Evangelicals preach on it,Sometimes Spirit-filled people mention it, and the 3rd Level is all about it.In one word it's........

Godliness. The Mystery of godliness.

The epistle 1 Timothy is peppered with it. Sort of like writing in Blackpool Rock.

1 Timothy 6:11 pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, perseverance and gentleness.

1 Timothy 3:16 By common confession, great is the mystery of godliness:

He who was revealed in the flesh,

Was vindicated in the Spirit,

Seen by angels,

Proclaimed among the nations,

Believed on in the world,

Taken up in glory. ========Probably quoting from a song they used to sing.

1 Timothy 4:7-8 discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness;
v8for bodily discipline is only of little profit, but godliness is profitable for all things, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come

Evangelicals love preaching about this stuff. Laying it on thick to people.

The Fall left us in the delusion that we are independant beings...like God..able to know the truth and bandy about godliness directives to one another...as if we as independant beings can ,like gods...just try a little harder and press into it. The worst thing about evangelicalism is that without a clear Sword of the Spirit coming out of the Presence of God....at no point is this "independence" position confronted. And it's just laws and precepts coming tumbling out of a preacher's mouth.
The Spirit-filled can so major on spiritual experiences....and in these days the grace message, that any sense of "discipline" and "energetic pursuit of godliness" kind of looks old-fashioned.
Helen Rubio was taking some time over this in The Russian Dolls talk last year.She said this key thing:"We make dates and appointments to be with special people in our lives."
As in our work and home life, there are things we do regularly that by dint of regularity "become us". They become the rhythm of our lives. This is the other side of things to those one-off Divine special encounters. This is encounter as lifestyle.

This Peter Stott extract from this morning sparked this post off:

Legalism is what you do on the outside to look holy.

Godly training (from 1 Timothy 4:7above) is what you do on the inside to open yourself to God.

People say the answer to misuse is no use....when the answer to misuse is right use!!!

The third level is slightly more insistant than this. The third level is all about godliness and how it works.

The clue is in 1 Timothy 3:16 onwards. "revealed in the flesh". Christ must be revealed in our flesh too!!!

I am an expert on all the things that Helen Rubio and Peter Stott were recommending. Actually in truth I am not an expert...and am revisiting these things in these days....but from a 3rd level understanding.
But what I mean is this..................

In the 80s, (like Rob Rufus) I fasted weeks on end. I was desperate. I attended every meeting possible. I got up at 5am to seek God. I prayed with a few. I prayed along with all the Bible House people. I prayed in the large gatherings. I led in worship. Between us and in our stream of churches we received a deluge of songs. Many songs live on...or would if known by other streams...to this day. I led an evangelistic drama troupe. I helped in the beginning stages of a church in France.

In a word....I'm all Rubio'd up on the Rubio plan of meeting God.
But there was something I'd not seen. I'd read the books. Actually Ed Miller describes the process perfectly in Thy God Reigneth. I kind of received the breakthrough in my spirit first. But the actualization of it.The articulation of it comes from the book "Yes I am" by Norman Grubb...see the complete book in my Stages of Growth Link section

Godliness, Paul writes, is a mystery. And more and more if you see the word "mystery" and "mystic"....understand it as Spirit. As Spirit revelation. As touching those inward believing parts of you that completely bypass your conscious mind. What scientists say mostly goes on in your left hand side of the brain is the conscious language bits of your brain. Where you string coherent thoughts together.Step by step thinking.

The spirit of man. His innermost heart is found here. And though it may express in the right hand side of the brain or "right-brain"(apart from China where their picture language and musical speech has confused things somewhat) spirit is spirit....and the material is material. Which is why no surgical scalpel is ever going to turn up some spirit somewhere in the body.

