Tim said to me that he had dreaded the time that I would lose a parent, because he knew what I was like several years ago. I would have been hysterical, and would have had panic attacks, crying all the time and no doubt go into depression. However I have changed with the help of God, by putting my faith and trusting in Jesus before anything else. It doesn’t mean that bad things don’t happen to us, but by having faith in Jesus and truly believing that He is our Messiah, gives us the strength to get through those hard times knowing that we are not alone. I turned my back on God once and felt very alone, and promise that I will not do it again. God gives me hope which I haven’t had for a very long time, and it truly is a comfort to me. I feel for those that do not know God, and I pray that they seek God before it is too late as we only have this life time to reach out to Him.
Showing posts with label faith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label faith. Show all posts
Friday, March 30, 2012
Gloria's Testimony
This is what my wife Gloria wrote regarding her reaction to her dad’s recent death. This is a paragraph taken from a letter she sent to her friends in which she tells them of her loss:
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
2012: the first months.
I’ve clearly done very little blogging in recent months. My four blogs on this account have been neglected for some time, partly due to access difficulties. But I’ve also been very quiet on my new wordpress blog. Most entries there have been short.
This year hasn’t had the best start. So far there’s been my father in law’s death, followed by my newly widowed mum-in-law being evacuated from approaching flood waters. In addition to those major events there were quite a few smaller scale difficulties that I would have liked to avoid.
But despite the clear negative aspects to all of these events, we not only survived them, we found ourselves encouraged and uplifted.
I know my wife would have been an emotional wreck if she had lost one of her parents several years ago, so something has clearly changed. She was able not only to cope with her own grief; she supported her mum through the funeral arrangements, the funeral itself and through her first two weeks without her husband.
She later wrote to several friends to tell her of her father’s death and detailed the reason for her strength. I hope to post part of that letter before too long sharing in her words the change that made the difference.
This year hasn’t had the best start. So far there’s been my father in law’s death, followed by my newly widowed mum-in-law being evacuated from approaching flood waters. In addition to those major events there were quite a few smaller scale difficulties that I would have liked to avoid.
But despite the clear negative aspects to all of these events, we not only survived them, we found ourselves encouraged and uplifted.
I know my wife would have been an emotional wreck if she had lost one of her parents several years ago, so something has clearly changed. She was able not only to cope with her own grief; she supported her mum through the funeral arrangements, the funeral itself and through her first two weeks without her husband.
She later wrote to several friends to tell her of her father’s death and detailed the reason for her strength. I hope to post part of that letter before too long sharing in her words the change that made the difference.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
SECURE FOUNDATIONS
At work we have an Occupational Health and Safety noticeboard where information about workplace safety can be posted. Occasionally there will be photos of actual cases of incredible carelessness (even stupidity) that put people’s lives at risk.
An example would be someone standing on a ladder balanced on a chair that they have placed on a table – all in the attempt to reach a height beyond the capability of the ladder.
This thoughtless approach and attitude brings to mind the way some people approach their relationship with Jesus.
The ladder in the above example lacks stability. It is not placed on the required foundation, and it is a danger to anyone who climbs it.
There are foundations to the Christian life. They are specifically mentioned together in Hebrews 6 and separately elsewhere. They provide the basics of Christian faith, a secure anchor point. Yet how often do arguments arise about their necessity?
Some people seem intent on seeing how few of the foundational things they need? Is baptism really necessary? What about repentance? Surely it’s enough to merely believe?
These people make me think of the man on that ladder: seeing how little contact he can have with a solid foundation without falling. Some even try to test things further, rocking the ladder to one side until it is balancing on one leg only.
An example would be someone standing on a ladder balanced on a chair that they have placed on a table – all in the attempt to reach a height beyond the capability of the ladder.
This thoughtless approach and attitude brings to mind the way some people approach their relationship with Jesus.
The ladder in the above example lacks stability. It is not placed on the required foundation, and it is a danger to anyone who climbs it.
There are foundations to the Christian life. They are specifically mentioned together in Hebrews 6 and separately elsewhere. They provide the basics of Christian faith, a secure anchor point. Yet how often do arguments arise about their necessity?
Some people seem intent on seeing how few of the foundational things they need? Is baptism really necessary? What about repentance? Surely it’s enough to merely believe?
These people make me think of the man on that ladder: seeing how little contact he can have with a solid foundation without falling. Some even try to test things further, rocking the ladder to one side until it is balancing on one leg only.
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Who has God elected or chosen to save?
This is a link to the second part of a series examining the foundational doctrines of Calvinism from an Arminian point of view.
Its author, William Birch, is a former Calvinist.
