I am a bundle of paradoxes

There’s a touch of vanity in even the holiest of men and women. They see no reason to deny it. And they know that reality bites back if it isn’t respected. When I get honest, I admit that I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and I get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and still play games. Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer. To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side, I learn who I am and what God’s grace means. As Thomas Merton put it, “A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God.” The gospel of grace nullifies our adulation of televangelists, charismatic superstars, and local church heroes. It obliterates the two-class citizenship theory operative in many American churches. For grace proclaims the awesome truth that all is gift. All that is good is ours, not by right, but by the sheer bounty of a gracious God. - Brennan Manning

Evolutionists, televangelists and legalists

There are three categories of people I can’t associate myself with:

• The people who believe they were evolved from monkeys
• The televangelists who seek money
• The self-righteous (legalists)

That’s not the full list but these three comes on top. To be honest, I dream of a world without them. These people make me angry. I know I know I am not responding the right way, but I can’t help it. I just think they are foolish, doesn't matter how much skills, education and knowledge they possess.

Evolutionists

There was a time in my life when the teacher at my school showed me a series of pictures explaining how a monkey slowly transformed into a hairless, tailless creature and eventually became a full man (It’s interesting to note that the tail is fully gone today but the hair part not fully 'evolved' yet!). Those pictures showed only males. I am not sure about the women though, I think the assumption is women were evolved from female monkeys and men came from the male monkeys. But anyways, the next Sunday I would go to the Sunday school and there the teacher narrated a totally different story, that we were created by God out of mud. But the interesting thing is, though these two concepts were totally contradicting, I kind of believed both the accounts. I think I was dull and brainless. It seems like there was an unwritten rule that whatever comes from a 'printed media' is believable and unquestionable, especially those comes with the support of so called ‘science’.

About 5 years ago, I read a book called ‘Fearfully and wonderfully made’, written by Dr. Paul Brand and Philip Yancey. In the book the authors try to portrait a wonderful picture of the complexity and creativity found in human bodies. They went into the interesting details of four different components of human body: cells, bones, skin and motion. Dr. Brand was a missionary doctor, working among leprosy patients in the parts of India. In the book, the facts that were most fascinating to me were about the cells and the skin. The book also have the analogies between the biological and spiritual body, but that part I cared only less.

It was one of my sick days and I was alone at home. I had flu and could hardly sit up or stand. So I brought a comforter to the living room, spread it over, put two pillows on one end, lied down comfortably and started reading this book. When I came to a portion where it says how our body responds to a simple touch on our skin, it kind of blew me away. The 'touch' is such a simple, common thing to us but the things happening behind the scenes are just incredible. The number of cells (probably millions) involved in the action, and how they concentrate to the area where something touched our skin, the message it sends to the brain, brain responds and then we feel the ‘touch’. Feeling a simple touch on our skin itself is a way too complicated process, though it doesn’t appear that way. Dr. Brand worked among leprosy patients and one of the major symptoms of leprosy is that the patients lose their sensitivity to touch and their ability to feel pain on parts of their body. Apparently, even if you stick a knife to such parts of their body, they wouldn't feel the pain! No wonder these patients eventually lose parts of their body. The authors did an incredible job explaining how 'pain' itself is a gift of God - they call it gift of pain.

Not to mention the complexity of our eyes, brain and other organs. There were moments where I couldn’t get off the goose-bumps I was getting from all these. At times I had to get up, stand on my feet and raise my hands to praise the incomprehensible creativity of God. I was filled with awe and wonder. The interesting thing is that the book didn’t particularly talked about the love of God or any such sentimental sides, but still I couldn’t stop praising Him seeing how wonderfully he has created us. The book didn’t even argue against evolution or any of that thing, but on that day I completely, without a tiny bit of doubt, ruled out the foolishness of evolution and it never bothered me ever again. Today I call such 'sciences' foolishness because Bible does so: The fool says in his heart, "There is no God." - Psalm 14:1

Televangelists

Some of the televangelists make me laugh today, and some of them make me want to throw my remote control onto the TV screen and yell. I am talking about the sow-and-reap and Word of Faith breeds. I used to watch a lot of TBN during the days after I became a born-again Christian. I thought Paul Crouch was doing an incredible job through his ministry, reaching millions all around the world. But for some reason, the asking for money (sowing a seed), selling of miracle spring water and hand-kerchiefs etc didn't really resonate well with me. Also, I didn't like the fact the women who came on the screen wore at least 6 layers of make-up and some heavy jewelry and that kind of stuff. I thought something wasn't right.

