It is amazing to me how mixed up many Christian concepts of heaven are.  They seem to be a blend of what the world believes, what superstition says and what they might have been taught at church or in bible study group.  I think the average believer spends very little time in scripture and consequently they don’t voice their beliefs with other Christians because they can’t defend those beliefs. We live in an age where the average person, whether Christian or secular, has access to many different translations of the Bible and yet we still seem to know so little of what the word of God actually says about the subject of heaven….other than it’s preferable to going to hell.

We have been seeing violence on the daily news lately with all the chaos and protesting on university campuses in America, which in my mind is the result of poor parenting. The rioting of students on the university campuses is not a surprise given that parents have believed in the lie that providing college for their kids is the best way to love their kids.  This, I believe, is a clear deception of Satan. When parents turn over their children to atheistic teachers to be indoctrinated in twisted and evil thinking, the end result is that their children become God haters who no longer understand how to reason truth from error.

Just because people surrender to Jesus Christ doesn’t mean they are living and thinking like the Lord would desire. The apostle Paul spoke about the need to “NOT” be conformed to the thinking of the world but to be “TRANSFORMED” in our thinking so our choices and actions would be pleasing to the Lord and our lives would be blessed. The problem is that we so often exchange transformation of thinking for learning doctrine, which often hardens our hearts rather than making them softer towards the Lord. Transformation is a process rather than a belief and transformation doesn’t happen without God’s help and our cooperation.

This is the second part in a series on the “Myths” we as Christians have embraced as if they were biblical when in fact scripture speaks otherwise. The hard part is to know what is biblical and what is not in our beliefs when the only sources we rely on are sermons on Sunday morning or various books pastors might recommend. No pastor or teacher has a market on the truth of scripture and that includes me so what I’m advocating is to study the scripture and not just rely of what others say just because they are good pastors or good teachers.

Many Christians say they trust the Bible, that is until some new bit of science comes out and gives us a “NEW TRUTH” that contradicts reliability of scripture and at least causes doubt about the trustworthiness of scripture among believers. This is not excluding the “THEORY” of evolution taught in public schools long before I was in grade school in the ’50s. In times like these many professing believers, even strong ones, secretly capitulate to the intimidation of scientific information. When you question the book of Genesis and the story of creation for the theory of billions of years of evolution you already are making science as your god, not the God of the bible.

When I look at the landscape of how people think and act these days, for both non Christians as well as Christians, there seems to be a disconnect between what a person believes or feels and what are the plain facts before them. People don’t seem to be bothered by the inconsistencies in their lives, let alone in the lives of those around them. It seems people just get entrenched in certain lines of thinking without asking themselves if the things they believe are true or false. Maybe we just hate the idea of finding out that we are wrong about something and thus don’t want to know our error.

When we as Christians talk about walking in the spirit do we acknowledge the fact that many people walk and are led by the demonic realm and not the Holy Spirit?  When watching the nightly news one has to consider the “Demonic Realm” as having a major role in the violence and hatred that is happening.  The terrorist group Hamas murdered thousands of innocent civilians, including killing babies, for no more reason they they hate Jews. If one can not see evil personified then we are hopelessly ignorant and will surely suffer for it. The world denied evil in Hitler and his Nazi regime and the world experienced a world war because of it. 

I don’t write often on subjects like this, but I feel I need to write to those who may be struggling with the darkness around them as they attempt to walk with the Lord. We live in a time when many say these are the “Last Days” and I believe it more true now than ever before. We must be watchful lest we become discouraged in our souls to the point of quitting or running away from our calling in the Lord.  We need to continue to walk as the Lord has directed our souls in scripture.

The new movie entitled “The Jesus Revolution” about how God moved in the late 1960s and early 1970s  seems to be making a positive impact on people. I, for one, was moved by watching it with my wife Susan as we both got saved when this powerful movement was happening. The question will be will this film inspire people to seek a “Jesus Revolution” in their own lives?

A few days ago I wrote on my Facebook page the idea that sometimes we need to forget in order to move forward into the things God has prepared for us. The example I used was how my wife, Susan, had to forget her natural family in order to walk in the new relationship God had prepared for her. This idea of forgetting should cover many other things in our lives, but unfortunately we keep repeating them and get stuck in our past.