Watching and Waiting Through A Time of Looming Threat

 We are living through a time that is unprecedented in the lives of most of us, and perhaps unprecedented, period.   Our lives have changed practically overnight and it doesn't look like we're going back to normal any time soon, if ever.  

And it's hard to know what to believe about a lot of it too.  Disinformation is probably most of the "news" these days.   Is the virus really responsible for all those deaths, or is a lot of it conflated with other medical conditions so there is no way to know?  The CDC came out a couple of weeks ago with the information that only 6% of the deaths attributed to COVID were clearly the result of COVID, while the rest involved other causes, in such a confused way that there's no way to know the true cause of death.  Then there is this unconscionable situation that a drug that could actually stop the virus in its early stages has been politically suppressed and is hardly mentioned at all any more while the death toll is reported every day as if no such remedy exists.  We're supposed to be expecting a vaccine which many fear is going to be as dangerous as the virus.    

Then there are the protests and the rioting that has been destroying businesses and property in some major cities.  The entire protest movement itself is founded on false information.  Supposedly it's a protest against systemic racism practiced by police against black citizens during arrest procedures.  The information has come out that the actual incidence of deaths by certain police methods is just as common in police dealings with whites, in some cases even more frequent.  That information is out there but the protests continue as if it weren't.  And at least in Portland the protests regularly turn to violence at nightfall every day while the media continue to describe it as "mostly peaceful."   Meanwhile there is this utterly irrational move to get rid of the police altogether as if they were the cause of all the problems.  Truly we are living in an upside-down world.

On top of all that, as if it weren't enough, wildfires swept the western US, and are still burning in some places, covering an enormous swath of land.  It's been a summer of high temperatures, which happens periodically anyway, which brought on lightning storms as the cause of the fires.  Some of it is attributed to global warming but how much should be is hard to determine since the west does go through periodic cycles of heat waves and fire danger anyway.  Not to mention that the cause of global warming is still in dispute:  how much is due to human causes?   There is also the factor of politically/environmentally motivated laws that have cut back on normal fire prevention methods such as the clearing away of fire hazards.  

In all these things emotional reactions are provoked as one group blames another with a great deal of righteous passion.   Does the wearing of face masks help against the virus or not?:  Violence against those wearing them and those refusing to wear them has occurred, and we still don't know for sure whether the argument for or against is the correct one.  A couple of California churches, after shutting down for the virus for a few weeks, have gone back to meeting regularly as the threat of the virus was seen to be a lot less dangerous than had originally been anticipated.  Yet they are under legal sanctions for their choice to hold services, and are the target of angry accusations.   And again we don't really know what the real danger of of the virus really is.  So far the churches are free of it though.

The times are chaotic and grave threats in many forms lurk just behind a fragile curtain of social habits, threat of violence, threat of loss of supplies for our everyday needs.  Nobody is really starving to death because the government keeps giving economic support, but how long is that going to last?  How long before the systems that sustain us can't continue?  Some people are stocking up for a future of total breakdown but how many are in a position to do that?

I've personally backed off my usual immersion in the political situation to make a big effort to renew my Christian life.  God is the only refuge in such a time.  And if the Rapture is right around the corner as it certainly seems it must be, I want to be spiritually strong for it.   Otherwise there's not much preparation I'm in a position to do for my own protection or the protection of family and friends.

We're in a waiting pattern.  Who knows what is going to happen next?

More

’Tis not enough to save our souls, 

To shun the eternal fires; 

The thought of God will rouse the heart 

To more sublime desires.

How little of that road, my soul! 

How little hast thou gone! 

Take heart, and let the thought of God 

Allure thee further on.

---------Frederick William Faber (two stanzas from The Way of Perfection) 

Tozer, Christian Book of Mystical Verse

The simplicity of the idea that you can draw near to God by merely thinking of Him is very attractive.  It can't mean that anyone could do this of course, there do have to be some preconditions.  You'd have to be born again for starters, and you'd have to know the biblical portrait of God or who knows what "god" you'd be invoking.  

