- Are We Walking In The Light?

What have we been doing with all the light and guidance God has given us in His Word and through His Spirit? I am concerned that some Christian leaders are deriding the “mysticism” of spiritually minded Christian believers—men and women who are so devoted to Jesus Christ that nothing else in this life and in this world much matters. A couple of generations ago, all Christendom was in one of two camps: People were either “liberals” (also called “modernists” and “rationalists”), who questioned the inspired authority of the Scriptures and who denied that Jesus was more than a master teacher and a splendid human example. Or people were “evangelicals”—accepting without question the fundamental and total authority of the Scriptures as God’s Spirit-inspired Word and recognizing Jesus Christ as God enfleshed. Now, suddenly, we find the lines are no longer so simply drawn. Now an increasing number of scholars and authors claim to be both evangelicals and rationalists.

Church history is clear. Jesus Christ has always had devoted, adoring followers who found it possible to love their Savior and Lord with all their hearts and minds and souls. If so-called evangelicals can now speak lightly about these “evangelical mystics,” we must conclude that truth in our day has taken a cruelly cynical twist.

Those evangelical mystics have been a potent force for God and for the Word of God. You will have to count Moses, David, Isaiah, John and Paul among them. You will have to count Augustine, Luther and the Wesleys. You will have to add Lady Julian, Fanny Crosby, Francis Faber, Brother Lawrence, A.B. Simpson and a mighty host of other men and women whose greatest delight in life was the rapturous love of God in their souls! Could it be that in our advanced generation we are forgetting that all people will have to answer to God for the decisions they made in life either accepting or rejecting the spiritual light God has given them? Are we forgetting that the moral judgments of God will fall upon individuals and nations according to the light they have received?