Some thoughts from a conversation with Mark Kehoe this morning…
- We are beings of profound potential – both for evil and for good. Our divine potential for evil, suffering, and darkness is as deep as our potential for good.
- We really don’t understand our capacity for evil until it is revealed to us, and this should frighten and disturb us deeply. The depth of the natural man is not just a capacity for indulgence or selfishness, it is a capacity to inflict suffering upon others.
- We aren’t redeemed from our fallen potential until we become strictly honest beings. We must be divested of lies, darkness, and deception. Our capacity for deception is as infinite as our capacity to become a divine being in the likeness of our eternal parents.
- Encountering Christ is the process of having the light divided from the darkness within us. It is to have the truth in us increased, and to have the falsehood and lies within us transmuted into truth.
- Giving ourselves over to Christ can be, and usually must be, a very disruptive and painful experience. It is a death – a death of the falsehood within us. The death of the natural man is a death of the self as we know it. It is a real and painful death.
- But the redemption of the truth within us is glorious. And the mercy of Christ is that he will redeem anything truthful within us.
- The paradox of Christ is that his love kills us. It kills the natural man. It kills who we think we are. It doesn’t accept us in our self-oriented and deceived state – it requires complete transformation – granting hope that the transformation can be made.
- Receiving Christ requires us to go through a death and be resurrected (spiritually and physically). We die before we die as to the things of the world. And we are reborn in this life into a newness of life in the form of Christ.
- Submitting our light to Christ will create a magnification. Submitting our darkness will create a transformation.
Scary and deep. Uncomfortable. Truly, I must fully understand and accept that not only am I nothing in this fallen state, I am less than the dust of the earth. And yet when I grasp my Savior’s hand, and get through the darkness and reconcile my loathsome state to Him, it is then that I come to know the goodness and greatness of God— and find my true self at last, gloriously regenerated in Christ.
Maybe that is what the hell is —to contemplate and wallow in the darkness that IS our fallen selves. Sobering thoughts. Love you, Todd.
LikeLiked by 1 person