LRC, Houston - the weekends-free church in Houston, Texas

Frustration, and maybe a little anger, is better than apathy!

Did you really think that being a Christian was going to be as easy as making a one minute public confession, possibly getting dunked, dropping a few coins in the offering tray, and attending church when all your systems were go (50% of the time)?

Surprise!

But did you really bargain for this? You tithe and even give offerings. You volunteer for church projects and help out every time you get a chance. You are at every Sunday service unless you’re sick or on vacation. In fact, you attend almost every event the church offers. You’ve taken a course in hermeneutics and Biblical interpretation. You pray every day, read your Bible several times throughout the week, and you’ve even dabbled in a little meditation on the Word and contemplated deeper matters. And THEN you find out that one of those SACRED COWS that you’ve believed in for the last 10-40 years simply is not true; let alone sacred!

Surprise!

So, do you throw eveything out the window?

Of course you want to. Someone has messed with your neat little house of religion that you have built. Worse yet, it’s the Holy Spirit doing it- not a man. It’s not that Mark made one mistake in the Bible (Mark 2:26 compared to the fact which is I Sam. 21:1-6) and there are no more! Of course there are numerous mistakes that the human authors made in our sacred Bible. Can you make that distinction?

Bart Ehrman hit the nail on the head in his most recent book, Misquoting Jesus when he said, “There are hundreds of thousands of textual changes found among our many manuscripts, most of which are completely insignificant (while others are), and they are there if no other reason to show us that the scribes could not spell or keep focused any better than the rest of us.” Listen, I know the pain of having someone shoot down your sacred cow. My religious field is full of dead carcasses: some with rotting flesh, having been recently slain!

BRICKIANITY!

Yep, that’s what Rob Bell (The Velvet Elvis) calls those who have a brick in their wall removed, chiseled out, and just chunk the whole thing because one brick is missing. The better response might be to ask ourselves, why did we build the walls in the first place? Isn’t our Christian walk about Jesus Christ? Of course you say! So, I am going to assume that Jack Nicholson was wrong and you CAN HANDLE THE TRUTH?

Because the TRUTH is that we don’t want to have to start all over again in what we really, really believe, let along confront where we’re not sure. Leave me alone in my existing thought-world that I have constructed.

We don’t want to have to DIG for the truth. We don’t want to have to seek the Holy Spirit for answers. We don’t want to have to read, study, and pan for the gold in the dirt of religion. We don’t want to have to admit that we don’t know, might even be mistaken about a few things. We don’t want to change! Change brings regression: and sometimes downright anger!

Three choices!

You can live in denial, dig in and defend the fortress of your belief structures (either realistically and practically or stiff-necked). Secondly, you can run! You can always find a group that will agree with you, embrace you, tend to your wounded ego, and confirm your comfortable worldview. Or, you can be open-minded, permeable, diaphanous, and inquisitive and let the Holy Spirit take you on one of the most incredible rides of your life. No one knows it all, but as we join hands in a journey through the wilderness of the Spirit, we can not only be SAFE in the journey, but, we can EXPERIENCE LIFE as it was meant to be lived (in technicolor, not black and white).

After all, the TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE!