There is a yearning in every heart to know God and to experience His presence! Deep inside every one of us is the hearts cry that hungers for God to meet us and complete us. This is how we were created! We were all made with a God shaped vacuum inside of us that can only be filled by Jesus Christ. Nothing else satisfies. “In your presence is fullness of Joy, and at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” Psalm 16:11. That’s what we want to experience!
What price are you willing to pay to experience God’s presence?
What is a genuine experience of God like?
What is the normal Christian life?
- Mysticism is the attempt to get you to focus on your feelings.
- Mysticism is the attempt to misdirect your allegiances away from Christ.
- Mysticism is the belief that we can only know God through experiences.
- Mysticism is purely subjective.
- Mysticism diminishes the authority of Scripture. 2 Peter 1:3–8
- We should Test the spirits, but should not quench the Spirit.
Mysticism seeks experiences to enter the presence of God.
Christianity seeks Jesus which results in genuine experiences.
Intimacy with God is defined by His Word.
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Mysticism defrauds you of genuine faith.
Mysticism is trickery, only pretending to be humble.
Mysticism is an intrusion into the unseen, and unknowable.
We should involve ourselves in the things revealed in The Word. Deut 29:29.
Mysticism does not hold fast to the head!
Experience is the authority rather than Jesus being the Head.
We must let God’s Word interpret our experiences.
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Hold fast to Jesus as your Head.
Hold fast to Jesus and He will nourish your soul.
Hold fast to Jesus and He will bring you growth and maturity.
This is genuine spirituality! This is the experience you want! What you want is genuine nourishment that comes from putting Jesus first in your life. Spiritual, satisfying Nourishment comes from holding to the Head. When you put Jesus first in your life, in your family, in your worship and in your experiences, good things happen.
MESSAGE
Do you long for God’s presence?
There is a yearning in every heart to know God and to experience His presence! Deep inside every one of us is the hearts cry that hungers for God to meet us and complete us. This is how we were created! We were all made with a God shaped vacuum inside of us that can only be filled by Jesus Christ. Nothing else satisfies. “In your presence is fullness of Joy, and at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” Psalm 16:11. That’s what we want to experience!
Experience: That’s a key word we want to talk about. What price are you willing to pay to experience God’s presence? What would it be like to be transported to the heavenlies right into the throne room where God is seated surrounded by glorious light? To see the angels flying, singing “holy, holy, holy!” Would you like to experience transcendent colors, smells, sights, sounds and joys! Do you wish you could know awe inspiring dreams, visions, revelations, and sensations!
And hence the question: what is a genuine experience of God like? What can we Christians expect to experience from our faith? What is the normal Christian life?
We are going to try to answer some of those questions today by addressing the dangers of Mysticism. If Secularism is the most dangerous philosophy of the world, and Legalism is the most dangerous philosophy of religion, Mysticism is the most insidious attack on your spirituality.
Mysticism is the attempt to get you to focus on your feelings and experiences rather than on Jesus and the Word of God. Mysticism is the insidious, sly attempt to misdirect your allegiances away from Christ, and to entrap you in the hollow, illusive world of hyper-spirituality.
Let me try to define Mysticism for you: Mysticism is the belief that we can only know God through deep, otherworldly, transcendent, rapturous experiences. (rather than through simple faith in Jesus)
Mysticism is prevalent in our world and it is taking over Christianity. Tune into any TBN broadcast, and you are likely to hear conversations about supernatural experiences like dancing with angels, talking to Jesus face to face, taking trips to heaven, traveling in time, and other stories so amazing they sound like fairy tales. But the church is eating them up! [i]
At a time when the entire world seems to be turning away from using rational understanding and turning to the mystical means as the basis for life, Christians seem unaware of the implications of this trend for the faith.
If I were to give an appropriate label to the religious scene in the last three decades, I might call it “the age of confusion.” We no longer know what it means to be spiritual! We have churches claiming signs and wonders are the way, others say that delving deep into solitude and meditation is the way; some use trinkets, incense, candles and chanting, still others fasting or seeing dreams and visions, while yet still others opt for public performances.