During that time I used to listen the 'Bible answer man' broadcast on the radio. One of Hank Hanegraaff's books intrigued me and I went ahead and bought it. The book is called 'Christianity in Crisis', which was an end-product of Hank and his ministry's study and research into the secrets of some televangelists, exposing their faulty teachings. To be honest, that book really impacted me. That was the first time I was introduced to some Christian heresy and it made me depressed. As a person coming from a Orthodox background, I thought all born-agianers' were super nice and they believed and taught only biblical truth. I even wanted to give up Christianity when I came to know some of the so called famous Christian evangelists, their teachings, and the way they bend Bible, God and Jesus for their own financial gain. [BTW, I am not a big fan of Hank (based on where I am today in my understanding of God's grace and love) , but that one book really helped me to re-think religion]. I stopped watching all that crap on TBN. Today, if I am in a comedy mood or something, I do watch sometimes, and when I sense the feeling of depression by listening to them, I would change the channel to CNN and watch Larry King live or something like that.

Legalists

So that book 'Christianity in crisis' really gave me a kick-start of my journey out of the junkyard of religion. It was that time that I listened only to Christian radio and Christian music, ate only Christian sandwiches and drove Christian cars. One day I was on my way back to home from work and I heard a tail of 'People to People' broadcast on the christian radio station I was listening to, where this guy called Bob George speaking arrogantly against a caller who claimed that we are still under the obligations of the law, cutting the conversation out, talking against the Holy Law of God, asking people to quit church, and that kind of thing. At first, I was offended and wondered why this guy was still on the radio, that too on a Christian radio! Anyways, the next few days, I heard bits and pieces of his broadcast, and something in it hooked me up with it and I eventually changed my work time so that I could catch the entire 30 minutes broadcast on my way back home.

It could be my frustration towards religion what attracted me to that broadcast, the religion wasn't really working for me. I knew something was wrong but didn't know how to spell it out. You know, they keep preaching about the fruits of Holy Spirit and I even memorized those verses, but honestly, I had none of those fruits in my life. Anyways, I ended up buying Bob George's book called 'Classic Christianity'. I eagerly started reading it from the first page where he starts with a story in which he was crying in his car one day since there wasn't any joy in his life although he was so busy in his ministry. I was shocked and I thought to myself it was my own story. I used to cry in my minivan on my way to work, crying out to God to fill me with His peace and joy (especially on Mondays). I worked for God tirelessly on Sunday, but Monday I was empty, tired and dry.

That book shook my world. The first time I heard the words such as legalism, mixing of law and grace etc. It also introduced to me the truths of finished work of Christ, finality of the cross, total forgiveness in Christ, unconditional love of God, Grace of God, our identity in Christ and it simply started replacing the many errors I had subscribed to for so many years.

And today, I can hardly stand legalism and it's proponents...

Fear, pee and homeopathy.

I used to wet my bed up until I was in 12th grade! I lived in a small countryside home surrounded by thick woods, it was as if living in the forest and there wasn't any bathrooms in side the home. So if I want to pee at night, I first need to grab the flash light from under my bed, go up to the main front door, open the door without waking up anybody else, step out into the thick darkness, walk about 100 ft to the bathroom which was detached and isolated from home. At night that bathroom looked like a ghost house. Because of the trees, the nights looked so thick and dark, to add to the effect there were so many crickets and other small creatures such as frogs etc made a lot of noise.

It wasn't uncommon at all to encounter poisonous snakes around the yard. [The home is in the middle of about 50 acres of land cultivating various trees/plants (cashew, coco, mango, papaya, banana, pineapple, coconut, coffee etc) and paddy fields]. We always used flash lights to go out at night, if not, we would possibly step on a snake. My Dad used to keep a big bamboo stick to kill the snakes [Sometimes he used the same stick on me and my brother as well, not to kill us but to discipline us]. He killed a minimum of 2-3 snakes every month. Sometimes the snakes even come inside the home and once I remember one of them got into my parent's bed, fortunately it didn't bite them. I used to see my Dad as a 'hero' because he wasn't scared of snakes at all. Some of our neighbors used to come and get him to kill snakes they find in their chicken houses. He wouldn't let me or my brother go near him as he try to kill the snake. Once he kill them he would call us to take a closer look at the dead snake. Most of them belonged to the cobra family. They weren't very big in size but highly poisonous.

