Jesus our Lord

The sharp end of the stick where moving away from the institutional expressions of church are concerned must be about how it affects your relationship with Jesus. Firstly we need to understand what it is to elect Christ as the true Lord of your life. We need to get rid of all the things we buy into that make us decentralised on God. I know a Pastor who has the tag line of his church 'Christ centred' yet he dominates the stage and is constantly filling the peoples ears with his product and his own 'wisdom' I believe we can help each other out in life but NEVER to take any percentage of the attention off the living source Jesus. Sadly many men are church icons, telling the congregations that they are their disciples or at least living this principle out.



A relationship with God is something we should all be working towards being unfettered. Reliance's, scaffolding, life support systems all exist in the church and work towards us becoming more plugged into the dust. We need to be plugged into our heavenly source: Jesus and that is an amazing thing. We begin to see who we really are in the light of his love, we experience his first hand love as we draw upon him, not a sermon, to sustain us in times of need. We rejoice even in hard times because it is these that excavate the soul to contain more of God's Spirit. We can nurture the raw faith it takes to truly trust in that which is unseen. Gone are the pseudo-faith claims that are really business plans. Gone are the hope in some unseen cloud to win the neighbours when we really need to be light and life. We key into the realities of supernatural ordinariness instead of living from goose-bump to goose-bump.

er.... whats that you say?

At this time the evangelical/pentecostal types in the church are wondering what has happened to a couple of their hero's. Both have been subject to that old chestnut 'sin' and have been found out. I don't think that they have sinned is the problem, its the fact that they have hero status at all. Its happened before and it will happen again, man will raise the profile of someone and over time they will be found out. My particular issue about one of the men concerned was that he was putting forward unbiblical teaching about angels and such like. I'm not talking about the grey issues we have our own points of view about, I mean things that encroach upon the core beliefs of Christianity and present weird and wonderful opinions as fact.

Many have told me that I shouldn't be so worried, 'let God sort it out' but I simply can't! It is our responsibility to discern the error and be alert! It appears we are all worried that if we question the strange teachings of some platform superstar we are judging. No. Judging can only be an issue if conclusions are brought with no data. If something occurs and we have data, we must act according to scripture in dealing with the issue. Nowhere does Jesus say, 'tho leavest thy brains at thy house' when approaching false teaching. Jesus said we would know by their fruit and fruit is measured by scripture. Its not rocket science!

It's going too far when having reached a conclusion about a ministry that is misguiding or teaching erroneous stuff, we then lambast the individual. I cannot judge the motives of an individual but I can comment on its scriptural validity. Interestingly my communications about certain ministries with other Christians have led to them taking pot shots at my motives while telling me to not judge! Here's my motive for raising the issues:

The Word of God is our standard, our datum edge and our compass. If I hear or read of anyone who is knowingly or unknowingly using it wrong, it is my responsibility to protect my brothers and sisters from such error.

Done in love we can all exist in a safe environment, free from the false teaching and misleading statements from those who know better