Ephesians 4:18 - The Way of the Empty Mind

"...being having been darkened in the thinking, having been estranged from the life of God through the ignorance being in them, through the hardness of the heart of them...

-The nations are walking the way of the empty mind, journeying through life without The Truth, and thus they are walking (and stumbling) around in the dark.  They are in fact quite un-enlightened.  Darkened, cut off from the Light, cut off from Jesus, Who is the Light which enlightens every man (John 1.9, 1.4).  So they don’t know the Light (or even much about it), and in truth are rather unwilling to come to the Light (John 3.19-20).  Darkness does tend to have a certain appeal once you have acclimated and adapted to it.  The nations in fact repeatedly reject the open invitation to come to the Light, ashamed and guilt-ridden, afraid of exposure, and have wound up with a spiritual condition known as cardio porosis, not a heart that is porous so much as petrified, hardened up and covered over with a callous, repeatedly rejecting the appeals of Heaven and rather impervious to them as a result, at least while their heart continues in a place of pride and unsurrender.  Godlessness is a disease which, once contracted, nothing short of a miracle can cure.

-Excluded from the life of God.  Excluded from the life of God.  What tragedy, this.  And really, how does this phrase set with me?  Should it not stick in my throat and make me gag with great grief and horror?  The nations are estranged from God, alienated, and to be sure, this does for them make the whole realm of the spirit seem strange and foreign.  The truth of God is not in them - they are ignorant of it, and so yes, Paul exhorts God’s people to NOT live like this.  Do not live life with a heart that is hard, hardened against the stuff of heaven, against the things you cannot see or feel or touch or replicate in some controlled laboratory experiment.  Do not live like heaven is some strange alien world, out-of-sight out-of-mind and irrelevant.  It is in fact our home, our destiny, our eternal destination.  And do not live like God is a stranger.  Do not live each day or even start your day apart from this One Who made you, Who so loves you, Who blesses you, Who rescued and remade you to show off His breathtaking goodness to this world which is estranged from Him, adrift in darkness.  Truly, no greater tragedy than that even one of these precious souls for whom God sent His only begotten Son should live even one day much less an eternity separated from Him.  It starts with me...