As I understand things each of us is born with a personality, gifts, and an inner disposition. It is the beginnings of a perspective that is developed and molded over years through the living of life, education formal or informal, experiences, habits, family, heritage, culture, time in history we were born, birth order, and a myriad of other things.We begin to see and understand life and our existence through this lens we call perspective, what the Bible calls understanding. It is how we learn to handle situations and people. It has great impact on the way we respond to those things. Woundings and failure can color our understanding and as a result affect our decision making processes and with that our decisions. Success and accomplishment great or small will have a different affect on our understanding, but equally as powerful.
Changing that perspective or understanding can be beyond difficult. In all of us it resides almost without our awareness. Sounding something like "I am who I am; I cannot change." Our habits and lifestyle good or bad are born from our understanding and are lived out. Sometimes things can change, but more often I believe they are merely compensated for. We judge life based on our right and wrong and try to live accordingly. Jesus Christ came to live and die and was raised from the dead to bring true change and interrupt that process. From what I have seen, people can often receive His life but through a lack of awareness, stay fixed in their understanding while adding Jesus to their experience. I believe many of our factions and lack of a godly lifestyle can be tied to this malady.
Paul saw this in the church at Ephesus. He began his letter to them explaining that they were loved, accepted, sealed, and that they had every spiritual blessing in heavenly places. But knowing the difficulty in believing and having those things active in their lives he prays, "Therefore I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, do not cease to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers: that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him,the eyes of your understanding being enlightened;"(Ephesians 1:15-17a). Our perspective comes from the eyes of our understanding and cannot change without the influence of the wisdom and revelation of knowing God. Wisdom being what to do and the right way to do it and revelation into the way God does things. Seeing and understanding God can change the way we see life causing the changes in the way we act. Not by the present church prescription of "gain more knowledge and try harder". Even biblical knowledge seen through unenlightened eyes has been misleading for me. It can sound like more work and with that so much more tiring. But from what I see God gives it to us not because we are being good or bad but, because we ask Him. I am asking all the more these days....
