Contemplative Prayer

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

Welcome back to No Compromise Radio ministry. I'm very happy, I'm sitting in my studio this afternoon. The blue sky out there today, the day that I'm taping this show, and I have my new mixing board, and I think I sound marvelous.

Now, what I mean by that is, I don't, well, I do think I'm marvelous, but that's a sin issue. But I mean, I think the audio quality is marvelous. And I don't know if it's just the headphones are turned up too loudly in my ears, but it sounds good.

What Mysticism Is and Why It Matters

So let's get cracking, as they would say, theological cracking. Today, I wanna continue to talk about one of my favorite issues. Sadly, I have to talk about it, but it's a favorite issue of mine to talk about for this reason.

Even though it's a bad thing, I like to talk about it because it's so prevalent. It's so prevalent. Those two words the same? So today I would like to talk about liver shivers, liver shivers. I'd like to talk about impressions.

I would like to speak about God speaking to you. Compliment, karma, karma, karma, karma chameleon. Contemplative prayer. Labyrinths, that'd be a good football team mascot name, wouldn't it? The labyrinths are taking the field.

They've got a first and 10 on their own, 23 minutes to go in the game. One of the labyrinths is split far to the left on the hash mark. So today I'd like to talk a little bit more about this general topic of mysticism.

Maybe we should call this today Christian clairvoyance. That might be good, Christian clairvoyance. And here's the issue. You either receive messages from God these days from the inside or from the outside.

Now, maybe you think you receive them from both. Maybe you're a charismatic and you say, I receive word from God from the outside, external, outside of myself, extra nos, as the Latin word would be, I believe.

I receive them from scripture, but I also am led from the inside. And God talks to me when I pray. But I want to disavow you of that. I want to say today that if you have a desire to hear God from the inside, then you are eroding the doctrine of Sola Scriptura.

The sufficiency of scriptures are at stake. And since the Bible is such a great book, I want to make sure that you do not abandon it for mysticism, Quakerism, inner light stuff. I talk about this all the time, but I talk about it all the time because it's all around us.

You can't get away from it. Evangelicalism is ripe with the fruit of mysticism. You know, I've been looking for mysticism in all the wrong places. Sadly, you don't have to look outside of evangelicalism itself, mainstream evangelicalism.

So let's try to understand it a little bit more today, a little bit fuller and a little bit deeper so you can see it. And when you see it, you can know it. And then to know me is to love me. John Calvin said, a dog barks when his master is attacked.

I would be a coward if I saw that God's truth was attack and yet would remain silent. And that's what we want to do on No Compromise Radio. Always biblical, always provocative, always in that order. I would like to discuss this because it's always around.

It just happens all the time. And I also want to discuss it because this is one of my topics for the Wretched Radio Conference. And so I might as well kill two fowls with one rock, okay? Now you say, well, what is mysticism, Mike?

What is mysticism? A mystic herself, Georgia Harkness, says in her book, Mysticism, that there are at least 26 definitions. Ooh, did God tell you there are 26? Maybe one for every letter of the alphabet.

I find that interesting because, you know, it's nice to have a tight definition, but I guess today it's beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It's reader response theory. It's what you, you know, it's love the one you're with.

Let's go to MacArthur's definition. The mystic disdains rational understanding and seeks truth instead through the feelings, the imagination, personal visions, inner voices, private illumination, or other purely subjective means.

So we have mystics who try to hear from God, to commune with God through intuition, insight, instinct, from the inside. You know, like when people have belly buttons, you either have an Annie or an Audi.

That's not a A-U-D-I, that's not a car. You either have an Annie or an Audi, so too you can receive truth. And you'll see, according to B .B. Warfield, as I've said many times before, that there are two religions in the world and the religion of hearing God from the inside and hearing God from the outside.

And so today mysticism, we're going to say, is communing with God or listening to God from the inside. Someone said that mysticism begins with a mist and always ends in a schism. I said it, but I didn't come up with it.

I wish I would have. Personal union with God and communion and discourse with God, enlightenment through some internal way. Now, Christian mysticism used to be underground. It used to be for crazy Morovians.

It used to be for crazy Quakers down in Nantucket. It used to be for other people. And now it is mainstream. Mainstream, and Christians are listening to their splankna, their gut, they're listening to their liver, they're listening to their gizzard, as we would call it.

