The Cost of the Deeper Christian Life

I want to discuss with you tonight why you should not be interested in the deeper Christian life. And I am dead serious. And that’s the subject. The reason you should not be interested in the deeper Christian life is very simply: it could very well destroy you. It could destroy you physically. It could destroy you psychologically. It could destroy you spiritually. It doesn’t fall to everyone to get interested in the deeper Christian life. It’s dangerous to get interested in it, and in fact, the truth of the matter is it’s dangerous to be interested in the Christian life at all, because the Christian life can destroy you. I think that the deeper Christian life is more equipped to destroy you than anything else. We all enjoy the word “destroyed” because we think of all the bad that is going to be destroyed, but that’s not really what I’m talking about. I mean, you could end up being a blubbering idiot, or you could end up dead. This is a dangerous matter, friends, to get involved in.

Most of us get drawn to the deeper Christian life because of a seeking within our spirits. What you two young brothers are going to get this week…you’re not coming here particularly out of this great interest. You just stumbled in on this. What you’re going to get this week is what all of us should have gotten when we first got saved. In fact, probably this is the warning we should have received before we got saved. The warning that I’m going to give you tonight because if you took out the words “the deeper Christian life”, you would actually be talking about the Christian life as it ought to be. There really should not have ever been a Christian nation. There should not have been a Christian Europe. There should have they should still be German and Italian blood-drinking pagans over there right now with little groups of hidden Christians, but because of Constantine, there came the Christian nation. This thing should still be dangerous.

Well, here’s the first reason you ought not to be interested in the deeper Christian life. It is not well known, and therefore it is open to great misunderstanding. Let’s say that you have been a Christian for a while. You’ve gone off on all the ordinary things, the retreats, you’ve heard all the sermons, read all the books, and it doesn’t satisfy you. Now you’ve either touched something singularly or with a small group of people, and your friends have found out about it, and they are Christians, but they have never heard of this, and you don’t know a label to put on it. They don’t know what you’re into, and someone has said we have a tendency to kill that which we do not understand, and if you don’t understand some mysterious aspect of what’s going on in another Christian’s life, you tend to get suspicious of what’s going on. And this has been happening for the last 1500 years. A few people have gotten interested in the deeper things of Christ. Other Christians have not understood it, and they get caught in a spin dry. They get caught in the ringer. Anything that’s not well-known is subject to misunderstanding.

Now, what comes out of that is social rejection and being socially ostracized. I wish Christians could understand how painful that is. Persecution is an overglamorized thing. Until you go through a grocery line, checking out your groceries, and you accidentally got behind and in front of another Christian and they stand there going through the checkout line and they both refused to speak to you, and these were close friends of yours in the Christian faith, and they really are embarrassed to be standing there with you and they don’t want to talk to you or they refusing to talk to you. Until that happens to you, you don’t know what social rejection means. And I’ll say just like this, most Christians can’t handle that. They immediately just…this is not what I had expected, and they give up whatever it is they’re chasing at that moment.

This used to happen to people 50 years ago in the charismatic movement, the Pentecostal movement. That doesn’t happen anymore; now it’s the charismatic who’s standing there in the line, not talking to you. They’ve gotten very accepted in the Christian world, and they’re the ones who begin to look peculiar at folks who are doing something besides speaking in tongues. I’m not picking on the charismatics. All of you charismatics out there, relax. Wait till you find out what I’ve got to say about the fundamentalists, and especially Southern Baptists who are neither charismatic nor fundamentalist.

As I read the literature written by Christians of long ago, you kind of read between the lines because sometimes they just hint at what they’re trying to say, and sometimes they address a situation and call it by a word that doesn’t make any sense to us today. But you get behind the pen, you get behind the heart, and sometimes the broken heart, and you say, “What’s really provoking that sentence? Why has this devout saintly Christian written this way? What’s he saying? What’s she saying?” And one of the recurring themes of Christians who belong to this little group who get interested in the deep things of Christ is that they are the natural enemies…and it works both ways in this case…the natural enemies of the intellectual. And that, of course, in itself is a word most of us don’t understand. What do you mean by the intellectual? The intellectual is naturally averse to and afraid of the deeper Christian life, and the brother or sister who is really involved in it, he is just really angry at all of the volleys being shot from the intellectual side of the Christian faith.

