Day 35 meditation reveals the primary reason why most people fail to experience the good life.
Most people seem to be caught on a perpetual merry-go-round. As the piped music plays, they go through life being carried up and down by the circumstances of which they encounter. When all is said and done for most of their lives, it seems they have merely gone around in circles. Up and down, round and round, their lives seem to have little, if any, meaningful direction (Gal. 4:1-8).
When man does, with seemingly great creativity, forge ahead to catch a moment in the sun, he often finds the moment lacking and briefly gone. As man nears the top of his quested summit, it seems an event out of the night plunges him back to the valley to begin once again his endless search for meaning and life. Something seems to be flawed in the very fiber of his existence.
Day 35 meditation emphasizes the good life is possible for man because the Spirit of God dwells within him.
Most men struggle in life simply because they fail to comprehend that God is “the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (John 1:9). Every created entity comes into being because the Spirit of life, the Son of God, quickens (enlivens) it into existence. Man experiences life simply because he experiences the Spirit of God that is within him. God is mysteriously the breath of life for every man.
The problem is not that man does not experience God. The problem is man does not know, or worse, refuses to honor God for his life. Although all men continually experience and live their life according to the outworking of the life of God, man often finds himself in opposition to that life in the world of his mind, in the world of his illusions.
Day 35 reveals the devastation that comes to man in the make believer world of his illusions.
Man begins to glory in the life that is in him as if it is his life. He awakes in his mind to his own perceived identity. Although life is only of God, man begins to perceive the experiences of living as if he can control them. This quest for life from within himself actually brings death in his mind to the life of God. Although the life of God never dies, man often fails to enjoy the glory of that life because he moves into the make believe world of his fantasies (Gal. 2:21-22).
Living in the world. being controlled by the endless, hopeless fulfilling of his own fantasies, will eventually bring man to such corruption and violence that God will step in to destroy that world. God will eventually out of his love and much longsuffering bring everyone to the end of themselves. Once the individual is out of control of the world he thought he could control, his cry finally rises to God in agony, “Lord, save me, I am perishing.”
Three Ignoble Illusions
- The illusion that man can make life happen by his own control.
- The illusion that man can make life happen by forcing his relationships.
- The illusion that man can make life happen by the power of the imaginations of his mind.
