Author: Nana5 | Page 2 | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

A Few Of My Favorite Things….

What I learned from the United Pentecostal Church organization.

It seems I am always looking at the UPC in a negative way. That I wasted my years in this organization and this morning in prayer, it seemed like God challenged me to name a few things that were good about this organization. So there I sat reflecting on this challenge and came up with a list of a few of my favorite things…

1. Because I had unanswered questions, I learned to study the word for myself.
2. When I studied the standards that were taught as if they were heaven or hell issues. God showed me that a clean heart and a right spirit was more important than my stinking self righteousness.
3. God revealed his plan of salvation to me and it’s not by works but by faith in Jesus Christ. I believe that the salvation of sinners is wholly through grace. There is nothing that we can add to it.
4. When I read 1 Corinthians 11, God opened my eyes to see that my hair wasn’t magical no matter how long it is and according to 1 Corinthians 11:16, “But if anyone seems to be contentious, we have no such custom, nor do the churches of God.” This was the verse‬‬ that was supposedly in the wrong place in the Bible.
5. God doesn’t like a (church) service controlled by emotionalism but everything is to be done in decently and in order. I believe a Christians’ moderation should be obvious to others and should never lead people into extremes of fanaticism. “Let all things be done decently and in order.” I Corinthians‬ ‭14:40‬ ‭NKJV‬‬.
6. So many people fake speaking in tongues so they make up for it by making large contributions to the church and brown-nosing the pastor. Reminds me of Simon the Sorcerer. “And when Simon saw that through the laying on of the apostles’ hands the Holy Spirit was given, he offered them money, saying, “Give me this power also, that anyone on whom I lay hands may receive the Holy Spirit.” Acts‬ ‭8:18-19‬. NKJV
7. If there is no fruit being produced in a church, then you need to get out and find one that believes the Holy Spirit bestows enabling ministry gifts upon believers; and that we should show spiritual “fruit” as evidence of a Spirit-filled life. “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.” ‭‭Galatians‬ ‭5:22-23‬ ‭NKJV‬‬
8. In the UPC most of the churches are involved with pastor worship instead of God worship because people are more afraid of the pastor than they are of God. I believe one of the Ten Commandments says “You shall have no other gods before Me.” Exodus‬ ‭20:3‬ ‭NKJV‬‬.
9. I was trained by the pastor to not have any friends outside of “the church” and to not be unequally yoked. So I often wondered how I was supposed to be a soul winner when I was not supposed to be around them. “But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.” Matthew‬ ‭9:13‬ ‭NKJV‬‬
10. Last but not least, I learned how to carry a very heavy burden placed upon me by “the church”. How to dress, how to act, what to do and when to do it. I was so busy working for the church that I wasn’t working for God. Jesus said “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Matthew‬ ‭11:28‬ ‭NKJV‬‬. It wasn’t until I left the UPC that I understood the meaning of a lighter burden.

So these are a few of my favorite things that I didn’t like about the UPC organization and by turning away from them, I actually found God and His mercy and grace.

Picking Up the Pieces

During my time with the United Pentecostal Church, I felt like my heart had been broken so many times that I was always picking up pieces to try and put myself back together. So many hopes and dreams shattered along with my marriage.

This August 3rd will mark 15 years since my divorce, another shattering moment and there I was trying to pick up pieces of my heart. I was still attending an UPC church and I had one friend who tried to help.

My other friends were worldly ladies who I worked with and who the church frowned upon. But that was the beginning of the end of church as I knew it. My friends at work took me to lunch to celebrate my divorce with a cake and funny gifts just to lift me up.

My divorce was ignored at church except for the wives telling me to stay away from their husbands and not to even talk to them. There was never any love or support shown to me except for my one friend.

So when I left, she left also and is now very active in the church we attend today. God revealed to me that although we are abandoned by those who you love and no matter how many times your heart is broken, He is there to help pick up the pieces with admonishment to the pastors who have been cruel and hurtful to those with broken hearts.

The weak you have not strengthened, nor have you healed those who were sick, nor bound up the broken, nor brought back what was driven away, nor sought what was lost; but with force and cruelty you have ruled them.

Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the LORD: “ As I live,” says the Lord GOD, “surely because My flock became a prey, and My flock became food for every beast of the field, because there was no shepherd, nor did My shepherds search for My flock, but the shepherds fed themselves and did not feed My flock. ‭‭Ezekiel‬ ‭34:4, 7-8‬ ‭NKJV

I eventually saw that God will take care of you and those abusers will get their due. When I started letting God help me again and with the help of my “worldly” friends I began to heal from the inside out.

