There has to be a better way Pastor Sean Harris…there has to be a better way to teach this world truth…to teach parents how to love and raise their children in Godly homes…there has to be a better way than how you approach it. To implore parents to, “Punch” their children if their acting effeminate is beyond ignorant…beyond insulting…and it paints a despicable portrait of Christianity.
There has to be a better way Pastor Charles Worley…I watched a short two minutes of your sermon about how you think we should lock up all the professing gays and lesbians in the world behind electrified fences. I listened to your words and did not find God in the midst of a single syllable. I nodded my head in disappointment as I heard your congregation support you with, “Amens” every time you said something hateful and disgusting. I struggle to understand how we as Christians could approve anything you said from the pulpit that day.
The thing is…like you men…I believe the Bible is pretty clear about the issue of relationships between men and women. I believe the Bible is clear about the definition of marriage. I believe God makes it clear of His disapproval of same-sex relationships. And like you men…I stand by God’s Word.
But I cannot and will not condone or support your ruthless attacks. Listen, we may not agree with a lifestyle…but we can show love and respect for every unique soul God has created.
Do you honestly think you have any credibility regarding this issue anymore? Do you honestly think that you are speaking for God? Do you honestly think anyone professing to be a homosexual will even listen to you?
You traded your chance to allow God to do something awesome through you for a mere 30 minutes of selfish, hateful, dialogue that only accomplished getting your tirades published in national newspapers. In your passion to try and prove someone wrong about an individual’s sexuality, you let your emotions betray you, men. You forgot the simple truth that it is not the believer’s calling to “convert” anyone. We are called to share God’s truth in love and nothing more. We are called to love people like, Jesus does……like Jesus.
Can you honestly say that you’ve done this? I don’t think you can.
I had no idea when I chose the word, “RESTLESS” for my One Word 365 for 2012, how much that very word would challenge me in different ways. While my goal was in January (and still is) to be “RESTLESS” in my pursuit of God…I found that I also have been faced with other forms of RESTLESSNESS in my life.
I believe the first thing I’ve faced is my sleeping habits…or lack thereof. You see, at the beginning of February I moved into my own apartment (Woohoo!) and since then my sleeping patterns have been crazy off kilter. At first it had a lot to do with getting use to apartment living again…the constant pounding of feet and creaking all around me was something I hadn’t experience in a few years. But also, my mind has been in overdrive at nights…it races with thoughts, ideas, conflicts, worries, doubts, excitement, hopefulness, and so many other things. At times I’ve annoyed myself as I’ve laid wide awake in the pitch dark of my bedroom thinking about so many things that I have absolutely no control of whether good or bad.
Then other occurrences have happened that have intensified the RESTLESS environment in my heart. My upstairs neighbors flooded my hall bathroom one night…and then a week and a half later flooded my kitchen. While no major damage was done, my fingernails bitten down to nothing proved that I was worried about the next “BAD” thing to happen.
A couple of days after the second flood….
Smoke began to billow out from underneath the hood of my truck. I freaked out as I pulled over and stuck my head under my truck to see oil quickly dripping on the ground. My oil pan was covered in oil as well as the undercarriage of my truck going back to the tailgate. In panic mode I quickly drove to my local oil change garage (where I had had the oil changed almost a month prior) to find out that not only had my trucks oil filter not been changed during its last service…but someone had crushed the filter causing oil to leak out everywhere.
I remember closing my eyes and rubbing my temples as I prayed that God would spare me the headache of something happening too my truck. I remember the manager of the garage at one point telling me, “Everything’s gonna be ok, Jeremy. We’ll get you some fresh oil, a new filter, and we’ll pay to have your truck cleaned up and detailed.” I remember the exhale from my chest was almost a shudder…sweet relief circulated through my body like a warm blanket. Everything’s gonna be okay, I thought.
Then the toothache started last week :o) HaHa!
I’ll spare you the details of my abscessed tooth and its painful removal from the back of my mouth.
As I read back over all that has happened since January I can’t help but smile a little bit. While I have been RESTLESS in sleep, with my apartment, truck, and even my tooth…I have also been RESTLESS in my desire to see God fully in my life. I take comfort in knowing that for the first time in a long time my desire to seek Him and be loved by Him is still pulsing through my veins. I’m still reaching out to Him in the tough times…God has shown me the fullness that can be found through pursuing Him with a RESTLESS heart.
