Holy Cow

Am I upset with anyone about my indoctrination into religious bondages and inaccurate theology?  Do I look back with anger or resentment to my family, churches, or teachers?  No.  As a rule, they were all doing their best with what they understood to be the true.  To be honest, the only person I am tempted to be upset with is myself.  Why did I take so long to come to the truths which I now rest and delight in?  Life would have been so different if I had known this stuff earlier.   I can’t help wishing I had a whole lifetime to live out the beautiful revelations I have come into.  There are so many messages I wish I could unpreach—or at least revise.  How many bouts with depression, discouragement, and self-loathing could have been avoided?   How much less damage to my physical health if I had known then what I know now about God.  I felt more bound to a specific interpretation of the Bible than I did to the Word Himself.   Christianity is about intimate interaction with the Trinity not about a relationship with a book.  Too much is made of the book, and too little is made of Christ.  Salvation is Christ. He is the meeting place of God and man.  The Bible is not a member of the Trinity.  No book could do what God did by becoming man.  The Bible must be clearly and forever subjugated to Christ.  We do no service to the Bible by making it more than it is.  It can become an idol and stand in the way of knowing God when improperly used.   It has been used to justify many awful things when not put into subordination to Jesus.  For decades, I could not have been more sincere, yet I was severely wrong about many things.  I have come to identify doctinal inflexibility as a major enemy of the growing child of God.  Our knowledge of an infinite God has infinite room to increase.  How dare I ever think I have found a place to settle.  Trapped in doctinal systems, we tend to cling to “interpretations” of scriptures as if they are the gospel truth.  There are other interpretations for things we were raised thinking were absolute truth.  The hungry will relentlessly investigate.  When you discover what you thought was God’s word was only one possible interpretation—and a wrong one, at that—you have a choice to make.  Some decide they have too much invested in the old system.  Others move forward regardless of the cost.  American Christianity has more “sacred cows” than Texas has longhorns.  The cost of not facing these “cows” is enormous and continuously detrimental.  The cost of confronting the “cows” is about as well received as Jesus was in Nazareth.