People talk like the christian experience is mainly a psychological one. But there is very little that can be done to change a person on a horizontal level. The truth is that we are product of the culture of words that we believe are true. We are made to feel secure by creating habits of thought that parallels how we can control the outcome presupposing in creating the image of the other person in our minds that will play out to our advantage. We naturally view ourselves in the most positive light that is not necessarily consistent with how the other person views us. So we live with the purpose of training our minds to control our environment.
This is how we learn to control those ideas we get from scripture. Our understanding of a concept in scripture is defined by us in the natural way that we control our circumstances. Its very difficult for us to let the scripture not only speak for itself but be applied in a way that it changes our habits of thought. We can take a whole system of doctrine by applying scientific methods as a way to be convinced that we have given up our preconceived ideas. We seldom apply ourselves to scripture so that we go from the word to the Person. And so we never change the habit of controlling the application rather than transforming the idea so that we experience a Person that is bigger than our understanding.
This is what is dangerous about lowering the scripture and using it as a manual to explain problems and how to overcome them. We define evil as sin, corruption and a lack of christian character. But it is Satan and His children that defines the evil of sin. So we are not in conflict with the psychological results of sin like guilt, fear, and sorrow. We are in conflict with a Being that controls the world through guilt , fear, and sorrow. So the guilt, sorrow and fear are not a psychological enemy that we can control through the words of the bible, forgiveness, having joy, experiencing peace etc. But these dispositions are on a much bigger level that we could imagine. You see that we face a Personal devil who opposed Christ on the level of a supernatural struggle. We are identified with Christ in the way that He viewed this struggle. So in ourselves we have no ability to control evil. We have no ability to deal with guilt, fear, and sorrow.
You see in scripture Christ has defined our struggles in His view of love, anger,and trials that are made to consume us as we draw near to God. He sees the righteous and the wicked as they really are. This is what faith is all about . Its believing that the world is much worse that we could ever imagine. And its being able to envision that our future is beyond our understanding. And so we measure situations according to our view of understanding with an ability to empathize. So our view of the world is constrained by our natural desire to control it. But most of us have never been to the level where we oppose evil as Christ opposes it. We hardly ever speak to God in the words of anger or love as they are spoken by Christ in facing His opposition. We never reach a hot level of anger, or consuming love of God because we believe in our natural selves that its out of control and mysterious. But unless we use these words on the level that Christ prayed them in the Psalms we will never understand the nature of evil or the kind of opposition that we are facing.
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