One weakness to which most of us are susceptible is the continual desire to win favour with other men instead of with God. In this message I will attempt to show how such a position slows down, and sometimes halts, our growth. 

 

Having covered Self-Worship, Creative Delusion, Comfort Zones, and Torpidity in recent weeks, we have seen that the real inauspicious nature of self-worship and creative delusion is this: how is such a man ever to achieve the comfort, acceptance, admiration, and prestige that he is looking for? He is not going to win the favour of men by endlessly proclaiming himself to be great or knowledgeable, he is not going to the win the favour of men by boasting, or by being obstreperous, or by arrogance, and yet all the time his claustrophobic need to be admired and loved and adored is killing off his chances of genuine admiration, love, and adoration. All of us can see it occurring in others, but it is far more important to see it occurring within the self.

 

Now of course, many of us can have sympathy with those that are always trying hard to impress other people; that is to say, we know deep down that it is really a weakness, an insecurity, and, like vanity, usually a humble fault. One of the best ways to help people in this state is to try to make them aware that the real things which men and women most admire, the things with which man can receive true favour are also, in fact, the things which will win us favour with God Himself. If you can help a man to realise this and believe it wholeheartedly you will have set him on the right road to salvation, and in doing do, you will help him dispense with much of his pride and insecurity.

 

God created us to be like His Son, thus it is not so strange and not so much of a departure to abandon that which is consuming us and try to win God's favour by abnegation; that is, by surrendering the self and relying upon His grace for our salvation. And here we have perhaps discovered the biggest truth of our existence. Our often conflicting goal to win favour with men and find out about ultimate realities are, in fact, extricable. A man should at once abandon all attempts to be admired by this claustrophobic need - for we are very rarely admired by someone as much as we think we are. And consequently it just so happens that if you search with all your heart to find God you will find that you are on the right route to winning favour with men and women as well; they will love your grace and kindness far more than they love your talents and abilities; real talent, real intelligence, and real ability, comes not from claustrophobic needs or from Creative Delusion, it comes from the true realisation of the human condition - our need for salvation and our need to receive the Spirit. 

 

Here the atheist has stumbled upon one of the biggest costs of giving up the true destiny for which he was created. He is attempting to tell people that there is no Heaven, that their soul is temporal, that the inner hunger which they feel is, in fact, an illusion. This type of thinking might work well with the propagandist, it might work well in the contemporary media of existentialism and self-worship, but thought about for a second, it does not tell us anything about our real selves except our susceptibility to denial and delusion. Denial of the supernatural involves a much bigger denial, for denial of the supernatural is merely an appendage to the denial of the self - to the face of our own thinking. However much a man or woman agrees with the atheist propagandist, he or she knows deep down that what is being described is, in fact, not a description of the self. And here is where Creative Delusion does its second big trick; it convinces men and women that this must apply to everyone else, except the very small minority, of which they must be one. 

 

In a world that is predominated by image, I think it would be good if we could help people to give up all this misleading nonsense about impressing men and winning the wrong kind of favour with the world - for the truest impression a man can make on the world is by realising its true precursory nature. Realise this and you will help put men back in touch with reality; that is, almost everyone that you meet is disquieted by the fact that they pretend to understand the true pattern of reality when they really feel quite detached from it. It is no bad thing to admit our weaknesses; all good men and women know that when we admit our own weaknesses we very often encourage others to do the same. Before long a weakness shared turns into a mutual strength; an uplifting moment of understanding - of solidarity between men and women. And if this type of occurrence were more frequent, it would soon start to spread around the nation until eventually the mass majority would understand themselves and each other much better than they do. 

 

Grace, compassion, tenderness and respect go a long way - even more so if both parties are in the process of searching for ultimate truths. And with a little understanding of this, how could any man or woman wish any of these things were not true? So long as we do not become proud in our grace, how could anyone not experience the truest delight in this realisation? Creative Delusion is most operational in those that cannot see a man who is disinclined - in fact, there is no greater disillusionment than to desire that these hints of new beginnings are illusory. Nothing is more contemptible to the inner-self than to wish that this cowardly Creative Delusion continues - that Self-Worship - powerful enough to abrogate palpable visions of new beginnings - continues to be the driving force behind our suspending of reason. 

