A WHOLE NEW STRUCTURE

“Therefore if anyone is in Christ, this person is a new creation; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.”  (2 Corinthians 5:17 NASB)

If our view of ourselves is anything less than being a word spoken forth by God, then our self image is a self-constructed façade -- a crust of self…

I have come to realize that the primary work of God's grace in our lives is to liberate us from this destructive bondage to the crust of self in order to shape us into wholeness.  God is seeking to create in us a whole new structure of habits, attitudes, and perceptions, of dynamics of personal and corporate relationships, of patterns of reaction and response to the world.

This new structure is one of increasing Christ-likeness.  God is seeking to break the crust. 

-- M. Robert Mulholland Jr. in “Shaped by the Word”

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SPIRITUAL PERCEPTION

Every animal on earth has a set of correspondences with the environment around it, and some of these correspondences far exceed ours. Humans can perceive only 30 percent of the range of the sun’s light and 1/70^th of the spectrum of electromagnetic energy. Many animals far exceed our abilities. Bats detect insects by sonar; pigeons navigate by magnetic fields; bloodhounds perceive a world of smell unavailable to us.

Perhaps the spiritual or “unseen” world requires an inbuilt set of correspondences activated only through some sort of spiritual [awakening]. “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above,” said Jesus (John 3:3 NRSV). “The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit,” said Paul (1 Corinthians 2:14 NIV). Both expressions point to a different level of correspondences available only to a person spiritually alive.

-- Philip Yancey in “Seeing the Invisible God”


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