Posted: Fri Feb 11, 2011 4:41 pm
AllanS wrote:stellar renegade wrote:Once you have a glimpse of the Father (which only comes late in your spiritual walk) you'll never be able to doubt again.
You might be hallucinating. Or it might be the devil in disguise. How will you know you are glimpsing the true Father and not a very clever counterfeit? What test will you apply that will be powerful enough to distinguish True God from Fake God? What if True God doesn't look or feel or sound as we imagine he should?
The True God isn't a look or feel or sound. It's an internal knowing, an experience in a heart that has become one with its Maker. You can only come to that through spiritual progression. When I first saw the Father, it was a gradual realization, as I was looking at the sunset and felt this all-encompassing love coming from everywhere, wrapping itself around me and flowing through me. That love didn't seem like a definite, distinct personality at first. Only as I began to focus on it did I realize.
AllanS wrote:It's happened before...
Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.”
Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time?..."
Exactly. This is such a beautiful picture of how we come to know the Father. The whole time we're looking for God, the Word (through all of creation) is crying out, "But this IS God! I'm showing God to you right now!" And this same Word said the same exact thing in human form when it came to live amongst us.
The only way to bring people along is to allow them to feed off of the experience you've had, the power of Spirit that you've been given in your own life. I can't point to anything definite or absolute that IS the Father, because it all expresses Him, but Jesus Christ His Son expresses Him most clearly (not divorced from the context He was found in, of course...) but that's because the Father is no object but is completely transcendent, even while finite subjects and objects express His invisible nature.
And of course there's the clever paradox from Jesus' own words,
And the Father who sent me has himself testified concerning me. You have never heard his voice nor seen his form, nor does his word dwell in you, for you do not believe the one he sent.
John 5:37-38
No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father.
John 6:46
At first he says that the Jews should've seen his Father, and then he acts as if no one can except for himself. What gives?
Well, apparently there's a way that the Son can see the Father in which no one else can. Yet there's another way to see and know the Father, through the Son, which awakens an inner knowing.
Without that absolute knowing and believing, one could never feel fully loved by the Father... because one would never have the absolute security and comfort of the Father inside of them and as a part of them. They would still, to some degree, feel immensely alone.