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Jesus had much to say about the kind of people he intended us to be. Among many other things, he told us that the Truth would set us free. The Truth, as distinct from lies, false ideas, false fronts and false foundations. It is so important to understand that we begin life as believers with a great deal of misinformation underlying our ideas about God, life, and ourselves. We have been told in Scripture that unbelievers have minds that are blinded by the Evil One, and that only in Christ is this veil removed. All those years in the darkness leaves us with a legacy of untruth: everything from seeing the Father as a stern old man sitting in judgment, to the idea that hell is just a fairy story designed to scare children into being good.
When I was first saved, I found I had to change my mind on so many things. It was so hard to accept that I didn't have to earn God's love, for example. The religious world had told me for years that God was watching me carefully, waiting for me to stumble; that he was keeping a ledger (like Santa Claus) of just who was being good or bad. But the amazing joy and freedom I found when the truth of God's grace dawned on my darkness! It changed everything in my life. But that was just the start, and the easy part, of having the Holy Spirit change my way of thinking. Paul tells us in Romans 12 that we need to have our minds renewed in order to know and approve God's perfect will. The world's way of thinking needs to be rooted out, and that is not easy.
And that is where disillusionment comes in. For, what is it to be disillusioned, but to have your illusions shattered? And what are illusions, but untrue ideas and beliefs that we have acquired along our way? The Holy Spirit wants to root out your illusions, he wants you disillusioned. At first, this can be a wonderful experience. Like finding out that God loves you, and is not the angry Judge you had always thought he was, many of our illusions are ones we are happy to see shattered. But as we grow in Christ, the illusions he wants to challenge are those which are harder to let go. In fact, it is sometimes so hard to have our illusions challenged, that we prefer not to grow any further, and to keep our illusions intact. We don't want to accept that our brothers and sisters in Christ are not perfect, are often, in fact, mostimperfect. We don't want to believe that the world is so opposed to God, and we think we can live like everyone else while remining true to our Lord. We want to think that our heavenly Father will always lead us in peace and love and joy, and we will never know doubt, sadness, or any kind of lack. But these illusions can rob us of the fruit which the Holy Spirit wishes to produce in our lives.
Look at Luke 8, where Jesus tells the story of the sower and the seed. Three kinds of people hear the Word of God and respond. One group hear with joy, and believe for a while. But they have no root and when testing comes, they fall away. Another group responds and develops roots, but they are choked by life's worries, riches and pleasures, and they do not mature. The third group have 'good and noble hearts', they put down roots, retain the word and persevere to fruitfulness. The main point of this parable is developed immediately by the Lord. He says that a lamp that is lit is not hidden, but put on a stand to be seen. Then he sums up thus:
For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open. Therefore consider carefully how you listen. Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what he thinks he has will be taken from him. [Luke 8.17-18]This word has to do with seeing, with things being revealed. The testing which caused the first group to fall away revealed something in them, as did the attraction of life's worries, riches and pleasures in the second group. It showed their shallowness and lack of commitment. It showed that other things mattered more to them than what they had found in the Lord. That is why Jesus says that there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed: the true, deeply-hidden attitudes and motives in each of us cannot remain concealed under the light of the Holy Spirit's work. The new-born Christian can be completely blind to the true state of his mind and heart, overwhelmed by the joy and peace of salvation. It is easy at such times to imagine that nothing will ever come between you and serving the Lord God. But the Holy Spirit knows better, and sees to the depths of our inner selves. Much pruning is required before any lasting fruit emerges. Old ways need to be changed, old attitudes and ideas shaken and demolished. Look how Jesus sums up the process:
Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what he thinks he has will be taken away from him.In other words, that which is of the Holy Spirit will be built upon and developed. But what is it that we don't have, but which can be taken away from us? Illusions. What we think we have of God, the spiritual insights, the maturity, the revelations, the understandings that are not true, these have to go, to be replaced by the truth. We must be disillusioned of these things before we will let them go.
All of the things spoken of here have to do in some way with sight: illusions are a false way of seeing things. Revelation is the true way to see things. And these things have to do with how we see God, the Christian life, our brothers and sisters in Christ, and ourselves. The young Christian believes he will be able to turn the world upside down in no time, so full of love for God and man is his heart. It is hard to accept that it may take years of pruning and teaching before he is ready to be used by God. But he has to learn that the love required for such a life will demand his own death. The worries of life, and even more, the riches and pleasures of life, exert tremendous power over him, though at first he may not know it. Martyrdom is attractive to the young Christian: but he needs to face up to the true state of his heart. Very soon, perhaps, the would-be martyr finds it hard just to find time to pray and read his Bible each day. Being a witness for Jesus becomes difficult in school or workplace: it makes him unpopular, or a fool in the eyes of his friends and those he respects. He finds that he doesn't like to be called a 'born-again Christian' because the term is associated with fanatics and fools. More and more, when people ask him if he believes in God, he finds himself saying things like: 'Yes, but....'.
The riches of this life no longer appear dangerous, but reasonable. After all, he reasons, we should be responsible and save for our old age, or for a rainy day, or for unexpected difficulties. And he doesn't notice that he is disobeying the commands of God, and trying to protect himself from whatever God might send to him. He spends his money on pleasures: a nicer car, a bigger house, a second car, a longer vacation. He spends money on insurance policies, to protect him from "acts of God"! He values himself and others by what he owns, what he does, and the respect of others in the world. Perhaps worst of all: when he hears that God loves him, he's not at all surprised. He thinks that, if God loves him, it must only be because he is somehow rather loveable. What is happening? He is deluded, he is creating illusions about himself and how he is living.
