D2MG@SDSUMUS (Kurt Evans) (01/13/90)
I regret that Elliot Miller's complete testimony is far too long
to post here. I am posting only the last of about ten sections. Please
take the time to read it. Thanks!
From *A Crash Course on the New Age Movement*
Copyright 1989 by Elliot Miller
It seemed at every turn I received further confirmation that my
decision to follow Jesus and abandon my New Age path had been a moral
choice between good and evil. I finally yielded once and for all to
this heavenly verdict, but I still had difficulty understanding exactly
what had been wrong with my former "sacramental" use of drugs. After
all, hadn't it made me a better, more spiritually minded person?
After a couple of weeks of painful confusion over this, I finally
turned to prayer: "God, you know I've given up drugs for you and I'm
willing never to use them again. But it would really help if I under-
stood why. Please show me what is wrong with them."
Rising up from prayer I headed downstairs and sat on a couch next
to Tom's fiancee Liz, just in time to overhear her refer to "drugs" in
a conversation with Tom. "What was that you were saying?" I asked, won-
dering if my prayer would be instantaneously answered.
"I was just talking to Tom about my sister. She'd accepted the
Lord with us before, but has now gone back to smoking marijuana. So I'm
writing a letter to warn her not to use drugs, because they open your
mind to a spiritual realm, but that realm is not of God. It gives you
a false kind of a peace and a false kind of a light, like the peace and
light the Antichrist will give to the world. And so you can have a
false sense of security that you're on the road to God when you're
actually on the road to hell."
Liz's answer once and for all delivered me from my conflict. I
could finally understand why drug use, or for that matter, Eastern med-
itation or any method of inducing altered states of consciousness, was
not the way to reach God. It was possible to have a spiritual exper-
ience--even to feel blissfully enlightened and serene--without *really*
experiencing God. Spiritual evil can and does masquerade as spiritual
good (2 Cor. 11:14), and trancelike states of consciousness tend to open
one up to such influences.
As I submitted to the spiritual regimen of the house, including
daily personal and group Bible study and prayer, I gradually began to
understand experientially what *authentic* spirituality is--entirely
different from what I'd known before. I remember its dawning upon me
after three months in Ashland that I now really knew what it was to be
"born again"; what everyone meant when they spoke of having a *personal*
relationship with the Lord. I no longer just knew *about* him--I *knew*
him. I found this intimate fellowship with Christ to be the sweetest
thing I'd ever known in life. It surpassed the "bliss" of cosmic con-
sciousness--which I had previously thought to be the ultimate experience
--just as one would expect the genuine to surpass the counterfeit.
In my more than eighteen years of experience I have found orthodox
Christian faith to be entirely satisfying, both experientially and
intellectually. It has profoundly answered the questions and met the
needs that first propelled me on my search for truth. It is my sincere
hope that New Agers will not take this testimony lightly, for I believe
I had the same intellectual and experiential reasons for rejecting or-
thodox Christianity in favor of a more esoteric path as they. If I can
find abundant satisfaction in evangelical faith, it seems to me they
could too.
Actually, I have no reason to doubt that I would have gone on to
become an active participant in the contemporary New Age movement were
it not for one thing only: through all my spiritual experiences I re-
mained *open* to the possibility of another world view being true than
the one to which I was currently attracted. For this reason it is
ironic when New Agers now accuse me of closed-mindedness *because of*
my Christian beliefs.
My biggest concern about today's New Agers is that they seem to be
closed to everything but pantheism. Today's seekers do not appear as
interested in finding objective truth as those of fifteen to twenty
years ago. Spirituality without such commitment falls right into the
hands of the Evil One. Jesus said, "Seek and you shall find" (Matt.
7:7). He also said "I am . . . the truth . . ." (John 14:6). My exper-
ience, and that of numerous others I know of, testifies to the piercing
accuracy of both these claims.
Offered with a prayer,
Kurt