i was raised RCC and then God called me out of the Harlot and chose me to belong to Him.
So the FATHER, of His Good Pleasure, brought me to Christ.
When HE brought me to Christ i was overwhelmed of my sin and shame as His Word reveled the TRUTH of His Holiness and Purity.
But HE did not leave me like that, for HE poured out His Grace and covered all my sins.
GREAT JOY filled me to overflowing as HE placed me in Christ.
Thank you for sharing your personal journey...it is good to see the other side of the posts to the actual person.
My experience is not dramatic or miraculous, just a slow and sure realisation that what was taught to me by the church, simply did not sit well with me and their explanations were frustratingly vague and completely illogical. I wanted my answers direct from Scripture and only Scripture. If anyone said “I think it means....” I immediately closed the conversation....I am not remotely interested in what a thousand other people “think” the Bible says...I wanted the Bible to speak for itself.
I undertook a Bible study with those who felt the same way I did.....allowing the Bible to speak for itself, without tap dancing meaning into it that fought with other things. I found so many contradictions in the way the church imputed meaning into ambiguous verses to support something Jesus never directly said.
I studied for two solid years before I committed myself in baptism to the same God that Jesus served. I carefully checked the meaning of original language words to make sure that the translations I was using were accurate. It was very enlightening to discover how much bias was demonstrated concerning the trinity that was inferred all over the place, when the original languages did not even suggest it.
I delved into church history of the later centuries as opposed to Christian history of the first century, and discovered where all the rot had come from......not Jesus or the apostles.
The God of Israel was the God of Jesus, so I wanted to get to know him and to understand Jesus’ teachings from his Jewish perspective. All the Bible writers were Jewish, so unless we read their writings through a Jewish lens, we will never know the God who was served so faithfully by those first Christians.
I wanted to know why we were created and what purpose we served here on this earth? The Creator had gone to a lot of trouble if this was just a training ground for heaven......and there was no mention of it to Adam.....no heaven or hell....just everlasting life in beautiful surroundings, serving God’s purpose for our being here. The only mention of death was in connection to sin. No sin would have meant no death.
There is so much added to the beautiful simplicity of God’s first purose for humankind, that takes us so far away from why we were put here in the first place.
It seems to make others uncomfortable when we bring up things that fight with what is essentially strong indoctrination of three main issues...and these three are connected to beliefs held in common by the majority of the human race no matter what religion they adhere to...
1) The worship of multiple gods....or even one god split into three separate personalities. There were many triads worshiped in paganism.
2) Belief in an afterlife, with some conscious part of man that invisibly exits the body at death.
3) The destination for that invisible entity....to either a heaven of bliss for the good people ......or a hell of eternal torture in flames for the wicked.
I questioned all three when I reaized that even the pagans held all these beliefs in some form or another.
If God was a person with multiple personalities, and we are made in his image, then multiple personality disorder would not be a disorder...it would be completely natural. Yet it is not natural......the product of extreme trauma.
When God formed Adam and placed him in the garden, he did not mention any place for this soul to go except back to the dust from which he was created. Adam was not “given” a soul but “became” one when God started him breathing. All living things that breathe are called “souls” in the Bible. The word never means a disembodied spirit.
There was just “life and death”......not “heaven or hell”.
A restoration of life was promised by resurrection, but there was no continuation of it immediately after death. The resurrection was yet future when they wrote about it.
I also realised that it was the devil who told the woman “you surely will not die” when God had told Adam the opposite. So there is no such thing as an immortal soul as I studied the word “soul” in the Bible and discovered that it did not mean what I was taught. Souls are not spirits...they are entirely mortal (Ezekiel 18:4)....animals and humans are souls because they breathe oxygen.....and after Adam’s sin, humans were relegated to the same fate as the animals, with no superiority over them. (Eccl 3:19-20)
No one comes to the FATHER but thru JESUS.
That is true...but I also came to realize that no one can come to the son without an invitation from his Father. (John 6:65)