AN EXAMINATION OF TULIP THEOLOGY: "U" FOR UNCONDITIONAL ELECTION
An excerpt from the article.
Who has God elected or chosen to save? It is explicitly and overwhelmingly clear from Scripture that God has chosen to save anyone who will believe in His Son Jesus Christ (Mk. 1:15; John 1:7, 12; 4:42; 6:29; 11:27; 12:42; 14:1; 16:30-31; 17:20; Acts 8:37; 15:11; 16:31; Rom. 3:22; 4:11; 10:9; 1 Cor. 1:21; Gal. 3:22; Eph. 1:19; 1 Tim. 4:10) -- the most explicit passage being, "God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe" (1 Cor. 1:21 NASB).
This being the truth of Scripture then election must be viewed as conditional: it is conditioned upon faith in Christ. Thus Arminians believe in the doctrine of Conditional Election; but only in the sense that sinners become elect upon faith in and union with Christ Jesus, and not beforehand. We believe it is erroneous to say that God has unconditionally elected to save or unconditionally saves anyone, since faith is the condition to being justified, regenerated and thus saved.
-----
The first part of the series can be found here:
Examination of tulip
Its author, William Birch, is a former Calvinist.
AN EXAMINATION OF TULIP THEOLOGY: "U" FOR UNCONDITIONAL ELECTION
An excerpt from the article.
Who has God elected or chosen to save? It is explicitly and overwhelmingly clear from Scripture that God has chosen to save anyone who will believe in His Son Jesus Christ (Mk. 1:15; John 1:7, 12; 4:42; 6:29; 11:27; 12:42; 14:1; 16:30-31; 17:20; Acts 8:37; 15:11; 16:31; Rom. 3:22; 4:11; 10:9; 1 Cor. 1:21; Gal. 3:22; Eph. 1:19; 1 Tim. 4:10) -- the most explicit passage being, "God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe" (1 Cor. 1:21 NASB).
This being the truth of Scripture then election must be viewed as conditional: it is conditioned upon faith in Christ. Thus Arminians believe in the doctrine of Conditional Election; but only in the sense that sinners become elect upon faith in and union with Christ Jesus, and not beforehand. We believe it is erroneous to say that God has unconditionally elected to save or unconditionally saves anyone, since faith is the condition to being justified, regenerated and thus saved.
-----
The first part of the series can be found here:
Examination of tulip
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Word of "Faith"
I’ve made no secret about my one time involvement with Word of Faith (WOF) teaching. It’s a confession that one visitor to this blog has tried to use against me. On more than one occasion (here and elsewhere) he has tried to use it to discredit who I am and what I now believe.
Accompanying that attempt has been an assumption about the extent of my involvement and the effect it continues to have on my life. From the tone and the content of insinuations made I can see he assumes my attraction to WOF was inspired by greed.
While my involvement with WOF has never been hidden, I don’t recall writing about my reasons for getting involved with that teaching. I now want to address those reasons.
For several years I had been involved with a Pentecostal denomination that continually presented a Christian reality that I was not experiencing. No matter how often they insisted that healing and miracles were valid today – they were demonstrating nothing of that professed reality. There was a huge gap between professed belief and actual experience. It was a gap that didn’t seem to exist in scripture. What was the problem?
My introduction to WOF came at a midweek home fellowship meeting. Members of the group had been listening to tapes from one of Kenneth Copeland’s conferences and they were sharing some of the things that had excited them. I offered significant resistance to the things they were saying but eventually their enthusiasm got through to me.
Was I won over by the promise of a prosperous life? Or was it the claim that Christians could and should live in total health?
It was neither. The thing that broke down the wall of my resistance was a realisation of what faith meant. At that stage I didn’t know about the WOF teachings of faith being a force that anyone could utilise. I knew nothing about the emphasis on positive confession (confess and possess or the less reverent blab it and grab it). All I knew was that I gained an understanding of faith for the first time. It became much more than an “airy-fairy” mystical word that seemed to have no practical use.
At best my previous understanding of faith involved a lot of uncertainty and had more in common with “wishing” than with a firm trust in my redeemer.
For the first time faith became something more certain and firm, something concrete.
Having faith in God meant to trust Him no matter what.
It meant taking Him at His word and having confidence in what He had said. Primarily, in practical terms, that meant accepting His word as being the truth even when our circumstances or experience offered contradictory evidence. If God had promised something in scripture, and if all conditions of that promise were met, then we should have the total confidence of receiving what was promised, because God is not a liar.
