These are a series of lessons adapted from Jonathan Fisk’s book, Broken. All are encouraged buy Broken to get the full content in the book.
Never follow a rule that could conceivably have its mind changed by the shifting of the wind
The Devil’s First Rule
The devil has only one basic lie. It is The Lie. It’s the same Lie he’s been telling since the beginning (John 8:44; Genesis 3:4-5). As a result, he’s an expert at it. He’s learned that there’s more than one way to put a little spin on the same deception. He dresses up The Lie in new clothes, and he gives The Lie a new name. And at the drop of the hat, he can do it again, and again, and again. First, he points you left. Then, he points you right. But both directions are off the path and lead down into a bog, where the waters are muddy and fog blurs the sight.
With each new step, the fog gets denser, and memories of the path grow dimmer. The weeds and thorns cut your hands. Your feet bruise on the stones sunk beneath the mud. Your conscience feels ragged and tired. Then, here comes The Lie again (it’s the same lie, but now with a top hat, a monocle, and a refined, compelling accent). This time he says: “You know that you only have that cursed path to blame for all of this. If you’d never been on that path to begin with, none of this would have happened to you.”
Only two kinds of spirituality exist in the world. One is right, and one is wrong. The goal of the wrong one is to convince you that it is the right one. It’s to get you to eat The Lie, to swallow his dish whole, digest it, and then, despite the stomachache, go back for more. The devil’s goal is to convince you to replace Jesus’ words with his Lie, so you arrive at the place where you trust in his rules–rules that he teaches as if they were God’s rules.
– What is the Devil’s first rule?
Emotional Dan and the Sun
Punk Rock John once had a friend. His name was Dan. Dan starred in a five-minute part on a video produced by a superchurch out in California. It was edgy and cool-ish, marvelously shot and edited. But, despite all its best intents, it was also godless.
Picture this: Our hero Dan stands on a blacktop court somewhere in suburbia. Time-lapse photography paints clouds rolling overhead in an azure sky. The grass waves in a deep, organic green. Light shifts from midday to late afternoon, while acoustic guitar and hidden keyboard swells tear at your heart before a word is even uttered.
“I was in a dark and depressing place.” Dan’s slightly awkward teen voice raises the tension further, begging you for authenticity and understanding. “I grew up in Church, but I didn’t know if God was real. I was alone one afternoon, walking out on a playground.” The music now has an emotional edge. You feel like crying for him. “Then, just as I was seriously questioning and doubting, a cloud fully covered the sun and left me alone in the darkness. And it was, as if …” he pauses. The timed-lapse stills roll into overcast. The colors fade. The green grass becomes pale and pasty. “It was as if God had abandoned me.”
“But then!” Dan’s voice tears apart the gloomy melody while bright, spotless images flash on the screen, and a fresh new riff enlivens the beat. “Right then! Right when I was ready to give up, the sun came out again!” Dan’s happiness is tangible. Everything is right with the world again! “I could feel the sun’s warmth on my face, and I knew–I just knew! I knew that God was there.”
What was Dan doing? He wasn’t teaching kids to put their faith in the sun. He wasn’t saying that God will always prove Himself to you in the exact, mildly surprising happenstance event involving the sun and some clouds. No. But he was saying that God will always, somehow, prove Himself in mildly surprising, happenstance events. He was preaching and teaching Mysticism.
Read Matthew 12:38-42, 1 Corinthians 1:21-23, and Hebrews 1:1-2.
– What was Dan missing from his theology?
Consumer-Market Mystics
The first rule that every real Christian should fight to the death (and break as often as possible) is Mysticism. Mysticism is like a seductive woman, sitting at a sidewalk café, watching everyone who passes by. She always dresses herself in the latest fashions and styles, and while she rarely yells, you can, somehow, always hear her voice above the crowd.
“Whoever would be spiritual, let him talk to me,” she says. “Learn my spiritual disciplines from me; I will teach you to experience God. Let me teach you my newfound methods. I will help you learn to discover God through what you feel. Follow me and my advice, and I will show you the trick to finding God in your heart.”
Mysticism: The belief that you can attain direct knowledge of God through your subjective experiences. Distilled down, mysticism is nothing more than the worship of your emotions.
Mysticism has found many ready listeners in American culture because American culture is the melting pot of trying to feel good. Humans have always made feeling good a high priority, but in our age we have made it into an art form. Both Christians and non-Christians alike spend most of the waking day trying to feel good. When we feel bad (which happens a lot), we begin wandering around the market for something new to consume to try, all so we can feel better.
Once we find an answer, we remain diligent in trying to make feeling better last as long as possible. This is our way of life. It is our economy, our national pastime, and our greatest export. We believe, teach, and confess that the key to happiness is managing discomfort by increasing good feelings instead. We are so successful at it that we’ve also come to assume that God approaches religion the same way!
And so, all over America, every week, many of the most well-meaning of us congregate in houses that we have built for the sole purpose of trying to feel God together. By combining applied motivational speeches and creative musical arrangements with the latest and best gimmicks of technology, we listen to the promise that we can and will feel good by finding God (and find God by feeling good).
We consume these carefully crafted divine experiences like any other product. We expect them to be over on the hour, so we still have plenty of time to trot back to our lives of buying, selling, and trying to feel even better in all the ways we possibly can.
None of us feels manipulated. We would be angry if you said that we were just consumers being sold a fast-food religion. “Mysticism” is just a fancy word without any meaning to us. But every week we buy it anyway. We go to our churches in search of a better feeling, and when we find it, we believe we have found the real presence of God.
Read Romans 1:21-25
– In verse 25, Paul says, “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served something created instead of the Creator.” Can we make an idol of trying to feel good and replacing that for the truth of God?
– Discuss the state of the current church?
