From the Inside Out
My pastor, Larry Rollins of Grace United Methodist Church, is the organizer of a summer camp for youth. At the 2007 summer camp, the kids were taught a new song "From the Inside Out". It made its way into the church praise band's repretoire, and has been sung two or three times since. I recall hearing and singing it twice, the words affecting me strongly. I loved the song, but was frustrated. Read the verses: nice words, but how do you do them? How do you make them active in your life? And why is the song affecting me so strongly? So much more than a simply good song would? What was going ON?
At the time, I was treating the doctrine of Saltation, and the associated idea of the new christian being a symbiosis of Homo with Deus. as a metaphor. That is, I saw it as a useful comparison to explain the role that the Holy Spirit was playing in the Christian's life. Metaphors have limits, and I was looking for them in that "metaphor". I wasn't finding them: Many verses I read seemed to make more sense when viewed as supporting Saltation and Symbiosis, and I wasn't finding any that unambiguously contradicted it. I was beginning to suspect that maybe the "metaphor" of Symbiosis was more than a metaphor: it might be the real thing. How to prove it? I am an engineer and an experimental scientist. I needed an observation or a successful experiment to determine if the suspicion was true, and cannot vouch for anything's reality unless I personally experienced it or was convinced of its reality to the point of personal commitment.
I don't recall when I connected the dots, but it then hit me: If the Christian life is really Symbiotically based, then the Holy Spirit was actually inside. If the symbiotic union is real, then He would know that I was suspecting He was really "down there", and that I needed proof. But I needed more than proof of existence. I needed proof of symbiosis. And the nature of symbiosis is cooperation between the partners.
Here is my reasoning: If symbiosis is false, then the Holy Spirit would not cooperate to "prove" a falsehood, and the lack of cooperation itself disproves symbiosis. But if symbiosis is true, then cooperation in conveying the fact of symbiosis proves symbiosis, since symbiosis requires cooperation between the two partners. The cooperation to prove symbiosis is itself cooperation, which is the nature of symbiosis. (This seems a bit twisty and complicated. This is standard reasoning used in the mathematical field of Game Theory.)
The "proof" was in my reaction to "From the inside out". The song says nothing about the Holy Spirit, and the idea of "living from the inside out" meant you have to be convinced in your heart of something before you can live it. That's the surface message of the text.
But what if the whole purpose of the Symbiosis is to enable the person to live according to Jesus' will and desires "from the inside out?" That is, for the Homo partner to literally and consciously cooperate with the Deus partner within? If so, then communicating the desire to cooperate is the necessary first step in such a cooperative venture. Could it be that how I was reacting tio the song was actually coming from the Deus partner within? What better way could the Deus partner communicate the message "Hey! I'm REALLY down in you, and I can help you live better by working within you, from the inside out" by doing the spiritual equivalent of banging a tin cup on the walls, bars, and water pipes of the heart of the Homo partner every time the latter hears the phrase "To love you from the inside out"?
Okay, call it a confirmation from a pilot test. I believed it enough to divert time from entertainment to pursue the new line of research.
I've learned that all the guidance and wisdom I thought I was getting from God the Father up in heaven (and not in the inside of me) actually was "from the inside out". I haven't totally subjected all of my thought life to Christ, but I'm making definite progress. I've lost two hangups and a phobia that has plagued me for decades. Heck, this article should have been on the web 24 hours earlier, but wasn't because every time I took a break, I'd get a sudden insight into the nature of Symbiosis. The realization of the limitations of the Old Covenant promises came to me two hours ago. My friends, Symbiosis is really real.
So before you go confronting that evolutionist on Darwin Day to say that Pentecost is better, do yourself a favor and start living from the inside out, so you can say to that evolutionist, "Yes, I do. And here's the proof in my own life!"
You don't know how? Read on!
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