Christ the Lord by Anne Rice

Okay, when my pastor told me to read a book by the lady who wrote all the vampire LeStat books, I was intrigued. I took some Christmas money and bought Christ the Lord for my Nook. It’s Jesus telling his story in first person beginning in Alexandria, Egypt. I’ve read the first three chapters tonight and it’s interesting in some ways, but you can tell Rice is Catholic. For instance, Jesus’ mother Mary claims she’s still a virgin and Joseph will never touch her. That’s the Catholic dogma of the Perpetual Virginity of the Blessed Mother. It has no basis in scripture, but is a longstanding tradition in Holy Mother Church.

Jesus has also killed a boy who was bullying him and then raised the boy from the dead. Apparently, he also created some sparrows from clay and gave them life. Both of those are spurious traditional teachings from Catholic tradition. The Gospels don’t record Jesus performing any miracles before he turned the water to wine at Cana. I don’t suppose there’s any reason he COULDN’T have performed miracles before then.

The Jesus in Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt is way different from the Jesus I grew up learning about. He is a confused seven year old who spontaneously uses his “powers” and has no idea how or why it happens. He is shown having no control over his actions. Now I’m not sure how much of this I believe. I find it hard to swallow that God the Father would allow Jesus so much power as a child. Think of the unbelievable damage he could have done in innocence.

I get it. She’s trying to show the humanity of Jesus. Okay. Fine. It still doesn’t make a lot of sense though. For my part, I still think Jesus was a very ordinary boy who lived a completely ordinary life until God revealed that Jesus was His Son at Jesus’ baptism by John. What do I know though?

About Moral Compasses

I was listening to a lecture today and the professor was talking about ethics and morals and natural law. I think I’ve finally gotten a decent grasp on a problem that’s plagued me for a long time.

I worry about what other people see as stupid stuff. The stupid stuff in this case is what happens to anyone who stands in Judgement having never heard the Gospel or anything remotely resembling the Gospel. What’s going to happen to people like the Incas and Aztecs or the Chinese or Polynesians who lived before Christ or who died before the missionary boards started sending people out.

I think I may have a handle on it. Natural or General Revelation. The way I understand it to be now is everyone has a conscience because we are made in the image of God. If a person follows the dictates of his or her conscience, he or she will — by divine design — head in the right general direction regardless of whether or not he or she ever hears the Gospel.

As I’ve pondered this today, I’ve developed an analogy that helps me. How accurate it is, I have no idea, but it’s been useful for me to find a handle on things. A person’s conscience is like a cheap compass. It isn’t perfect, but it will guide you in the general direction you need to go. A person who has access to the complete Scriptures however, has a modern GPS module. Obviously, a GPS is going to put you much closer to the exact destination than the compass, but everyone doesn’t have a GPS yet, while everyone — as a remnant of our divine creation — has a conscience or a MORAL compass.

I also compared it to a ruler. A basic tape measure will usually be marked off in 1/16s. A really nice, expensive tape measure might go all the way up to 1/64ths. Then some people use laser measuring systems that can determine length down to nearly microscopic levels.

The important thing, I think, is that God knows all this and has figured it into His plan for judging the world. As a God of perfect justice, I wouldn’t think he would hold an aborigine from pre-Colonial Australia who acted as best he knew in light of his moral compass to the same standard as a modern Christian with the Bible in easy to read translations and widely available teaching on every Biblical subject.

I don’t know how far the analogy holds nor do I know how exactly it applies to every culture everywhere. I know Spartans practiced exposure to weed out infants not strong enough for the Spartan way of life. Is this contrary to conscience if the cultural morals dictate this behavior or did the Spartans doom themselves because of their barbaric — to us — practices?

What about the Aztecs? It would be hard to find a more bloodthirsty bunch than those pre-Columbian meso-Americans. They practiced ritual human sacrifice and worshiped a wide pantheon of deities. If that was the norm for them, do they make it in? Then I think about one of the Incan emperors. For whatever reason, he believed in worshiping only ONE god. He lead people to worship the Sun, but not the Sun per se, but the Sun as representing that great all-powerful god. Some archeologists call him the Incan Akhenaten. Was his cheap compass a little more accurate?

I know it seems futile to conjecture, but to me it’s still important because it’s how to understand the way God deals with people in all times and places. Those people existed and so they had souls just like us. Those souls, according to orthodoxy, are destined for an afterlife . . . it would be pretty capricious if they were damned because they refused to believe in or follow a God they had no idea existed.

Problems with Worship

When I was growing up, I was pretty certain what worship was all about. It was singing the old songs and everyone dancing until — if we were really blessed that day or night — the “Spirit would fall” and someone would take off running and everyone would go to shouting praises and someone would start walking the backs of the pews.

I remember napping through it all. Once I even woke up to see someone — I think it was Papa — walk over me.