The biblical faith I discovered was not a vague uncertain trust in God. It involved an absolute confidence in Him and His character. His word became the standard by which God and His purposes could be known. Through scripture His desires and plans for mankind were revealed. By knowing His will and in particular through knowing what He had provided for His children, we could have the foundation upon which our faith could firmly stand.
That is the area of WOF that attracted me. It was not the promise of health and wealth – it was the promise of living as a genuinely effective Christian witness, actually LIVING and demonstrating the Christian life described in the New Testament instead of tolerating the hypocrisy of professing one thing and living another. It gave a tangible reality to faith and it was no longer merely a theological concept.
THAT is what drew me to WOF. Its teachers were the first to give me a real understanding of what faith is and at the time they were the only ones who seemed to be teaching that truth.
However, their message came with a lot of excess baggage that was not so helpful. While their doctrines were always (supposedly) based on ‘the word” – like all false doctrines they were based on PARTS of the word. I became very adept at quoting scripture to promote the teaching I was receiving. But my quotes were learned mainly via Copeland recordings and not through turning to scripture for myself. I was therefore never aware of the correct context of those quotes. I was only familiar with the interpretations placed upon those verses by the Copelands and associated ministries.
While the understanding of faith that I’d initially gained was still valuable (that is trusting God’s word to be the truth): all validity was dependant on it REALLY being GOD’S word and not a false assumption that I mistook for God’s word. Believing in an assumption or a wrong interpretation of scripture is NOT an expression of faith in God. That is where my departure from WOF began. There were too many inconsistencies between what I was being taught and what I was reading in scripture for myself. Too much of scripture was being ignored or misapplied.
At first I pushed aside my concerns. After all no one is perfect and I couldn’t expect the teachers to get everything right – and they were the ones who had given me an insight into the nature of faith when my church and its leaders seemed to be as much in the dark as I had been.
Instead of being attracted to WOF by their teaching on prosperity, it was the increasing emphasis on earthly wealth that gave me most cause for concern. While I was struggling financially I could see these men and women living highly extravagant lifestyles, financed by the donations they solicited. It seemed that the way for me to get out of financial difficulties was by sending them money (?) – and their lifestyles showed how it all worked (and could allegedly work for me) with God clearly blessing them and their ministry with wealth. None of this (their extravagance) seemed compatible with anything that Jesus said about wealth. Those parts of scripture were among those conveniently ignored.
A major area of their teaching on faith that I could not reconcile with anything in scripture was the idea that faith is a force that works when it principles are put into practice. Even unbelievers were tapping into this force of faith and were reaping its benefits without realising what they were doing. This teaching made faith into something impersonal with a power of its own. It was not a matter of having faith in someone (God), it was important to have faith in your faith. This is where “positive confession” came into play. Continued positive confession was the means of reinforcing and expressing faith to obtain a desired outcome. Negative confession was equally effective, but the outcome was nothing to be desired.
I was never comfortable with this aspect of WOF teaching and when I read “The Seduction of Christianity’ by Hunt and McMahon the reason for my discomfort was made clear. The authors showed there was a relationship between these beliefs and practices with occultism and eastern mysticism. It was around that time that I broke away from WOF teaching.
WOF teaching is riddled with false doctrine and false practices (and I think that has increased in the 20+ years since I abandoned it). But like the majority of heresies there is enough truth to disguise the lies. In the case of WOF I gained a much stronger understanding of what faith is (and is not). Faith revolves around relationship; knowing God, His ways and His desires well enough to trust Him totally. Faith requires an understanding of His will and is focused on His will. It is not focused on our desire or our assumptions and it definitely is not a “force” to be operated.
Looking back now I can say that my understanding of faith began with my involvement with WOF teachers – but it developed and matured DESPITE their teaching and not because of it.
Accompanying that attempt has been an assumption about the extent of my involvement and the effect it continues to have on my life. From the tone and the content of insinuations made I can see he assumes my attraction to WOF was inspired by greed.
While my involvement with WOF has never been hidden, I don’t recall writing about my reasons for getting involved with that teaching. I now want to address those reasons.
For several years I had been involved with a Pentecostal denomination that continually presented a Christian reality that I was not experiencing. No matter how often they insisted that healing and miracles were valid today – they were demonstrating nothing of that professed reality. There was a huge gap between professed belief and actual experience. It was a gap that didn’t seem to exist in scripture. What was the problem?
My introduction to WOF came at a midweek home fellowship meeting. Members of the group had been listening to tapes from one of Kenneth Copeland’s conferences and they were sharing some of the things that had excited them. I offered significant resistance to the things they were saying but eventually their enthusiasm got through to me.Was I won over by the promise of a prosperous life? Or was it the claim that Christians could and should live in total health?
