WHO'S THE REAL HERETIC?

This week I launched a brand new podcast with some friends called "Heretic Happy Hour" and so far it's performing better than we expected.

In our very first episode we talked about the word "Heresy" and where it comes from.

The actual word means "causing division" and the emphasis is on the sin of dividing the Church, not about false teaching.

Unity is a big deal for Jesus. He prayed that we would be one as He and the Father are one. He said that our unity would be a sign to the world that Jesus was actually the Messiah sent from God.

This is also why Jesus commanded us to love one another as He has loved us - which is to say - extravagantly and unconditionally.

Paul also stressed unity in his epistles to the early Christian assembly. He rebuked the Corinthians for dividing over which Apostle they like best. He reminded the Galatians that we are no longer divided by race, or status, or gender, but that we are all one in Christ. He rebuked the Romans for dividing over whether or not eating meat sacrificed to idols was right or wrong and told them to each be convinced in their own mind, but to remain in unity as brothers and sisters in Christ.

He even suggested that it was ok to just allow oneself to be wronged as long as unity in the Body of Christ was maintained.

Unity was - and is - crucial. People will know that we are the followers of Christ if we have love for one another. So, it's a very big deal.

It's why Paul warned us in Titus to warn a divisive person twice and then have nothing more to do with them if they refused to stop dividing the Church.

So, the idea of dividing that Body was heresy. It went against everything that Jesus and His Apostles stood for.

Heresy, is about division. This means one could be guilty of heresy while teaching the truth.

How? By using the truth to divide the Body of Christ.

One could also be a heretic for simply saying this: "I cannot fellowship with anyone who disagrees with my theology."

Only a heretic divides the Body of Christ over differences in theology.

The irony, of course, is that people do this all the time. Hardly a day goes by on Facebook where someone doesn't say exactly this - "I cannot fellowship with anyone who disagrees with my theology" - and usually in the process that same person will accuse those who disagree with them of being heretics.

But the only heretic is the one who divides the Body of Christ - even if they are technically correct in their theology.

So, please don't be a heretic. Don't divide the Body of Christ over your own views of scripture. Don't insist that everyone must agree with you on ever single point before you'll accept them into your fellowship.

Our unity is in Christ.

-kg

LISTEN: Episode 01 of The Heretic Happy Hour: "Heresy Is In The Eye of the Beholder"

On iTunes Here>

OR, listen on Podbean here>

NEW PODCAST: HERETIC HAPPY HOUR

"Burning questions, not people."

Starting tomorrow, Tuesday September 25, the brand-new podcast I've been working on with Matthew Distefano and Jamal Jivanjee will launch on iTunes.

The first 3 episodes will post all at once, so please do me a huge favor:
*Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes
*Download the episodes [at least one]
*Leave a review or comment
*Rate the podcast

If you can do that for us, it would really mean a lot.

Also: Head over to Facebook and join the brand-new Heretic Happy Hour group we've started. It's already attracted over 450 people but there's room for a few more.

This podcast is something I'm very excited about. I do hope you'll take some time to listen and to interact as well.

We've even set up a Heretic Hotline where you can call us and leave a voice mail message (which we might play on an upcoming podcast episode] or text us a message or question.

The Heretic Hotline number is: (240) 3-HERESY or (240) 343-7379

Our first 3 episodes are:

1) Heresy Is In The Eye of the Beholder
2) Is Total Agreement Necessary for Unity?
3) What Does It Mean To Be A Christian?

Future episodes are:

4) How Other Religions Compare To Christianity
5) Discovering Christ in Non-Christian Places
6) Can We Know God Without the Bible?

and more to come!

Thanks for your support!

-kg

Knowing Jesus Without Your Bible

In my previous post I asked the question: "What if no one had a Bible?"

The point of asking that question was to get us to consider what our faith would be like without depending upon what others wrote 2,000 years ago about their experiences of Jesus.

Instead, I hoped to inspire us to consider that our faith is based on our own experiences of Jesus - today.

Some people misunderstood that. Maybe it was my fault? If so, I apologize.

But let me make it crystal clear: The Bible leads us to Jesus. But what we do with Jesus after that is the most important thing of all.

People often tell me that we couldn't know anything about Jesus or God without the Bible.

But the Bible contradicts that. Over and over again.

