In this message I am going to talk about one of the principal reasons why I think there are, proportionally, so few Christians in this country; it is because of the attempted compartmentalisation of Christianity; that is, the separation of Christianity into an isolated 'personal preference' category.
But before we look into this, there is something else that should be said. We have already established that the self is a very complex entity and that we need to stay focused on Christ if we are to avoid being caught up in earthly things. Almost every part of nature points to some sin or other, particularly those parts of nature in which God seems absent. But we have a fair and just God who says that He will reveal Himself to those who search for Him with all their hearts; therefore those who never bothered to spend even a small part of their life trying to find Him have missed something of crucial importance.
Many modern men and women compartmentalise religion; they treat it as one would treat a drama class or a fishing expedition - 'It is good if it appeals to your taste but if it doesn't, never mind, try something else'. That thought summarises much of the modern day attitudes to religion, but it has crept in from shifting zeitgeists and bad philosophies. There are many subsidiary or subdivisional things which make up life as we know it, but they are not to be confused with the biggest pictures. We feel drawn to, say, an attractive person, or a valley, or a statue, or a fountain; but we have created for ourselves a state of thought and depiction which makes models of things. Thus if another thing does not suit the typological model, it is categorised into something else - not of reason, but of taste. But the precise correlation between one categorisation and another is not at any point differentiated by an outside model; there is an exact method from which one draws one categorisation to one taste and another to another. But we do not say that an error of thinking is the same method of categorisation as an ugly fountain, or an unsightly painting; thus nothing gives us a more assured idea of the false correlation between unappealing taste and bad reasoning than our discovery of, say, a 'decrepit building' and a 'false notion' in the same model of categorisation at the same time.
If we think for a second we can see that this rule of thought applies to every such enquiry. The mere fact that we have thought this about Christianity; that we have relegated it to a compartment of life, tells us nothing about our actual feelings for it - it tells us about our tastes and about our false notions, but it never makes them right or wrong. If we are to talk about the attractiveness of people or the beauty of nature or the eloquence of prose, we must also talk about splendour of sound reason, or the beauty of certainty, or the attractiveness of corroborated evidence. We do not, of course, talk this way, because we have compartmentalised adjectives to suit our own linguistics - but the fact that we have done this says nothing about our overall valuing of such things.
We can think of a Queen being both physically beautiful and a bloodthirsty tyrant, for one does not negate the other unless we add special value to beauty - a special value which transcends mere physicality. And, of course, we do, but we also add greater value to Christianity than its position often shows. This analysis can help to show us why all the other religions which rely not on grace but solely on faith and works are in error; for faith itself is not a gift from reason it is a gift from grace. Other religions deny this, claiming that faith is a gift from reason - but to do this is to deny the power of grace, for reason itself cannot bestow such things. And here, it should be said, I am only referring to the mildly heretical religions - there are some that take this error one step further; that is, they attribute reason not as the giver, but as the sole route to God - they have made no distinction between faith and reason, and have, in the process, expunged grace from the picture altogether.
So how do we reconstitute Christianity back from its perceived compartmentalisation into something more beneficial to the self and thus more conducive to our own salvation? Well, grace is necessary, not because we are worthy but because we are not. We are able to be truly blessed if we embrace a religion which shows itself to understand man so accurately. And it stands to reason that if Christianity understands man so well, it is bound to have the antidote for the human condition. The world is pretty good at concealing our true nature, but concealment is not the same as eradication. You have to dislike the sin that is in you before you can work towards the eradication; that is, you must dislike the self before you can ask God to help you love the self, not because of anything that you are but because of everything that Christ is.
There are four ways to live your life; passion for the truth without rational enquiry, rational enquiry without passion for the truth, neither passion for the truth nor rational enquiry, both passion for the truth and rational enquiry. The first three belong in the domain of human inculpation; the last, in the domain of ultimate realities - and of the four, the last is the real way to search for Christ.
We are told that the kingdom of God is within us (Luke 17:21) - therefore we are more likely to find Him if we begin to dislike the bad things that are in us and search for better things. If we refuse to do this, we face inner battles, for we cannot be free until our passion and our rational enquiry are working together to eradicate unhelpful things within us. And of course, we are not going to be saved until we realise that the most unhelpful part of us is our sinful nature. We are spiritually sick, and whereas we would take a paracetamol if we had a headache, and take antibiotics if we had an infection, and have an operation if our organs demanded it, we should do the same with our spiritual sickness - we should look for the cure in Christ. The world has no resources to cure us; we are spiritually defected every time we look to the world to cure our inner-dissatisfaction. Thus if we did find anything in the world to make us feel temporarily satisfied, it would not be long before something else occurred that would show us our true state once again.
