A Journey From PhD Complexity to Fisherman Simplicity

A Journey From PhD Complexity to Fisherman Simplicity

True Conversion to Jesus: Yielding to ALL of His Teachings, ALL of His Promises, ALL of His Commands, Plus Abandoning Your Adulthood for His Childhood!

Authentic, Biblical Christianity – the “Christianity” that JESUS brought into being – demands that anyone who wants to take the path that Jesus created for us to follow Him into His glorification, is committed to:

(1) Believing EVERYTHING Jesus and His apostles taught us to believe – in the grammatically natural and literal sense in which He taught it;

AND

(2) Obeying everything Jesus commanded us to do in the same sense in which He commanded it.

AND

(3) Experiencing everything that Jesus promised and commanded us to experience regardless of how impossible it may seem!

Commitment to ALL three are essential components of a saving relationship with Him as His “disciple.” Any other man-made path is a part of that “broad way” which “leads to destruction and there are many who go in by it” (Matthew 7:13). According to the popular teachings and official statements of the great majority of post-Constantinian Christian Churches about what are considered permissible behavior and decisions for their members, most “Christian Churches” have embraced significant aspects of His ”broad way!” Even within the Apostolic communities, newly baptized converts sometimes brought in with them their former ungodly instincts, but even they knew and had accepted what Jesus had taught: remember, that His famous “Sermon on the Mount” was heard by the thousands who were not yet committed to Him in discipleship (Matthew 7:28)!

 

From the perspective of much of Christendom’s versions of “Christianity” that statement may seem “legalistic” and too “exclusive.” But it was Jesus Himself who made those claims clear over and over again, in such statements as:

“Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are MANY who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matthew 5:13-14). [I loved the Boy Scouts as a child, but Jesus seems to be describing that HE was bringing into being something more akin to the consecration demanded of the U.S. Marines, rather than that of the Boy Scouts!]

“Do not suppose that I came to bring peace on the earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be those of his own household. The one who is more devoted to father or mother than to me is not worthy of me, and the one who is more devoted to son or daughter than to me is not worthy of me; and he who does not take up his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me. The one ‘finding’ his life will lose it, and the one ‘losing’ his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:34-39).      [Does it not seem clear to you that Jesus was demanding a deeply disturbing and painful decision that will separate you from any previous loyalties you have known, whether familial, political, racial, or national patriotism? Surely, the God who judges the thoughts of our hearts, sees whether we are more passionate about Him and His Son than we are about our family relationships, our career goals, or our national patriotism!]

“Now large crowds were traveling with Him and turning He said to them: ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not carry his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple. Further, which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and calculate the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? This so he does not lay a foundation without being able to finish, and all who see it begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This man began to build and wasn’t able to finish!” Or what king, going to engage another king in battle, does not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to meet the one coming against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is still far away he sends a delegation and asks for terms for peace.  So likewise, any of you who does not renounce all his own possessions cannot be my disciple’” (Luke 14:25-33).       [Since Jesus, as our Creator, invented  the ability for us to think and speak in words, His thoughtful choice of those words “hate” and “renounce” – when combined with His long exhortation about “counting the cost” – surely OUGHT to make it clear that the only kind of relationship with Him that will produce the fruits that He promises demands a radically exclusive consecration to Him. And compared to what He chose to say, do not our various forms of contemporary Christianity seem to have been “adjusted” downwards to create something far less than what He created as being “normative,” “orthodox,” and acceptable to our Creator?]

