December 05, 2011
Understanding
When TV commentator Andy Rooney recently passed away there were many
eulogies. Reporter John Roberts said, “Andy
would tell it the way he saw it. You never walked away saying, ‘I wonder what
he meant by that?’” Jesus taught in parables, it wasn’t unusual for people
to walk away saying, ‘I wonder what he
meant by that?’. I can certainly relate.
For me, listening to parables would be somewhat akin to hearing someone
talk in tongues…I just don’t get them unless someone interprets. Thankfully the
New Testament writers spoke a spiritual language that we can all understand. “We have not received the spirit of the
world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has
freely given us.” (1Cor
2:12 NIV)
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----You’re certainly right in saying the New Testament was written in a language we all can understand, knowing that your use of the pronoun refers to those who know the Lord. I have friends who are not idiots, but who are not given to the Lord either. They draw blanks on some of the New Testament’s simplest concepts and are totally mixed up in what they do think about others. Our thinking would be just as washed up, too, without the Holy Spirit. It would be kind of fun to know how He does it, but frankly, none of our five senses were given the ability to sense spirits, the Holy Spirit, or anything else of the spiritual world, so we are rather short on data necessary for any direct knowledge of how He does it.
-----But we’ve been given rational minds capable of making sense out of the physical effects caused by the Holy Spirit: love, kindness, gentleness, peace, self-control, faithfulness, and those sort of attitudes and activities, as well as the Bible itself, the history of the giving of its message, the history of its preservation, and the history of its prophecies becoming history. In fact, every event in the world looks entirely different when viewed through an understanding of even the basic message of the Bible. In some ways, then, how the Spirit forms understanding in us who follow the Lord is a little bit clear, and how darkness shrouds the minds of those who reject Him is a bit obvious, too.
-----It is kind of like a DNA thing. Every cell has a full strand of it. And of course, every cell in the body is the offspring of the first cell - the fertilized egg. Yet every cell becomes what it needs to be where it is to make the entire body work, some being part of fingernails, others nerves, some muscles, others bone marrow. Yet the DNA in all the thousands of cell varieties is identical within the same human body. Likewise, we bring to the Lord an egg of an attitude much like humility, an attitude which says to the Lord, “If there is any disparity between You and I, then You are right and I am wrong, and I would sure like to be right, too, if You would mercifully make me that way, however You might do it.” At least that is the way I’ve come to understand the call upon the Lord - kind of a mix of confession, repentance, request, and worship. Into that egg of an attitude then comes the Holy Spirit to dwell with our spirit. There in us, like the DNA is in a cell, the completeness of God’s essence is in the Holy Spirit in us, yet we become only an aspect here and an aspect there of what we should completely be (godly.) What makes the body cell specifically become a fingernail cell rather than a nerve cell? The cell is epigenetically effected by the cells around it, that is, a biochemical communication happens between the growing cell and the community of cells within which it grows that directs the way the DNA effects its growth. That’s kind of cool. We grow up within a community of believers. And believe me, they have an effect upon how we think and feel according to the mental and emotional “chemistry” carried through the events transpiring between us.
-----I don’t believe this is in any way THE way the Holy Spirit brings to us understanding. But I think it is a bit of the way which is so fundamentally apparent in the pattern of everything happening that it bears a useful insight on the importance of formulating those chemical reactions between us according to Biblical prescriptions. Then formulated, the activities “epigenetically” effecting our growth in the Lord (including understanding) become the activities of love, kindness, gentleness, peace, self-control, faithfulness, and those sort of attitudes.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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