Saturday, October 06, 2007
What to do When Soaking
The other night, I presented this material to some friends and I wanted to post it online so others could access the same resource.
What To Do When Soaking
Who is this for?
People are all laying out on the floor, from time to time, someone says s/he sees something. You’re sitting there wondering what in the world are they talking about.
You’ve heard all the talk about soaking, but when it comes to doing it, it seems boring and unreal.
You long to hear Jesus just like the disciples, and you long to hear God like the people in the Old Testament, but it seems as though He isn’t around or that people in the past had a better connection than you do now.
You’ve been told some version of the pray more, read your Bible more try harder solution to your pain and lack of growth and are fed up with it.
Faith it.
Sometimes it is difficult for us to let go of that voice in our minds that keeps telling us that this is all make-believe and that it isn’t making a real difference in our lives. I submit to you that faith is the very act of ignoring that voice.
Remember this equation: spiritual=imaginative, but imaginative=unreal IS NOT necessarily true.
From Boyd, Gregory A. Seeing is Believing: Experience Jesus through Imaginative Prayer, Baker: Grand Rapids, MI, 2004.
It’s not so much what we intellectually believe is true that impacts us; it’s what we experience as real (Boyd 12).
Imagination, when guided by the Holy Spirit and submitted to the authority of Scripture, is our main receptor to the spiritual world (16).
[There is a] frequently held assumption that any lack of fruit in our lives. . . is primarily the result of a lack of effort on our part at producing the fruit. They reflect the misguided view that the problem in people’s lives is their behavior (22).
The fruit of the Spirit is not a goal we can and must seek to attain. Indeed, it is called the fruit of the Spirit precisely because it is the fruit of the Spirit and not the product of our own effort (23).
The puzzle is not to be resolved by distinguishing between the way God sees us and the way we actually are by distinguishing between the way we actually are and the way we experience ourselves (30).
The problem is with the experienced self-identity that brings forth the behavior (30).
[A]ll genuine growth in believers’ lives is dependent upon their deepening experience of their true identity in Christ (35).
[The flesh] is a deceptive state of being (35).
[W]e struggle with the deception of the flesh only because we have a new nature that is based on the truth that God is Lord and the only ultimate source of our life (37).
The more we align our experienced self-identity with our true identity, the more we walk in the abundant life Jesus came to give us (37-8).
Almost all emotional and psychological illnesses are in one way or another connected to an unwillingness or inability to face truth (48).
When we engage in religious activity as a means of acquiring something that we think is lacking in ourselves, in truth we are simply engaging a religious variety of the flesh (53).
For we are only as healthy as our picture of God is accurate (56).
The main work of the Holy Spirit is . . not to supplement what the Son did but to apply what the Son did to the lives of God’s people (56).
The extent to which the truth about who God is and who we are becomes an experienced reality on our lives is the extent to which our lives are whole (63).
We tend to have the naïve conviction that if only we read another book or get involved in another Bible study, our lives will be significantly changed (71).
We have come to identify the imagination as something that takes us away form truth rather than something that can be useful, and indeed necessary, to enable us to experience truth (72).
You will be emotionally affected by the information I give you only to the degree that you use it to form your own concrete re-presentation. . . in your mind (73).
When our re-presentations are vivid but don’t correspond to truth, or when our re-presentations correspond to truth but are not vivid, we will have difficulty being transformed in a healthy, godly direction (76).
If our faith is going to be powerful and transformative, is going to have to be imaginative and experiential (79).
We need to be pointed to Jesus mainly where we are blinded—namely, the imagination (80).
I submit that God’s desire to be known by his people in concrete, vivid, personal, and transforming ways has never ceased. God is still sending signals, as it were, but we have discredited these signals by writing them off as make-believe (86).
Our tendency to trust in our own efforts to bring about transformation as well as our dismissal of the imagination as a central vehicle for giving us access to spiritual realities strongly play into this ongoing veiling of our minds (89).
If the principle that we are transformed according to that on which we fix our minds works when we employ it against our nature, he [Origen] argued, how much more profoundly will it work when we use it in a way that is consistent with our nature? We do this when we fix our minds on the one in whose image we are actually made. . . .What we spiritually become, Origen was saying, is determined by what we gaze at in our minds (91).
