Campus CrossWalk Magazine: 2005 Summer Issue -- Reality Realized

During my senior year in college, I lived alone and off-campus, without radio or television in my room. In the resulting silence my mind played some peculiar games. For several weeks, for example, as I lay in bed at night, the question kept coming into my head, "How do I know that I am me and that my life is real? What if my entire perceived life is really only the dream of a Chinese peasant living on a sampan in the Yangtze River?" These recurring thoughts troubled me considerably. I was glad when they stopped and I felt comfortably real again.

Those moments of psychological disorientation back in 1966 may serve as a parable of the man or woman, however bright and gifted, who walks through life without consciously relating to God in Jesus Christ. In reality the Creator is there, his purpose is good and he wants every person to experience life fully now and throughout eternity. Yet so very many people, including some who provide church leadership and epitomize Christian labor, move through the years and finally die as thoroughly unaligned with divine reality as my own personhood is different from the dream of a poor Asian on a houseboat in China.

The Bible presents being a Christian as becoming properly aligned with reality -- first with God himself, then with God's creation and his purpose for it and all its inhabitants. God originally made the universe "good" and it still is not evil although it is marred and fallen. In Jesus Christ, God accomplished a cosmic recovery and restoration that goes far beyond snatching individual human beings from life on this planet and rescuing them finally from hell. Scripture tells us this, for example, in Colossians 1:15-23 and in 2 Corinthians 5:14-21. To be joined to Christ is to live in a new creation. It is to realize reality (2 Cor. 5:17).

I reckon that most Christians I know (beginning with myself) have much to learn and to experience along these lines. We need to ask ourselves some questions, perhaps the following for starters: Am I secure in the Father's invincible love? Do I feel it? Do I share God's evaluation that the physical world around me is good? Do I seek to preserve it? Am I in community with others who know God in Christ -- and with those who do not yet know him? Do I cherish those relationships? Do I regularly look for God's workings in the lives of others and support what he is doing? Do I perceive his saving agenda and join in it as an undeserving recipient of his grace? Does everything that I consider "religious" advance these objectives, or does any of it actually stand in the way?

© 2005 by Edward Fudge. Unlimited permission to copy without altering text or profiteering is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice. For encouragement and spiritual food any time, visit Ed’s multimedia website at http://www.edwardfudge.com .

GracEmail goes out most weekdays to 4100 subscribers around the globe. For a free subscription, go to http://www.edwardfudge.com.