Moriah_Conquering_Wind
Well-Known Member
If we do not dynamically engage with others, dancing the dance of needing and being needed, we do not see anyone as he truly bes, and we end up sinning against them most gravely indeed. We can start overguarding ourselves so fearful of opening the door to harm that we turn our backs on valuable feedback that matters. When we start counting an authentic expression of appreciation as seductive "flattery" -- or an authentic response of distress or dismay as some kind of sinister plot to manipulate -- we have cut ourselves off from not just the humanity of the other person but from our own. The pride of self-sufficiency frequently masquerades as spiritual confidence ... and the one caught in it will always be the last to know.If we aren't moved by what we need from that person we can see them as they are without sinning against them.
If we refuse to engage dynamically and authentically with others so as to permit them to touch and affect us, we have no hope for touching and affecting them -- not for ourselves in genuine relationship, and not for God in genuine or useful ministry. God made the human species to be interdependent and characterized it in its REDEEMED form (His own) as a BODY of many parts, all needing one another, for a reason.We can know that that person will strike or treat us badly and not allow any of it to get to us and we will never 'extend' our soul to anyone for approval or acceptance but God.
The Holy Spirit living and moving through us does not divorce or distance or detach us from either our own humanity or that of others. Rather the Holy Spirit grounds us, fills us, deepens us into what it means to be fully human as God intended human to be, with all its passion, concern, meaning, energy, sincerity, earnestness, authenticity. God did not make us to be angels or aliens, not disembodied spirits with neither infirmity nor struggle nor sweat nor emotion, but men and women, human beings, as fully corporeal and messy as intelligent, self-aware, visionary and ennobled.Once you only 'care' what God thinks. People will just be people and you will live and move from the Holy Spirit in you.
This in fact illustrates the fullest meaning of the INCARNATION of Christ -- God BECOMING Man, living as a Man, walking among men and women, touching, healing, comforting, encouraging, teaching, enlightening, awakening, FEELING with us, alongside us, hungering as we do, tiring as we do, thirsting as we do, needing human companionship and support as we do... Remember His plaintive pleas in Gethsemane for His closest friends to watch and pray WITH Him as He sorrowed? He NEEDED people in that fateful hour where the clarity of the Father's face first began to be withdrawn and sent Him into confusion and self-doubt. When He returned from the grave to life, He did not return as a ghost or disembodied "above it all" spirit -- but retained the human form in all its dusty, gritty, messy physicality and corporeality, now imbued with Life Eternal. And His plan does not point to some cloudsitting, harp-strumming, airsniffing upturned nose "above it all" existence for us when life here bes through, but to a new heavens and a new earth where His redeemed will dwell forever in corporeal forms made to last for eternity as they first came forth from His hand, fresh in Eden. This should say something about the value with which God invests His "messy" physical, corporeal, needy, longing, hungry, writhing material Creation. And while Moriah bes not typically the one to anthropocentrize either spirituality or salvation, it does seem that this reality should mean something special to human beings and suggest to them not to despise the image of God in which He has seen fit to create them.
To detach some mythic hyperspiritual "above it all" ism from the gritty realities of messy feelings and needs and longings of the human heart constitutes the original sin and fallacy of the classical Hellenic gnostic sects with their separation between the "spiritual" as pure and good and the "material" as corrupt and fallen and evil. The book of Genesis teaches a much different reality though: God CREATED all that messy material-ness in the soil and trees and fish and rocks and plants and birds and reptiles and mammals and humans, CREATED it to be that way, all physical and messy and full of needs and feelings and longings that way, and pronounced it GOOD. How DARE anyone, ANYONE, in the name of religion, suggest we exceed the original good plan of the Creator from the foundation of the world, to which the very route of salvation and reclamation He devised bes made to return us.
To live encased in spiritual latex suits, never actually touching nor being touched by others for fear of contamination, only reinforces the lies the abusive spirits loose in the world try to program into us: that nobody else has any real feelings, that others' feelings don't matter, that we and our feelings can never really matter to others, that nothing we do or say can ever really touch anyone else or affect them, etc. May God have mercy on those suffocating under these lies and deliver us all from those who contribute toward spreading them, deliberately or unknowingly.
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