The way to focus our minds in prayer, therefore, is to picture mentally the one to whom we pray and the matter about which we pray (92).
The principle of cataphatic spirituality is simply that the more you imaginatively enter into the things of God with all five senses the more spiritual realities open up to you in an experiential, transforming way (102).
Finding the inner sanctuary: For beginners, this place is easiest to locate by recalling a place in your memory that is pleasant, serene, and easy to recall vividly (109).
It is spiritual perception precisely because it is a perception through the imagination (111).
Faith for contemporary Western Christians is generally a belief about something, not an experience of anything (128).
If God ever did try to communicate to us with an inner voice, an inner image, an inner vision, or a dream. . .our scientific worldview would incline us to immediately censor it from our consciousness or write off as “just imagination” (129).
The implication of secular psychology, then, is that everything imaginative that takes place in your mind is the mind’s own doing. You voice of conscience, your internal dialogue, your dreams, and what you see with your “mind’s eye” are all products of your own mind (129).
Yet if Jesus really is with us, isn’t a vivid image of him being in your presence closer to truth than any image we might have of our environment that would exclude him (130)?
To the extent that modern science influences us to see and experience ourselves and the world as though God were not an ever-present reality, it is very much part of the deception of the flesh that we must overcome if we are to be “transformed by the renewing of our minds” (130).
What we in our age of intellectualized Christianity so desperately need to see and experience is that our imagination and God’s Spirit can work together to bring us into a concrete and dynamic relationship with the Lord (131).
This great revelatory act of God becoming a man is rendered completely insignificant for us so far as our prayer lives are concerned if we are not allowed to form any mental picture of Jesus Christ (138).
We become what we imaginatively see (139).
The best way to ensure people will not experience joy, or any other aspect of the fruit of the Spirit, is to get them to mistake it for something they are able to create on their own, through their own effort (163).
Only what is experienced as real can transform a person (169).
The point of the exercise is to rest. The more vividly we can see and hear Jesus, the more fruitful our rest will be. But if we make seeing or hearing Jesus a task we need to accomplish, our rest turns into work, and it will not be fruitful (172).
Exercise 1:
Find your inner sanctuary. Enter there with as many of your five senses as you can. Once there, ask Jesus to come. Look for Him. Gaze at Him. Listen.
Exercise 2: Get Wild and Time Travel
Think of your favorite Bible story. Ask Jesus to take you there and re-present it to you in your imagination. Remember to use as many of the senses as you can and allow Jesus to go with you.
Conclusion
One of the quickest ways to get your imagination back in gear is to repent of the lie that it is unnecessary for spiritual transformation. It’s good to do this verbally. After you’ve repented of the lie, receive the truth that our minds can perceive spiritual reality through the imagination based on the word of God from II Cor. 3:17-18.
The Holy Spirit isn’t going to reveal new doctrines to you, but apply what you already know cognitively to be true through an imaginative experience so that your heart will be transformed.
Don’t be surprised if two things happen to you. 1) You’re going to remember your times of “resting in Christ” and they will become part of your memories just like important events in your life or dreams. 2) Your dream life will take a new turn and you’ll have more vivid dreams that you’ll be able to remember better.
One of the central points of Boyd’s thesis is that many of us don’t access the reality of the biblical worldview because we don’t have the correct content and/or understanding of the biblical language. Many times throughout Scripture, the Lord speaks through the imagination and it is simply referred to as a vision or a dream. Allow the Holy Spirit to give the content of your understanding of words because what we name things really does make a difference.
Finally, I submit to you that we all have used our imagination in a spiritual dimension not once, but many times in our lives. Look at it this way: the spiritual reality is either something that cannot be accessed by us at all and we’re not expected to OR it is something that is very easily accessed but hidden by under different names to keep us from accessing it. I, for one, agree with Boyd that our imagination is our primary receptor for spiritual reality.
I would also argue that when our imagination is effused with the Holy Spirit and He moves us to speak, our words birthed in vision and declared into the natural have the power to change what is, indeed, a lesser reality. For what is seen is temporal, but what is not seen is eternal.