So now 15 years has passed since my divorce and I’m happy to say I’m healed from that heartache and even have a new love interest that God brought into my life. We’ve been together 5 years.

I’ve been delivered from the UPCI, bruised and battered spiritually, but I’m healing and the broken pieces of my heart are being healed and restored.

Praise the LORD! For it is good to sing praises to our God; For it is pleasant, and praise is beautiful. The LORD builds up Jerusalem; He gathers together the outcasts of Israel. He heals the brokenhearted And binds up their wounds. ‭‭Psalms‬ ‭147:1-3

I may have been an outcast, a divorced woman is a stigma that is hard to shake in the UPC, but I no longer have a stigma now that I’m free and the pieces have all been picked up.

No Longer A Victim!

A close friend of mine was a victim of an armed robbery in a store she managed and was brutally beaten and left for dead. She survived the physical injuries but was kept a victim in her mind and developed many fears, anxieties, and PTSD. It took her many years to recover mentally and emotionally but she recovered because she refused to keep thinking like she was a victim.

She even managed to open a bridal store and ran the business for 5 or 6 years until she had to sell it to take care of her mother who had cancer. She is a survivor and a strong one.

Not only did she survive something so tragic as the robbery, she is also a spiritual abuse survivor. She came out of the United Pentecostal Church and is now a pastor of a Methodist church, director of a Women’s Center and State Rep for Celebrate Recovery. She is one busy woman.

This is her story of recovery from victim to victor!

Acting like you’re always a victim and complaining about the hurts that were done to you fuels your sense of victimization. Believing you’re a victim, makes it seem like you have no power over the direction of your life, and it will keep you stuck in the same grip of fear until you take control of your situation.

I suffered terrible trauma in my life and found the courage to turn it all around. When I remembered I had access to far more power, authority, and influence over my life than I ever believed. I stopped hiding, complaining, and refusing to see myself as a hapless victim, I found that I was more powerful than I realized, but only when I chose to accept this reality and I moved on.

It wasn’t easy but I had to stop blaming God and start believing in Him again. I had to find my faith, trust and strength in Him. He was the lover of my soul, my redeemer, my peace and only He could restore my life. He gave me a new outlook and a purpose.

I left the legalistic church and found freedom and healing through Celebrate Recovery and getting involved in another group of believers where there was no judgement and I could seek the solace that I needed. It took me a few years but I’m totally changed from the “victim” I thought I was, to the victor I am today.

Yes I still have triggers but I work through them and I have boundaries set up but I know if God can do this for me, he can do it for anybody if you are willing to try.

That’s her testimony and I wanted to share it because she has greatly helped me too. My friend is a wonderful and positive person to hang out with. I pray this will help you as much as it did me.

********
Shop at our Amazon store! As an Amazon Influencer, this website earns from qualifying purchases.

Unbelieving Believers

“Only Jesus can satisfy your soul
And only He can change your heart
And make you whole;
He’ll give you peace you never knew
Sweet love and joy and Heaven too,
For only Jesus can satisfy your soul.”
(Lanny Wolfe)

I woke up to this song in my heart this morning….don’t ask me why…. I haven’t heard or sung it in years…..but I sat up in bed belting out the chorus like I was an accomplished singer. Which I am not!

But it’s been stuck in my head and I can’t keep from singing it. I’m sure (hopefully) this has happened to many of you too. So I stopped questioning the reason and started enjoying the message of the song.

Many of us have gone through awful and wicked abuse in our lives and going to church to find Jesus seemed the most natural thing to do. Problem is there are so many legalistic churches that we found ourselves trapped in a works-based religion that gave us very little joy and no satisfaction for our soul. So we left, bandaging our wounds and limping out of a building never to return.

Our hearts have been broken into so many pieces and our souls crushed and our emotions and feelings have been hardened and now we are numb. We feel anger against God and the church we left and let’s face it, we are just so angry.

Even with all the baggage we are carrying, our hearts and souls still long for Jesus. We still want that joy of the Lord and His freedom and His grace and mercy. Because we never found it in the legalistic churches, we are having trouble believing that it is even true.

Then God wakes you up with a song in your heart…..

I know when I left the United Pentecostal Church I was leaving a lifetime of teaching and spiritual works but I had become an Unbelieving Believer. I was lost in the wilderness with a hardened heart and an unbelieving spirit. And just like the Israelites, I wandered about in rebellion with a hardened soul so I couldn’t be hurt again. I guarded myself against God, His Word, church and people. I literally let the enemy of my soul encase my heart in ice so I couldn’t feel the pain….but I also couldn’t feel anything else but anger.

