The Door Of Perception
Bible Study
The Key to Life
Reflections on the Lord's Prayer
Object:
Jesus, gazing into the heart of reality, prayed, "Our Father who art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name." Holy be your name. Seeing is the door to life, now and eternally. But Jesus said with sadness, "You see, and you don't see; you hear, and you don't hear; you think, and you don't understand."
We are blind and deaf and dull of mind; and God has a hard time getting through to us. But as we pray, "Hallowed be thy name," we glimpse the depth of reality. We perceive something of the power and glory. We begin to grasp the rightness and the adequacy of God -- the power that can guide my life and the power that can control history.
But our families, our youth, our nation are forgetting God; we are drifting in free suspension toward the doors of death. There is still hope -- the goal is God; the savior is Christ; the foundation is the Bible. That's who we are. "Thus sayeth the Lord."
Young Isaiah was where we are now. He was a successful young politician under King Uzziah. Uzziah died; Isaiah lost his place in court. The king had been his center; now he was lost. In his desperation he drifted into the temple. It all came alive for the first time. This was no routine worship service. He was in shock; the doors of perception were opened. He saw and knew!
There was fire and smoke coming from the altar. There was God, sitting on a throne, high and lifted up. His train filled the temple. There was an earthquake and the temple shook. Isaiah cried out: "Woe is me. I have seen God. But I am a man of unclean lips; and I live among a people of unclean lips." Then one of the seraphims flew and took a live coal from off the altar. He flew to Isaiah and touched his lips with the hot, searing coal, saying, "This has touched your lips, you are clean."
Then there was a voice saying, "Whom shall I send, who will go for us?" Isaiah answered, "Here am I. Send me" (Isaiah 6:1-8, paraphrase). God said, "Go." He went. Thus Isaiah entered into life as God's leader of His people. He even began to share a vision of the coming Messiah. He guides and touches our hearts today.
This has happened over and over again to youth of many centuries. This is where our true leadership comes from. There is hope. God still lives. He is in control. The doors of perception must open again. We must pray for it and prepare our youth for it. Christ will come again to America.
Desert Storm has passed. South Africa is holding its breath. Bosnia and Serbia have been at each other's throats. There is hate everywhere. The world situation and the national situation demand again that we allow God to open the doors of perception and reveal His power and His purpose, asking, "Whom shall I send, who will go for us?" There are new leaders who will respond. When we know the truth we will pray, "Hallowed be thy name," and then obey. We rediscover God in the low places of history, and life is redirected. When God is known and obeyed, life is cleansed and history moves forward and upward toward the Kingdom of God on earth. Let us see it again: "Hallowed be Thy Name."
Jesus is the one who sees the eternal truth. Follow Him. We don't see it all. Harold Kushner tells of a play. A couple is on their honeymoon. It is probably their first voyage on the ocean. The young man says, "If I were to die tomorrow, I would feel that my life has been full because I have known your love." The bride answers, "Yes, I feel the same way." They kiss and move away from the rail. The name of the ship, written on a life preserver, is revealed as they step aside: The Titanic. By faith we know that does not have to be their end.
Carl Jung writes that of all his patients over 35, there has not been one whose problem was not one of finding a religious outlook on life. Murphy's Law suggests: "Anything that can go wrong, will." But there is an opposite law, that anything that should be set right sooner or later will. God is working on it. The grand old hymn "Crown Him With Many Crowns" points this out:
His glories now we sing,
who died, and rose on high,
who died eternal life to bring,
and lives that death may die.
Doug, a minister in our conference, lived very close to Christ. After a long illness he was approaching the end. I asked him if the spiritual was real to him. I shall not forget his answer: "The spiritual is more real to me than the physical. It is the only reality." Soon he took the next step into life.
This kind of spiritual assurance is the secret of great living. It is the ultimate power of true leadership. Moses discovered it at the burning bush and led his people out of slavery. Elijah found it after the earthquake, wind, and fire, in the still small voice, and went back to lead his people. Paul experienced it on the Damascus road and became the world's greatest missionary. John Wesley found it in the little prayer meeting on Aldersgate Street and founded the Methodist Church.