But I've experienced the truth of it myself.  After much prayer and tears of repentance that God would forgive me for getting so far from Him, and would renew my first love of Him and guide me to a deeper love, now if I just have the thought of God I experience a deep peace, and even a "panting" like the deer of the psalm that pants for the waters.  This is not just an emotional thing but something spiritual or supernatural.  

Faber must be talking about such an experience, though it would make sense that there would be varieties and deeper versions of it.  No complex methodology here, just sincere desire to draw nearer to God, to know God as Jesus prayed His followers would.  Lovesick for God is where I want to be for the rest of my life, though there may not be much of my life left.  (And of course I use the word "lovesick" to invoke the Song of Songs, which is so frequently misinterpreted to be referring to merely human love.)

Later:  In searching for more inspiration at You Tube I kept running into the false mystics, which does make me wish again that Tozer might not have been so casual about his use of the term.  Anti-Christian mystics abound, wresting the scriptures to fit some notion of their own that denies the whole history of Christian theology.   Even mytics who may have started out pursuing the true God in prayer veer unnervingly off the path into all sorts of false ideas.  These ideas can often be identified as focusing on us, the human beings, rather than on God.   I may want to write more about this later.

Another piece of the Great Apostasy of the End Times: The Emerging or Emergent Church

 I did not want to go here, into posts about false teachers in the churches that relate to the topic of mysticism, but now I feel obligated to try at least to identify some of it because it is certainly a great danger to Christians.  Contemplative Prayer is one such movement, but the Emerging Church may be the umbrella under which that and other teachings alien to Christianity are being imported into the Church.  The Emerging Church is described as a Postmodern movement, which means it rests on experience and rejects the idea of absolute truth.  That alone of course makes it alien to Christianity.  

Just another brand of apostasy we can recognize within the Great Apostasy that is preparing the world for the final One World Religion under the Antichrist.    There are so many kinds of false teachings I couldn't possibly track them all, though maybe I can at least touch on the major ones.  There are of course Christian leaders who are exposing these things, such as Pastor Joe Schimmel; and John MacArthur has identified many strands of it in his sermons.  Justin Peters is another source of information.  And Andrew Strom whose film on Kundalini in the churches I linked in the upper right margin is another.  

So now I'm watching a film about the Emerging/Emergent Church and noting names associated with it, some I've heard of but others that are new to me.  It was made by Elliott Resch who also made one about the Seeker-Sensitive and Purpose-Driven movements.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF-CHA4Z2FQ

 One glaring problem with this Emerging Church movement that jumps out at me right away in this film  is that it has some influence in a whole slew of denominations and the Roman Church is one of them.  "Father" Richard Rohr is a name I ran across when checking up on Contemplative Prayer.  He's the one who said it's about being constantly in touch with God and with everything surrounding us, which sounds uncomfortably like Pantheism but at least isn't Christianity.  The precipitating incident that caused me to leave the Charismatic Movement way back in the nineties was that women in the parachurch group I belonged to prayed for the Pope as if he was part of the Church.

Other names the film identifies as leaders of the Emerging Church are Tony Jones, Rob Bell, Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Peter Rollins, Phyllis Tickle.  Two pastors who have adopted much of this movement in their churches are Rick Warren and Marc Driscoll.  , 

Phyllis Tickle calls it a move of God.   Some define it as wanting to rethink "how Church is done" along with others who want to rethink some of the major doctrines of Christianity.    Apparently much of it comes out of a dissatisfaction with the "conservative economic and political" character of the Church.  

So much for two millennia of carefully wrought doctrine by the greatest thinkers of the Church.  And the film then goes on to show how the movement encourages doubt in all the foundational truths of Christianity such as the virgin birth and the resurrection and so on.

I'm only half an hour into what is a three-hour film and I can't take any more right now.  I'm glad I saw this much because I had known very little about the Emerging Church and now I know it's such an extreme heresy nobody should talk about its leaders as "brothers."  Sure, pray for them, heretics can change their minds, but there should be no hint of accepting them as fellow Christians.

Good and Bad Mysticisms Part 2

 No, there is no higher plane, there's no surpassing experience;  there is no deeper life.  Christ is all in all.