In a devotion I read a few days ago, Joyce Meyers mentioned, “The problem with being an Unbelieving Believer is you shut the door on God and what He has planned for your future” and dwell on things that has happened to you….the shame, hateful words, false accusations, and of course the shunning.

I’m seven years into my recovery now and the first thing God was able to get through to me was that to receive anything from Him, I needed to believe. As God melted the ice around my heart and let me know it was okay to believe in Him again. I chose to start believing little by little and not mix in doubt and unbelief.

Realizing that Jesus wanted to restore my heart, soul, and emotions I was going to have to let Him into those areas of my life again. I was going to have to change my ways and become like David and pursue God and ask him to change me and to give me the same kind of heart that He has.

I have come to realize that Jesus truly satisfies that longing in my heart and it comes from knowing God more intimately today than I did yesterday. I have become a Believing Believer again.

********
Shop at our Amazon store! As an Amazon Influencer, this website earns from qualifying purchases.

Submission? Is It For Today? Part 2

I never heard my Pastor teach about submission in the 7 years I’ve been attending this church until about a year or so ago. Needless to say, I probably would have gotten up and left because of my past. But something was intriguing about what my pastor thought about submission and I wanted to know why so many married couples seemed so happy together, even my daughter was happy in her new marriage.

After being brought up in the United Pentecostal Church and endured their subservient view of women, I was curious to know how they looked at women. So I stayed to listen…

He started with a quote from an article he read by John Piper, “Submission is the defined calling of a wife to honor and affirm her husband’s leadership, and so help to carry it through according to her gifts.”

I wasn’t too sure about this but I said to myself I would listen to the end so I stayed and he continued, reading 1 Peter 3:1-6.

“In the same way, you wives must accept the authority of your husbands. Then, even if some refuse to obey the Good News, your godly lives will speak to them without any words. They will be won over by observing your pure and reverent lives. Don’t be concerned about the outward beauty of fancy hairstyles, expensive jewelry, or beautiful clothes. You should clothe yourselves instead with the beauty that comes from within, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is so precious to God. This is how the holy women of old made themselves beautiful. They put their trust in God and accepted the authority of their husbands. For instance, Sarah obeyed her husband, Abraham, and called him her master. You are her daughters when you do what is right without fear of what your husbands might do.”

This was going from bad to worse for me. I refuse to call some man my Master….then pastor surprised me and said he knew what every woman in the place was thinking and to be patient it wasn’t what we thought. He then went back to the article by John Piper and said he was going to tell us what submission was NOT. Submission was NOT? I was all ears and wanted to hear this…

Submission is….

1. Not agreeing on everything. The wife who is a believer has sworn allegiance to Jesus Christ and he is her Lord and King. It is possible to be submissive and refuse to think what your husband says you should think about. God has made us with a mind, we can think, we can plan and reason.*

2. Not leaving your brain at the altar. Any man who says “I do the thinking in this family!” is sick and has a warped view of his authority. Before you go to the altar you need to agree it’s okay to disagree. When a decision can’t be made the husband has the final say.*

3. Not stopping to influence your husband to become a believer. God says you can win your husband by your submissive attitude.*

4. Not putting the will of your husband before the will of God. Jesus is your Lord and for his sake, you will submit to your husband. But Jesus is your Lord and Savior and when you have to choose between the two, you will choose Christ. You don’t do this with an arrogant attitude but a meek one, letting your husband know you can’t do what he suggested.*

5. Not getting your spiritual strength from your husband. Your hope is in Christ, you attend church, pray and study the Word. Your strength comes from the Lord.*

6. Not living or acting in fear. You are a God-fearing wife and you are fearless. Husbands are called to a unique kind of leadership in marriage and the wife is called to a unique kind of submission. It can be a wonderful marriage, a unique and blessed partnership.*

Of course the pastor gave me a lot to think about and maybe ….just maybe….my thinking about submission could change, especially after he ended his sermon with the rest of the chapter…

“In the same way, you husbands must give honor to your wives. Treat your wife with understanding as you live together. She may be weaker than you are, but she is your equal partner in God’s gift of new life. Treat her as you should so your prayers will not be hindered.” 1 Peter‬ ‭3:7 NLT

Now I like that!

*information came from article by John Piper, “Six Things Submission Is Not” and my sermon notes from 4/24/17.

Submission? Is It For Today? Part 1

********
Shop at our Amazon store! As an Amazon Influencer, this website earns from qualifying purchases.