Returning to the God of our fathers....

As a little girl, I learned about Jesus at my parents' knee.  I listened as they talked of spiritual things and sang as they lifted hymns up to heaven.  I prayed simple, childlike prayers and believed with a simple, childlike faith.  I went to church and Sunday school, said grace before dinner and prayed before bed.  I was a Christian......or at least I was to the best of my knowledge.

I grew up and grew away......I would have adamantly acknowledged Christ as my Savior....believing in Him with everything in me, however, the choices in my life did not reflect that belief.  I lived for myself, with an occasional nod to my Creator.  I wanted to be both a "Christian" and like everyone else in the world.  I worshiped the God of my fathers.....but I hadn't made Him my own.

As with all prodigals, I was brought low by my choices.  When the scales finally fell from my eyes, I fell to my knees and sought God....truly sought Him for the first time.  Rather than relying on my fathers' faith, I began to earnestly seek the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

And I have never quit seeking Him.

Through the years I have walked and I have stumbled, crawled and walked again.  God has gently brought me along, refining and remaking me.  And as He has continued to mold and shape me I have begun to question....never God, but every ritual and contrivance of man.  Why do we sit in pews, pass out grape juice and crackers and have "communion" once a month?  Why does every church I've ever been to follow the same script.... Announcements, Prayer, Praise & Prayer, Worship (3 songs), Prayer, Sermon (1/2 hour), Communion (if its the first Sunday of the month) Hymn (1st and last verse), and then Prayer?  Why do we sit in the same seats, chat with the same people and get involved with the same programs?    Why do we look like every other church in every other town in every other state?  And why are we just as lost and hopeless as the world around us?  The answer?  Man.

Man has created rituals and systems and programs with which to measure holiness.  However, rather than holiness they create emptiness - which brings me back to the question......why?  Why do we "worship" the way that we worship?  Why do we follow conventional form and function rather than search the scriptures to find how the first "church" followed Christ?

We're returning to the God of our fathers.....therein lies the reason we follow the rituals and contrivances of man.  Instead of seeking to follow the Christ of the Bible we are following the forms and conventions of the Roman Catholic Church, from which the Protestant Church was born.

The first church was a church of simple faith.  They gathered in homes, had everything in common and their numbers grew daily.  They broke bread together, ministered to each others needs, worshiped, shared news and were filled with the Holy Spirit.  They became the body of Christ, bound by chords of brotherly love.

That simple faith was slowly and completely replaced with the pageantry and ritual that is the Catholic Church.  Simplicity gave way to the worship of saints, a human priest once again became a go-between between man and God, and the sufficiency of Christ was replaced with penance and purgatory.  And thus the world was thrust into an age of darkness.

The Protestant Church was the rebellious child of the Catholic Church.  They wanted throw off the conventions of their Mother church, but never completely shed the deeply ingrained rituals associated  with their faith.  And the older the Protestant church becomes, the more they become like their parent.

Our quest for holiness should lead us to the simple faith of the Bible not to the rituals of man.  We should seek to return to the simple faith of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob not the pageantry of man-made religion.  We should ask why....and then we should search the scripture for the truth.

We have to return to the God of our true fathers.....not the God of our church fathers.  "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you."  Matthew 6:33

Open Season

That's it!  No more pizza deliveries! 

Many years ago, our dearest friends came down with the influenza.  Well, not our friends exactly, rather their four children came down with the flu, at the same time.  They had been sick for the better part of a week and the whole family was exhausted and worn.  Sir Knight and I decided that we would do what we could to ease their burden and delivered homemade "take and bake" pizzas to their home - tucked away up a winding road on a country hillside.  The weather was sloppy - a wet spring snow had just fallen and the roads were soft with the spring thaw.  After dropping off the pizzas, as we made our way down their somewhat treacherous hillside, I rolled our Landcruiser.   Sir Knight and I crawled out of the truck (thankfully we had left our children at home), trekked back to our friend's house and called a wrecker.  The insurance company totaled that truck and to this day, I still don't like to drive to our dear friend's home in the middle of winter!

Pizza's ready to deliver

Last Friday, Sir Knight, the children (all five of them), and I packed into our Landcruiser on yet another pizza run.  Friends (on the other side of the county) had been through the wringer.  The husband, a logger, had been injured on the job in the spring and had been off work since.  Immediately after the injury, he had been advised to rest and then had gone through extensive physical therapy, only to find out that his ankle had been completely destroyed - to the point that no amount of physical therapy could help.  Finally, he'd had his ankle surgically repaired, and was now recuperating, unable to put ANY weight on it for the next two months, before again attempting physical therapy. 

The scene of the crime

 

And so, with the Landcruiser filled to the brim with children, pizza and smore's dip (complete with graham crackers for dipping), we set off for the small mountain town about a half an hour away.  In our defense, we missed four of them.  Four deer had jumped in front of our truck before the fifth one finally succeeded in its mission of self destruction.   I'm not kidding - that spike jumped in front of our truck before we saw it!  We felt the bump and saw the deer fly past the passenger side windows before we even knew what hit us!  Our front right bumper was ripped up and rubbing on the tire, so we pulled over to assess the damage.  Miss Serenity ran over to the deer to verify it was dead and found it incapacitated but still breathing.  Master Hand Grenade grabbed his knife and quickly put it out of its misery.  We tore the broken part of the bumper off, hopped back in the truck and continued on our way - arriving at our friends with a bloody knife to clean and deer hair to scrub off our hands.

After a lively debate about whether we should go back for the backstrap, we settled into a wonderful evening of pizza, fellowship and s'mores dip.  We drove home with one headlight, a funky turn signal and deer hair sticking out of the grill.

As Sir Knight and I  mulled over the evening's events, we finally found a common thread - pizza!  We have decided that next time we take a meal to ailing friends, it will have to be lasagna!