The Gospel Coalition

In my book Do I Know God? I identify six ways a person might be decieved into thinking they know God when in fact they don’t. This post is the fourth installment of a series of posts which began the other day outlining those six ways. If you missed the first three posts you can click here and here and here.

Deception 4: “I’m spiritual. Isn’t that enough?”

From Oprah to Madonna, Tom Cruise to Deepak Chopra, our country is full of people who seem to be serious about exploring the varieties of spiritual experience.

What might be driving our generation’s evident appetite for spirituality apart from religion?3 One explanation points to what has been lost since Enlightenment man traded in the sacred and transcendent for the natural and physical.

People today live in a “world without windows,” explains sociologist Peter Berger. By contrast, he says, in centuries past humanity lived with windows to other worlds. They recognized there was Someone bigger, Someone to appeal to beyond themselves, a larger purpose to life beyond this world. But the modern world, with all its technological advances and scientific sophistication, has turned away from the supernatural and closed the blinds on the unseen world.

In our new world without windows, God, spirituality, and mystery have become less and less imaginable. Everything has become a matter of human classification, calculation, and control. And since there is no reality beyond what we can see, everything is produced, managed, and solved this side of the ceiling.

It seems, though, that the human spirit will have none of it. In a world robbed of mystery, people yearn for transcendence. They sense there must be more to life than the bottom line, and they begin to understand that all our modern technologies and capabilities cannot make us better, more satisfied people or answer our deepest questions.

This may explain why supernatural dramas such as X-Files, Joan of Arcadia, Medium, Ghost Whisperer, Supernatural, and Heroes seem to pop up every new television season. And why people are increasingly fascinated with Eastern mysticism, angels, aliens, psychics, the afterlife, and metaphysical healing—even why the drug ecstasy is so popular among youth. Our generation is crying out for something different, something higher, something out of this world.

This is both good and bad. As C. S. Lewis said in Mere Christianity, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” People growing more conscious of the eternity that God has set in every human heart (Ecclesiastes 3:11) is a good thing, and it’s something we should all celebrate. On the other hand, “people who have been starved of water for a long time will drink anything, even if it is polluted.”5 There are endless varieties of spiritual options available to people today, and spiritual seekers seem willing to try them to satisfy their spiritual thirst.

The Bible warns against any kind of spirituality apart from true relationship with God. Time and again God condemned pagan idolatry, mysticism, and false worship. Paul wrote, “They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25). And when Paul visited Athens and addressed the people in the Areopagus, he acknowledged how spiritual they were, yet he showed them that while they were deeply spiritual, they didn’t have a relationship with the living God (Acts 17:22–31).

It’s encouraging that so many people are rediscovering their spiritual thirst and are open to spiritual answers to their deepest questions and longings. But just as salt water can’t quench our physical thirst, so false and incomplete spirituality can never satisfy our spiritual thirst. Only true relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ can satisfy that thirst. True spirituality is the inner experience of an ever-deepening relationship with God the Father, through God the Son, in God the Spirit. Anything less than entering into an eternal relationship with God through Jesus Christ is a false spirituality that cannot save or satisfy.

When we settle for anything less than true spirituality, we are, Lewis said, “like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

Far better to allow our spiritual longings to bring us to Christ. Hebrews 12:2 tells us to “[look] to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” In Jesus we begin to understand that this world is not all there is, and he empowers us to live in this world with the next world in view. When we place our faith in Christ and what he accomplished on that “old rugged cross,” he not only satisfies our thirst for God, but he also promises to usher us from this age to the next one safely and soundly—where God’s children will live with him forever.