BEWARE OF SUPERSTITIOUS CHURCHES

What's this? Are some churches really superstitious? From what I've experienced, some are. In my brief stay on this planet, I wasted fifteen and a half years in one. Now I'm free of that aberrant congregation and their superstitious nonsense.

What do I mean by superstitious nonsense? Many Christians seem to think that if they do or don't do certain things to ward off evil, bad things will happen to them or their loved ones. For example, I remember being told to plead the blood of Jesus over myself or my friends in order to protect them from demons. Some of my former congregants even backed up this superstition by mentioning bad consequences resulting after  foregoing this procedure. Nowhere in all of Scripture does it say we should pray to have Christ's blood sprinkled on us to protect us from demons.

If you read the sixth chapter of Paul's letter to the Ephesian church, You'll find out the activities and attitudes which actually protect Christians from going astray and sinning against God. Furthermore, putting on the whole Armour of God is a spiritual exercise involving our minds. It isn't declaring, "I Plead the blood of Jesus," on somebody or something.

Using "in Jesus' name" at the end of a prayer doesn't make it more effective either. I was wrongly taught that it gave the prayer more power if I said that. What those misleaders failed to recognize is God's sovereignty over all things. What he lets happen happens for his glory and our spiritual growth. Prayer isn't some sort of magic incantation but our agreeing with the heavenly Father that his will be done in earth as it is in heaven.

Perhaps the worst example of superstition is the idea that our words can bring what we say into reality. The idea is that since God spoke and the universe leapt into existence, and that we can become his adopted children through Christ, that we also can wield the same creative power. Some preachers even have blasphemously claimed that we are little gods. They base this on Psalms 82:6. I found out the hard way that this DOESN'T work. Only God has creative power and prerogative.

Having written my testimony of how God corrected the superstitions I learned at a cultic house church, I'm eager to help free others of their bondage to blasphemous notions. Please listen to my testimony and hear why it's so crucial to understand that nothing happens to us that God doesn't know about and that nothing he lets happen is for our eternal harm. Check out my memoir of God's providential leading on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Powell's Books.

WAS A CHURCH PAINTING PROPHETIC?

When I think back to the fifteen years I spent in a toxic house church, I notice how superstitious the elders of it were. This is especially true when it came to its leader and his supposed visions. One of them involved a painting on the plaster of the basement wall above the baptismal tank.

When I returned from my summer holidays at my parents place to the house church, I immediately noticed that somebody had painted a picture of a river and impossibly steap green hills behind it. When I remarked about it to Sister Roberta, she crowed, "Brother Herald had a vision. He saw the city of refuge in the Nahanni Valley  mentioned in Revelation Chapter twelve."

As I admired the painting, Sister Roberta continued, "The swirles in the plaster matched exactly the hills and river in the vision so we painted them."

I stood and gawked in amazement at this supposed vision. We had been taught that when the mark of the beast was imposed on the world, the weak christians would be taken to a city of refuge in the Northwest Territories for three and a half years. The able-bodied Christians would fight the mark of the beast while the young and infirm believers would be kept safe in that northern location.

Now I realize that what we had been taught was completely wrong. The books of the Bible were written for us but not to us, as Hank Hanegraaff of the Bible Answer Man show rightly says. Consequently, the last book of the Bible was written to seven churches in what now is the nation of Turky.  Though we learn much from Scripture, none of it was written to twenty-first-century believers.

In Revelation 12:1-6, John portrays in symbolic form the life of Christ. The woman is Mary who fled to Egypt with Joseph and the Christ child.  The readers of the letter that John wrote to the seven churches would have recognized the allusion to Old Testiment apocolyptic language immediately. John used it to amplify his message to these congregations. That's why Revelation seems such a mysterious book to us. We can't relate to Old Testiment figures of speech. For more on the subject of the Bible being written for our instruction but to ancient peoples, check The Christian Research Institute's web site.

If I had only known how to read the Bible for all it's worth, and all its wealth, I would never have fallen for a blasphemous minister and his twisted lies. Even so, I feel that God wanted me to publish How I Was Razed: A Journey from Cultism to Christianity. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Virtual Bookworm Publishers.