What is Real?

We all seem to have our own vision of God ... and Reality seems to be the scarcest thing in the universe!

Years ago Amy Carmichael wrote a list of things which are spiritually suspect.
I don't remember her list, but I am sure that we can all come up with a list of our own.

Suspect things are things which are too easy, 
Suspect are the things which offer instantaneous fail-safe solutions.

It is so tempting to become infatuated with "solutions" which make the Christian life easy.
We are tempted by things which promise to lift us out from the toilsome path through the desert, and set us down safe and sound on the far side of the sands.

How attractive it is to think of an experience which can instantly remove obstacles and land us in a place of spiritual enjoyment without alloy.

Perhaps four hundred years ago William Law affirmed that the greater price we pay for a spiritual truth the greater bargain we obtain.
Alas! we like to read it backward ... and today the less we pay, the better it suites us.

The Bible warns to lay hands suddenly on no man for ministry (1Tim 5.22)
and yet we do it all the time "because we can."
The "latest and greatest" holds an irresistible charm and the slow process of the husbandman who has "long patience" awaiting the fruit is forsaken.

Moses had his forty years in the desert, and Paul had his own experience in Arabia.
Job learnt his lesson in pain, and David cried in his bed.
Down through the history of church biography men have found God when all other sources have proved to be mere mirages without substance.

Saints, there is a realm in God far beyond our present thinking, a realm so vast that it reaches into the reality of eternity.
It is a realm where God Himself opens before us the wonders of the working of His love in the world in which we live.

A Vision... of Brightness

There is a spiritual truth: we possess what our spirits see.

Jesus asked Peter "Whom say ye that I am?" 
And upon Peter's confession of the revelation within, Jesus said "I will give unto you the keys...whatsoever ye bind..loose...shall be bound...loosed".
Jesus is saying "What you see in Me I give to you."

Paul declares to the Thessalonians (2Thess 2:8) that the Lord will destroy the wicked one...by the Brightness of His coming.

It may have been Campbell Morgan who said, that before preaching on a passage he would read it fifty times seeking to understand.
I wonder if we could contemplate the word Brightness in the same way until it dawn within us as a revelation from heaven.

There is a transcendant reality in God which we must perceive if we are to live in the realm of His kingdom.

It is the Brightness of the True Light ... a brightness beyond all earthly light.
The Brightness of the One Who fills all eternity, far beyond all that pertains to this realm of shadows.
The enemy-destroying Light, which causes all to be subservient to itself. 

In our world we are surrounded by gloom and we need a vision of God's Brightness if we are to know Him.
Moses asked "show me Thy glory"... not just the works, the deliverances and the manna, but "show me Thyself."

We cannot live beyond our vision, and if we are satisfied with the things around us, we will never see beyond them, or live above them.

We live in a world wracked by the forces of spiritual warfare and it is time to lift our eyes above the shadows around us.
It is time to see the Ever-and-Ever Light of the One Who will bring all to its final destination...
It is time to walk, not in the light of earth but in the light of God's Brightness.
It is time to look with wide open eyes, quickened by the God-given vision, until  darkness is done away and we walk our earthly pathway in the light of His Brightness.