NILS VON KALM says living the Christian life is not about chasing an experience…
Melbourne, Australia
Many years ago, I was at a church where the pastor said, “The Holy Spirit is here tonight. Can you feel it?!”
I remember wondering if there was something I was missing because I couldn’t feel it. Why did everyone else seemingly have this experience of God but I didn’t?
PICTURE: den-belitsky/iStockphoto
Fast-forward a few years and I did feel it. When I was 19, I had what I can only describe as a conversion experience. This was despite having at that time been a Christian for some years. But then I spent decades trying to recapture that experience. It didn’t work.
What are you putting your trust in? An experience you had once which you can’t let go of and which you’ve tried for years or decades to have again? Or are you trusting what the Bible says about God and your connection to God?
What are you putting your trust in? An experience you had once which you can’t let go of and which you’ve tried for years or decades to have again? Or are you trusting what the Bible says about God and your connection to God?
This is the problem with the feel-good attitude of most megachurches. It’s all about an experience. In the end it’s no different to any other experience that people can have. A U2 concert is described by many as a religious experience.
Living the Christian life is not about an experience.
Remember the literal mountaintop experience that Peter, James and John had with Jesus at the Transfiguration. What did Jesus say on the way down the mountain? “Don’t tell anyone about this”. How would you have felt if you had just had a literal mountaintop spiritual experience with God Himself and He doesn’t want you to tell anyone about it? And what’s more, He then tells you that He is going to Jerusalem to suffer and die. What a let down!
The fact is that the only mountaintop we need to look for is what Martin Luther King, Jr, talked about the night before he died. In what became known as his “mountaintop” speech, he quite eerily and prophetically said the following:
“Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
The mountaintop King talked about was the promised land of freedom where God’s kingdom of love for each other, peace both in our hearts and in the world, and justice for all, the shalom of God, would reign.
That is the only mountaintop we need to look out for. It’s about total commitment to a new world; heaven on earth.
The Transfiguration is the ultimate demonstration that Jesus and nothing and no one else is our final authority. Not the Bible, not the church, and not any traditions.
When they were up on the mountain, and Moses and Elijah appeared in the cloud and Jesus’ body was transfigured, it was a climactic declaration of who Jesus is. Moses, representing the Law, and Elijah, representing the prophets, appear, and the voice from the cloud says not to listen to them as your final authority, but to listen to this, “my Son, whom I love”.
What the Transfiguration shows is that Jesus outdoes the entire Law and the Prophets in terms of authority. We see this also in what are some of Jesus’ final words on Earth prior to his ascension. Following His resurrection, He says to the disciples, “all authority in Heaven and on Earth has been given to me”. As a preacher I heard once said, “the Bible is not the final authority for Christians. How do we know this? It says so in the Bible!” Jesus is our final authority; He is the Word of God. So, we are to read the Bible through the lens of Him, as He in fact taught us to do, and did Himself.
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In John 5:39, Jesus rebukes the Jews listening to Him by telling them that “you search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, yet it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life”. Isn’t that what we often do as well? We think that the Scriptures are the ultimate authority for us, when Jesus says that He himself is. So, when we have contradictions in the Scriptures, such as when, in I Samuel 15, where Samuel says to Saul that God had told him to not spare the Amalekites, even the women and children, and then we have Jesus telling us in the Sermon on the Mount to love our enemies, we are to listen to Jesus.
So many horrific acts have been done in the name of God because we have seen the Bible as the final authority. This is, of course, not to say that we shouldn’t listen to the Scriptures. We should. But we should listen to them in the light of Jesus. This is what II Timothy 3:16-17 means when it says that all Scripture is inspired by God. Inspiration means it is to be taken seriously; it does not mean infallibility.
Holding mountaintop experiences lightly and listening ultimately to Jesus are the message we can glean from the story of the Transfiguration. Like Peter, James and John on the mountain, we are to heed the still, small voice that says of Jesus, “listen to Him”.