But the basic problem of Mysticism is the belief that spirituality should or must be attained through recurring subjective experiences. “The mystic disdains the mind and seeks truth instead through the feelings, the imagination, personal visions, inner voices, private illumination, or other purely subjective means.”
For Example, well known speaker Joyce Meyer has said, “Stop trying to get hold of God with your head. It’s a heart thing. You’ve got to see what’s in your heart. As soon as you get into reasoning, you’re going to have trouble believing.[ii]
It is a tragedy that many have come to the place where they believe that doctrine and theology are almost like bad words: “Well, I don’t need doctrine, I don’t need theology; I just love Jesus.”
The disengaged mind is the enemy of the Christian. It is the friend of the false teacher, because the more your mind is disengaged, the easier it is to lead you astray
People start to pay less and less attention to Scripture, and more attention to the inner light. But eventually the novelty of it wears off. The activity dies down. What’s left is the internal Word, which, it turns out, is no different from our own opinions, convictions, and desires. What they are saying is that The Bible is not enough.
Because mystics relay on subjective, private, spiritual experiences for guidance and wisdom, they diminish the authority of Scripture. Vision and spiritual encounters become more important than the truths found in God’s Word.
Here is the greatest danger of Mysticism: It denies the sufficiency of Scripture and goes about to find another way for God to communicate with us. The Bible is not enough! The mystic has to have something more. And that is where many professing Christians are today: I’ve got to have a dream, I’ve got to have a vision, I’ve got to have an experience, I’ve got to get Holy Ghost goosebumps, I’ve got to feel something. In Mysticism, experience is king.
Second Peter 1:3–8 sums up our call nicely: “His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature,
Listen, I’m not against experience. I am NOT suggesting is that experiences should be shunned. Test, but don’t quench. Be critical, but not unbelieving.
‘Come now, let us reason together,’ says the Lord” (Isa. 1:18). ‘‘Test the Spirits” (1 John 4:1). ‘‘Give an account for the hope that is in you” (1 Pet. 3:15). ‘‘Love the Lord with all . . . your mind” (Matt. 22:37). ‘‘Whatever is true … let your mind dwell on these things” (Phil. 4:8). These are not idle suggestions; they are biblical imperatives.
I’m all for experiences which line up with God’s Word. But here’s the difference. Mysticism seeks experiences in the hopes that they will allow him to ender the presence of God! Biblical Christianity seeks God and that act in and of itself results in genuine experiences.
Christianity involves spiritual experience, but intimacy with God is defined by His Word and not by some sort of mysterious practice. Anything a Christian experiences must line up with the truth of the Bible. Drawing near to God involves things like regular prayer, studying God’s Word, worshiping God, and fellowshipping with other believers.
Christians do have mystical experiences. When we accept Jesus as Savior, we are indwelled by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit transforms us and enables us to live out God’s calling. Often, filled with the Holy Spirit, a Christian will demonstrate great wisdom or faith or spiritual discernment. A Christian filled with the Holy Spirit will also demonstrate things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control
Let’s see what this passage says about Mysticism:
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18 Let no one cheat you of your reward, taking delight in false humility and worship of angels, intruding into those things which he has not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind, 19 and not holding fast to the Head,
The first thing you should notice is that mysticism cheats you of your reward. καταβραβεύω katabrabeuo This means that it attempts to defraud you of genuine faith, or deprive you of genuine spirituality. Mysticism is trickery. At face value it claims to grant you access to God, but then only traps you in a hopeless cycle forcing you to try to have more and more, deeper and deeper, wilder and wilder experiences until, like the Word of Faith movement, you are completely in la la land.
It’s interesting that the method they delight in false humility. They pretend to humble, and perhaps believe that they are truly humble, but if they are honest with themselves they would see that they are truly vainly puffed up instead. In seeking God, mystics can feel superior to other Christians because they feel they alone are worthy to connect with God on another plane that others aren’t privy to.
How does this pretend humility work? In this example, this mystic gets a vision of angels, and humbly shares his revelation with a few others. Then they get on a stage, or a TV show and have the host do the instructions. “Hey, this is Bob, you would not believe the amazing things God has been revealing to him! He’s been with angels! You know, these venerated angels that surround the throne of God itself, and cry “Holy, Holy, Holy!” Bob was there!” And Bob smiles humbly for the camera.