What the Bible tells us is that we can know Jesus, and the Father, directly, personally and immediately at this very moment. [So, if you really believe the Bible, then do what the Bible says; connect with God yourself. Don't just read about Him - know Him and listen to Him and follow Him and learn to love Him more every day].

I've already written about this fact several times.

So, if someone took your Bibles away, you would still have Jesus. 

If every Bible on earth was suddenly destroyed, you and I would still hear His voice.

If no one ever read the Bible again, God would still be alive and moving and speaking and revealing Himself through His Spirit, and through His people, and through nature, and art, and music, and circumstances.

However, if your faith would be hopelessly empty without the Bible, then you just might have a much bigger problem. Maybe you don't actually have a relationship with God? Maybe you've only focused on reading a book and learning information about God, but you've not exactly come to know that God in any real way yet?

If so, then I most certainly recommend setting your Bible aside. Get to know Jesus. Spend time alone with Him. Talk to Him. Listen to His voice. Practice an awareness of His presence. Reading more Bible verses will not help you encounter Him. In fact, it just might postpone any deeper experiences with Jesus you might have.

You've read about God. You know information about Jesus. That's great. But now it's time to meet Him and to know Him in a deeper way.

God is not the Bible. The Bible is not God.

Yes, the Bible is a wonderful blessing to us all. We should be very grateful for it. But Jesus transcends and eclipses the Bible in every possible way. He is not bound by a book. He is not constricted into syllables and sentences. He is not captured on a page.

By asking the question: "What if no one had a Bible?" I am inviting you to consider moving on to phase 2 of your life in Christ.

Look up from the page long enough to listen for His still small voice.

Close the book long enough to walk with Him today.

Put the Bible back on the shelf long enough to put what you've read about into practice.

You can always come back to it later. But sometimes you need to take off the training wheels and learn to balance yourself if you really hope to enter the race.

I'll meet you at the top of the hill.

-kg

**
FOR FURTHER READING:

The Problem With Saying The Bible Is The Word of God

Why I Love the Word of God

The Word of God and the Bible

Five Times Jesus Contradicted The Old Testament

If No One Had A Bible

Try to imagine it: No Bibles anywhere. No King James. No NIV. Not even a paperback copy of "The Message".

What would that be like?

Regardless of how such a thing might happen, try to imagine what it would be like to never have access to the Bible - ever again.

In some ways, I think our world might actually be a better place if no one had a Bible anymore. 

Maybe if we didn't depend on a book for everything we'd start to discover an inner desperation and a hunger for a deeper experience of Jesus.

Not only that, if there were no Bibles, we just might start to value listening to one another share testimonies of Jesus. Especially if there was no more need to hear from the resident Bible expert or scholar talk for an hour every weekend.

Imagine sitting around your living room with friends and listening to people share what Jesus was saying or doing in their lives that week. Imagine someone closing their eyes and quoting verses about how nothing can separate us from the love of God, or about how Jesus died for us while we were still enemies of God?

Don't you think this might help us to connect with one another - and with Jesus - more directly?

Maybe I'm the only one, but the more I think about this the more convinced I am that we might just be better off without our Bibles.

Now, I get it. I'm talking about what it would be like to first learn what the Bible says and study it and memorize it before experiencing those words in a deeper and more intimate way.

But, what if we only had our memories of scripture to sustain us? What if we could only pass on to our children the verses that really spoke deeply to us? What verses would we choose?

Probably verses where Jesus says, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do" and "Love one another as I have loved you" would dominate your memory.

Perhaps you'd want your children to remember certain Parables that Jesus shared, like the Prodigal Son, or the Treasure in the Field or the Sower of Seeds.

Chances are you probably wouldn't find it all that crucial to memorize verses where God commanded His people to slaughter every man, woman and child and warned them not to show any compassion while doing so. You might leave behind the verses about how blessed those people are who dash infants against the rocks.

That, to me, would be a very good thing.

If all we had left was Jesus and our memories of scriptures that really touched us and profoundly changed us, that wouldn't be so bad.

What do you think?

-kg

All I Really Know

Learning to discern the voice of God is challenging, and we don't always get it right. 

Sometimes we get it very, very wrong, in fact. 

In those moments it can be difficult to maintain our trust in Him because we can assume that He misled us, especially when we had our hopes in whatever we felt like He promised us.

