“I have given up religion for Lent!”

While Val and I were travelling recently we met a number of people who had been on a strong learning curve under the tutorage of the Holy Spirit! It highlights the many, many people from all backgrounds who have sensed that there is more to relationship with God than a group of rules or traditions. Knowing him is a deep friendship which is primary to all our life! I have often said, “I have given up religion for Lent!”

A young man in his late 20’s with his wife and young family expressed it this way:

We stopped going to formal structured ‘church’ services about 2 and a half years ago and have had a wonderful time relying wholly on the Lord EVERY day for His sustenance, satisfaction and provision. I have found it absolutely freeing and liberating just to live my life without being seen DOING anything but being able to share the Love of God with those He brings us into contact with.

I grew up going to a congregation (since I was born) that started out with very noble intentions and ideals and had a ‘Vision” for unity in the Body of Christ and that The Church would be just that, no walls, no denominations…just Christians getting together as the Lord lead and was just as effective as the early church. Unfortunately the leaders of that particular group have gotten impatient with the Lord as He has not moved like they would have liked Him to so they have set up their own ‘administration for the fullness of time’ with the Elders as the head of the church and……etc etc etc

They have gone to the extreme of being a cult now and are breaking up families left right and centre and all the typical stuff that happens in those kinds of places. It is hard for me and my family to see it because we have life long friends who still go there and they were forced to cut us off.

Basically what happened to us was that we all, individually met the Lord for the first time in our lives and it was wonderful. But because it didn’t come from the elders, they didn’t like it, and demanded that we renounce it but we just simple couldn’t, it revolutionised our family life and we’ve never been so close. We’re not without our challenges but the Lord is SOOO gracious and faithful. My mum has been a Christian all her life and she is one of 8 children. Her father was an AOG paster and they spent their whole life street witnessing and handing out tracts on street corners etc. So when she met the Lord it was such a radical change in her life, Likewise my father, who got ‘saved’ in his early 20’s.

I too gave my heart to the Lord when I was 4 years old, got baptised at the age of 7 and filled with the Spirit not long after and tried to live the best I could as a Christian through my teens and early 20’s. Unfortunately the congregation that we belonged to was so focused on ministry that you couldn’t not get caught up in the striving to be noticed and continually wanting to be accepted, especially by the elders and I had the perspective that the more full on for Christ you were the more of a leader you were. All my uncles were full time preachers by the time they were in their late teens so I just thought that being full time in the ministry was the ultimate.

When I was 24 yrs old the Lord put me into a situation that absolutely devastated me and I was completely out of control and all I could do was take each day at a time and trust that the Lord was doing something in me.

As time went on the situation in me got worse and I remember one particular week was just completely black. That is the only way I could describe it. By the Wednesday I vaguely remember reading in Isaiah 58 that if you fast….your healing will come speedily. I decided to fast but that seemed to make it worse and by Friday I just couldn’t bear it any more and when I went home from work I just wanted to be with my Dad and Mum (I was living at home at this stage), I didn’t care what we did I just wanted their company. I got home and the house was dark and empty and I didn’t know where they were so I went to my room and fell on the floor and sobbed my heart out.

While I was doing that, I felt something black leave me and sort of sink into the floor, hard to explain but looking back I know exactly what happened at that moment.

The next morning I woke up and something was different…I was still hurting a lot but now there was this sense of hope. Kind of like when you have had a nightmare and you wait for the morning to come and finally after a lifetime of waiting a faint slither of light appears on the horizon and you breathe a great sigh of relief because the night is over.

Well that next week was the most amazing week in my life to that point. I still hurt a lot but the Grace of God was so amazing and real it actually got me through. By Thursday the Lord said very clearly to wait. Wait??? What for?? Just about every ten minutes I would get the very clear word just to wait and keep in waiting. Gave up trying to figure it out after a couple of hours and began to wait…didn’t know what for, but I just waited.

On Friday, another hard day but I had an overwhelming sense to keep waiting so I just plugged on. I jumped into my car and started the trip home and turned a corner and out of the blue I took a huge deep breathe as if I had been under water for too long and came up gasping. I saw myself sit up (inside) and I knew that I was born again. It was the most thrilling drive home I have ever had because I KNEW that Jesus was Lord and the creator of the universe and the saviour of the whole world and I had his life in me – period!!

I remember seeing people who were saved out of horrible situations in their lives and they would be over the moon with joy with the fact that they were save and I would just say in my heart “yeah whatever, I already know…I’ve known all my life”. Now I completely new what they were feeling…I WAS SAVED. Praise God.