 

A visitor from another planet who had no theological or linguistic “axes to grind” and who read those statements of Jesus would understand quite easily that Jesus was not interested in getting great numbers to “sign up” under some banner. If anything, he would assume that Jesus was actually scaring away all but those who were willing to undergo some form of quite unpleasant – even physically painful – “processing” from Him in order to become like Him and in order to inherit the promises that He assured were waiting for them on the other side of that divinely created “processing.” To make such a tremendous decision would require a great degree of confidence in Him, His goodness, His authority, and the truthfulness of His teachings! Among those “chosen few” who felt drawn to Him for some reason that they could hardly understand, the promises that He held out to them were worth the heavy price that He was careful to spell out for them. Vast crowds were drawn to hear Him teach, because along with His truth came manifestation of His power and willingness to ease their suffering. But only a small fraction of those masses were willing to publicly commit themselves to become His “disciples” by publicly confessing Him as God’s representative and then being immersed in water for the forgiveness of their sinfulness (Acts 2:38).

 

The Gospel proclaimed in the Book of Acts and subsequent Epistles, which invites all men to embrace Christ as their “Lord and Savior” cannot be detached from its foundation of Jesus’s teachings in the Gospels, where Jesus spells out very clearly the DEGREE of “faith,” dedication, unconditional surrender, and careful obedience that He insists we bring to our “saving relationship” with Him. Our personal “virtue treasury” may only be valued in copper coins, but He demands ALL of it from the beginning! Compared to to costly decisions involved in the movement that the Spirit of Jesus launched, our various denominations of contemporary Christianity – whether Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or the various Protestant groups are clear departures from that Christianity that puts the world and the  flesh within us to death; and yet, it continues to claim all that Jesus had promised for themselves! That is either a “sweet deal” or a treacherous deception – what do you think?

 

And that taking up of our “cross” requires a form of “ego suicide” that produces what He called the mind and heart of a “little child” (Matthew 18:1-2). No matter HOW advanced we may have become in our “scientific age,” since Jesus was the one who personally created all of those sciences  (John 1:3, Colossians 1:16, Hebrews 1:2), we can hardly imagine that anyone in our age has somehow “outgrown” the need to embrace His teachings, promises, and commands in the same way that His first century disciples had received them. If you truly believe that Jesus is the divine Son of God, then you will truly have a heart desire to fulfill that old adage – when HE says “jump” you gladly say “how high?” (even if you fail many times before succeeding!). If you really belong to Him, you will be eager to obey every command and receive every one of His magnificent promises!

Jesus is quite regularly treated nowadays, in our democratic culture where those whom we vote into power are supposed to be our servants, as a poet whose unpleasant demands and fantastic promises can be “reinterpreted” as “poetic exaggeration” or “hyperbole,” so that they do not mean precisely what they SEEM to be saying. But to His Jewish disciples – who had lived under the demands and precision of the divine Law for about 1,500 years, Jesus’s words were to be regarded like those of Moses, at the very least, but more like the words of the One who had spoken to Moses! The God that Jesus had incarnated told His people not to even touch something as holy as the Ark of the Lord, but “… when they came to Nachon’s threshing floor, Uzzah put out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen stumbled. Then the anger of the LORD was aroused against Uzzah, and God struck him there for his error; and he died there by the ark of God” (2 Samuel 8:6). Our post-Constantinian versions of Christianity look back on such actions by God as no longer being something to worry about. And yet we were warned, “See that you do not refuse Him who speaks. For if they did not escape who refused Him who spoke on earth, much MORE shall we not escape if we turn away from Him who speaks from heaven” (Hebrews 12:25). So, if He who speaks from heaven told us: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist the evildoer.  But whoever strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other to him as well” (Matthew 5:38-39; see also James 5:6). Both He, His apostles, AND the first centuries of His churches both taught and MODELED how that teaching was to be lived out. But virtually NO church today (with a few wonderful exceptions) thinks that Jesus really meant what His words SEEM to be saying. Many of us think that we live under some special exemption from Israel’s discipline because we interpret His promise that “the gates of hades will not overpower it” to mean that we cannot fall into error and apostasy. That is a perfect example of  “eisegesis” – reading meaning INTO  a text that is not really there! “hades” simply described where all the dead existed, both godly and the ungodly, the equivalent of “sheol” in the Old Testament. The “gates” to any place was the way you entered that place. The “gates of hades” is the entrance to hades. And how do you enter hades? By DYING! So Jesus were simply teaching – to those who have ears to hear – that what HE defined as “my church” would never pass through those “gates” – would never pass away! He promised no protection from the addition or subtractions of teachings and institutions by man-made leaders. WHERE, for example, are the recognized Spirit-created “prophets” that were in the church for some centuries? That “gates of hades” promise has nothing to do with be hierarchical leaders being protected from falsehoods!

