Our hearts must be free to love God unconditionally if we are to fight and win in the dark, dangerous, and deceptive end-times spiritual warfare within which we are all currently engaged, whether we like it or not, whether we are aware of it or not.
Everything is a temptation now; that’s because of the way the world has become lawless, where evil has been sanctioned publicly as “good”.
We are now being compelled and expected to participate in evil as culture (pagan culture, mind you) which has turbo-charged temptation for Christians.
We are to have absolutely nothing to do with any negotiating with such evil; we must stand against it, testify to the truth, and expose evil and corruption when we encounter it.
We are now charged with one key command that we must take seriously found in Holy Scripture for the time.
We each need to grapple with this command to discern it’s practical meaning for us in our own context, and that is, to FLEE Babylon… NOW!
NOT to participate in the celebration of evil.
Attaching our heart to anything in this world is to live within a framework that is only temporal and material.
Different versions of the Bible translate words differently, but the most accurate translations of Colossians 3:2 I think is found in the King James version, using the word “affection” rather than thoughts:
“Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.”
[Colossians 3:2].
The first commandment is to love the Lord your God with ALL your heart…., which is the antithesis of attaching our heart to anything in this world.
Our heart is a funny thing. It’s like the eye. It gets what it looks at with desire (intent, focus) but it can really only look at one thing at a time, so we’re always choosing “for” something, yes, but we are also choosing “against” everything else with that same choice.
To turn our attention, our minds-eye, to the things of this world with an intention to experience those things we are looking at, ie., we desire or have an affection for them, is to redirect the funnel filling us from facing heaven to facing earth… that’s the only choice we really have, so we might as well refer to it as our “freedom funnel”…. the question is, where are we going to funnel from today?
Directing it to savor sensuality is to place our soul in what is passing away.
It is to live in darkness and sin.
It is also to put our souls in eternal jeopardy.
Worldly pleasures titillating our senses with material delights and exciting our imagination with prideful and ambitious fantasies of fortune, fame and fulfillment may seem to be something of substance to us now, as they excite our senses and stimulate the anticipatory euphoric pleasure sensors in our brain, but they are not!
They are all fleeting experiences, without essence. There is no substantial spiritual connection with what is real and what will remain: God the Holy Trinity.
“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever….let us go forth to Him, outside the camp, bearing His reproach. For here we have no continuing city, but we seek the one to come.” [Hebrews 13ff]
So, as we sit as “soul” on the sidelines watching and reveling in our own experiences of the things of this world let us begin to do so with an awareness that when they pass away, so too will all our experience of them, leaving our souls empty of life.
Ironically, to live in this world as if we were not in it, but in heaven already, having our thoughts there, having a perspective on the world from where God sits on his throne, having a funnel facing heaven, empowers us to truly and fully live for others in this world.
It is only THEN that we can truly experience the fullness of life in God, even while living in this valley of tears.
It is only then, a husband can truly love his wife, being freed from preoccupation with self and able to hear the silent communications that transmit from her heart to his heart when the funnel isn’t clogged up with other things.
It is only then that we can truly rejoice, being fully and more purely abandoned to the movements of the Holy Spirit, freed from the contamination of ego.
Even though we know deep-down that we should be looking at heaven, we often don’t, because it doesn’t excite our senses to do that here on earth with the veil in place making our connection to heaven – as real and transforming as it is – often experientially oblivious to our senses, which we don’t like at all.
The things of earth excite our senses though!
When we look at earth with our minds-eye, then also give our heart’s desire to the thing we are gazing at, then we drag our soul down from that boring experience of giving our “affection” to heaven, for the devil to play with here in his temporary kingdom.
It’s easy to do this even without realizing it, as we attempt to make this temporal time-sensitive valley we’re anxiously passing through a little less “full of tears”.
But that’s NOT what we’ve been asked to do by Jesus!
We’ve been asked to take up our cross daily in imitation of Jesus, who poured out his blood for us while hanging on a cross, remaining perfectly “thread-free” regarding any attachment to this world, as he lived in perfect and total obedience to God the Father, as we must do as well, but we must be willing to stand outside the gate with Him, scorned,, as St. Paul noted in the quote from Hebrews above.
So, husbands, I did this post mainly for you this morning. I suspected some of you (upon hearing at church this morning that phrase “…let those having wives act as not having them…”) might foolishly think God Is giving you permission to not have to check in with the Mrs. anymore whenever you’d like to plan a fishing or hunting weekend in the cabin with the bros?