This is John MacArthur from 7:56 on the sermon I mentioned in the last post on this subject, where he is preaching from Colossians 2:18    ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0fETODHsoM),

The frustrating thing is that he's using the term mysticism only to refer to today's charismatics and televangelists who are fleecing the flock, selling "miracles," seeing angels and having other sorts of visions and so on.   There are also some self-appointed teachers who claim o hear from God that are included among these deceivers, such as Beth Moore.  I don't know anything about her except for the occasional You Tube clip, I just know she is one MacArthur and others identify as a false teacher, someone who claims to hear from God directly for her teachings.  There are also some books I haven't read, such as The Shack and Jesus Calling and others that are warned against in the same way.    I know very little of them and the little I know suggests that the criticism is quite correct.

But then these false teachers are not distinguished from the mystics Tozer presents in his books.   There are teachers who do talk of a higher life, a deeper life who focus on the biblical portrait of God and Christ in a way that exalts them and builds affection toward them in the reader.  These are very far from the signs-and-wonders kind of thinking MacArthur particularly condemns.  He calls it all a big ego trip with false humility, using the terms from the Colossians passage to brand the whole range of phenomena that go by the term "mysticism" which unfortunately would vilify an Isaac Watts or a Gerhard Tersteegen along with an Oral Roberts or a Benny Hinn or a Beth Moore.

Again, I wish I had another term for the experiences I've been trying to talk about, that Tozer calls Mysticism, that do not deserve MacArthur's sweeping denunciations.  He brands all "mysticism" in terms of the Colossians passage, as false humility, worship of angels etc., and sums them all up as a "big ego trip" that is all about denying the sufficience of Christ.

I'm not even sure Mysticism is the right word for the phenomena he is talking about.  I'd be more inclined to call it a form of witchcraft myself.   He already showed the falseness of the Charismatic Movement in his Strange Fire Conference.  There is this Contemplative Prayer movement in some churches now too, that sounds like another big deception.    Heard one practitioner of that movement, pparently a Roman Catholic, describe it as a constant awareness of God AND everything around us.  So that everything is prayer.  Pretty far from anything biblical I'd say.

So most likely everything he denounces as mysticism should be denounced.  The problem is that the term also includes some of the very best devotional writing in the history of Christianity, most of which I'm sure he would himself acknowledge, such as the humns of Wesley and Watts.   Others he may not be as familiar with, such as Madame Guyon and Gerhard Tersteegen, whose poetry Tozer includes in his book of Mystical Verse.  They are both called Mystics by the scholars, but their writings are completely Christ-exalting.

He and others like Justin Peters rightly say the false teachers deny the sufficiency of Christ and the sufficiency of scripture. HOWEVER, what this does in practice is confine us all to a very limited idea of the sufficiency of Christ.  As Tozer puts it, we are confined to a very narrow or shallow idea of Justification by Faith, and confined to avoid any kind of further seeking of a deeper life IN CHRIST, a deeper knowledge of Christ, a deeper love of Christ.  And since some of those who do pursue THIS KIND of deeper life have superntural experiences they come under suspicion just for that reason and tarring them with the Word of Faith apostates is thereby seemingly justified in a way that is terribly unjust to some of the most serious Christians..

The "more" that is sought from this other mystical camp is more love of God, more knowledge of God, more mortification of sin, more growth in humility and compassion and all the fruits of the Spirit.   This is because somehow we do get stuck in a rather worldly-feeling Christian life.  Perhaps we shouldn't.  Perhaps if we just pursued the means of grace more persistently we would accomplish what we are seeking, but I don't think it can be denied that the general tenor of many churches is really fleshly and hardly spiritual at all.   So we look for a "more" that will crucify the flesh in reality and grow us in grace in reality and increase our love of God in reawlity because for whatever reason the usual methods employed in the churches are not doing that and when we get these exhortations that "there is no more," and "there is no higher life" and so on, we may just feel cheated and spiritually deprived.  Yes you can have Bible studies and prayer times and have devotional times at home, regularly read the Bible and so on, and still somehow maintain what I'm calling this fleshly tone in the churches.  

