Awareness
But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. (Ephesians 2:4–9)
Where are you? We might think this is a simple question to answer. All we must do is open our eyes, and we will see where we are. If we need to get somewhere, we have tools like Google Maps that show us our location, where we are going, and how to get there. Yet, for some of us, locational awareness does not come easily. I consider myself directionally challenged. I never quite know where I am. If someone asks me which way is north, I will return a blank stare. If you are in a big parking lot, and someone is walking around looking for their car, it is probably me.
In Ephesians chapters one through three, Paul talks about another kind of awareness that we can’t discern with our eyes or find on a map. He says God has seated us with Christ in the heavenly places. Some scholars assume this is a little temple talk. The Jews called the Holiest of Holies in the temple the heavenly place, the place where heaven and earth became one. They associated it with the Shekinah, the glory of God’s presence. Through union with Christ, this is not a place we visit, but a place we are seated, and in that place is infinite kindness. Paul uses the word “together” three times in Ephesians three to describe how Christ’s victory defines us. The heavenly place is where we fully realize our togetherness with God.
We are in the heavenly place. We do not achieve it, and there is no day on which we finally arrive. If we assume we are getting closer and closer to the Lord, we do not understand Paul’s words. If we read this passage again, we will see there is not one thing to do. It is a statement of fact, of reality itself. Paul was describing you. His message was not one of becoming but of being. The first chapters of Ephesians tell us who we are and where we are. Paul asks us only to open the eyes of our heart just as we open our physical eyes every day.
If the heavenly place is not our experience, we lack awareness, not worthiness. If there is a Christian journey, it is an unveiling, not an accomplishment. We become increasingly aware of God’s reality, letting go of the illusion of absence for the truth of God’s presence. Our journey, more than anything, is a change of mind.
Awareness of the infinite is something that we are losing in our day, and we have been for some time. William Wishard wrote a remarkable book called Between Two Ages: The 21st Century and the Crisis of Meaning. In it he says we Americans are losing consciousness. This does not mean we are passing out all the time. It means we are losing our awareness of the unseen, and we are becoming conscious only of the seen.
At Thorncrown Chapel, we have had over eight million visitors over a 45-year period. That is a lot of people to watch over a substantial period. I have been there for forty of those years, and I believe Wishard is right.
Thorncrown was designed to be a thin place. This expression comes from ancient Celtic Christianity. A thin place is a space where the line between heaven and earth is thin. Fay Jones, the architect, believed architecture can be spiritual. It can help us be aware of the infinite. Thorncrown is not closer to God. It is just a place where it is a little easier to see God’s closeness. That is what the chapel was meant to be, a place we open our eyes, see God’s glory, and know we are a part.
It seems fewer people are having a thin-place experience when they visit. Many still have a finite experience of beauty, and sometimes that is awe-inspiring, but too many perceive nothing at all. Increasingly, we get reviews that say, “There is nothing to do here…one star!”
Cell phones sped up our loss of consciousness. They are a wonderful tool for communication, finding information, and other conveniences, but they can also steal our awareness. We can lose consciousness not only of God’s glory but of the beauty that surrounds us, replacing the material world with a digital one. Our desire becomes capturing our lives with a picture rather than living in the moment.
Humanity’s loss of consciousness far precedes the creation of cell phones. It began to change about 500 years ago with the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment. This change of mind brought many good things with it, but as science has taken center stage, so did materialism.
Materialism is not just the love of material things. It is the thought that the finite world is reality, and what can be seen is all there is. A philosophy grew out of science: “If it can’t be measured, it does not exist.” The phrase space/time came to define reality. Reality is space in a dimension of time. If there were no time, nothing would ever happen, or some say everything would happen all at once.
If reality is just space and time, life becomes a material experience and nothing else. The great human endeavor becomes a better material experience. Science has certainly succeeded at this quest. We enjoy possessions, comforts, and healthy lives no one dreamed of 500 years ago.(1)
According to Wishard, our loss of awareness accelerated in the 20th century. An enormous creation of wealth fueled materialism’s engine. In the United States, we created more wealth in 100 years than all the previous civilizations combined. This helped ingrain the material paradigm in our psyche. We were once a need-based society where our desire was for what we needed. We became want-based people who conclude getting what we want is the key to happiness. This is the core philosophy of consumerism.
