Last night, I had one of those bad dreams about having been called into a situation of responsibility, being there long enough to get to that familiar place of people not wanting me any longer, feeling hopeless about figuring out what to do, and being so thankful to wake up!
Lots of real life came
into the picture, and so my morning began with plenty of interacting with God
about how to have a face-to-face encounter with him when we cannot see his face
with our material eyes.
I am a novice when it
comes to understanding brain-science. However, the snippets that get through to
me leave me fascinated with the way God created us for attachment. This week I
have been trying to understand how God designed our brains to respond to face-to-face
interactions. As we look at someone when we are chatting, our sub-conscious
thoughts are assessing and reacting to them faster than our conscious thoughts
can process what we think we see.
With this design of our
physical bodies aimed at helping us attach to God and one another, it has me
considering how this works with the soul/spirit part of who we are. If our
brains are designed to build attachment by looking into someone’s face, how do
we build attachment to Jesus Christ with our minds, particularly considering
God giving life to our spirits so we can attach to him in the spiritual realm
as much or more as we could have attached to Jesus in the material world when
he was here?[1]
I will share some things
I am pondering in prayer and meditation on the word. My hope is that I can
encourage you to come into God’s presence with questions, and wondering, and
curiosity, the way children love to attach to us about the things they are
learning.
· My
starting place is whether prayer and meditation on God’s word is a sufficient
counterpart to looking into someone’s eyes so that it has the same effect on
our minds as eye-to-eye interaction has on our brains. Jesus “lifted up his
eyes to heaven, and said, ‘Father…’”[2] Can
we lift up our eyes to heaven in our minds so that what we “see” of God’s face
is just as, or almost as, real as if we saw him with our eyes?
· I think that
Paul’s expression, “when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed”,[3] is
true for everyone who believes in Jesus since Paul adds, “And we all, with
unveiled face…”[4]
This seems to mean that the veils of dissociation and self-protection believers
wear are deliberate acts of our own, at least so far as personally allowing our
WoLVeS to keep us from Jesus.[5] As
a shepherd (pastor), it grieves me to watch professing believers permit their
WoLVeS to hinder the church when Jesus has given us everything we need to be
done with them.[6]
· The
connection between, “beholding the glory of the Lord,” and, “being
transformed into the same image”, has me fascinated with how the
synchronizing of our brains makes us like or dislike each other, and how we relate
to Jesus spiritually so our minds synchronize with him in the light of his love
for us. It also scares the heebie-jeebies out of me that self-protective adults
are synchronizing the brains of our children to be like us in the things that
are most influential inside us (often a deep-seated belief that we are worthless
and have no hope of fixing that problem). The fact that it happens faster than
our conscious thinking makes me desperate to get us adults living out of our
new identity in Christ so all our children are synchronizing with our new
hearts and minds.
· Satan’s
success as, “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers,”[7]
has me deeply concerned for the unbelievers in our lives and the necessity of
spiritual warfare praying for their salvation.
· Paul
talked like God already “has shone in our hearts to give the light of the
knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”[8]
God clearly wants us to attach to this “knowledge”, and Satan clearly
wants to stop that attachment. It only takes a faith-response to Jesus for us
to have “the victory that has overcome the world”.[9]
· This
attachment between, “beholding the glory of the Lord,” and, “in the
face of Jesus Christ,” along with the, “looking to Jesus,” and, “Consider
him,” of Hebrews 12,[10]
has me asking God to reveal to me how this works in real life so that looking
into the face of Jesus Christ spiritually has the same effect on my mind as
looking into his face physically would have on my brain.
· When we
combine an understanding of God’s desire for us to behold the glory of God that
is in the face of Jesus Christ, with the brain-science that demonstrates how God’s
creation of Man’s physical being is designed to facilitate the greatest
attachment ever, it begins to stand out how often God addresses us with some
reference to seeing his face. This is particularly notable in the blessing God
commanded Aaron and his sons to pronounce over Israel, “Yahweh bless you and keep you; Yahweh make his face to shine upon
you and be gracious to you; Yahweh lift up his countenance upon you and give
you peace.”[11] And it is crowned with the
promise that, “when
he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.”[12]
Although I have had a
growing faith in Jesus Christ from childhood, I have also had to deal with the real-life
damage of living in a sinful world. I grew up fitting the description of a
fear-based identity. I was the Attachment-Light-Always-On kid who had to come
to God with all my attachment-failures, trusting him with what people have done
to me, and confessing to him what I have done to others.
I am quite sure that
my nightmares about failure in life and ministry have enough truth in them that
I am asking God to show me what it means in real life. Whatever ails me in that
regard, whatever veil of self-protection may be hiding anything from my
consciousness, the thought of synchronizing my mind to the mind of Christ has
me longing for the fullest experience of this as is possible this side of
heaven no matter what painful realities I still must face about myself or anything
that has happened to me.
Since it is true of
every child of God that, “we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of
the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to
another”, I want to grow in my beholding so I can grow up in Christ. I hope this sharing helps all of us attach to Jesus
more and better than we have ever known him before.
© 2021 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8
Email: in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the
English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text
Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of
Good News Publishers.)
[1] I mean this in
reference to those who have been made alive in Jesus Christ by faith in his
name (see Ephesians 2:1-10).
[2] John 17:1
[3] II Corinthians 3:16
[4] II Corinthians 3:18
[5] WoLVeS stands for the
Wounds, Lies, Vows and Strongholds that, if left unresolved in our hearts,
become like a pack of wolves constantly hindering God’s work of shepherding us
in Christ. Thanks to Marcus Warner of Deeper Walk International for introducing
this acronym.
[6] II Corinthians 10:4 (context
is II Corinthians 10:1-6)
[7] II Corinthians 4:4
[8] II Corinthians 4:6
[9] I John 5:4
[10] Hebrews 12:1-3
[11] Numbers 6:22-27
[12] I John 3:1-3
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