The blindnesses we Christians don't see

A good friend of mine recently said to me, 'see your blindness'.

Paradoxical words because how can the blind see? It's like a Zen koan, an insoluble puzzle that forces discursive reason to be silent and stop its incessant chatter. Only the Holy Spirit of Truth can cause us to 'see our blindness' and then heal us.

The third chapter of Jonah revealed a blindness to me: when the people of Nineveh heard that judgement was coming upon their city, they began to amend their lives! They were sorry, yes, but it was a sorrow, borne out of a change in attitude, in heart, which issued in action.

The Reformers, Luther and Calvin, believed that the Christian life began in repentance and was to continue in repentance, a continual renewing of the mind or understanding; not merely an intellectual approval of interesting proposals but a divinely, initiated spiritual work involving the deep heart.

'Be not conformed to this world': I was educated early in Pentecostalism and Brethrenism - a strange mixture - but both emphasised the dangers of conformity to the world. Of course, my early education was about girls not wearing lipstick, young people going to dances and the cinema, drinking alcohol, coarse language and playing cards.

A Pentecostal preacher once shattered my easy complacency about standards by sharing that Pentecostals throughout the world had wildly divergent ideas about 'worldliness'. He joked that in one place in the deep south of the U.S. when he asked for a cup of coffee, he was told, "Coffee, coffee, down here we don't even drink whiskey!" What the preacher explained was that we always have to be aware of worldliness but we also have to be aware that the 'world' changes and that 'worldliness' in one generation or in one country may not be 'worldliness' in another. Some preaching about 'worldliness' is close to stupidity.

The Church at many levels has now become openly conformable to the present age. This situation is not because church members wear lipstick, dance, go to the pictures or say 'bloody'.

We must ask God to show us our blindness, our willingness to compromise with the spirit of the age so that our lives are little different from those outside the church. Our virtual atheism as defined by John Wesley, where we can consider anything as outside the superintendence of almighty God, is our biggest compromise with the world. Too many swallow camels but choke on gnats!