Things in my life are nowhere near perfect…and I am a long ways from experiencing everything God has planned for my life…but I take courage in knowing that this is just the beginning. That no matter the trial, my God is a God of LOVE, TRUTH, and PURPOSE. There is no one like Him…
So I’ll keep walking out my faith in this life God has blessed me with…it’s not a perfect walk…but I truly believe it’s a purposeful one.
Trenton heard the commotion before he saw it. Quickly he turned the corner at the end of the hall and saw one of his friends pinned on the ground. Someone in a dark hooded sweater and blue jeans sat on top of his friend… raining blows down on his face and chest. For a split second Trenton tried to see who the attacker was…but the hood hung low over their eyes causing any identification to be impossible. Trenton also noticed more of his friends standing around the assault but not doing anything to stop it…their faces revealed terror and unbelief.
Move, Trenton thought to himself as he rushed the attacker…he leaned low and tackled him to the ground. The two slid across the cool linoleum a few feet before stopping. Trenton barely had time to regain his footing before the hooded nightmare was up and on top of his friend again. He brought his arm up to throw another punch but Trenton caught it and pushed the stranger away.
“Just knock it off, man!” Trenton screamed. His heart was now thudding against his chest…it was a deep pounding instrumental he had never heard before. He felt his body begin to perspire through his shirt as he sharpened his focus to see past the darkness of the hood. It’s weird that I can’t see this dude’s face, right? he thought.
“No,” he heard a deep but familiar voice say from within the hood.
Where have I heard that voice before?
He moved towards his friend again and this time Trenton was ready. He wrapped his arms around the attacker and with all his might slammed him against the wall in an attempt to keep him still. The attacker let out a single hiss from his lips before busting through Trenton’s hold and landing two hard blows to his chest. Trenton felt his body surge to life as adrenaline fueled him…he lunged, grabbing the attacker by his sweater and drug him to the ground.
If I can just keep him pinned until somebody can call the cops…the attacker was strong.
Trenton could keep him pinned for only a few seconds at a time before he was rolled over and forced to desperately pull his enemy back with both hands. What the heck did Jay do to tick this guy off, he thought. The attacker fought against Trenton with great rage in order to get to his friend…until finally he stopped…until finally the dark gaping hole where his face should have been turned to Trenton…and leaped on him.
Trenton thought it was amazing how much he could think while being beaten. He wondered why his friends wouldn’t help him. He wondered why the attacker seemed so familiar even though he had no way of identifying him. It wasn’t until he began to taste the slick metallic edge of his own blood that he finally found the strength to wrestle the attacker off him and pin him once more.
Without thinking Trenton clinched his hands into tight fists and brought down his most massive blows. He was not a fighter…his punches were sloppy hitting his target on top of the head, in the face, on the chin, in the side of the neck and in the chest…all the while his face remained behind a veil of darkness Trenton couldn’t see past. When he finally felt the attacker stop struggling beneath him Trenton stood up and made his way towards his friend.
“Are you ok?” he asked not noticing the silent movements of the hooded man behind him rise to his feet. It was only the fearful look in his friends eyes that made Trenton turn around.
The man brought up his hands and brushed the hood from his head…Trenton felt his body begin to shake as whatever strength he had before was gone. Audible sounds came from Trenton’s mouth…but no words.
I hope you don’t mind the world of fiction I created above…somewhere deep inside of me I find that I have stories to tell…and hopefully they’re stories (even if they’re, “out there” extraordinary stories) that comment on the realities we face in our everyday non-fiction lives.
In the story above we find our main character fighting a stranger with all he has to protect his friend…only to find out in the end that it wasn’t a strange attacker with a hood that he was fighting…it was himself.
In this story I needed something different…I of course wanted to bring to life the everyday battle each and everyone of us face against the darkness within ourselves that we’re born into this world with…sin. But I needed more than just a story about Trenton facing the darker shadow of himself…I needed that darker side, which will always be apart of Trenton, to be ruthless in his attack of his friend.
It’s so cold and unthinkable to even think about hurting someone we care about…but this is the nature of sin. Sin has no preference who it hurts…it has no feeling of guilt about who it destroys. Sin first wrapped its sticky fingers around the heart of man in the garden of Eden…an invisible monster that we helped create and strengthen…and we battle it everyday because in and of our own-selves…we can’t kill it…and sometimes we even choose to give into it.
I find it interesting how Satan has kind of paralleled his use of sin in each of our lives with what Christ presented to the Apostles in Acts 1 when He said, “And when the Holy Spirit comes on you, you will be able to be my witnesses in Jerusalem, all over Judea and Samaria, even to the ends of the world.”
