At some point while I watched the new movie What the [Bleep] Do We Know? I started to feel a little queazy.
      I was interested in the film's subject matter—the mysterious and imponderable questions about reality posed by quantum physics.
      But soon the film started sliding off into New Age claptrap, and—hey, wait a minute! Who the [bleep] is that fat old lady getting all the close-ups?
      Her confident, melifluous voice punctuated the movie, tying all the science together to support her philosophy: "We are all gods. We can create our own reality with our minds."
      I had a sudden flashback to the '80s.
      That's JZ Knight! She's trying to pass herself off as a scientist rather than a New Age housewife from Tacoma, WA.
      JZ started "channeling" Ramtha, a 35,000-year-old Lemurian warrior in 1977 and became the darling of celebrity mush heads like Shirley Mclaine.
      At the end of the film, she is actually identified as Ramtha rather than JZ Knight. You gotta give her/him credit for persistence.
      We had a great time in the early '80s poking fun at her pompous claims, and we even helped produce a parody song, to the tune of a Beach Boy's classic. We called it "Help Me Ramtha."
      But watching the film made me realize that man's desire to become God isn't going away. It's only being constantly repackaged and growing stronger.
      JZ is marketing something that is the secret desire of everyone on the planet—to create and control our own reality.
      That's why Christ's message of self-denial is so radical.
      The essence of a "complete" life requires nothing less and nothing more than a complete self-surrender to God.
      The self is a created creature, and can never become the Creator. But whenever we murmer about our situation, it's the evidence we want to become our own god.
      "You have made him a little lower than God." (Psalm 8:4; Job 7:17. Also see Hebrews 2:5-18). The "little lower" is important. Man was made in the image of God, but was never intended to become God.
      Though Christian faith warns against the exaltation of self, it stops short of self-abasement or the like. Self-mortification is self-defeating, because it focuses the attention on self—to watch it, to mortify it, to keep it under. It is a law of the mind that "whatever gets your attention gets you." (Romans 8:13)
      If your self gets your attention, even a fighting attention, it will get you. You will be a self-preoccupied person. The extremes of self-deification and self-mortification are both paths that lead to cultism.
      What is the true path? It is self-surrender, not self-commitment. You can be committed to a person or project or God and not be surrendered. You may be there under inner protest.
      Self-surrender comes when you know you have lost.
      We are to hand back to God the self that is handed to us by the Creator, to surrender the one and only thing we truly own—the very right to ourselves.
      This is a hard demand, but it cannot be softened.
      "If anyone wishes to be a follower of mine, he must leave his self behind." Luke 9:23 (NEB) (See Galatians. 2:20)
      Quacks treat symptoms; doctors treat disease. Religion treats symptoms. Trying to change the un-surrendered self is religious quackery. We are radical because we must go to the root. All else is tinkering.
      Surrender is not a kind of spiritual lobotomy where you become a vegetable, but that is our fear. By our act of self-surrender, consent and cooperation, God wipes clean our selfishness. We are then empowered to obey the deepest law of the universe.
      Center on yourself for any reason and the self will disintegrate into confusion—you will not like any part of yourself. But, "Whoever loses his life for my sake will save it." Then you can love your neighbor as yourself.
      It is a paradox that dwarfs the complexities of quantum physics and there's only a divine solution.
      Surrender puts you in position to receive the power that created the universe—the power that raised Christ from the dead. He will raise us from a dead self-for-self life, to a creative fruitful life—His life.
      I am important because I am His. Now I can express myself without apology. For me to live is Christ. Surrender saves you from self-deification and egotistic self-assertion, always wanting to occupy the center of attention. It also saves you from self-mortification, shyness, victimhood and thinking, "What do they think of me?" Surrender saves you from self-consciousness and from herd-consciousness, because you have the mind of Christ. You can be yourself because you are His self. You are free.
      You don't have to keep up appearances, or prove anything or play a part. Instead you can say, "I am what I am by the grace of God."
      You are supernaturally natural. You can know yourself, you can accept yourself, you can forgive yourself, and you can express yourself—if you surrender yourself.
      In the emptying that results from surrender, the Holy Spirit rushes in to fill the vacuum.
      "Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit saith the Lord of Hosts."
      Most people who see JZ Knight's film will ponder the questions that the science presents, but probably dismiss Ramtha's interpretations. After all, not only is a 35,000-year-old Ascended Master hard to swallow, but one of the 14 talking heads claims his views were misrepresented, a second was a former priest kicked out of the church because of child abuse, and another "scientist" was from Transcendental Meditation's Maharishi University.
      But still, people will wish they could believe it.
      We can point them in the right direction only if we've given up our own desire for omnipotence.

Ole's morning bible study is available here.