As a kid, whenever I wanted to pee at night, I used to wake my Dad up and he used to accompany me to go out. I was scared of darkness, snakes, ghosts and all kind of night crawlers. I didn't believe in ghosts, but I was scared of them! By the time I was in high school I felt bad about waking my Dad each time I wanted to pee, but at the same time I was so scared to go out in the dark by myself, so I peed in my bed! It wasn't that I peed while asleep, but I peed knowingly!

My parents thought it was a 'disease'(obviously I didn't tell them that I was deliberately doing it). My Dad started looking for treating my 'illness' and found out there is some effective medicine for this in homeopathy. (There wasn't any website called www.stopbedwettingnow.com) He found a doctor (who is specialized in treating bed-wetting) 30 kilometers away from home and took me to consult him. I still remember my Dad's embarrassed face as he explained my 'problem' to the doctor, but the doctor didn't seem to bother much about the fact that I am in 12th grade and still wetting my bed. He prescribed medicine for 2 weeks and then I had to visit him every two weeks to give an update and collect the next course of medicine. Homeopathic medicines weren't available in pharmacies, the doctors themselves sold it in their clinics. I used to take two buses to go to that doctor every two weeks for many months. [The only 'vehicle' we owned was a bicycle, so we relied on public transportation to go to places. To catch a bus itself I had to travel 2-3 kilometers on my bike]

I can't remember when exactly I got over my fear of going out in the dark. It was around that time we built a new home (next to the old no-bathroom-inside-home) and there were two bathrooms inside. It was a big relief! When we built that new home we put a thick layer of pebbles around our home for two reasons: 1. it looked good. 2. it would scare the snakes away. When the snakes crawl onto the pebbles it makes noise and that scares them.

You might be wondering what am I getting at with all these. Well, honestly, nothing much! I tried to find a 'spiritual application' for this story but I really couldn't, so I thought I would just share this. The only one thing I can think of is the 'power' of fear. Fear made me to wet by bed deliberately. Fear didn't let me think outside of my own 'solutions', it literally paralyzed me. I am pretty sure if I took courage to explain to my parents what was really happening, it could have saved a lot of frustration, time, money and efforts. Look what fear can do...

What would you do (WWYD)?

I like to raise a question. Imagine you have a very successful ministry (or church), which you have built up over the many years by tirelessly working for it with all your energy. You have gained a huge population of ‘followers’ through your books, websites, sermons, blogs, radio and television ministries. You literally have a cutting edge theology, doctrines, principles, worldviews and biblical frameworks. You have used some great sounding illustrations to explain your positions on theological matters and you believe with all your heart what you teach/preach/write is faultless. From the financial contributions of your ‘partners’, listeners and followers you built a world-class head quarters in one of the metro cities in U.S. You even have international coverage, and gained access to some of the highly unreachable areas around the world. You make a good living out of your ministry; your spouse resigned from his/her job and joined you to help you out in the work of the Lord. You have many of your relatives in the ministry’s payroll. There are multitudes out there sending money to your ministry accounts every month by partnering with you as ‘members’. Let’s say your ministry is now 5, 10 or 20 years old and you slowly began to understand the theology you embraced for years is not really standing against the scrutiny of the truth of the New Testament. Your understanding is challenged and shaken by some of the things God started to reveal to you from His Word (It all started from the darkest moment of your life where you wondered why some of your principles didn't really work in real life). You are in utter confusion, but God is not stopping there, he is continually, without apology, challenging your heart. You really started feeling the ‘double-edged sword’ going deep into your soul, God is removing the veil over your eyes, things becoming clearer and clearer every day in a fresh perspective. You are even wondering how you missed the obvious. You struggled with God and His Word, but can’t win, finally reaching a point where you either ignore the truths mindlessly and continue with the work of the ministry as if nothing happened OR you admit everything you have ever learned/taught was utterly wrong and make a 180 degree turn. You are standing on fire that without tearing off major parts of the Bible (Pauline Epistles, for example) you can't win.

What would you do?

