Ask Pastor Mike Fabarez

Speaker 1

Well, today on Focal Point, author and teacher Mike Fabarez addresses a topic that many are wondering about today. We're glad to have you with us today on Focal Point. I'm your host, Dave Drouy.

Today, we'll hear Mike Fabarez address a fascinating question on the subject of Christian mysticism from our listening family, of course. If you'd like to pose a question of your own, we invite you to stop by focalpointradio.org; more details on that later.

Pastor Mike is the senior pastor at Compass Bible Church in Southern California, and we're joining him and executive director Jay Wurton inside the Pastor Study.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Dave. Pastor Mike, we've received a question from a listener about Christian mysticism, asking what what is it all about? Perhaps you could start by defining exactly what Christian mysticism is.

Speaker 3

Well, I wish anyone could define exactly what Christian mysticism is. That's a problem. Mysticism is defined by so many different people in so many different ways. If you want to go back to the etymology of the word and what it means, it comes from the word *mysterion* in Greek, meaning mystery.

You know, a mystic believes in some kind of mysterious encounter, either with a kind of secondary level of knowledge, and usually it's a secondary level of experience that people are trying to say is really the encounter we're looking for with God. I mean, it has so many different forms, and almost every religious system has a mystical element within it. I mean, you have mystical Judaism and mystical Buddhism, and there are all kinds of subcategories where people are looking for some kind of secondary experience.

And by that, even that, some would define mysticism as different from an experience. Yet a lot of the encounters that we have with people who have this mystical bent to their Christianity, or quote some Christian mystic, as they would call them, are looking for a kind of encounter—some existential, some kind of experiential encounter.

If you want to get to the basis of that, we're looking oftentimes for a feeling in our encounter with God, whether it's in prayer or whatever it might be. So, it's very important that we just know what a huge category it is when someone brings up mysticism or Christian mysticism. It's a broad category, and there are a lot of different people using that phrase that mean a lot of different things.

Speaker 2

Why do you think people are drawn towards mysticism?

Speaker 3

Well, I do think it's much like the Gnostics, the second and third century of, you know, our Christian era. Here since Christ, it has been a great thing to feel like you're special and in a second tiered kind of level of knowledge or experience that other people don't have. The normal person, the non-initiate, doesn't have this experience. I'm a part of the club. I've got special access and some kind of encounter that the other people don't have.

When I preach and kind of the practical ways I talk about it is, you know, some people feel like there's a second tier or varsity kind of Christianity. And when you're talking to someone who's into the existential experience, they're looking at that experience as the thing that makes them a professional Christian, a pro varsity. I'm in with God in a way that other people aren't.

What they'll say is, you can be a Christian and not have this kind of experience. But you know, there's this goal that you should have to drive your Christian life into a deeper place of some kind of union with God that makes your feelings. Often it comes down to that feel something you didn't feel before.

They'll often downplay the rationalistic approach of just knowing the right things and even trusting in the right things or the right people. You know, my trust is in Christ. I sense the comfort of the Spirit, all those things. But, you know, you need something more. You need to go to the next level. You need to have these deep and very profound moving experiences with God.

Speaker 2

So how does that differ from what the Bible says on how we encounter God?

Speaker 3

Well, of course, Christian mysticism often wants to say that is what God is shooting for in all people's lives. But what's interesting is they'll point to experiences in the Bible that were very rare. You know, the kinds of encounters that you see Isaiah having in Isaiah 6 or Paul on the road to Damascus. And these are very unique situations, certainly not the common experience of people even in the Bible. So I don't think it is what we should expect.

I think we need to be very careful when our emotions start to be the arbiter of what is good in our Christian life. You know, I think of the way that Paul addressed the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 14, when they had really kind of gotten on their high horse spiritually and felt like they were the ones that had this kind of varsity Christianity going on. He has to write to them and say it wasn't like the word of God just came to you or came from you or it's only reached you.

