Crisis of Faith

To the Yahoo Group...in response to an honest question about questioning God.
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Generally when I reach a crisis of faith its because I'm living in expectation instead of expectancy. Not to be cute or trite about it, I have come to believe that God will always come through for me, and that it will often look nothing like I think it should. In fact God has shown an interest in destroying some of the good things He placed in my life earlier, as a way of moving me into things he wants for me next.

This is universally true with me. God leads me into tight corners, prunes away perfectly good things, sours my milk, even cuts a wound in me from time to time. It's all to move me into what is next. Yesterday's weapons don't work against tomorrows demons. I don't get my new shield when I see an enemy draw back his bow. I get my new shield when the arrows are descending upon me.

I need to KNOW that I'm provisioned to stand in the spot I'm called to stand in. I'm called to be a man, I'm called to be a husband and a father. God did this to me, He didn't even ask if I wanted it. He made me to want it, he awakened the desires so I would beg him to give it to me, then he gave it to me and most of the time I don't feel at all prepared for it, lol. After 37 years as a single man God is giving me a wife and three daughters. I'm so far outside my comfort zone I don't know which way is up. Yet I KNOW God has prepared and provisioned me.

By his stripes we are healed. To me that means a perfectly good tree had to be wounded so that the orphaned branches could be bound into that spot and live. As an orphaned branch that is restored to the vine I give God full authority to prune my life that it may bare good fruit.

But as you say, their are days when the fog sets in so thick I can't remember the promises God made me. On those days its hard to believe that their even is a God. I think that Dan's question has come across the minds of every true believer at some time or another. That's when we must lean on each other.

A. R. Bunch

All Sin is Equal: Even Homosexuality.

Another in a long line of responses to a yahoo group.
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I definitely promote the all sins are equal standpoint. I've heard the "sin that leads to death" argument before and its very compelling, but I just can't read it that way and have it fit in with my understanding of God.

You certainly don't have to agree with me, but this is how I read that. If the only way to live eternally was to get to New York City, and my friend gets on a flight for Dallas TX, and I get on one bound for LA. neither of us is doing what we need to in order to get there. Lets say that my friends plane crashes and he dies in Oklahoma. Can we say that he was a better man than I? He got a lot closer to New York than I did. But I'm still alive to try again. Which of us is better off?

The thing I love the best about that example is that we can all see that we don't have enough information to judge. If I pushed for an answer I'm sure we could give one, and have pretty good reasons why we picked one guy over the other, but realistically as humans we just can't tell. No one made it to New York so it doesn't matter if one guy dies, to my way of thinking.

Now if the argument is--if you believe your wrong actions are right actions you are in more danger because you won't repent them--that's a little different matter. I can see that. On the other, I think we all have sin in our lives that we are unaware of. Even if its just a wrong idea about who we are. Many a passive man thinks he's a good Christian even though he's abusive to his family through inaction. Is that a sin that leads unto death because he doesn't know to feel bad about it?

I think a number of Christians think they are doing the world a disservice if they don't stand against homosexuality because homosexuals claim that their actions aren't wrong. Every person I've ever known who recovered from same sex attraction said that they knew all along it was wrong, even if it was just a tiny voice inside. Setting that aside I think the first sin to eliminate from your life is the sin the Holy Spirit brings to your attention. We might be shocked to find out the number of sins the Holy Spirit chooses to work on ahead of homosexuality.

I challenge the notion that we are helping anyone by actively fighting homosexuality. Again, I'm not in favor of it. I don't approve of it. I just want to point out that as Christians we need to spend a lot more time and energy pronouncing what is really true about someone, and less energy and time addressing the things we think they do wrong. The power of life and death are in the tongue. If we speak to the Spirit in someone we will call that out and the flesh will fall away. If we speak to the flesh in them only bad things happen.

A. R. Bunch

On the topic of politics again

Below is a post I made to a Wild at Heart yahoo group forum. I thought I'd post it here as well as it gives a good insight into Christianity and politics. I do want to add to it a link to an article by MorningStar ministries that says very similar things regarding revival.
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Well that is a certainly a great post to get things heated up on this forum. Good Job Brian.

I have so many comments to make from so many angles I don't quite know where to begin.

I'll begin with W. Brian Thorton's statement "...However, I believe that dependence on the government and the welfare
state we now live in is nothing short of a spiritual curse. God is no
longer our provider. Since government is our provider, we don't need
God anymore. So, for nearly 80 years He (God) has gradually been
removed from our public lives."