What To Do When Soaking
Who is this for?
People are all laying out on the floor, from time to time, someone says s/he sees something. You’re sitting there wondering what in the world are they talking about.
You’ve heard all the talk about soaking, but when it comes to doing it, it seems boring and unreal.
You long to hear Jesus just like the disciples, and you long to hear God like the people in the Old Testament, but it seems as though He isn’t around or that people in the past had a better connection than you do now.
You’ve been told some version of the pray more, read your Bible more try harder solution to your pain and lack of growth and are fed up with it.
Faith it.
Sometimes it is difficult for us to let go of that voice in our minds that keeps telling us that this is all make-believe and that it isn’t making a real difference in our lives. I submit to you that faith is the very act of ignoring that voice.
Remember this equation: spiritual=imaginative, but imaginative=unreal IS NOT necessarily true.
From Boyd, Gregory A. Seeing is Believing: Experience Jesus through Imaginative Prayer, Baker: Grand Rapids, MI, 2004.
It’s not so much what we intellectually believe is true that impacts us; it’s what we experience as real (Boyd 12).
Imagination, when guided by the Holy Spirit and submitted to the authority of Scripture, is our main receptor to the spiritual world (16).
[There is a] frequently held assumption that any lack of fruit in our lives. . . is primarily the result of a lack of effort on our part at producing the fruit. They reflect the misguided view that the problem in people’s lives is their behavior (22).
The fruit of the Spirit is not a goal we can and must seek to attain. Indeed, it is called the fruit of the Spirit precisely because it is the fruit of the Spirit and not the product of our own effort (23).
The puzzle is not to be resolved by distinguishing between the way God sees us and the way we actually are by distinguishing between the way we actually are and the way we experience ourselves (30).
The problem is with the experienced self-identity that brings forth the behavior (30).
[A]ll genuine growth in believers’ lives is dependent upon their deepening experience of their true identity in Christ (35).
[The flesh] is a deceptive state of being (35).
[W]e struggle with the deception of the flesh only because we have a new nature that is based on the truth that God is Lord and the only ultimate source of our life (37).
The more we align our experienced self-identity with our true identity, the more we walk in the abundant life Jesus came to give us (37-8).
Almost all emotional and psychological illnesses are in one way or another connected to an unwillingness or inability to face truth (48).
When we engage in religious activity as a means of acquiring something that we think is lacking in ourselves, in truth we are simply engaging a religious variety of the flesh (53).
For we are only as healthy as our picture of God is accurate (56).
The main work of the Holy Spirit is . . not to supplement what the Son did but to apply what the Son did to the lives of God’s people (56).
The extent to which the truth about who God is and who we are becomes an experienced reality on our lives is the extent to which our lives are whole (63).
We tend to have the naïve conviction that if only we read another book or get involved in another Bible study, our lives will be significantly changed (71).
We have come to identify the imagination as something that takes us away form truth rather than something that can be useful, and indeed necessary, to enable us to experience truth (72).
You will be emotionally affected by the information I give you only to the degree that you use it to form your own concrete re-presentation. . . in your mind (73).
When our re-presentations are vivid but don’t correspond to truth, or when our re-presentations correspond to truth but are not vivid, we will have difficulty being transformed in a healthy, godly direction (76).
If our faith is going to be powerful and transformative, is going to have to be imaginative and experiential (79).
We need to be pointed to Jesus mainly where we are blinded—namely, the imagination (80).
I submit that God’s desire to be known by his people in concrete, vivid, personal, and transforming ways has never ceased. God is still sending signals, as it were, but we have discredited these signals by writing them off as make-believe (86).
Our tendency to trust in our own efforts to bring about transformation as well as our dismissal of the imagination as a central vehicle for giving us access to spiritual realities strongly play into this ongoing veiling of our minds (89).
If the principle that we are transformed according to that on which we fix our minds works when we employ it against our nature, he [Origen] argued, how much more profoundly will it work when we use it in a way that is consistent with our nature? We do this when we fix our minds on the one in whose image we are actually made. . . .What we spiritually become, Origen was saying, is determined by what we gaze at in our minds (91).