You see, Christ gave a model of sorts for us all to follow in order to reach people for His cause…first starting within…in Jerusalem (or where ever your community lives) and then working our way out…spreading God’s Word and Message to the ends of the earth.
Satan uses sin in the same way…he starts within…and then works his way out…touching as many lives as possible…but it all starts within ourselves….a constant battle.
Paul speaks of the battle within, in Romans 7:
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What I don’t understand about myself is that I decide one way, but then I act another, doing things I absolutely despise. So if I can’t be trusted to figure out what is best for myself and then do it, it becomes obvious that God’s command is necessary. But I need something more! For if I know the law but still can’t keep it, and if the power of sin within me keeps sabotaging my best intentions, I obviously need help! I realize that I don’t have what it takes. I can will it, but I can’t do it. I decide to do good, but I don’t really do it; I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway. My decisions, such as they are, don’t result in actions. Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the better of me every time.
Can’t you just feel the hurt and desperation in Paul’s words? I mean, this is Paul! A figure in the Bible we all look up to…and in this passage we find the frustration He was facing from the power of sin within. But this is something else to remember…sin doesn’t seduce just us non-apostle types…it comes after us all. From the baby Christians to the greatest Spiritual giants…sin wages war within all of us…and it longs too fight…to wear us down…to take us to a place where we say, “Ok…I give in.”
It happens so regularly that it’s predictable. The moment I decide to do good, sin is there to trip me up. I truly delight in God’s commands, but it’s pretty obvious that not all of me joins in that delight. Parts of me covertly rebel, and just when I least expect it, they take charge.I’ve tried everything and nothing helps. I’m at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn’t that the real question?
The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind, but am pulled by the influence of sin to do something totally different.
Once again we find that the battle within is not fought and won on our own…it’s not like a movie where the good guy takes down the bad guy with grit determination and his ability to take a hit. Christ wins and has already won this battle with sin! Apart from God, we will find no true victory. Christ is our Warrior…our strength…our Victor.
If you want to stand a chance against the fight within…you have to go to God with it. And yes, I do realize that it’s not as easy as it looks written there…but a battle worth fighting is never easy…is it?
He walked slowly…dragging his now useless left foot across the dirt and only using it to maintain balance and not fall over. His hands were clinched in tight fists…bloody and cracked; they were the only part of his body that displayed any strength in him.
He drew in painful breathes while blood painted the back of his throat in bright red strokes…he swallowed the fowl taste in his mouth and shuddered at the sudden growl in his stomach.
His eyes were sunken dark orbs that let salty tears breach their lids with each painful movement. The tears that made trails down the cracks and boils of his blistered face use to sear him with burning hot pain…but not anymore.
He shook his head slowly as he realized his skin was becoming an ugly hard shell…there was something completely inhuman about it. Like there was something deep within himself that was trying to get out…it was stretching his skin and breaking it down. It was a violence he had never experienced before…and the result was his breathing corpse walking the outskirts of town where he and others like him had been out-casted by the healthy.
A small smile of desperation cracked his peeling lips as he thought about where he was before in life, and where he walked now. He let a slight chuckle breathe past his swollen tongue as he remembered his family…such an occurrence (his laugh) was lunacy, he knew that much. But he no longer concerned himself with matters of sanity. He was after all, seeking out a man that supposedly could perform miracles.
And while others like him told him it was foolish to go after something so ridiculous…something inside told him to put his faith in the impossible for once. And that thought offered him enough hope to keep him walking now…hoping that tonight would be the night for his miracle. And trusting that this man could see past the ugliness of his outsides…and expose the true nature of what was in his heart.
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A leper came to him, begging on his knees, “If you want to, you can cleanse me.”
Deeply moved, Jesus put out his hand, touched him, and said, “I want to. Be clean.” Then and there the leprosy was gone, his skin smooth and healthy.
Mark 1 (the message)
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I’m going to be honest with you…every time I read this passage three words always stop me in my tracks and stir up my emotions, “I WANT TO…”
It’s just a reminder to me of how much Jesus loves you and I. You see, Christ wasn’t forced into dying a brutal death on the cross for us…He wasn’t talked into it or annoyed so much by all of our junk that He just had to do something.
He said, “I WANT TO…”
Is this not the most amazing thing you’ve ever heard? Just like Jesus wanted to heal the leper, He WANTED to die for each and every one of us so someday we would join Him in Heaven. I don’t know about you but that’s just amazing to me…truly awesome.