 

Creative Delusion tells a man to be happy with his stature - it suppress the hints of discontentment within him; it tells him to strive for goodness because he thinks goodness by itself will be enough. It is one of the biggest lies the world has ever been faced with, yet those whose desire in their hearts is to know God are the ones that will escape the lies; it is goodness which is being produced by a genuine wish to serve, when reason itself, permits such servitude. It is what the Bible refers to as 'working out our salvation' (Philippians 2:12). 

 

It is a sad but true fact that those who are happy with Torpidity (the apathetic mindset we discussed last week), those who are content with their own parochial satisfaction are living a hopeless existence. Of course, they will try to gloss it up with outward pseudo-contentment, but it is, in truth, a lipstick on the ugly face of pride. All men are, of course, painfully aware of their own pride - for pride, along with envy and jealousy, is more predominant than virtually all other feelings, due to its mischievously deceiving nature. And if this imputation also suggests that the impression atheists give is that of cognitive dishonesty (which I think it does), then it is an impression which they will not be able to correct by denying it. A man who is able to create for himself, some sort of inner-happiness which he thinks is wholly attributable to the work that pride is doing within him is going to be quite outwardly happy and confident but inwardly dejected. The Elysian Fields which men seem to conjure up in their depiction of atheistic comfort simply does not bear any resemblance to the real psychology of the self and human longing. 

 

Christ said that we are to have compassion for such people - after all, St Paul reminds us that to them the message of the cross is foolishness (1 Corinthians 1:18). Where ordinarily we might have contempt for their foolishness if it were related to, say, politics or science, we should be aware that thoughts of religion when mixed in with the strong force of Creative Delusion, often produces an erroneousness that would otherwise not be there if 'religion' were not the subject. But if we keep offering support to them and we keep showing them love and grace, there is a chance they might see the Christ that is in us. The error in their thinking is in some cases a humble fault, for if their insecurities were not so great, they might be more comfortable seeking the truth. 

 

It is to be admitted that the search is paradoxical - in one sense it is a difficult position; it reveals to us a few things about ourselves that we would scarcely like to admit, but in the other sense, it is a search that will reveal its true rewards to anybody with the slightest bit of common sense and recognition of their emotional self. Those who are controlled by Torpidity see eternity as rather trivial, forever letting their convictions change according to the places where pleasure takes them - even to those places which desire the extirpation of eternal reality. This is the worst state of mind - it is the complete opposite to rational enquiry - they behave as if the matter of eternity were so trivial and that the matter of knowing God were so unimportant that day-to-day superficiality is to be preferred. Torpidity, when helping a man to find this trivialisation pleasurable, creates the most impenetrable barriers, which strong intimations of new beginnings are the only thing powerful enough to break. It is the perfect non-constricting way of life, based upon a hermetic philosophy which lets in only the things to which it is initially attracted (Christianity of course, not being one of these things - for nothing quite so wonderful can be instantly attractive). 

 

Those who are held captive by earthly philosophies and nothing else are often the ones with the weakest reasoning and the narrowest possibilities; the world has nothing to offer them apart from false hopes and undulating happiness. But those who are prepared to take a chance on exploring ultimate truths will find that it was no risk at all. Those who are prepared to invest in eternity will find that the price they paid was billions of times lower than its true value. Creative Delusion illuminates this life because it causes us to see it as the ultimate reality - it causes us to aggrandise this life because we are to see it as the only one we will have. It diminishes, in the mind of the self, the role of the divine to almost nothing, thus the more trivial the divine, the less we are compelled to think about the efficacy of Christianity - to the extent that even our reasoning cannot save us from our plight. 