He says, if you guys think you're spiritual and you think you're prophets, well, then you ought to recognize. Here's Paul writing scripture, of course, saying that I am spiritual and I have the spirit, and I'm telling you what you should and should not do. In other words, he's writing scripture to them, and that scripture needs to be understood, processed in their minds, and applied in their lives.

And that is something he's saying brings the person who claims Christ in line with God's will. It's not just having a sense that my experiences or my encounter with the presence of God kind of trumps your quoting of what Paul said in this case you should or should not do. In other words, Scripture speaks clearly and plainly. God is a good teacher, and he speaks to all Christians in the word of God. He has spoken, and that becomes the rule of life and Christian belief.

That would trump anybody who comes on the scene and says, well, I've had an experience. There are people that are often claiming we can disregard the clear teaching of the Bible because they have some other source of authority. Often in mysticism of one type or another, it's the experience that I have, the feelings that I have, the move inside my heart that I have. You can blame a lot of that on God, but when it comes down to it, God has spoken very clearly, objectively in the Bible, and that needs to be the thing that trumps any feeling I might have.

Speaker 2

Pastor Mike, we hear a lot today about spiritual formation, and this sounds very similar to that, this Christian mysticism.

Speaker 3

Is it? Are they related? It can be, yes. And spiritual formation, I was talking not long ago with a school that is certainly concerned about doing things biblically, and yet they have the spiritual formation department. They know that many schools, many Christian institutions of higher learning, have kind of gone down a road with this, that it looks a lot like the mystics of church history who were looking for an encounter beyond the propositions of God's word.

And so they're trying to differentiate themselves by saying, well, we may have the title of spiritual formation, but we're not teaching those things. I was heartened by that. These are very important people in the administration of this Christian school, and so I was heartened by that. But I recognize that a lot of people see spiritual formation as code, if you will, for this kind of medieval mysticism, or maybe some of the monastic desert fathers or even Catholic mystics that have written extensively on these things.

So that may be too much detail, Jay, but the point is everyone wants to be spiritually formed into the image of Christ. If you just use those words with biblical definitions, okay, no problem. I want to be continually growing into the image of Christ. I want to be spiritually mature. All of that's great, but we've got to be careful.

When the word of God takes a second place to my feelings and my impressions, feelings can come. Sometimes my feelings connect with all that truth and I feel things, and other times they don't. But the word of God is going to stand at the end of time as true, and a lot of my feelings are going to be very unreliable.

Speaker 2

Shown to be wrong.

Speaker 3

They're going to be shown to be wrong. Absolutely many of them.

Speaker 2

Well, thank you, Pastor Mike.

These ideas are popular in some Christian circles, so I think it's important for us to understand what they are.

We're going to finish our discussion today with a message you gave called "Knowing the Real God and the Real Gospel."

Speaker 4

Part of the reputation of a church is based on its doctrinal statement. That's probably how you look for a church. Right when you came here, or went to whatever last church you were at, you look at the doctrine and say, and that really builds a lot of the reputation of the church. Oh, look at this church. Look, they believe in the essentials of the faith. They have a right view of Christ and they view the Scriptures properly, and that often builds the reputation.

But if the church does not practically value a certain set of things that reflect their doctrine, that grow from their doctrinal statement, they may have the reputation of being alive, but they may be, in fact, dead as they've drifted away from the principles on which they were founded. If we're going to be a biblical church, we need to have the Bible as the center, with the preachers being used by the Bible to get its message out to the people. That's the kind of preaching we're committed to.

Now, the things we're going to talk about, the two most important things we're going to discuss as a biblical church with biblical preaching, are who is God and how do we get saved? We need to rightly understand Him, and how do we get right with that God to know what we've received from.

Speaker 3

God and His word, keep it and.

Speaker 4

Make sure that we don't deviate. And if there's any deviation, if there's any kind of slide away from it, we're quick to repent because we don't want God at any point in the history of our church to say, I'm.

Speaker 3

Going to come to you like a.