When's the last time you had a gizzard, by the way? When I was growing up, we didn't have much money. And in Nebraska, I remember my mother going to the store and she, one time she made me eat a brain, a boiled cow brain sandwich.

And I remember it was on white bread, probably Wonder Bread. And she put French's yellow mustard on it, and that was it. She said, I had to eat half of it. You know, in those days, you did what you were told.

And so I remember half a cow brain sandwich. And she probably made some comment about how that would make you smart. But she would also go and get chicken hearts. And I remember going over to the fry pan, seeing about a hundred chicken hearts.

And you could see the little aorta there, aorta. And those were quite fascinating to eat. I didn't mind the chicken hearts with a little bit of grease and a little bit of salt. Hey, what doesn't taste good with grease and salt?

And I also did not mind the gizzards. They were a little chewy. You know, they always put them in that little bag. And they were a little choosy, but I hated, of course, the liver or those kinds of things.

But gizzard, not too bad. Do you listen to God from the outside? That is to say an external fixed source. Truth that is true, whether you're alive or dead. Truth that is true, whether you're an infant or a senior citizen.

Truth that is true, whether you didn't exist or not. True truth, as Francis Schaeffer would say. True truth, because if you don't hear from God that way, these days in the last days, oh yes, in the past, God may have spoken in many different ways, the Urim and the Thu 'um.

But today he speaks through his son, Hebrews chapter one, one to three, and his apostolic messengers. So how do you hear from God? And if you do hear from God on the inside with impressions and intuition and instinct, how do you know, in fact, it's God?

How do you know it's in fact God? And of course the problem is, and I'm getting ahead of myself, but the problem is men and women are depraved and their thinker is tainted by sin. Their, can you imagine this?

Okay, hold on, hold on to your hats here at Info at No Compromise Radio. Your gizzard is affected by the fall. And so whether you are a Christian clairvoyant or you have some liver shiver, you are affected by the fall.

So you can't trust yourself. If the heart is desperately wicked, deceitful above all else, who can know it? Then how can you know that's God speaking when you have an impression? Impressions are impressions.

That's all they are. Dreams are just dreams. That's all they are. People think they can hear from God and dreams and visions and these other things. I want to drive you to the Bible. That's what we're gonna do today.

I think that's probably a radio show, isn't it? Back to the Bible, the Bible bus. It's all kinds of these things. And I applaud them for getting the people back to the Bible. That's our problem today.

We don't know the Bible. And can I say this? Well, of course I can, it's my show. Many people who consider themselves sincere Christians and believe in the inner mystic experience, deep down, I think if they would peel the onion layers open and look down at their heart, I think they would see laziness down in there someplace.

I think they'd see laziness because the Bible, of course, children can understand much of it, but it takes hard work. It takes sweat and toil. It takes dedication. It takes spirit energized labor, kapi a 'o, to sit down and read your Bible and study it.

Because we are people on the move. We don't have time and we're busy and we've got THX and Dolby and sense around and iPods and iClouds and iThis and iThat. And it's very, very difficult to sit down and learn true truth.

So we take the easy route. And the easy route is God just told me. Plus that settles the deal and you don't have to say, well, I'm really not too sure about the meaning of this verse. What does it say and what does it mean?

So, you know, God just told me. And then if I wanna get an argument, no one's gonna say to me, well, you didn't take that in context. I am the context because God spoke to me and my gut feeling. Can you imagine exchanging gut feelings and liver shivers for the word of the living God?

I don't want you to do that. That's why I talk about this all the time because so many people do it. Jeffrey Bromley said in the Baker Dictionary of Theology, page 367, mysticism presses beyond the external forms of religion to an attempted direct knowledge of God.

That's it. That's it. An attempt to direct knowledge of God, hearing from God directly inside of you. And friends, I'm trying to tell you that is not Christianity. That is not Christianity. That is not last days Christianity, Hebrews Christianity.

And you say, well, that's Acts Christianity. Well, you think everything that happens in the book of Acts happens today? Like people just getting beamed up and dropped down at Azotahs, you know, 10 kilometers, 10 miles, you know, Acts chapter eight away.

That's interesting. I don't see the spirit of God doing that. But anyway, that's a different hermeneutical subject. Many times, Acts, you see what is described and we don't take that as prescription. Why aren't some of those things talked about in the book of epistles?