When I started going to Abundant Life Church of God, it was more of the same, just with lots more than ten people. You even knew people by how the reacted to the Spirit touching them. Sister Al’Lora looked exactly like she was fighting a bee off. Brother Danny was a runner, so was Brother Wayne. I was a crier. I’d get struck by the awesomeness of it all and tears would start streaming down my cheeks. Eventually, just like growing up, people would start speaking in tongues and that was another way you could identify everyone. To this day, if you put my mama in the Bilo Center and packed it out with people yelling and Mama started speaking in tongues, I could walk right up to her. Worship seemed easy and normal then. well. Of course, our raucous, emotion-laden services were easy to come by. Sing someone’s favorite song enough times — “Looking for a City” or “Caananland is Just in Sight” happened to be my favorites — and eventually the Spirit was going to fall.

Then Papa died and I left the Pentecostal church forever. Unfortunately, it seems that I left my worship as well.

Somehow, through the teaching and reading I’ve been exposed to since leaving my old church for our new church, I don’t have a handle on worship. Apparently, it also seems that all those services when I thought we were in the midst of worship didn’t actually turn out to be worship either. I don’t know if all of them were straight out good music and emotion or not, but I’m certain lots of them were.

In any event, I don’t get emotional at all in church anymore. I’ve tried to think it’s the different music. I’ve wondered about the different emphasis. At the bottom of it all, though, I think it’s just me. I seem to have tossed the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.  The teaching will be great and I’ll be thinking about what it means for me, and then the lights go down and it’s supposed to be “worship time.”

I’m standing there or sitting if my back is acting up and I don’t really feel a thing. So I start going through my thoughts trying to figure out what’s wrong with me. The music is good — I still prefer Southern Gospel, even if I haven’t listened to any since Papa died — but it’s not the music. Dana loves the music and it puts her in a worshipful mood. It just doesn’t move me anymore and that’s a real concern for me. Why don’t I feel moved anymore? I will still cry at the drop of a handkerchief; I just don’t do it in church.

The irony of the entire situation lies in the fact that I used to think I was worshiping even if I wasn’t learning. Now I’m learning, but I don’t feel like I’m worshiping. I’m really afraid of the fact that my trouble with worship lies in my uncertainty about everything else.

Once upon a time, I was certain God was real, I knew Jesus loved me, and I couldn’t wait to get to get to Heaven and see everyone who had “gone on before.” Now what? Where all those answers were is just a ton of questions and I guess it’s just a strain to worship when you aren’t positive of your motives. This week’s teaching talked about the Magi and how they were really wealthy, but they were willing to put their faces in the dust of a Bethlehem shack in worship of the Christ-Child.

How can I put my face in the dirt and mean it? I don’t mind looking like a fool to other people. I’ve practically made a habit of it in my life. I just wish I felt something again. It’s like my head is in the game and my heart goes out to other people, but is that worship?

I’ve heard that worship is intensely personal and everyone has to work out his or her own way of worshiping God, but honestly, I don’t even know where to start. When the worship part of our services begin, mostly I’m concentrating on NOT thinking about stuff outside church for those moments. I’m trying so hard to focus everything on the moment at hand.

But I just don’t feel anything and I have no idea of exactly why.

This is one area when I just wish someone could say “this is how you worship.” Of course, growing up, people said that very thing with their actions during services all the time.

Look where that got me.

Can’t Buy a Free Lunch

All my life I’ve heard and read two “truisms” that everybody seems to agree with: 1) If something sounds or seems too good to be true, it probably is and 2) There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

That’s all just ducky until you apply it to salvation. Salvation is a free lunch. Okay, let’s clarify that. Salvation is free to us, the believers. Jesus Christ went through torture, death, and hell to purchase salvation for us, but as far as we are concerned in the equation — free lunch. To quote the hymn, Jesus paid it all. We cannot earn, buy, beg, borrow, or steal our salvation. All we can do is freely accept what’s been freely given after being bought at a terrible cost. That fact causes all kinds of problems for many believers, many non-believers, and many non-believers who think they are believers.

The problem is simple. Free salvation sounds too good to be true because, “everybody knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

Salvation is a mystery to me. The Atonement, however, is not. Adam’s original act of passivity sold the newly created humans out to sin. Because of that first wrong choice, we — as a race of people — were utterly damned. I’ll just say that seems unbelievably wrong and unfair to me, but I know “fair” is a place to ride rides, eat cotton candy, and step in monkey poo.

So anyway, Adam managed to insult God — creating a chasm between a holy God and now unholy mankind. God introduced conscience, human government, and eventually The Law with all the ritual sacrifices to keep the idea of the debt man owed Him fresh in our minds. Eventually, Jesus came to earth in the form of an embryo placed inside a virgin, allowing Him to be born without sin’s taint on Him. He then lived a perfect life according to conscience, righteous human government, and The Law. Since He was perfect, sinless, AND Eternal God, His innocent death on the Cross paid our unpayable debt. Salvation? I really don’t know how that works.

