Welcome to another Thursday UNFILTERED blog post, the only blog that’s sad to announce that the origami business has folded.
Update: The publisher is projecting a Spring 2025 release for The Untold Story of the New Testament Church: Revised and Expanded. We’re still in the editing cycle, and it’s been extremely difficult. So your prayers are appreciated.
Now for today’s article.
Let’s face it. Our brain is a lazy schlub.
Its favorite activity is maintaining all the comfortable illusions we’ve gathered over the years. This includes our ideological fort made up of assumptions, beliefs, and half-truths that make us feel secure in our version of reality.
So when something new comes along that threatens to pull apart the threads of our intellectual safe space, our brain throws a tantrum.
It refuses to let unfamiliar ideas take root, opting instead to crudely filter and contort them until they fit nicely inside the fortified belief system we’ve grown so attached to.
Our minds have an amazing ability to take in new information and make it fit our preexisting mental blueprints. It’s a coping mechanism, really – a way for our brains to avoid the exhausting task of reconstructing our entire web of beliefs every time we encounter something that challenges our worldview.
This tendency goes back a long way, and it helps explain some biblical head-scratchers.
Take the ancient Israelites’ view of the coming Messiah. They had spent centuries imagining a warrior-king who would crush Israel’s enemies and usher in an era of national supremacy.
So when Jesus showed up preaching about suffering, sacrifice, laying your life down, and an “upside-down” kingdom not of this world, well, let’s just say they weren’t quite ready for that plot twist.
Their spiritual blinders caused them to filter Jesus’ radical message through the lens of their long-held assumptions about Messianic triumph and power.
No wonder the disciples constantly misunderstood Him, envisioning positions of prestige in the kingdom instead of a cross. Even after He had just finished talking about it.
Jesus’ subversive teachings threatened to crack the very foundations of their belief systems, and well, their minds wouldn’t permit it.
Anything He said that didn’t align with their Zionist power fantasies got vigorously filtered out and reinterpreted.
Jesus: “Take up your cross and follow me. Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it.”
The Disciples: “Thanks for the reminder Lord, which of us is going to be the greatest in the kingdom when you pounce on the Romans?”
Today, we see the same dance.
Especially with those of us who attempt to introduce legitimately fresh, earth-shattering ideas about the Lord Jesus and His kingdom.
It doesn’t matter how mind-blowingly brilliant an insight may be, some people will unwittingly reinterpret and water it down until it fits inside their preexisting mental boxes.
The power of spiritual filters simply astounds me.
Let me share one example that some of my friends and I have had.
In a conference message, I shared insights that have blown my own circuitry and altered my own heart. Some people in the audience were turned upside down, meeting the Lord in a brand new way. Some wept as if they’d just met Christ for the first time.
Yet someone else responded, “I’m so excited! My pastor shared the exact same thing last Sunday. Thanks for the reminder.”
Intrigued, I checked out this pastor’s sermon from last Sunday.
Shockingly, except for the words “Jesus,” “power,” “God,” “Bible,” “gospel,” “Holy Spirit,” and “kingdom,” there was nothing in common with my talk and his.
How can this be? Answer: Spiritual filters. Their power is inexplicable.
Christian or not, our brains are hard-wired to force the strange to become familiar. When the landscape doesn’t match the territory, our first instinct is to bend the data, not the other way around.
And this happens at an unconscious level.
The journey is learning to recognize those blinders for what they are and cultivating a willingness to remap our minds to align with that which is strange to us, even when it wrecks our previous operating systems.
You see, how we hear is a reflection of our hearts. (For this reason, Jesus warned, “Be careful how you hear” – Luke 8:18.)
In the end, having our blinders removed is both terrifying and freeing.
Many visionaries and revolutionaries have walked this path before us, and they too faced the same hurdle.
Only those who are humble enough to become a child in the kingdom will hear and see epiphanies so powerful they’ll part waters. The rest will completely miss them, seeing nothing and hearing only thunder.
Until next Thursday,
fv
Psalm 115:1
Some Traditions Refuse to Die, Like This One