'When you get free from it, and it's just you'

A relative of mine may have to leave her long-standing church (Church of Christ) if they decide to allow gay marriage, something they are currently pondering. As it is, her beloved pastor announced the other month he was retiring after 20-some years at the church. Everyone suspects it is because of the possibility of the church board endorsing gays.

Jordan said awhile back he caught a radio show on WYLL in which the pastor of a Church of Christ church in a northern Chicago suburb participated in a panel discussion among preachers.

“That poor guy didn’t believe anything,” recalled Jordan. “He was trying to explain how Jesus really didn’t mind contradicting the Bible and that He didn’t really believe the Bible!”

When the radio show host asked, “Do you believe Jesus was God?” the preacher’s response was, “Well, I believe that Jesus believed the scriptures of his god.”

By that statement alone, explained Jordan, “It says the guy must believe Jesus had a god, somebody else had a god too and the rest must all be gods.

“That’s liberalism. It’s just unbelief, plain and simple. By the way, most preachers think like that guy. When you come to look at the reality of that, there’s a whole lot of stuff out there in the world for God to set right.

“A guy like that fellow takes that passage (in Luke 21) and says, ‘See, Jesus said that everything is going to be fulfilled and we know that’s 70 A.D. Everything was fulfilled in 70 A.D., therefore there’s no prophecy about vengeance and wrath yet to be fulfilled.'

"See how somebody could do that? This preacher reasoned that even though Jesus taught the Sabbath law, Christ determined, ‘I can heal a man on the Sabbath and that’s more important than keeping what the Bible says.’

“I’m thinking, ‘The six-year-olds in our kindergarten would be able to answer that better than that!’ And this was a guy they introduced as ‘Dr. somebody.’ You know, the answer he didn’t have is how to ‘rightly divide’ the Word.”

*****

Several years ago, a longtime Independent Baptist preacher in North Carolina learned from Jordan’s cable TV show about how to study the Bible dispensationally. As a result, he decided to drop his association with the Baptist denomination.

He called Jordan up, saying, “You know, I need to figure out how to do the paperwork on this name change because we’re not under the Baptists anymore. Do we need to go to the IRS and get our name changed? Is there somebody we can go get under?”

Jordan said he told him, “No, you weren’t in the denomination before. You were an independent church; you’re still an independent church. All you got to do is change your name.”

People have the idea denominations control things and that’s what religion is about. Even when you just carry the name of a denomination you’re under the yoke of it.

Jordan explains, “You know when you get free from that, and it’s just you, well, that’s almost an inexplicable thing in religion. It’s so different to the ears of the world out there.”

******

Personal installment for today:

When my dad first told my mom he was going to become a missionary doctor in Ecuador, taking all of us with him, my mom says he explained, “I’ve got to do something for God before I die.”

My dad was someone who thought he had heart trouble because of chest pain that was really just due to anxiety, probably from all the pills he took.

All through my childhood he would tell us kids individually and corporately, “I’m not going to be around much longer.”

*****

I never knew my dad had an addiction to uppers and downers until after he died (at almost 79 years old) and my mom told me—I was in my mid-30s!

Now,  when I was a kid I would see my dad take a pill here and there, and he did always carry a bunch in his pants pocket, but he said they were for certain ailments.

He tried to push pills on me, my brother and sister when we were in our teens, but I truly believe he had good intentions. None of us would really take them—we just pretended to take them when he was watching.

The thing is I never knew growing up why my dad would be in such bad moods. He could be in a real good mood and then, without any warning, turn into a bad mood. This could all happen in a five-minute period sometimes. He could be so volatile that you never knew where you stood with him and I personally was afraid of him on and off all through my teens. I never really ever stopped being afraid of him until just a few years before his death and after my mom divorced him after 31 years of marriage.

What bothered me the most was how he could be mean to my mother, and I would hear her cry so often at night behind her locked bedroom door. More than a few times I actually prayed to God that my dad would die.

I admitted this to my brother about 10 years ago now and he said he did the same thing at least a few times!!

(new article tomorrow)