peace . love . joy

My mother loves to listen to recordings of Christian talks and seminars. And she was doing just that yesterday when I walked into the kitchen to wash up from lunch. Usually, I'd just walk on by, slightly cringing (because I don't quite like people angrily screaming into my ear, for some strange reason, preachers tend to love doing that), but then something the speaker said caught my attention:

No Christian has his theology perfect.
And we've all been guilty at some time of not only misinterpreting texts, but our own experiences.
And what Wesley says about that is our experience is not the final authority;
the Word of God is the final authority.

So if there is some kind of conflict between the Word of God and the experience, which one of those has to be wrong?
That would be the experience.
Experience is not an independent authority in our lives. A Lot of people say things like "I can't deny my experience". My response is "yes, you can".
You have to critically evaluate your experiences.

Here's the point:
A genuine experience may not be a true experience.

(Rev. Dr. Ben Witherington III, Rapture or Parousia?, Aldersgate Convention)

Here, he was answering a question about someone's apparent vision of the Rapture and being left behind. Now, what interested me was not discussed topic of the End Times, but his ideas of our experiences.

All of us experience things, from simple physical stimulations, like sounds and smells, that our body and brain register, to more complex intangible and invisible sensations, some of which we find great difficulty in expressing and recounting in exact terms to others. Human beings were created with, to borrow from Jane Austen, sense and sensibility. And all of it is very real to us, however you choose to define 'real'. That's what Rev. Dr. Ben meant when he mentioned a "genuine" experience.

But here's where the confusion and complication begins:
he claims not all experiences, no matter how "genuine", are "true".
By "true", he was refering to experiences that originated, that are created and sent by God to us.

This statement resonates profoundly within me. Because I, for one, place great significance and value on my faculties of sensibility. My belief is that God has given me a body, a working physical body complete with its hidden inner mechanisms, whose functions I shall exploit to understand and glorify Him as best I can. Through my body, its receptors and processors, through my past and present circumstances, through my experiences, the Bible and its contents have been brought to life, God has been made real in my life.

But while some experiences are "true" and God-inherent, others aren't.

Descriptively put, our brains are not permanently and exclusively tuned to God's channel.

We are like radios that require manual-tuning, you know, those with the little knobs that you turn to adjust the frequency, to listen to different radio broadcasting stations. Sometimes, there is a clear and abrupt change when you turn the dial: just one degree of rotation and the station changes without a confusing mish-mash of voices, static and what not. But sometimes, there is a transition, there is this range of frequencies within which, you can register two different channels and so, you simultaneously hear two different stations layered upon each other. And that's when you'll have to decide which station is the one you desire to listen to.

Messages, words, pictures or visions, voices, sensations.. Some are honestly from God, of God, good, correct, True. Others are obviously not. But those that aren't so clear-cut, those whose frequencies straddle the fence, slyly overlapping and sharing them frequency ranges..

Testing our experiences, what we perceive, calls for discernment, wisdom, knowledge and a very strict and critical mind.
Methinks this is not an easy task at all fundamentally because our experiences are so authentic, so difficult to dispute with, to deny, to doubt, to call into question.
But sometimes, it's also because the Truth is not what we want to hear, to see, to know.

A genuine experience may not be a true experience.

"Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world.
By this you know the Spirit of God:
every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God,
and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already."

~ 1 John 4:1-3