A Reasonable Mystic

The Universal Call to Prayer

What a dreadful delusion hath prevailed over the greater part of mankind, in supposing that they are not called to a state of prayer! whereas all are capable of prayer, and are called thereto, as all are called to and are capable of salvation.

Prayer is the application of the heart to God, and the internal exercise of love. S. Paul hath enjoined us to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. v 17), and our Lord saith, “I say unto you all, watch and pray” (Mark xiii. 33, 37): all therefore may, and all ought to practice prayer. I grant that meditation is attainable but by few, for few are capable of it; and therefore, my beloved brethren who are athirst for salvation, meditative prayer is not the prayer which God requires of you, nor which we would recommend.

Let all pray: we should live by prayer, as we should live by love. “I counsel you to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that ye may be rich” (Rev. iii. 8), this is much more easily obtained than we can conceive. “Come, all ye that are athirst, to these living waters”; nor lose your precious moments in “hewing out cisterns, broken cisterns that will hold no water” (John vii. 37; Jer ii. 13). Come, ye famished souls, who find naught whereon to feed; come, and ye shall be fully satisfied!

Come, ye poor afflicted ones, who groan beneath your load of wretchedness and pain, and ye shall find ease and comfort! Come, ye sick, to your Physician, and be not fearful of approaching Him because ye are filled with diseases; expose them to His view and they shall be healed!

Children, draw near to your Father, and He will embrace you in the arms of love! Come, ye poor, stray, wandering sheep, return to your Shepherd! Come, sinners, to your Saviour! Come, ye dull, ignorant, and illiterate, ye who think yourselves the most incapable of prayer! ye are more peculiarly called and adapted thereto. Let all without exception come, for Jesus Christ hath called all.

Yet let not those come who are without a heart; they are not asked; for there must be a heart, that there may be love. But who is without a heart? O come, then, give this heart to God; and here learn how to make the donation.

All who are desirous of prayer may easily pray, enabled by those ordinary graces and gifts of the Holy Spirit which are common to all men.

Prayer is the guide to perfection and the sovereign good; it delivers us from every vice, and obtains us every virtue; for the one great means to become perfect, is to walk in the presence of God: He Himself hath said, “walk in my presence and be ye perfect” (Gen. xvii. 1). It is by prayer alone, that we are brought into this presence, and maintained in it without interruption.

You must then learn a species of prayer, which may be exercised at all times; which doth not obstruct outward employments; and which may be equally practiced by princes, kings, prelates, priests and magistrates, soldiers and children, tradesmen, labourers, women and sick persons: it cannot, therefore, be the prayer of the head, but of the heart; not a prayer of the understanding alone, which is so limited in its operations that it can have but one object at one time; but the prayer of the heart is not interrupted by the exercises of reason: indeed nothing can interrupt this prayer, but irregular and disordered affections: and when once we have tasted of God, and the sweetness of His love, we shall find it impossible to relish aught but Himself?

Nothing is so easily obtained as the possession and enjoyment of God, for “in him we live, move, and have our being;” and He is more desirous to give Himself into us, than we can be to receive Him.

All consists in the manner of seeking Him; and to seek aright, is easier and more natural to us than breathing. Though you think yourselves ever so stupid, dull, and incapable of sublime attainments, yet, by prayer, you may live in God Himself with less difficulty or interruption than you live in the vital air. Will it not then be highly sinful to neglect prayer? But this I trust you will not, when you have learnt the method, which is exceedingly easy.

Posts in this series:
Madame Guyon – A Spiritual Reading
Madame Guyon – A Short and Easy Method of Prayer – Preface
Madame Guyon – A Short and Easy Method of Prayer – Chapter 1
Madame Guyon – A Short and Easy Method of Prayer – Chapter 2
Madame Guyon – A Short and Easy Method of Prayer – Chapter 3

One of the most effective helps for the believer to move quickly and intimately into the presence of God is the Spiritual gift of speaking in tongues. It is a greatly neglected gift in the wider church, probably because a great deal of the available teaching is misleading, and sometimes deceptive, with a strong focus on the dangers, prompting believers to live in fear rather than faith, and very little teaching on the uses of this gift.

I was prompted by a comment by a friend to revisit my old article on speaking in tongues: Tongues – making it happen, on the Healing Prayer Ministries Network website. As a result I’ve writen the first of a series on this topic on my Speaking-in-Tongues blog. The first of these new articles is called Tongues five years on.

