This is the third article on myths we believe in. If you have not read the first two, please read them first to understand why I am calling these topics myths. When Christians read the scriptures we take our cues about how to understand what God is saying from so called “Intelligent” people who claim they know Greek and Hebrew words and sentence structure. But, have we been brainwashed to believe false ideas about what God is saying? History is not always right, especially when it comes to scripture. 

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.

When you listen to many in the Christian community who profess they believe the Bible is the word of God and the ultimate authority in their lives you might want to dig a little deeper to see if that is in fact the truth or if  what they really mean is they support their Christian doctrine with their particular slant.  There are many who profess they believe that scripture is the final word in their lives when it is not.

We live in a time in history when we are so attached to our technology that we are losing our ability to truly care for one another in meaningful ways. Our addiction to smartphones have beguiled us into an insatiable hunger to be informed about what’s happening in the world, and people in whom we are interested, that we are unaware of how separated we have become from the people right around us.

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.

If we are honest, all of us know we have messed up in some areas of life, and some of us have messed up a lot. When we consider being held accountable for our actions I think we all want, or hope, for mercy to win over judgment.  Just how or why could that be the case if we are brought before a judge about our actions? What about being brought before God over our lifetime of actions and words? Will we receive justice or mercy? How do we define what justice and mercy are?

I think there are many instances in our lives that God is probing our hearts and minds to see if we will participate in a creative miracle with him or deny participation because we only see the natural. Being spiritually minded is not denying the natural but working in tandem with the natural.  However, learning how to think both naturally and spiritually together takes a lifetime of training and discipline.

If you find some things in scripture that are hard to swallow, or hard to apply, you are not alone. I have walked with God since 1969 and still find some things difficult that God calls me to do or believe. Some things cause me to outright argue with God or at least invoke in me desire to avoid them. Why? Because my salvation is still in progress and God is not through helping me to get a Kingdom mindset rather than a selfish worldly one. This leads me to voice a concern I have with modern preaching and teaching in the body of Christ.

If you gave your life to Christ your heart had to go through a transformational process where you changed from wanting to live for your self-interest to wanting to please God as your top priority. If your heart didn’t change salvation was never truly realized regardless how many times you prayed the sinner’s prayer. After all, God is more interested in transformation than he is in just forgiveness.   

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.