Christian Faith or Magical Thinking?
For a couple of Sundays, we’ve been considering the importance of a contemporary experience of hearing God’s voice. A fresh relationship with the Lord prevents us from following a sterile set of rules that have little true power to shape our values and daily lives into the likeness of Jesus Christ.
We need to hear the words of God in order to do the works of God. I’ve been encouraging you to actively listen, to invite the Spirit of God to speak to you, guiding your life. What power. What an influence for the Lord you can become when you have heard from Him. That ‘knowing’ produces tremendous confidence!
The Book of Acts was written by Luke to tell us the story of the first generation Christians. Ordinary men and women heard from God and knew His Presence in their lives. Just a few Spirit-filled people changed the world in a century’s time BECAUSE they were listening to the Spirit and doing the will of the Father.
Shortly after the Day of Pentecost when the Believers were filled with God’s Spirit, Peter and John were going into the temple. They were approached by a crippled man who wanted money. Instead, they prayed for his healing and he was able to walk. This so amazed people that they gathered to look. These men began to talk about the Lord and so annoyed the religious authorities that they were arrested. At their hearing before the council of highly educated religious leaders they defended themselves eloquently. Acts 4.8 tells us that Peter was filled with a holy boldness. After he had spoken, the reaction of the court was: Acts 4:13
When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.
The relationship they found with their Heavenly Father was so compelling that they gave their lives to spread the good news. Driven by this passion and empowered by the Holy Spirit, they reached – in one generation – from one end of the Roman Empire to the other. There is the story of Stephen. Acts 6:8-10
8 Now Stephen, a man full of God’s grace and power, did great wonders and miraculous signs among the people. 9 Opposition arose, however, from members of the Synagogue of the Freedmen (as it was called)—Jews of Cyrene and Alexandria as well as the provinces of Cilicia and Asia. These men began to argue with Stephen,10 but they could not stand up against his wisdom or the Spirit by whom he spoke.
His witness so enraged the crowd that they dragged out of the city and killed him by stoning him. His final words show us how he heard from heaven and walked with God. Acts 7:56-60
56 “Look,” he said, “I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” 57 At this they covered their ears and, yelling at the top of their voices, they all rushed at him, 58 dragged him out of the city and began to stone him. Meanwhile, the witnesses laid their clothes at the feet of a young man named Saul. 59 While they were stoning him, Stephen prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” 60 Then he fell on his knees and cried out, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” When he had said this, he fell asleep.
Similar stories tell us how those early Christians overcame hardship, faced crisis, healed the sick, cared lovingly
for each other, knew where to go and what to say... All by the word of God that came to them by the Holy Spirit.
Some of you just can’t help thinking, “Well, that was then and this is now. God’s not speaking that way anymore.”
But He is... if He seems silent, it is because we are not listening.
To help you understand the concept of God’s voice in our time, let me share a story from my life. Some of you have heard it before and some of you were part of my life then.
In January, 1986, on a cold Saturday afternoon, our phone rang. When the sobbing coming over the lines subsided, Bev and I determined that the caller was Margarita from Dallas, TX. She had come into our lives about a year and half earlier as a result of outreach ministry. A man had recruited her to become part of his high-wire circus act in her native Colombia, So. America and then brought her to the US. Once he got her to the States he became abusive and cruel. We had urged her to separate from him, but she was frightened since she spoke no English and needed his support for her daughter and after month with us, she left with him. Now she was desperate. In her very broken English, she explained that she had separated from the man and that in a rage he had come to her apartment and taken her 4 yr. old daughter at gunpoint. Because her immigration papers were not in order, she was afraid to go the police, so she called us. Her story broke our hearts, but what could we do? We were not rich. We had no connections in Texas.
The next day we shared the story with this congregation and asked for their prayer for Margarita and her daughter. At the conclusion of the service as I stood at the door greeting people over $1000 was pressed into my hands in small bills.
God was saying, “Do something” and we were asking, “what should we do now?” Margarita told me that she believed her former boyfriend had taken her daughter to Florida. Using the funds given to me, I bought a tickets for Margarita and myself to go to Miami. I would fly in on Monday morning and she would arrive from Dallas around Noon. I knew nothing of Miami, but she assured me that she could navigate through the city. She didn’t tell me that the only time she had ever been in that city was the night that she came from Colombia.
I arrived in Miami, met Margarita’s flight, rented a car, and drove to the airport exit. Turning to her I asked, “Which way?” Her words hit me like a sledgehammer: “I don’t remember nothing!” Here we were in a city without contacts, without a plan except for her directions, and she remembers nothing!
