r/ChristianMysticism

Naaman was not healed by a dramatic moment. He was healed when he humbled himself and obeyed.

That convicts me.

I keep asking God to fight battles while I keep feeding the worry. Maybe worship comes first. Maybe healing begins when pride stops arguing.

What simple act of obedience are you resisting?

How has God used periods of physical illness or weakness in your own life to show you things that health completely obscured? If you have experienced a time where a hospital bed or a season of physical suffering became a classroom for spiritual growth and personal sanctification, what specific truths or scriptures did the Holy Spirit bring to light for you during that quiet time?

The Great Value of Sickness

In an age intoxicated by the illusion of human autonomy and perpetual youth, the mention of physical infirmity is treated as an absolute failure. The modern medical establishment, coupled with a self indulgent culture, views the failing body as the ultimate tragedy. Even within the professing church, a hollow gospel of emotional comfort and health and wealth prosperity has turned God into a celestial vending machine. They tell you that if you have enough faith, you will never suffer. They tell you that sickness is always a direct sign of demonic oppression or lack of spiritual power. They handle the Bible like a textbook to be corrected by modern psychology rather than the living word of the living God. But when you open the Bible, you find a reality that shatters these superficial delusions. Sickness is not an oversight in the plan of God. For the believer, it is often a profound school of sanctification, a means by which the Almighty humbles our pride, isolates us from a distracting world, and prepares our souls for the Judgment Seat of Christ.

The Purpose of Divine Chastisement

Psalms 119 verse 71 states, It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn thy statutes.

The natural man reads that verse and immediately rebels. How can affliction be good? The skeptical believer, looking for comfort through worldly methods, objects that a loving God would never use physical suffering to teach His children. They view this position as unnecessarily harsh or outdated. Yet the Psalmist, writing under the direct inspiration of the Holy Ghost, declares it to be an absolute good. The truth is that when health is abundant, the world is loud, and our flesh is strong, we do not listen to God. We are too busy building our own little empires, scrolling through endless digital distractions, and drowning out the quiet conviction of the Holy Spirit.

God uses the quietness of a sickbed to strip away the clamor. When your strength is spent and you are forced to look at the ceiling, the worldly ambitions that seemed so vital yesterday suddenly lose their luster. Are you quiet enough to hear Him when your body fails? Sickness has a way of exposing our total dependence on the Creator. It forces a man to face his own mortality, tearing down the pride that makes him think he is the master of his own destiny. It is a pastoral correction designed to bring personal holiness. If you are suffering today, do not view it merely as an attack to be resisted, but look to see if it is a loving hand guiding you back to His statutes.

The Weakness That Manifests Power

Second Corinthians 12 verse 9 records the words of the Lord to the Apostle Paul, And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.

A skeptical believer loves to alter the meaning of verses like this to soften their blow, suggesting that Paul was merely dealing with a metaphorical thorn or a psychological difficulty. They cannot stomach the reality of a physical infirmity remaining uncured in the life of God's greatest apostle. They want a religion that guarantees physical comfort because their real focus is earthly ease. But Paul did not ask for a psychological adjustment, he sought the Lord thrice for a physical deliverance, and the answer was a majestic refusal that elevated his suffering into a vessel for divine power.

When you are weak, you are finally in a position where God can use you without your pride taking the credit. The great danger for the modern Christian is not physical weakness, but the illusion of spiritual strength. Sickness tears away the spiritual cosplay where sincerity replaces truth. It reveals exactly what you are made of when the stage lights are turned off. For the observer who watches a Christian suffer with grace, it provides an undeniable testimony that cannot be argued away by intellectual debates. They can mock your logic, they can attack your confidence, but they cannot explain the supernatural peace that rests upon a dying saint who knows his sins are washed in the blood of the Lamb.

The Perversion of Worldly Philosophy

Colossians 2 verse 8 warns, Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.

