Do you feel that we are moving right now, moving very fast? Switch on all your senses — your eyes, your ears, your nose, all five of them — to maximum, and immediately tell me: do you sense motion? You do not. And yet I am telling you the absolute truth: at this very moment we are moving at over one thousand miles per hour. The earth is spinning on its axis at over a thousand miles an hour. By the time I have finished speaking, we will have moved hundreds of miles. And yet every sense you have tells you that you are on solid, stationary ground.
Your senses are wrong — or at least they are not telling you what is actually happening. This is not a game. I am trying to drive home an exceedingly important point. The trouble with us when it comes to the spiritual life is that we have grown up relying upon our senses as the primary — indeed the only — source of information fed into our brain. And when we bring that mentality into the spiritual life, we face a blank wall. If we can hardly perceive correctly what happens in the material world with our physical senses, then much less — indeed not at all — can we perceive spiritual things with those same senses.
Consider speed. Driving at sixty miles per hour, you hear the wind rushing by and see the road markings flashing past — your senses register movement clearly. But I have driven a German Opel at over one hundred miles an hour — one hundred and seventy kilometres per hour — and had hardly any sensation of speed at all, because the structure and design of that car damped it. The same speed, and my senses were giving me entirely different information. I had to look at the speedometer again and again because it did not feel like a hundred miles an hour. Our senses cannot be depended upon to give us accurate information, because so many other factors are involved.
Consider an aeroplane. On the runway at one hundred miles an hour you feel enormous vibration, noise, everything rushing past your window. But once the plane reaches cruising altitude of thirty-five thousand feet at six hundred and fifty miles an hour, you have no sensation of speed whatever. You walk around the cabin exactly as you would walk on the ground. The speed has tripled or quadrupled and yet your senses give you nothing. Funny. And the human race, for almost all of its history, believed that the earth was flat — because every sense anyone possessed told them so. The person who first said we are spinning on an axis was persecuted, even by the church, because the church was making the same mistake as everybody else: going by sense perception.
Translate this to the spiritual life. We have spent years in school training ourselves to process the information that comes through our eyes and ears, confident that our minds can assess it better than any computer. And then we try to perceive spiritual things — and we face a blank wall. This is directly connected to the camp theme, which is taken from Luke 18:8, the second half of that verse: "When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith?" That is a rhetorical question. The expected answer is no. He will not find faith. And if he looks through this congregation right now, for ninety percent of us, the answer is no — not the kind of faith he is looking for.
The parable in Luke 18 is the parable of the widow and the unjust judge, and it has to do with prayer. Some dear brothers and sisters have said to me: I don't know how to pray. And what happens when they pray? They turn up their senses. Lord, I'm listening. They strain their ears for twenty-five seconds. Nothing. They look around — all they see is the wall in front of them. They try the sixth sense, tuning in, cranking up the power. Still nothing. And they give up. Because they are looking for their senses to give them something — something to see, something to hear, something to feel.
Even in an aeroplane — the moment you take off and your engines are running, though you can see and hear nothing of it, this entire hall is filled with radio waves, perhaps twenty stations broadcasting, and all you can hear is my voice. You need a radio because your excellent ears cannot detect what is actually present in the air around you. The spiritual world is infinitely more so. God speaks, God is present, God is at work — and our senses give us nothing.
I was recently reading the work of a psychiatrist — a Christian psychiatrist — who reminds us of a remarkable fact: our conscious mind constitutes a very small percentage of our total mind. Ninety-five percent of your mind is unconscious. You do not even know yourself, because ninety-five percent of your mind is unavailable to your conscious awareness. And consider this: I went to school in Switzerland as a boy, in the German-speaking part, and learned German for one year. Then we returned to China, and I did not speak a single word of German for the next ten or twelve years. When I returned to Switzerland over a decade later, I expected to have forgotten everything — but within a few days I was speaking German again as though I had never been away. Where had that information been stored for twelve years? In the vast reservoir of the unconscious mind, recorded perfectly, waiting. Even that which is within us is hidden from our conscious senses.
So I ask you honestly at this moment: do you function by faith or by sight? And do not give me the easy answer — "I function by both." That is the second reason for unfaithfulness, and we will come to it. The root of the disease of unbelief is that we are carnal, as the Bible calls it — functioning according to the flesh, according to the outward eye, not according to the spirit, not according to what the Bible calls the inner man. And that is the pathology I want to trace.
In Galatians 2:20 and Galatians 6:14, Paul speaks of the cross of Christ coming into his personal life — being crucified to the world and the world to him. That is what must happen to us. The cross comes into my life and crucifies me, so that I no longer function on this carnal level but on a new, spiritual level. Unless we learn what the cross means in our lives — the cross by which we are crucified to the world and its constant demand upon our five senses — we shall never learn to commune with God and be led by his Spirit. What I mean, what the theme of this camp is about, what faith consists of, we must continue to develop. But the first and foundational point is this: you and I must understand that our physical senses, which we have relied on for everything, cannot tell us the nature of spiritual reality. To enter the spiritual life we must once and for all move beyond them.