We have all met people whose admiration for others is hard for us to detect, but we must conclude that if a man is deserving of such admiration, it is perhaps we who do not know it yet. Thus if he shows us what it is that is worthy of admiration we too might admire him the same as others do. It is similar with many men's perception of Christianity - they have not seen what it is that makes other men follow Christ; thus we must show them, we must reflect Christ in everything we do. Just as our earthly beloved is able to show us not just her own qualities and merits but help bring out our own too; we too must help people to realise not just the qualities of Christ, but the gifts He has given each of us so that we can know Him. If we reflect Christ, if He is the most visible part of us, we can help people to see that the qualities which He has imparted to us are in fact qualities of which they too would like to be custodians.
We are all pattern seeking creatures, thus we will just as happily attach ourselves to false notions as true ones. If our minds make as a primacy a dominion of feeling, conviction and imagination, we can never know about truth and falsehood; for the true powers of such a primacy are in the forces in which the Devil reigns. There will, of course, be many things which are inwardly rewarding and many that are not. It is our job to hold on to those which are both rewarding and true. The world offers us many divergent 'compartment' alternatives, into which we can all be blown if the prevailing wind happens to favour such a drift. And I think the biggest error that men and women have made when dismissing Christianity is that they have formulated opinions about the faith based upon their perceptions of nature rather than their perceptions of the self.
What does analysis of worldly things tell us about the intrinsic nature of beauty or compassion or grace? Nothing that can be separated from the primary truth of existence. A man claims to love beauty but is it for the sake of the world? Of course not. He loves a woman - does he love just the physical nature of her? No, the love, the deepest of loves, would still be felt if she lost her looks in a bad car accident. Does he love her because of her large family, or her clothes? Certainly not. Does he love the trillions of cells that make up her body, one by one? No. If she died, would he remember her jewellery in the same way he remembers her kindness? No. Thus we see that even love, if it is confined to worldly judgements, tells us very little about true realities.
We only find out about true realities when we step outside of this analysis and look at the real nature of earthly qualities; for only then can we find out about the self and what we really need. Now of course, knowing this and helping others to realise it are two different things. We must, therefore, start helping a man not from where we are but from where he is. We can see his error but when we enter his standpoint we see that from that position he thinks he is right. But hopefully if we show him where he is wrong, he will thank us for it; that is, he won't be angry at himself for his error he will delight in the fact that his thinking was sound, it was just tainted by one of two things; either he did not have all the facts, or he was only partially right. A man's sense impressions will always seem true to him; thus he cannot be wrong from inner-convictions alone, it is ultimate realities which constitute the wrongness of inner-convictions.
One day he might feel doubtful of his abilities; the next day he might feel full of zeal. Both are strong convictions - it is the ultimate reality, not any type of feeling or desire, which says that a central point between these two convictions is the best place for him to understand himself a little better. Ultimate truths do not exclude each other as false convictions often do. Find one truth and you will very likely find the next and the next until in the end you will start to know yourself and Christ. The distractions, of course, occur because for every truth there are many more falsehoods. False religions, false prophecies, false claims of supernatural experiences, false mediums, and many more - but we must expect such things. It is a grievous error to believe that the falsity of many constitutes the falsity of all - for in one sense there are no such things as false things without true things. I can think of no claims in this world that are based solely on fabrication without some distillation from a better and more auspicious truth.
There are bad dreams and good dreams, bad philosophies and good philosophies - it is a world of opposites; thus if we are to believe that every drop of the vast reservoir of supernaturalism is a complete lie, created purely from human imagination, we shall be forced to declare that it is the only thing of its kind in the history of mankind. My own reasoning tells me that the imagining of false religions, if they are to be judged as we judge every other contention and counter-contention, are almost certainly due to the fact that we have a true religion in Christianity. My reasoning tells me the same about all forms of supernaturalism; many people I know have experienced the supernatural (myself included) - plus millions more in the world who I have not met. If all supernaturalism is false, it is the biggest distortion of truth that the world has ever seen. Thus if truth can be distorted to such vast levels, we should be reluctant to trust anything outside of the senses.