In Romans, Paul says:

If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. For the Scripture says, “Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.” For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him. For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”  Romans 10:9-13

Seems simple and straightforward. Come to an understanding in your heart Jesus died and rose again to secure your salvation. Once you have that truth firmly established in your heart, you can say you “believe,” at which point you can “call on the name of the Lord.” Then you are saved.

But how firm and certain does the understanding of Christ’s Atonement have to be? What if you WANT to Believe but you get all twisted? What if you believe as much as you can but still have some doubts? I’ve always been taught God knows every man’s heart, so does that mean He knows if you Believe or not? What if YOU think you believe but God doesn’t?

What if? What if? What if? Ad infinitum! Something very simple gets complicated and I am almost certain I’m overthinking some point somewhere, but I can’t put my finger on exactly WHERE. I know I earnestly want to Believe. I think I DO Believe — most days. On good days anyway.

I know I’m not alone either because so many people are trying to buy that free lunch. I guess it’s natural in a way. You think, “I HAVE to do something! I have to offer God something. There’s no such thing as a free lunch!” So some people knock on doors. Some say rosaries. Some go on the mission field.

Every false teaching at its core is based on “doing something” so God will sell you that free lunch.

But, once again, you can’t buy that lunch. Jesus bought that lunch 2000 years ago and left it on the table for whoever wanted it. So how do you know you’ve accepted the gift? That makes the loop start over again and we are back to trying to “buy” or “earn” salvation, which we can’t do.

Child comes in from playing one Saturday and sits down at the table for lunch. Daddy hands the child a PB&J sandwich and a glass of milk. The child eats the sandwich and drinks the milk. Then he hugs his daddy and if he’s not “too old” for such foolishness, kisses daddy on the cheek and goes back  to play. The child doesn’t offer his daddy anything for that sandwich. He doesn’t ask 10,000 questions about that sandwich either.

He doesn’t volunteer for more chores or ask to forfeit his allowance. He doesn’t question where the peanut butter came from or what material the knife was that spread the jelly. All he knows is he was hungry and his daddy fixed him the sandwich and milk and everybody knows when it’s lunchtime and daddy hands you a sandwich and lunch, you sit down, eat and drink, thank daddy then go back out to play until daddy calls you in for supper.

Is that salvation? Just take the grace and go on about our lives? Can we do tons of stuff to try and buy free lunch and end up in Hell OR we can do nothing except take the free lunch and end up in Heaven? So how do we accept the gift and KNOW without doubt we’ve accepted it and been accepted?

I think that is what faith is and I’m not sure I have enough faith. It just sounds too good to be true.

The Worst False Teaching from America’s Pulpits

Churches have fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and visited the imprisoned but somewhere along the way, and I point to the 20th Century as the point where it all began, the church in America stumbled off the path of righteousness and — indeed — the path of orthodoxy into a mire rivaling Bunyan’s “Slough of Despond.” Just like that storied bog from centuries ago, this quicksand pit has a name as well.

It’s called Prosperity Gospel.

For reasons unknown but certainly not scriptural, thousands of preachers and teachers across the country are teaching the worst heresy since Marcion  and they are risking the souls of millions in the process. These men and women are teaching people turning their lives over to Christ and being “born again” is going to somehow make their lives get better and better and solve every problem they’ve ever had and that they’ll ever encounter.

That’s a bald face lie.

About “prospering” Jesus said:

 ³⁴ “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. ³⁵ For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. ³⁶ And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household.      Matthew 10:34-36 (ESV)

Sound like a promise of a rose garden? Is ending up an outcast from one’s own family a way of prospering? If anyone thinks so, he’s got more of a masochistic streak in him than I do.

Jesus said  following Him was going to be costly, not prosperous, but to hear famous “christian” personalities today like Joel Osteen, one would think saying a “sinner’s prayer” and joining a body of like-minded people puts one on the road to the merry old land of Oz. Pastor Joel is lying to millions of people, but this post isn’t about exposing specific false teachers. This is about ONE MAJOR FALSE TEACHING — following Christ is going to make a person prosper.

Very seldom in the Scriptures — Old or New Testament — does a person’s conversion or encounter with God get that person into anything but trouble:

• Noah had his life turned upside down and became the laughingstock of his region because God chose him to build the Ark and save part of Creation.
• Abraham had to change his name and leave everything he had worked for and built up behind him when God called him out of Ur of the Chaldees. He was OLD and starting over.
• Moses’ stupidity and temper got him stuck on the backside of the desert, but he was doing pretty good for himself until he met God in a burning bush and ended up caring for the entire nation of Israel for more than forty years.
• JOB! Job was one of the “good guys” minding his own business and serving God faithfully as best he knew how and God wrecked his life completely JUST TO PROVE A POINT!