Any epistles? Oh yeah, 1 Corinthians 12 and 14, as Paul chastens the church of Corinth for excesses. But see what happens today is discernment is an all time low for evangelicals. Combine that with a lot of dead orthodoxy, people learning the truth about God with external revelation only.

And then people run from dead orthodoxy. I wanna run from dead orthodoxy too, right? But dead, that's no good. But the option is not turn inward and have an experience. I like experiences, but my experiences don't drive me to truth.

Truth that drives my experience. That's exactly the way it should be. The other thing that's happening today when it comes to mysticism, that's what we're talking about today, Christian clairvoyance, people listening to God from the inside and not from an external fixed source, the canon of scripture, is that we live in a rebellious age and an age that wants to go against the authorities, against old established structures.

I could even hear that in the Stephen Furtick, shameful, hey haters video that was out on YouTube a while ago. This is a new day and you guys are old and he did the whole gay scare tactic. You know, you're just afraid.

Well, there's a part of people that are rebellious and they want to go against establishment and this rebel mentality going against mainstream is another reason I think that contributes to people desiring mysticism.

Here's my premise on No Compromise Radio today. It's impossible to discern false teaching, false teachers and false methods if you do not have any objective yardsticks to measure them with. That is to say, if I don't have an external outside truth, how do I even defend the scriptures?

How do I even proclaim the scriptures? The evangelical commitment has always been that the sole source of revelation is from God. Arthur Johnson said, the scriptures nowhere teach that God gives us any knowledge through spiritual experience.

Knowledge of spiritual matters is always linked to God's propositional revelation, the written word. Page 120, Wilfred Corden, mysticism and the evangelical option, Zondervan. So we've got people going around saying they can hear from God on the inside when I'm trying to push you to scripture.

You can just read Psalm 119 if you're struggling with this and Psalm 119 will show you the glories of God's instruction Torah. Well, when did this all sneak into Christianity? I'm sure there have been waves of this throughout the ages and people dabbling with it.

Of course there have been mystics, but they usually were outside of the mainstream Christianity but Quaker minister, Richard Foster had a book published in 1978 that really was used, I don't know if it's by Satan or by somebody, by the publisher as a catalyst.

It was used catalytically to get people into mysticism in evangelicalism. It's called celebration of discipline, the path to spiritual growth. And in evangelical circles prior to 1978, not too much of this stuff was going on.

But Christianity Today then said that that was one of the 10 best books of the 20th century. And the readers of Christianity Today voted it as the third most influential book after the Bible. And the thing is, even though they shouldn't have voted it that way, it probably is that influential.

Sadly, and what Foster did is he took medieval monks and their monkeries and their clairvoyant impressions. And he used that to write to modern day evangelicals and they bought it all. They bought it all.

Contemplative prayer was a big one. Contemplative prayer. Now, should you pray? Well, yes. Prayer is when you speak to God and you speak to Him using rational words, rational thoughts. You don't have to say the words, of course.

It comes from our mind. Paul said he would pray with his spirit and he would pray with his mind, 1 Corinthians 14. We pray without ceasing. We make our requests made known to God. We confess sins. There are all kinds of verses from 1 Thessalonians 5 to Philippians 4 and 1 John 1, where we pray and we use our mind.

But contemplative prayer doesn't do what you normally would think of when you think of prayer. Celebration of discipline, original edition, page 15. Christian meditation is an attempt to empty the mind in order to fill it.

And so before any of this stuff goes on, even God talking to you, the first thing you've got to do in contemplative prayer, that's like mysticism. It is mysticism. You've got to get rid of your mind. You've got to discard your mind.

You're not to think. Now, where do people get such notions? Christianity, of course, is more than a religion of the mind, but it includes the mind. And how do you love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength if you don't use your mind?

Actually, mind isn't used in the Old Testament. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength. What was Jesus doing? Adding to the scriptures? No, because in Hebrew language, mind is definitely thought of with heart and here what is implicit in the Old Testament, mind not listed.

Jesus makes explicit in the New Testament, mind listed. You love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And so you need to use your mind. Gary Thomas said, Choose a word, he uses Jesus, her father's example, as a focus for contemplative prayer.