My Bible says that this kind of mysticism that deals with revelations, dreams, visions, special words of faith, etc, are nothing less than intrusions into the unseen, and unknowable. Today’s mystics are experts on things one can’t empirically know.
There is much that is mysterious about God. But He has revealed Himself to us. Rather than seek out strange mystical experiences, we should involve ourselves in the things God has revealed to us in His Word. (Deuteronomy 29:29).
Paul calls this form of Mysticism, “not holding fast to the head!” In other words they’d rather have experiences with angles than have Jesus. They want to be their own authority rather than have Jesus as the head of their lives.
This is the danger of mysticism. It will entice you, entangle you and entrap you. Instead of trusting your own experiences, let God’s Word interpret them for you.
“The heart is more deceitful than everything else and it is desperately sick, desperately wicked; who can even know it.” Proverbs 28:26,
Don’t let Mysticism treat you. Mysticism will entrap you,
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Hold fast to the head, from whom all the body, nourished and knit together by joints and ligaments, grows with the increase that is from God.
Hold fast to the head. One rudimentary thing I have noticed is that any time the body is separated from the head, it’s dead! Funny how that works! Hold fast to Jesus and He will nourish you.
You will be nourished and knit together. Spiritual experiences are a natural outgrowth of being part of the body of Christ and knit together with one another. The head sends electrical impulses down the spine, and the hands clap, and the feet dance, and the lips sing praises to God! That leads to goose bumps and a genuine experience of God’s presence.
Instead of being stuck in the merry go round that demands you have one mountain top experience after the other, holding to the head leads to nourishment and genuine maturity. “The body grows with the increase that is from God!”
This is genuine spirituality! This is the experience you want! You don’t want the empty calories of the addictive, sugary, sacchariney sweet, cold cereal kind of Christianity. Mysticism will mislead you, Christ will feed you
In closing remember this: Secularism will cheat you, Christ will complete you. The Law is a shadow, but Christ is the substance! Mysticism will entrap you, Christ will nourish you.
What you want is genuine nourishment that comes from putting Jesus first in your life. Spiritual, satisfying Nourishment comes from holding to the Head. When you put Jesus first in your life, in your family, in your worship and in your experiences, good things happen.
[i] https://www.mikeduran.com/2017/11/27/the-dangers-of-christian-mysticism/
[ii] https://www.gty.org/library/sermons-library/TM22-10/mysticism-the-deadly-dangers-of-trusting-personal-experience-over-biblical-authority-justin-peters
Mysticism exists in a myriad of forms. Within Christianity, it is seen in Roman Catholic teachings, the 20th century Pentecostal and Charismatic traditions, and in the Quakers. In the great three monotheistic religions, it is seen in the practices of the Gnostic Christians, the Sufi Muslims, and the Kabalistic Jews. Outside of monotheism, mysticism expresses itself in the Western New Age movement, as well as the Eastern Buddhism and Hinduism, Yoga, and Native American spirituality.
The Charismatic movement, with its emphasis on dreams and visions, feelings and experiences, and new revelation, is one form of Christian mysticism. Because we have God’s completed Word, we are not to seek after dreams and visions or extra revelation from God. While it is possible for God to reveal Himself in dreams and visions today, we should beware the subjective nature of feelings and spiritual impressions.
Paul had many strange experiences of God. He was struck from his horse by God’s light on the Road to Damascus (Acts 9). He used “mystical” language, praying that God would open the eyes of our hearts (Eph. 1:18) and reveling in the fact that believers are seated with Christ in heavenly places (Eph. 2:6). In fact, the apostle Paul was even caught up to the third heaven, unsure whether he was “in the body or out,” and witnessed things that words could not describe (II Cor. 12). We cannot study the apostle Paul’s life without conceding the miraculous, mysterious, and, yes, even the mystical. However, that same apostle warned about “giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils” (I Tim. 4:1) and cursed anyone who would preach a false gospel (Gal. 1:8).
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