And a door opens.....

In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, C.S.Lewis writes of getting into the sidecar of a motorcycle which his brother was driving.  When he stepped into the sidecar, he was an unbeliever; by the time they arrived at their destination, He believed.  What happened during that short time?

Lewis' entire life had prepared him for that single moment when a door opened in the universe and he stepped through it.  His love of nature, and of mythology, of fantasy, of poetry, of language -- all had been preparation for that one moment.  His friendship with J.R.R.Tolkein, the book club where they exchanged ideas and commented on one another's books -- had all been leading up to the moment the curtains parted and revealed to him Jesus Christ, the Lord God of heaven and earth.

Up until that moment, we think we see, as did the Scribes and Pharisees of Jesus' day; we think we see, as I did as a young intellectual who thought she "knew" how the Bible was written, who thought Jesus was "a man of his time" and spoke as an inculturated Jew.  I, too, at one time was a proponent of the time-snobbishness that held that we, as moderns, were so much more enlightened than the people of the New Testament, and certainly, of the Old Testament.  What they ascribed to the action of God, we now "know" to be science and nature at work, or so I then believed.

But one day, a door opens, and we, if we are blessed and graced, step from one universe into the next--the world of belief.  Our scepticism fades as the wonders of daily grace and miracles unfold before our eyes.  No longer is Jesus a historical figure, but a living Presence in our lives.  We are drawn by His love and we hear His voice; He reveals to us His own Spirit, Who leads us into all truth.  We have been born again, not by our own will or effort, but by the fatherhood of God who brings us to a new birth in His Spirit. 

While we continue to live "in" the world, but not "of" the world, we see what we could not see before; we hear what before was silent; we become sensitive to things that before we scorned.  We see not from our own history and perspective, but from God's viewpoint -- and everything is different.  It is as if we (our old selves) have died and a new person has come back from the dead, someone who for the first time is more alive to the things of God than to the things of this world. 

This is the meaning of Christ's death and resurrection---He had to crucify the sin nature that kept us blind to the Spirit of God in order to bring out of the earth a "new man," a man alive to God.  I Cor. 2:14 says: The natural man does not grasp the things of God, nor can he, for they are revealed by the Spirit.  But the spiritual man judges all things....and we have the mind of Christ.

The "mind of Christ" is not acquired by study, but by revelation.  We have to thirst for it, ask for it -- but when the door opens, we will know it.