When you look outside the pages of Scripture, human philosophy completely perverts the purpose of suffering. Man left to his own devices falls into two major errors. The first error is a cold, mechanical view that treats sickness as a cosmic trap, a harsh debt you must stoically endure to pay off your own past failures. The second error actually worships the suffering itself, teaching that by enduring pain or flagellating the flesh, a person can somehow earn favor with God or atone for sin. Both views are spiritually bankrupt. The idea that your physical pain can atone for sin is a direct insult to the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross, who blotted out our debt completely.

The Scripture avoids both of these perverse extremes. The Bible never teaches that sickness is a virtue in itself, nor does it teach that pain is an inescapable trap with no purpose. Sickness is simply a reality of a fallen world. The true virtue is never found in the illness, the virtue is found in the sovereign God who takes that negative trial and shapes it for an eternal purpose. God does not ask you to detach from reality or rely on your own endurance. He uses the trial to drive you directly to Him.

The Discernment of The Judgment Seat

First Corinthians 11 verse 31 and 32 says, For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged. But when we are judged, we are chastened of the Lord, that we should not be condemned with the world.

Here is a dispensational truth that the average churchgoer completely misses. There is a vast difference between the condemnation of the lost world and the fatherly chastisement of a believer. The modern worldling lives under the delusion that his good health is a sign of divine favor, ignoring the fact that he is marching straight toward eternal damnation. The skeptical believer, however, often thinks that any trouble means God is angry, missing the reality that we are dealt with as sons. When we refuse to judge our own coldness, our own worldliness, and our own neglect of the Scriptures, God will step in and judge us through physical means.

This is not a popular message in an era that demands emotional validation over doctrinal precision. The skeptical believer will claim this makes God look like a tyrant. But a father who never corrects his child is not a loving father, he is a negligent one. Sickness causes a man to evaluate his life in light of eternity. It forces you to ask yourself, what am I doing with the time I have left? Will my works burn as wood, hay, and stubble at the Judgment Seat of Christ, or will they abide as gold and precious stones? God would rather break your physical body now to save your spiritual reward than let you coast into eternity fat, healthy, and completely empty handed.

The Sovereignty of The Author

Job 2 verse 10 says, What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? In all this did not Job sin with his lips.

The ultimate target of modern philosophy is the absolute sovereignty of God as revealed in the Scriptures. Skeptical believers often want a manageable deity who conforms to human standards of fairness and cultural evolution. They have a hard time accepting a God who says in Isaiah, I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things. They try to explain away these passages or hide behind theological jargon to protect God from looking bad to the secular world. Job did not make excuses for God. He recognized that both health and sickness, prosperity and adversity, come from the same sovereign hand.

If you are struggling with these truths today, waiting to find fault with the tone or the structural assumptions, ask yourself why you feel such intense hostility toward the absolute authority of the Creator. You want to argue about the problem of suffering because it allows you to keep God on trial while you sit as the judge. But the cross of Jesus Christ closes every loophole. God did not exempt Himself from suffering, He entered into it to purchase redemption for all who believe. Your arguments are not with the structure of this exhortation, they are with the text of the Book you are desperately trying to avoid.

Conclusion And Appeal

The true value of sickness is that it destroys our illusions. It strips away the superficial devotion, the intellectual vanity, and the worldly comforts that keep us from absolute surrender to the Lord Jesus Christ. It forces us to lean entirely upon the words of God. If your health is failing, do not let the devil convince you that God has forsaken you. Use this time to search your heart, to cleanse your hands, and to immerse yourself in the truth of the Scripture. Let the Holy Spirit bring the conviction that leads to genuine spiritual revival.

I’ve been struggling with something for a while, and I’m curious if anyone here has gone through something similar.

I feel genuinely drawn to Christ and to the idea of knowing God directly through prayer and contemplation. That desire feels very real to me.

At the same time, I have a hard time accepting many of the doctrines of the church I was raised in. Questions like the problem of evil, free will, eternal punishment, and a few other teachings have never sat well with me, no matter how much I’ve tried to understand them.

