God (Christianity) -- Worship and love; Spirituality
God and the spiritual world are real. We can reckon upon them with as
much assurance as we reckon upon the familiar world around us.
Spiritual things are there (or rather we should say _here_) inviting
our attention and challenging our trust.
Our trouble is that we have established bad thought habits. We
habitually think of the visible world as real and doubt the reality of
any other. We do not deny the existence of the spiritual world but we
doubt that it is real in the accepted meaning of the word.
The world of sense intrudes upon our attention day and night for the
whole of our lifetime. It is clamorous, insistent and
self-demonstrating. It does not appeal to our faith; it is here,
assaulting our five senses, demanding to be accepted as real and final.
But sin has so clouded the lenses of our hearts that we cannot see that
other reality, the City of God, shining around us. The world of sense
triumphs. The visible becomes the enemy of the invisible; the temporal,
of the eternal. That is the curse inherited by every member of Adam's
tragic race.
At the root of the Christian life lies belief in the invisible. The
object of the Christian's faith is unseen reality.
Our uncorrected thinking, influenced by the blindness of our natural
hearts and the intrusive ubiquity of visible things, tends to draw a
contrast between the spiritual and the real; but actually no such
contrast exists. The antithesis lies elsewhere: between the real and the
imaginary, between the spiritual and the material, between the temporal
and the eternal; but between the spiritual and the real, never. The
spiritual _is_ real.
If we would rise into that region of light and power plainly beckoning
us through the Scriptures of truth we must break the evil habit of
ignoring the spiritual. We must shift our interest from the seen to the
unseen. For the great unseen Reality is God. "He that cometh to God must
believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently
seek him." This is basic in the life of faith. From there we can rise to
unlimited heights. "Ye believe in God," said our Lord Jesus Christ,
"believe also in me." Without the first there can be no second.
If we truly want to follow God we must seek to be other-worldly. This I
say knowing well that that word has been used with scorn by the sons of
this world and applied to the Christian as a badge of reproach. So be
it. Every man must choose his world. If we who follow Christ, with all
the facts before us and knowing what we are about, deliberately choose
the Kingdom of God as our sphere of interest I see no reason why anyone
should object. If we lose by it, the loss is our own; if we gain, we rob
no one by so doing. The "other world," which is the object of this
world's disdain and the subject of the drunkard's mocking song, is our
carefully chosen goal and the object of our holiest longing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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