This week on Things Unseen, we've been thinking about the fall, and just some of the lessons

that Genesis 3 continues to teach us.

Yesterday we will begin to touch on something of great spiritual importance to us, I think.

The way Paul speaks about exchanging the truth about God for the lie, that is the lie about

him, the lie that he isn't in fact a wonderfully kind and generous father.

And at the end yesterday, I was suggesting that many of the great pastoral

masters of the spiritual life have noted that this can actually become a kind of spiritual

pandemic among Christians. And like what we sometimes have referred to as long COVID, the

effects of it sometimes go down pretty deeply and they linger long.

You don't need to take my word for this.

Here are the words of arguably the greatest English theologians since the time of the Reformation,

I mean John Owen.

And there is something I think that's important in what he says.

Let me quote him.

He says, Christians are but little exercised in holding immediate communion with the Father in love.

Unacquaintedness with our mercies, our privileges, is our sin as well as our trouble.

We hearken not to the voice of the Spirit which is given unto us that we may know the things that are freely bestowed on us by God.

This makes us go heavily when we might rejoice and to be weak where we might be strong in the

Lord.

And then he says this, how few of the saints are experimentally acquainted with this privilege

of holding immediate communion with the Father in love.

With what anxious, doubtful thoughts do they look upon Him?

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