Well, Gene, I’ve never met an intellectual. I don’t know what you’re talking about here. Who is the intellectual? Well, then maybe I should tell you what it really is. What was Fenelon saying when he brought this up? What was Molino saying when he brought this up? What was Guyon saying when she took dead aim at something and blasted away? In her world, she was talking to people who had a lot of head knowledge about the Lord but very little internal experience with Christ, and, trying to find a word for it, she called them intellectuals or something like that.

I would say those who are very tied up in and defend, and have a real broad understanding of ritual. Those who are really into theology and can just tell you all the things we should and should not believe. Same kind of people. We don’t run across those kinds of folks much, do we? Not a whole lot, really, we don’t, but they’re very tied up in this is and this isn’t, and it’s all up here. There’s very little of their real personal relationship to an indwelling Christ, and they have a really natural, honest fear of people who talk about a Lord who dwells within us, and I’ll get to that a little bit further. Okay, we don’t know too much about those two, but boy oh boy, here it comes. Are you ready?

In our age, there are people who are more Bible-centered than Christ-centered. The word intellectual fits perfectly right there. Intellectualism: a basic objective understanding of the Bible, geography, geology, archaeology, Greek, the linguistics of it, the syntax of it, the interpretation of it, the exposition of it, the memorization of it, the parabolic, the eschatological, the ecclesiological, and I’m running out of big words. The cosmological, I can go on, I just began to remember some of them, the… All of these things…books outline the doctrines, explain the methods of how to know the Lord according to steps 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. What you should and should not do. The seven ways to approach God in prayer; the four things you must do in the beginning. What it means to pray in the name of Jesus, what it means to pray in the name of the Father, and why you should pray in the name of the Lord Jesus. Your relationship to the Lord on the basis of redemption during prayer, your relationship with Him, as far as your relationship with other Christians in prayer, and on and on, that all sounds good. It turns a lot of people on, but when it comes down to it, that’s the mongoose and the cobra. And don’t ask me which is the Christian who’s in the deeper Christian life and the one who is very centered in the Bible, but they are just natural enemies. I’m sorry about that, but it’s the truth. Every once in a while, some of these people get over here into this camp, as the Bible man gets over here, but almost never does this person move from here to here.

Now, the person who is really Bible centered will think for all the world I’m some sort of a liberal who doesn’t believe in the word of God. This is the only thought that a Bible student can come up with: that man, oh boy, he’s a heretic. Well, that’s what I’m talking about, and that’s why you ought not to get interested in the deeper Christian life, because that’s what they’ll tell you, whereas the man who is Christ-centered was long ago Bible centered. And as the old saying goes, he gave it up for Lent. He gave it up for Christ. His appreciation of the Bible is as great as that of a man who is Bible-centered; he just doesn’t talk about it anymore. The center is Christ. There is no difference in their reverence for inspired Scripture, for written revelation, nor for their commitment and belief in the authority of Scripture, and the verbal inspiration of it, its accuracy, or any other term you wish to use. But nonetheless, they seem to be always at war with one another. And then, because this group is bigger than this group, you can really expect to catch a lot of criticism and be really misunderstood.

I said in the video previously, I’ll repeat it. I have never seen a man who is Bible-centered as faithful to the Bible as a man who is Christ-centered. The man who is Christ-centered will consistently be more faithful to scripture than the man who is Bible-centered. A man who is Bible-centered can be Bible-centered, carry all the trappings and traditions of 1800 years, and find no problems with them. The man or woman who is Christ-centered is going to be naturally at war with traditions and modern-day practices that the Bible never mentions. I’ve always been fascinated by the man who is Bible-centered, and he hears that a friend of his has gotten interested in the deep things of the Lord, and immediately says, “That’s dangerous.” Oh, people have been drawn off of that throughout the centuries; they’re always getting their lives messed up; terrible things have come out of that. I’ve tried to think throughout history, where did someone who was really wrapped up in Jesus Christ ever get dangerous? And there are a few instances.