When materialism and consumerism combined, the American dream was born. Its goal was an ever-better material experience. Technology has fueled the fire. Now, if our material experience doesn’t cut it, through games, movies, and TV shows we can have a digital experience that is everything our lives aren’t.
We are drowning in materialism but largely ignore it. It permeates our thinking. The media bombards us with it every day. Countless advertisements assure us that consumption is the way to completeness. All we need is a little more. Movies and television only acknowledge material existence. They portray the struggle to turn a bad material experience into a good one. To the world, life is an endless flow of bad happenings and good happenings. Our struggle with bad things makes a good story, but if we are not careful, it can become the story that defines us.
“No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. (Matthew 6:24)
Materialism has infiltrated the church and how we understand God. We see it in how we teach faith. Many teachers define faith as the means to a better material experience. If we possess enough faith, we can turn a bad circumstance into a good one. We can turn lacking into having. It makes us the head and not the tail.
Finite blessings were the central promise of the Old Covenant. At Mount Sinai, God said that if His people obeyed His commandments, He would give them an excellent material experience. In Leviticus and Deuteronomy there is a whole page of finite blessings for those who keep the Torah. Life would be good. God also said He would give them a bad material experience if they disobeyed. Life would be bad, very bad. There is a little more than a page of curses for disobedience.
In our day, we have blended the old and new covenants. We replaced Torah keeping with faith, but the outcome is still finite blessings. While we see material blessings in the new covenant, they are not at its core. Its promise is infinite, not a good life but eternal life. The New Testament challenged the world’s definition of life and reality. Jesus brought the experience of the infinite and made life an experience of who God is, not just an experience of good and bad. He gave Old Covenant Isreal a land in which to dwell, but for us, He opened the heavenlies and seated us there.
Therefore, I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, do not cease to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers: that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality and power and might and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come. And He put all things under His feet and gave Him to be head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all. (Ephesians 1:15–23)
The body of Christ is a wonderful picture of our relationship with God. Our biological body excels at the material experience. We have five senses to help us get along in the physical world. These, along with our brains, wire us to experience the good and bad of finite existence. We call this awareness consciousness. Our body is at home in space/time.
The body of Christ is spiritual. It is at home in the heavenlies, and it is for a heavenly experience. We often associate spirituality with certain deeds, such as prayer, meditation, and Bible study. This is unfortunate, because a spiritual person is someone who is aware of the infinite. To them, life is more than a series of good and bad experiences. It is the experience of the unseen God. Who He is defines the moments, not finite circumstances. This is at the heart of faith in the New Testament.
Most often, our experience of God is the opposite of our material experience. The world can be in turmoil, but we know peace. God’s peace is infinite. This means it had no measure, but it also means it is always so. While the world hopes for troubles to go away, the body of Christ is at rest in infinite peace. Trials are always happening, but so is God’s peace. Our hearts choose the reality in which we dwell.
Our lives can be empty. We own nothing we want, no reason to be happy, but in Christ we experience joy. In fact, we overflow, because God is the one who fills all in all. If life is merely a material experience, we need a good one to be happy. When Christ is our life, we dwell above good and bad. If you have ever been full when you had nothing you wanted, you have experienced the Spirit.
Our enemies can surround us but still love them. They strike us, but we do not need to hit back. Why? We experience this reality: God is love. In the world, if someone diminishes our finite experience, if they take from us or devalue us, we must strike back to save ourselves. In Christ, we have worth no one can diminish, and no one can make us empty no matter what they take from us. We have no need to retaliate.
Look for God in the opposites and you shall surely find Him. Look for Him in your emptiness, and He will reveal His fullness. On the days your material experience suggests God is far away, He will unveil His nearness. When the finite measures of your worth are bankrupt, He will reveal the infinite righteousness that defines you. Thus, we walk by faith and not by sight.
When we ponder reality, we likely think of the external world. This is the way most people define existence. We are back to science and the materialism that comes with it. If it can’t be measured, it is not real. We define awareness as alertness to our surroundings, and getting real is reaching an honest appraisal of external circumstances.