The thing is, I’m not looking for reasons to reject Christianity. If anything, it’s the opposite. I want to follow Christ, but I don’t know if I can honestly force myself to believe things that I don’t find convincing.
So I guess my question is: can someone genuinely walk the Christian mystical path while still wrestling with these kinds of doubts? Is union with God something that comes first, with understanding following later, or does accepting the Church’s doctrines have to come first?

If you’ve been in a similar place, I’d really appreciate hearing your experience. I’m much more interested in how people have actually lived through this than in debates or apologetics.
Thanks.

Pessoal gostaria de aprender um pouco mais sobre o misticismo cristão, gostaria de linhagens que envolvessem alquimia. Como começar a estudar ? O que eu faço ? O que eu leio primeiro?

Se alguém quiser me ajudar ou estiver começando, também chamem na DM para conversarmos sobre

“God does speak—sometimes one way and sometimes another— even though people may not understand it. He speaks in a dream or a vision of the night when people are in a deep sleep, lying on their beds.”
‭‭Job‬ ‭33‬:‭14-15

How can one develop love for God? This is an important question. The answer is both easy and difficult. Easy because we often hear that if we pray to God, worship Him, repeat His name, and try to lead a pure and good life, love for God will arise. Yet, although this sounds simple, it is easier said than done. When we try to put these ideas into practice, we encounter many difficulties.

In the beginning, devotion often appears to be nothing more than a preparation a kind of imagination. We think of God, speak to Him, pray to Him, and try to feel His presence even though we may not perceive Him directly. However, as our practice deepens, this imagination gradually transforms into realization. What is imagination today can become realization tomorrow. That is how love of God is cultivated.

This process requires something of the innocence of childhood and the freedom of heart that allows a child to play with a doll and experience it as something living and meaningful. To an adult, the doll is merely an object; to the child, it is a companion. In a similar way, the spiritual seeker learns to relate to God with sincerity, simplicity, and feeling, even before direct realization dawns.

In truth, much of what people pursue in ordinary life is also based on imagination and mental projection. We imagine a successful career, a future home, our children's marriages, financial security, recognition, and countless other possibilities. Most of our hopes, fears, and ambitions concern a future that does not yet exist. Even our experience of the present is filtered through thoughts, interpretations, and mental images. We live largely in a mental world.

The same principle applies to spiritual life. In the beginning, one may honestly admit, “Yes, for me God still feels like an idea, a possibility, even a kind of fantasy.” But through sincere practice through holy name chanting, prayer, remembrance, and devotion that idea gradually becomes a living reality. What was once only a thought begins to be felt as a presence. What seemed distant becomes intimate. What appeared imaginary becomes more real than anything else.

Thus, love of God grows little by little. Imagination deepens into feeling, feeling deepens into experience, and experience matures into realization. Through persistent remembrance of the Divine, the heart awakens, and love for God becomes natural and spontaneous.

So I had this experience of the names of god and they came from this reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names\\\_of\\\_God\\\_in\\\_Judaism

I might try to find a closer one with regards to my experience but the names of God came to me as Elah Elohim Elohei, I will look further into Elohei but I found it on some Jewish article before. Elah and Elohim can be found on the reference.

I am not a Jew but the experience was so direct that these were the names of God that I need to go back and do the research. Anyways I think I need to study Kabbalah or something but what is your take on this. I know you can believe in the names of god and not be Jewish but what should I do. I can post this to Christian’s as well but I am not sure what they believe about the names of god anyways your thoughts?

Edit: I found this on AI

Hebrew translation: "Elohei" (אֱלֹהֵי) translates to "God of..." (e.g\*., Elohei Avra\*ham means "God of Abraham"). I need some scholarly articles or something for verification that these are the names of god.

I (21M) recall that at the age of 13, during my first traditionalist " for adults" catechism class, the priest taught us that "no one loves what they do not know," and that since God had created each of us solely to "know Him, love Him, and serve Him," knowing God was our duty and our salvation.

