In the secular West our view of what we know is primarily about logic and reason. Certainly reason is important since we are told to love the Lord with all our mind, but it is not the totality of how we know. In fact there is a “trinity” of ways we know. So yes, we know by reason, but we also know also by intuition and experience. Perhaps we learn to trust only by experience.
Regarding intuition, Einstein tells of how he discovered the theory of relativity laying on a grassy grassy bank gazing at a sunbeam through half closed eyes and wondering what it would be like to ride on a beam of light, when the theory of relativity came to him intuitively. He goes on to say that he then went to his laboratory and proved it. Notice the relationship here between the rational and the intuitive. On the one hand, it was not by a series of logical steps that he arrived at his conclusion, on the other he needed the logical steps in order to prove his theory. What I am trying to say here, is that the three ways of knowing are not independent, they intricately interconnected, they are a trinity.
By analogy we know a person by words, by that persons' spirit (the intuitive aspect), and what we experience of him or her at a sensory level. Knowing their words is obvious, the spirit perhaps less so. A person with a spirit of negativity is perhaps the easiest to discern. It is, for example, easy to spot a spirit of bitterness, or anger, or greed, or arrogance. Less obvious perhaps is a gentle spirit, a spirit of humility or of trustworthiness. We are talking here about the character (good or bad) of the person we are encountering, and we often discern these things first through our feelings, our senses.
The Scriptures tell us that the mature have their senses exercised to discern between good and evil (Hebrews 5:14). That they do need to be exercised is clear. It is not innate, it is something we learn, something we grow into. We can start with noticing the tension in the air that we feel when someone is angry or someone is trying to manipulate us. Jesus often sensed what was happening in the natural. He was given words of wisdom and words of knowledge (1 Corinthians 12:8). We too can access these things, and many times they come through our senses, by what we feel.
Applying all this to what Paul is praying, we see we need to know God in this way, through His Word (the Bible), through His Spirit (manifesting His character through His faithfulness, mercy justice etc., etc.) and through encounter where, for example, we feel the love of God poured out into our hearts by the same Spirit (Romans 5:5). We all need more and more of this. It is in and through such encounters that we loose the orphan spirit that permeates so much of our culture. To use a secular turn of phrase, we need to have our love deficit cancelled by allowing God to fill up our “love tanks.”
Without such encounters we will likely continue to seek love or fulfillment in all the wrong places, through our various addictions be it substance abuse or perfectionism or Workaholism etc. And this is where the spirit of wisdom comes in. We need the spirit of wisdom to unveil our wrong beliefs. I remember a friend (who has given me permission to share his journey) who was convinced that he was a looser. It was what he experienced and continued to experience though self fulfilling prophecy with his confidence level at zero. During one of our sessions the Lord gave him a word of wisdom for himself. He suddenly blurted out “This belief is evil isn't it?” It was the last thing on my mind, but I immediately knew it was true and of the Lord, and this revelation allowed him to repent of believing it, and to start to recover a sense of worth and confidence in his (awesome actually) abilities.
So then we need a spirit of revelation to know Him, and how much He loves us, and we also need the spirit of wisdom to know what of our ungodly beliefs are currently keeping us from a deeper relationship with Him. We need to pray this prayer (I do) for ourselves and those we love.
No comments:
Post a Comment