I meant to say, “I doubt that you need an audience with God.” Plenty of people have had those and it still didn’t help.

Novato

I wish I could say something that would just fix it for you. But I don’t have it.

I feel like the answer is inside you though. I doubt that you don’t need an audience with God. There’s something else that you need to get in touch with or deal with. Something inside you. I’m not pretending to have some kind of supernatural revelation. I just know how I’m wired and I know we’re all not so different. I’m not talking about some kind of sin either. Sin’s never been an obstacle for God. For us, yes, but not for him. But there’s something on your side of the equation that’s holding you back. It could be sin, a wound, a fear. I say that because if there’s a problem connecting with God, it’s never because of unwillingness or inability on God’s part. We like to blame Him because it exonerates us.

I’m praying for something good to happen to you.

Novato

“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me – watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”
Jesus, Matthew 11:28-30, The Message Bible

I wish it was that easy for me. I see things differently, and IT IS ill fitting of me.

All I ask, all I plead, is for tbe Divine One (God) to be revealed to me. Revealed, personally, to me. Not through some Earthly, human charlatan. I expect a personal audience with Creator, if He exists.

I don’t know. Ask The Roopster.

BD,

Thanks for chiming in. I had intended to acknowledge your previous contribution in my last post but it got long and time short. Earlier today I typed a nice long message to you, but when I hit Publish I got an error message from a server somewhere. When I click “Back” the message was gone and so was my time. I don’t have time to redo what was undone. But here’s the best part.

“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me – watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”
Jesus, Matthew 11:28-30, The Message Bible

I’m learning those unforced rhythms of grace and I love it.

Novato

By the way, I appreciate your post. I know (and remember) what you’re writing about. Sort of a been-there-done-that thing. I can’t come full circle with a Christian walk. I can’t go back. I must “try” to move forward. If God ‘is’ then God ‘will’ for me. But He’ll have to change the approach with me. He can’t send his Earthly minions, I’m not receptive to their pleas. He can’t do the whole Job-ish, “break me down” scheme, as it will only make me hate Him. He’ll have to appeal to my heart, on a deep, personal, one-on-one level. He’ll have to break through the ice and stone and steel. But then again, I don’t believe there is a ‘Him.’

IF there is a ‘person’ of God, I’m definitely not real pleased with Him/Her/It. And I’m completely disgusted and revolted by the church leadership, and the pathetic, sheepish followership. It is time for a renewal of truth and purity of thought and action. This old ‘white-wash’ of a belief system is fading.

BD, no sweat. Gods that require forcing belief in aren’t much for being gods.

Paul,

“What is evil?” indeed! It seems that, contrary to what you suggest, no matter how many people I ask, I can never get a very solid, definitive demarcation between good and evil. And it is constantly sold to me as rock solid and constant. Yet, I’m left to interpolate some imagined boundary between all the different perceptions, no matter how closely they might agree at the extremes of the spectrum.

I’m glad you chimed in. I intended to acknowledge your previous contribution in my last post, but it got long and time got short.

I was a miserable Christian also for more years than I like to think about. You know, during the first days and weeks following that encounter with Jesus everything in my life was overshadowed by two things. One, I knew that this was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me, and secondly, I knew that I had nothing to do with it. It was sweet. Since I had nothing to do with it, other than saying “yes” to Him, I couldn’t take credit or responsibility for it. It was all about Jesus, His love for me, His forgiveness, His goodness.

Church was the place I learned how to “work” God. 3 step, 7 step, 9 step seminars on how to get God to give up the goods and clinch the deal. Soon, it became all about me and my performance to prove how much I loved Him. It became about my faith rather than His faithfulness. I found out, as you no doubt did also, that basing my walk on the intensity of my love for God accomplishes very little, changes little, and only leads to frustration. However, when we know and experience His perfect love for us, that changes everything. Unfortunately most preaching puts the emphasis on our DUTY to love Him, which kills the whole deal.

For me, returning to that first love meant getting back to that place where it is all about Him. I’m still carrying some baggage and scars, but I’m enjoying life and Jesus again.

I used to ask charismatics, “How many of you need to pray more?” Nearly everybody would raise their hand. Then I’d ask, “How many of you need to read the Word more?” Oh, they’d raise two hands. Then I would ask, “When is it going to be enough?” A dead silence would fall over them. It would never be enough. Talk about rats running in a squirrel cage. I never went anywhere but all the activity made me feel like I was doing something worthwhile.

Baron, I wish I knew what to say about your own frustrating experience. I know that Jesus wasn’t the source, and I wish I could give you some of the good stuff I’ve found.

24 comes on in a few minutes. I’ll check back when it’s over.

Novato

You really are an interesting dude. I can appreciate a person who can explain themselves and their thoughts in print so well.

I realize that this current blog ‘appears’ to be for you and Roopster, but I would like to express (without so many words) my take on this.

I was a miserable Christian. Didn’t enjoy a bit of it. Yes, some of it was the fake people, the many auditorium-like religious centers, and the liturgical crap. The biggest part was that as much as I surrendered, and cried out to God to break me down and build me up. Nothing ever happened. NOTHING!!! Yep, I know, I probably didn’t do it right. I should have stuck it out. Prayed. Opened my heart more. Prayed. Read the Bible more. Prayed. Blah, blah, blah. I have very little faith (currently) to invest in any god.

