FOUR STAGES OF THE BELIEVERS FAITH: Unawakened Faith; Awakened Faith; Enlightened Faith; Illuminated Faith.
THE ILLUMINATED CONVERT.(4)
The truly enlightened disciple becomes more frustrated as time progresses and his hunger grows. He is disappointed with himself and his own inner self. One day he becomes so disillusioned with his own spiritual state that he considers quitting altogether.
1. He becomes sorrowful over his inner state and his inability to grasp the answers.
1a. Then still reading the Word, he grows despondent about ever becoming a spiritual person or becoming good enough when he sees so many of his own foibles, failures, and sins.
1b. He wishes he could be more than sorry for himself, but genuinely sorry enough to satisfy God.
1c. He hungers and thirsts for a resolution with a deep longing.
2. It is then after listening to regular preaching of a godly minister in a Bible-believing assembly expounding Christ in the Scriptures that a change will at last occur.
2a. The risen Saviour invisibly presents Himself to his mind.
2b. The glow of His presence is awe-inspiring and HOPE begins to burn within him.
2c. Suddenly doubts are replaced by the gift of grace.
2d. The Bible with which he so often struggled now seems the LIVING WORD of life which had hitherto only been a book of stories.
2e. His eyes are opened and his mind and soul are ILLUMINATED by the regenerating Holy Spirit.
2f. Within this believer, HOPE is accompanied by PEACE is beyond human understanding.
2g. His exuberance makes his spirit revel in JOY.
2h. He has become a new creature in Christ by the power of His resurrection. (2 Corinthians 5:17)
The typical believer who has been awakened and had a measure of enlightenment.
1. His own faith wavers (James 1:6-8) and believes in the Scriptures, but with reservations.
2. His own powers of reason raise obstacles that prevent him from being granted repentance and saving-faith.
3. When he gives up the mental struggle of contending with God and surrenders his mind and his questions he becomes a candidate for grace. (Jeremiah 29:13)
4. When he surrenders self-will and his intellect to God as inadequate in gaining an encounter with the God of grace, then he is near the kingdom of heaven.
5. Thus only when he admits that this life-changing encounter of grace is at the Lord’s behest, that prevenient grace gives the earnestness and patience to wait for the promise.
6. Others have told him that the individual’s ability of choice is enough. But, free-will is a myth.
7. The Bible teaches that man’s volition is biased. His will-power is captive to the curse of perpetual self-will. Adam’s natural streak of rebellion was in Eve as well, because the natural free-will went its own way even before the inherent curse began to plague his descendants of humanity. (Romans 5)
8. Both Eve and Adam rejected eternal life to gain a superior spiritual knowledge of good and evil. Ever since man’s natural propensity from birth is the hidden streak of rebellion that sways his decisions and the course of his direction. Man will aspire to and be content with enlightenment as part of superior knowledge, but in itself will be an obstacle to his illumination and translation from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of His dear Son.
9. The curse of hidden inbred sin runs within the natural nature ready to break out at the opportune time. The Reformation re-echoed this forgotten truth of the bondage of the will, so amplified by the apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans. It was Origen’s writings that allowed the humanists to validate the myth of free-will as an asset of the human persona. This occurred in the church during the Renaissance before the 17th Century and in the Age of Enlightenment (Reason) afterward. Yet human reason, which is such an asset to the intelligentsia and the literati of our world, is the greatest obstacle to the conversion of a sinner into a saint wherein he is redeemed and ransomed by his Saviour giving his life for his rescue.
10. For illumination, the believer first needs to become a wholehearted pilgrim of the Man he follows. Albeit needed wholeheartedness is a constant theme of the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms and was reiterated by Christ and the apostles. (Deuteronomy 10:12; Matthew 22:37; Mark 12:30)
11. Repentance is the last catalyst to illumination by the Spirit of Christ. Never has there been so little understanding of biblical repentance as in our present day, but godly sorrow is the gift of grace that the human spirit is incapable of simulating.
12. Countless leaders, within the church and without, are completely mistaken about its characteristics and attributes since the 18th C Age of Reason. Thus even the best of believers conjure up unbiblical concepts upon which they rely for their eternal destiny. It is either assumed in affirmation or automated in free-will decision responding to the entreaties of pulpit orators. In neither case is it present. Even in blessed sacraments and ordinances, it cannot be enacted by the elements of water-wine-wafer rites.
The 18th C Age of Enlightenment elevated reason but further darkened the soul emphasizing the ability of human will to be responsible, moral and religious.. Thus the false gospel of moralism is a poor substitute for biblically expounding Christ in the volume of the Book. (Hebrews 10). It rarely occurs in our pulpits’ extemporaneous banter.
While the believer’s enlightenment can arouse the mind to zealous religious fervour, illumination will by grace open the believer’s eyes of his understanding that he might understand the Scriptures. (Luke 24:32;45)
Whereas he had hitherto had a degree of mental understanding by enlightenment, now he will have spiritual perception. Until this point, he has had only a natural understanding of the Word.
Previous to his illumination “his natural man received not the things of the Spirit of God: for they were foolishness to him: neither could he know them, because they were spiritually discerned. Now his understanding of Christ in the Scriptures is not in the words which man’s wisdom teaches, but which the Holy Ghost teaches; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. Now he has received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that he might know the things that are freely given to him of God. (1 Corinthians 2: 11-15)
Peter and the ten other enlightened disciples went forty months before they were illuminated on the day Jesus rose from the dead. (Luke 24:27-32; 44-45; John 20:21-22)
It is possible for a believer to go forty years after being awakened, then enlightened in mind, before he is finally illuminated by grace to be justified by faith.
Bible References
a. John 10:16….and other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice
b. 1 Corinthians 15:3… awake to righteousness, and sin not; for some have not the knowledge of god:
c. Ephesians 5:14… awake you that sleep, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light.
d. Romans 13:11 …it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now, is our salvation nearer than when we believed.
e. John 6:37:… all that the Father gives me shall come to me
f. John 6. 45… every man, therefore, that has heard and has learned of the Father, comes unto me.
g. 2 Corinthians 7: 8-1: …you were made sorry after a godly manner. For godly sorrow works repentance to salvation.”
h. Jeremiah 29:13…and you shall seek me, and find me when you shall search for me with all your heart.
i. John 6:44…no man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him.
j. John 6:65 …no man can come unto me, except it were given unto him of my Father.
k. John 1:13…born not of blood, nor by the will of the flesh or the will of man, but of God.
l. Hebrews 9:14; 10:22; Isaiah 55.
** All scripture quoted from the KJV: King James Version (Public Domain).
Bibliographic References
1 Jonathan Edwards: Freedom of the Will (1746) was an evangelist (with George Whitfield) greatly used in the First Great Awakening of New England. He later turned against Reformation and paved the way for New England Theology’s easy religion of the 19th and 20th C’s that has permeated the USA and the globe.
2 William James: Varieties of Religious Experience, was the 19th C Father of Modern Psychology who gave easy-religionists and modern evangelists fuel for their false fire. His inflammatory book’s destruction of biblical conversion great Christians in modern history was his greatest accomplishment and destabilized a large swathe of Christendom. Though he was a certified agnostic he had devilishly influenced the theological halls of Christendom’s seminaries against radical, real, traditional biblical conversion. His philosophy has discredited faith-by-grace in evangelical conservative Christendom for the last 150 years. This is why easy-religion permeates the full cross-section of Christendom today.
THE ILLUMINATED BELIEVER. (4)