Learn from History?

The more things change, the more they stay the same way!

 

It is ironic that we use this proverbial saying on a daily basis, but yet we do not use it with the philosophy of religion or church. Let me expound on this and explain. But please remember that you may not like it.

 

Life is continuous and our concept of living has been nonchalant and indescribable. We are easily content in our lives, we do not like change, we live like today will be the same as yesterday.

 

This reality of the same old life routines has been passed down from generation to generation without any questions being asked. We are a people that either have been told something and believed it and practiced it or we just have been feed an idea that has just stuck with us and we have not questioned it.

 

This is where we have needed to question where the beginning is and what it is! Now, right here we need to set up some parameters. One, this paradigm, I believe that this is very particular to the United States,or even to the western world of influence.

This concentration of influence was by the ideology of religious freedom coming from England and the surrounding area. The waves of people leaving the countries of persecution were then very open to the minds of new ideas and new concepts of the new world.

 

This began as soon as they settled in the new land. Religious leaders were soon recognized and were used as inspirational motivators to “keeping the faith” in the harsh and wild wilderness. These leaders were pioneers in the foundation of the “new world” as the new religious norm.

 

As the new world expanded and as the religious world went with it, it needed some structure and direction. This is when the pillars of the religious world became know as the institutional church’s and their standards of pillars of belief .

 

Some of these leaders were D. L. Moody,Charles Finney,George Whitefield,John Wesley,R. A. Torrey,Billy Graham,and Gideons.

 

These men are now the ones that we have followed in their ideological philosophies of “religion” for almost 300 years. In fact we have expanded and made it even more diverse than God could even imagine, so much in fact that we now have over 35,000 different denominations in the U.S..

 

I am not pointing fingers at these men but ourselves!! You see, we left it to them to interpret the message of the bible for us and they ran with it. They had the advantage in that they were the primary owners of bibles. It was taken for granted that these men had said they had read it and are now giving us the cliff notes of it, in their sermons, but it took the understanding away from us to search the scriptures ourselves. We have for centuries been lazy,non caring because all we had to do was go to church on sunday to read the bible from the pastor. The statistics of recent surveys have really pointed this out about the so called christian and their behaviors with reading the bible.

 

The one and prominent message was “you must repent and be saved therefore you will go to Heaven, or you will go to Hell”. These traveling men and evangelists of the bible were very effective in their ministries so that their was organization to form a “church” to further the “message”..

 

The downside to this is that we took this for granted without checking for truth! Our lack of desire to test for the truth has led us astray. We have all been guilty of not understanding God’s internal purpose of the bible for us.

 

It was not just the concept of us being saved from our destruction from the “knowledge of good and evil” but God’s desire was to have the same scene from Genesis 3, but His people(adam and eve)and now us to commune with Him and them to him. This was God’s desire from the time God created the World.

 

Let your imagination just fly and put yourselves in this picture of us saying that we had chose the “Tree of Life”, and try to visualize what this would really be in God’s eyes!!

 

Just to let you in on a secret the answer is in Revelation 21:1-8!

 

See if you can see the message of the whole bible as one intent of God.

Take a snapshot with your spiritual camera and see what it takes a picture of!

 

Could it be that all God wanted from us was and is to be with us?! Awesome!!!