Just a Little Talk with Jesus
By John Gavazzoni

The reader may need to exercise some patience if I seem to be indulging in a bit of elderly maudlin sentimentality. Shortly, I'll be calling upon an old gospel song in support of a message that has been insistently demanding my heart's attention. Unlike the great horse, Silver, coming out of the past with thundering hoof beats, the words of a song going back to the earliest days of the beginning of my walk with Jesus, sneaked gently out of the past into my memory on softly padded feet.

As I tried to remember the words as accurately as possible, I realized that its message provided a perfect complement to the sometimes whisperings, sometimes thunderings, of the Spirit's Jesus-centering voice. I'm sure my recollection is not word-perfect, but this is close to what Oswald J Smith penned:

"I once was lost in sin, but Jesus took me in,
And then a little light from heaven filled my soul.
It bathed my heart in love, and wrote my name above,
And just a little talk with Jesus made me whole.

"Now let us have a little talk with Jesus,
Let us tell Him all about our troubles.
He will hear our faintest cry,
And He will answer bye and bye.
Now when you feel a little prayer wheel turning,
And you know a little fire is burning,
You will find a little talk with Jesus makes it right."

God, in His wisdom, has imposed upon our five-senses dominated eonian consciousness a most strategic futility. In a word, we are entirely incapable of figuring out God. What is so maddening is that in the deepest recesses of our being, we know that He desires that we come to know Him in the full splendor of His Being. But when, to our thinking, He remains stubbornly veiled from us, a deception enters in that first suggests, then follows up with insistence, that we take some God-seeking initiative.

This leads to us tuning into SOME of what God knows, WITHOUT KNOWING GOD. We think, as it were, that we can sneak in the back door, grab a little God-kind-of-knowledge, so that, to change the metaphor, we can "get this show on the road." What we get is the knowledge that Paul warned about, the knowledge that "puffs up" instead of "builds up."

The true knowledge of God, experiential and intimate is at the heart of the New Covenant. At the heart of the New Covenant, the Divine Nature knows Itself in/by intimate communion, the communion of the Holy Spirit. The Divine Nature's knowledge of Itself, is the knowledge of Itself as a Father and a Son in perfect Oneness. This is a knowledge filled with mutual delight in One Another as One Unity, and Love is its all-pervasive dynamic.

If a man is to know God, he must be permitted, I repeat permitted, to share by grace in the "I AM" self-knowledge, self-identification of God. What I'm saying is that we can only know God, by God's own knowing of Himself/Herself shared with us. This knowledge is the communion which IS life.

Can you dare to give serious consideration to this thought?: There is a mutual dependency within the Divine Nature. God, in order to be a Father, is dependent upon having a Son, and by continuing to have a Son, God continues to be a Father. Likewise, of course, the Son cannot be the Son without God being His Father. This is implied by Jesus' affirmation that He is in the Father, and the Father is in Him. Each One, within the Other, makes each of Them who They are, and They are One.

Oh my, the loving, gracious communion that goes on "there." Pure, eternal ecstasy. In contradistinction to that knowledge, our archetypical "knowledge of good and evil," is at best comical, and at worst tragic. The former is life, and the latter is death, and all of us are suffering to some degree from a mixture of the two in our spiritual experience.

So this brings us to the matter of something that's very much in the "atmosphere," within which we are working out our salvation, God being the One operative in that working out, as the One both willing/choosing, and doing/performing. What's in the atmosphere, in the air surrounding our walking with the Lord very particularly in this present hour, is the matter of what is popularly called "Christ-consciousness."

Whew! What a hot potato that is. It seems to be an assumption by many brethren, that if one is seeking "Christ-consciousness," they can rest assured that they are spiritually on target. Hmmm, it might be well to "have a little talk with Jesus" about that. You see, the God-kind of consciousness, came to us in Jesus Christ, right out from the midst of the Divine Nature's own communion. If semantically, "consciousness," is to be our reference point, I much prefer "Christ's consciousness," over "Christ-consciousness."

Jesus taught us that eonian life is that we might know HIM, the only true God, and/even Jesus Christ whom (He) has sent. You ought not sneak in the back door and grab some Christ-consciousness, without knowing HIM in personal, intimate communion. Are we seeking to know Him, or a consciousness? There seems to be a notion that what made Jesus who He was, was His consciousness. No, He is, Who He is, because He was begotten of God, and because He was born of God, He shares His Father's mind. He lived out Who He was, by constantly SEEING the Father.

Slippery slope here folks. I rather regularly hear the Lord tell me to back up a ways because I've begun to veer off onto a head-trip path. Let's lay the basics down firmly, dear ones, so that we won't have to keep repenting of dead works: Jesus made HIMSELF known to us, and by/in Him, made the Father known. It is in personal communion with the Father, and with His Son, Jesus Christ, that we have the mind of Christ.

There is this principle that is always intrinsic to the experience of spiritual transformation: It is by looking at the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, that we are changed from glory to glory. Yes, I know that happens within us, but have you considered that preposition. HE is WITHin us. He is with us, in us, in union with us. That union retains what I call "the anotherness," of Christ's indwelling.

He is He, and we and we, in perfect union. Union, after all, clearly implies more than one. If you opt out of the intellectual tension that that truth presents to you, seeking the intellectual comfort zone of a simplistic understanding of oneness, a oneness that leaves you seeking Christ-consciousness in communion with yourself, you will be walking proof that "the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field, which the Lord God had made."

I sense among us, that tendency to drift toward the Greek idea of the Logos, as opposed to John's explanation in his Gospel. The idea of a transcendent Logos was very prominent in Greek philosophy. They thought of the Logos in very impersonal terms, and expressions such as "the Cosmic Mind," or "Universal Mind," even "Christ-consciousness," are traceable to what one historian observed, that the Greeks turned Christ into a philosophy.

The full quote is along these lines: “The Greeks turned Christ into a philosophy; the Romans turned Him into an Empire; the Europeans turned Him into a culture, and we Americans have turned Him into a business.”

In contrast, St. John knew the Logos, the Word, the Message of God to be the very Person of Jesus Christ. Dear brother and sister, have you left your first love? Hear the question pressed upon Peter, "Lovest thou me?" It's so easy to fall in love with an idea/ideal, as the Greek philosophers did. It's like a drug-high. Wow! I wish you could see all the psychedelic colors of my Christ-consciousness. Take a sniff, it will blow your mind.

Another old song of Oswald J Smoith’s comes to mind, and I hope we all will remember that we were once, in our own way, like the man described in the lyrics:

"One sat alone, beside the highway begging.
His eyes were blind, the light he could not see.
He clutched his rags, and shivered in the shadows.
Then JESUS CAME and bade his darkness flee.

"So men today, have found the Savior able.
They could not conquer passion, lust and sin.
Their broken hearts had left them sad and lonely,
Then JESUS CAME, and dwelt HIMSELF within."

Chorus:
"When Jesus comes, the tempter's power is broken.
When Jesus comes, the tears are wiped away.
He takes the gloom, and fills the life with glory.
For all is changed, when Jesus comes to stay.