The Mystical Way
Active Member
Okay, I've decided to grant you one last response, after thinking about it quite a lot. So let me tell you a true story that happened to me:
About eight-and-a-half years ago, when I was 30, I was alone in my bedroom, about to go to bed, when I distinctly heard the Spirit tell me that if I demonstrated just a tiny bit of faith in Him by obeying an instruction from Him to close all of the windows in the room for just ONE day, He'd reward my obedience by curing me of an embarrassing bedwetting problem that had afflicted me most nights since early childhood and caused me profound unhappiness.
So I did. And it worked.
And I haven't been a bed-wetter since.
As for my conversion itself, when I was 21, let's just say it was extremely sudden and immediate and startling, and that I was alone in my bedroom when it happened, and that I had not been reading any Christian literature, and that I had not been socialising with any Christians, and that I had not been watching any Christian TV shows or videos. In fact, up until about two minutes before my genuinely miraculous conversion, I had spent the previous nine years being a vehemently Anti-Christian mocker of Christ who ridiculed Him daily and thought it was absolutely hilarious. You will NEVER comprehend the impact of being in a situation where you're about to draw, for the umpteenth time in your life, a picture mocking Jesus Christ to show off to an atheist friend, when out of nowhere, a voice you've never heard before tells you clearly and plainly that you're mocking what you do not understand and that Jesus Christ is God and that the Virgin Birth and Crucifixion and Resurrection really did happen. And not only that, but then to actually have Scripture explained to you when you haven't even heard half of it before in your life — to have that happen.... And then, years later, going online and googling all of the different explanations that He Himself gave to you, and realising that they align not with the teachings of some 19th Century Americans or some 16th Century Germans, but with the teachings of Apostolic Fathers and Church Fathers and Desert Elders and Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy and Oriental Orthodoxy — all of which you'd assumed was "false doctrine"....
How would you react in that situation?
I'll tell you one effect it would have on you: you'd never advise anyone to discuss their spiritual life with a person whose job title in the Christian world is "pastor".
I cannot, in good conscience, subscribe to your ridiculously simplistic Protestant exegetical methodology, or to your idea that I should seek the advice of a person whose job title in the Christian world is practically a warning sign letting me know that the church he leads is a church where people don't really believe that it's important to be united in heart and mind when it comes to interpreting the Scriptures — a church where ten different members could get up to ten different explanations about what a passage in the Bible "really means", even though the Holy Spirit is supposedly "guiding" all of them. So you see, I may be on a disability pension, mostly housebound, with anxiety problems and oversensitivity to certain kinds of sensory stimuli, unable to attend a church, but I definitely know where I'd be if I didn't have those problems and it sure as hell isn't a place with pastors or people being all "Sola" this and that. I have to be loyal to God in terms of what He reveals to me via direct private revelation even if sometimes, on a superficial level, it doesn't appear to square with Scripture. Sorry if that makes me a baddie who whizzes in people's lemonade or whatever but it can't be helped. But don't worry 'cause I'm not going to receive any commands to start a cult or form a new church or any idiotic crap like that. So it's all good.
As for you, you're entitled to stick your head in or up whatever makes you happy but don't try to get me to follow your way of being Christian because God doesn't want me to and that's that.Now goodbye.
Upvote
0
