SteveGrayFTW said:
If you don't mind me asking, JayJayDee, how did you come into Christianity?
Did you convert (and if so, why?), or were you born into this path?
Were you born into a particular denomination, or did you convert (and if so, why?)?
I was raised by semi-religious parents (Christians in name only) in the Anglican Church. They sent us kids to Sunday School but never went to church themselves. A fairly typical situation, growing up in Australia in the 50's. The minister never visited my parents to encourage them to come to church and as long as they sent their weekly donation with us kids on a Sunday, he wasn't really interested in them.
All through my life for reasons I cannot explain, I felt God was near me, looking out for me and I would spend hours pawing through a little KJV that my Nana gave me when I was 10. I didn't read much, but I loved the illustrations which seemed to say more to me than the words did anyhow. The Bible's message was somewhat of a mystery to me but I figured that the minister knew it all for me so I wasn't much worried.
It wasn't till I hit my late teens that I really started to wonder about all the hard questions. I asked them, but never got any satisfying answers....I began to think there weren't any. I stopped going to church and got stuck into evolution, but my thoughts about God would not go away. I knew he was there in the design I saw in living things and I knew that evolution was a way to steer me away from appreciating him as a thoughtful Creator. I was in limbo for some years, completely disillusioned with the church system and feeling as if God was hiding behind a wall so high that I would never be able to get to him.
Then I lost my father very suddenly to a massive heart attack. (He was only 52) Everything in me was screaming "not fair"! This sent me on a mission to find answers....there had to be some explanations that the church was missing. No one I approached had anything satisfying to tell me. They were as perplexed about it all as I was. It was all a mystery.
I looked into other belief systems...the LDS,(they had some very strange beliefs that were not at all Biblical)
I looked into Buddhism and Hinduism, (there were some appealing teachings but these used many idols and I knew that God abhorred such things.)
Islam seemed to be Draconian, lost in ritual and performance like Catholicism. I knew that God did not not accept prayers that were meaningless recitations or that required external things like prayer beads. There is no prayer said by Jesus, that is recorded in the NT where he said "repeat this prayer". The Lord's prayer is a classic example of this. He did not say "pray this prayer"...he said "pray this way". Intimate conversation with God has to come from the heart, not just by rote from the mind.
What made you decide the Bible was the word of God, as opposed to the Torah, the Koran, the Rig Veda, etc...?
Jesus himself denounced the attitude of the Pharisees, accusing them of invalidating God's word by their strict adherence to their own man-made tradition. The ones who put Christ to death were continually castigated by him during his ministry. I had no desire to know about them.
Pre-Christian servants of God however were another story. (Heb 11)
Islam had a history of violence and accepted Jesus only as a prophet, not as the son of God.
Eastern religious writings though giving evidence of wisdom, also involved idolatry, and a multiplicity of gods, breaking many of the Ten Commandments, (which I believed were non-negotiable.)
Let me just say that I have no issue with the people who follow these religions because I am sure that the majority of them are just like you and me...who see themselves as decent human beings who just want to do the right thing.
It is the religious institutions themselves that I see as satanic substitutes for authentic worship....a way to mislead even sincere ones. Each has an appeal to different aspects of people's personalities. The devil knows human nature better than we do.
You have heard the story of "how you hide a 40 foot tree out in the middle of a cleared field?" If you haven't.....see link.
http://www.religiousforums.com/foru...395-how-could-you-hide-40-ft.html#post3534893
Do you ever have doubts, or at least questions?
All my doubts came from the teachings of Christendom. I never understood the trinity because it was the most illogical thing I had ever heard. The Jews don't believe it and neither does Islam accept it, so why does Christendom, as the other "Abrahamic" religion, teach it? (Deut 6:4) No explanation ever made sense of it to me.
I questioned the teaching of "hellfire" because it was clearly a breach of the standard of justice taught in God's word. Never was fire used for torture in Israel. There were not even any prisons in ancient Israel.
I even dabbled in spiritism for a while, not realizing that it is forbidden in the Bible. When a seance predicted my father's death, and it came true, I was sickened and refused to touch it again. (Deut 18:10-12)
A religion should be judged on the activities of the people who practice it. I never saw a church that practiced what it preached. When it came to war, I knew that God's law said "thou shalt not kill" and to "love your enemies" but I saw clergymen encouraging soldiers to kill their enemies and they blessed the weapons that were going to be used to murder innocents. People on both sides in the two World Wars claimed to be Christians, yet they violated a direct command of Jesus to love their "brothers". (1 John 4:20, 21)
I saw an emphasis on money that went beyond helping the poor....in many cases, it was more about enriching the minister's lifestyle.
The churches don't preach like Jesus told all Christians to do. They preach only to the converted, which is not what Jesus did. He preached to his own people (who claimed to worship the same God,) but he went out to find them wherever they lived. (Matt 10:11-15) In all my years on this planet, no church member has ever come to my door to offer me the good news of God's kingdom. Yet this is the work that Jesus said would be done "in all the inhabited earth for a witness to all the nations" before the foretold "end" of the present age would come. (Matt 24:14; 28:19, 20)
I guess, at the end of the day, only one group of Christians had all the answers and lived up to all that the Bible says a Christian should be, (None of them are perfect of course, but they at least try to the best of their imperfect ability to obey all of God's commands, not just the ones that suit)....these were the last people on earth I expected to come up with the goods :cover:.....but it did not require a stretch of my imagination to accept their very reasonable explanations. They showed me from my own Bible where to find them and how Christendom had corrupted the Bible's teachings centuries ago.
I have been working with them for the past 40 years, preaching the Bible's message and teaching people the same truths I learned from them so many years ago.
I believe that God led me to his people and allowed me to tear down the wall between us. If you really search for God, he will allow you to find him. (John 6:44; 2 Chron 15:2; Acts 17:26, 27)