In one day her plagues will overtake her:
death, mourning and famine.
She will be consumed by fire,
for mighty is the Lord God who judges her.
—
‘“Woe! Woe to you, great city,
you mighty city of Babylon!
In one hour your judgement has come!”
—
‘Rejoice over her, you heavens!
Rejoice, you people of God!
Rejoice, apostles and prophets!
For God has judged her
with the judgment she imposed on you.’
(From Revelation 18)
1) pick a topic you know nothing about (ie world economics)
2) Make a prediction related to that topic (ie a depression worse than the great depression)
3) Be flexible with your terminology (you say depression, I’ll say recession – just don’t call the whole thing off)
4) Be even more flexible with your terminology (ie “will occur by” becomes “will start by”)
5) Search the internet for anything or anyone that seems to support what you predicted and post the links to prove you were right.
6) Ignore everything and everyone who posts evidence that shows you were wrong.
7) Never admit error – just sit back and hope people forget the things that didn’t work out as predicted.
8) If all else fails claim that your intercession helped prevent the predicted event.
While I have looked for reliable teaching materials for many years, so far the most helpful teacher I have found is David Pawson. He seems to be less influenced by theological tradition than others I’ve come across. The most important thing I’ve learned from him is to take the Berean approach of searching the scriptures for myself to test all teaching and revelation against scripture.
Along with that I have learned NOT to rely on “texts” from the bible – but to rely on the overall revelation of God given through the bible. Scripture was not given in chapters and verses, and yet today we tend to concentrate on those small divisions to highlight little bits of scripture as if they individually contain all we need to know about a particular issue.
My own understanding of God and His ways was severely lacking until I gained an overview of the whole bible and saw how it all fits together. (Of course my understanding of God STILL has a long way to go – but it has improved significantly since I turned to [the whole of] scripture for myself instead of always relying on others to tell me what should be believed).
One reason I respect Mr Pawson’s teaching is that I resisted so much of it at first – but after taking the time to assess his teaching against scripture I found most of the time he had been right and I had been wrong. Later, when I started to address scripture for myself, I found his teaching was starting to becoming a confirmation of what I was already learning from scripture instead of it being something new I was hearing from him.
I find this is the best way to learn:
1) Search the scriptures for yourself
2) Trust the Holy Spirit to give understanding of scripture.
3) Expect to receive confirmation/correction from other believers of the things you have learned though steps 1 and 2.
It’s easy to make mistakes, it is easy to get things wrong – but step 3, fellowship with Spirit-led believers you can trust and through the help of reliable teachers those mistakes can be minismised and kept in check.
______________
See the link to David Pawson in the side bar. It gives access to a huge library of his teaching covering 40 years of more of his ministry. Keep in mind his teaching has matured over that time .
Continuing with a topic I addressed recently, I ask: “What is the REAL situation with ‘lone ranger’ Christians”?
Let’s look at myself as an example.
I attended the same church for around a decade. At the time I left I was the youth leader and occasionally asked to preach to a couple of hundred people in Sunday and mid-week meetings.
I was introduced to Kenneth Copeland’s teaching and gathered for home prayer with a small group from the church mentioned. It was members of this group who had made me aware of Copeland.
A new church started closer to home. I attended a few meetings on Sunday afternoons, in between my regular church meetings. I got along well with the pastor. He asked me to preach one afternoon.
I moved from my original Church to the more local, much smaller fellowship and the pastor appointed me as an elder.
I stayed with that church for a year and a half before I entered a 15 year “spiritual crisis” – I left the church and wandered from one group to another for a few months – meeting with a few other established fellowships trying to find direction
Churchless with my faith wavering, I cried out to God but was met with silence.
15+ years later God answered.
With newly reawakened faith I started to look for a church, meeting with pastors and attending home “cell group” meetings. I tried many fellowships – but found none of them suitable. They were interested in organised meetings but not in developing relationship. Everything was centred on getting more people into meetings, or to other church organised events
I still had leanings towards WOF and tried watching Copeland on TV, buying his sermons and receiving his magazine. DESPERATELY I wanted his teaching to be the truth, but found myself being more and more closed to it.
I saw mention of an “Out of Church” (OOC) movement in Charisma magazine but didn’t buy the magazine to read it. However the topic of the article intrigued me. *
Not long after that I came across Andrew Strom’s Revivalschool forum and saw the possibility of something beyond traditional Sunday service centred churches. It had a big OOC membership and I later found Andrew had been mentioned (maybe quoted) in the Charisma article. He was seen as something of a champion of the OOC believers but he soon rejected those who once saw him as someone who could give some kind of cohesion to this “movement”. Many left or were banned from his forum and some of them started their own, picking up many of the other disillusioned exiles from Revivalschool.
About six years ago I moved to my current home town and attended a Charismatic fellowship for several months until I could no longer ignore their false gospel and their tendency to follow every new fad that came along. They were very keen followers of the “Toronto Blessing” and various associated ministries.
