All of these three, if lived to their maximum, will produce in us true blessedness and Heavenly rewards; in fact, it is the closest we will get to a little taster of Heaven on earth. This, I think, best describes what we mean when we talk of ascending towards the fullness of the divine. These three areas of Christianity that I have just described, they are what I call stage three of our Christian journey - the stage that can, if we are not careful, be elusive unless we make a concerted effort to reach it.
There are in total four stages of Christianity, three of which we can experience as earthly creatures and the fourth we experience in Heaven when we are fully united with God. None of us knows enough about the fourth stage so I am going to concentrate largely on the first three stages.
Stage one is the analytical stage, the point of salvation - and it should be noted straight away that this stage has several variations - perhaps more than stages two and three combined. The analytical stage is the period of time when we reason out exactly what the Christian faith entails. We research the faith (along with, perhaps, other faiths and other philosophies) - come to a rational conclusion about the evidence and then decide that we want to surrender our lives to Christ. This can happen over many years or over a few months or sometimes in a sudden rush, and equally, God reveals Himself to people in different ways depending on individual circumstances. Those who have been brought up as Christians all their lives by Christian parents (or parent), go through this stage too, but in a different way; they have not had to make the decision to become a Christian in the same way that an adult convert has (although sometimes later analysis of a different sort is required). Despite the many variations, stage one can be summarised thus: it is the stage where one comes to the conclusion that Christ is our saviour and lives their life accordingly.
Stage two is where we put it all into practice. Once again, there are variations to the point - for example, a child brought up in a Christian home could be living through parts of stage two before fully imbibing stage one - but generally speaking stage two is our co-ordinating our life to accord with God’s will. And we find as we are living through stage two, that for each thing we do in accordance with God’s will and His plan for us, we become a little bit more blessed and we grow a little bit more in Christ. Examples of this are giving up some, if not the majority, of our egregious sins, learning His word in the Bible and putting it into practice, prayer, supplication, rational enquiry, Christian friendships, and many, many more.
As wonderful as all this is; there is, however, a danger that one can mistake this stage for the compete actuality. Stage two is, in itself, such a rewarding stage both intrinsically and extrinsically, that one can, if complacency sets in, mistake it for ultimate realities within the Christian faith. It is not so, there is another stage - another level - that God will take us to; a level of which we can have faint hints in stage two, but all the time know that something is amiss. This is the third stage that we are discussing. I shall not go into too much detail about the transitional period between stages two and three because it varies with each individual, but if you have never contemplated this before, I am afraid it is going to come as a bit of a shock to you.
Before we go on, I must guard against one possible misconception. This progression through the stages is not wholly interrelated with time - it is only partially interrelated. Thus you can, and often do, experience sensations just after your conversion which are closer to the third stage than at points in your journey which are months or sometimes yeas later. Colloquially it is often called ‘Being on fire for God’. If we think of stage two as our fire for God burning along moderately (with periodic hints of the roaring flame) and the third stage as our fire for God almost constantly blazing up through the roof, I think we can have a good idea of the distinction.
One thing I am sure of is this. All my experiences tell me that God desires that we reach the third stage even more than we desire it ourselves. If we are not careful, we can move along from day to day stuck in stage two. And of course the longer one is at stage two the harder it is to get to stage three. As St Paul says to the Galatians, ‘You were running a good race. Who cut in on you and kept you from obeying the truth?’.
I will try to describe for you what I think stage three is like. A man has lived his life and has, all along, been aware of a lingering intangibility. He knows that whatever this thing is, it is not attainable through the self, it is something given to the self. The self has merely the necessary apparatus for receiving it. Something happens in his life, something which brings about in him the realisation that He was specially created by God - that the universe was created so God could love man. And with this realisation comes further knowledge of his purpose and goals.
Under such premises and conclusions, how could anything less than the fullness of the divine be acceptable? If the universe was created for us, how could we achieve true blessedness unless we spent every waking moment living our lives for Him or with Him in mind?
Once this is realised, the giving up of sins, the reading of His word, and every other aspect of stage two become precursors. That is, antecedent developments were all the time laying down the foundations for something much greater - a full imbibing of God in our time on earth - a cognitive elevation that lifts us into His presence. Every morning the man who truly desires this stage can experience the daily renewal. He can awake each morning, his body almost trembling with excitement at what this new day will bring forth. Questions race into his soul - What has God got planned for me today? How can I best serve Him? Which ways will He make use of my gifts today? What blessings will He pour upon me today?