So here’s my challenge…as you spend Easter this weekend with your friends and family…or even if you’re spending it alone…try and remember that we celebrate Christ’s Victory on the cross not because of what He was forced to do…but because of what He WANTED to do.
You my brother and sister…are truly wonderful…beautiful…and worth dying for.
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“This is why the Father loves me: because I freely lay down my life. And so I am free to take it up again. No one takes it from me. I lay it down of my own free will.”
The smell of toilet bowl cleaner reacting with the dirt (there were other things but I try to keep this blog clean if I can) on the porcelain filled my nostrils as I stood bent at the waist scrubbing thoroughly with my toilet brush in hand. I closed my eyes for a few moments while letting an all too familiar “sinking” feeling flood my stomach. My mouth went dry as I felt one of the fingers on my left hand release a drop of sweat into the tip of the rubber glove housed around it. I opened my eyes…a small shiver vibrated through my body like an old engine without oil…and then I began scrubbing once more.
A few months before I was working in a church…I had my own office…big desk and nice padded chair…the sweet aroma of an apple cider candle could sometimes be sniffed out within the confines of my square office. In that time you probably would have found me working on that Sunday’s lesson plan for my class or cranking out sermon slides for my pastor…always and I mean ALWAYS I had some brand of music playing through my garage sale vintage cd player….the whole environment was totally predictable for me…and something I took for granted every day. But as I continued to scrub the toilet I recounted the environment at my new job…it too had grown predictable but in a lot different ways.
The sound of a wire brush against the toilet was one thing…it sounded nothing like the strings of an acoustic guitar resonating peacefully through stereo speakers. The rustling of the dirt, grit, and grime that moved within the tight nit strings of my large broom against the floor…for some reason the broom would always miss small traces of dirt that I would have to go back and clean up with my other, smaller, broom. The drone of the vacuum cleaner that I used to clean the carpets…the 1970’s styled can of furniture polish that never seemed to completely wipe off any of the furniture in my employers office…the smell of window cleaner on a hot day…and now, as I finished up wiping down the toilet, the all too familiar sound of a leaky faucet that was starting to drive me mad…
Plink-Plink…Plink-Plink…Plink….
I tossed my things onto my cleaning cart and moved to the next bathroom trying to not think about where I had been before and where I was now.
“How will God ever use me like this,” I thought to myself.
Almost six years later I can still remember that “sinking” feeling…I don’t feel it nearly as often anymore…but things in my life have changed over time (like they tend to do) the last six years…my job position has changed…my personal life has changed…I have certainly changed.
I remember how I felt about my life then…being a janitor…I remember how I felt just…low. It’s not that I thought I was better than those that worked similar jobs…if anything at that time I thought after what I had done I deserved what I called my, “craptastic” job.
But for me I felt like the person that claims they’ve died and gone to Heaven, only to be brought back to life on earth after a few short minutes…some of these individuals say their experience in Heaven caused them much pain once they were brought back to life on earth…after what they had seen and experienced…they found great difficulty just living through the next moment life had to offer them.
It’s true, I didn’t handle things in ministry well at all…in fact I didn’t do a lot of things right or appropriate. But when you’re cleaning someone else’s urine off a toilet…you start to realize just what you had before…things sink in…at least that’s what happened to me.
As I look back now and think about that one lone thought I had, “How will God ever use me like this.” I see the arrogance I had. To think that God would somehow be rendered powerless or be overshadowed by my job, reveals a certain arrogance I carried around with me.
Of course at that time in my life if anyone would have told me I was being arrogant I would have thought they were crazy. I was big on internal self-punishment back then…I felt like garbage and honestly I acted like it too. But part of being honest with myself and with you my brothers and sisters, is admitting that I carry arrogance with me every day…I did then and I still do now.
The truth is this…God is not limited in communicating truth through us because of a particular job that we have…God’s love and truth blasts through the barriers we create that consist of our mistakes of the past…our insecurities of today…and our fears of tomorrow. Whether you’re cleaning muck out of barn or counting money in a bank…God can use you…His truth will not be contained or stopped…you are valuable to His cause no matter the circumstance.
I pray today that God would help me and others to push away the arrogance in our lives and see just how powerful He truly is. Will you pray with me?
It only lasts for a few seconds and then fades away…
The game was over and I packed my glove away into my bat-bag. We had lost but me and the other guys on my team still managed to smile and joke around. We were in a church league and I found the new relationship’s I was forming with these men was something I really needed. Feeling like I was a part of a team and bonding with other Godly men provided healing in my life that I wasn’t expecting.
