The time was the late 1980s. We loved our church, the people, the fellowship. We were INvolved. But as we listened to the preacher, week after week, I would say to my husband, “He never tells about his own experience with God. He never reveals his heart.” So we became troubled.
As I listened intently to his messages, I began to recognize that the content came from books I read. Almost verbatim he preached the messages of others who had wrought it out personally, but this was the shock: he never made mention of, nor gave credit to the author.
Years later the Lord put me in relationship with someone on his staff and she told me the secretary transcribed the books for him to preach. Week by week! Without shame or conscience the man plagiarized his sermons from the best Christians and presented them as his own! So he gained renown by means of a serious lie! In time his very opposition to the Real Christ was evident and we left the church, having confronted him and assuring him of our forgiveness. I didn’t expose him, but his whole ministry was eventually discredited.
But for all time that one factor, that he never revealed his walk with God, came to be clear – he didn’t have a walk with God! Church was his business I suppose, and he was trying to give the best he could. He had nothing of his own to give.
An authentic, experiential walk with God in reality! That is passion of this blog we call GetAlongWithGod. He IS a God worth knowing!
Our private walk with Him is a gift of transparency we are giving the body of Christ.
Ours is a true experience of Him!
An adventure of discipleship.
A constant adjustment!
Sweet increase of the knowledge of Christ.
Chastening as ‘children He loves’ (Heb. 13).
And often learning more clearly what we already know.
The disciples went through fear of Christ, storms of life, sweet correction, stumbles and fumbles. To discover this ‘Strange Other Being’ unlike anyone they had known and beyond what they could even imagine . . . this was a continuously vivid encounter, full of ‘shock and awe.’
Anything less is religious business. Delusion. Philosophy. Religiosity. Nor is it benign. That preacher carried many with him into personal exaltation and the elimination of Christ as Head. Scripture warns us . . .
See to it that no one carries you off as spoil or
makes you yourselves captive by his so called philosophy
and intellectualism and vain deceit (idle fancies and plain nonsense),
following human tradition (men’s ideas of the material
rather than the spiritual world), just crude notions following
the rudimentary and elemental teachings of the universe and
disregarding [the teachings of] Christ (the Messiah).
Colossians 2:8 (see v.18 also) Amplified Bible
So I am passionate that our readers understand what a gift Jennifer, Carole, John and others are giving to the large Body of Christ.
A gift of privacy opened, hearts splayed,
secrets shared in trust!
Receive it with reverence, Saints!
Such Christian authenticity and honesty is rare, is it not?
