Category: performance based | Page 9

Good News

I’m not sure when or how I got a copy of the Good News Bible. It was not allowed. There was only one approved version of the Bible and don’t you dare listen to those radio preachers. So I never heard the Good News, in fact most of it was bad news. If you don’t stop or start doing you will go to hell.

I was told the gospel was Acts 2:38, those three steps to salvation: repent, be baptized every one of you in Jesus name, and receive the Holy Ghost. You couldn’t say Holy Spirit, that was new-fangled and not in the approved version of the Bible. I can still see in my mind’s eye the huge wall size poster replica of stairs I painted for my Sunday school class depicting the three steps to heaven. Why kids, do these three steps and never make a mistake and you might, if you are “perfect” and never cut your hair, go to heaven. But you’ll never know for sure. God can be awful mean sometimes.

By the late 80’s to early 90’s, I rebelled. After years of crying, praying, and never understanding why I couldn’t be good. I started listening to the radio preachers, who gave me a glimpse into the Good News. Then in 1995, I began reading in earnest my Good News Bible and learned that the gospel is not Acts 2:38 but Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection for me. This gospel or good news is what I had missed all those years. It wasn’t my effort to save myself but His effort on the cross to save me that would get me to heaven.

And now I want to remind you, my friends, of the Good News which I preached to you, which you received, and on which your faith stands firm. That is the gospel, the message that I preached to you. You are saved by the gospel if you hold firmly to it—unless it was for nothing that you believed. I passed on to you what I received, which is of the greatest importance: that Christ died for our sins, as written in the Scriptures; that he was buried and that he was raised to life three days later… I Corinthians 15:1-4

God’s love

In my former church, the pastor emphasized that we can’t be “good enough” for God. I assume that what he meant was that we will never be able to “earn” salvation- it’s a gift. But his statement bothered me because of the way it was used.

Recently I went to a Christian comedian “concert” (Ken Davis). He told a story that his young granddaughter (under six) had gotten lost in the mountains while they were camping a few years ago. They searched for 3 1/2 hours, and couldn’t find her. Called in search and rescue. Nothing. A storm was coming in. He was in a panic, sure, after not finding her in all that time, that she would never be found alive. Then the call came- hikers found her over 2 miles from camp, sitting on a rock. When they brought her back to camp, someone snapped a picture of him talking to her. He was squatted down, holding both her hands, looking straight in her eyes. And he asked us what we thought he was telling her. “Don’t you ever do that again!” “How could you wander off like that!” “You know better!” No. All he could say, again and again, was “I love you, I love you, I love you.” And he asked how we could think God, who loves us so much more, could do any less.

On the way home, I kept thinking about that. There was very little ever said about the love of God in my former church. But His love is very real, and very near. We may not ever be “good enough” to earn salvation, but that’s because it’s free. And if that’s the case, none of us is “bad enough” to slip beyond God’s love and mercy either. We have more than a Savior. We have a Father who loves us more dearly than we can even understand. And I love Him, too.

Living for God should not be so hard

Why is it so hard to worship God or have any kind of walk with Him?

I ran across a statement similar to this not long ago, I forget where.

The church I was in, when I was first there, seemed to be fun and I had no idea that worship could be so much fun. But then…but then. We had to be there (in church) as it was a requirement. Didn’t we love God enough? We had to shout and dance and cavort. Didn’t we love God? We had to be there at social functions like a pot luck – 100% attendance for the whole church. Saturday morning visitation in the freezing cold and wind in winter and the hot (95 at 10 am) humid mornings in summer. It was another requirement. After all, didn’t we love God?

If we were not jumping around during song service we were not worshiping. Sometimes the altar calls went to 11 pm. Most of us had jobs we had to go to Monday morning (and Tuesday through Friday too). And get up at 5 am to go to the church to pray before going to work. And then the revivals. One year we were having so many revivals I was nearly exhausted but that didn’t matter. Didn’t we love God?

Then there were the standards of dress and hair. Don’t cut your hair. Don’t even trim off one split end. Don’t even pull out the hard knot, pick it out gently (obviously said by men who had short hair). Skirts down to the ankle. A lot of the young women liked the “pencil” skirts and shuffled along. I sometimes hoped there was not an emergency where they had to RUN out of the church to save their lives. Splits in skirts had to be sewn down to the hem line. (Then one day the Pastor said we could sew them down to 4 inches below the knee which helped some). Sleeves down to the wrist. In our hot Kansas summers we could wear sleeves to just below the elbow. It was still too hot.

If you cut your hair you lose power. If you wore your skirt and sleeves too short someone was bound to be lusting after your knees and elbows. Give a Bible study or go to the “Bad Place.” Speak in tongues every single day so you know you still have the Holy Ghost. Pray an hour a day, everyday. Invite someone to church – oh the contests, we had to see who’d bring the most visitors! Read the Bible through every year.

The list just went on and on. I had lost sight of my Jesus. I did not like what I was becoming – judgmental about those who did not come to our church, the one with the Truth. No other church had the truth like we did. I remember sitting on the pew for awhile, thinking, “Where is Jesus? Where have they put Him?”

At one time, I was told salvation is so easy (pre-Pentecost days): Just believe on the Lord, He is savior and He died on the cross. The cross had all but disappeared. Like Fudge’s book: Christianity Without the Cross. Where had the simplicity of salvation gone? Why was it so complicated?

It was man’s rules that dimmed the hope of salvation and grace. Man’s rules that tried to keep people in control and in a church building. We were told God only lives here in this place. And we believed all this.

I don’t read my Bible every day now. But sometimes I pick it up and read a bit and it seems to mean more than when I rushed to read x chapters every night and felt guilty if I missed a few days reading.

