My 19 year old daughter often says ‘I like being me!’ We are all meant to enjoy being ourselves. We were created to live in a ‘flow’ rather than on a draft board of black and white. By living in God through Jesus we can live in life rather than in bits of life. Our days can either be whole or ‘bitty’ depending in whether our source of wholeness is Jesus or positions and perspectives.
Jesus didn’t go about attempting a balancing act getting His perspectives right. He didn’t live from them. He didn’t seek balance. He was balance. He didn’t live from view-points or mind-sets. He had more than the mind of His Father. He was His son – an extension of His Father’s being, yet profoundly Himself! He was the Son of His Father –the perfect model for the sons and daughters of men.
Jesus did a lot of healing, spoke words of life and liberated people from the power of Satan. He was healing. He did not stress out over issues like Christians can. He served His Father by being Himself and doing what He saw the Father doing. Jesus was life and lived in its’ flow. When Jesus is our life we live in that flow of balance and wholeness. But there’s more. We become who we are and can enjoy being ourselves.
‘To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.’ I learned this in science, which I was passably good at, until our teacher went on a one-term binge on mass and density. I lost interest after that. I do recall Archimedes. But focused more on his darting around the bath room in the nude shouting Eureka than on principle.
To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Yes, I did learn this in my junior years around the pneumatic trough. However age has revealed to me that as a result of the knowledge of good and evil, a lot of people think reactively. People adopt a reactionary stance to some abuse of a good thing that they have endured at the hand of … well … people like themselves.
We can live out of reaction and response but we are meant to live out of God.
One of my teachers, a young and patient man – a graduate, I believe of Bathurst teachers college, Australia, put a glass rod in his mouth after stirring hydrochloric acid in a beaker. This caused amusement and a satisfactory diversion to we year 9 scholars. He embarrassment him self, coughed and spluttered but suffered no harm other than to his ego.
Later in adult life as a teacher, one of my colleagues had a more challenging experience when he let a lump of sodium slip into a pneumatic trough of unsuspecting water. A hole was burned in the black board, the fire engine came and the men in yellow uniforms sucked up fowl odours with their extracting machine. Numerous students escaped out of windows. Startled parents collected their kids early. Again, no serious damage was done. The teacher retained his job but the principal retired a early.
If we followed the path pioneered by a certain variety of Christian, we might feel forced to ban pneumatic troughs, cease using beakers and exchange male science teachers for ladies. We could take refuge in any number of reactions. We could do all this, go home and spend the rest of our lives in bed wearing a crash helmet.
A knowledge of good and evil mind-set can cause us to live in reaction mode. Some one claims to have the gift of prophecy, has an affair and gives a few people whacky words that do not come to pass. So “we get a thing” against prophecy. Then spend the remainder of our lives deaf to God’s Voice. It’s curious that pastors through bad preaching, have deceived more people than have prophets, simply because there are more of them. But people keep listening to them and their influence has not been annulled.
The nature of a religious life in the knowledge of good and evil is like living on a draft board of black and white squares. We can step into and over these squares, dodging about like a person crossing a river by trying to jump on the most secure looking rocks. We can reject some things yet be caught in fashions and fads. Sure, we are meant to be discriminating but we are called to live out of God – not even out of discernment.
The result is that people surf in on the waves and get washed out by the rip.
People can live in dichotomies calling one thing a plague and another thing a bounty, living jerky lives zigzagging between ‘positions.’ The truth is though, that things just are. They were all created good with the capacity to minister life. But when we live in things rather than in God the things rise up to tyrannize us and stain our lives with misery. This is why Christians can be so sour.
Since Jesus lived in His Father and not in the knowledge of good and evil – which means not in dichotomies, theses, antitheses, dictions and contradictions. He just was and He just did. Jesus is ‘ I AM.’ As daughters and sons we have a place in Him – to be ourselves doing our Father’s business.
Jesus went about releasing life by being Himself. “I AM” can do that and so can His daughters and sons – if we are alive in God, have our epistemology rooted in God and not in the bisected, dissected, fragmented, mode of The Good versus Evil monger.
We need to live out of God and not out of our experiences, which means not living out of us. The only way to rid our selves of fractured, contentious, oppositional thinking, is to let Jesus be our life. Then we have the mind of Christ. But not because we have worked it all out, situated ourselves in correct perspectives or avoided the mistakes of others.
We are able to see and ‘be’ because we are deep-rooted in the wholeness of Jesus. Here we live in God and are able to multiply the good. Good and evil do not cease to exist because we live in God. But formed and built up in Him we are furnished with the discernment see what is of man and what is of God and live in an atmosphere of liberty and peace.
Keith Allen