So many of us never see the vision; we never know God. We perceive no mighty power of beyondness. We are aware of no amazing love and forgiveness. We fail to grasp the High and the Holy. All we know is a feeble "Is-ness." We are unaware of an "Almighty rightness." We see only the shallow surface and step on it. We spend all our time gazing at that which destroys us. We gaze into the abyss until we fall into the abyss. That is not the way God designed life. That's why God sent us Christ. There is a way out, and up. "Where there is no vision (perception), the people perish." God is high and lifted up, and also present.
Too often we gaze at the altar and see only a piece of furniture -- no fire and smoke and power. We hear great music -- just sound -- and never hear the real note of surprise, joy, and laughter, and a shout of praise. We've never been touched by the live coal from off the alter. Not only have we put our light under a bushel, we have covered up the lighthouse.
We, creating new myths as a substitute for God, worshiping the small half-gods of wealth and ambition, just might stumble head-on into the Living God. Then we see beyond the altar, hear beyond the music, perceive beyond the sermon, and glimpse God judging our deeds, forgiving our sins, and making us new persons. We see our need revealed, our forgiveness assured, and our mission is upon us.
Our perception is self-limited. As Thomas Edison reminds us, "No one knows one seven-billionth of one percent about anything." We don't see through the wall into the riches of spiritual reality. Jesus gazed upon the Father's face every day and invites us, by faith, to move with him into the presence of God. We behold the glory of God and we know we are lost; we see the love of God and we know we are saved. Why did our ancestors shout? They perceived the power and glory at the heart of worship, and they shouted. Let us perceive, and shout!
There is a glorious mystery at the heart of reality. Faith becomes the conscious awareness of a power, a love, a joy, other than ourselves, which seeps down and takes possession of our subconscious minds, removing doubt and fear and putting in their place trust, peace, and joy, which produces strength, health, and wholeness. But, sadly, Lillian Smith reminds us: "We have shunned understanding... nobody values wonder and awe; they are outworn things, like tenderness and love, left in the nursery with unanswered questions and broken dolls and broken dreams." The Church should once more throw open the doors into the power and the glory and let the light flow through to brighten our darkness and give us a clear vision into things ultimate. This happened to Isaiah, and he saw "the Lord high and lifted up." Hallowed be thy name.
Aldous Huxley says it well in The Doors Of Perception (New York: Harper, 1954, p. 79):
The man who comes back through the door in the wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humble in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand.
Something happens to us when we go through those doors of perception.
Simon Peter "saw," and he cried out, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God." Isaiah cried out, "Here am I, send me." In the spiritual breakthrough at Pentecost the tiny group of scared disciples saw the vision and felt the power and went out to conquer the world for Christ. For us there are dimensions of life yet undreamed of. The British science mystic, William Blake, points out: "If the doors of perception were cleaned, everything would appear to man (as it is) -- Infinite!"
All of us are directly related to the mind of God, but we deny our kinship, and stumble on through life to nothingness. The vacuum is what confuses us. The pipeline to reality is choked by our consuming lesser interests and we find ourselves alone in a vast universe that makes no sense. God created us for something more -- much more.
There is the story about Dr. Merton Rice and Bishop Qwale. Dr. Rice heard the Bishop say that a thunderstorm was the best place to hear the voice of God. Merton Rice, a struggling young preacher, thought he would try it. A storm came through at three in the morning. Merton went out into the woods and sat on a log in the pouring rain. He waited and listened and heard nothing. He got up, soaking wet, and said to himself, "Merton Rice, you're a fool," and went home. Later he told Bishop Qwale, "All I heard was my own voice saying, 'Merton Rice, you're a fool.' "
The old Bishop replied: "Well, Merton, how much do you expect to learn in one thunderstorm?" Perhaps, "all of us think more highly of ourselves than we ought to think."
How do you open the doors of perception into the holy? God is constantly opening these doors for us: being caught high on the side of a mountain in a thunderstorm, enduring a night lost in the desert, being caught in a hurricane at sea, flying through the night in a damaged plane. You see things you never saw before.
There are many more normal revealing experiences: your wedding day, the birth of the first child, the christening of that first child, a death in the family, a serious illness. These are all moments when we glimpse beyond the door in the wall. We can close the door, or open it and enter into new life.
I stood at 4 o'clock one morning at Angel Point on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. About ten of us watched the sun rise and paint the canyon with glorious color, layer by layer. When we left we began to realize that we had stood there for two hours, and no one had spoken above a whisper. God was there -- and we knew it.
