convictions are the key to discovering the thread of reality God has for you.
When you can embrace that understanding of reality, then it changes everything. Our ultimate authority is your Heavenly Father. You are only as beholden to any human authority as He tells you in your heart. It's all tactical and temporary, subject to future variations. Your ultimate loyalty is the Messiah, living inside your soul as the Holy Spirit. If He's not there, nothing can help you. If He's there, nothing can stop you.
So, every question you face is already answered in your heart, long before your conscious awareness discerns it. We are eternal beings, existing in God's hand long before we occupied mortal flesh. Your convictions were written there by the finger of God before you were born. How do you suppose Jesus was aware as a human that He was the Messiah? It was a matter of conviction. He sought to discern His eternal identity. Your convictions have existed in your eternal soul before your human self became aware. It's a simple matter of who God made you to be.
The only thing left is for you to become consciously aware of what God has made. We have a vast store of testimonial evidence showing that God harmonizes our convictions among others. It may be difficult to find harmonious faith partners. That's as much due to their own lack of awareness as anything else. But that God will bring you into the company of others who share some of your convictions is His promise. The only question is how close you can commune with them based on how much you have in common.
And more to the point, it's a matter of how much you share today and whether the Lord intends you to fellowship together for a long or short span of time. It throws everything back on whether you can be obedient to the Lord moment by moment, since the whole thing is living and active (Hebrews 4:12). You are seeking the flow of the Spirit always, because nothing ever stands unchanged for very long. Nothing in this world is eternal.
The job we have is to be less of this world and more of Eternity. We really need to get the concept that this world isn't worth much. It's just a place where we can testify of God's glory, which assumes you invest your effort to discern His glory inside of you. The more clearly you see Him, the less seriously you take this world.
The notion that truth is static and stands independent of God's living Person is a pagan concept arising from a rejection of divine revelation. It's one of the basic false assumptions of Aristotelian epistemology. It's nothing more than an attempt to elevate fallen mankind to divinity. The Bible arose before Aristotle. The philosophical assumptions behind the Bible are radically different from what we have in the West. We need to conform our philosophical assumptions -- our epistemology -- to that of the Hebrew people, to that of Jesus Himself.
All I can do is point these things out, and hope the Lord speaks through my words.
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