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Anger

I am struggling with anger, and with guilt for the anger that I feel. Oh, the anger is well founded. I don’t think my anger is off base, unchristian, or unfounded. I have been lied to, lied on, falsely accused, and misrepresented. I’ve been discredited, shamed and humiliated, falsely accused by saints and then the pastor, and informed that I cannot even speak in my own defense because doing so questions his authority. I have seen backbiting, bitterness, variance, envying, strife, contention, gossip, and lying promoted in the name of religion. And I have seen true religion negated due to these promotions. Pure religion and undefiled is this… to visit the fatherless and widows… and to keep himself unspotted from the world…

My anger is as justified as Jesus’ when he drove out the money changers in the temple. No, I’m not being haughty or proud. I am not justifying bitterness, nor am I thinking more highly of myself than I ought. I am simply stating the facts. Jesus got angry, he even made a whip and drove out the money changers, yet He was without sin. To lay sin at my feet for saying the attitudes directly spoken against in the Bible should not be ignored in the church is neither reasonable nor biblical.

I have been told multiple times that I should forgive and forget things that should not be forgotten and which the offender never repented of. According to the unspoken rules of the church, if I tell the pastor he has offended me, I will be “reproved and rebuked” and told that I have a bitter, unforgiving spirit. Further, if I call and ask to go back to church, I will be dealt with harshly for leaving. I will be expected to attend four services a week and will have little or no privacy. I will not be able to use the internet for anything but work purposes. And I will only be sitting on a pew waiting to be called out for some new false report or supposed infraction anyway.

So I’m angry. Not sinfully angry, but angry in a way that has prompted change and research on my part. Anger that has made me re-look and rethink several teachings of the conservative Oneness movement. Anger that has made me realize that I’d prefer to go to a church where the women wear pants and they sing the doxology than to sit in a church where brothers and sisters distrust each other, where people are judged more than they are loved and accepted, and where there are some big names and also many no names.

I’m angry. I have a right and a need to be angry. When my anger shows through in my writing, it is not because I’m a horrible backslid reprobate. It is because there are terrible wrongs taking place under God’s name, and good people are being hurt as a result. There is no greater hypocrisy, no worse way to take God’s name in vain than to do these things “in His name” and then attempt to silence those who have been so misused.

Informational post on speaking in tongues #3

This is just a little ‘did you know’ informational post on the subject of speaking in tongues, shared as some food for thought.

Did you know that the Apostle Paul shows that everyone will not speak in tongues? This is found in 1 Corinthians 12:29-30 where Paul asks a series of questions where the obvious answer is ‘no.’

Some people will tell you that you must speak in tongues or that all believers should. Oneness Pentecostals will say unless you speak in tongues, you are not saved as they claim it is the ‘initial evidence’ of receiving the Holy Spirit. These lines of thought are not found in scripture. The apostle Paul didn’t teach or believe it, nor did any of the other apostles.

All are not apostles, are they? All are not prophets, are they? All are not teachers, are they? All do not have gifts of healing, do they? All do not speak with tongues, do they? All do not interpret, do they? NASB
Are we all apostles? Are we all prophets? Are we all teachers? Do we all have the power to do miracles? Do we all have the gift of healing? Do we all have the ability to speak in unknown languages? Do we all have the ability to interpret unknown languages? Of course not! NLT
Are all apostles? are all prophets? are all teachers? are all workers of miracles? Have all the gifts of healing? do all speak with tongues? do all interpret? KJV
Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all have gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? NIV

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.

Informational post on speaking in tongues #2

This is just a little ‘did you know’ informational post on the subject of speaking in tongues, shared as some food for thought. It goes along with a statement made in the first post: “Paul wanted the entire group of believers to be edified when they gathered together.”