The same feelings are felt at bedtime; the same euphoria. The fire is burning high, and only sleep can distract him from it. He has learnt precisely why He was created. He has discovered God’s abundant grace in giving; he has discovered that the divine wisdom, divine love and divine grace will continue to pour out onto him more and more each day, because his hands are free to receive these things. He has felt deep in his own heart, just how much God wants to bless us and how much pleasure God receives from giving special things to us. He has even found out how to see every travail as a challenge to better himself, grow further, and become more like Christ. He is, as St Paul says, strong even when he is weak. This is stage three. Knowledge of its arrival is the knowledge of its absence, both in ourselves and in others.
And while it is true that divine things are given which are commensurate with our abilities, it is a great fallacy to believe that those whose minds are not so sharp cannot reach the third stage. God does not expect everyone to be geniuses - He wants to bless the fool just as much. But He does desire that the fool and the genius (and all who stand between) are able to achieve their full potential. If this happens, the blessings are qualitatively equal (although, of course, each can serve God in different ways). Unequal giving only occurs with unequal desires; that is, God will give more and more to those who passionately desire all the things which providential guidance provides and providential wisdom desires. So long as your desires concord with His desires for you, they will be continually answered, fed, and satisfied, abundantly. The real misadventure, the misleading vacuity, is when a Christian finds a resting place and stops looking to Him for more wisdom, more grace and a greater growth.
It is, I presume, one of the things that saddens God most, the fact that so many of us are quite content to rest in stage two. I suppose it is a very true part of reality that one can leave this planet in stage two and pass straight on to stage four - without ever experiencing the stupendous nature of stage three. The only condition attached to stage three is that one must desire to arrive there; but this is, I would say, often harder than it first seems, for there are many earthly distractions; it takes real dedication, and a ravenous desire for God, to overcome them.
If you have been a Christian for many years, drifting along each day in stage two - one of the hardest things is to relocate the old desires, that is, to know how you can follow this through properly. We humans are not very good at receiving information and applying it to our thinking, for we are always distracted by something else. The thing demanded of us never really seems to suit at the time the demand is made. How often we have read something that we know will benefit us hugely, but instead allowed our impatience, or our unwillingness to think profoundly about how best we can make it happen, to get in the way. We casually carry on with a routine hoping that it will eventually drift in all by itself. It almost certainly won’t - but we are well equipped to discover the positive inroads towards the blessings that I am talking about in this message.
Do you remember when you first realised that the words in the Bible would have to be absorbed (more than just read) in order to relate them to real life situations? And do you remember how you did it? You allowed the divine words to excite you in a way that brought them into yourself; that is, they were not just words any more, they were blueprints for your life, and more excitingly, they were your future marked out on paper. You soon realised that if you followed them through, you too could become truly blessed. That is what you have to do to move from stage two to stage three.
It is a bit like anticipating a financial windfall. If you had received information that you were going to receive great wealth, you would be taking all thoughts of being rich into the next domain of reality. The money would no longer be a fantasy, but a reality, in which it would be incumbent upon you to visualise new real life situations with greater wealth. The same is happening when you try to take a little bit more of the divine. What you had before was good, but you are now thinking of enrichment in a way that reveals itself to be a true and real way of growing with the Spirit. Just as the capacity for happiness must re-awake before one becomes fully aware of its absence, a reawakening to the need for spiritual growth must come about by a full awareness of its absence.
As Solomon said, ‘Each one is aware of the affliction of his own heart’ 1 Kings 8:38.
To be aware of the need for a big push towards the third stage is to be aware of the need for deeper insight. And this deeper insight, you will find fascinating when it arrives, because you will delight in its arrival, but you will also be shocked to realise that you could at least recognise it in some sense and that it was in you all along. The full ascension was part of you all along.