What a great insight, and undoubtedly true. God loves to tell me things, which--if I repeated them--people would think I'm crazy. He once explained to me that a spirit of brotherly strife once lived in Africa. Village conquered their neighbors and sold them as slaves. With these slaves came civil strife which lead to civil war here in America. The reason this spirits power didn't erode in the American south until Dr. King was that no one had ever fought it on both a political and spiritual front before.

Sounds kinda crazy to me but it also makes sense. At the same time I think it might be a stretch to blame the California fires on gay marriage. While we as humans can look at gay marriage and see an indicator of the moral temperature of a culture is that how God sees it? God knows every sin in every heart. Is he more upset that a person choses to have sex with a person of the same sex, or if that person tries to marry a person of the same sex? Aren't we committing adultery when we lust after a married woman? Does that anger God more or less than wanting to have sex with someone of the same sex? These are strictly rhetorical questions.

Reading the bible, I don't get the feeling God is happy about homosexuality, but aren't all sins equal? As Christians we get so caught up in disapproving of one sin over another. When Jesus interceded on behalf of the prostitute, he asked, "where are your accusers?" Only Jesus was without sin so only Jesus was in a place to accuse her, and he didn't. That's an example we need to study.

I'm always surprised by the way modern evangelicals (whom I often criticize though I count myself among them) discount and ignore the entire old testament unless the subject is homosexuality. Brian I know as an Adventist you probably don't count yourself an evangelical Christian or someone who ignores the old testament, but we'll come back to that.

I've written here before regarding Sodom and Gomorrah, (Genesis 18:16 on) but I'll go back to it for the new kids. I find it telling that God decides not to send the destroying Angels straight to work, but comes to earth with them and walks past Abraham's tent. So God chose to consult a human, or at least provide an opportunity for comment, before destroying the cities. God also let himself be talked down to 10 righteous people. We always blame Abraham for stopping there, but I think he is only guilty of having too much faith in his relative Lot. Surely Lot and his family had at least ten righteous among them. Even though Abraham stops at that point, God still makes a way of escape for the righteous who are there.

So if we look for just a moment beyond the whole gay thing we see a few more things that God was up to. It was an opportunity for relationship with Abraham. It was a way to move Lot out of a bad situation he'd become too comfortable with.

I also want to point out the footnote in the NIV version that says "spare them" is actually also interpretable as "forgive them." To my mind that could read, "26 The LORD said, "If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will forgive the whole place for their sake." That sounds crazy. Am I saying that if we were to intercede for the gays God would forgive them? The only thing God says about why He's telling Abraham is that he intends to make a great nation of him and bless all nations through it. So is God training Abraham to intercede? I think so. There is also a reference to Ez. 16:49 "Now this was the sin
of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and
unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy." So while God never tells Abraham the exact sin Sodom is guilty of we assume its homosexuality because that's what's up when the men check it out. But the only time anyone says what the "outcry" was its that they didn't share there blessings.

This all leads me to believe that the bible doesn't actually indicate that God has a special hatred of homosexuality, which causes Him to punish entire regions.

My point in all this is that we as men of God need to be standing in our place in the battle. We need to be men of God, whom God blesses the wicked through. I think that's the lesson of Sodom and Gomorrah. Those of us who are circumcised of the heart are spiritually the sons of Abraham and we are anointed to be conduit of blessing to the world. Not a conduit of judgment and condemnation.

This point dovetails into my next comment.

Politically speaking we Christians have invited much of the hatred that is thrown against us. When I think of men like L. Ron Hubburd, the founder of Scientology, his father was a minister. So was James Hetfeild of Metalica. What about all the young boys that were molested by priests and ministers? What about the people who are sitting down to family dinner and the doorbell rings--its another Christian trying to cram God down their throat like it was Amway. I don't have enough fingers and toes to count the number of times a Christian has told me, "you either believe X, or you are going to hell." Don't we realize that it sounds like, "you either believe what I believe or you can go to hell?"

But whether we engage in some horrible abuse toward non-Christians or not we are all guilty of misrepresenting Christ. This is the scary aspect of what John Eldredge is teaching. Christian nice guys have are not what the world needs. I'm not saying this from a place of self recrimination but from a place of hope. The marred image of masculinity in our nation is not the result of Christian men living in the image of Christ. Its not because we didn't give enough tracts out, or communicate our disapproval enough. It's because we haven't let love be our identifying banner. We haven't gone the extra mile when carrying our neighbors burden. We haven't gone the first mile in many instances. We have not shared our blessings, and in that we are more like the residents of Sodom than we would like to admit.

A. R. Bunch