Why should we feel so guilty if we didn’t follow all the rules? Why should we feel ashamed? Jesus did not preach that. Paul did not preach that. The Bible does not teach us to be/feel that way. Jesus really got onto the Pharisees about all their rules and regulations. Why do we need all that?

We don’t. Building a relationship with anyone should not be contingent on rules and regulations And so it goes with God. He loves us unconditionally. No conditions except that we worship him only and know that Jesus is the one who paid the ultimate price. That is why He said “It is Finished” and died.

I only hope and pray that those who are still following so many rules will see the light in Jesus and stop all the nonsense.

Stress. Anxiety. Depression.

Stress, anxiety and depression are caused when we are living to please others. ~ Paulo Coelho.

While I don’t think I ever had anxiety or was depressed while I was in my former United Pentecostal church, I did suffer from some stress. Trying to please other people, mainly those in charge, was stressful. Because you could never do enough to please them. Never.

I was sick one Saturday morning and didn’t even wake up until 10. That was when everyone going on visitation left. No one bothered to call to see where I was and I did not call in either. But the next Saturday, in front of everyone, I sure got the filleted-drawn and quartered treatment about not being there EVERY Saturday (as I had for weeks and weeks and on time while others came if the notion struck them). This was the pastor’s wife who called me out. She, who hardly ever showed up on time for some of these functions. But I seriously think she liked making the belated appearance. If you came after she did you are not dedicated to God or the Church.

I always felt that God was so much easier to please than any human agent. Humans just have their own criteria they go by and you need to measure up OR ELSE!

Read Tired of Trying to Measure Up by Jeff VanVonderen if you have problems with those hard to please people.

Placing Blame

When you go through a trial, if you don’t pass, you’re bound to repeat it til you get it right.

What is the indication that someone has “passed” a trial? Does a righteous God make people repeatedly go through something, and without indicating what they have done wrong, force them to repeat the trial because they somehow unwittingly failed? What is a mark of failure or success, from a Pentecostal perspective? Is it staying in church? Keeping a right attitude? Keeping a smile on your face in public even when you are dying inside? Forgiving and loving the people who hurt you?

When I was in school, we were given quizzes through a week or month. The quizzes and later our tests were scored, corrected, and returned to us. If we students reviewed our corrected quizzes, we saw the errors we had made and would learn from them. Many times, when I saw the correct answer to a question I had missed, that fact or answer would be etched in my memory. I would never make the same mistake again.

If the tests had not been scored, reviewed, or corrected, but only returned with “Pass” or “Fail” written at the top, we would not have known what we did wrong. We would not have been able to improve. We would have become frustrated by this method of grading. Any teacher who had graded this way would have been considered a very poor teacher and would probably been released from their position.

How then, in a walk with God, can people be repeatedly told they must have “failed” some test without being told what they did wrong or how to improve? What kind of teacher is God if he simply says, “You failed. Try again,” without showing us how to do better when we ask? That doesn’t make sense.

Someone might say, “All the answers are right there in the Bible- you’re just missing it.” Am I? God hasn’t opened his word and my understanding after years of the same problem?

For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him? (Luke 11:10-13)

God isn’t playing games with us. He doesn’t leave us to fail repeatedly without giving us the answers as to how to succeed with Him when we ask.

As a child, when I would bring some supposed wrong to my mom, I’d often hear: “There are always two sides to a story,” “it takes two to tango,” or “and what did you do to her?” Mom loved me, but she raised me to understand that most things were not totally one person’s fault or another’s. If I was bullied at school, for example, she comforted me, but she also questioned where I was and why and offered solutions to avoid similar situations in the future. If I ignored her advice and walked back into the same situation again, I was at fault- not because the bully was right, but because I had not taken steps to prevent their wrong behavior toward me.

I have put that training to use in this situation. I am not totally at fault, as some in church would like to think. Nor am I not responsible at all for what happened, because I walked into the same problem more than once. That was not an issue of passing or failing a trial, that was an issue of trying too hard to make something work that just, well… didn’t. It is not my fault that I was falsely accused. It is not that God is putting me through some horrible trial repeatedly. But I allowed a wrong situation and wrong behaviors to continue, trying to be more forgiving, trying to forget their wrongful accusations and cutting words, attempting to be more submissive and obedient, trying to show that I don’t have a chip on my shoulder or that I’m not intrinsically a more wicked person than anyone else or that there isn’t anything “wrong” with me.

When the pastor would tell me that my situation was abnormal, that there was something wrong with me, that I was unforgiving or bitter or unsubmissive, I would go out of my way to attempt to be more normal, right, forgiving, or submissive, thinking he would eventually see that I wasn’t the terrible person that he apparently thought I was. He would shun me, and I would press for attention, craving the love I saw him show to others. He would be angry at me, and I would think it was my fault. I had failed again. He told me I was depressed and negative and so he didn’t want to spend time with me or have others around me. So I would try to act happy and positive, and he would tell me that I didn’t take his rebuke seriously! I finally realized there was nothing I could do to change what he thought of me. There was no way that I could ‘succeed’ in that man’s church, not because I was not a successful person, but because I was expected to fail. It took a very long time for me to understand what had happened, and really I’m still sifting through it all.

I am not to blame. It is not my fault, and I will not continue to go through the same trial repeatedly because I somehow unwittingly fail every time. How did I come to this? Because now, people say that I failed because I quit church. Yet I never quit before. So if quitting church is the mark of failure, I have passed with flying colors many times, yet was still repeating the same ‘trial!’ I won’t fail this test again. This time I will succeed. I will walk away from the bully and will not put myself within the bully’s reach again. And in doing that, I will succeed.