Having stated that I am still very interested, though, interacting about it. To hear a NEW message, the olds didn’t do much.

Yea, I need to start a blog, like I need to attend church membership classes.

I did check out “Is The Bible the Word of God” and really enjoyed / agreed with much of it. You are so right about the idolatrous “Book Worship”. That’s as bad as the “Worship our Worship” cult I used to belong to. (We worshipped the Book too.) “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”

However, I still believe that God has overseen / intervened in the preservation of the message of His Book. The OVERWHELMING weight of historical, archealogical, and common sense evidence (theological evidence too, but I know that won’t impress you) support the accuracy and veracity of the Bible. The supposed contradictions you choke on deal with superfluous information, incomplete information, or things you merely don’t understand; things perhaps no one understands. But those are not contradictions, and no reason to abandon logic or reason, and ignore the evidence.

Here’s my concluding thoughts in this discussion. I’ve had a very similar experience to yours. I’ve been rejected, burned out, myself a religious fundamentalist, WOFer, codependent, victim of abuse during a 30+ yr. experience with the church almost identical to yours. There is a major difference though.

My background was non religious. I was a hippy with no fundamentalist indoctrination or conditioning when some Jesus Freaks witnessed to me at a shopping center and prayed with me on a little grassy knoll (not the same herb I had in my pocket at the time). I needed/wanted help, but at the time I didn’t believe that the Bible was the Word of God, Adam & Eve ever existed, or that Jesus was God. I don’t think I believed anything in the Bible as a matter of fact; in my mind it was merely a collection of stories with moral messages. I wasn’t anti anything; I just didn’t believe.

But I did need help with my drug addiction problem and some other issues, and I’d called out to God a few days earlier. I didn’t know who He was for sure or if He was even there, and I prayed that way. Two weeks earlier I’d been witnessed to for the first time in my life by some Campus Crusade for Christ people in Ann Arbor, Mi, but I thought they were idiots.

However, when my hippie friend led me in a simple prayer asking Jesus for help, instantaneously God flooded my life with Himself. I can’t explain it, but I was dramatically and spontaneously changed. The addictions instantly disappeared. I was transformed in that moment. There was no process, no deliverance, no counseling, and no waiting. It was instant and it was a MIRACLE. He even removed my desire for cigarettes, which I’d been struggling to quit for months. No cold turkey; no temptation, no gritting my teeth. He took away the desire. It was as though I’d never used them. It never occurred to me whether my lifestyle was pleasing to God or not. I didn’t care. But I did know that it was taking me somewhere I didn’t want to go.

This was not the result of conditioning. It wasn’t the result of anything I believed or had been indoctrinated in since, as I said, I didn’t believe in the Bible, church, any particular religion, and I wasn’t even sure if God was there. But I was desperate and He (whoever he was) looked like my only hope. Those people told me he was Jesus, so I asked him for help.

Earlier you said that the same thing happens to converts to Islam and other religions. But, I wasn’t converting to a religion, belief system, or discipline. Listen, I’ve heard countless testimonies of Muslims, Budhists, Scientologists, Mormons, etc. What they talk about is not what happened to me. I met the one true living God. Like CS Lewis said, either Jesus is who the Bible (the eyewitnesses)says he is or else he is a lunatic or worse yet a liar. He can not be just a nice guy or great moral teacher and be a liar/deceiver too. He said, “before Moses was, I AM.” He called himself “I AM”, in other words God.

After that encounter in the shopping center I started going to church and got entangled in the matrix of spiritual Nintendo games, codependence, and the abuse that gets so much play on this blog. After investing almost 25 yrs of my life in that hell, my world came crashing down. You know the story since it’s like yours. It shook me to the very foundation of my faith and life, and this is where the difference is between my journey and yours I think (tell me if I’m wrong).

When I was stripped of everything I knew Christianity, God, and Jesus to be, even my own identity that was completely reliant on that system, I was brought to the point of even questioning God’s existence. Eventually all I had left was that day in 1971 when Jesus changed me forever. So I went back there and started over again. But, you didn’t have a “System Restore Point”, (to use XP terminology) like that to go back to.

Roop, the context of your life was such that you never got to make that kind of choice; have that kind of confrontation like I had in that shopping center. And to make matters worse the same people who were telling you that Jesus is God, and you can trust the Bible, were also the ones doing the abuse, manipulation, religion, and other bullshit we talk about on this blog. (Look, I’m saying “we” like I’m part of this or something.)

QUOTE:
Morpheus explains “The Matrix” to Neo. From the movie, “The Matrix.”

“The Matrix is a system Neo. That system is our enemy, but when you’re inside you look around. What do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand. Most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inhered, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.”

You were like one of those people in the matrix Paul. You took the Red Pill and now you’re dealing with the consequences. I was born outside the Matrix, and that’s my salvation. Interestingly, your present state of mind is not that different from mine when I met Jesus. The good news is you are perfectly positioned for God to burst upon the scene and do some incontrovertible miracle in your life that’s totally unrelated to your “faith”, religous belief, etc. just like happened to me. Keep seeking my dear friend and you will find. I’m confident everything’s going to be alright.

Hasta Pronto,

Novato