I want to include some lines from some of the verses in Tozer's book but I think I'll start with a few scripture verses mostly off the top of my head that I think call us to this higher life that is being denied us.  It's not that these are not preached on, it's not that we aren't familiar with them, but their real power to change us and grow us somehow gets slighted.  

Thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind and with all thy strength

John 17:3   And this is life eternal, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.

Jeremiah 29:13  And you shall seek Me and find Me when you seek Me with all your heart.

As the deer panteth for the waters so my soul panteth after Thee.

Song of Songs   My Beloved is mine and I am His

John 14:17  He dwelleth with you and shall be in you

He who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him

 I wanted to include some of Tozer's verse and maybe some more scirpture but now I just want to get this posted so I'll either add some to this later or start a new post for the purpose.

Another Near-Death Vision and How it Plays into the End Times Tribulation Scenario

    This is a digression from the theme of mysticism in my personal attempt to renew my spiritual life, to return for a moment to the End Times scenario and the role I've come to  think is likely to be played by all these "visits to heaven" that have been proliferating in the last few decades.  They all seem to be designed to persuade people that there is an afterlife, and some of them purport to give the Christian view of the afterlife.  Personal experiences seem to have a great deal of persuasive power no matter how much they contradict each other or teach clearly false doctrine.  

I just saw this one at You Tube and decided I should listen to it.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDbGbzu7a2w&t=3s    It's about the experience after death of a young Buddhist monk in Myanmar (Burma) some years ago.   He describes walking across a flat plain and crossing a river, at which point he sees a "lake of fire" and encounters a demon spirit who answers his questions about what he is seeing.

The demon spirit says he is the King of Hell, the Destroyer, and tells the monk to look into the lake of fire.  There he sees his Buddhist teacher who had died in a car accident and asks why he is there. since he was a good Buddhist teacher  The King of Hell says 

"Yes he was a good teacher but he did not believe in Jesus Christ;  that's why he is in Hell."

He then sees Gautama Buddha in the fire and is told that he too is there "because he did not believe in the eternal God."  Then he sees a famous revolutionary leader of Myanmar who is there "because he didn't believe in Jesus Christ"  and then the giant Goliath who was killed by the young David according to the biblical story, and the King of Hell explains that he is there "becuase he blasphemed the eternal God."   He has to explain who David and Goliath were to the monk who has never heard any of these things before.

He is told to go back where he came from because his name isn't written down for the Lake of Fire (not that it would be.  We are told in the Bible that our names are in the Book of Life or not, those slated for Hell aren't written anywhere)_  He is to become a Christian.   He comes to a fork in the road, he sees a couple of men walking on the broader road and follows them, seeks them killed.  He goes back to the fork and takes the narrower road instead which eventually turns to gold and he meets a man who eventually identifies himself as the one who has "the keys to heaven."  He tells the monk he can't go to heaven now but "if he follows Jesus Christ" he can go there at the end of his life.  "The man's name was Peter."

Hm, we seem to be in a Catholic Vision where Peter has the keys to heaven?

"Peter" directs him to see what is supposed to be the Creation of man.  He sees "the eternal God" who says to an angel, "Let us make man."    The angel objects, saying "they will do wrong" but man is created anyway, the man named Adam.  God "blows" at him to bring him to life.

Some bad theology in this vision, but of course the monk wouldn't know that since he knows nothing at all about Christianity or the Bible.  However, Christians listening to the story should know it's false, but I gather from the Comments below the video that they don't.

So the monk is told to go back to his life and tell everybody that they must "believe in Jesus Christ or they will go to Hell."  

OK.  So.  When one first hears a story like this from such a sincere-sounding person it is hard to find fault with it.  You can get persuaded thta for whatever reason God saves some people in such a direct way, by teaching them the gospel through a near-death experience of the afterlife.   Such stories have been coming out of Muslim parts of the world too.  There's something about testimony based on direct experience that is persuasive even when it is full of obvious deceptions when you take the time to think about it.

The main clue to this one as a deception is the repeated phrase about how one must "believe in Jesus Christ."  That is what passes for the gospel here, but the true gospel is never given.  "Believe in Jesus Christ" means what?  Beleive He exists or existed?  What does it mean?  There is nothing in this vision about Jesus' dying to pay for our sins, THAT being the gospel of salvation.  You can believe in his existence, you can like his teachings, you can "follow Him" even, but if you never receive the new birth on the basis of His death to pay for your sins you are not a Christian, and it is very possible that none of those who beleive this vision are saved.   

