I'd like to preface this with the hope that we can remain civil, and that this thread is used more for understanding and not debate.
What is it about the denomination or church that you belong to that leads you to believe it is correct, or true in its teaching? Can you look at your church and say it is following the example of Christ and His Apostles? If so, please provide some examples.
I've always been fascinated with the different denominations with Christianity...I grew up in the Episcopal Church, but loved attending a little Baptist church when I would spend the weekend with my grandparents...when I came to Christ, it was in a Pentecostal church...I've spent a couple of years in a Methodist church as well...so I consider myself a mixed bag.
My label here at CF says Pentecostal, and I am, in the sense that I believe the gifts of the Spirit are still active in the believers' lives today, just as they were on the day of Pentecost and throughout the book of Acts, and Paul's Epistles...but I differ in a lot of ways from any of the Pentecostal denominations that I've studied...I've yet to find any denomination or church that I am in 100% agreement with. If any of you have, and are could you please tell me why?
As I said in the beginning...I'd like for this to be educational and not turn into a battle royale...but, in the immortal words of Mick Jagger, you can't always get what you want.
Hello,
I grew up attending a Baptist church for about 30 years, so I had a fairly mainstream Protestant understanding of the Bible, but that started to change over the last 4-5 years when I started digging into studying the Jewish cultural context of the Bible in order to try to better understand it in the way that the Jews in the 1st century would have understood it. I think I've gained a much deeper understanding of the Bible over the last 4-5 years than I had gained over the previous 30 years, so I highly recommend studying the Jewish cultural context of the Bible even if you don't reach the same conclusions that I did. There is quite a bit that we miss when we don't have the same background knowledge that they had and it can be easy to come conclusions that they never would have made.
Part of what lead to this change in perspective was the seeing the stark contrast between how Jews viewed the Mosaic Law and how Christians view it. Throughout the Psalms, especially in Psalms 119, it says many times that David delighted in obeying God's, that he loved it, that he mediated on it day and night, and that people who walk according to it are blessed, and Paul also delighted in obeying God's Law (Romans 7:22), so I think he was on the same page as David, and it is not a stretch to think the average Jew was in full agreement with the Psalms as well. Yet the view of the Mosaic Law that I had been taught stood in stark contrast with the view expressed in Psalms 119. Instead of viewing the Mosaic Law by faith as a delight and a divine privilege, I viewed it as a heavy legalistic burden that Jesus had to die on the cross to free us from. Those two views are incompatible, but if the Psalms are Scripture and all Scripture God breathed and true, then my view needed to conform to Psalms 119, and I needed to read the NT authors as though they also agreed with Psalms 119. Once I started doing this, my eyes became open to many instances where Scripture had been twisted to make it against obeying God's Law counter to the warning in 2 Peter 3:15-17. Furthermore, I found that the Bible had much more continuity than I had given it credit for and made much more sense. Now I wonder how we ever got it so upside down that we actually teach against obeying the Laws of our God.
Another part of this change in perspective was realizing that there was large body of Jewish oral laws, traditions, ruling, and fences that I needed to account for in my theology. For example, in Matthew 15:2-3, Jesus was asked why his disciples didn't keep the traditions of the elders and he responded by asking them why they broke the command of God for the sake of their tradition (Deuteronomy 4:2). He went on to say that for the sake of their tradition they made void the Word of God (Matthew 15:6), he quoted Isaiah 29:13 to say that they were worshiping God in vain because they were teaching as doctrines the commands of men (Matthew 15:8-9), and he called them hypocrites for setting aside the commands of God in order to establish their own tradition (Mark 7:6-9), so much of the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees was in regard to the role of these oral laws and traditions rather than over God's Law, and this conflicted with the Pharisees continued with his followers through Acts 15 and Galatians.
The third part was the realization God's Law was never given for the purpose of providing the means of becoming justified that trying to become justified through obeying it has always been a legalistic perversion and fundamental misunderstanding of it. Paul spent a lot of time hammering home the point that obedience to the Law was not about being justified and that we are justified by faith apart from the Law, yet many people today are still making the error of thinking that obeying God's Law was about trying to become justified, only they have compounded their error by concluding that our faith does away with our need to obey it, whereas Paul concluded that our faith does not abolish God's Law, but rather our faith upholds it (Romans 3:27-31). In Matthew 23:23, Jesus said that faith was one of the most important aspects of the Law and in Deuteronomy 6:24, God said that what He commanded for His people's own good, so if you believe what God said and you have faith in Him to guide you in how to rightly live, then you will live in obedience to His Law by faith, for the righteous shall live by faith (Habakkuk 2:4). According to Romans 4:1-8, Abraham was justified by faith, so God had no need to provide an alternative and unobtainable means of becoming justified through our own effort when a perfectly good means of becoming justified by faith was already in place. Abraham was justified by faith and by the same faith, he lived in obedience to God's commands, along with everyone else mentioned in Hebrews 11, so the one and only way that there has ever been to become justified is by faith.
So after a few years of digging into these issues, it eventually led me to join a Messianic congregation. According Acts 6:13, Stephen was falsely accused of teaching Jews against obeying God's Law and according to Acts 21:20-24, Paul took steps at the direct of James to disprove false rumors that he was teaching Jews against obeying God's Law and to show that he continued to live in obedience to the Law, so if no one in leadership was teaching against obeying God's Law, then all Christians were Torah observant Jews for roughly the first 7-15 years after Christ's resurrection up until the inclusion of Gentiles in Acts 10. This is the way that I think Christianity has always been meant to be followed, but with the inclusion of Gentiles, so this is what we seek to emulate. Originally Christianity was a sect of Judaism, so it was as much a part of Judaism as various denominations are all part of Christianity. However, over time Christianity became more cut off from the Jewish roots of its faith, with Christians following the Messiah, but not the Law that he taught and lived out, with Jews following God's Law, but not their Jewish Messiah, who is the living obedient of God's Law, and with both sadly only following half the truth. The Torah is the way (
Exodus 18:20,
Deuteronomy 5:33,
Deuteronomy 8:6,
Deuteronomy 26:16-17,
Deuteronomy 28:9,
Isaiah 2:3,
Jeremiah 6:16-19,
Psalms 119:1,
Matthew 3:3,
Matthew 22:16), the truth (
Psalms 119:142,
Psalms 119:151,
John 17:17), and the life (
Proverbs 13:14,
Matthew 19:17,
Deuteronomy 30:15-20), Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life (
John 14:6), the Torah is God's Word, and Messiah is God's Word made flesh, so there is no following one apart from following the other.
We have two services on Saturday morning, with the the first involving a traditional Jewish liturgy with a Torah reading and commentary. We go through the Torah on a yearly cycle that reads that same Torah portion as every other Jewish congregation. The second service involves more singing and the sermon. After that, we eat a kosher meal together. Then I help with the youth group, we have prayer for Israel, a round table discussion on the Torah portion for that week, we just started Revelation study, and for a while we were having a Havdalah service at the closing of the Sabbath. That led to some long days where I left home around 9 AM and didn't get back until 7-8 PM, but people can stay as long or as short as they want.
If you are interested, we have a number of excellent studies posted online on Matthew, Romans, Galatians, the Temple, the Feasts of the Lord, the People of God, and on Finding the Messiah in the Torah:
Kehilat Sar Shalom, a Messianic Community Congregation
We also have a number of articles and the first Revelation study is posted.