There is, it must be conceded, a certain paradox that exists, which seems to confuse many Christians. If God is the ground of our very being, what about when a desire comes through us which impedes our ascension? Is that still God inside directing? In one sense, yes. In one sense, there are no desires which, if Christ has been inside you for any length of time, were not derived from His presence. But the only way in which one can make real to oneself what Christianity teaches about growing into the fullness of the divine, about being perfect, is to remember that every feeling which leads you to something which is not stimulating your growth, is the malformation of the inner-rationality which the Spirit working in us is starting to improve. It is not good to think that an absence of such lucidity is, in any way, due to the fact that a part of the divine is not ever going to be present. It will be present when the recipient knows what to do with it. The melody is perfect to begin with, it is just that we are not competent musicians.
The first helpful step is to expel the haze, to run through the fog - to get back to what has at least some degree of Spiritual reality. I am not, in stating this, suggesting that we do not need periods of rest, periods when we need to escape from Christian duty. But we need to know how to work before we can know how to rest properly. We should not simply want to read history books, we should desire to make history ourselves. Let us be a part of history, not just a forgotten memories for those who inherit our world. But we have to do it the right way. If we try to make history, we will most likely fail. But if we try to live for Christ in every way that it is possible; if we are so determined to reach our maximum potential that nothing stands in our way, then we shall very likely make history, certainly in the small pockets of the universe that each of us occupies.
But what of these distractions? I do not think we can avoid coming face to face with them. But our Christian duty bears no analogy to these things, except when we are able to make use of them in ways of which it can only be conceived through the passionate will to reach full growth in Christ. Some of the more mundane things in life can provide us with opportunities to grow so long as growth is the predominant factor in participation.
Every day, our earthly life furnishes us with gliding hints of how we should be growing in Christ. I am sure that all Christians remember times when the resounding roar of stage three was in their stead, and equally, I am sure that all Christians remember when it was but a mere echo - when it seemed resigned to the memory file rather than at the forefront of daily living.
You know as well as I do that that memory was a foretaste, a mirage even, of a power which the apparatus for growth, or rather Christ building the apparatus within us, will be the apparatus through which all things shall be received. For when this happens, there are no crossed wires, no desires or feelings leading us away from our true selves. The resounding noise of stage three need no longer be intermittent - in fact, it need not be private to the soul in which it occurs - for it can spread through to the next soul and the next and the next.
But we must all be on our guard, for both good habits and bad habits will spread through Christian circles. Fire spreads through a forest quicker than wisdom spreads through a church. In other words, as good as this positive spreading is, we must also realise that it works the other way too. The tautological nature of stagnancy can operate within a group in exactly the same way, and we see this in really bad churches where growth in Christ is sparse. We see an awful paradox operating in the group, for we see that all of them desperately need the third stage because of their stoical nature towards learning more of His divine wisdom. The inceptive desires towards the third stage nearly always involves the process of realising the true pleasures of abandonment; that is, a full re-ascent back into the very thing which is stimulating the desire for growth. To those who reside in stage two, stage three (when it is thought of) looks like a codicil - an appendix. But to those who reside in stage three, stage two is seen as a prelude - a prologue to being truly illuminated by the real divine wisdom for which you were called to experience all along.
I do not think that their stoicism is down to carelessness; it is down to illusory faith. Illusory in the sense that they rely on God in the wrong way; they presume that because they have been saved that God will naturally carry on giving them things which they have not made the effort to desire for themselves. It is a bit like a young boy wanting his parents to do his homework for him rather than helping him so that he is able to do it for himself. God helps us is in a similar way - that is, He does not do it all for us, but He puts into us a little bit of Himself. He gives us the necessary rationale so that we can know the distinction between our responsibility and His - thus bringing about the knowledge that if our responsibility to continue trying to grow is acted upon, then His responsibility to give to those who ask will also be acted upon.
I think it is helpful to look at the situation thus. For every Christian, each change that occurs within is bringing us a step nearer to Christ or a step further away. There are no changes of neutrality, for our thinking cannot change with a completely neutral result. It is true that we do not always know for sure which way a particular change has led us; that is, many changes have correlative consequences which are not known until some time after the change - but it is our responsibility, as Christians alive in Christ, to ensure that each change in our internal set-up is, as far as it is in our control, a change which leads us one step nearer to God. And here is where the devil comes into the equation, for he is the one who convinces us that what we have, in itself, will get better; will improve by itself, without very much effort on our part.. The devil uses time as this tool - he makes us think that the hours, weeks, months and years are figures waiting to reveal to us the things that only experience by itself can reveal. This is the terrible mistake that can, in the end, cost us the third stage.