There are other deceptions in the vision though that one alone should be enough.  In the Bible account of the Creation God says "Let Us make man in our image."  He's not talking to an angel, He's talking to the other two Persons of the triune Godhead.   And God "breathed" into Adam, didn't "blow" at him.  

The demons are apparently capable of creating such scenarios to deceive people and they seem to be working overtime on this particular kind of deception as the last days close in on us..  

The deception that interests me the most in this case  is the portrayal of "Peter" as the holder of the keys of heaven.  Why is this vision teaching a Roman Catholic misinterpretation?

Well, here's my thought on it:  I have been arguing here that the final Antichrist is most likely going to be the Pope, and if the Rapture occurs within the next few years that would be Pope Francis.  The Harlot Church of the Book of Revelation clearly represents the Roman Church and although there may be a part played by Islam in the final scenario the Revived Roman Empire prophesied as the setting for the playing out of the Great Tribulation looks to me like it's essentially the recovery of the Holy Roman Empire that ruled over Europe in the Middle Ages.  It never really died if you think of it as the outworking of the Roman Church which has never gone away although it lost its civil power at the Reformation..  The Vatican is a nation state unto itself so all the pieces are in place for whatever event allows them all to come together in the revived Empire.  As I've seen it, with the true Christians taken out of the way at the Rapture, the Pope, who has international standing anyway, will emerge through a covenant with Israel as the man who can bring peace to a chaotic world, the Antichrist who will rule the entire world, not just Europe.  The Roman Church will recover both the religious and the civil power it lost at the Reformation, but much more power this time around./  

SO, I'm thinking this vision experienced by the Buddhist monk is one of the ways Satan is preparing for this scenario to unfold by creating a population of deceived "believers in Christ" who contribute to the expansion of the worldwide influence of the Roman Church, that institution being the core element in the false religion of the Tribulation period.   Somehow Islam will have to come on board, probably through their reverence for Jesus as a Prophet.  Not sure how that's going to play out, but somehow in the end there's going to be this pastiche of religions coming together as One Religion, presided over by the Harlot Church of Rome.  the Popes have been working hard to bring all religions under their wing for decades now.    The final world religion has to be at least a hodgepodge that can be taken for "Christianity" by the vast majority of people who have no way of judging it.,  

Remember, this whole scenario is Satan's doing, his masterpiece you might say.  He invented the Roman Church and the papacy, he also invented Islam, both creations of his evil genius.  The whole drama of Planet Earth is a playing out of the war of Satan against God, and the final act will be Satan's Day when he gets to rule the world through his Antichrist, putting himself in God's place, and gets to do his worst to destroy humanity which he hates.  He was defeated at the Cross, he knows his time is short, but he's pulling out all the stops for the Grand Finale.

There will be dissenters.  There will be those who will refuse the Mark of the Beast.  Many of them will die as martyrs.  Others may go on living into the Millennial Kingdom.   A vast number of people will be saved through the most miserable time anyone has ever seen on Earth.

But I'm picturing the main engine of the False Religion to be the Roman Church and its revived Inquisition.

Come soon, Lord Jesus.  

Amen.

Good and Bad "Mysticisms"

So I heard some more of MacArthur on the subject of mysticism and it just gets more frustrating.  ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0fETODHsoM&t=71s)   He's preaching on Colossians 2:18 which he calls a warning against "mysticism."   He likes the NASB and my favorite is the KJB, and since the KJB can be hard to read I'm also including the NKJB (New King James) as possibly clearer, so here are three different translations of that passage: 

New American Standard 

 Let no one keep defrauding you of your prize by delighting in self-abasement and the worship of the angels, taking his stand on visions he has seen, inflated without cause by his fleshly mind,

New King James Version

Let no one cheat you of your reward, taking delight in false humility and worship of angels, intruding into those things which he has not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind,