Jesus came to open our eyes and free us from captivity. Mary was so excited that she forgot to help Martha with the morning meal. She couldn't stop listening to what Jesus was saying. Martha complained. Jesus answered: "Don't bother her. She has chosen a good thing." Mary's perception of life was breaking wide before her eyes. Jesus himself withdrew a great while before day to be with the Heavenly Father.
True worship opens the doors of perception; earnest prayer opens the door and we can see things not known before. Those whom Jesus touches saw and were swept into new dimensions of life. They were hardly aware that the door behind them had closed. As they turned to go back to the old life, the door was no longer there -- but the new way lay invitingly ahead.
In Christ we begin to see a million miles high, a million miles wide, a million miles deep. The inscape of life is lighted, and warmed, and expanded. It is like the unimagined music that surged back and forth in Handel's spirit as he pounded out the Messiah. But so many of us in our blindness, failing to see life's exciting dimensions in God, pursue the nearer forms of pleasure and get drunk. Not seeing the true joy and love in the family, we fall victim to cheap sex and plunge into the pit.
There is a way out of chaos, lostness, and madness. Christ reveals the difference between heaven and hell. He did not shrink from the pure light of God. We can follow him, sustained by his love, because in the darkness we have glimpsed his light and are haunted by his love.
Jesus led the disciples to behold the mystery of the power and the glory. He revealed to them the abundant life. It still happens. I was leading a youth assembly of four hundred young people from our conference. The president was a high school senior. In the opening meeting he revealed to the other youth that he had received an appointment to Annapolis. He couldn't decide whether this was right for him. He was struggling with decision. He asked the assembly to pray for him. And he meant it.
A new spirit came into the assembly and we all felt it. The presence came, and grew. Toward the end the spirit was electric. During the communion service I could hear the catch of breath; I heard sigh after sigh. In a strange way God was possessing them. On the campus half of them were asking, "What does God want me to do?" They experienced a new sense of the Holy, and entered a new quality of life. Grant it again, O Lord.
The fire can burn once more behind our altars. The old foundations can tremble. Our lips can be cleansed. God still calls, "Whom shall I send?" God waits for the answer; "Here am I. Send me."
Christian youth can once more claim the world, when they truly perceive the Power and the Glory.
"Hallowed be Thy Name."
We are blind and deaf and dull of mind; and God has a hard time getting through to us. But as we pray, "Hallowed be thy name," we glimpse the depth of reality. We perceive something of the power and glory. We begin to grasp the rightness and the adequacy of God -- the power that can guide my life and the power that can control history.
But our families, our youth, our nation are forgetting God; we are drifting in free suspension toward the doors of death. There is still hope -- the goal is God; the savior is Christ; the foundation is the Bible. That's who we are. "Thus sayeth the Lord."
Young Isaiah was where we are now. He was a successful young politician under King Uzziah. Uzziah died; Isaiah lost his place in court. The king had been his center; now he was lost. In his desperation he drifted into the temple. It all came alive for the first time. This was no routine worship service. He was in shock; the doors of perception were opened. He saw and knew!
There was fire and smoke coming from the altar. There was God, sitting on a throne, high and lifted up. His train filled the temple. There was an earthquake and the temple shook. Isaiah cried out: "Woe is me. I have seen God. But I am a man of unclean lips; and I live among a people of unclean lips." Then one of the seraphims flew and took a live coal from off the altar. He flew to Isaiah and touched his lips with the hot, searing coal, saying, "This has touched your lips, you are clean."
Then there was a voice saying, "Whom shall I send, who will go for us?" Isaiah answered, "Here am I. Send me" (Isaiah 6:1-8, paraphrase). God said, "Go." He went. Thus Isaiah entered into life as God's leader of His people. He even began to share a vision of the coming Messiah. He guides and touches our hearts today.
This has happened over and over again to youth of many centuries. This is where our true leadership comes from. There is hope. God still lives. He is in control. The doors of perception must open again. We must pray for it and prepare our youth for it. Christ will come again to America.