I drove down the road punching the air and absolutely praising God. All of a sudden all the scriptures that I had spent my whole life learning made sense and I knew I had just begun my life in Christ. I knew that in John 3:3-5 I had been born to see the kingdom of God to that point in my life but had not entered but now I was born to enter and I had entered and I knew it.

Well that was 9 years ago and my life has been the most amazing journey and soooooo much has happened that is waaaaaaaaaaaay beyond what I had ever planned for my life. The funny thing is I am doing much less in the lime light and just getting on with life and it is so much more satisfying. Please excuse my language but it is the clearest way to explain. What I had planned for my life was a pile of dog shit compared to the feast the Lord has given me now and it is still only just beginning.

Part of the journey has been getting shown the door at the congregation to which we belonged all our lives and that was very painful but we knew that we couldn’t go it alone so we found a local AOG and went there for a couple of years. During that time I met my wife and we got married and now have the 2 kids.

Someone show us Wayne Jacobson’s book ‘So you don’t want to go to church any more’ and it rang true with us. So my wife and I started to wait on the Lord for the right time to stop going. The more we waited the more uncomfortable we got as we watch all the classic controlling mechanisms and fake relating etc going on so finally after 6 months of waiting I went and told them that we wanted to stay in touch but would not be attending their services.

As I said earlier, since then we have enjoyed our lives every day and I especially enjoy Sundays now. It’s a great day to share our lives with our family and friends who don’t know the Lord and we’ve seen my wife’s dad come to know the Lord since.

We are back and we are back!!

It is now just three months since Val and I returned from our journey around the world. We were rather tired when we returned, but truly enjoyed being back in our own bed and in our own home. It took a few weeks to sort through and answer the mountain of mail and even though we had kept fairly up-to-date with e-mail, even they demanded a certain amount of time.

If you looked at this blog you would see that over the last week's we have not been writing anything at all, because there has been nothing happening, but because we just haven't been orientated to keeping in touch. For which we apologise. We aim to keep up the blog and encourage readers to contribute comments.

Just three weeks after we returned from our journey we gathered together with 30 or so others at a home in central Victoria. This rural location was chosen when we met together over Easter. Again we enjoyed just being together and reflecting on the place that God has brought us to. The gathering shared some video clips of folk we had met in different places in the world telling of how God had led them on in relation to himself. It was a rich and happy time.

We have been asked many times what things stand out as we look back on our three months on the road. There are four headings come to mind.

1.God is at work in his church and the gates of Hades nor the organisation of men have stood in the way of it.
We met many people who were confident that God was leading them on in their Christian walk in a freedom to live and decide to live in a submitted way, endeavouring to live as faithful followers and friends of the Lord Jesus.

Some were part of institutional churches, others met in what they described as house churches while others still quietly lived in relation to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and in a gentle relation with other believers. But in all the people and groups we met, the evidence was that God had dealt with them individually. He had led them through situations that were as different as the number of people. To the place where they started to ask Father, "What are you saying to us?" To different degrees people followed what they saw he was asking of them. They entered an adventure where they began to know him into deeper way, sometimes where they were by themselves, with little fellowship with other people, even wondering sometimes if they
had "got it all wrong". Interestingly, we met no one in these groups who wanted to go back!

2. God deals with his people as the individuals who matter that he declares that we are.
Time and again we heard the story of how God had moved in the lives of people through things that were very specific to the individuals involved. This was not a man made "movement" of places where God revealed to individuals and small groups his desire for his people. And while people related the story of how God led them on which was unique to them, when we look back at the scores of people to whom we listened, one can see very clear similarities.

They all spoke of
1. Something coming to their attention which they felt was out of order and gave them a sense of dis-ease which resulted in them crying out to God and asking him about what is going on..

2. They had a sense that one way or another God showed them a way ahead which often entailed leaving places where they relied on other people for their fellowship and encouragement in Christian living and learning to find their resource in Jesus alone. Through this time they learned much that they have never known before.

3. They found that every step of the way is part of his teaching. Many told how they had hunted for "good Biblical teaching" and felt the need of regular admonition and direction from people around them. But they saw that as Father led them on the many and varied ways in which they were learning, sometimes through things that they had read other times through a chance encounter with a brother or sister. The scriptures had come alive to them and their walk with God seemed to have a new freshness.

It seems that what God is doing in places all around the world is growing his family as a church and a people who are walking into the future with a different paradigm. What an exciting time to live!