God, of course, reveals Himself as perfectly as is possible for the human intellect of a mere layperson through the Catechism of Saint Pius X, a compendium of doctrine published in 1912.

Over the course of the year, we would learn—always and exclusively through the texts the priest read to us—who God is.

We wouldn't even learn, on the other hand, the names of those who sat beside us throughout the year. The priest only wanted to speak with us once, and in private. On that occasion, his only concern for myself consisted in that I — as a male — was wearing a ring with a gemstone (which, of course, is appropriate only for ladies and dignitaires) and that I still served as an altar boy occasionaly at a nearby “Novus Ordo” parish that my familly attended.

There was no communal activity to experience other than listening, with an ever-growing passivity (referred to as "docility"), to whatever came out of the sacred mouth of our good shepherd—whether it was doctrine from dusty manuals or a hastily murmured Latin liturgy.

Unsurprisingly, not even half of those who began the catechism classes actually finished them, leaving only those who still needed to receive a sacrament of Christian initiation.

The apostle Saint John, in his first letter to one of the earliest Christian communities, warns that "whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love" (1 John 4:8).

He defines, by writing so, what is to fail to know God. But how, then, can we know Him? The apostle himself explains right after:

"This is how we know that we are in Him and He in us: if we love one another, God abides in us and His love is perfected in us."

No one, the apostle teaches, has ever seen God (John 1:18 & 1 John 4:12). He can only be known through love for one's neighbor, who is the figure of Christ before us.

In catechism, I learned to "know, love, and serve God," whom, according to the Gospel, "no one has ever seen."

Later on, life taught me the very same thing the apostle had already proclaimed two thousand years ago:

"Whoever does not love their brother, whom they can see, is incapable of loving God, whom they cannot see."

Only long after catechism and after leaving behind almost everything I heard from that priest did I begin to learn what it means to know, love, and serve this other, who—always, and whoever they may be—is the true Christ, the Son of God.

 The remarkable thing about Jesus was that to him the important thing is Love, and it isnt about Jesus rescuing us from some firy hell, it is about that he will rescue you from self and place you into his world of Love, and that comes with stipulations in that only if you will receive it as he did from God Himself. Matt 3:16. 

  Jesus shows up over and over again giving of himself over to us that we may give the same over to the other, not out from an obligation for a belief, but because your heart will not accept anything less than where there is no enemy to defeat nor victory to win but only the satisfaction for doing the right thing what ever that may be that is thrown into your path such as a cross. 

  In that you look at Jesus and he looks back at you and noting needs be said because understanding is mutual by identification with him, and with a stare in the eye and hand shake as in, Well done my good and faithful servant, turns and walks away leaving you with a pride that only Love can satisfy. 

Did you ever experience in your life the total surrender to God moment? How did you all do it? Really curious on this one, cause I saw one post that when a person actually stops praying about it and stops controlling God to change His will in accordance with yours, that is when the time that you really surrendered everything to Him and that He will actually start to work on that thing youve been praying about :)

I'm studying various spiritual traditions, and I came across this subreddit, and I'd like to ask a few questions, if it's not too much trouble.

What is mystical Christianity like in practice?

Are you necessarily affiliated with the church? Or is it a separate spiritual practice?

What would this union with God in mystical Christianity be like?

Forgive my analogy if it's offensive, but it's like natural witchcraft, where the practitioner works alone following certain rules? But they can also use their creativity in their practices.

How do you talk to God? I read some posts and saw that you talk to Him or have revelations.

Please forgive me if I sound offensive; I don't mean to be rude or crude, just to understand mystical Christianity. I'm currently reading The Imitation of Christ, and even though I'm not a Christian, I found it beautiful.

From the time the Pharaoh’s daughter discovered him until around 40, Moses was fully integrated into Egyptian culture. He was a prince, which would have meant he almost certainly was introduced into the Egyptian rites in the Ancient Mystery Schools.

To what degree did this become influence him? Did he fully reject all of it when he left Egypt? Or are there elements of that theology within Christianity/Judaism?