While I’ll be covering many different areas in these articles, such as their use in ministry, healing, and intercession, the primary purpose of all of these activities is not really service to God, but rather intimacy with Jesus. So the articles should be helpful for anyone wanting to move closer in their relationship with God.

We finished Part 1 by saying that the human mind already has a faculty that appears to fulfill all of the functions needed for spirit to spirit communication. It is called the imagination.

For some kinds of communication, e.g. thoughts, words and visions, the imagination is already able to place the information into the mind, with one of the only difficulties being for the mind to know where the thought, etc. came from. For things like physical or emotional feelings, the imagination needs to affect the body. However, such an ability is already well established, as evidenced by the abreaction of the body when a past trauma is remembered, or the rising up of fear, hatred or love when we learn of something happening to someone else, even in a fictional context such as a novel or a movie. We can even conjure up in our imagination details of something that never happened and feel what would be appropriate emotions or sensations as if it was a real event. Psychosomatic illness and many phobias are cases in point.

So, the human imagination provides all of the faculties that are needed for spirit to spirit communication, and I am convinced that this is an important function of the imagination, perhaps even its primary purpose. Yes, it is the faculty by which we create original ideas, but that is not surprising if creativity is actually a function of the human spirit, not the mind alone.

If humans are created in the image of God, who is infinitely creative (in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth with a word), and given that God, by definition, is a Spirit, then it surely follows that spirits create!

In one sense, spirit to spirit communication could be considered as a creative process, whereby one spiritual being creates a “message” directly in the imagination of another spiritual being.

Those of us who believe we have heard God’s voice, who have prophesied, seen a vision or “picture”, or received words of knowledge or wisdom, know that it just appears in the mind out of nowhere, and it takes experience to discern that we did not just imagine it or ‘make it up”.

So, when someone says, “You didn’t really hear God (or see an angel or demon, or have a vision), you just imagined it,” then they are partly right. You did imagine it, but that does not mean it didn’t really happen. It is extremely difficult for someone steeped in a tradition of intellectualism to grasp the possibility that the mind is not supreme.

If the role of imagination is as I have described above, then many otherwise esoteric subjects lose some of their mystique. In particular, consider prayer. True prayer is revealed to be an intimate, two-way communication between two persons, rather than the hit or miss, impersonal, ritualistic uttering of formulaic words so often practiced in and out of the church. Spiritual gifts such as prophecy, word of wisdom, word of knowledge, and interpretation of tongues become a natural outworking of the ability of the human spirit to listen to the Spirit of God. You can learn more about the practicalities of this at Listening2God.com where you will find a complete course on hearing God’s voice, prayer, intercession, spiritual gifts, and more.

Even some human to human interactions become easier to understand, such as the bond of love between husband and wife, and the knowledge we often have on first meeting someone that they are, or are not, a person with whom we wish to have a relationship.

Given all of the above, we can see how important it is to develop and nurture our imaginative and creative abilities. Is it any wonder that children, until they become burdened with the knowledge and responsibilities of adult life, are so much more spiritually in tune with God and creation. This is especially so if they have not yet been told that they should put aside their childish fantasies and “grow up”.

We will have more to say about all of this.

Those with an interest in exploring and understanding how the human brain operates, and the relationship between brain and mind, generally operate with an overriding assumption – that the human mind is alone, isolated from all other minds except for communication processes relying on the five physical senses – sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste, and the ability to speak, write, draw, gesticulate, etcetra.

Some enthusiasts also posit extra-sensory perceptions, human to human, human to animal, and sometimes human to other entities. Such investigations are not held in high regard by the general scientific and medical community, I believe largely because of their assumptions that other entities do not exist, and that all processes are determined entirely by operation of the physical brain.

Leaving out, for now, speculative ideas like ESP, five physical senses would be enough for simple communication and interaction. However, this neglects the possibility that a considerable amount of human interaction is of a much more direct, though largely unconscious nature. Such neglect is one result of another common assumption – that human beings do not have a spirit that is not merely a function of the mind or the brain.

Let us put all of that aside for now and examine a hypothetical scenario. Just suppose that:

1. humans have a spirit,
2. there exist other entities that have, or are, spirits, and
3. spirit can communicate directly to spirits.

