01 July 2024
This blog tends to be academic in approach. However, it's an academic approach to faith in Christ.
As a reminder, "faith" refers to your feudal submission to Jesus as Lord. A synonym is "commitment". Properly, the word "religion" means your response to grace and election. It's the sum of human activities that express your faith in Christ. The term "salvation" points to the collective results of seeking peace with God in His terms. Creation itself is fundamentally tribal and feudal; religion should be the same.
The logic is rather simple. You cannot come to Him without His call; He must initiate things or you will remain disconnected from Him. You have no power to choose faith. It's His gift to you. Once faith is awakened, we are obliged to seek His face constantly, striving to perceive His approval or disapproval of the options before us every moment of the day. Eventually we'll get a feel for His personality and character.
The process means subjecting your flesh to His Holy Spirit. Faith is not in your head; that's where religion resides. Faith is in your heart, so your heart must rule over your head, and thus, the rest of your fleshly existence. There is no clinical explanation for this. The best I can offer is the statement that your heart is the seat of your will, your ability to make a commitment, of exercising faith. To state that it is separate from the intellect is usually enough for most people to recognize it and begin the internal process of shifting their consciousness into their hearts.
Your flesh is your biggest enemy, always seeking to cooperate with Satan. It is his chief ally in our lives, and that includes your intellect and emotions. Move your conscious soul into your heart, where the Lord reigns.
In this, we are taking up the divine moral agenda of our Creator. There are creatures far above our level who serve Him, and some don't serve very well. They have a measure of free will, so to speak. At some point, one of His heavenly servants objected and argued about the terms of his service. God banished him from the heavenly courts to a place the Bible calls "the Abyss" or, in our terms, the Dungeon.
That servant became the Dungeon Master, a role that includes being a prosecutor of humans. It allows him to engage in espionage to tempt humans to be unfaithful. We accepted his temptation, which meant putting on prison garb (mortal flesh) and entering his dungeon. That's this world, constrained by time and space.
The whole point in letting this happen was something beyond our comprehension, but it includes us having a chance to rejoin God's side in this debate while we are stuck in this dungeon. The Bible uses the language of glorifying Christ; the glory of Christ is primarily in how well His servants can appropriate His blessings. When we embrace the privileges of Covenant behavior and all the blessings that come with it, that is His glory.
Showing our aplomb with typical human worldly obsessions, shrugging off attacks designed to rile us on the same level of the flesh as drives everyone else -- that is how we glorify our Savior.
This document is public domain; spread the message.