Laboratory of myself

Christians express their faith in many ways. Some are religious, others are not. To those who are indifferent, anyone who is a Christian is classified as religious. That’s a self-defense mechanism for those who use it. Without looking into it, these people categorize as religious anyone who confesses Christ and follows Him, so that they have their excuse for not doing likewise: ‘I am not religious.’

But not all followers of Jesus are religious. I certainly am not. I am not a religious Christian, but a scientific one. I know that the Living God is not static, but personal, dynamic and interested in working with me, to bring me fully into the Truth. Having created me, He wants me to love Him in perfect freedom, to become by grace what He is by nature, and this requires a response on my part.

I am scientific in my approach to God, but it is not that I study God scientifically, but rather that I allow myself to be studied scientifically by God, and by myself under His direction. It is the scientific approach that works best for me.

In the laboratory of myself, experiments are done one after the other, following the instructions in the manual, that is, the Holy Bible.

Someone has called the Word of God the wiring diagram of the universe. I would not call it that, even in its written form as the Divine Scriptures, but I have found it to be the manual to the human species, full of experiments that anyone can do to find out who they are, who God is, and what we are created to be. To read the Bible and not do what it commands is like going to lectures and skipping lab.

I did that in college. Let me warn you, it doesn’t work.

We learn by doing, at least I do. We know we are the image of the unseen God, and that knowledge should launch us on a journey of exploration and experimentation to find our Source. This is not an individualistic pursuit, however, because essential to the scientific method is to work with others, compare results, help each other, and in the end all arrive at the Truth. Solitary scientists often lapse into fantasy.

What is the point of all this?

There are groups that call themselves ‘Christian Scientists’ but aren’t really scientists, it is only their name. There are Gnostics who claim salvation or at least superiority through the acquisition of knowledge, but they don’t really know a thing. There are those who call themselves ‘Catholics’ because they’ve agreed on doctrines that they say are universal, even though it’s obvious they aren’t. There are the Orthodox who believe they have the fullness of Christianity—and that they may have—but what good is it, if they guard it as a treasure to cache instead of spending it for what it can buy?

All these are mere names defining nothing and no one.

What defines us as followers of Jesus Christ is our willingness to let ourselves be disassembled and put back together again. We can’t know in advance the outcome of the experiments done in the laboratory of ourselves, but we want to do them anyway. We want to let ourselves be molded by the hands that made us, not the other way round, molding images that our hands, our thoughts, have made. Those we know would be only idols.

Formal idolatry has long ago vanished and been replaced by the idolatry of fantasy—religious fantasy, psychological and philosophic fantasy, deified opinion, mitered and sceptered personality cults.

Yet the Truth is always the Truth wherever it appears, even if it appears outside the gates, and we can never go wrong in following it, no matter what anyone says.

Fantasy always fades. Only Truth stays bright.

Jesus Christ, we know, is the Truth. For humanity there can be no other Truth, because Truth is One. Let Him enter the laboratory of yourself, do the experiments as He directs you, reading the instructions in His Book, performing what is written there, and learn what He has set aside for you to know, for though it may seem humble compared to worldly wisdom, it is the scientific Truth.

It is only what really is, and only what really is, is worth being.