There’s something in natural affection which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there’s also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly. Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is. And if it finally refuses conversion its corruption will be worse than the corruption of what ye call the lower passions. It is a stronger angel, and therefore, when it falls, a fiercer devil. C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce
Trending: trading the transcendent for the trivial.
This is the essence of idolatry – to embrace a deflated form of or wholesale alternative to divine love in a futile attempt to satisfy the inner longings of the soul.
And when the idol doesn’t deliver, our thirst drives us to double down. We either increase our obeisance or turn to another and settle for whatever fleeting hint of satisfaction we can find before we are back where we started.
Parched. Desperate. Bereft.
So pervasive is this paradigm that it permeates our entire purpose and everyday practice.
We trade transcendent truth for trivial trinkets. We exchange the presence of the God for the study of God, leaving the landscape of our souls littered with crumbling idols of dogma. And eventually, when all conceivable idols fashioned in the image of God fail to satisfy, we abandon all hope in God altogether and wander even further into the desert.
And in that desert, as we encounter other divine beings created in the image of God like ourselves – we create idols of them as well.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in our pursuit of a husband or wife to share a lifetime of love.
Rather than embrace the presence of the divine one created in God’s image, we spend years developing an idol that potential candidates must conform to. And when they don’t – we send them away, whether literally or metaphorically. We cancel them. We disassemble the relationship with them in favor of maintaining the relationship we have with the idol.
Today, we will seek to escape this paradigm, casting aside our idols so that we may instead embrace the divine God of the Universe himself, along with the one he brings to us in the relationship of marriage.
Source Scripture
Matthew 5:27-32; Mark 9:43-48; Luke 16:18
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
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Read Malachi 2:10-16. How does this Old Testament passage, written 400 years earlier than the Sermon on the Mount, compare to Jesus’ words?
Read Mark 10:1-12. What was the motive for the Pharisees asking Jesus this question? What motive did the disciples have for following up Jesus’ response with their own questions privately?
If you have suffered loss due to divorce, there is hope. Read Psalm 147:3. What is God’s attitude toward you? What does he intend to do for you?
I realised that my anger created restlessness, brooding, inner disputes, and made prayer nearly impossible. But the most disturbing anger was the anger at myself for not responding properly, for not knowing how to express my disagreement, for external obedience while remaining rebellious from within, and for letting small and seemingly insignificant events have so much power over my emotional life. In summary: passive aggressive behaviour. – Henri Nouwen
Anger is like fire. Under control, it can bring much-needed warmth to a cold environment or form a backfire to stop the spread of a raging wildfire. But out of control, the smallest of sparks can ignite an inferno that races to consume and destroy.
Controlling anger is not, as we might often assume, merely the exercise of withholding caustic words or violent deeds. Containing the anger within the confines of the body does not bring it under control – it suppresses. Compresses. Distresses.
Left in this state, we smolder. And the resulting pressure requires release. It will either build a backdraft that explodes when someone or something opens the door, or it will seep out at regular intervals in a period – or even a lifetime – of passive aggression.
Some of us, without even knowing, live in a perpetual state of anger – like the coal fire in Centralia, Pennsylvania, that has been burning underground since 1962. And in this state, everyone – and everything – agitates us. Or, more destructively, we find ourselves wondering we explode at the slightest provocation.
Today, we will take a fresh look at unsettled anger – how to determine if we need to extinguish it, or build a good fire that helps others. And, in most cases, we learn how to avoid creating the drought conditions in the soul that allow it to burn uncontrollably in the first place.
Source Scripture
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
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Read 1 John 1. How does this passage relate to today’s podcast and help you examine your inward life as it pertains to anger? Where do you see the ministry of reconciliation to God and others? How does hypocrisy sneak into our lives to prevent us from seeing how our refusal to reconcile warps our view of the divine?
Books to Read
Unoffendable by Brant Hansen
To have faith in Christ means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you. C.S. Lewis
Is it a sin to….. fill in the blank. Yes, or no!!
The formulation of such questions and the hands-on-hips scrutiny that awaits their answers disclose an underlying, dualistic paradigm that we might call religious meritocracy.
Do the right thing – earn your way to heaven. If, then. Yes, no.
Religious meritocracy produces, as its logical conclusion, rigid boundaries with which to declare judgement, excluding those on the outside and self-righteously promoting those on the inside to elevated status. Everything becomes about the boundaries, where all troops are amassed. And yet, in so doing, the interior state becomes entirely devoid of the life with which the boundaries were intended to cradle.
It’s easy to fall prey to this paradigm if you take only a cursory glance at sacred Scripture, particularly the Old Testament. The law given to Moses and the message preached by prophets often center on those deeds that, if committed, warrant punishment. Do not murder. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal. Or else.
And yet, as we will see in today’s episode, the sacred rarely emerges from cursory glances, just as the breathtaking experiences of vacation in a beautiful country does not come by walking its borders heal-to-toe all the way around and then returning home.
Today, we cross the threshold of the borders outlined by the letter of the law and go deep into the interior – to the breathtaking Spirit of the Law – that brings life and love to otherwise dead religion.
