My Crazy Faith

Understanding God's Will #1: You say that we have an effect on the path that we walk in this life, that God’s “best path and best plans” don’t always "just happen" apart from our cooperation.    Do you have Scripture to back that up? Yes, well, I’m glad you asked.   But first, let  me ask this:    If God always did whatever He wanted to do in our lives, regardless of us, why are we told so often in the Bible to pray for wisdom, to seek it, to be discerning?    If our choices and actions don’t really matter and don’t have an effect because He's already got everything all planned out and will just do whatever He wants to do anyway [a Calvinist view of things, not my view or what I think the Bible teaches], then it doesn’t matter if we live with wisdom or foolishness.    Whatever happens is God’s plan, right?     Proverbs 4:7  tells us  “Wisdom is supreme; therefore get wisdom.    Though it cost you all yo...

(R eposted from a few years ago, updated slightly.  Part of the "End Times" series.) It’s amazing and disturbing how brazen our society is in attacking everything about God and everything He created:  marriage, monogamy, sex, family, sexuality, the scientific reality of gender, morality, modesty, the value of a person, the right to life, the existence of "right and wrong," the Bible, Jesus, and Absolute Truth.  Not to mention God Himself, His very existence. We are destroying everything associated with Him (except nature – we worship that), and then we call ourselves "progressive." But you know what I think about it all?   I think that God is letting it happen because He is drawing lines in the sand.  Through all these divisive issues and all the immorality, God is saying “Pick a side!  I am forcing you to decide which side you want to be on ... because I am coming back soon to take My people out of here.  So I need you all to decide: ...

(From my post  "We Left Our Church Because of Calvinism." )              It's common to hear Calvinists say, "We uphold the Scriptures above all!"   My Calvinist pastor (of our ex-church) loved to say (all the time), "I am teaching right from the Scriptures.  We always have to go right to the Word.  Always ask 'What does the text say?'"  (And this always made me start singing "What does the fox say?" in my mind.) I disagree with Calvinism, but I agree with my pastor ... When a Calvinist tells you what a Bible verse teaches,  go right to the text  (or if they don't provide a verse but just give you a general "It's what the Bible teaches," demand to know the verses they are referencing).                Go right to the text to see what it says, what it doesn't say, what they added or are assuming, how they are twisting it or taking it out of context, etc. ...

[A repost: Updated July 2020 with lots of new stuff, including memes.  (When do I ever write anything short?)  For the text-only version, no memes,  click here .   For the memes only,  click here .   For the links only,  click here .   I also broke this long post down into smaller posts for a "Things My Calvinist Pastor Said" series  (click on it for the links in the series).  All memes were created with  imgflip .] The inevitable has finally happened, the day we hoped would never come: The day we officially resigned from our church because of our pastor's dogmatic Calvinist preaching (May 20, 2019).   (From now on, I will try to call him our "ex-pastor."  And for the record, it was an Evangelical Free Church, which are being  taken over by Calvinism  all over the place.  So be wary and educated.) It's been a long road.  He came on board about 6 years ago, and began introducing hi...