The question I now want to ask is: what type of faculty within a human being would be needed for such spirit to spirit communication to take place?

Because a spirit does not have a physical form, the physical senses are not likely to be of much use. Rather, I suspect that some form of direct transfer of information would be more likely. In other words, what one entity “sends” to the other would simply “appear” within the receiving entity’s mind.

Note, I am not talking about what is usually called ESP. Most of the explanations that I have seen for ESP ability assume some form of brain to brain transfer, perhaps by means of electromagnetic waves. This is analogous to normal human thinking being enhanced by some form of radio system controlled by the mind, allowing the thoughts to be transmitted to another person. What I am considering here is a more basic ability, but it might also provide a better explanation for what has been thought to be ESP phenomena as well.

Most understandings of the nature of spirit allow it to be unconstrained in some degree by time and space, so a physical transmission medium would not be essential. Rather, two spirits might simultaneously occupy a single conceptual space for the duration of their interaction. Again, here “space” is not necessarily physical relativistic space. If it is actually physical space then an alternative possibility is that spirits might have access to relativistic dimensions apart from the normal Einsteinian space, such as are commonly drawn on in current attempts by physicists to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity. This is a subject I will write more about another time.

Let us now go back to our question of the nature of the faculty the human mind would need to support spirit to spirit communication and to provide a spirit/mind/brain interface. From the perspective of a person receiving such a communication, the “message” would simply appear in the mind as a thought, picture, memory or emotion, or by the impression of a sound, smell or physical sensation as the body responds to the information.

Similarly, transmission would occur by simply thinking, visualizing, feeling, etcetera, the content to be communicated. Interestingly, visualization has become a popular technique among some New Age and humanist groups in the attempt to try to change reality. Such use and abuse of visualization is something else I will write more about later, but suffice it to say that even in its misuse the principles remain the same, only the motive or the intended recipient has changed.

The human mind already has a faculty that appears to fulfill all of the functions described above. It is called the imagination.

In Imagine That! – Part 2 we will explore further the role of the human imagination in perceiving the spiritual realm.

If you are reading this post you would probably also be interested in posts in some of my blogs:

Listening 2 God

• Theology of Lying
• Prophecy Versus Preaching
• Purifying the Prophetic – Sanctified Psychic Reading
• Tell him he’s dreaming!
• Ministry to Children
• Step Out and Prophesy
• Welcome to Listening 2 God blog

Mal’s Meanderings

• The Law and the Prophets
• Barbers don’t exist – irrefutable proof.
• Please, Mr Einstein
• The things you are asked in counselling
• Is prophecy the same as inspired preaching?
• Purpose-Driven?
• Noctaphobia
• Why ‘Beth Tephillah’?
• Doppler Shift
• Being Made One
• What we believe
• Top Ten Truths That Shape My Teaching
• Jesus and Walls
• A Vision for the Church
• The perfect pastor
• The words ‘charismatic’ and ‘pentecostal’ have passed their use-by dates
• Managed Friendship
• Crossing Over – a word from Rick Joyner
• History of Medicine
• I’ve just discovered a great website on open theism
• I am greatly enjoying the stimulating lecture series
• If you’re wondering how this blog came to be called Mal’s Meanderings
• This morning I felt like taking a short break
• “If you write for God you will reach many men and bring them joy”
• In this blog I plan to talk about many things

speak-in-tongues blog

• Allowing Speaking in Tongues
• Welcome to the Speak in Tongues blog

In my last post I mentioned the more obvious mystical stream in the Evangelical church, based on the contemplative tradition. Much less recognised, however, and one of the primary motivations for my explorations, is the clear mystical content of the Charismatic Movement. This movement, following on after the original Pentecostal Movement of the early 20th Century, introduced the direct, tangible experience of God into the lives of many otherwise conservative, evangelical believers, who would probably neither have, nor desire, contact with anything they thought of as mystical.

Evangelicals have long had a suspicion, even a fear, of mystics and mysticism, seeing their teachings and practices as closer to Eastern religions than true Christianity. Some of the old mystics appearing to engage with the occult did not help either. The modern equivalent is seen in the New Age Movement. Yet, when we look at the goals of many mystics and those of many charismatics, they are identical – only the point of origin of their journey differs.

