“We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age….No, we speak of God’s secret wisdom; a wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began….‘No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love Him,’ but God has revealed it to us by His Spirit” (I Corinthians 2:6-9)
The life of Christ revealed to us by the Holy Spirit is a constant process of learning and openness to teachings of the Spirit, because only the Spirit can educate us about God in the same way that some things can be known about a private life that only the individual can know.
We set as a minimum the basic facts about the Holy Trinity that all Orthodox Christians must know, called kerugma, which include the birth, life, death, resurrection and the second coming of Christ, the elements recited in the Nicene Creed. Here are the essential articles of our faith. We follow by explaining the meaning of those spiritual facts. Expanding beyond the elementary instruction and implications of what the life of Christ entails, the Christian is encouraged to move on to perfection. St. Paul invites us through the letter of Corinthians to maturity, a reaching outward and upward beyond the ordinary understanding of the faith in Jesus Christ. One must separate himself or herself from the wisdom of this age, and that’s not a simple assignment. Humans are by nature adaptive. We adjust to new circumstances, and we hold onto the old and comfortable. We take for granted what is reported to us as news, we agree with pundits, and we assume that what society, this age, considers true is true.
It doesn’t imply that social values and truisms are wrong, only that we are to use spiritual discernment and draw our own conclusions based on what we know about what God has in store for us. More than that, as we develop in the ways of the Spirit, we prepare our souls to receive the profound mysteries that God desires to share with those who are ready and capable of appreciating them. Not all who progress in Christianity are able to comprehend the mysteries. Again, a sorting out happens. There are those persons who are sensitive to the whispers of the Holy Spirit. They are like St. Paul—willing to set aside everything else that others consider important in order to grasp hold of the Spirit and follow wherever it leads. Another type of person is able to listen to the promptings of the soul but lacks the essential ability to change his or her life style and way of thinking about all that is part of life.
Those with souls that are not in touch with the Spirit are unable to rise above the material needs of life. If everything that a person values in life is either physical or material, they simply will never be able to rise to the appreciation of spiritual things. It makes no sense to them, regardless of how they pray, what they do for their faith or for their Church. If they live for sex, they will never appreciate the joy of chastity. If they live for money, they will never comprehend how rewarding generosity can be. If they live only for the delights of this world, they have no appreciation of God’s kingdom. They will insist that they have a great desire to get to heaven, but they have no idea why, or what they would do once there.
If you wish to develop into the mind of Christ, you must pray for the coming of the Holy Spirit and invite the Spirit into your heart and realize that what it means is to have the Spirit of God take control of your life. Spiritual life is not something one can dabble in, nor can one be fooled into assuming he or she has already gone as far as possible on the way to the Kingdom of heaven. On the other hand, once you have overcome the limits of this age and open yourself to mature wisdom, you will see all things in a new way.