This Happy Gift of Tongues by James C Davidson

Author:James C Davidson
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2012-08-10T23:00:00+00:00

Text references:

1) Genesis 29 verses 31-35

2) Romans 8 verse 28

3) Psalm 103 verse 17

4) 1 Corinthians 7 verse 14

5) Ephesians 5 verse 20

6) 1 Thessalonians 5 verse 18

Chapter 10 - Down-to-earth Mystics

In the Saturday Sermon of a local newspaper, a minister wrote that while mystics might have direct access to God, most of us are not mystics, and that direct access to God is not the way for us.

I don't know whom his 'most of us' referred to, but it can hardly have been Christians. For we Christians do have direct access to God - and Jesus made it possible.

The Bible is a record of people who had a relationship with God. And not only the 'spiritual giants' - the household names - but the 'all flesh' - the sons and daughters, young men, old, men servants and handmaids of Joel chapter 2 and Acts chapter 2. In the Bible, ordinary everyday people had direct access to God.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines a mystic as:

'One who seeks by contemplation and self-surrender to obtain union with or absorption into the Deity, or who believes in spiritual apprehension of truths beyond the understanding.'

Was Paul praying for the handful of mystics, the few outstanding Christians, when he prayed:

'- that you - may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge - that you may be filled to the measure of all the fulness of God.'(1)

Or was he praying for all Christians? The first verse of Ephesians, the one which contains the address, clearly says:

'To the saints in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus:'

If you love the Lord, if you are a Christian, you come into that second category - 'the faithful in Christ Jesus'. So let us look at what Paul prayed for us. We'll examine some of the words in the prayer.

'grasp' - it really means 'to lay hold of so as to make one's own'. (2) That is no 'airy fairy' experience, but a real-life encounter with the love of Christ.

'-and to know-' The Christian is to know the love of Christ. But not as a theory picked up second-hand from some other more spiritual Christian, but by personal experience.

I was told of a man who went for an interview for a position with a Christian association, and after saying all the correct things to the selection committee and apparently making the right responses, was surprised to be turned down. The Chairman went on to tell him: 'Mr X, you certainly know all that you need to know, but you seem to have learned it all from other people.'

There are four root-words translated 'know' in the New Testament, and the word used in this passage means - 'a knowledge grounded in personal experience.'(2)

The Christian is to have a personal experience of God, one which is real, not theoretical. It is an experience by faith, an experience of stepping out in the dark and finding the rock beneath his feet.

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