What Peter and Helen Rubio are saying is no different to saints for centuries....in modern speak it's this "at some point in your Christian life you have to make the shift
from left-brain to right -brain"
or from conscious surface thought to deep within the recesses of your heart and spirit."
Later I will publish relevant extracts from the French saints - Madame Guyon and Bishop Fenelon. I haven't read him yet...but the mystic philosopher theologian Jacob Boehme of a century earlier in Germany was apparently covering similar ground. I noticed Union Life were offering his book.
So after centuries of suspicion, and public burnings by the Catholic Church, can we now do away with the word mystic?
It just simply describes the Holy Spirit's main activity in a believer's life of acting as a Removal Company. Moving us out of our main dwelling as a result of the Fall
which was a "dead, lifeless adherence to life lived according to :
Laws
Statutes
Surface Conscious thought
but all based on the stupid notion that we are gods in our own right see Romans Chapter 1

to our new primary address
Dad's Home by Crystal Sea
Heaven on Earth
Spirit as expressed in Right-brain Town
Loveshire
Kingdom
based on the new notion that we never had a separate existence...that that separateness itself was a lie of the devil....and we recognize the base of our life now is our permanent joinedness to God who re-birthed us by a Holy Spirit birth the instant we said "yes" on our insides to inviting Jesus into our heart. It's our left-brain that has to catch up.

So all activities such as
Opening our hearts
Meditating on the Word
Being still and listening to God
Maybe soaking, while listening to Spirit anointed musicians
Opening ourselves to the prophetic
Yes, breaking the outer reliance on the food cycle by simply ignoring it and fasting

All these things are just things/activities which move the rest of our bags in to our new primary address!!!
Does this mean we don't use our left-brain anymore?
No. I think you'll find that God's earthly and pre-born again representatives on Earth the Jews (soon by the way to pick up on this third level stuff - have you noticed how nothing in 1st level or 2nd level Christianity has interested them so far?) for all their adherence to the Word of God
and to the Worship of God
are the most intelligent Left and right brain people percapita on the planet? For a start anyone counted Jewish BBC and Hollywood actors and movers and shakers recently?

The left-brain, Oh Mr Richard Dawkins of the God Delusion, was never constructed to be a foundation to live from!
It was constructed as a somewhat slender limited bit of gear to
express and articulate what is in our hearts
and to be consequently a step by step computer to guide us through our actions and changes
and to aid us in explaining, teaching and directing others.

The left-brain cannot love
Cannot make love
Cannot make music - though it can make the mechanics of noise-there is a difference
cannot laugh....though it can articulate a laugh
Cannot dream up anything radically new
Cannot even learn to drive....though it may in a limited fashion learn a few of the precepts of driving....spatial stuff does not go on in the left-brain.

People who have shut-down adherence to other parts of us as foundations and made the left-brain the foundation for existence are
Jews when faced with Jesus Christ
Communist China and Russia. China to this day persecutes born again Christians,
Fascist Germany, who after Pietism, closed the door to the heart and through Nietsche and later German "higher" criticism made sure the Lutheran Church did not go anywhere near the Baptism of the Holy Spirit which was outpoured in the Black Forest area around 1906.
Bertrand Russell...whose background includes helping incitethe Boxer Rebellion in China while a young Watchman Nee was leading revivals amongst his fellow youngsters there.
A whole swathe of scientists right through the 20th Century up to and including Richard Dawkins.
Oh....and a large part of Radio 4 output

Were the left-brain neutral as we were led to believe in the Fall, Dawkins would not be so dangerous a figure. But somehow this inward choice we made in Genesis 3 was never neutral. It plugged the depths of our innards into Darkness on a permanent basis. Only accepting Jesus by faith in our hearts can begin to turn the ship around and give us another foundation for living. And only the baptism in the Spirit can forcibly begin us moving the rest of our belongings into our new primary address here on Earth. Anyone who knows me knows that being baptised in the Spirit in itself does not impress me. I wanted to know that this God stuff works on a daily basis. That's why I listen so intently to preachers to hear if I can hear God in their lives.
Any idiot can preach Jesus and being filled with the Spirit.We (Christine and I, separately and unknown to the other)were doing that at age 13.
That was not what we read in the New Testament. It was the foundation yes...
But the apostles and especially Paul were imparting something else:

a Jesus who came to DESTROY ALL the WORKS of the Evil One
they were imparting a Kingdom lived on Earth...NOW
A Kingdom where because they were founded on spiritual realities
they could be madly, deeply,passionately in love with God and with one another safely
such that when Paul left on the beach in Acts they were all hugging ,kissing, and in tears!!

THIS IS CHURCH !!