King James Bible
Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind,

There is nothing in the scripture itself which labels this kind of behavior as "mysticism" so this is MacArthur's own idea of what mysticism is.  It makes me wish I had another term for what I've been talking about here but the problem is there isn't one.  Better the phenomena described above were called "occultism" or  "Gnosticism."   As MacArthur continues his talk he uses terminology associated with Gnosticism, and there are other places in the New Testament where Gnositicm is specifically warned against.  When I first startied reading the writers identified as the Mystics, during the early years of reading back in the late 80s, those years that led to my becoming a Christian,  that's what they were called and changing their name isn't going to happen.  But they are not anything like what that scripture passage is describing and what MacArthur thinks is mysticism.   It is also not  Gnosticism.  One of my atheist friends during those years didn't like the "fundamentalist" direction my thinking was taking and gave me a book about the Gnostics, which for some reason have a higher standing among intellectual types than Christianity does.  I could only read a few pages of it.  It so blasphemed God it frightened me and I couldn't go on readingf.  I like to think that's because I really was already one of the Lord's sheep who hear His voice and won't follow any other.

Even in my own reading, however, I did come across people who were called Mystics that not only did not attract me, they seemed to be pursuing a spirit completely different from the love of God I'd been finding in the ones that did attract me.  Jacob Boehme was positively scary and offputting, so was Mechtilde of Magdeburg.  So it has to be acknowledged that there are different mysticisms and some are not good, some are probably witchcraft rather than anything truly Christian.   Perhaps Edgar Cayce could be put in the bad cateogry.  He had some kind of supernatural or spiritual experiences and was considered to be a healer and thought of himself as a Christian, but there's really nothing in his writings about God or Jesus except as perhaps instruments of the paranormal phenomena he experienced.

I hope I don't have to get more deeply into all of this.  I'm no expert, I've merely read enough to have a general idea of the spiritual territory that's involved in these questions, and I've already done some posts on it in the past.  In the upper right margin I have listed Andrew Strom's film on how Kundalini Yoga has found a welcome in some churches and needs to be recognized as demonic and repudiated.  Hinduism loves to make claims about Jesus Christ and to confuse Biblical teachings with their demonic practices and Christians should not be falling for this.   Practices of the eastern religions have found a place in the churches because Christians are naive.   Yoga is not necessarily harmless for instance.   God says in Hosea 4:6: 

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge   

They have rejected the knowledge of the true God and therefore He will reject them.  They have forgotten His law and He will forget their children.    It is the "liberal" churches that invite the eastern religions in, and they are open to the charge of rejecting the true God and forgetting His law.  But unfortunately some of the eastern practices entice the merely naive who are not strongly grounded in their faith..  

Maybe I will have to say more about all that after all eventually  But this all came up because I wanted to renew my own spiritual life and immersing myself in devotional reading has often accomplished that for me.  Devotional reading such as Tozer's Pursuit of God and his book of Mystical Verse can certainly revive my spiritual life, but it also raises these questions about what mysticism is.  I usually answer that it is the intense longing after God that inspired Tozer and those writers he includes in his book of verse, that takes the longing soul deeper or higher into the Christian life than many others go or want to go.  

One of the most famous mystics is John of the Cross who wrote the poem "Dark Night of the Soul" and the book in which he elucidates the poem at great length, "The Ascent of Mount Carmel."  

Here are the first few stanzas of the poem.  It is considered to be a mystical poem.  

On a dark night,
Kindled in love with yearnings–oh, happy chance!–
I went forth without being observed,
My house being now at rest.

In darkness and secure,
By the secret ladder, disguised–oh, happy chance!–
In darkness and in concealment,
My house being now at rest.

In the happy night,
In secret, when none saw me,
Nor I beheld aught,
Without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart

 If you read the book about it you'll certainly understand that there are some methodological issues involved, as he discusses how prayer is practiced in a way that subdues the flesh and releases the spirit.  It's been a long time since I read the book and I'm sure I don't know exactly what he means by many of these figures, but at least the "dark night" refers to the subduing of the flesh, perhaps the overactive wandering mind, perhaps the senses,  as does his "house being now at rest,"   It is when the clamoring of the life of the flesh  is "dark" and "at rest" that the spirit is most alive to the things of God.  

