Your Final Authority

Have you ever come across the boating analogy for discovering God’s purpose in your life? It imagines three navigational lights in the harbor approach. When all three lights are in line, your course ahead is safe.

The “lights” are the Bible, the Church and the Spirit. So if you have a guiding Bible text, other Christians agree and the voice within says “Go!” - you go. But no one ever explains what happens when the three are not in line. The “boat” doesn’t just stand still. Life goes on. Decisions still have to be made.

So what or who is the FINAL AUTHORITY in my life? Is it the Bible, the Church or the Spirit living within? This is an old and very important question for daily living.

Up to the Reformation, the answer was the Church. An authoritarian priesthood banded down the answers to an obedient flock. The church system was the final authority in questions of faith and conduct.

The reformers changed all that. The concepts of freedom flooded into all areas of life. The world planners struggled for a previously unknown world social equality. And alongside, in the spiritual realm, Anabaptists, Quakers and others began to express the freedom of the Spirit. The majority, however, drew back from the “dangers” of genuine freedom and again ended up in the grasp of external authority - The Bible of the reformers.

It is said that the reformers who came out on top rejected an infallible Church only to replace it with an infallible Book. Understand that here we are discussing not the nature of the Bible, but its place; not its truth, but its use. For them it became the final authority. The Bible had become the final revelation, and so for all practical purposes the Spirit within seemed to be unneeded.

The freedom to read and love the Bible became an extremely valuable force in western civilization, but because it came to be used as a conceptual code, it again brought people into bondage to an external authority.

There was a third group that dissented from this view. They saw that there was another choice: that the Life of Christ within through the Spirit was the FINAL AUTHORITY.

At the beginning of the charismatic movement, the Holy Spirit began to loosen up our reliance on externals. He set us free and people began to hear Christ for themselves. What was the importance of this new direction? It was because external law, whatever its source, always leaves us with a static and unnerving situation. Law can only say how things ought or ought not to be done, and then impose penalties for failure. When it is dispensed through people, it gives them an authority they can’t handle and their flock a “security” which keeps them immature and unused to hearing God for themselves. When it comes through a code, it produces disputes as to its meaning as well as evasions whenever the content is inconvenient.

But people always seem so afraid to trust the unpredictable dynamic of the Spirit of Christ - it seems too blurry to handle, too chaotic for faith! So we begin to organize Him again, moving back to the authority of an infallible leadership. But, thank God, He will not be organized.

Christ is not a tame lion! He is a free Spirit and He is our Life. He is continually presenting that glorious song of liberty which we have always known, deep down. It was the song in the background that held us safe through all the legalism and structure of religion. Christ sings of a life that is dynamic and exciting - not static, but unpredictable, because IT’S HE!

I have faith that in this day our Father is going to complete the incomplete revelation by bringing in its fullness the practical reality of “Christ IN you.” It is a dawning realization to many that He is actually THE Life and that you “need no man to teach you, for you have an anointing which will teach you all things.” (1 John 2:27).

JESUS CHRIST WITHIN IS MY FINAL AUTHORITY. He is my foundation (not words about Him), and He is in union with me. I have no fear of missing the way - because He is it! No fear of not walking in essential truth - because He is it! And the new eternal Life He gave me? No fear of losing it! You guessed it — He’s it! (John 14:6).

“Too subjective,” you say, “at best an indistinct mess and at worst, anarchy.” Not really, not if I have that faith assurance that it actually IS He in me.

“Arrogant?” Yes, it could sound that way, but not when I know He is All and in union with Him, I am complete.

“Dangerous?” Oh, yes! but so much better than the safety of the cemetery or the caution of the law court...

and it’s such FUN!

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