Did you know the Bible teaches that when believers gather together, people should not be speaking in tongues all at the same time? Are you aware that the number of believers who should speak in tongues in a gathering should be limited to no more than three, with each speaking separately? Did you know that if anyone does speak in tongues at a service, they should only do so if someone is there to interpret? (That includes the pastor or guest minister, where many suddenly come out with tongues in the midst of speaking and there is no interpretation.)

Surprised? I imagine many are. Apostolic and Pentecostal churches encourage people to speak in tongues during gatherings. Yet if the apostle Paul were alive today, he would be telling them to stop this practice. He would consider this to be out of order and causing confusion to guests, just as he did with the church at Corinth. He taught that when believers were gathered together it should be with the purpose of everyone being edified. Tongues without interpretation does not edify the body of believers or the guests simply because they do not understand what is being spoken. This is why he encouraged those who spoke in tongues to also pray that they would be able to interpret, as was covered in the first post.

In 1 Corinthians 14:27-28 Paul wrote:

If anyone speaks in a tongue, it should be by two or at the most three, and each in turn, and one must interpret; but if there is no interpreter, he must keep silent in the church; and let him speak to himself and to God. NASB
If anyone speaks in a tongue, two—or at the most three—should speak, one at a time, and someone must interpret. If there is no interpreter, the speaker should keep quiet in the church and speak to himself and to God. NIV
If any man speak in an unknown tongue, let it be by two, or at the most by three, and that by course; and let one interpret. But if there be no interpreter, let him keep silence in the church; and let him speak to himself, and to God. KJV
No more than two or three should speak in tongues. They must speak one at a time, and someone must interpret what they say. But if no one is present who can interpret, they must be silent in your church meeting and speak in tongues to God privately. NLT

Going to church

I went to a Baptist church and a Nazarene church this morning… mainly because the roads were bad and they weren’t that far apart, and partly because I was curious how they were different and similar. As my sister noted in an e-mail, each church, no matter the denomination, is different. So my experiences in these two doesn’t mean I think anything particularly about the denominations; these were just two churches I happened to go to.

One thing I have been surprised by is that church is boring. *blush* I haven’t sat in a service where one person was doing all the talking for almost two decades- stand, dance, hop, leap, kneel, clap, say “amen” and “preach,” yes, but not sit. None of the services I’ve been in so far are very, ah, interactive…

Neither of the churches today had ushers. Neither seemed to take attendance. Whew! I like that! One had several Pentecostal type actions and words- raised hands and such, the other had none. Both had a group of four to five people get up on the platform and sing all the songs, both had projectors with words on them. (I’ve seen this at every non-Pentecostal church I’ve been in recently.) Both had loooonnngggg prayers… I have to laugh to myself; I’m guessing I could get my sweet hour of prayer in just by attending an hour and a half denominational service! Pentecostals take prayer requests for longer, but these people pray, in minute detail, about every request. It isn’t just, “Oh, God, you know the needs! Thank you Jesus! Hallelujah! Amen!” They seriously pray for their requests- every one. I really like that. They act like they really believe every need and every person lifted up is important. I like that.

One, the preacher was kind of in charge even when he wasn’t leading, and in the other, the pastor actually made a joke about how it was OK to have him for lunch if people wanted to, and that people could correct him if they wanted to, as well. He seemed almost *gasp* human!

Every Pentecostal I know that will speak to me tells me I should “get back in church.” I know they would disagree with me about going to a Trinitarian church. That bothers me. I like a lot of things about Pentecostal worship and praise. I even enjoyed ‘holiness standards‘ and teachings on Jesus’ name baptism and such. I miss some things.

But in Pentecost I’ve missed the old, meaningful hymns like the ones sung this morning, people being able to accept each other in their humanity, the freedom to make choices on my own without rebuke, and preaching on things like grace, mercy, and love, too. I need those right now. Pentecostal style worship and praise I can do at home. I’ve got enough preaching CDs that if I really want an Apostolic message on baptism, I can listen to one any time. And standards are my choice. So I’m glad that, at least for a while, I can be bored! 🙂