Desert Storm has passed. South Africa is holding its breath. Bosnia and Serbia have been at each other's throats. There is hate everywhere. The world situation and the national situation demand again that we allow God to open the doors of perception and reveal His power and His purpose, asking, "Whom shall I send, who will go for us?" There are new leaders who will respond. When we know the truth we will pray, "Hallowed be thy name," and then obey. We rediscover God in the low places of history, and life is redirected. When God is known and obeyed, life is cleansed and history moves forward and upward toward the Kingdom of God on earth. Let us see it again: "Hallowed be Thy Name."
Jesus is the one who sees the eternal truth. Follow Him. We don't see it all. Harold Kushner tells of a play. A couple is on their honeymoon. It is probably their first voyage on the ocean. The young man says, "If I were to die tomorrow, I would feel that my life has been full because I have known your love." The bride answers, "Yes, I feel the same way." They kiss and move away from the rail. The name of the ship, written on a life preserver, is revealed as they step aside: The Titanic. By faith we know that does not have to be their end.
Carl Jung writes that of all his patients over 35, there has not been one whose problem was not one of finding a religious outlook on life. Murphy's Law suggests: "Anything that can go wrong, will." But there is an opposite law, that anything that should be set right sooner or later will. God is working on it. The grand old hymn "Crown Him With Many Crowns" points this out:
His glories now we sing,
who died, and rose on high,
who died eternal life to bring,
and lives that death may die.
Doug, a minister in our conference, lived very close to Christ. After a long illness he was approaching the end. I asked him if the spiritual was real to him. I shall not forget his answer: "The spiritual is more real to me than the physical. It is the only reality." Soon he took the next step into life.
This kind of spiritual assurance is the secret of great living. It is the ultimate power of true leadership. Moses discovered it at the burning bush and led his people out of slavery. Elijah found it after the earthquake, wind, and fire, in the still small voice, and went back to lead his people. Paul experienced it on the Damascus road and became the world's greatest missionary. John Wesley found it in the little prayer meeting on Aldersgate Street and founded the Methodist Church.
So many of us never see the vision; we never know God. We perceive no mighty power of beyondness. We are aware of no amazing love and forgiveness. We fail to grasp the High and the Holy. All we know is a feeble "Is-ness." We are unaware of an "Almighty rightness." We see only the shallow surface and step on it. We spend all our time gazing at that which destroys us. We gaze into the abyss until we fall into the abyss. That is not the way God designed life. That's why God sent us Christ. There is a way out, and up. "Where there is no vision (perception), the people perish." God is high and lifted up, and also present.
Too often we gaze at the altar and see only a piece of furniture -- no fire and smoke and power. We hear great music -- just sound -- and never hear the real note of surprise, joy, and laughter, and a shout of praise. We've never been touched by the live coal from off the alter. Not only have we put our light under a bushel, we have covered up the lighthouse.
We, creating new myths as a substitute for God, worshiping the small half-gods of wealth and ambition, just might stumble head-on into the Living God. Then we see beyond the altar, hear beyond the music, perceive beyond the sermon, and glimpse God judging our deeds, forgiving our sins, and making us new persons. We see our need revealed, our forgiveness assured, and our mission is upon us.
Our perception is self-limited. As Thomas Edison reminds us, "No one knows one seven-billionth of one percent about anything." We don't see through the wall into the riches of spiritual reality. Jesus gazed upon the Father's face every day and invites us, by faith, to move with him into the presence of God. We behold the glory of God and we know we are lost; we see the love of God and we know we are saved. Why did our ancestors shout? They perceived the power and glory at the heart of worship, and they shouted. Let us perceive, and shout!
There is a glorious mystery at the heart of reality. Faith becomes the conscious awareness of a power, a love, a joy, other than ourselves, which seeps down and takes possession of our subconscious minds, removing doubt and fear and putting in their place trust, peace, and joy, which produces strength, health, and wholeness. But, sadly, Lillian Smith reminds us: "We have shunned understanding... nobody values wonder and awe; they are outworn things, like tenderness and love, left in the nursery with unanswered questions and broken dolls and broken dreams." The Church should once more throw open the doors into the power and the glory and let the light flow through to brighten our darkness and give us a clear vision into things ultimate. This happened to Isaiah, and he saw "the Lord high and lifted up." Hallowed be thy name.
Aldous Huxley says it well in The Doors Of Perception (New York: Harper, 1954, p. 79):
The man who comes back through the door in the wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humble in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand.
Something happens to us when we go through those doors of perception.