That’s Old Covenant under the rule of God the Father alone, but Jesus’ Incarnation doesn’t make things any better:

• His earthly parents, Mary and Joseph? How about lifelong charges and accusations of adultery? What about uprooting completely and moving hundreds of miles not once, but FOUR TIMES in 12 years?
• His earthly first cousin, John the Baptist? This guy BAPTIZED the Son of God and ended up getting his head cut off because of a woman and he never got an explanation why his life fell apart after meeting Jesus.
• The blind man Jesus healed in John chapter 9? Sure, he got his sight back, but he lost every friend he had when he was kicked out of the synagogue and his own parents disowned him to avoid sharing his excommunication.
• His half-brother, James was beheaded for leading the infant church in Jerusalem.
• Paul was enjoying a meteoric rise in the Jewish theological circles until Jesus knocked him, literally, off one ass and onto another. Every person who thinks becoming a Christian is going to make her life easier should read Paul’s testimony in 2 Corinthians 11: 23-28 and decide if she’s got it better right now than Paul.

Down through history from Jesus’ ministry to the present day, faithfully following Christ has meant brokenness and hardship much more often than accolades and honors. Following Christ, not just calling oneself a “christian,” but actually pursuing Christ’s teachings fully and working towards doing all Jesus commanded us to do makes a person more earthly enemies than friends. Jesus said as much:

¹⁸ “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. ¹⁹ If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. ²⁰Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours. ²¹But all these things they will do to you on account of my name, because they do not know him who sent me.”     John 15: 18-21.

Let the talking heads on TBN and other “christian” networks blather on about how great life will be once you let Jesus take over. Let Rev. Osteen brag on Oprah about how “no negative sermons will ever cross my pulpit.” The bottom line is this, Jesus came to save the eternal souls of all who would follow Him and call Him Lord and Master. He did NOT come to make our lives easier. Our lives to come — in eternity — are what will be easier, but down here . . . there’s a reason old hymns call this world “a vale of tears.”

I would even say if your life IS a bed of roses with NO problems or persecutions at all, you might want to examine yourself to see if you are really a Follower of Christ or just another person calling himself a “christian.”

Let the Journey Begin

I am a Christian.

I was raised to be a Christian by other Christians including my mom and my grandparents. Mom and her daddy were old school Pentecostal and my dad’s parents were hard shell Southern Baptists. That’s not a great combination if you don’t know anything about denominations. Basically, it’s like the Arctic and the Antarctic — opposite ends of the world. I never thought much about what I believed. I listened to what the pastors taught and what my mom and grandparents taught and as far as I was concerned, that was all I needed to do.

Mom’s daddy was our preacher and I pretty much idolized him. It wasn’t because he was a particularly good preacher, even though he was a great preacher, it was more because he was my papa and I loved him. I also took every word he said at face value. He and mom were my biggest influences as far as my Christian beliefs.

Papa died a few years ago. Turns out, some of what he taught me wasn’t completely orthodox. None of it was stupid or anything and we didn’t handle snakes. He just had a way of looking at God and Jesus that ended up being somewhat wrong. I was devastated because his word to me was gospel. If I couldn’t believe everything Papa had told me, what could I believe?

I left the Pentecostal church and I almost became an atheist . . . very almost.  In the end though, I couldn’t. What I did do was threw out everything I believed. I cleaned house. The metaphor I like to use is when a company gets taken over by another company and all the workers get fired but they can reapply for their old jobs.

Well, I “fired” everything I believed in for my entire life and forced every belief and every concept to “reapply” to get back into my worldview. Some things — like the Trinity — didn’t stay gone long, but others . . . well, it’s been messy trying to get a handle on what I believe and what I don’t.

Long story short, I’m in the midst of a deep crisis of faith. I’ve been in this mess for a few years now and I’ve decided to try to write my way out of it. That’s were this blog comes in. I’m going to write down my thoughts on stuff. Some of it will be simple and straightforward and some of it will make anyone who reads this scratch his head.

I’m not blessed with tons of friends . . . or even one real close friend. If I’m going to talk this crisis out, it looks like it’s going to have to be on this blog with whoever stops by. I know this is tough because I’ve been dealing with it for years now. I think this would have been easier — much easier — when I was in my 20s like most people are when they have these issues.

But, it is what it is and I’ve come along 20 years late to this mess. I have to get a handle on what I believe again, on my faith, or I’m going to end up an emotional cripple at best and in an asylum at worst. Christianity is that important to me.

So if you’re up for it, you’re welcomed to tag along and watch. I won’t lie to you; this could get ugly, but if you want to stay on board, well,

let the journey begin.