Sitting in that rented car in the parking lot of a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant, laid my head on the steering wheel and prayed a sorry prayer,
“Lord, I feel awfully stupid at this moment. I’ve spent people’s money to get here. I have no plan, no one to call, and I do not know where to go. Please show me something.”
It would make a great story to tell you that God’s Presence lit up the windshield with driving directions, but nothing like that happened. Instead, I had the impression that I should just drive So drive I did. We rather aimlessly took a turn here and a turn there and in a few moments found ourselves driving past the So. Dade County Sheriff’s Dept. Another impression. “Stop here!”
We went in a explained that we were in Florida looking for a little girl. The desk officer was polite and when he found out I was from NJ called for a detective who recently had joined the dept after moving to Florida from NJ. The man came and we soon found that he came from Phillipsburg and he had heard of Washington Assembly. He took a real interest in us, explained the law to us, and gave us his card. If we needed further help we were to call.
And off we went. Where? We didn’t know, but we were making good time!
We drove, again seemingly aimlessly. I do not remember how long we drove exactly, but it was a long time, perhaps an hour. Margarita wasn’t silent. I was feeling increasingly stupid about this fool’s errand I’d started. Then suddenly she screamed, really screamed! She thought she recognized a mobile home park as one where she had stayed when they entered the country a couple of years before. Sure enough as we turned in, she recognized a home. We knocked at the door and the people warmly took us in and listened to our story. They then made some calls around the state and after about 30 minutes had located someone who had seen the man we were looking for the day previously in Sarasota and he had a little girl with him. Off we went for the 5-6 hour drive across So. Florida’s Alligator Alley to the town. Arriving there at midnight, I left Margarita with acquaintances she had in the town and found a room.
The next day God was with us again as we checked out contacts. In the late morning, we found ourselves standing at a door of a home where the little girl was supposed to be staying. The woman who answered the door denied even knowing who the girl was. Then Margarita screamed again! It was something in Spanish but in my smattering knowledge of the language I picked up that it was about shoes. She spotted her child’s shoes to one side of the door. Confronted with this evidence and a menacing sheriff’s deputy, the woman quickly produced the child. There was no struggle for the kidnapper had left the country the night before to see his father in Colombia. As we drove back to Miami, Margarita urged me to take the little girl back to NJ where she would be safe, and that’s how Maribel, now a beautiful young lady, came to be a part of our family.
Did I hear God’s voice? Not audibly.
But HE was guiding. HE was very much present and His concern for one young mother’s anguish and one little girl was very evident!
As you hear a story like that, you probably think: “Sure, it happened just like that.” because you just simply don’t accept that God does miracles anymore. OR you may be thinking, “I wish God would speak to me in that way.”
Most Believers share the desire that I have to know that God is guiding and directing our lives in an immediate way. Our greatest desire to is bring His hope and healing to this needy world. That desire is admirable, but it has it’s pitfalls. We can be diverted from the
real relationship with God into a place of fantasy filled with magical thinking.
What do I mean?
Think of the purpose of magic. Magic seeks to alter the normal, to change the perception of reality.
True, modern magicians are illusionists. They only appear to do things that are supernatural by tricking our senses.
Christian, in our desire to see people’s lives changed... it is all too tempting to resort to magical thinking. We begin to think that the use of ritual, of spells, of charms, the right techniques... can create an illusion of spiritual power and perhaps create belief that WILL change people or events. That is both wrong and terribly sad. We trade off the real and lasting work of the Almighty God for some cheap tricks, for some smooth psychological techniques. We are willing to deceive ourselves and others with a mere illusion in place of a real, life-changing experience of God’s power. Unwilling to wait on God’s time and God’s will, we assume His place. When He doesn’t produce the results we want on demand and on cue, we mistakenly choose to become manipulators and magicians, creating illusions to replace reality.
An evangelist who claimed to know what people in his audience needed to be healed and to know specifically what their illness was unmasked several years ago a fraud. He was claiming divine discernment, while in truth, he was wearing a hidden radio earpiece through which his wife could feed him information she picked up from people as they entered the auditorium. Your attempts at spiritual magic may not be so blatant as that, but do you attempt do, by your own efforts, what only God can do?
Another common error of Believers is the slide into the practice of a kind of Christian voodoo! This is seeking power without relationship. Let me explain.
The voodoo priest doesn’t go through his incantations to come close to the spirits he believes he is addressing!
In fact, he is fearful of those spirits. The voodoo priest want those spirits to do what he asks of them.
In your times of prayer, do you seek to KNOW your Lord, to come close to Him OR
are you just trying to get Him to produce some good for you?