With God, the highest reality comes from within you. This idea is very foreign to us. In ourselves is the hardest place to see God. We think of Him as up in heaven or maybe beside us or upon us. Yet, the internal dwelling is most dear to the Lord.
We see temple imagery throughout the Bible. This should reveal God’s intentions. He does not come just to bless but to inhabit. We are His chosen dwelling, the place where the infinite and finite become one. This unfathomable togetherness takes place within our innermost being. This inner reality defines us and every moment of our lives.
On the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.” (John 7:37–38.)
Christ never intended for the inner reality to remain hidden. He died and rose so it could come out into our external experience. When Jesus died, the veil in the temple was torn. We say this means we have access to the glory of God, and it does. Yet if we are the temple of the Holy Spirit, Christ’s death means the inner place is not veiled. The Christ within is going to come out into our outer experience. Thus, life becomes not just a material experience but an experience of who God is.
Jesus came to save a people whose only reality was their temporal experience. They hoped God would intervene and make it better. God’s people were having a terrible material experience, and its name was Rome. They hoped the Messiah would once again make them the head and not the tail and scatter their enemies in seven directions (Deuteronomy 28:13).
Jesus came to make them the head and not the tail, but it was in a way they could not comprehend. He came to break the illusion of materialism for the reality of the kingdom of God. From that time forth, reality would not be found in things that can be measured but in knowing the infinite. Life would be more about knowing than having and wanting.
How we define reality affects everything. It can be a projection of our own ego, who I am, what I have, and what happens to me. The ego sits as the judge of good/evil and bad/good. If we follow its delusions, our life becomes an endeavor to control our external reality. Or we can be spiritual. We can realize our ego’s projections are the illusion and reality is Christ. This is death and resurrection. We die to the ego’s reality, and we are raised in the mind of Christ. We experience His consciousness of Himself, and He is reality.
But as it is written:
“Eye has not seen, nor ear heard,
Nor have entered into the heart of man
The things which God has prepared for those who love Him.”
But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God. For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God.
These things we also speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he who is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is rightly judged by no one. For “who has known the mind of the LORD that he may instruct Him?” But we have the mind of Christ. (1 Corinthians 2:9–16)
Changing our understanding of reality won’t happen at the height of our efforts to catch God. It will more likely happen in weakness, failure, and in not having what we want. A paradigm shift occurs when our previous paradigm fails. These failures are the catalyst for awakening.
We hope for revival, but revival differs from an awakening. Revivals begin with great human effort, hours of prayer and repentance. There is glory in this, but it is the fading glory Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians 3. Awakening begins not at the height of our pursuit but at its end, when our efforts to capture God have failed. It happens in low places, because here we will admit we are wrong. We see our efforts as futility, even contrary to the Spirit. When the reality of the ego’s making comes to naught, God reveals He is reality.
Therefore, God shakes what can be shaken (Hebrews 12:26-27), and that is our material experience. The Lord challenges our definition of reality until it fails. Paradigms die hard, but after death comes resurrection. We experience the mind of Christ, seeing as He sees, and knowing God as He knows God. We know only in His knowing, and we perceive reality only through His consciousness. In this togetherness, we find ourselves face to face with He who is and who has always been.
Let us end by asking the questions we started with. “Where are you?” When you answer, do you think merely of a place in space/time? Is your highest reality your material experience? Do you seek meaning in having and achieving? One of the Lord’s greatest works is to change our answers to the deepest questions of life. We are in Him, and He is our highest reality. Our lives are an experience of who He is in the good, bad, and ordinary. Our meaning is found in knowing, and to know Christ is to comprehend reality.
(1) Interestingly, during the 20th and early 21st centuries, cracks in materialism’s foundations began to show up. Scientists were once convinced that space/time is reality, but now they are not so sure. Many are saying there is a quantum realm from which space/time originates. This realm is timeless and possibly even conscious. There are an increasing number of physicists and neuroscientists who conclude the material realm originates with consciousness and not the other way around. Are they brushing up against God and peering into the heavenly place? Time will tell, but experts say that the war between science and faith might someday end, and this will be a revolution that will make the last one pale in comparison.