On one side shame, ego, money, fame, people, buildings, books, CDs and on the other side truth...

I am not particularly asking YOU to answer the question but I was just thinking out loud what would people do in such situations. Can someone knowingly teach error? Can someone teach some 'principles' which don't even work in their own life, again and again? How much people can illogically double talk? How strong the 'tradition' can become, over the truth?

Some thoughts on blogging...

"Dance like nobody's watching, love like you've never been hurt.
Sing like nobody's listening, live like it's heaven on earth." -- Mark Twain

I have heard this quote years ago but didn't know who wrote it, so I decided to google it today to find who the author is. According to Wikipedia, Mark Twain was an American humorist, satirist, lecturer and writer. But anyways, I am going to apologize to him and make a little modification to his above quote:

"Dance like nobody's watching, love like you've never been hurt.
Sing like nobody's listening, live like it's heaven on earth. Write like nobody is reading"

We, humans have an inherent desire to express ourselves and we do it by talking, speaking, writing and thinking. And it looks like Christians have a lot more to express due to the fact that their true humanity has been restored by the work of Christ. If we don't express, who will?

But I shy away from expressing myself naked (on an emotional level) when I know people are watching (reading). In other words, I would express myself better in a personal journal which I know for sure nobody (not even my wife!) is going to read (ever!). Why? I don't want my negatives to be known and noticed. But at the same time I like to read the honest, raw, expressing, shameless, outspoken writings. Only then I can relate to my own struggles.

A quote from Anne Lamot on writing:

"The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of the workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth"

If we can't tell the truth, it is better not to write. It is when a Christian comes and tells me that he struggles with atheism (at times), I can relate.

Bird by bird...

When I have a lot of things to say, I feel overwhelmed, and it kind of makes me immobilized unless I break it into little pieces and take piece by piece.

Another excerpt from Anne:

"Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at that time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'"

Do you have a 'Testimony'?

It was a December 31st, when the church conducted a special evening service to welcome the New Year. At the beginning of the service, pastor gave an opportunity to all the families to share their testimony about how God blessed them that year. The idea was, one person would represent one family and share the testimony of that family. As it proceeded in a random order, I am sitting there and listening to all the testimonies people share. All of them were about how God blessed them that year financially, physically and materially. People shared how they were healed of sickness, how God blessed them with a new home, new job etc. I started feeling nervous as I was realizing that I do not have a testimony like them, so I pushed my wife to do the sharing for our family but she hesitated.

It was the year God started showing me the truth of His grace and love, so on a spiritual level, I had a big testimony but I wasn’t sure if that is what was expected from me to share. Not even a single person in the entire congregation shared anything as how God blessed them spiritually, such as showing them some truth from His word, the blessing of being in a relationship with Christ etc. Finally the microphone came to me and all I could say was ‘this year God taught me a lot of things form His word and I am excited about what He is going to do in the coming year’. Needless to say, it didn’t make any applause; it didn’t make any ‘amens’. It was as if, who cares what God showed me from Bible? Do I have anything dramatic? Any supernatural healing? Any financial miracles? Any victory over sins? Any special anointing?

Though I didn’t have anything supernatural, I had good health, I had enough money, my family was in good shape and for all these I am always thankful, but I was more excited about something God was doing deep in my heart. He was showing me something that is so valuable than any materialistic things of the world. He was revealing the truth of His Gospel. He was teaching me that the Gospel is more than the changes it brings in our life such as good moral living, material blessings and good health.

Once I watched a testimony of a murderer on youtube. He murdered a husband and wife and went to jail. While in the jail, He got saved. His testimony was about an hour long and if you put that testimony into one sentence it would be something like this: ‘Before my salvation, I was this bad. Now, since I am saved, I am this good’. After listening to the testimony, I wished I was a murderer once. I wished I had a powerful testimony like him. I thought to myself, my testimony wasn’t worth sharing because it lacks dramatic, supernatural events which are required to move people’s heart. It is the criminals who get the chance to share their testimonies wherever they go. By the way, I have no doubt about the changes it brought to his life, but is that the point of gospel?