Source Scripture
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
(Apple I Spotify)
Read Romans 8-13. Compare Paul’s explanation of what it means to live by the Spirit and his religious establishment’s failed attempts to find the kingdom of heaven because of their focus on the letter of the law.
Read Luke 24:13-35. Note the reaction of the two men walking back to Emmaus on the Sunday following the crucifixion when a stranger explains everything from the law and the prophets.
Related Quotes
A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.– G.K. Chesterton
The left hemisphere [of the brain] prefers the impersonal to the personal, and that tendency would in any case be instantiated in the fabric of a technologically driven and bureaucratically administered society. The impersonal would come to replace the personal. There would be a focus on material things at the expense of the living. Social cohesion, and the bonds between person and person, and just as importantly between person and place, the context in which each person belongs, would be neglected, perhaps actively disrupted, as both inconvenient and incomprehensible to the left hemisphere acting on its own. There would be a depersonalisation of the relationships between members of society, and in society’s relationship with its members. Exploitation rather than co-operation would be, explicitly or not, the default relationship between human individuals, and between humanity and the rest of the world. Resentment would lead to an emphasis on uniformity and equality, not as just one desirable to be balanced with others, but as the ultimate desirable, transcending all others. As a result individualities would be ironed out and identification would be by categories: socioeconomic groups, races, sexes, and so on, which would also feel themselves to be implicitly or explicitly in competition with, resentful of, one another. Paranoia and lack of trust would come to be the pervading stance within society both between individuals, and between such groups, and would be the stance of government towards its people. Ian McGilchrist
It is in our nature to be connected with each other. Interwoven. Interdependent. Interlocked in love and community.
And yet this is not our reality. Instead, we are alienated. Separated. Resentful. Mistrustful. In fear and paranoia, we depersonalize. Criticize. Exploit. Avoid.
In this increasingly diseased state, lacking the restorative powers of wholesome social community, the suffering caused by our isolation intensifies – due to our isolation.
It’s time to reverse the trend. To heal the wounds. To cure the disease.
Today, in our look back at the previous six episodes, we will surface their underlying theme of creating community and reversing the curse of isolation and the catastrophic toll it has taken from on of us.
Source Scripture
Matthew 5:10-12; Luke 6:22-23,26
Matthew 5:13; Mark 9:49-50; Luke 14:34-35
Matthew 5:14-16; Mark 4:21; Luke 8:16; 11:33
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
Many of the neuroses that plague the lives of modern humans, from anxiety to depression, are often fed, if not caused, by a confined, claustrophobic, and ultimately unsubstantiated interpretation of consensus reality: that is, by a deprived myth derived from grammatical rules. The depressed person sees no meaning in life largely because the small box of her linguistic thinking limits her view of what life is. Bernardo Kastrup
Words. Logic. Reason. Argument. Language is the bedrock on which most of us form and defend our framework of belief – the over-arching narrative that governs how we make sense of the world around us.
If something cannot be expressed in words, we think, then it cannot be true. How could it be?
And yet, are not the greatest experiences of our lives those in which we find ourselves… Speechless? When someone we know faces profound grief and loss, do we attempt to console them with logic? Would you prefer a detailed map and well-worded paragraph describing the islands of Hawaii over a personal visit?
Logic, reason, and the scientific method can go only so far in their attempts to penetrate the depths of the human soul. To limit ourselves to only what they offer is to live in the shadows of the fullness of reality. In a growing darkness. Where we crawl about, wondering why we cannot seem to see and experience the true depths of who we are and who we are meant to be.
What, then, can penetrate this darkness if not reason?
The divine light of truth, demonstrated in the raw, authentic, spiritual form of a narrative.
Words. Logic. Reason. Argument. Language is the bedrock on which most of us form and defend our framework of belief – the over-arching narrative that governs how we make sense of the world around us.
If something cannot be expressed in words, we think, then it cannot be true. How could it be?
And yet, are not the greatest experiences of our lives those in which we find ourselves… Speechless? When someone we know faces profound grief and loss, do we attempt to console them with logic? Would you prefer a detailed map and well-worded paragraph describing the islands of Hawaii over a personal visit?
Logic, reason, and the scientific method can go only so far in their attempts to penetrate the depths of the human soul. To limit ourselves to only what they offer is to live in the shadows of the fullness of reality. In a growing darkness. Where we crawl about, wondering why we cannot seem to see and experience the true depths of who we are and who we are meant to be.
What, then, can penetrate this darkness if not reason?
The divine light of truth, demonstrated in the raw, authentic, spiritual form of a narrative.
Source Scripture
Matthew 5:14-16; Mark 4:21; Luke 8:16; 11:33
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
It is like the famous Irishman who found that a certain kind of stove reduced his fuel bill by half and thence concluded that two stoves of the same kind would enable him to warm his house with no fuel at all. It is the magician’s bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, our selves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. – C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
Essence. This word connotes the wellspring of being – our nature. Often in an attempt to describe such a concept we turn to words like…
Father. The essence of a father is that he has children that he loves, provides for, protects, guides. If we see someone who claims to be a father violating that essence through abuse or abandonment, we feel natural tension. That tension is the distance between what we believe to be the essence of fatherhood and the broken example now before us.