It was neither. The thing that broke down the wall of my resistance was a realisation of what faith meant. At that stage I didn’t know about the WOF teachings of faith being a force that anyone could utilise. I knew nothing about the emphasis on positive confession (confess and possess or the less reverent blab it and grab it). All I knew was that I gained an understanding of faith for the first time. It became much more than an “airy-fairy” mystical word that seemed to have no practical use.
At best my previous understanding of faith involved a lot of uncertainty and had more in common with “wishing” than with a firm trust in my redeemer.
For the first time faith became something more certain and firm, something concrete.
Having faith in God meant to trust Him no matter what.
It meant taking Him at His word and having confidence in what He had said. Primarily, in practical terms, that meant accepting His word as being the truth even when our circumstances or experience offered contradictory evidence. If God had promised something in scripture, and if all conditions of that promise were met, then we should have the total confidence of receiving what was promised, because God is not a liar.
The biblical faith I discovered was not a vague uncertain trust in God. It involved an absolute confidence in Him and His character. His word became the standard by which God and His purposes could be known. Through scripture His desires and plans for mankind were revealed. By knowing His will and in particular through knowing what He had provided for His children, we could have the foundation upon which our faith could firmly stand.
That is the area of WOF that attracted me. It was not the promise of health and wealth – it was the promise of living as a genuinely effective Christian witness, actually LIVING and demonstrating the Christian life described in the New Testament instead of tolerating the hypocrisy of professing one thing and living another. It gave a tangible reality to faith and it was no longer merely a theological concept.
THAT is what drew me to WOF. Its teachers were the first to give me a real understanding of what faith is and at the time they were the only ones who seemed to be teaching that truth.
However, their message came with a lot of excess baggage that was not so helpful. While their doctrines were always (supposedly) based on ‘the word” – like all false doctrines they were based on PARTS of the word. I became very adept at quoting scripture to promote the teaching I was receiving. But my quotes were learned mainly via Copeland recordings and not through turning to scripture for myself. I was therefore never aware of the correct context of those quotes. I was only familiar with the interpretations placed upon those verses by the Copelands and associated ministries.
While the understanding of faith that I’d initially gained was still valuable (that is trusting God’s word to be the truth): all validity was dependant on it REALLY being GOD’S word and not a false assumption that I mistook for God’s word. Believing in an assumption or a wrong interpretation of scripture is NOT an expression of faith in God. That is where my departure from WOF began. There were too many inconsistencies between what I was being taught and what I was reading in scripture for myself. Too much of scripture was being ignored or misapplied.
At first I pushed aside my concerns. After all no one is perfect and I couldn’t expect the teachers to get everything right – and they were the ones who had given me an insight into the nature of faith when my church and its leaders seemed to be as much in the dark as I had been.
Instead of being attracted to WOF by their teaching on prosperity, it was the increasing emphasis on earthly wealth that gave me most cause for concern. While I was struggling financially I could see these men and women living highly extravagant lifestyles, financed by the donations they solicited. It seemed that the way for me to get out of financial difficulties was by sending them money (?) – and their lifestyles showed how it all worked (and could allegedly work for me) with God clearly blessing them and their ministry with wealth. None of this (their extravagance) seemed compatible with anything that Jesus said about wealth. Those parts of scripture were among those conveniently ignored.
A major area of their teaching on faith that I could not reconcile with anything in scripture was the idea that faith is a force that works when it principles are put into practice. Even unbelievers were tapping into this force of faith and were reaping its benefits without realising what they were doing. This teaching made faith into something impersonal with a power of its own. It was not a matter of having faith in someone (God), it was important to have faith in your faith. This is where “positive confession” came into play. Continued positive confession was the means of reinforcing and expressing faith to obtain a desired outcome. Negative confession was equally effective, but the outcome was nothing to be desired.
I was never comfortable with this aspect of WOF teaching and when I read “The Seduction of Christianity’ by Hunt and McMahon the reason for my discomfort was made clear. The authors showed there was a relationship between these beliefs and practices with occultism and eastern mysticism. It was around that time that I broke away from WOF teaching.
WOF teaching is riddled with false doctrine and false practices (and I think that has increased in the 20+ years since I abandoned it). But like the majority of heresies there is enough truth to disguise the lies. In the case of WOF I gained a much stronger understanding of what faith is (and is not). Faith revolves around relationship; knowing God, His ways and His desires well enough to trust Him totally. Faith requires an understanding of His will and is focused on His will. It is not focused on our desire or our assumptions and it definitely is not a “force” to be operated.
Looking back now I can say that my understanding of faith began with my involvement with WOF teachers – but it developed and matured DESPITE their teaching and not because of it.
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