The Road to Nowhere
Two undeniable problems confront us with this mystic pursuit of God through feelings. The first (and the biggest for Christians) is that Jesus never taught it. Seriously, the Bible never tells you that the path to finding God lies hidden within positive experiences. It’s not that Jesus has a problem with hearts or emotions in general; after all, He created them. But He didn’t create emotion to speak to us through them–that was why He created words!
The second problem with believing that we can find God in our hearts is that human emotions always have an unintended side effect: they wear off. Feelings can come with extraordinary strength. They can be as real and potent as the sun warming your face. They can fill you with confidence, conviction, and daring. They can motivate you, get you to turn your life around, and press you to achieve what you never thought was possible.
But emotions inevitably also do what emotions always do–change. One day you wake up to discover that last week’s methods, which were so good at helping you feel God–the songs, the practices, and everything else that gave you such strong comfort and assurance–aren’t working any more.
Mysticism’s lie: You can find God in your heart.
But the dark side of Mysticism isn’t always such an early tragedy. For many, Mysticism dances with them through decades of church attendance, purposeful living, and chasing after a successful life. For many, it isn’t until they’re sitting alone in a nursing home, forcing down 15 pills a day, and hoping for a visit from anyone. It’s then that despair and their doubts about God, buried beneath endless rays of sunshine, come flooding back within the perfect storm of a broken life.
Sometimes it’s later, sometimes it’s sooner, but it’s unavoidable that the lows tip the balance back from the highs. How many times can feelings fix the real questions of faith? What about after the divorce, after the layoff, after the bankruptcy, after the sin? What will give Dan hope next?
Although he will rarely admit it, the Mystic Christian wakes up every day feeling a little bit weaker. He needs to try something a little bit newer. Like a drug addict needing his fix, he needs to recover the emotions that convinced him that he had a true encounter with God the day before. If Dan walks this path long enough, if he eats The Lie long enough, then it is only a matter of time until he wakes up royally angry (and not fully sure why). It’s just that a growing awareness is overcoming him that his attempts to feel God aren’t working.
Dan is too tired to go seeking yet another emotional proof. He’s unwilling to force-feed himself yet another quest for experience at yet another new church. He’s fed up with believing that this next trick will work when all the others have had such limited success. In the end, Dan will decide that his problem is, not himself, but God.
This is the moment for which Mysticism has been waiting her entire life. That was her plan from the beginning. She knows Dan won’t take out his anger on her. After all, Dan doesn’t even realize she is the one he’s been worshiping. Dan thinks he has been worshiping the God of the Bible.
On that day, Dan will wake up and blame his failures of trying to feel God on Christianity–after all, Christianity is what he thinks he has been practicing. He has tried with all his heart, mind, and soul to feel God. As a direct result of that, he now feels with utmost, experiential certainty that Christianity is the most untrustworthy religion in the world. What will he try next?
This is the dark danger of Mysticism. She is appallingly powerful. Once you’ve believed the lie she tells, that you can find God in your heart, she can convince you to try almost anything.
When God and Spirit Smash, You Get Jesus
John 6:63: [Jesus said,] It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.
– What is the meaning of “flesh” in this verse?
– Where then do we get life?
– Discuss: Connect the Word, Jesus, with His words. How is the Word inextricably tied to His words?
2 Timothy 3:16: All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.
The words “breathed out by God” are only one word in Greek, an unusual term that Paul may have coined. Theopneumos (pronounced thay-oh-noo-mos) is the smashing together of two more common Greek roots: Theos means “God,” and pneuma, while it can mean “breath” or “wind,” is usually translated as “spirit.” So, literally, St. Paul says, “All Scripture is God’s-Spirited.”
Holy Scripture is God’s own Spirited words. God has given them to establish doctrine (eternal truth) to rebuke our natural sinful thoughts and correct our ignorance by training us to believe we are made righteous because of Jesus. This Christianity comes to us from outside of us, promised to us, a gift you are free to believe by faith.
1 Timothy 3:15: The Church of the living God, is the pillar and foundation of the truth.
2 Peter 1:20: You should know this: no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation.
– What is God’s way to keep one’s understanding of Scripture from falling prey to mysticism: “I feel that this passage means …”?
We live in a sad age. Yet, our age is not so different from every age since the serpent first tempted our forebears to believe God’s Word wasn’t the only truth worth believing. The lips of Mysticism have always dripped with milk and honey.
But Mysticism has also been a bitter, two-edged sword. From her seat at the café, she promises life. “Come in and drink with me,” she says, but she knows nothing (Proverbs 9:13-14), and she holds only death and corruption. She teaches you not to listen to the reproving doctrines of Scripture. Instead, you learn to despise discipline and hate correction. She closes your ears to any teacher but your own heart and leads you to the brink of utter ruin. Her spirituality is intoxicating, alluring, and seductive.
It should shock us all the more that many pulpits in America not only fail to warn us about this adulterous spirituality, but instead promote it. The number of mystical “Christian” rules for finding God come in all styles and sizes, but they are always the same lie: “Your emotions are where you will find God.” So, you don’t have the answers? Pray and wait for a feeling. Do you need to figure something out? Go listen to the wind. Not sure if Jesus lives? It doesn’t matter, for He lives inside your heart.
Emotions are a magnificent gift of the created world. God made them for us. They are part of being human, and Christianity exalts in the redemption that Jesus won for us. But there is a chasm of difference between believing feelings are a gift from God and believing feelings are God. Feelings can be good, but feelings are never the Gospel. Rules and traditions, methods, and disciplines that teach that your emotions are the source of God revealing of Himself to you confuse Jesus Christ with yourself. As exciting as those kinds of promises might sound, ignore them. Get real wisdom. Follow the Word of God instead.