 

Christianity has plenty to tell us about ourselves, that we are our own worst enemies, that it is our self-centredness which distances us from Christ; that we are in such dire need that there is nothing whatsoever that we can do to alter our state but pray for mercy; that is, pray for the ability to work towards our salvation. For the last few thousand years men have worshipped false gods and also made gods of other things in the worldly domain. But God becomes man to show us the real object of worship, the one and only God - the true God in Christ. Any attempt to trivialise this does not come from sound logic or rational enquiry it comes from the pure will to accede to our own unhelpful desires, most of which will lead us down the path of fruitlessness. 

 

Those who accede to falsehood are of course acceding to futility; and for every instance of false acquiescence, we have an instance of denying a fundamental truth. If there were no Creative Delusion there would be no false abstractions, but equally if God did not become man there would be no cure for Creative Delusion. The Christian formula is quite simple, and if we do not try to make it overly complicated, we shall see that in order to understand our own need for God we must come to know Christ; for knowledge of God and the self gives us a blessedness that is unspeakably wonderful. It is a blessedness which takes two rather perturbing realities - the knowing of the real self without knowing God and the knowing of God without knowing the real self - and conflates them into one life-affirming blessedness. Knowledge of one without the other would be very disquieting - but together we can learn about the true nature of the world, of eternity, and of our place in both. 

 

If nobody had ever experienced God through the Spirit then our predicament would probably never have been felt, for there is no need to ascribe purpose to a purposeless universe. But Christ came to show that there is an eternal purpose for all created men and women that have lived and that will ever live; thus it is ridiculous to suppose that we are not compelled to know Him simply because the appearance of Christ happened so long ago. If God became man, He did so forever; thus there are no time factors to consider - He is the primary fact of our existence. 

 

The Bible says that we are made up of spirit and flesh - this means that Christianity applies to every single person in exactly the same way; that is, the spirit of each person belongs somewhere else - and it is up to us to realise that fact. Christ came to save the world and by doing this He served both the Father and His creation. 

 

He united the bad with the good to produce divine grace by which we can know our Creator. Because real knowledge of God's relationship with man must come first through Christ, I should not feel able to attempt to present God to anyone without being in Christ first. To look for God apart from Christ or to think you know God apart from Christ is to be in a state of delusion, for if just one man could know God without Christ, then Christ died for nothing. And of course, those who were alive before Christ was born were still saved through Christ, it was a prefatory salvation - salvation through the anticipation of Christ who was to come. It is a great fallacy to believe that those who were alive before Christ was born a man had no knowledge of Him; the prophecies of His coming and, indeed, His union with the Father before the universe was created were, in fact, in the divine words and revelations right from the beginning. 

 

Most of the accomplished atheist scientists have stridently asserted that there is no evidence for the existence of God - but this says more about the doubter than it does about God. We are called to search for the truth - therefore it is a certain fact that if God's existence is real, we are bound to find Him, for divine goodness will not break His promise. Therefore a man searching for God must not stop at first sights of nothing, nor must he carry on past the search to step into the domain of self-worship all over again. He must seek in the right way, and if he desires to come out the other end of the search without finding anything, you can be sure that he will not find God. If, however, he opens his mind both to finding God and surrendering himself to God, he will find God revealing Himself at every juncture. 

 

Once he starts to realise the he is lost without God, he will start to see his true need; but this is exactly the same as losing something in normal daily experience and then finding it. If you are going to find, say, your watch you must be aware of not having it to be aware that it is lost and you must be aware of seeing it to be aware that you have found it. This sounds very obvious, but it is not always seen as obvious. You have to be aware of not seeing something or not having something before you can find it; thus if you carry on with life not knowing you have lost something you will carry on unaware that you should be looking for it. And of course, just as in searching for the watch you will find things which you had previously forgotten you had. 

 

When we search for God we will uncover and rediscover those true and real things about the self which we had tried to lose in the past. Through it all we shall discover pride and grace, sinfulness and mercy, selfishness and generosity, reliance and salvation, and a myriad of conflicting parts of both the self and the world. In searching for divine freedom we get to see the best and worst of man; his search for greatness exhibits both his greed and egocentricity and, indeed, his self-denial and humility. But in Christ we have real liberation and thus the opportunity for help in our discipline, as we try to get things right on our journey, and avoid being taken in by distracting earthly things when we should be concentrating on Him.