The most challenging time for our family was when Wendy had a dream that she was pregnant with twins. She was standing in our back yard working with her flowers and she felt like she was having a miscarriage. Her first thought was, "Oh no. I'm losing this baby" but immediately she heard the Lord say to her in her dream: "Don't say this baby will die if I say it will live."

A few weeks later she realized she was actually pregnant. 

A few weeks after that she started to lose the baby.

People came over to our house and prayed over her. They affirmed what she had heard in her dream; that this child would not die but live. 

So, we held on tight to those promises, and especially to this dream which God had given to her long before she even realized she was pregnant.

But then we lost the baby.

It's hard to describe the sense of loss and betrayal we felt.

How could God do this? Why would He give us such a specific dream and promise of life and then take it away from us? Was God being cruel? Was He playing with us? Didn't He know how we would have interpreted that dream and that promise that the child would not die but live?

There were no answers then, only questions.

We grieved. We cried. We wrestled with our doubts. We struggled to hang on to our faith in God's goodness.

Over time we began to look at all of this through another lens. Wendy had another dream later on that suggested that our daughter was indeed alive and in the presence of Jesus. She took comfort knowing that we would see her - and the other 5 children we had miscarried - one day soon.

But that experience led us to reassess the way we interpreted God's voice. Not everything was easy to discern. Not every word was to be taken at face value.

In other words, we weren't so sure about what we knew anymore. 

I recently shared this story with someone and they asked me what to do when you know that God has told you something but you're still struggling with doubts?

After thinking about how to respond I had to say this: "The list of things I 'know' is pretty short these days. I can only say that God is good and He loves me. Beyond that, I can't honestly say I "know" anything."

This is where we are. 

Our confidence in anything other than God's goodness and love for us is up for grabs. 

But because we know that we are loved by a God who is good, we can handle anything else that comes our way.

Like the man who said to Jesus, "I believe. Help my unbelief!" or Peter who said, "Lord, where can we go? You have the words of life", we can only hold tight to Him, even if we don't always understand what He is doing.

So, hold fast to these simple truths: God is good. He loves you.

Anything else is subject to change.

-kg

BIBLE-BELIEVING CHRISTIANS?

The more I talk to Christians the more I start to notice how often certain phrases reveal a belief system that’s just under the surface.

For example, the other day I shared something on Facebook about an infamously anti-Christian celebrity who had posted a video on their wall which suggested they might possibly have turned to Christ. 

Some people were genuinely excited that this man may have found faith in Christ. 

Most, however, were angry that I had shared the video at all. 

Still others doubted the legitimacy of the man’s conversion because he was not a "Bible-believing Christian” and that got me thinking about another famous person who wasn’t “Bible-believing” but most certainly was a Jesus-follower.

Gandhi, who would never have called himself a “Christian” and most certainly not a “Bible-believer,” was a Jesus-follower. By that I mean, for the last several years of his life he read the Sermon on the Mount every day and tried to put it into practice.

What would you call someone who did that? Possibly not a “Bible-believing Christian” but at the very least, a “Jesus-follower” would be an accurate description.

Now, I'm not saying that Gandhi was a Christian, or even that he placed any faith in Jesus beyond the the teachings he read in the Sermon on the Mount. 

But, the funny thing is, I hardly know any “Bible-believing Christians” who read the Sermon on the Mount every day and then try to live it out in their daily lives.

Do you?

I think we should be more alarmed at the fact that there are apparently many more “Bible-believing Christians” in the world who don’t read the words of Jesus daily or try to put His teachings into practice.

Isn’t this exactly what Jesus was talking about when he rebuked the Pharisees saying:

“You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.“ [John 5:39-40]

It’s not in the Bible that we find life. We only find life in Christ. He is the One we need to go to and follow if we want eternal life.

Maybe we need to move beyond the idea of "Bible-believing Christianity" towards a "Jesus-following Christianity"?

Because believing in something is worthless if you're not actually putting it into practice in your daily life. 

"Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says." [James 1:22]

We need more Jesus-followers and less Bible-believers.

Who's with me?

-kg

The Authority of Scripture?

“When [LGBTQ-affirming Christians] tell me that I am wrong for saying that [homosexuality] is a sin, in the simplicity of my faith in the Holy Scriptures, I point him to this sacred record [the Bible], and tell him, in all candor, as my text does, that his teaching blasphemes the name of God and His doctrine.

"“The tree of [affirming homosexuality and transgenderism] is evil and only evil…[it] is nourished by an utter rejection of the Scriptures.” – Rev. Henry Van Dyke

Many Christians today would agree whole-heartedly with Pastor Van Dyke's statements here. But keep in mind that what he was actually defending here was slavery and his opponents were Abolitionists. Still, his position in favor of slave-holding was very strongly supported by the Holy Scriptures. One cannot deny that he was right about the fact that the Bible did not condemn slaveholding outright.

But we cannot miss the fact that it is more than possible for someone to be Biblically-correct about something and still be very, very wrong at the same time.

The struggle for many of us is that we have been told for so long that we need to be "Biblically-minded" that we have forgotten that this same Bible teaches us to listen to the voice of the Good Shepherd and affirms that we have the mind of Christ.

Furthermore, the same Bible also teaches us to love extravagantly - as Christ has loved us - which was unconditionally and before we did anything to change our minds about Him, or how we live.

Here are Van Dykes actual comments about Abolitionists made in 1860:

“The tree of Abolition is evil and only evil…[it] is nourished by an utter rejection of the Scriptures....When the Abolitionist tells me that slaveholding is sin, in the simplicity of my faith in the Holy Scriptures, I point him to this sacred record, and tell him, in all candor, as my text does, that his teaching blasphemes the name of God and His doctrine.”-– Rev. Henry Van Dyke (1860), “The Character and Influence of Abolitionism” (sermon), p.11.

Now, listen to what pro-slavery Christians said in the 1800’s about Abolitionists and substitute the topic of homosexuality and you’ll see that the arguments used today are exactly the same:

“[Opponents of slavery] decide a priori [in advance] what the Bible ought to speak, and then turn it over in order to see how they can make it speak what they wish…When Moses speaks the words of the God of the Hebrews, it is for us to listen, not to call into question.” – Bernard Whitman (1831), Two Letters to the Rev. Moses Stuart: On the Subject of Religious Liberty”, p. 30-42.

“If the present course of the abolitionists is right, then the course of Christ and the apostles were wrong.” – Charles Hodge (1860), “Bible Argument on Slavery” in E.N. Elliott’s “Cotton Is King”, p. 849.

“The tree of Abolition is evil and only evil…[it] is nourished by an utter rejection of the Scriptures.” – Rev. Henry Van Dyke (1860), “The Character and Influence of Abolitionism” (sermon), p.11.

“Those who oppose slavery are engaged in willful or conscious opposition to the truth…Who are we, that in our modern wisdom presume to set aside the Word of God, and…invent for ourselves a ‘higher law’ that those holy Scriptures which are given to us as ‘a light to our feet and a lamp to our paths’ must answer?”-  Episcopal Bishop John Henry Hopkins (1864), “Scriptural, Ecclesiastical, and Historical View of Slavery.”, p.16

Those who opposed slavery [the Abolitionists] had very little scriptural support for their position, but they were on the side of Christ all the same.

Why is it so hard for us today to see that there are times when we need to listen to the mind of Christ and the voice of the Good Shepherd in order to fulfill the law of love?

As Henry Brinton said recently: 

“An answer based only on Biblical quotations may put us on the side of Southern theologians who supported slavery and lost their way.” [Quoted from CNN, Oct. 15, 2014] [John Blake, “How the Bible Was Used To Justify Slavery, Abolitionism.”]

Sometimes, to obey Jesus we might have to admit that the Bible falls short. In those cases, we must cling tightly to the Good Shepherd and remember His command:

“Love one another as I have loved you.” – Jesus

Today, almost no Christian would argue in favor of slavery, in spite of the fact that it is quite “Biblical.”

So, the question of “authority” immediately comes to mind. Some argue for the inerrant and infallible authority of Scripture as the rule for a Christian’s life. But others, like me, suggest instead that our authority is Christ and that it is still the Holy Spirit who cries out to the Body of Christ today.

Sadly, many of us will not, or cannot, listen because we are convinced that our Bibles – and only our Bibles – have authority over us.

Are we willing to submit ourselves to the Holy Spirit? Are we courageous enough to allow Jesus to be our guide?

Keep in mind that the Bible never holds itself up as our final authority. Instead, the Bible points us to Jesus and reminds us that He is the Head of the Church.

In the words of our Abba Father who thundered from heaven, “This is my Son. Listen to Him!”

-kg