That is what this poem is about, the soul's drawing near to God in prayer, or the"ascent" to the presence of God in the quietness of the flesh and the world.   "Be still and know that I am God" may be the apt scripture reference.  In a sense it is a treatise in itself of the practices that lead to the experience of God;s love and our love to Him.  "Kindled in love with yearnings" sets the emotional tone, which is probably the engine that drives the whole undertaking.  Much  of the poem probably refers to the moritification of sin and the growth of virtues such as humility, but I'd have to reread the book to know how he talks about those things.  The emphasis on being unobserved, concealed etc., suggests we're not talking about a state of false humility, and there is no hint of anything like the worship of angels here.  This is not what Paul is warning against in Colossians 2:18.

The poem is about how by subduing the flesh and the world the soul is enabed through prayer to have a deep loving experience of God.  THIS is what I've understood to be Mysticism.  

A pursuit of God in prayer that starts out in the right direction can take a person deep enough to start having "supernatural" experiences of various sorts.   Or as the mystics may think of it, these may be rewards from God, or "consolations" from God.  Tozer isn't writing about that aspect of things but to read any of the mystics themselves will make that clear.  Yes there is a deeper or higher Christian life but it isn't something different from Christian life in general, it's the result of a more intense pursuit of the biblical revelations of God.  

HOWEVER,

In that pursuit it is possible to get off into the "spirit realms" if you don't know what you are doing or you let yourself be attracted too much to whatever supernatural experiences you might have.  The Christian mystics themselves are always warning against taking such phenomena too seriously because you often can't tell where it is coming from.  You may assume it is from God when it is in reality a demonic counterfeit.  So they recommend simply leaving them alone, not dwelling on them, not trying to hold on to them.. 

As I hear more of MacArthur's sermon I have to say that he's right about what he's right about.  There is a lot of what he is calling mysticism in the churches these days and it is dangerous.  I'm in this uncomfortable position of trying to defend what I think of as a genuine Bible-based experience that comes to some people as a result of a true passionate love of the true God and Jesus Christ and not an ego trip and not a pursuit of experience for experience's sake or for thrills,   As I said I wish I could just use a different term for it but Tozer called it mysticism and it has a long history of going by that name so that's not going to work.  Guess I'm going to have to continue this is in the next post.

Trump is the real Democratic Party we used to know; Hillsdale College could teach us true American History; and HCQ should be saving lives

 I only got to hear a few snippets of Rush Limbaugh's show this morning but it was enough to produce three gold nuggets to mention here.    Nuggets of perspective that could get America back on track if enough people lerned from them.

Realized that two of them came from callers to the show.  Of course Rush himself is full of good stuff but oh well in this case it happened to be incidental things.

And the third was just an ad for Hillsdale College which is offering free online video courses on American history.  I think if enough Americans imersed ourselves in those it could go a long way to bringing us back to the America we were meant to be.

that's one nugget.  The second was the caller who said she'd been a Democrawt until she realized that the old Democratic Party is no longer what it was but that Trump is really that old Democratic Party.  She's right.  Trump is the real Democratic Party.  Now if only so many misguided Democrats recognized that fact.

And nugget three was the caller who was lamenting the bad press heaped on the drug Hydroxychloroquine since if used in the right dose at the onset of COVIC it is as good as a cure for it.  The bad press has come from a  few really stupid studies of the drug's MISUSE, in the wrong dose at the wrong time with patients already dying of conditions other than COVID.  But if it's used at the right time, in the right dose with Zithromax and Zinc it even saves the lives of people with these co-morbid conditions.   I've posted information on this earlier.

So people are dying who don't have to die because this drug has been buried under propaganda through studies that may have been politically motivated in the first place, since they were so bad they shouldn't even have been published.   

More of the story:  Democrats realize where your Party really is these days and leave thtqa anti-American Marxist-Communist monstrosity the other one has become;  Democrts, Republicans and everybody else:  sign up for the Hillsdale course which you can take at your convenience; and everybody make sure you have a source of HCQ with Zithromax and Zinc lined up in case you get COVID.