Allegiance, Truth and Power: Three crucial dimensions for Christian living

 

Unlike Jesus, though, we in our Bible schools, colleges, seminaries and churches tend to focus strongly on knowledge about some aspect of Christian life rather than on actually experiencing that aspect. We hope, often vainly, that people who hear about repentance and converting to Christ will come to repent and convert. We hope that people who hear about faithfulness or intimacy or love or reconciliation or grace or any of the other relational aspects of Christian life will, through hearing about them, grow in their experience of them. We also hope that those who hear about the freedom we can receive and impart to others through the use of the authority and power Jesus has given us will go ahead and use that authority and power. Unfortunately, there is often little or no transfer from knowledge about to experience of in many of these areas because we don’t have the holistic balance Jesus had.

Nevertheless, we continue to fill people’s minds with information, knowledge and truth to the point of intellectual indigestion because our training techniques seldom include actually doing what we are talking about. With one notable exception. In Christian training institutions focused on producing pastors, there are usually courses designed to train people to preach in which the students actually have to produce and deliver sermons. Well and good. They actually learn how to do something by doing it. Yet what they learn is seldom more than how to present information about Christian topics. If they are to learn anything about how to interact with people relationally to bring about healthy relationships with God and humans, they have to learn these things elsewhere. And if they are to learn how to operate in God’s power to bring the freedom their people crave, they have to learn this outside of the curricula of the schools supposedly established to train them to do pastoral work.

Ideally, then, we should be teaching truth as Jesus did to combat ignorance and error. We should know, however, that whenever the Scripture speaks of knowledge and truth, it is referring to experiential knowledge and truth, not merely the intellectual byproducts of these factors. And we should be led in teaching truth by the Holy Spirit who, incidentally is also the Producer of the relational fruits of the Spirit and the Giver of the power-oriented gifts of the Spirit. That is, He is in charge of all three of these crucial dimensions.

The Truth Dimension

Primary concern: Understanding

This dimension involves teaching led by the Holy Spirit (Jn 16:13)

Scripturally both truth and knowledge are experiential, not simply cognitive

Truth provides antidotes for ignorance and error

Though spiritual truth is pervasively relational and experiential (Jn 8:32), there is also a cognitive and informational dimension

This dimension embodies truth and knowledge of all aspects of Christian experience

We are to learn in this dimension about the contents of the other two dimensions

We are expected to grow in this knowledge dimension as in all other dimensions of Christian experience

Satanic and human lies are to be countered with God’s truths

Under this dimension, the church is to be experienced as a teaching place (discipleship, mentoring, classroom)

Theology is both cognitive and experiential

Power Leading to Freedom

Jesus said He came to set captives free (Lk 4:18). In making such a statement, He implied both that there is one who has captured many people and that people need the freedom God offers. People need freedom so badly that He, Jesus, came to earth to offer this freedom. He then demonstrated throughout His ministry what He meant by this statement.

We read in Philippians 2:5-8 that Jesus laid aside His divinity and worked totally as a human being in the power of the Holy Spirit while He was on earth. He did nothing to indicate to the world, including the people of His hometown, Nazareth, that He was, in fact, God incarnate until after His baptism. Then, functioning wholly as a human being under the leading of the Father (Jn 5:19) and the power of the Holy Spirit (Lk 4:14), He began to set people free from captivity to the enemy as evidenced by sickness, lameness, blindness, demonization and the like. Jesus worked in the authority and power given Him by the Father, never once using His own divinity while on earth.

 

Tags: allegiance, christian, crucial, dimensions, living, power, truth

Category: Fall 2010, Living the Faith