In Him no Secrets are Hidden

Didn’t your mother tell you that it was inappropriate to tell secrets?!?!

I hate uncomfortable and peculiar social situations where someone whispers something into someone else’s ear and you are there left in the dark to wonder what just transpired. Maybe there is a look of fear after the secret is told or a burst of laughter and you are there thinking to yourself, “What! What just happened? Do I need to know this information? Are they talking about something important? Does this information affect me in any way? Could I be hurt if I knew, or would it help me?” You want to be in on the news. You want help. You want to be influenced by this information. You want to laugh too. But no, you are left in the dark to wonder what in the world is going on.

There is a resource out there called The Secret. It is the biggest “hot mess” I have ever seen. The premise is that there is a secret knowledge out there that you can tap into to get anything that you want, as if it were about you and me at all. The resource claims that if you can think it and channel the power of envisioning what you want, then you can achieve it. This is Gnosticism revisited and puked back out onto the self help table of the masses. “Gnosticism is a pre-Christian and early Christian religious movement teaching that salvation comes by learning esoteric spiritual truths that free humanity from the material world, believed in this movement to be evil (Encarta Dictionary: English).” In simpler terms, knowledge is power. We can know enough to transcend this material world and achieve salvation through a special knowledge or secret.

The good news of Jesus Christ is no secret. God has plainly made Himself known to all people through His son Jesus. When God saw the persistent ignorance of Himself among the Jews and Gentiles, He was persistent and chose to come down from heaven and to show us Himself through Jesus. If we have seen Jesus, we have seen God. No guess work is required and we are not left in the dark in a peculiar situation. God has made Himself known to us and has done all the work to rescue us.

“This mystery has been kept in the dark for a long time, but now it’s out in the open. God wanted everyone, not just Jews, to know this rich and glorious secret inside and out, regardless of their background, regardless of their religious standing. The mystery in a nutshell is just this: Christ is in you, so therefore you can look forward to sharing in God’s glory. It’s that simple. That is the substance of our Message. We preach Christ, warning people not to add to the Message. We teach in a spirit of profound common sense so that we can bring each person to maturity. To be mature is to be basic. Christ! No more, no less. That’s what I’m working so hard at day after day, year after year, doing my best with the energy God so generously gives me. ”

Peterson, Eugene H.: The Message : The Bible in Contemporary Language. Colorado Springs, Colo. : NavPress, 2002, S. Col 1:26-29

In Him no secrets are hidden,

Robbie