April 09, 2014
Getting to Know You
Growing up I really didn’t know my father. In my
formative years our relationship was blurred by alcoholism (literally) and in
my pre-teen years divorce freed him to be an absent parent. Over the years when
we had an occasional visit the communication was surface level and awkward. The
disciples knew the Father, but they didn’t “know” the Father. Questions run
through my mind when I think about the disciples asking Jesus to teach them how
to pray. I suppose each could have had different reasons for wanting to know how
to pray. Had they in the past been distant from God and didn’t know how to
communicate with Him? Was the relationship Jesus had with the
Father something they wanted to tap into? As students did they think this was
just another component to their education? Jesus said to them, “When you
pray, say: “‘Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come. Give us each day
our daily bread. Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins
against us. And lead us not into temptation’ (Luke 11:2-4 NIV)”
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2 comments:
Gail;
-----From the perspective of what it is to know, there are two kinds of knowledge. The first is a knowledge of the particulars. We are most familiar with it because our entire lives tick past us particular by particular by particular. Each particular moment brings particular details to be inter-related with past details for the making of sense and understanding and the drawing of conclusions sound enough to themselves become details. So we can look into history and watch this kind of knowledge progress in most everything. Books were once written on scrolls, then codices, but always copies were made by hand and pen until the printing press, then pressed by plate and die until the knowledge of electricity and magnetism turned plate and die into drum-roller and magnetic pattern. Now we read books on Ipads. The knowledge of particulars has given us automobiles, computers, and ice cream, to name the important ones.
-----Maybe you can now guess the other kind of knowledge. You can’t really say it is the opposite of particular knowledge, for it involves particular knowledge. Yet it does not focus on particulars although correlations of pertinent particulars construct its focus. And it is not a knowledge of what you can touch or have touched but of the essence of all their proper, non-stretched, non-twisted, non-jammed, shaken, adjusted, nor bias-sorted fit together into one naturally cohesive pattern. The mind’s bent toward the particular hamstrings its knowledge of the universal. It is not that we are unable to know universal truths, its that we try to bring them home like particulars.
-----One of the first indications I noticed that God truly is infinitely loving is that enough particular details are present in any normally intelligent life for the basic essence of God to be known. Philosophers have railed duality for centuries. Yet each one is born, and each one dies. Eureka! Duality! Well, between those two events, each inhales and exhales, otherwise they quickly proceed to their second event. Another duality. There’s night and day, light and darkness, truth and deceit, good and evil, and at the pinnacles of those last two, God and Satan. That’s just one “for example.” Life is full of “for examples”. Especially when you look at the feminine world. Mothers of almost every species will sacrifice themselves for their offspring. A bit metaphorical, if not perfectly that. But the giant “more-over” is that God moved amongst and in men over the spans of history, subtly emerging thoughts and expressions from men’s minds He needed written. And many of these recorded expressions cap off and particularize valuable, universal truths, such as, “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world His invisible nature, namely, His eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” (Rom 1:19-20) But they don’t want to be without excuse. So they philosophize the impossibility of knowing God and seal their own doom. Unfortunately for them, God is not completely knowable, but He is essentially knowable.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
And it goes on...
...and on and on...
-----Prayer, on the other hand, is quite the opposite. It proceeds not from the possibility of knowing God, but from both knowing God and the possibility of knowing Him more deeply. So it was when Jesus taught His guys how to pray that He said to address your Father in heaven. This is knowledge. And He said to differentiate Him, “Hallowed be Thy name;” point to which side of duality He is. That somewhat particularizes God. Then we’re going to ask Him into our knowledge in a big way, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.”
-----His kingdom is not only beings and places and principles and rules, it is the way all those perfectly interact, as well as, the knowledge and understanding of it all. Notice that in this template for prayer Jesus did not tell us to thank God for His kingdom having come and His will having been done, even though some of His kingdom has come and some of His will has been done. Though we can know and do know a bit of Him and His kingdom, we are living in the “middle” of this communication God makes of all the world’s rottenness and righteousness in the face of His responses to these. As His kingdom emerges to particularize for the physical world His universal victory over evil, we see not only the events and circumstances of His kingdom’s emergence, but also the sense and essence of them. (And please, do not translate my willingness to use the term “emergence” into any kind of acceptance or approval of this old fashioned, we-are-gods emergent-church idea.) So we do have knowledge of God, though only a pittance of it, though that pittance ever grows by our labors to cry out to Jesus’ Father for knowledge from our love of it, then go looking through all due awareness (Rov 2:1-12.)
-----Like the other things of God’s effects, prayer to Him is what it is because He is what He is. Just any humbled and sincere outcry from chin-deep quicksand will get you onto the Rock. But to move forward from there is to learn what is what of the I AM That I Am, rather than what you want of what. To nonchalantly puff into the air some bilge about knowing God by any approach we wish to make might speak truth of our first approach. But if thereafter we do not begin approaching Him according to His principles and designs and patterns, then we come to know what we ourselves construct. Those would be idols.
-----I hate half-baked ideas. “Come as you are” was pulled from the oven before the stuffing warmed up. “Come as you are, stay as He would have you,” might get closer to popping up the turkey button. And though sloppiness gets my clothes on in the morning, I don’t look good then. Sloppiness gets your prayers heard, but it does not leave your mind in order. I know God draws us towards more orderly minds which better learn Him. But we are they who must follow the drawing for good spiritual order to grasp the intricately beautiful dainties of God. Thus Jesus’ template for prayer was taught to His disciples. Try it! You’ll like it!
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