Simon Peter "saw," and he cried out, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God." Isaiah cried out, "Here am I, send me." In the spiritual breakthrough at Pentecost the tiny group of scared disciples saw the vision and felt the power and went out to conquer the world for Christ. For us there are dimensions of life yet undreamed of. The British science mystic, William Blake, points out: "If the doors of perception were cleaned, everything would appear to man (as it is) -- Infinite!"
All of us are directly related to the mind of God, but we deny our kinship, and stumble on through life to nothingness. The vacuum is what confuses us. The pipeline to reality is choked by our consuming lesser interests and we find ourselves alone in a vast universe that makes no sense. God created us for something more -- much more.
There is the story about Dr. Merton Rice and Bishop Qwale. Dr. Rice heard the Bishop say that a thunderstorm was the best place to hear the voice of God. Merton Rice, a struggling young preacher, thought he would try it. A storm came through at three in the morning. Merton went out into the woods and sat on a log in the pouring rain. He waited and listened and heard nothing. He got up, soaking wet, and said to himself, "Merton Rice, you're a fool," and went home. Later he told Bishop Qwale, "All I heard was my own voice saying, 'Merton Rice, you're a fool.' "
The old Bishop replied: "Well, Merton, how much do you expect to learn in one thunderstorm?" Perhaps, "all of us think more highly of ourselves than we ought to think."
How do you open the doors of perception into the holy? God is constantly opening these doors for us: being caught high on the side of a mountain in a thunderstorm, enduring a night lost in the desert, being caught in a hurricane at sea, flying through the night in a damaged plane. You see things you never saw before.
There are many more normal revealing experiences: your wedding day, the birth of the first child, the christening of that first child, a death in the family, a serious illness. These are all moments when we glimpse beyond the door in the wall. We can close the door, or open it and enter into new life.
I stood at 4 o'clock one morning at Angel Point on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. About ten of us watched the sun rise and paint the canyon with glorious color, layer by layer. When we left we began to realize that we had stood there for two hours, and no one had spoken above a whisper. God was there -- and we knew it.
Jesus came to open our eyes and free us from captivity. Mary was so excited that she forgot to help Martha with the morning meal. She couldn't stop listening to what Jesus was saying. Martha complained. Jesus answered: "Don't bother her. She has chosen a good thing." Mary's perception of life was breaking wide before her eyes. Jesus himself withdrew a great while before day to be with the Heavenly Father.
True worship opens the doors of perception; earnest prayer opens the door and we can see things not known before. Those whom Jesus touches saw and were swept into new dimensions of life. They were hardly aware that the door behind them had closed. As they turned to go back to the old life, the door was no longer there -- but the new way lay invitingly ahead.
In Christ we begin to see a million miles high, a million miles wide, a million miles deep. The inscape of life is lighted, and warmed, and expanded. It is like the unimagined music that surged back and forth in Handel's spirit as he pounded out the Messiah. But so many of us in our blindness, failing to see life's exciting dimensions in God, pursue the nearer forms of pleasure and get drunk. Not seeing the true joy and love in the family, we fall victim to cheap sex and plunge into the pit.
There is a way out of chaos, lostness, and madness. Christ reveals the difference between heaven and hell. He did not shrink from the pure light of God. We can follow him, sustained by his love, because in the darkness we have glimpsed his light and are haunted by his love.
Jesus led the disciples to behold the mystery of the power and the glory. He revealed to them the abundant life. It still happens. I was leading a youth assembly of four hundred young people from our conference. The president was a high school senior. In the opening meeting he revealed to the other youth that he had received an appointment to Annapolis. He couldn't decide whether this was right for him. He was struggling with decision. He asked the assembly to pray for him. And he meant it.
A new spirit came into the assembly and we all felt it. The presence came, and grew. Toward the end the spirit was electric. During the communion service I could hear the catch of breath; I heard sigh after sigh. In a strange way God was possessing them. On the campus half of them were asking, "What does God want me to do?" They experienced a new sense of the Holy, and entered a new quality of life. Grant it again, O Lord.
The fire can burn once more behind our altars. The old foundations can tremble. Our lips can be cleansed. God still calls, "Whom shall I send?" God waits for the answer; "Here am I. Send me."
Christian youth can once more claim the world, when they truly perceive the Power and the Glory.
"Hallowed be Thy Name."