Repeat the word silently in your mind for a set amount of time. How long do you think you'd say to repeat Jesus for? Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

I sound like the record skipping. That was only about 15 seconds, but I probably was bugging you. It was bugging me. How's it bugging? He said, say that for about 20 minutes. Can you imagine the whole no compromise radio show?

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. And then Gary Thomas said with contemplative mystical prayer, say this until your heart seems to be repeating the word by itself.

There you go. There you go. You're just up and at them now. You're just running off cylinders. You're not even thinking about it. Your heart is just seeing it yourself. Just as naturally and involuntarily as breathing.

But centering prayer is a contemplative act in which you don't do anything. You're simply resting in the presence of God. I only have one word for that. Two words for that. Forget you. What is going on?

Richard Foster said, I find it best to sit in a straight chair. By the way, I have a new chair here. My no compromise studios have a new mixing board and a new chair. See, I just need new theology. Some people would think.

Richard Foster said, I find it best to sit in a straight chair with my back correctly positioned in the chair and both feet flat on the floor. I'm gonna do that right now. Okay. If you're not driving, you can do that.

Straight chair, back position properly, both feet on the floor. Place the hands on the knees, palms up in a gesture of receptivity. I'm actually doing it. Sometimes it is good to close the eyes to remove distractions.

I could do that on radio, but you can't do that in the car. Sometimes it's good to close the eyes to remove distractions and center the attention on Christ. At other times, it is helpful to ponder a picture of the Lord, preferably white, democratic, blue eyed.

Looks like, you know, metrosexual. Let's see, where am I? At other times, it's helpful to ponder a picture or look at some lovely trees and plants for the same purpose. Or if you're in New England, you can look at the tundra.

Why did it snow? Friends, doesn't this sound weird? But what's just as weird, God talking to you from the inside it's all the same, comes from the same vein, the same root, the same issue. Yacinelli said, before you begin in prayer, choose a sacred word as a symbol of your intention to be with God.

Ask the Holy Spirit to reveal a word that is suitable for you. Jesus, Lord, Abba, love, mercy, stillness, faith, trust, shalom, and amen. Stillness, stillness, stillness, stillness. Then it gets worse.

King said, respiratory prayers are usually said and associated with the breathing rhythm. So here's what you do. The Jesus prayer, with the inhale, or Jesus Christ. With the exhale, say, have mercy upon me, the sinner.

Or Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, the sinner. Son of God, that's hard to do. That's a lot of words. What does that do? That just makes me dizzy. That's what that makes me do. Friends, you have the scriptures.

You have the scriptures. When you pray, you talk to God. And if he speaks to you, he speaks to you with chapter and verse. Today on No Compromise Radio, we're talking about mysticism, and we just dipped our toe into the pond of contemplative prayer.

And you know, the thing is, when it comes to contemplative prayer, Beth Moore has bought into this thing, hook, line, and sinker as well. Beth said the Lord would speak to Moses face to face as a man speaks with his friend.

That is part of contemplative prayer. When we sit back and realize that it is not just that we have something to say to God, it's that God has something he says to us. I wanna be in that tent of meeting.

Well, I'd say to Beth that she ought to understand what the Bible teaches with Moses and the tent of meeting and Miriam and what happened there. I don't think you wanna be in that tent of meeting, Beth, but Beth has bought into contemplative prayer, hook, line, and sinker.

And she's into all this stuff that Brennan Manning has provoted, Mark Iaconelli, and everyone else. And then you get these impressions, Bill Gothard checks in your spirit, waiting directly from the Lord, and Blackabee, God speaking to us by impressions.

Friends, impressions are just impressions. When you hear something from the inside, you should say to yourself, I don't trust myself. I can't trust myself. What does the word of God say? That's what you need to do to fill your mind with scripture.

So when you do think of a verse, or you think of something, it's a Bible verse instead. God speaks to you, really? You, in the middle of Worcester, out of all the people in the world, God's now speaking to you?

How many people did God speak to directly in the corpus of scripture? Well, No Compromised Radio today, your homework assignment is to read Psalm 119, and you'll say, why would I abandon the instruction from God to go inside to hear my own liver shiver?

Info at nocompromisedradio .com.

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This production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible-teaching church, firmly committed to unleashing the life-transforming power of God's word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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