Pyromaniacs has an insightful post on the fear of doing anything in the flesh. Sarx is the Greek word for flesh, and therefore sarkicophobia is the fear of working in the flesh, out of the flesh, or with the flesh providing the motivation or force. Of course, this is opposed to being “in the Spirit.” The typical illustration (and useful in so many ways) is the glove metaphor. We are the glove and Spirit is the invisible hand moving the glove. The verse that goes along with this is “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”
So far, so good. But where this can lead, and does under some “higher life” teaches, is a passivity when it comes to action and an introversion that can so twist the mind and soul that paralysis sits in. There is such a suspicion of human effort that the natural course of thinking rationally, planning, and executing are considered fleshly. Christianity is turned into a “state of mind” exercise that brings endless and tortuous self-examination and self-hate.
I grew up with the “higher life” teaching and found it exhausting and an experience in failure. At first taste it was thrilling and promising. It was an altered state of consciousness sort of thing. Exciting speakers, books (like Watchman Nee’s The Normal Christian Life), conferences and testimonies kept us comng back for more. But it was like a drug that you needed more of to get the same effect. And it ultimately became an experience in solipsism, that the only thing I was in fact experiencing was me – my moods, fears, my desires, my passions, my, my, my, my. It was a deep well I was falling into, with no bottom and no light.
It was the Reformers, such as Luther, Calvin and others, who rescued me from this journey into virtual reality. Their contribution was to inform me that human effort in obedience to Christ was not a bad thing but a good thing. They let me know that “in Christ” did not mean the substitution of Christ for my soul or mind. I was still Don Bryant and not Jesus. Don had to make decisions, take action, think, plan, do. And though all Don did would be tainted with sin, he could not escape into a fantasy land of “letting go and letting God” if by that was meant that everything about Don would be the mystical, irrational and fantastical leading of the Spirit without the hard work of going to bed on time, setting the alarm, dragging myself out of bed and in an orderly way setting about doing the work of Christ for that day.
Higher life movements iarestill around in many forms. After all, who could be against the higher life? But what they have in common is not, in fact, a higher life. What they have in common is a suspicion of human exertion and a flawed anthropology that seeks to so melt humanity into deity that there is a virtual identity – in other words, to make the Christian life easier than it is, more natural, shall we say, to walk by sight and not by faith. Here is the reality. I will never be God. I will always and eternally be other than God. I cannot escape being me – learning, growing, repenting, changing, and so on. I will never be in that place where God and me are the same. And I will never be spared the responsibility to make decisions, perspire blood like Jesus did at Gethsemane, be tempted to turn back, experience the withdrawal of God’s felt presence and yet choose to walk by faith and not by sight anyway.
At times, by God’s grace, this is sometimes less exhausting. He provides oasis moments of refreshing where serving Him and doing His will is so natural, so a part of me that even the hardest task is no task at all. But I cannot stay there. Soon I am out in the wilderness feeling the heat and wondering where the day’s water and bread will come from. There I will feel my faintness. There I will feel my desire to quit. There I will wonder, doubt and fear. There I will not find green pastures but hot sand and thorn bushes. Until God refreshes me at the next oasis. How long which state of the soul exists is in God’s hands.
Some Christians turn this reality into an excuse for a “gee-ain’t-it-awful” approach to Christianity. They seem to expect so little. It’s at this point that I wish to be around some of the “higher life” type of Christians. They don’t dwell on the wilderness experiences and they seem to expect more from their faith in Christ. But soon they end up irritating me. They deny the complexities of the Christian experience by covering over the failures with a too quickly said PTL. They make out our journey to be easier than it proves to be and send everyone around them on a guilt trip. Ultimately, keeping between the two edges of the shore and not running aground in either direction is the safer place. It’s a “not too much this, not too much that” sort of thing. And everyday we are adjusting.
So the next time a spiritual Bernie Madoff (the financier who promised higher returns than the market could really return and was found in fact to be running a Ponzi shceme) comes along and promises you an escape from the struggle check a little closer. There are no easy returns in the land of following Christ. We still must deny ourselves, take up our cross every day and follow him, losing our lives. And putting ourselves to death has never been, and never will be, an easy thing to do.