 

 

In my supposedly “Christian” (but actually skeptical) college, seminary, and graduate school, I was actually trained to regard the apostolic writings as somewhat of a primitive version of what God had revealed through Jesus. That meant that much of what is taught in the Gospels, Acts, and the subsequent Epistles necessarily required the subsequent centuries of ecclesiastical theological refinement to keep His revelation “up to date” and relevant for our increasing advances in scientific, cultural, and psychological understanding. For some reason, it never occurred to me to challenge that assumption by such simple reasoning as, “If we HAVE gotten more mature in our understanding than what is described within the New Testament, then why do we supposedly more knowledgeable Christians merely send our supposedly ‘severely mentally ill’ citizens to some institution and load them up with mind altering pharmaceuticals for months and years, when Jesus and HIS supposedly primitive followers could cast that ‘illness’ out of their supposedly ‘mentally ill patients’ upon command in the name of Jesus?” OR, “If we DO have a more mature version of Christianity than those of the first century, then why do we have to make it through the financial burdens of life on our own, when they were able to have created a distinct and independent society among whom there WERE none in need?” So who really IS more “advanced”?

 

As a result of my years of academic theological “sophistication” and “depth,” in order to introduce me to what HE means by “repentance toward God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ,” our Father had to hand me over to some very painful and humiliating experiences, showing me that my intellectually sophisticated ecclesiastical processing accomplished absolutely nothing like what the “discipling” of Jesus and His apostles had created among those who entrusted themselves to their tutelage!

 

Our ACTUAL attitude toward Jesus is measured perfectly by our attitude toward the literature that HE caused to be written down and preserved, and which He let govern Him while with us. As I found out to my shame, if we do not have the same kind of passionate regard that He had for the previous literature that HIS Spirit had inspired, and the later literature which His Spirit-inspired apostles created afterwards – if we do not have that attitude, then we are in no way yet His “disciple”! Jesus, for example, was so eager to fulfill all that was written within His literature for Him to accomplish as their “messiah” that He searched out details that most of us would consider to be “legalistic” – details like hopping on a donkey to make His entry into Jerusalem (Zechariah 9:9), or have His mother and earthly father take Him down and then call Him out from Egypt (Hosea 11:1), or fulfill prophecy by moving to Galilee (Matthew 4:12-16; Isaiah 9:1-2). In my experience, most of us who consider ourselves to be serious “Bible-believing” Christians are actually more functionally surrendered to the filtered versions produced by our denominational and congregational traditions than we are to the specific texts of the apostolic writings that pertain to us as faithful “disciples” of Jesus! And because we are deluded enough to assume that what is acceptable to our tradition is acceptable to God, we feel free to ignore the same significant and Spirit-inspired passages that our fellow denominational citizens ignore, disregarding Jesus’s own warning that, “one who is unrighteous in a very little thing is also unrighteous in much” (Luke 16:10). Anyone who makes his decisions based upon the idea that there is “safety in numbers,” is deceived indeed! Take, for example, that “petty” requirement by Jesus’s delegate Paul, that all female disciples are to cover their heads when praying or prophesying (1 Corinthians 11:3-12) that have been so universally abandoned, even by supposedly “Bible-believing” Christians; or the exhortation that His male disciples are to assume the priestly posture of “lifting up holy hands” in prayer (1 Timothy 2:8). One can easily accumulate many dozens of New Testament – Apostolic – details that we self-acclaimed Christians consider “a very little thing,” which can be safely ignored! But the God who has swept away entire nations and empires will have no compunctions about sweeping away entire denominations who have disregarded what WE judge to be “a very little thing.” Have we learned nothing from His two thousand years of dealing with His own people Israel: blessing them IF they prove faithful, but assaulting and crushing them when they do NOT? Can you not see the comparison between what God did to Israel through the Babylonians and what He did to the Constantinian Church State with the arrival of the Muslims in the seventh century?

