Pastor Ash Dotson
I invite you to join us … Oasis UMC Sundays at 9:30 a.m. in the Laredo Room. In John 7:36 what do you think Jesus means by saying, “You will search for me and you will not find me” and “Where I am, you cannot come”?
I hit my late teens and early 20s in the ’70s so I was always jealous of those who were a little bit older and got to experience the ’60s with the freedom to truly explore the “new consciousness” as it was called. I really think it was one of the most interesting times in U.S. history with humankind exploring what it means to be human. It was a time of “expanding” the mind. Now I know a lot of what was called mind expansion was by experimenting with drugs, and I am not advocating that, but I do believe there was whole scale mind expansion taking place without the use of drugs during the ’60s.
Folks began to search for truth, realizing that the truth that had been taught to them wasn’t really truth at all. Many began to look within for a different truth, for a real truth, that they weren’t finding in society or organized religion. The mainstream church has been dying, yet to recover from its perceived irrelevance.
Now to the scripture above: Jesus was preaching “mind expansion”; he had been telling those who were listening that they needed to learn to think in new ways. For instance, Jesus’ parables required a new way of thinking to understand them. Jesus was prompting folks to realize that they needed to develop the mind of God, to learn to think like the divine, to die to self … that is, the false self. Only then can Jesus be understood and can we come to know God.
Jesus is saying that it is only through developing this new way of thinking … I’ll call it love-thinking; it is only through giving up our ego–based false self, it is only through beginning the journey to finding our true self that we can truly comprehend Jesus’ teachings. The folks he is speaking to above have shown that they are going to hang on to their old ways of thinking, their ego ways of thinking, and that is why they will search and not find. That is why they cannot go where Jesus is going.
On the other hand Matthew (7:7-8) writes in his Gospel that those who seek will find, those who knock will find the door opened to them. In this context, seeking and knocking mean being willing to expand our minds, to give up our old ways of thinking, to give up our false selves. We must turn to love-thinking for the door to be opened. We will never find truth using the tools developed by a false self. We must undergo mind expansion in and with the Spirit of God. With which “self” are you seeking and knocking?