daily java

Daily Java: 

Gazing intently at the high council, Paul began: “Brothers, I have always lived before God with a clear conscience!” (Acts 23:1)

I have never been one to accept stuff at face value. And I have always promised the Lord that when I could no longer ethically teach in a denomination, I would leave. I have to be honest.

I started life in a completely different place than now as I end life. I started out in a church that had all the answers. Their doctrine was complete and had been arrived at years before. Their job now was to defend the faith once delivered. Since it had been delivered and the forefathers of the denomination had “re-discovered” it, it was our job to maintain it, to preach it, to defend it, to keep it safe from harm and above all, from change.

Then I began to see cracks in the system. There were certain inalienable doctrines that were indeed alienable, especial if you began looking at them in the light of context rather than single scripture.

The more I saw the more I changed. And the more I changed, the more I moved out of that denomination. One cannot be a part of that particular church without accepting all of the particulars as God-given.

At the age of 44, I left my life-church. I moved from there to another denomination, one which shared a common root with the one I had grown up in. The problem was, except for a couple of things (non-instrumental music as mandate), it was basically the same. I began to see holes in the structure.

After several years and a total mind change with the baptism of the Holy Spirit, I moved to a third. Unfortunately, it too was to hide-bound in its doctrine there was no room for individual thought. So after a lot of pain, I changed again.

The fourth church was, in many ways a good church with a very normal outlook on things. Unfortunately, I hit one of the churches in the denomination that would not change from traditional ways of looking at things.

Now I realize that this does not speak well of me in some ways. I appear wishy washy or maybe just too hard to please. And I suppose in some ways I am.

But the problem is that I changed my mind as I went along through life and I was aligned with churches in which that was not allowed.

There was no growth, no forward movement. It was all maintenance.

I remember someone telling me years ago that it was interesting to read about how the Restoration people restored the church back in the 1800’s. The person mentioned that it was like reading about the buffalo hunters of the 1800’s. Even though there were no buffalo left to hunt, it was interesting to see how they hunted them.

After thinking about that for a couple of years, my thought was NO. if all truth has already been arrived at, what is the point of study? Is there no more forward learning, no more finding new things in the word of God. Is that word so static that it has been totally plumbed and there is nothing left?

The answer, of course, is no. we search out our own salvation, we seek God ourselves. We do not go to others to see what he had to say. We have that relationship with him alone.

No church can tell us what God says, or what the will of God is. No church can tell us that they alone have discovered the will of God. That is sheer and absolute arrogance.

And this is true. If a person doesn’t change his mind at least a couple of times during his life, he doesn’t have much of a mind.

And the church that will not allow that is a sad and dead church indeed.