There might be one feeling that you have against my statement. Is not faith that He is working inside me enough for me to arrive at stage three so long as I keep trying to improve myself? Only in the smallest sense, only in the most miraculous circumstances can this type of faith carry you. Those who ask such a thing have forgotten what faith really is and how it constantly needs appetite to drive it. If you are going to grow into a little bit of what Christ is like, then faith must bring about perturbation, no, petrification, at every hint that you are doing things which are impeding God’s giving. And surely no man or woman who knows Christ and has the Spirit inside them believes that it should be any other way. If you are drowning, the mere thought, even for a second, that the body who is rescuing you has lost contact should be terrifying. No one who really knows what Christ desires for them (save for misconception or self-delusion) should, at any given moment, be content with the dissipation of such wonderful things.
So long as reason is continuing to stimulate, faith is the art of keeping safe all the things which reason tells you God is doing in you. And if you do not become a master of your own desires and feelings, you will be forever oscillating between Christian growth and Christian stagnancy. And if you find yourself thinking that temptation is nothing but an abstract concept, that modern men and women know perfectly well how to resist the temptation into quiescent passivity, then I am afraid it has crept into your education from the Empiricist philosophers of the past two hundred years. All those times you thought you were free from temptation, the devil was telling you a big lie.
It is a fact that God shows more of Himself to some people than He does to others - not because He has favourites, but because it is impossible for Him to show Himself to a person whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition for receiving the endowment in question - just as the truest reflection of physical beauty cannot be fully received through a shattered mirror.
The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is not that we should dwell on it, or even that we should progress slowly, embracing change only at the point that it comes in our stead. In fact, unless we passionately desire that our daily thoughts, prayers and actions will produce in us a more Christ-like creature, we are, ostensibly, misusing God’s grace.
The moment that every Christian realises his or her need for stage three, is very likely the moment that its semi-intangibility will start to disappear. There will be many things going on in the mind that bring about a realisation of what the Spirit in the body is really like. There will be the realisation - the newly comprehensible fact of Christ inside - who was fully man, sharing with you the temporal part of living, and fully God (just like His Father) who is at your side and is already at that moment beginning to show you things in the third stage which give you awareness of things in receiving distance from eternity. He is turning your dreams into a reality.
As we reach the third stage, Christ is really able to His best work in us. He can start to put more and more of the divine into us; He can begin to transport some of the exciting things in Heaven into our earthly selves - that is, into things under Heaven to which the real Heavenly desires belong. He is turning a love of Him into a love of all other things connected with Him - for how often have you seen people spending their lives trying to love God without loving all the things that are connected to the divine? How often have you mistaken intrinsic love of salvation for all the illuminating lights that beam out of it?
You may feel that this is very unlike your own experience, you may even feel that there has never been any hints of a stage beyond the one with which you are familiar. But very often our daily living provides us with perceptions which are not true to the facts.
Perhaps there are too many distractions, perhaps you do not have the confidence to exude Christ in that way. Perhaps you think that God is perfectly happy with the efforts you have made thus far. Perhaps He is, perhaps not. But we cannot find out by mere feeling, for all those things in life which helped produce the feelings - good Bible study, good friends, good prayer, good connect groups, a good church, will, by themselves, bring us no nearer to discovering the truth about our own position, just as finding out which supermarket a man prefers will give us no indication of how hungry he is. The interrelation is tenuous, not as a calculator is related to mathematics but as sense-experience is related to epistemology.
These wonderful things - our edifying Bible studies, our great friends, our good prayers, our good connect groups, our church - they are not detached from the three stages, they are part of them. They are not sources, they are conductors - transmitting parts of the divine just as a body transmits heat. They are the agencies or media which Christ is using to direct towards the third stage, towards a closer proximity to the divine. The real journey towards the third stage belongs in our own heart; external things - essential as they are - are merely directives.
For the second part of this article, see Network Norwich next week.Meanwhile, if you want to find out more about Christianity, visit:
www.rejesus.co.uk
