People fail, the Gospel Doesn’t | Ears to Hear #25

People are fast to leave religion when they grow disillusioned with its institutions, often tossing aside the transformative power of the gospel itself. This episode challenges that all-or-nothing mindset. I explore why demanding proof before belief, combined with institutional frustration, keeps so many from experiencing the peace that comes from faithfully testing gospel principles in daily life. It’s time to separate flawed systems from timeless truths and give the baby a real chance.

Title Song: Nothing but the Blood of Jesus by Free As a Bird

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

This last week, as I've been doing my personal studies of the scriptures and religion and anything else that's relevant, I found something interesting. I've ran into a lot who in religion have been disaffected by their belief, their church, their shelf collapsed, meaning all these things that they had been resting on, all these truths that they had been taught their whole lives about God, their church, their faith, their religion, the nature of God. Is it the Trinity? Is he does he have a body? Is God? Does Jesus claim to be God? I've I've gone down some rabbit holes and I found something important. And I've talked about this a long time ago, but God, the point is that I cannot prove God to you. Nobody can prove or disappo disprove God to me. That defeats the whole purpose. If God could be proved to a general public, to the populace, then what's the point of faith? And that's this is the point I want to make. This this can be a very brief, quick episode, but faith trumps everything. The same people who would falter and waver in their belief of God wouldn't have the faith to sustain continuing to believe in God if the world is gonna keep changing and going in a direction that's away from him. Does that does that track? Like, if things now already about your faith's institution shake you and cause you to then direct that to God isn't real, then your shelf has been built on the wrong foundation to begin with. And I think it's important that in our journey, in our walks with God, if you will, we do not condemn the things that are God, the very things that are God. I mentioned last week in the episode, when we open the Bible, when we open our scriptures to ourselves, we're negotiating with the text. Each time we do that, there's a negotiation. That's why the Bible alone gives us, you know, hundreds of denominations to choose from. Because we can't, as a people, man, the nature of man, we can't decide what the heck it's even talking about. We can't agree or disagree on the data that's in the Bible. And I think we can err too much on that side of like trying to prove this and that, but if you strip the Bible down, there's a lot that it just doesn't, it's not coherent, it's definitely not univocal. And this is somebody who's read the Bible cover to cover, and I believe in it. I return to the scriptures as the standard works for the voice of God. I choose to presuppose my belief upon the Bible that God can speak to me through this book. I choose that going in. That doesn't mean when I read the chapter in the Old Testament about the bear mauling children, that I necessarily one, think that's good, two, take that super literal, three, make any sort of conclusion about what that means. What I can do though is get revelation for my life from it as I choose, as I read it. Oh, well, you're then you're just picking and choosing. Well, aren't we all? Isn't that all what we do with religion? And the goal then is to pick and choose what principles, when I apply them to my life, lead me to have the best life, which is also sub subjective, right? That's subjective to you and your background and your upbringing and what you want out of life. What I want in life, and what I found now in my ripe years of 26 years of age, is I want peace. I want the feeling of peace. It's a feeling I know exactly what it feels like, I know what it doesn't feel like, I know the absence of it. I've become accustomed to it more recently, and it's beautiful. And having been in instances where peace is far from me, I don't want to lose that. Well, to get that feeling of peace, to lay down every night knowing who I am, where I came from, where I'm going, and why I'm here, aka peace for me, I don't want to sacrifice that. I don't want to relinquish that for any purpose, any worldly thing. And if somebody offers me a mode that allows me to feel more of that feeling more deeply, by all means, let me apply those principles and see see for myself. But I have not found a better way to do that than through faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ, through repenting of my sins, by being baptized when I was eight years old, by receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost, which will lead and guide me and direct me, and then continuing that process over and over and over again. It's the basics, it's the bare minimum. And the older I get, the more I realize the basics are everything. But when we have faith crises amongst us, our shelf oftentimes is built upon people, it's built upon what we're told, it's built upon what we think we we knew about something. And so when those things might get broken, if you are a Catholic and you grew up with a Trinitarian notion of God, if you do some studies and research and figure out, okay, one, the Trinitary is a post-biblical formulation of the concept of God starting in second century CE, then you're probably gonna be a little confused. But if you think that when Jesus Christ came to earth, he taught people the Trinity, like factually, the the data that's just not remotely close to being true. So if your foundation is on this formulation of God that you've been looking through, like that's