It is amazing that how people believe in a gospel of change. They all want to know how gospel changed our outward behavior and it is as if they believe that is the purpose of the gospel. And I agree that, it certainly is part of it, but is that the whole point? To me, gospel is more than how it helped me to stop drinking and smoking, more than what it does to my behavior. Gospel goes beneath the skin, it heals the root issue, more than the symptoms. It gives us a brand new identity in Christ. Like Joel said in his post, it is a gospel of exchange, not just a change.

Materialism has crept into the church. I think a majority of people goes to church not just for spiritual reasons, but for physical/material reason. How’s it going to help my kids to have proper discipline? How’s it going to help me to behave? How’s it going to give me a sense of security as being part of a community? How’s the sermons motivate me to live a morally right life? How's it going to teach me to control my finances? What blessing it can provide me on my health?
Isn’t that the reason churches conduct ‘marriage seminars’, ‘financial seminars’, ‘parents seminars’, 'leadership seminars', 'health and fitness seminars' etc? Everything they do is driven by externalism. They see themselves as a physical commodity and all they are concerned about is how nicely they can present it to the world. So when they come across a person who is ‘successful’ in his ministry, in his family life and in his finances or business, they immediately invite him to share his testimony or his secrets of success and probably don't even care how his relationship with Christ is. The message it conveys is, if you are not doing well in your education, money, leadership, health, career or relationships, you are not spiritual enough. After all, who cares about your relationship with Christ?

My testimony would probably go like this: 'Once I was so tired of trying to generate my own righteousness, but now God showed me how I can receive it as a gift. He made me a partaker of His divine nature and everything I will ever need comes with that'. It is as simple as that. Is it dramatic? Yes, but all the drama happened in my heart, not necessarily in my finances, health or earthly relationships. It isn't colorful enough to get any attention. This is not to say that, with the salvation, I now escaped from the problems of this world. I will have problems, but beyond all the problems I have hope and that hope is not based on my anything; it solely is based on Jesus and the relationship I have with Him.

Spiritual Dog Show

When I sit in the pew and watch a bunch of highly spiritual men sitting in the pulpit and the super spiritual among them spit out stuff like how accurately they can jump through the hoop, my feeling is like watching a dog show. As an unskilled, untrained dog, I too want to jump like them. It forces me to build my own high expectations on myself. I would run to the dog-school and eat highly nutritious dog-food and if possible find a dog-trainer. Quite sadly, it wouldn't take a long time to see me lying in the corner, tired and depressed.

God says we are spiritual beings more than physical beings, so He cares about our spirit more than anything else. He operates from a spiritual realm and He want us to see the things from His perspective. Unfortunately today's churches don't teach us this. Bible says, 'in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last'. When did it become a mere behavior modification system? When did it become about prosperity and bodily healing? When did it become a 'different gospel'?

Confused!

Okay, My week-end wasn't that good (I lost some sleep on something). My theology was challenged!
I am still confused. Everything started from listening to one of the podcasts over at Free believers network. Here is the link to the podcast: What about sin?. Listen to it, if you would like. (I agreed to everything they said except one thing which really confused me) Here is my confusion:

I have always thought in my mind that Christ's sacrifice was to satisfy God (His anger on sin). And so it is called propitiation. From that, I get a picture of a perfectly just and rightfully angry God who couldn't leave sins unpunished, so He chose His own son to pour His wrath on.

But the verse which confuses me is this:

"Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me; 6with burnt offerings and sin offerings you were not pleased. - Heb 10:5-6 (quote from Psalms)

Does this mean that God did not require or desire a sacrifice, but Christ's blood was offered to Devil? Bible also says, 'Christ offered himself as a ransom'; ransom to whom? Could this mean that Devil possessed the ownership of humanity (due to sin) and Christ offered His own blood to Satan in order to purchase us back from Him?

Sorry If I am not making sense. Though I believe in the unconditional love of God (in the light of gospel), back in my mind, I had a picture of a wrathful God. It came from Old Testament (sin offering, blood shedding, killings etc). I had always thought that God desired all those, but the picture Darrin gives is that God didn't require it but He was stopping the sin/devil. Darrin used (in the podcast) the illustration of a bear(sin) coming to attack us, Christ giving himself to the bear so that it won't attack us. He referred to the Narnia movie in His comments as well where the lion (Christ figure) gave Himself to the witch (represents Satan?).

Any thoughts? If I put my question into one statement, It would look something like this: Was the sacrifice of Jesus (or the sin offering in OT) to satisfy God's wrath?