No, far more likely, far more believable is that the vast amount of supernatural claims, from outward miracles, to claims of Christ living inside of people are, in fact, true - true enough to produce in their wake, as many false claims as true ones. When it comes to religion in this contemporary age, the truth of it is so often blurred by Creative Delusion and man-made half-truths that most of us (save for unexpected revelations) are only likely to find the truth about if we passionately desire it. And if ever you want to know the power of the truth, you will find it in those poor outwardly unhappy souls who know the truth but fight against it, allowing it to penetrate only as far as their inner-weaknesses allow them to - for then you will see how demanding and uncompromising 'truth' is.
Yes, the ways of the world are going to make Christianity seem abstruse; but nothing so wonderful as knowing God can come to a man so easily as, say, his purchasing the daily paper or getting to work each day. As we come near to drawing this series to a close, we should remember that we have an enemy in Satan who is fully committed to bringing about our destruction; thus the tool he is using, the tool of Creative Delusion, is the one that you must break if you are to find Christ. Creative Delusion represents desires so supportingly that it engenders them deep within our souls, telling us that they must be right. The Devil's methods are not all polarised from God's; some of the most deceptive are slight deviants - enough to put you on the wrong track while at the same time having you believe that the virtue, or generosity, or tenderness, that came with the Creative Delusion must be quite helpful to the soul and commendable to the forces of life. This is most operational in non-Christian love - for we often see it as so full of honour and virtue that we innocently make it a god. Any self-created god will always be subordinate to our reasoning, for if we reject the first we will suffer anxiety and frustration, but if we reject the second we shall face despair.
We need not look for merit in all the events and actions which stopped us searching for Him; they all belong in the Devil's chamber of distractions. And even when a man is not distracted, he is faced with two opposing forces, those of self-worship and divine worship. I think it would be wrong to say that they are wholly extricable, for self-worship, bad in almost every part of itself, is good if the worshipping of the self is wholly attributable to God; that is, if our worshipping of the self is really our worshipping the Christ that is in us - in an attempt to see the body as a holy temple of God - worthy of worship only for the Christ that is in it.
If the search continues to a deeper level you will see that there are two types of analytical reaction to the search. One makes logical deductions from propositions and uses them to build the case, and the other discovers propositions inductively and detaches them from the enquiry if they are contrary to a man's wishes and desires. The first analytical reaction shows the breadth and durability of reason and the second shows the flawed nature of analysing with loaded dice.
It is true that mere feeling will never, by itself, produce clarity or lucidity - but it should also be noted that we cannot distinguish between truth and falsity without our reasoning coming in to direct feelings. Some initial feelings will be based on truisms, and some will be based on irrational causes; thus we must keep our reasoning solid and dependable. It should also be noted that bad habits alter the face of reasoning; thus pride or vanity or insecurity are very often the root causes of many other branches of bad habit which, if left, will also affect our reasoning. But if we pull up the roots we shall see that the branches die too - we shall see that when bad habits had supposed reason on their side they were wrongly seen as justifiable, but when reason pulled up their roots they were left unsupported and devoid of energy and life.
We are made in the image of God, and this image permits us to gradually understand ultimate realities - both the truth of our universe and the truth of Christ. We are often told that diversity is a good thing, but this is not always true. Neither morality, nor truth, nor reasoning has any room for diversity - for all three demand that an immutable standard is used and that no compromises are made. Secularism twists this tenet into something which suits its own cause. It projects, at its worst, the menagerie of differing things as a paradigmatic model for all types of reasoning. But this is a grievous error - for every part of feeling and reasoning, differing intrinsically (everything does) is all held together by standards outside of the centre. We never judge something at the precise moment of doing it; thus we are not going to understand the need for the search until we step outside altogether and evaluate this from an all-inclusive reasoning perspective. The universe has plenty to say to us, so does the world, so does the self - but it is God, working both in and through these things, who puts it all together.
When we see a man who regards Christianity in the same way that he regards drama classes or fishing - that is to say, he is under the impression that 'Christianity is okay for some, but it all comes down to matter of taste', you will know that he is very much caught in the trap of the times. And equally many see Christianity as simply a fact abut someone's moral outlook, or as simply a fact about someone's social preferences. All of these impressions are false. No man, as far as I know, has ever claimed Christ to be God and then held back from calling Him Lord - as the Bible says, only those who have the Holy Spirit can say that Jesus is Lord' (1 Corinthians 12:3). And this, I would say, is one of the big challenges ahead of us - to speak the Gospel in a manner worthy of Christ - in a manner that will reveal to people its true place in the world, not as a compartmentalised entity, but as the central fact of our existence.