# Will Jesus Find Faith? (Part B) — 2 Corinthians 5:7: Faith vs. Sight, the Foolishness of the Cross, and the Parable of the Widow
Our brother Calvin reminded us yesterday of 2 Corinthians 5:7: "We live by faith, not by sight." Sight is the most important of all our physical senses, and yet Paul strikes it clean off: if you are used to living by sight, you cannot function with faith. To function with faith, you have to finish with reliance upon your physical sight. That is asking a great deal — all our life we have depended on it.
Some Christians say: I function by both sight and faith. That is the very reason for unfaithfulness. We try to get one foot firmly planted in the world and the other one in the kingdom of God — the best of both worlds. If Jesus comes, at least he has me on this leg and can pull me in. If he does not come, I still have my other foot in the world, my property, my security. Paul said we live by faith, not by sight and faith. You either function by sight or by faith, not both. I am talking about spiritual things, not suggesting that after hearing Paul's words you should close your eyes and fall down the stairs. I had a friend in Cambridge — a brilliant mathematician — who decided that he had to pray with his eyes closed and therefore walked down the street of Cambridge praying, eyes shut. He came back the next day rejoicing that he had walked the whole street without hitting a tree. That is not what Paul means. I am talking about the spiritual life.
When you come to pray, you must learn to function not with your senses but with your spirit. You have a spirit — God has implanted in each of us the capacity to perceive spiritual things. We can see the unseen; we can perceive the spiritual. But we must learn how. If your spirit is blind, blinded by Satan as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4, then like the blind man in the Gospels you can say: Lord, give me my sight; heal my spiritual perception, that I may see — like Moses who endured as seeing him who is invisible. We depend upon him to give us the sight we do not have. Salvation is of grace.
This also answers the parable of Luke 18 — the widow and the unjust judge. Have you ever, like this widow, had the sense that you have prayed and prayed and God never answers? Every sense has cried out to God. You strained your eyes, your ears, everything — and God does not answer. God appears to you as an unjust judge, just as he appeared to Job, who said the heaven is as brass and the earth like iron. At that point, most of us quit. That is the point of the parable — we quit one moment too soon. And in that state every moment of waiting feels like an eternity. When you pray and God does not answer at once, it feels like praying for ten thousand years. As my brother Albert said: he did not know how long he was in that room crying out to God, whether it was an hour or ten thousand years. That is the voice of experience.
What we need to do is endure, persevere in prayer longer. But we cannot, because our senses rebel. We cannot stand not having an answer immediately, in the age of instant coffee and instant noodles. The God of the universe does not operate on those terms, because his plan of salvation is one that requires that we learn to finish with the flesh. And the cross is precisely what accomplishes this — crucifying us to the world, crucifying the constant demand of our five senses clamoring upon us, so that we may learn to commune with God and be led by his Spirit.
God's ways of salvation make no sense to the senses whatsoever. He asked Noah — who was not even a carpenter — to build a box, an ark with two doors and barely a window, and told him the world would be saved by it. Anyone who knew anything about boats would have told you the thing would break in half under the pressure of water. It was ridiculous to every sense perception and every piece of rational analysis. But wait until you look at the cross — because that is even more absurd.
I was in Israel a couple of years ago, and in a little shop I saw a picture of the crucifixion — not the artistic impressions we are accustomed to, with Christ lifted high and majestic, light shining from all directions, small human figures gazing upward in awe. This was realistic. The cross was low. His enemies were almost at eye level with him, watching the weakness on his face. He was so weak that he could not even carry his cross for the last stretch to the place of crucifixion — he fell on the ground and could not get up; they had to compel Simon of Cyrene to carry it for him. By the time they had finished whipping him and spitting upon him, the blood and spittle mixed on his face; he did not look like a human being anymore. If you and I had been standing at Calvary and looked at that figure, many of us would have been sick, many would have fainted. There was nothing there for the senses to recognise as a Saviour.
And in his last strength he gasped out words from Psalm 22 — "Eili, eili, lama sabachthani" — I hear it coming from him as a weak whisper. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why have you left me? And his last prayer: Father, forgive them — again only a gasp, barely enough strength to form the words. This, the Saviour of the world? To every sense and every rational faculty — it cannot be the most cosmic joke ever heard. How can this creature hanging on wood as a Roman criminal, rejected by God in his own words, rejected by the religious authorities, rejected by the civil authorities — how can this be the Saviour? All our senses tell us it cannot.
And yet it is. How do we know? We do not, unless the cross touches us — and then we see. May it happen to each of us. If you do not yet see it, pray this day: Lord, please give me my sight, that I may see that which my physical senses cannot see. Let us pray.