After leaving that group I befriended a minister from a traditional church who was new in town. I attended his church for a year and a half until our different theological viewpoints became too much. I left before our increasingly heated disagreements started to disrupt bible studies etc.
He was a Calvinist very steeped in church tradition who had originally shown openness to my views but became more entrenched in his “theology” when families of reinforcements came to the church, who had attended the same theological college as he had.
At that stage, approaching three years ago, I stopped trying to find a church.
A significant thing I’ve found whenever I’ve moved from a church – though retaining my faith; even though I’ve tried to maintain contact with people from that church, there has been NO reciprocal effort to maintain contact with me from those involved with those churches.
It is those CHURCHES or more accurately those church members who had been friends that made me into a “lone ranger” Christian. I want to meet in fellowship with others, but they are more committed to church than they are to brothers and sisters who are not part of THEIR particular church.
THAT is the kind of “Christianity” that I assume other “lone rangers” can have no part of.
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* http://www.charismamag.com/index.php/covers/260-cover-story/10434-when-christians-quit-church–
Yesterday I went to get my hair cut and the hairdresser had a couple of large posters on the wall. There was some kind of image over-printed with a stencilled piece of poetic wisdom. It started with a sentence I’ve heard a lot; a statement that is commonly believed and yet the reasoning behind the belief is never pondered – “Everything happens for a reason…”
But why does “everything happen for a reason”? And how?
Why shouldn’t everything be arbitrary and pointless as atheists insist?
What makes the adherents to this philosophy so certain? Is it merely a desperate hope, that they couldn’t face the idea of pointlessness – that their suffering (it’s often used in relation to BAD “everythings” that happen) was really worth enduring?
Is there some kind of anonymous force behind this idea – maybe “the universe” is directing destiny. Or is some kind of deity is at work? If so what kind of force or deity? And what kind of allegiance should we feel towards them considering he/she/it works so hard at making sure there’s purpose to life.
Do we pay as much attention to that deity as we expect him/her/it to pay towards us?
It seems the most popular kind of force/deity/universal controller is the anonymous type – one to whom we feel no responsibility, who expects no accountability, who lets us get on with life to do as we please instead of what pleases him/her/it.
The ancient Athenians had a god of this type. They erected a shrine to the “unknown god” – one god of many, just in case there was one they had missed in their great family of gods. They didn’t want to aggravate any god by neglecting them, even if they weren’t aware of his/her existence.
The apostle Paul came across this shrine and told the Athenians about the God they did not know. This is recorded in the New Testament book of Acts:
Men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are very religious; for as I was passing through and considering the objects of your worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Therefore, the One whom you worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you: God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. Nor is He worshipped with men’s hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things.
And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also His offspring.’
Therefore, since we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, something shaped by art and man’s devising. Truly, these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent, because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead.
So who or what is the force or power behind the “Everything happens for a reason” philosophy? Something anonymous that requires no accountability? Something “shaped by art and man’s devising”? (The Athenians at least had the sense to worship the god whose existence they suspected).
Maybe something of such important consequences to our life is something we should consider much more seriously. Something we can’t afford to be so casual about.
If you believe something is giving reason to everything that happens in your life – shouldn’t you think it important enough to give that something due attention in your life?
What if that something is actually someONE, who requires a response from you that will ensure the “reason” things are happening is working to your benefit?
The unknown God Paul spoke of was a God of that type. Not an anonymous deity. Not an apathetic deity who couldn’t care what you did in response to the reason He gives to our lives. Paul revealed a God who was Creator, a God with ownership over His creation (of which we are part).
A God to whom we are accountable.
A God who makes the rules and sets our consequences for how we live our lives and how we relate to Him.
A God we should take seriously and not casually dismiss.
If everything happens for a reason, it is HIS reason not ours. Everything revolves around HIM and not us. HE determines the standards and requirements we don’t.
If we think it’s not important to give Him due consideration we delude only ourselves.
A slightly blurry photo of my Rahab painting.
Working on Rahab’s face taught me quite a lot. It might have been easier If I’d worked directly from a photo to get the areas of light and shade right, but I relied too much on how I thought it looked on the canvas, struggling to change areas that didn’t look right without really understanding what needed to be done to fix them.
While the image of Rahab started with a photo, I distanced myself from that by attempting a pencil sketch from the photo and then by trying to transfer the details of the sketch to the painting. None of the stages of the image resembled its predecessor. The sketch looked nothing like the photo and the painting looked nothing like the sketch.
My initial satisfaction with the result of eroded over the weekend when Gloria and I had the opportunity to meet a successful fulltime artist and view his work. We unexpectedly came across the studio of Kim Nelson and were able to spend around half an hour with him viewing his work. He was very generous with his time, showing us his current project and telling us about the other paintings in his studio/gallery.
From the viewpoint of someone with little knowledge of art history, his work brought to my mind the Pre-Raphaelites, the romantic poets, and to a degree William Blake.
Onesimus Files 