The way to focus our minds in prayer, therefore, is to picture mentally the one to whom we pray and the matter about which we pray (92).
The principle of cataphatic spirituality is simply that the more you imaginatively enter into the things of God with all five senses the more spiritual realities open up to you in an experiential, transforming way (102).
Finding the inner sanctuary: For beginners, this place is easiest to locate by recalling a place in your memory that is pleasant, serene, and easy to recall vividly (109).
It is spiritual perception precisely because it is a perception through the imagination (111).
Faith for contemporary Western Christians is generally a belief about something, not an experience of anything (128).
If God ever did try to communicate to us with an inner voice, an inner image, an inner vision, or a dream. . .our scientific worldview would incline us to immediately censor it from our consciousness or write off as “just imagination” (129).
The implication of secular psychology, then, is that everything imaginative that takes place in your mind is the mind’s own doing. You voice of conscience, your internal dialogue, your dreams, and what you see with your “mind’s eye” are all products of your own mind (129).
Yet if Jesus really is with us, isn’t a vivid image of him being in your presence closer to truth than any image we might have of our environment that would exclude him (130)?
To the extent that modern science influences us to see and experience ourselves and the world as though God were not an ever-present reality, it is very much part of the deception of the flesh that we must overcome if we are to be “transformed by the renewing of our minds” (130).
What we in our age of intellectualized Christianity so desperately need to see and experience is that our imagination and God’s Spirit can work together to bring us into a concrete and dynamic relationship with the Lord (131).
This great revelatory act of God becoming a man is rendered completely insignificant for us so far as our prayer lives are concerned if we are not allowed to form any mental picture of Jesus Christ (138).
We become what we imaginatively see (139).
The best way to ensure people will not experience joy, or any other aspect of the fruit of the Spirit, is to get them to mistake it for something they are able to create on their own, through their own effort (163).
Only what is experienced as real can transform a person (169).
The point of the exercise is to rest. The more vividly we can see and hear Jesus, the more fruitful our rest will be. But if we make seeing or hearing Jesus a task we need to accomplish, our rest turns into work, and it will not be fruitful (172).
Exercise 1:
Find your inner sanctuary. Enter there with as many of your five senses as you can. Once there, ask Jesus to come. Look for Him. Gaze at Him. Listen.
Exercise 2: Get Wild and Time Travel
Think of your favorite Bible story. Ask Jesus to take you there and re-present it to you in your imagination. Remember to use as many of the senses as you can and allow Jesus to go with you.
Conclusion
One of the quickest ways to get your imagination back in gear is to repent of the lie that it is unnecessary for spiritual transformation. It’s good to do this verbally. After you’ve repented of the lie, receive the truth that our minds can perceive spiritual reality through the imagination based on the word of God from II Cor. 3:17-18.
The Holy Spirit isn’t going to reveal new doctrines to you, but apply what you already know cognitively to be true through an imaginative experience so that your heart will be transformed.
Don’t be surprised if two things happen to you. 1) You’re going to remember your times of “resting in Christ” and they will become part of your memories just like important events in your life or dreams. 2) Your dream life will take a new turn and you’ll have more vivid dreams that you’ll be able to remember better.
One of the central points of Boyd’s thesis is that many of us don’t access the reality of the biblical worldview because we don’t have the correct content and/or understanding of the biblical language. Many times throughout Scripture, the Lord speaks through the imagination and it is simply referred to as a vision or a dream. Allow the Holy Spirit to give the content of your understanding of words because what we name things really does make a difference.
Finally, I submit to you that we all have used our imagination in a spiritual dimension not once, but many times in our lives. Look at it this way: the spiritual reality is either something that cannot be accessed by us at all and we’re not expected to OR it is something that is very easily accessed but hidden by under different names to keep us from accessing it. I, for one, agree with Boyd that our imagination is our primary receptor for spiritual reality.
I would also argue that when our imagination is effused with the Holy Spirit and He moves us to speak, our words birthed in vision and declared into the natural have the power to change what is, indeed, a lesser reality. For what is seen is temporal, but what is not seen is eternal.
