Most Christians are taught what the Lord’s parables mean without actually receiving their meanings from God. At best, teachers teach what others have received from God. At worst, there are substandard and completely wrong interpretations passed off as genuine.

         This is the difference between religious dogma and divine revelation.

         In that light, it is said that spiritual knowledge is gained in two ways: (1) book knowledge, or head knowledge, or gaining data empirically, or reading our Bibles to gain facts, etc, and (2) divine revelation.

         The former is accessed by a working brain regardless of heart condition or spiritual proclivity. The latter, divine revelation, is gained through the Lord revealing something to our hearts—bypassing our heads (or possibly going through them).

         And speaking of brains, it should be obvious to most people with brains that divine revelation is the best method. One might even say it is actually the only method, and here’s why:

         We have millions of Christians who have been taught and dogmatized by the letter but actually have no understanding of the spirit (and much of the letter they are taught is not Biblical anyway). In fact, the majority of Christians worldwide are walking around in head knowledge, and the probable majority of those have very little head knowledge, (that’s what we pay the preacher/priest/minister for!), which means they have absolutely no spiritual knowledge whatsoever.

         How then are they Christians? One must understand the concept of cultural Christianity to understand that calling oneself a Christian because one identifies with some aspect of denominational Christianity makes one no more a Christian than so many proponents of other religions—those who are such only because of outside circumstances and cultural/family pressure. Many Buddhists, for example, do not actually practice the full teachings of the Buddha but still consider themselves Buddhists.

         It is no different with Christianity in the sense that most Christians do not practice or attempt to practice the full curriculum of the Lord Jesus and reject becoming real disciples.

         Real Christianity is different from all other belief systems and religions (including Unreal Christianity) simply because it is not a belief system or religion. It is based on an actual personal relationship with the God of the Universe who revealed Himself to us as one of us—God became a human being.

         Now, that in itself sounds completely weird to the natural mind and is thus summarily dismissed and denounced by most people right off the bat, which reveals something about the natural mind, of course.

         Further rejection by the natural mind of spiritual knowledge follows, and the idea that we can know God and God wants to know us and we can talk to God etc. is also thus placed in that place where the down to earth put belief in little green men and off-the-wall dark conspiracies and haunted houses and “I see dead people” and Ray’s hearing voices out in his field and in short, weird stuff that only weird people take a liking to.

         For non-believers this is understandable, but for all the so-called Christians who fall into this category it is beyond mind-boggling and completely proves my point: Most Christians want no part of all the “weird stuff” put forth in the Bible, but only the completely surface indoctrination and cultural low-denominational “refinement” that characterizes all dead forms of Christianity, much like the dead forms of Judaism during the Lord’s day which caused its proponents to reject the Lord Jesus outright.      

         Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God, which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words.

         But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised. [1Corinthians 2:12-14] [1]

         © 2014 by RJ Dawson. All Rights Reserved. [To Be Continued.]

[1] Unless otherwise noted all Scriptures are taken from the New American Standard Bible, © 1960, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.