I threw my bag over my shoulder and turned the corner of the dugout with five or six other guys. At first I simply walked with a crooked grin on my face and no thought at all to the discomfort I was about to feel in the next few seconds…but then I saw the guys on my team meeting their wives and girlfriends at the bleachers…exchanging hugs and kisses…laughing and smiling. I stood still taking in the scene before me…I wondered how a picture so beautifully painted could cut me like sharp glass.
One of the guys looked at me and I gave my best smile in hopes of masking what I felt inside. I couldn’t deny the war within…on one hand I was happy for my new friends and their relationships…but on the other hand I was gripped in the certainty that I would never experience such things again. My neck tensed and I closed my eyes as I fought the various emotions that flooded through my body…I was happy for them…but also jealous of them…I wanted to be the kind of man who wouldn’t believe the lies that were being whispered to my heart…I fought them internally with a sharp sword and god-like strength…but eventually I let the unrelenting deception take hold. I was a part of the team…but I felt alone…at least I felt alone in those few seconds before I smiled again and rejoined them in the bleachers.
It only lasts for a few seconds and then fades away…
I know, I know…some things are probably better left not mentioned…or talked about on a blog. Some of my fellow single brothers and sisters may feel that sharing such info is unnecessary…I know I’ve had these same thoughts for a long time…to share something like this is to risk the chance that others might feel sorry for you…that suddenly people might start acting different around you because they have some insight on what’s going on inside. You We don’t want them to see past your our smiles, laughs, jokes, and stiff upper lips.
It only lasts for a few seconds and then fades away…
There’s other reason’s too…we fear what people might think of us if they knew that sometimes we’re jealous of their relationships. That sometimes a small part of us hates to see even our closest friends and family cuddling, kissing, or acting out small forms of intimacy because it’s a reminder of what we don’t have, maybe never had, or even lost.
It only lasts for a few seconds and then fades away…
We keep these struggles to ourselves because we don’t want to be perceived as, “uncaring” or “selfish”. We don’t want others to think that we don’t care about them and their happiness…that we are only concerned with our own well-being and not theirs.
We battle our emotions…we battle in the attempt to do and think what is right by ourselves and by others…but we purposely battle alone. Why?
Because when we battle alone we feel like we’re not risking anything.
We become comfortable in the knowledge that when we fight alone, we know what to expect. There’s pain and hurt and heaviness…there’s doubt and fear and hopelessness.
But if we battle alone then there’s no chance that someone will look at us and ask, “What’s wrong with you? Why do you think this way?” in regard to our mindset…even though we know such words would most likely never leave another person’s lips, we still fear them. So we battle alone…and ultimately we feel alone….even if it’s just in those few seconds after a softball game when you stop and look at the picture before you. The feeling can be fleeting…or it can last days.
Brother’s and sister’s, we have to stop fighting this battle by ourselves…plain and simple, we can’t do it. I really believe at the core of this issue of feeling alone and not being in a relationship with someone else is the reality that our focus is off. We get so focused on who we’re not with that we miss out on who’s with us now…an amazing God that loves us unconditionally. Maybe we need to be focusing on our relationship with Him…maybe we need to stop acting like we’re, “okay” all the time and share our burdens with our friends and family.
You are not alone.
Yes…I know…you’ve heard this so many times now I’m sure you’re sick of it…but that doesn’t change the truth of it. And like anything else in our walks with God, we have to be intentional in our actions towards Him. If we truly want to feel loved by God and a part of something bigger than ourselves…then we have to take that first step in that direction. Moving past the wall of feeling alone doesn’t just happen to us…we have to find the strength to knock that wall down….any maybe it starts with being honest with God, ourselves, and others.
Six men surrounded me as I sat in my chair comfortably. One by one a warm hand found its place on my shoulders and the back of my neck. I closed my eyes as one of the men began to pray a slow passionate prayer that revealed his desire to see God do amazing things in my life.
I breathed slowly, taking in the man’s words…until the sound of a deep throaty hum filled my left ear and caused my eyes to open. The man humming next to me had surprised me but also quickly set me at ease with the single note he resonated from his mouth. I closed my eyes and once again focused on the prayer being spoken.
Quickly my eyes shot open as the man behind me began to softly say things I had never heard before…his speech did not distract the other man praying though they were only inches apart. With my head bowed I scanned the floor trying to gain some kind of understanding about what was happening. Between the praying, humming, and what appeared to be someone talking in tongues my mind reeled at elements I had never been directly exposed to before. “Just don’t get distracted,” I thought. “Just listen to the man’s prayer.”
This time I locked my eyes shut and swore not to open them again until the prayer was finished. I had almost reached a place of calm once more when suddenly all the men, slowly and softly began to push my body in different directions. Instead of losing focus in the midst of something else new to me I forced myself to only listen to the prayer as the men seemed to find a rhythm as they pushed me.
I felt my face begin to flush red and my eyes water as a soft vibration moved throughout my body. “What is this?” I thought. I opened my eyes and looked at my hands…they were still…not a shake visible…the same was true for the rest of my body as well. I wondered how I could possibly be feeling such a vibration from within me, but see no visible signs of shaking on the outside.
“Is this what I’ve been reading about all these years?” I thought. “The prayer…the humming…the talking in tongues…the pushing…the vibration…is all this the Holy Spirit working in a way I’ve never experienced before?”
My years of study, in college and on my own, ran through my thoughts at blazing speed…it clashed with almost everything happening to me and around me in those moments. Though I found myself confused I also wondered what would happen if I let my apprehension fade and tried to find a way to, “let go” so to speak…to whatever was happening.
I breathed deeply as the vibration seemed to make me want to hunch over more in my seat…the feeling in my body was almost intoxicating…my skin broke out in goose bumps. Everything suddenly sounded and felt beautiful to me…everything felt…light.
“What your feeling is your body reacting to all these new occurrences happening around you,” I thought to myself. “What you’re feeling is probably adrenaline…”
And with these last thoughts the prayer was over…and so was everything else…
The account I’ve given above happened to me in November of last year…and almost four months later I’m still a little in awe of it. Sometimes when I think about that day I wonder if I let my “rational” thought process interfere with something that could have been truly amazing…honestly, I just don’t know.
I have attended Baptist Churches beginning in my teen years and through today…I’ve also attended two Baptist Colleges. Up until I started my first year in college my belief system was built upon what had been told to me by others…I took their words as truth and rarely sought out information for myself. But my first year in college I was nagged with the question, “Why do you believe what you say you believe? For real, why do you?”
This question drove me to seek out these answers for myself…I no longer wanted to walk blindly behind the beliefs and convictions of another person…I wanted my own…I wanted to find the answers for myself. This desire has continued…though my life has taken a lot of different turns and I walked away from God a lot in my past…the desire to find an understanding and building my belief system has remained.
Through the years I’ve found that my beliefs have stayed consistent with Baptist doctrine, though I will admit I’ve spent way too many hours arguing about METHODS used by others that I thought were wrong, out of date, or the ugly word, TRADITIONAL.
I’ve studied the debated issues of salvation, baptism, the trinity and spiritual gifts. And through these studies I’ve formed my own beliefs. So why am I telling you all this?
Because of what happened to me in November.
My mind was going crazy during those four minutes or more of prayer. In those moments (and even afterwards) I thought all kinds of things about what I believed. But the question that haunts me most is…what could my experience have turned into had I not been trying to figure it out?
Would I have started talking in tongues? Would something else have happened?
You see, my beliefs tell me that talking in tongues is not a gift used today…(I want to say here that those that don’t agree with me on this issue, I hope, you understand that this is my belief based on my own study of God’s Word. It’s not my job to convince you to believe like me…and that’s not the point of this post…I respect your belief and interpretation of Scripture as I hope you do mine…I’m just trying to share an experience with you) so you can probably see why this event has flustered me at times. I find myself at times comparing what I feel God’s Word is telling me with my first hand experiences….and in this case I’m finding a collision of sorts.
I’m writing this blog entry because here lately a few people in my little blog world are writing about the Holy Spirit….His purpose…and what it means to be, Spirit-filled. I’ve never wanted to write entries about doctrinal belief systems on this blog…this blog is just a record of my walk in this life. But I can’t deny that this experience has caused me to dig deeper in my studies…to see if there are pieces of the puzzle I’m missing…not because I want to follow what others think or believe…but because something very significant (in my life anyway) happened to me in November.
So as I close this entry out I apologize for any missed closure to this topic I’ve thrown at you…because the truth is I don’t have all the answers. But I do want you to know that there is nothing wrong with studying a little deeper…there is nothing wrong with asking God for wisdom and some clarity.
I just wanted to share this experience with you…because I know I don’t have it all figured out…maybe you have been through something similar.