Speaker 4

Thief and you won't know when it is, but I'm going to come against you.

So to help us with this, I want to inject a word that's found here in Jude verses three and four, the little one chapter book. But the word that is so important in this text is the word contend to fight.

And basically he's calling people, peace-loving people like us in a very politically correct culture to be ready to fight for the things that were once for all delivered to the people of God.

Take a look at it in context.

Speaker 3

Verse number three.

Speaker 4

He says, beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I would like to have gone on about a whole lot of things.

But I'm going to get very defensive here about a need that you guys have. I found it necessary to write appealing to you to.

There's our word, circle it. Contend to fight to get into it with people for the faith. Really? That's what he wants us to do. Yeah.

Speaker 3

You know, we're not talking about throwing.

Speaker 4

Blows on the patio and, you know, wrestling by the donut table. Right. This is a kind of mental, intellectual fight that we're going to have to go through. Because God has, last phrase in verse three, He has once for all delivered this body of information to the saints. This is not fighting and contending for faith; it's fighting and contending for the faith, the corpus of information, the body of truth that's been delivered to us. And it's been once for all delivered. We can't change it.

As we read in our annual Bible reading this week, Galatians chapter one, if anybody wants to tweak certain things as it relates to the Gospel, we're supposed to say, "You're anathema." I don't care if it's Michael the Archangel; it doesn't matter. God delivers, we stick to it. We don't deviate. And so we got to fight. We got to be willing to fight. Unfortunately, we need to fight within the walls of our own church.

Because verse number four says certain people, just like then, so it is now, have crept in unnoticed, surreptitiously, secretly. They are sneaky. They don't look like enemies; they don't look like bad guys. But they're here, they're in our midst, and we didn't even notice they were here. He says, and these are the bad guys. They are these people that are twisting and contorting.

He describes them in the last three phrases here in verse four. They are, number one, ungodly people. Let me help you with that. Before we ever start to think about what that means, ungodly, we think of the word godly, being righteous, virtuous, doing the right thing. Ungodly means they're not really virtuous or doing the right thing. Well, that's true. But the real essence of that word doesn't have to do with conduct; it has to do with the disposition in their own thinking. The word is literally, it's got a negation in front of it, and then the word is reverent. Someone who has a reverence and an awe for God. They are irreverent. They are not in awe of God. They don't have that lofty view of God.

And as is always the case, when your view of God suffers, the gospel suffers. In the next line, these are the people who pervert the grace of our God, which is the essence and centerpiece of the gospel, and they turn it into something else. In this case, it's translated in the ESV as sensuality, this desire to do what I want. It's not just sexual immorality; it's all kinds of license to kind of live my own life. I got Jesus; He kind of merged into my life, and I'm living my life, and it's great.

Speaker 3

And you know, he doesn't really harsh.

Speaker 4

Out my fun and I kind of get to do what I want. And you know, self-denial. Well, we're not into that anymore. It's all about a kind of perverted gospel. It doesn't redirect, doesn't change, doesn't transform. It doesn't bring people to real repentance. It's a bunch of talk about those things. But it allows me to live the way I want to live. And when that happens, we can be sure that we're not viewing God properly. In this case, he focuses in on the second person of the Godhead, Jesus Christ. And he says, these are the people that deny our only despotes. We get the word. I say that word in Greek because we know that word in English, the despot. That sounds like a negative word in our language, but it just means one who has complete, absolute authoritative control. They deny the complete, absolute authoritative control and the lordship, the curiosity, the leadership of Jesus Christ. They see Christ as something other than what he is, and because he is the exact representation of the nature of God. Hebrews chapter one. If that's how you view Christ, certainly that's how you view God.

