Ben,
Can you print this out and read it when you have some time to really think about the words. I thought about you all night after our long conversation. I did my walk this morning at 6:30 feeling so good. This fast I'm doing is amazing...it's like a real high that you experience when you cleanse your body from all the toxic garbage we ingest. Anyway I'm talking to the Lord the whole time about how I know you are at a searching and coming into who you really are now and I just so want you to understand the deep,deep things of the Spirit life. Today in the news on CNN there is an article on how so many people are losing or changing their religion. The article goes on and on about this denomination and that religion and I just shake my head because it is so obvious that 75% of the people don't have a clue as to what's going on. The whole point is all they have is a religion....a way of making sense of life that makes them feel good. One person thinks this and one person thinks that and they create a following of people that don't know how to think on their own. The point is that God has made us as containers for His life. It's not about something some human,thus inferior, man has dreamed up. All you have to do is realize that He made us for Himself. He is birthing a family where we will be with Him and each other for eternity. If it's just about life on this earth how sad would that be. The only way I could bear to lose any of you is to know that we will all be together again soon in a perfect world without sin. So mainly I just want to say......I realize you hear a lot of things from your friends that are New Age or New World stuff and that's OK, we''re told to test the spirits but please don't ever let go of Jesus who makes our true happiness and joy possible. I love you so so much.
Self-Consciousness and Christ Consciousness
Norman P. Grubb
We are desperately conscious of the two opposing principles of good and evil through all life. They confront us in human nature, in the business, political and social world. They give rise to the constant tensions among nations, races, classes, right down to our own family circles; They are the theme of ethics and religion. They come closest home to us in our own personal lives, the conflict of flesh and spirit, the interweaving of prosperity and adversity, joy and sorrow, friendship and enmity, justice and injustice, health and disease, kindness and cruelty, through the whole garment of life. Now, though we are Christ's, we share in this divided world. We are part of it. We eat its food, partake in its activities, earn its money, taste of its sorrows and tragedies, and endure its temptations. Though one'd with Christ in spirit, we are still one with the world in body. Therefore, though new men in Christ, we still have a duality of consciousness: we have self-consciousness, world-consciousness, we are in the world (but not of it: John 17:13,16), in the flesh (but not of it: Gal.5:24), in self (but not of it: Gal.2:20). A great proportion of our waking hours must necessarily be spent in the affairs of this world, with Christ in the background rather than foreground of our consciousness. Sin only enters when we are consciously drawn into activities and attitudes which we know to be displeasing to Him. While we are in this divided world, we cannot have solely a Christ-consciousness. We must also have a self-consciousness: certainly it is the renewed self which knows how to maintain its abiding place: yet it is also a self-conscious self, responsive to all the stimuli of its environment, therefore as open to temptation fleshward as to Christ-control spiritward. It is still a case of "nevertheless I live", as well as, "yet not I, but Christ liveth in me".
The name God has given to humanity separated from Himself by the Fall - is "flesh" (Gen. 6:3). We are all flesh, Even the Savior, when He came to be among us, was "God manifested in the flesh". Not until the resurrection of the body, the final and complete state of unification with our ascended Head, can any member of the human race cease to be flesh. Flesh implies consciousness of separation from God, self-consciousness apart from Christ-consciousness. That does not necessarily mean something evil. Christ "in the days of His flesh" was conscious of his human self as apart from the Father with whom He was one (e.g.John 5:19). It is not flesh, which is evil, but the lusts of the flesh. And even they are not evil unless they are permitted to reign instead of serve. Self-consciousness, flesh-consciousness, is the normal and essential prerequisite, as members of this fallen human race, to a continuous life of faith, for it compels us constantly to "look away" from our helpless selves unto Jesus (Heb.12:2): and as we do so, flesh then becomes the servant and manifestor of Spirit. But the moment we fail to look away, then flesh becomes an evil thing, natural "desires of flesh and mind" have us in their grip, and become dominating, discordant lusts, and we their slaves.
Therefore, let us get it clear; we shall never in this life be free from a sense of self, as well as a realization of the indwelling Christ. We shall never, therefore, be free from temptation in a world that exists to tempt, nor be free from the daily necessity of vigilance and abiding. The chapter of triumphant living, Rom.8, significantly enough is the very chapter which warns against the subtleties of the surrounding flesh, and expresses our groaning amidst our rejoicing, as we long for the final redemption of the body, and are saved, not only by faith, but by hope.
For this reason, then, it is of utmost importance that we understand the exact relationship between the renewed self and the other Glorious Self, Christ Himself who dwells within. It is the hardest lesson we have to learn, and cannot be learned except in the hard way. Nothing but frequent and strong doses of the false activities of self can teach us this lesson. It is peculiarly subtle because it is now not a case of a troublesome bad self, but an anxious, frustrated, condemned good self; not good in the positive sense of being able to do good things, but good in the negative sense of wanting to do good and no longer wanting to do evil; a purified self, but though pure, still empty: just as a cup may be clean, but what really matters is the fluid it contains.
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