Husband, mother, policeman, priest – all of these possess an inherent essence that, when lost, fill us with disappointment. But when fulfilled, as in an example where a father gives his life to save one of his children, we feel an overwhelming sense of awe.
The alignment between essence and reality matters.
Whether we realize it or not, our essence is divine. Our wellspring is the heart. The soul. And when we choose to live in alignment with our essence, awe permeates our reality. But when we pollute or dilute our essence to pursue the non-essential, we break faith with the divine and life loses its meaning – for us and for those who know us.
So what word best describes our divine nature? Salt.
We are the salt of the earth…
This is the truth for you, men of Athens; I am hiding nothing from you either great or small in my speech, nor am I holding anything back. And yet I know rather well that I incur hatred by these very things; which is also a proof that I speak the truth. Socrates
The truth hurts, and its wounded often lash out.
When the divine light of truth confronts, all masks and costumes fashioned to conceal it fall away. And in that moment, confronted with the reality of our naked being, we face tough choices: run, fight, or embrace.
Those who run search for a place where they may reacquire the familiar cloaking devices. Those who fight rush the source of the light of truth and attack, hoping that darkness may once again fall. And those who embrace the truth are transformed and experience the divine.
Truth ignites hatred in those entrenched in ego-centered living, because it calls their entire being into question. Truth is a threat to the ego’s way of life, and so the mightiest personal military forces available must be sent out to “protect.”
A life founded on the ego’s principles resorts to hatred instead of love, lies instead of truth, and insults instead of encouragement.
Today we will face the reality that those of us who speak truth, live rightly, and align ourselves with the divine will inevitably be the victims of enraged, wounded egos. And in that reality can find happiness, because it is an indicator that we are living in the kingdom of heaven.
Conversely, though, if we find ourselves unnoticed. Unchallenged. Unopposed. Unaffected by the egos of the world, then it is a haunting sign that our truth is hidden or corrupt. Our living is weak or off base. And our Jesus is an idol constructed in our own image and not the living, breathing God of the Universe.
So let’s see where we stand.
Source Scripture
Matthew 5:10-12; Luke 6:22-23,26
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
Thinking is shown as a barrier to shalom, yet contemplation is the broker of Presence. Steve Wickham
Thinking here means engaging the mode of consciousness that divides everything into categories, classifying, comparing, and cataloguing everything and everyone in order to determine their place in orbit around the ego. In the last episode of Awestruck, we called this objective consciousness and discovered that it was the primary shroud preventing us from seeing the divine.
This mindscape, we’ll call it, has one primary orientation: preference. Things and people become good or bad, accepted or expelled, embraced or eschewed. In such a state, peace is impossible to attain, because something unwanted inevitably invades, producing anxiety, frustration, impatience, and in general a constant state of annoyance. This internal cauldron boils over into fruitless strategies to achieve ego-centric stability.
Contrast this approach to acquiring peace with that of contemplation, a mode of consciousness that shifts the focus from rational analysis to the transcendence of wonder. In this state, the gravity pull of the ego gives way to the levitation that exists only in the spirit.
Here we find shalom, where gratitude eclipses greed. Anxiety dissolves in divine trust. Annoyance gives way to joy.
And shalom is not just something we seek for ourselves. Anyone experiencing peace inherently longs to see it spread to others – and works towards that end.
Achieving shalom is an act of creation, and the creative forces that give birth to it are inherited from the divine creator. Today we look at how to create peace – in ourselves, in others, and in our world.
Source Scripture
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blest: it blesseth him that gives and him that takes. William Shakespeare
Atop the human body is the head. Here we inhale and exhale, consume food, see, hear, smell, and taste the world around us, and experience consciousness as provided by the brain. For whatever reason, all of this takes place at the highest point in the body.
Atop the pyramids is what is known as the pyramidion – the capstone. Typically it is a different color and stone than the rest of the pyramid and often contains the name of the owner of the pyramid etched into it. Many pyramidion of the ancient pyramids are now missing, lost to treasure hunters who valued their uniqueness.
Atop the Washington Monument is a small pyramid itself, with a capstone comprised of 100oz of aluminum and with the words laus Deo – or Praise be to God – etched therein.
Atop the Christmas tree every year are various objects of central importance to families – an angel or a star or some sort of prominent decoration that crowns the tree in symbolic fashion.
The highest point of a human or object or story is often set apart from the rest. It is the location that represents the climax of everything that led up to it or that comes afterward.
Today, we will examine the top, the crown, the climax of the nine beatitudes that Jesus shares with us at the beginning of his Sermon on the Mount. It is the fifth beatitude, and the apex of the chiasm formed by all nine of the statements Jesus made beginning with “blessed.”
And it deserves special treatment – because it is the climax of message of God to us, not just in the beatitudes, but in all of Scripture.
That beatitude is…the subject of today’s podcast.
Source Scripture
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras