Tag Archives: Faith

A Tale of Two Conversions: Withered


Note: This post is a direct follow-up to Shallow.

My high school conversion to Christianity established a root system that delved as deep into the soil of my heart as my thoughts and devotion toward God ran: not an inch deep. After my baptism, I became a full member of Trinity Baptist Church in Weatherford, OK. I decided to attend the Sunday morning service regularly. I came unprepared to grow. I didn’t have a Bible of my own, so I showed up to church equally empty-handed and empty-headed. I had no spiritual inclination, so the pastor’s sermons never resonated with me. I didn’t understand them, nor did I exert effort to learn the language of faith. I grew bored quickly. Church service devolved into back-pew gossip sessions with my friend. We whispered back and forth about our weekend exploits and the girls we wanted to date. I tuned out the preacher, the word of God preached, and any spiritual illumination that came with it. The elation I initially felt at having my sins forgiven and my eternal prison sentence revoked had waned. I forced myself to get up every Sunday morning.

My friend pushed my boundaries further, asking me to attend Sunday school before church. I grumbled at the prospect of tumbling out of bed at an even earlier hour, but I obliged him. This is when I started enjoying church, just not in a pious manner. Our small Sunday school class consisted of me, my buddy, and a female teacher who was probably in her mid-thirties at the time. She took her faith seriously, as well as the teaching material she presented to us every week. The only problem with this scenario is that I did not match her level of sincerity. I cringe now as I recall the memories. I turned the entire class into a vehicle for scalding sarcasm and lame jokes. I made light of the teacher and the material with equal contempt. I exasperated her week after week. She lost patience on more than one occasion. Did I feel guilty? Not an iota. I enjoyed watching her religious facade fade as she struggled to maintain her composure and control of the class. Reflecting back now, I’m almost forced to admit the vitriol I poured out on her came from an unholy source in the deep crevices of my withered soul. I had never in my life treated another human being this poorly. I grew up with an extreme sensitivity to other people’s emotions and navigated the best I could to not offend any soul I encountered. I cannot rationally explain my sudden shift in attitude. Why did I disdain her so? In reality, I had no problem with the teacher, but I proved myself unteachable to God’s holy word. It rained brimstone down on my head every time I heard it. My depraved soul craved the safety and comfort found in the shadows hiding behind empty religious rites. It contorted in torment when the pure word of God was preached. My condemned soul desired the disillusionment of self-deception to the truth; I stood naked in the holy gaze of God. I refused the true remedy of faith in Christ. I wanted no part of Him or His people. I expressed this plainly every Sunday morning for perhaps six months or so. The pleasure I gleaned in seeing my Bible teacher squirm slowly dissipated. I could find no other compelling reason to remain in church. I had my fire insurance card, signed and laminated, resting comfortably in my back pocket. I left the church and never came back. I had a life to live, and I decided not to waste a second more sitting on my butt in an old church pew, listening to words that exposed the darkness in my soul.

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A Tale of Two Conversions: Part One


I’m republishing an old series on my conversion to the Christian faith, which I have never finished. I’m currently working on the final few posts. If anyone out there is interested, I’ll post the three existing chapters one by one, then post the new chapters as they are finished. When the complete series is published, I plan to package it into a book, as I did with my series on converting to Calvinism.

A Tale of Two Conversions – Introduction

The Religious Nature of Politics


Another election year is upon us, and campaign ads pervade the airwaves like toxic fumes. I dread the stage of the political cycle when propaganda reaches peak levels of slander. I can’t even enjoy a football game in peace without being inundated with ads. No one looks forward to post-election tranquility more than I do. I can only hope peace prevails when the dust settles.

I want to point out a significant truth that I have come to over the years as a once politically disengaged Christian. My disdain for politics is longstanding and fervent. It is ugly, riddled with lies, half-truths, deception, power, and pride. I find it overwhelming to sift through all the double talk. I refused to sully myself in its muck and mire. But that position has turned out to be wrongheaded and harmful. When Christians collectively abdicate their civil duty to help determine the direction of community, state, and national discourse they, by default, are allowing other parties, influenced by humanistic philosophies and ideologies, to choose the way forward.

To put things bluntly, a nation built on Christian foundations and populated mostly by professing Christians cannot allow a pagan worldview to dominate our politics. A Christian worldview should shape our ethics, laws, and all civil affairs.

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Requiem


Kamber Shenae Doback-Lucas

Job’s friends had the best of intentions when they sat down with him in the ash pile remains of the life he had built for himself. Job mourned the loss of his vast wealth and personal health, but most of all he mourned the loss of his seven sons and three daughters. See, God permitted Satan to afflict Job and take away all that he cared about. Satan sought to turn his soul away from the God he adored. In the end, Satan’s challenge ended in failure. Job’s heart remained steadfast. But this does not mean Job did not suffer greatly – he did: He endured doubts and anguish. He had many burning questions, but no answers. He questioned his own integrity. He lost the will to live. His friends were no help at all. In fact, they blamed Job for his miseries, claiming God blesses the righteous and curses the wicked. And since Job had experienced unprecedented disaster on every side, they could only conclude he had sinned greatly and should repent for his wicked heart. However, we are told in the opening verse of the book that Job was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil. Later in the story, another friend, younger in years, but more accomplished in wisdom joined the conversation. He rebuked Job’s three friends and explained how God sometimes uses human suffering to purify and teach us things in a way that no other means will suffice. He counseled that it is our duty to humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God in those moments.

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Cultures Abhor a Spiritual Vacuum


Babylon had rejected God and his Word. A culture that rejects God on a large scale loses his divine protection against evil. It is like the principle of diffusion that everybody was taught in physics: ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’. We are spiritual beings, and we also cannot stand a vacuum. Cultures have a certain spirituality, be it a good one or a bad one. Cultures cannot stand a spiritual vacuum. When you have the Holy Spirit, he fills the vacuum and prevents a great deal of demonic activity and self-destructive actions among the people. Where the Holy Spirit is strong in a culture, even unbelievers are blessed. They are not saved, but they are kept from many forms of pollution. But when a culture turns its back on God, the Holy Spirit, to some degree, is withdrawn, leaving a vacuum. Guess who rushes in to fill it? The evil one and those fallen created beings, former angels, who now are demons. Thus, Babylon, an important, powerful culture that has rejected the God of the Bible, does not realize how far the demonic realm has taken charge of its activities.

Douglas F. Kelly, Revelation, A Mentor Expository Commentary (Ross-shire, Scotland: Mentor, 2012), 336.

When it comes to the recent controversial topic of Christian Nationalism and what type of government Christians should strive to establish, we read here Douglas Kelly’s conviction that no neutrality can exist when it comes to a philosophy of government. A culture must have convictions and those convictions will inform government policy. What kind of laws should a country full of Christians have? A secular one? Secularism is not neutral. It denies objective reality by rejecting the existence (or at least the involvement) of a divine being working in the affairs of this world. A nation whose God is the Lord will be blessed. A nation built upon Satan’s sand will decay and collapse in due time.

What is the Distinction between Fatalism and Predestination?


Predestination is the dirty fourteen-letter word of modern evangelicalism. It is the that-which-must-not-be-named doctrine of the majority who despise it. It is ever only breathed in whispers by those who are convinced of its biblical foundation, lest they roil the placid waters of Lake Kumbaya. It doesn’t need to be this way. We can have a lucid conversation on the matter without a donnybrook breaking out in the church parlor. Perhaps much of the consternation over the concept that God elects a people unto Himself prior even to creating the dust that the first person is formed from comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of the term.

So often I hear a froth-mouthed opponent of the doctrine say (between spurts of saliva) something like this:

If God predestinates our salvation then nothing we do matters. We’re all just muppets churning out episode after episode of the only show on TV, written, produced, and directed by the Great Jim Henson in the Sky.

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How to Love Your Enemies


But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. – Luke 6:27-28

What does it mean to love your enemies? Did Jesus command us to conjure strong feelings and affections for those who hate us and that we also hate? Is it even possible to have good feelings toward someone we despise? If we are totally honest with ourselves we must admit that we harbor strong negative emotions to those we call our enemies. Isn’t it a contradiction to say we love whom we hate? How could God make such a contradictory demand upon us? Is the command to love our enemies some kind of divine prank?

The answer lies in Christ’s words – we love by doing good to those who hate us, blessing those who curse us and praying for those who abuse us.

Do.

Bless.

Pray.

These principles seem straight forward enough but confusion can arise. What does it mean to bless someone? Isn’t doing good and praying for someone in fact, blessing them? Is there a difference in the meaning of these seemingly synonymous terms? Bless here in the Greek means ‘speak well of, praise’. Instead of indulging human nature’s propensity to gossip and slander our enemies (no matter how justified we feel in doing so) we should build them up and find what is praise-worthy and proclaim it. The all-encompassing love to our enemies we are commanded to fulfill is simply doing good to them, speaking well of them and asking God to care for them, despite the way we may feel. Continue reading →

Is Our Unbelief > God at Work in Us? – The Final Chapter


In this final post on the false teachings of Prosperity Pete I’m scrutinizing his outrageous claims about both man and God.

Quote: “Unbelief is more powerful than God in you.”

“some of you looked at me funny when I said ‘unbelief is more powerful than God in you’ – but I just read it to you.  God was present but he was limited because of unbelief.”

Scripture proof given: “How oft did they provoke him in the wilderness, and grieve him in the desert! Yea, they turned back and tempted God, and limited the Holy One of Israel” (Psalm 78: 40-41).

Refutation:

Let’s zoom out for second and take a look at this Psalm of Asaph as a whole.  He sets out to show God’s faithfulness to unbelieving Israel throughout her inglorious history.  Despite continual unbelief and unfaithfulness God preserves his people by his sovereign hand.  At times he brings strong rebuke and chastens his people with judgment and wrath.  God then shows his love and compassion by bestowing upon Israel abundant blessings that are totally undeserved. Rather than teaching that man can trump God with his unbelief and thwart his will this Psalm does just the opposite.  It teaches the absolute sovereignty of God, that his providence extends over all human works and endeavors.  On top of that, the Hebrew word for ‘limit’ can be interpreted various ways.  Here are how some modern translations render it: Continue reading →

I’m Not Good Enough, I’m Not Smart Enough and Dog-Gone-it God Just Doesn’t Like Me


My carefully constructed religious edifice came under fierce attack some five years ago and suffered irreparable damage.  The alarms of imminent collapse began reverberating through the dark corridors of my failing heart.  Wave upon wave of relentless missile attacks crumbled the once stalwart marble pillars of my faith.  The incoming warheads contained a volatile combination of sin and self-righteousness. Structural failure was inevitable.  My religion had failed me; no longer could it support my overwhelming sense of failure.  It could no longer assuage my feelings of guilt.  I attempted to prop up the sagging ceiling with support columns of modern evangelical platitudes and aphorisms.  They turned out to be hollow inside and buckled beneath the weight.  The brick and mortar I had so meticulously hand-crafted disintegrated all around me in a resounding crash.

Exposed to the harsh elements of the wilderness I couldn’t help but gaze at the majesty of the heavens and contemplate my plight.  Late one night in the midst of  an intense spiritual malaise I raised my eyes to the stars and cried out in desperation, “Father help me, I’ve lost my way.  I don’t measure up to your righteousness and I never will.  I don’t know what to believe anymore.  Please reveal to me the truth.”  If ever I’ve been convinced that God hears and answers my prayers, that night crystallized the reality of it once and for all.

Yes, God heard me.  I’m sure he had been waiting for this cry for deliverance for quite some time.  After all, God is in the deliverance business.  Salvation itself is defined as deliverance or rescue from danger.  I have no doubt that through his sovereign power he had brought me to this fiery trial, carried me through the flames and now was in the process of  treating all my grievous burns. Continue reading →

Blogging and God’s Blessings


So, what does one have to do with the other? Well, you may have noticed that my post production has significantly decreased over the past few weeks. There’s good news and bad news associated with this trend. The good news is that my attention and energy has been diverted by the Lord’s tremendous blessings in my life. With a family of six members, we had grown exceedingly close – not devotionally, but physically, in our nice, yet modest sized home. Well, out of the blue 2 weekends ago, we received a phone call from a family member cryptically telling us we must look at this house for sale not too far from where we currently live. My wife and I exchanged puzzled glances, asking each other the same question – Why? We aren’t shopping for a new house. Reluctantly, yet somewhat curious we both drove out to the address and were astonished at the beauty of the home. We saw a sign that read ‘Open House – Sunday’. After church the following day we toured the inside of the home and fell in love with it immediately. It has so much more room than our current home. We were surprised at the very reasonable pricing. The square-footage is a major upgrade, but the neighborhood itself is not quite as nice as ours, as my wife duly noted. This probably contributed toward the fair pricing. However, the street itself is very nice and has a lot less traffic than ours. The backyard is smaller, but much better landscaped. (Less mowing, baby!) The home was reasonably priced, yet still beyond our means to purchase. The providence of God however, quickly put us into a position to buy the house. The next day a bid was put in and to make a long story short, the deal will be closed on April 30th!

UN-be-LIEVABLE! Continue reading →