Consider my own story. I was raised in a Fundamentalist break-away from a conservative Baptist church. Eventually I migrated back to that Baptist church, and finally my wife and I became its pastors. Before we met we independently found the baptism of the Holy Spirit, largely due to a total dissatisfaction with the absence of real spiritual experience in our earlier training. Then together we embarked on learning, then practicing, and then teaching healing prayer ministry (which was earlier called prayer counselling), intercession and spiritual warfare, and operating in prophetic gifts. Of course, along the way we had to learn how to hear and recognise the voice of God (and other spirits), and had many experiences of hearing, seeing and feeling God’s presence in ourselves and on behalf of others. For us, the Vineyard Conferences in Melbourne, the Toronto Blessing of the 1990s, Intercessors for Melbourne, Tom Marshall seminars, and the prayer ministry courses of Elijah House, Ellel Ministries, Charles Kraft’s Deep Healing Ministries, and Wholeness through Christ were part of God’s great training ground.

While many people appear to see this charismatic movement as a new thing, I have long considered that there is an unbroken stream, which runs right through church history, of people with similar experiences of the power of the presence of God in the believer. It is usually manifested in small groups of people held suspect, or even ostracised by the rest of the church. Some of what they did was indeed heretical, but this is possibly inevitable among pioneers of unpopular views who are willing to risk reputation, and even life, in the pursuit of some reality.

I am sure we will take a closer look at some of these groups in our further explorations of being a reasonable mystic.

A few of the books related to this post:

Vineyard and John Wimber:

• John Wimber, Power Evangelism. Trafalgar Square Publishing, 2000.
• John Wimber, Power Healing. HarperSanFrancisco, 1991.

Toronto Blessing:

• Guy Chevreau, Catch the Fire: The Toronto Blessing an Experience of Renewal and Revival. London: Marshall Pickering, 1995.
• Dave Roberts, The Toronto Blessing. Eastbourne: Kingsway Publications,1994.

Tom Marshall:

• Tom Marshall, Living in the Freedom of the Spirit: Becoming the Person God Intended You to Be. Tonbridge, Kent: Sovereign World, 2002. [Was Free Indeed!, Sovereign World, 1983.]

 

Elijah House and the Sandfords:

• John and Paula Sandford, Elijah Among Us: Understanding and Responding to God’s Prophets Today. Grand rapids, MI: Chosen Books , 2002.
• John and Paula Sandford, The Elijah Task. Tulsa, OK: Victory House, 1979.
• John and Paula Sandford, Healing the Wounded Spirit. Tulsa, OK: Victory House, 1985.
• John and Paula Sandford, Prophets, Healers and the Emerging Church. Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image, 2003.
• John and Paula Sandford, The Transformation of the Inner Man. Tulsa, OK: Victory House, 1982.
• R. Loren Sandford, Wounded Warriors: Surviving Seasons of Stress. Tulsa, OK: Victory House, 1987. (This is now out of print but the material has been incorporated into the following book)
• R. Loren Sandford, Burnout : Renewal in the Wilderness. Concrete, Washington: Exanimo Corporation, 1998.

 

Ellel Ministries:

• Peter Horrobin, Healing Through Deliverance, Vol 1: The Biblical Basis. Chosen Books, 2003.
• Peter Horrobin, Healing Through Deliverance, Vol 2: The Practical Ministry. Chosen Books, 2003.
   

Deep Healing Ministries and Dr. Charles Kraft:

• Charles H. Kraft, Christianity with Power: Your Worldview and Your Experience of the Supernatural. Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Publications, 1989.
• Charles H. Kraft, Confronting Powerless Christianity: Evangelicals and the Missing Dimension. Grand Rapids, MI: Chosen Books, 2002.
• Charles H. Kraft, Deep Wounds, Deep Healing: Discovering the Vital Link Between Spiritual Warfare and Inner Healing. Vine Books, 2004.
• Charles H. Kraft, Defeating Dark Angels: Breaking Demonic Oppression in the Believer’s Life. Tonbridge, Kent: Sovereign World, 1993.
• Charles H. Kraft, The Rules of Engagement: Understanding the Principles That Govern the Spiritual Battles in Our Lives. Wipf & Stock, 2005.
   

Intercession and Spiritual Warfare:

• Cindy Jacobs, Possessing the Gates of the Enemy, Third Edition, Revised with Study Guide: A Training Manual for Militant Intercession. Grand Rapids, MI: Chosen Books, 1991.

More books later.