It is from this concern which if you start looking for it in the Bible you'll see the combination everywhere. We've got to work at keeping a high view of God because if we don't, both as partly cause and partly effect, we're going to have a messed up gospel. Those two things go together. Verse number three says, I'm eager to write to you about other stuff but I found it necessary to appeal to you to contend for the faith. And then he says the problem is people have crept in unnoticed. If Satan wants to get a church off track, what he's going to do is he's going to try and bring in some bait for the church. Some things that are not bald-faced lies, not anti-truth, but truth that's kind of a composite of truth and something else and draw them away. Because even Satan himself is not trying to introduce to you something blatantly different than what you believe and think. What he is trying to do is masquerade as someone who's on your team and for you, masquerading as an angel of light, and he wants to draw you off. And his messengers are like that. They're held captive in the church to do the will of the enemy and get us to just kind of mess the truth up just a little bit. It is a battle that we need to watch out for.

Number one, in your outline, I put it this way. It's not these bald-faced lies that are the most insidious and dangerous. It's the half-truths. You and I, we need to fight to dispel half-truths because they're everywhere, and they are the things that move a church from being alive to being dead, from being healthy to being sick, to having God's support and favor to having Christ oppose them. It is about keeping our doctrine pure. And there's no more important doctrine than the doctrine of revering God as God and seeing Christ as master and Lord. That's, I mean, that's just the bottom line—putting God in his rightful place.

Verse 5: We destroy arguments. There's our battlefield and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God. And what we're trying to do is take every thought captive to obey Christ. Anything that raises itself up to challenge the biblical knowledge of God, we reject it. We say we're not going to have that. Can we do that nicely? Sure, if you're not going to be belligerent, fine. We can nicely talk this over, but we cannot settle for an unbiblical view of God or an unbiblical view of the Gospel. We've got to be ready to fight. And by that, I guess I can say that as strongly as the Bible says it, even though that kind of grates against our politically correct atmosphere. That picture of the Kumbaya 21st-century Christianity where we all just get along—when it comes to doctrine, there are some things we just can't get along. Until you're ready to submit your mind to the authority of God's word and have God be who he is and have the Gospel be exactly what it is in Scripture, we really got to break fellowship. We can't have it. Does that mean we're going to agree on every little nuance of theology? Absolutely not. We can't. But it does mean that we're going to be tenacious and ruthless about what the Bible says, not willing to jettison any part of it because it doesn't feel right, it doesn't seem right, or it doesn't sit well with me.

And I'll tell you why. Matthew 7, Jesus preaching into the Sermon on the Mount, is bringing us, you know, into a landing here, and he just saves some of the scariest statements for the end of the sermon. Verse 23 is the one I'm thinking of, but just to get context, look at it in verse 21. You want to talk about composites of mostly truth and some error? Here it is, guys. Coming on Judgment Day, with the right nomenclature about God, they're going to say to Jesus, "Lord, Lord." Not everyone who says to me, Jesus says, "Lord, Lord," will enter the kingdom of heaven. You're kidding me. Really? No. You have to be the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. That means, and this is not works righteousness and not earning your salvation. This is when God gives his word. We don't reject it. We don't reject parts of it.

Speaker 3

We don't say, well, you know, that.

Speaker 4

Seems a little over the top. Seems a little zealous. Seems a little, little hard line. No, my view of God would be much nicer and simpler, more genteel. He'd be a little bit more like my great grandfather. We, we can't do that. We have to accept it all. The will of God. What God has said, what God has revealed, we're willing to accept it and embrace it and to live our lives accordingly.

Unfortunately, many on that day will come to him and say, "Lord, Lord." And though they've got a resume that looks very pro-Christian—they prophesied in his name, they preached out in his name, they cast out demons in his name. They did amazing things in his name. They did mighty works in his name. They're claiming all kinds of support for Christ. Then I will declare the scariest verse in the Bible. For me, at least as a pastor who cares about people getting right with God, these people think they're in with God. They wake up on the other side, and he says, "I never knew you. Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness."

There's an important word. You've cast off the rules. You've taken what I've said, and in some way, you've defined your way around it. You've made excuses for not seeing it for what it was. You didn't seem to care about what I delivered to you as truth. The faith, once for all, delivered to the saints has to be tenaciously, doggedly guarded against half-truths. Because passages like this should remind us that Jesus, when he speaks about being right and wrong—which is not as complicated as you may think—he says, "You better be right come Judgment Day," because there's a lot of people that will think they're in and they're not.