I am not suggesting that it is wrong to ask God to bless us or to guide us. We are to pray for people to be healed, to pray that suffering be alleviated, to seek God’s power to work through our lives. We ought to ask God boldly for those things we need and desire. HOWEVER, our first priority should be to KNOW Him so we can live for Him and in His Presence. I want others to say of me, “He’s been with Jesus!”
In Phillipians 3, Paul describes his Christian life. He tells how he had once been just religious. He had attempted, by his own efforts to do God’s work and only failed. Then he found Christ, through away his self-confidence and began to listen to the voice of God. He says, [Philippians 3:9-10] NLT
“I no longer count on my own goodness or my ability to obey God’s law, but I trust Christ to save me. For God’s way of making us right with himself depends on faith. 10 As a result, I can really know Christ and experience the mighty power that raised him from the dead.”
Spiritual power does not flow out of esoteric knowledge, incantations, or perfect righteousness! Knowing the power of God depends our faith that enables us to live close enough to Him to hear Him speak. If we want to be led by the voice of God we must live in a way that allows us to hear the voice of God.
It is so easy to forget that God is a Person, rather than an abstract force. That is one reason, I believe we should train ourselves to refer to Him in personal terms rather than simply as God.
The whole point of our Christianity is not to harness some kind of power so that we can have a better life. It is to KNOW a Person and out of intimate knowledge to do His will and work in our world.
What kind of person is God?
∙ God is Father. I do not have to take to the Scripture to show you this point. This is the most common way He chose to reveal Himself. He is Father, we are His children.
∙ God is Mother. Yes, that is true. I’m not being merely politically correct or taking a bow to feminism. God is revealed not only in the image of the Father, but in the gentle and nurturing image of Mother. In Isaiah 66, there is the vivid promise of being nursed by God, borrowing the picture of the baby at the mother’s breast. The God says in v.13 “As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you; and you will be comforted over Jerusalem.”
∙ God is Sovereign, ruling as a King. We are subjects. Thinking of God in parent imagery is comforting to most of us in it’s intimacy. God, in the Bible enriches our concept by telling us that He is a royal One in control of all creation. This reminds of the awe and respect that must be part of our love of the Lord.
∙ God is Husband. Emphasizing His loving concern and His desire to intimately know us, God tells us that we, the Church, are His bride. In the OT, He spoke to His people often using even sexual language so that they might know the depth of His passion for them.
∙ God is Shepherd. Meditate on the images in Psalm 23 and learn that the loving Shepherd desires to provide fully for all of your needs. Then turn to the New Testament where Jesus took this image for himself, declaring that He is the great Shepherd of the sheep of God, those who are totally dependent on Him.
As you use these images to enrich your prayer life, coming to KNOW God intimately becomes easier.
Instead of trying to love a general and undefined force, you can draw close to a real person... Father, Mother, King, Husband, Shepherd. In coming to KNOW and love this Person, we learn to give ourselves totally to Him. He uses us as HE chooses, to accomplish His purpose.
Let me clue you in on something.... That place in the center of His will is a place of ultimate fulfillment and great blessings, but it isn’t always a place of immediate happiness. Virtually every great servant of God whose story is told in the Holy Scripture had to endure some rough moments to stay faithful to the will of God. Loving Him requires surrender... the death of self-will and a willingness to be rejected by the world systems. Some of us don’t want that surrender of self BUT WE DO WANT spiritual power. So we revert to magic tricks and voodoo prayers.
The only way to get past the shallow one way prayers for blessings and protection and to begin to hear the voice of God is to grow intimately in love with the Lord.
If you’ve got your Bible take a look at one of the New Testament’s great passages about the great power found in LOVING God and being LOVED by Him.
Turn to Ephesians 3.
After writing at length about our heritage as children of God, Paul concludes with a prayer on our behalf.
{read 3: 14-19}
‘Rooted and established in love... having power (the full ability) to grasp the full dimension of the love of Christ, knowing a love that goes beyond knowing...” WHY? So you may be filled to overflowing with God!
Our faith is not about going through a set of rituals.
Our faith is not about keeping a set of rules.
Our faith is not about learning to follow some principles.
Our faith is about discovering the LOVE of God and then opening ourselves to an intimate, ongoing
conversation with Him.
Friend, I remind you of the most healing truth in all the world: Our Heavenly Father LOVES you!
May the Spirit help you to grasp that so you may be filled with God and really KNOW Him.
This week, listen for His voice.
∙ Invite the Father to talk with you in the ordinary moments of your life.
∙ When you don’t know what to do, ask Him
∙ If you feel unworthy or ashamed, ask the Spirit to embrace you with an experience of His love.
And my prayer.... that others will “be astonished and take note that you have been with Jesus.”
Amen
