January 28, 2025

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Read: Colossians 2:1-16

Be careful that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit based on human tradition, based on the elements of the world, rather than Christ. Colossians 2:8 (CSB)

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When I was a teenager, my brother taught me about the Holy Spirit and listening prayer. I chased the miraculous after that. When my sister tweaked her knee skiing on a youth trip to Banff, we laid hands on her and prayed for healing – and her knee got better. As a youth pastor, I encountered evil spirits on missions trips, had prophetic dreams and other legitimate spiritual experiences, and begged God for more of it. 

Then I hit a wall. An intellectual wall that wouldn’t let through until I found out how to reason out my faith. It took a few years, hours of reading, and hundreds of pages of working it out, but I eventually came to a very rational and solid foundation of knowledge to explain why I believe in God; the Christian God. 

Rewind 11 years earlier and I remember having a vivid dream while I was in Bible school. It was powerful and memorable; I sketched it out in detail when I woke up. When I asked my principal about prophetic dreams he downplayed it, majorly. Then one day, I was up in the Eagle’s Nest – a loft with a small library above our classroom – and found John MacArthur’s book Charismatic Chaos. Had I been chasing a fairy tale? 

If MacArthur made an argument for it, it didn’t stick. When I was called into ministry at 21, I sought out a mentor – a charismatic pastor in one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Winnipeg. However, I met resistance at my church to teaching about and applying the gifts of the Spirit. We had a few closet charismatics though. I remember when a group of women approached me and asked me to come teach them about listening prayer. They said they were actively praying that God would remove some leaders in the church so that the Holy Spirit could move. 

I didn’t go. I had enough sense to know that this was not how things should work in God’s family. You don’t “pray people out.” 

I left there a year later, and worked at a church that had just recently “welcomed the Holy Spirit.” They were on a veritable spiritual buzz when I arrived. 

But that is where I had my crisis of rational faith; that is where I hunkered down for several years to study and learn. When I started preaching on apologetics that was applauded, but when I started including logic into my teaching, that was a step too far. 

Do you know why? Because of Colossians 2:8. 

Here was the proof that philosophy in the church was dangerous. I actually had people tell me that philosophy is demonic. Sigh. 

Look, just because there is a word in the Bible (philosophy) doesn’t mean that it means philosophy in the way we do today. 

You know what’s funny? I struggled to understand philosophical arguments for the existence of God until I started to draw abstract sketches that helped me see the words in a new way. Furthermore, one of my seven core arguments that formed the rational foundation of my faith was the argument from experience. 

Do you know what the problem was? People. People were the problem. They still are. People with opinions and experiences (or lack thereof), who were absolutely positive they had the market cornered on Truth. (Big “T” or little “t”?)

So what is it? Is philosophy a human invention? I mean people are arguing these days that our modern understanding of geology is wrong. That our cosmology is wrong. And certainly that our understanding of biology is wrong. (Or at least how life arrived on the scene.) 

What if it’s both? What if there are rational arguments for the existence of… something? In fact, what if we require rational arguments to understand the existence of anything? And what if the arguments eventually dry up? Like… they just can’t capture it all and something mystical and mysterious is needed to complement our knowledge. 

You know, I believe that God used evolution to create life and that fills me with such wonder that emotion wells up from deep inside and I have a spiritual experience just thinking about it. I see the Northern Lights, or a perihelion around the sun in the icy grip of winter and I’m left in stunned silence. 

This is precisely why I like the Apostle John as much as I do. He was a mystic who wrote about the Logos (logic) as pre-dating creation and then seemed to suggest in his letters that at some point we should put a pause on the philosophizing and theologizing and just go love people. 

I know I lost some of you with the mention of “that” word up there. (Evolution). But this is my point, you would lose me if you mentioned something else, and at the end of the day, we need to read with an open mind – open to both the Spirit and to learn – and then go put feet to our faith because that’s the most important part.