Does that scare you? That should scare you. I'm not here to scare you. I'm here to read Christ's words and say, what do they do to you? That's what they do to me. We're all going to cross the threshold from this life into the next. I just wonder how many of us will hear from him, "Hey, welcome. Enter into the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world." And how many of you will hear, "Depart from me. I never knew you." That ought to be something that gives us pause and drives us back to say, "Whoa, am I sure about this whole thing? Do I know I'm not going on what I was raised on? I'm not relying on someone's sermon. I'm not reciting something from a tract. I'm really digging into the Word. I really understand what God says about himself. And I'm not rejecting any part of it."

God is the creator. God is holy. God is just. The gospel starts there. God is creator. He's in charge. He is holy. He's perfect and demands perfection. He's just. He must punish every sin, or he's not just. And if he's not just, he's not good. And if he's not good, he's not God. But the appeal to the gospel is not, "God loves you and wants to give you a lot of wonderful things." That is not the biblical gospel. That's like taking things, putting them on the table, finding things I want, and rearranging them to give me a whole different impression of the gospel than the biblical gospel, which starts with the problem that I have before a holy God.

Don't tell me about salvation until you tell me about what I need to be saved from. Don't talk to me about the freedom of love and forgiveness until I understand the condemnation and guilt of my sin. We have to start there. And people who start there, a lot of people say, "Oh, he's a fiery hellfire and brimstone preacher." Pray the Lord, I guess that he's out there on the streets doing that stuff. You do understand we cannot preach the gospel that gives us an answer to the problem unless we define what the biblical problem is.

Grace is not about helping us turbocharge our hopes and dreams. It is about God looking at people about to be zapped by his eternal judgment and stretching out his hand to save them as they do two things in the Bible: repent of their sins and put their trust in Christ. Repentance and faith. Turning and trusting. You can't say you're trusting in Christ because you believe a set of facts. James 2:17.

Speaker 3

Even the demons believe, right?

Speaker 4

If you're talking about facts, that's not the point. It's about moving beyond the facts to believing and trusting in what Christ has done.

Speaker 1

A serious look at the facts from Pastor Mike Fabarez on Focal Point. To hear this complete message, look for the title "Knowing the Real God and the Real Gospel" when you go to focalpointradio.org. This has been a special weekly segment we call Ask Pastor Mike. You know, so many of us have been discouraged to hear that God speaks in some ways to some people that seem so exciting and so different from what we've experienced. And there's certainly a lot of confusing teaching on this topic.

But as Pastor Mike examined the sensible focus on biblical facts, I trust he's given you a piece about this yet. God withholds no good thing from his children, and that's a truth made very clear in the resource we're featuring this month. It's called "A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23." The 23rd Psalm is a much-beloved passage of Scripture, but few have understood it as it was written from the unique perspective of a shepherd king intimately acquainted with the needs of a sheep. "A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23" gives you the facts about God who lovingly watches over and protects those who trust in their good Shepherd.

Request your copy of the book when you give a financial gift online at focalpointradio.org or when you call us at 888-320-5885. Again, that's 888-320-5885. You can also request "A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23" by mail by sending your donation to Focal Point, Post Office Box 2850, Laguna Hills, CA 92654.

If you have an interesting Bible question for Pastor Mike, we'd love to hear it. Contact us online at focalpointradio.org or post it at facebook.com/pastormike or twitter.com/pastormike. Leave your comments, like a post, or join our merry band of followers, and you'll be helping others in your network to find Focal Point as well.

I'm Dave Drouy wishing you a restorative weekend. Come back again on Monday when Mike Fabarez continues his message "When God Speaks." That's Monday on Focal Point. Today's program was produced and sponsored by Focal Point Ministries. Sam.