your paradigm for what you see life through, you might be tempted to then throw the idea of God away, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So that's a valid option you might consider. That's a valid option I think a lot of people are doing as they leave faith as a whole, as a movement. Why not then go, okay, hold on, let me separate these two concepts, which is very hard to do, and I'm not saying this is easy, but if you've been ingrained to think that God is the Trinity and that all three and one and one and three without body, parts, or passions, and the substantiate like whatever word vomit you want to come up with for your idea of God, if that's been your whole life, it's very hard to now separate your relationship with God and completely view view him as something other than what you've been told or have understood your whole life. That's very hard. But if you can, if you can, you might get a higher degree of peace knowing now the truth about God. Does that make sense? And this is just one example, and this I think can happen over and over and over again. So, me personally, in my faith, as I've come to learn things about my faith, my the history of it, the actual institution, much of which, like any institution, has the faults of man woven into it. It's hard to separate the faults of man from the doctrine of God when they're woven like this, when they're just completely united, or so you think. But that's why it's important to have the basis of faith in God and then using scripture as the standard. The standard for your foundation doesn't mean it's 100% perfect, but it's the best we have right now, and the faults of man have you been woven into that. And so that's why your personal relationship with God and Jesus Christ, through prayer, through reading his word, through repenting, becoming more and more holy, and becoming more in tune with the Holy Ghost, which he will give you, is so important. It's so important to navigate faith through the rest of your life. And I think, like, I don't want to try and prove belief to anyone. Like, it's never been about proving. For me, it's the childlike faith of can I rationalize what I can rationalize, but then can God ask me to maybe do something that's just absurd and I have the faith to just follow? Can God symbolically ask me to sacrifice my Isaac? Will I do it? Probably not right now. Whatever my Isaac is, I don't have a son. But that's the goal, that's the principle of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ is getting to a place where you don't need all the answers, you don't need certainty, you just need to believe and act. And I think it'd be so easy as a antagonist to Christianity to go, well, then you're just blind, then you're just following blindly, you're following religion, you're using it as a crutch for your own ailments in life. I think some of the smartest, wisest people I know are the people who are humble enough to be outside themselves and to just simply be believing people. To to have that character trait to just be a believing person is so rare now because everybody wants to know, everybody wants certainty, nobody likes risk, people just want to know and be affirmative. If you get in Christian media right now, it's honestly exhausting. Everyone's a prophet, everyone hears a quip online, regurgitates it, and puts their stamp of whatever authenticity they think they have to offer the world. And well, Reed, you're a hypocrite, that's what you're doing. Sure, but I'm not telling you what or what not to believe. I'm just offering my personal insights into the dangers of the modern world that we live in. And if you want to lead a life that leads you to feel fit like faith and peace, you have to be careful with what you consume. And if consuming whatever this is is causing you problems, then by all means, get block me. I don't care. But nothing that is very controversial that I'm saying. If you break it down, having faith in Jesus Christ is the number one foundation you need to build on. Because that faith in Jesus Christ is your relationship with Him. The amount to which you're able to believe and then act on the things that Jesus Christ prompts you to do in your life through the Spirit is the degree that your relationship will grow and be strengthened. I think those completely correlate. And repeated day in, day out over the course of your lifetime, by the end of your life, you will know him. John 17, 3, 3, 17, those are both good. One one of them, hopefully one of those, says, For this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God in Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent. That's eternal life. That's heaven. Knowing Jesus Christ. That's it. To know him is to love him, to love him is to serve him. How can you know somebody you haven't served, haven't believed in, and haven't acted accordingly to, acted on behalf of as a representative of him? When Peter says to Jesus, Jesus' question, will ye also go away? And his answer is, To whom shall we go? Thou hast the words words of eternal life. That's so important. Where would we go? Jesus has the words of eternal life. No, no other offering, at least that I've experienced, gives us the words of eternal life, gives us that peace. I'd argue that like monks probably have a good degree of peace in their life, and that like a degree of Buddhism does for sure. And there's there's definitely like levels to the amount of peace which you can gain in your life, but eternal life, peace that leads to eternal life is only in and through Jesus Christ, because his name is the only name whereby man will be saved. That's the message today. Thanks for watching. Tune in next week. Hope you like my new uh new background. This is gonna be it for the next couple episodes, so maybe I'll spice it up. I don't know.