 

When our Father brought me to the end of my self-confidence in 1972, He drew me into a “Charismatic Retreat” at an Episcopalian convent in Santa Barbara, California. It was led by David Schofield, an unusual but very Godly man – unusual, in the sense that an Episcopal priest would have had a childlike regard for the divine authority of the specific promises and commands of God’s New Covenant writings. He insisted very strongly that God’s Scripturally recorded promises were for those who were willing to surrender to His Scripturally recorded commands, and that we had to spend our time at this retreat getting honest with God about, “Have I really surrendered myself to Jesus so that I can legitimately call Him my ‘Master’?” Because of what God had been putting me through, and because I had such a high regard for this godly pastor, I went through some hours of the most intense soul searching I had ever known to that point. It let to the awareness that I did NOT have that kind of childlike confidence, trust, and surrender to the Jesus that is clearly described within the New Testament. As an already ordained Episcopal priest, I remember feeling as if I were in actual fact like a professional shoemaker who had just discovered that he did not know something as critical and fundamental as being able to install heels and soles on a shoe! That awareness was followed by the powerfully felt call to openly surrender my unconditional obedience to Jesus and to His apostolic writers – and that is what I did! During that soul searching, God showed me from reading Romans 10:9-10 that even though I had said the Creed hundreds of times I had never actually fulfilled His command that leads to HIS version of “salvation”: “if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in SALVATION.” The next morning at our Morning Prayer I made that public confession to the members of the retreat; I later realized that that was the very first time I had ever simply read a Scriptural command from God and then consciously did what I was told!

 

That simple and childlike surrender to the person of Jesus and to the literature of His inspired apostolic writings led to a number of subsequent decisions in the three years that followed. After the previous years of trying to “make sense” out of many Biblical passages that seemed to resist such attempts, it was amazing to me how understandable, logical and interconnected they became – once I simply assumed that Jesus’s commands and promises meant EXACTLY what they seemed to be saying AND once I was willing to surrender to believe them, obey them, and even experience them!

1. This cascading falling of formerly supposedly confusing Biblical “dominos” started with learning to forgive my unkind and harsh stepfather from being a mere mini-tyrant into simply being a “fellow victim” of the “God of this world” who was only passing on to me what Satan had poisoned within him, in the same way that I had fallen into attitudes that I had never consciously chosen to enter into me. I now started to have compassion for him and even want good things for a man that I had secretly probably even “hated”!
2. Next came a subsequent acceptance that ALL of God’s promises in the New Testament were being offered and commanded for our day as well. Jesus, for example, had said that, “He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water” (John 7:38); and, “these signs WILL follow those who ‘believe’…” (Mark 16:17); and Paul said, “I wish [or ‘want’’] you ALL spoke in tongues (1 Corinthians 14:5). Because of this new childlike simplicity that was now within me, it seems that I simply could not resist the weight and clarity and delight contained within all of those words, and within about three months, after more of His heavenly discipling, I experienced for myself some real version of what had also been described in those Pentecostal passages in the book of Acts (chapters 2, 8, 9, 10 & 19)!
3. It took several years for the next “impossible to fulfill command” to be fulfilled. Jesus had said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you NOT to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also” (Matthew 5:38-39). I used to be certain that He “could not” have meant what He had actually said in those words, since they would turn you into a spineless coward who had no protection. But now His Spirit seemed to make it clear that He and His apostles had always personally MODELED what they meant in their commands, and that God will always provide the attitude needed AND provide any protection that He thinks needed for such possible occasions. The Jesus of the Gospels was clearly no coward or “pushover”! But neither He, His apostles, nor apostolic disciples ever resorted to harming others physically – nor did the churches of the early centuries! So, I was now simply able to make that same commitment and leave it up to HIM how to work it out. And within just a few weeks He who disciples us from heaven in the way He used to from earth, provided an opportunity to minister to an addict who (supposedly) held me up at gunpoint while I was driving a cab; and instead of calling for help or running away (which I had believed that I could have done), I freely GAVE her my money with the promise that it was a gift as long as she would listen to what I had to say about how Jesus had rescued me and how He could easily deliver her as well. She actually let me witness Jesus’s love and power for about 20 minutes! Once again, Jesus meant what His words clearly seemed to mean, whether a command or a promise: “Are not two sparrows sold for a copper coin? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father’s will. Why even the hairs of your head are all numbered! Therefore do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows” (Matthew 10:29-31). His promises of personal protection and Presence are as literally true as His commands are literally demanding!
4. Next came what was described within the Book of Acts, how all of those real “Spirit-filled” disciples loved to share their possessions with one another in order to have “ALL things in common” (Acts 2:44, 4:32). In JESUS’S version of “church” the perennial and universal problem of poverty had been solved@ Because His bodily indwelling Pentecostal Spirit personally loved that kind of generous attitude and resulting condition, that attitude simply started to excite my own personal desire, leading to starting a similar community of several dozen disciples within three or four years. For reasons that were the result of immaturity rather than any scandal, we eventually dissolved our community – but ever since then, when compared to the intimacy and intensity we had experienced at our “Covenant House,” every version of “church” that I have experienced since then has seemed more like people “playing” church than “being” church!
5. And most amazingly, that childlike heart was then turned toward our marriage of seven years that had ended in divorce in 1970. God first had to make some impossible things become possible, but in 1975 He had made each of us aware of things we had not wanted to see about ourselves, opened some doors, and we were reconciled in July of that year! When His Spirit finally becomes united to you – your spirit, your soul, AND even your body – He brings much more than some of that promised “power from on high” into you; He brings HIMSELF into you: his personal attitudes, His yearnings, His sense of “right and wrong,” et cetera! It can be frustrating that He does not simply REPLACE His version for yours immediately, but praise God that He does bring His version alongside of your existing “old nature,” so that you can actually and freely CHOOSE whose version to let influence your decisions (with some occasional “nudges” to help things along!).

 

 

“At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, ‘Who then is greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ Then Jesus called a little child to Him, set him in the midst of them, and said, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will BY NO MEANS enter the kingdom of heaven’” (Matthew 18:1-2). [Do you personally think that He literally meant what He literally said, and that it applies to you?]

 

Authentic Christianity includes a series of decisions and EXPERIENTIAL events, one of which is putting your “adult Reed” to a humiliating death and yielding your trust to Jesus’s authority without conditions or qualifications – and doing the same for each and every one of  His teachings (as He carefully STATED them), His commands, and His promises. And you do this BEFORE you need to understand them. That is how children make their decisions: you don’t need to PROVE to them that a Santa Claus exists because they TRUST YOU! (Which is why you should NOT teach them that that jolly fat man exists).

 

Dear God, WHAT has happened to what You called “MY Church”!

The “Come to Jesus” part of the Gospel message is quite clearly expressed among Evangelicals; but what has happened to His Son’s “NOT resisting an evil man,” or to His “hating mother and father” radical exclusivity, or to His way that is so “difficult” that there are only a “few who find it”? OR to His “righteous, peace, and JOY in the Holy Spirit”? Someone seems to have infiltrated His holy movement and seduced them into bartering away His insistence upon producing quality in exchange for fallen man’s lust for numbers, popularity, and acceptance by the rebellious and worldly citizens around them! That devious “someone” would obviously much rather deal with some millions of Boy Scouts who “identify” as “Marines” rather than some thousands of actual Marines who have been transformed by surviving HIS holy “boot camp”!

 

MaranaTHA! COME, Lord Jesus!

**************************