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Rediscovering Jesus – Rediscovering the Bible (Part 4)
I hope you have enjoyed this little series on the Bible. I have one final post to share with you. 🙂 The Bible is history…the story of God and the people He created. The Bible is prophecy…some of which has been fulfilled and some of which is still to come. The Bible predicts a Savior and then reveals Him to us. It shows us our value as God’s creation and encourages us to seek after the God who made us. It demonstrates God’s incredible grace, love, forgiveness, mercy, and faithfulness. But even more than this, the Bible claims that it is alive, powerful, and able to change hearts, all by…
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Rediscovering Jesus – Rediscovering the Bible (Part 2)
Fresh out of homeschooled high school, and because our cultic group rejected traditional higher education, I was pursuing some online college-like classes through Bill Gothard’s Institute. The stress of assignments, deadlines, and a demanding English teacher was hard enough. But, the impossible task ahead of me put me over the edge. Two of my classes asked me to go point by point through the Basic and Advanced Seminars and use the Bible to prove them true. At first, I genuinely tried to complete the assignments, but I struggled to find verses that actually matched the things Gothard claimed. Eventually, as deadlines loomed and tasks piled up, I grabbed our trusty…
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Rediscovering Jesus – Rediscovering the Bible (Part 1)
When people of other religions become Christians, they leave behind their old religious books, the Quran, the Book of Mormon, etc. and start reading the Bible. It seems obvious. But, how do you leave behind the Bible and then start reading the Bible? How do you locate the truth when it’s supposedly found in the book that was used to tell you lies? How do you unravel lies about the God of Christianity without leaving Christianity altogether? These are legitimate and difficult questions. Unfortunately, the Bible can be used to say just about anything. Grab a verse here and a verse there, or just half of a verse, and you…
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The Start of Something New
“How does one get back to Jesus…truly? I would take that. Blog soon?” I’ve been pondering this question for the last few days. The question was inspired by a discussion on a Facebook group for former Bill Gothard students. I had asked these precious people to tell me why they chose to walk away from Christianity and/or the church…or why they chose to stay. They opened their hearts to me…so very honestly. Many of them left Gothard’s organization just to be re-injured by a normal church where they thought they were safe. The hurt is real. And so are the questions, frustration, confusion, anger, and sadness. After all the talk,…
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An Uncomfortable, Awkward Topic – Spiritual Abuse
This book, “The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse,” that I am reading…wow, it’s eye opening! I resonate with so much of it from my own life experiences. When I started this blog just over four years ago, I thought I was writing to people hurt by legalistic systems like Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Principles (the place that wounded me). But as I wrote and heard back from my readers, I realized that many of you had never heard of Bill Gothard. And yet, we still struggled with similar false ideas about God and performance based faith. At first I thought maybe Gothard had subtly influenced more of Evangelical Christianity that…
