So many, many people who think they are Christians are
really Christian mystics. They ascribe subjective assumptions about God and
justify them with a few dozen (or hundred) verses to support their claims. Dan
Phillips calls these people “members of the subjective-revelation school, the
pinprick-individual-semi-revealed-will-of-God school.”
Included in this bunch are Henry Blackaby, John Piper and
almost all Charismatics. This camp allows that the Bible is God’s word, but they
also allow for God’s special revelation to them apart from the Word of God. The
result is often a form of chaos that results in issues within the church. They
also hold that you can be doing everything right, from a Biblical,
Spirit-breathed faith perspective and still be out of God’s will. That’s pure
and simple mysticism.
The problems with this approach are many. Proof-texting is
rampant among this group. If you can just collect enough verses on a subject,
you can prove your understanding of it. Leaning on experience to “properly”
interpret Scripture is also big with this camp. They also tend to engage in a
misrepresentation of discipleship. They seem to think discipleship is cerebral,
and can be imputed by talk, by the voices of angels or by some mystical mumbo-jumbo. That’s pure and simple
mysticism. True discipleship involves getting to and practicing the
nitty-gritty, here’s how it’s done, details of followship.
Let’s take an example. Suppose you wanted to have a Sunday
School class grow by witnessing and/or serving in the community. During a class
you break into groups and members of each group share where they are in the
area of witnessing and serving. Then the class comes back together and a
representative from each group shares some of the things they talked about in
the group. They have grown in discipleship, right?
Wrong. That’s pure and simple mysticism.
Instead, there should be a specific time set aside, perhaps
a series of classes in which the actual procedure of witnessing and/or serving is
practiced before going out to inflict the community with amateurism, faulty
doctrine and other pit-falls.
One area of great confusion with these folks is the
leadership of the Holy Spirit. According to them, if God has led them on Monday
to preach a sermon next Sunday, the Holy Spirit can “inspire” them on Saturday
night to preach something else. Then they stand before the congregation
stumbling and bumbling their way through in a random manner and proclaim that
the message of the Holy Spirit. What a farce! That was not the leadership of
the Holy Spirit. That was their imaginations becoming vain. They think, “I’m a
Christian, my mind is suddenly focused on this sermon instead of the one God
originally gave me so it must be the Holy Spirit’s leading.”
Nonsense. That’s pure and simple mysticism. The Holy Spirit
has never, does not now and never will lead that way. That’s not even His job!
His job is to point to, and only to, the Lord Jesus Christ and His unmerited favor
that leads to salvation.
Preaching requires hours and hours of proper, careful
preparation. If that is not your bag, then God has not called you to preach.
God is not capricious and does not flop about in the wind like so many waving
flags. He is purposeful. If He has something for you to preach, He will give
you ample time to prepare. If He does not give you ample time, He has not told
you to preach it.
Way too many preachers engage in stream-of-consciousness
preaching where some word or phrase they’ve just said or read reminds them of
something and they take off chasing it as though it makes sense. That is not
Biblical preaching, regardless of how many verses of the Bible are quoted in
the process. That’s pure and simple mysticism.
People fall for mysticism. It touches a part of them that is
buried deep in the psyche. They yearn for the exciting. They crave the
mysterious. That’s why so many love magicians (who really deal in illusion, not
magic). They look for some outside “force” to guide them. They are not
satisfied with the God of the Bible and His plan of salvation through Christ.
They want more. They want mysticism.
That’s too bad, because if God’s plan of salvation is not
enough, nothing else will ever be.
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