He can rationalise so much by pointing to his brothers and sisters, who are doing the same things, and who are experts at putting a 'holy' face on for church on Sundays. They learn to smile and behave as they think they should, dressing up in their 'Sunday' clothes, making sure their hair and make-up are perfect, performing for the benefit of all the others performing around them. And its all an illusion: none of it is true, none of it is of God. They think they have something, but it is nothing.
The Holy Spirit wants to disillusion them, to wake them up to see things as they are. Will they wake up, or will they reject such a vision in favour of continuing the game? So, be careful how you listen: are you really hearing what God is saying, or do you nod wisely, take notes in your Bible, and then forget all about it by the time you leave the room? For those who allow the Spirit to reveal the truth to them, there is a painful time of disillusionment. They find that they are not who they thought they were. Their Christian life is not where they thought it was, and their daily walk has nothing to do with taking up their cross and following Jesus.
But there are those who want God. They are willing to face up to the truth about the world, the flesh and the devil. Hardest of all, they are prepared to face up to the truth about themselves. They forget what is past, and they press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of them. But that is not the end of the process. Just as they begin to feel that they are growing in the Spirit, that they are learning deeper things and moving in the maturity God has called them to, disillusionment sets in! They look around at their life, and something seems wrong. For all their learning and growing, their Bible reading and prayer, life is getting harder, not easier. Prayers are not being answered as they once were. Work and family are not going well, maybe, in fact, crashing into crisis. They thought that their deeper commitment to the Lord would lead to greater power to serve, greater joy in overcoming trials and temptations. In fact, they really thought it would lead to an end to trials and temptations like this. Spiritual warfare was something they could face with a measure of satisfaction, as 'mature' Christians, 'prayer warriors' that they are. But the problems they now face, the crisis which threatens to overwhelm them, is something they have prayed about many times, something they had trusted God to save them from, or to bring them through. But their strength is ebbing, their patience is fast disappearing, and they have NO joy in the trials. They are disillusioned. They thought God would move in their circumstances, but it now seems that it is God himself who is causing the trouble in the first place! What is happening?
God is destroying another serious illusion which afflicts so many of us. It is the lie that, if we commit ourselves to Jesus, and seek maturity and spiritual growth, then we will move into greater power and effectiveness in ministry and witness. But there is no such quid pro quo; God is not obliged to give us anything in return for our lives. The ultimate revelation of all for Christians is that God is GOD ALMIGHTY, Creator of everything that is. We have no claim on him in ourselves. As a loving Father, he has to face us with the disillusioning fact that we deserve hell, and nothing else. We have to understand what it really means when we read that 'it is all of grace...so no-one can boast'. We never graduate to a place as Christians where we are no longer dependant entirely on grace. We never attain a position where we have a right to grace and mercy...never! No matter how long we have served God, we are still as needy as when we were the deepest-dyed sinners in creation.
This is disillusioning, it is not what we thought, what we wanted to believe, was the case. Like Job, we have to come to accept that we will not always be given answers to why God treats us as He does. We must stand in faith, knowing that he loves us, and is training us in righteousness. But this truth also sets us free. Because it is only then that we begin to understand how amazing grace really is, how astounding it is that the Almighty God loves me! The illusion is that God is simply a loving, forgiving Lord, and, because we are so loveable, He cannot bring himself to condemn us. What a lie! So, in love, the Holy Spirit brings us to a place where we cannot deny our unworthiness any longer. We are faced with a holy and majestic God, and, in comparison, we appear in our true identity. It isn't a pretty sight.
We are so easily led into spiritual pride. Just getting saved makes some people so arrogant that they parade through life waving their Bible at unbelievers, demanding that they live up to a standard that only God's grace makes possible. They perform in church, dressing up in gowns and finery, enjoying the 'high', the 'holy' and the 'spiritual'. And Jesus looks at them and says: 'Pharisees!'. But as we grow in Christ, the temptation is still there. We think, 'I am getting much more spiritual these days; I am understanding so much more, so many deep things'. C. S. Lewis once said that the worst thing about humility was that, once you realised you had it, it was gone!
This pride takes a great deal of breaking. It is hard, painful and humiliating. It is disillusioning to us, making us admit things about ourselves that we really don't want to know. It is easier, far easier, to resist the intrusion of the Holy Spirit in our cosy world of religious righteousness. But such unreal illusions lead to an unreal life where we have to pretend that we are something we are not. We think we're wine, when really we're just water. In the twelfth chapter of Romans, Paul makes it very clear that there are two ways to see things: God's way and the way the world does. If we see things the same as the rest of world, then we know we are wrong. Its that simple. It is hard to be disillusioned, but it need not lead to condemnation. No, we're not the Christians we thought we were, but God is not surprised by that: he knew it all along. So allow him to bring you to the truth through disillusionment. You will come to see things as he does. You will see yourself as you are: and then have even greater joy and surprise at knowing how much God loves you.
Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God - which is your spiritual worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is - his good, pleasing and prefect will.For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you. [Romans 12.1- 3]