Which Jesus?
August 5, 2019 in Sovereign Grace Ministries
Years and years ago (circa 2007, can you believe it’s been that long?), this site started as a place to post some of my personal musings about our experience in a Sovereign Grace Church. (If you’re wondering what our experience was like, you can click on the tab above that says, “Who We Are And How We Got Here.”)
This was way before the problems with Sovereign Grace Ministries were EVER discussed publicly anywhere on the internet (except for some random comments on an inactive blog I eventually ended up preserving here). I had no idea other people might have felt the same as we did. Certainly, I had no idea anyone had had far worse experiences they wanted to talk about.
But life has a way of happening. Things change. People grow and change. Guy and I have grown and changed.
Just like Josh Harris, we have evolved in our thinking. Just in a way that’s basically the polar opposite of how he’s changed.
If you’re someone who has had a bad experience in your Sovereign Grace Church…if you’re someone who has stumbled on this site because you’ve been reading about Josh Harris’ recent self-proclaimed apostasy…if you’re looking for information about the Sovereign Grace organization’s historical issues…you’ve still reached a safe place where you can share your story, ask questions, or post your thoughts. Feel free to look around. Click on the “Stories” tab above. Read the sermon transcripts and see for yourself what used to be taught within SG churches.
HOWEVER, I feel like i need to explain where we are coming from nowadays. I’ve gotten more than a few emails asking why certain comments didn’t get published. I owe the readers here an explanation.
I seem to do my best thinking while responding to comments. Today, someone posted a comment and I wrote a response, and my response really captures where my thinking is right now. It might also help people understand where we are coming from nowadays. So I’m going to repost it below.
Again, full disclosure, it’s long and more than a little bit rambling. But hey, it’s the best I’ve got right now. So here goes…
This was posted in response to a commenter who asked,
Do honest and authentic Christians still come here to share their rich faith in Jesus Christ, and to rejoice in his faithfulness?
The short answer to your question is, for me, a resounding “Yes.” I find a lot of encouragement in many of the comments.
A more nuanced answer to your question (“Do honest and authentic Christians still come here to share their rich faith in Jesus Christ, and to rejoice in his faithfulness?”) is, it depends on which Jesus you’re talking about.
See, I’ve been on my own faith journey of sorts over the past several years. I think all believers are, actually, if we’re honest. And my journey has taken me some interesting places. I grew up in a really sweet, wholesome, mindlessly fundamentalist small-town Christian culture, going to the same Bible-believing Evangelical church and attending Christian schools the whole time. Some of the mindlessness about Christianity was a product of the era. I know I sound like an old lady these days, but I’m constantly telling my kids, things have changed TREMENDOUSLY in the past 20 years or so. It used to be that if someone claimed the name of Christ, there were certain things you could assume about their priorities, their attitudes, their lifestyle. Nowadays, that has all changed.
But anyway, that’s how I was raised, and for a number of years into adulthood, Guy and I sort of floated along, attending a couple of what were becoming increasingly bland seeker-friendly megachurches. Their statements of faith were all kosher, the preaching didn’t raise any alarms. But both Guy and I were feeling frustrated in a sort of nameless, formless way.
Then, through a series of random events, we found ourselves attending a Sunday evening service at a charismatic church. I was very yielded and eager…and on that night, I had some sort of experience. For years, I have sought to figure out what that experience was. Was it God? Was it my own brain? Was it the product of my eagerness?
Anyway, after that experience, I was hooked. We left our bland megachurch with nary a backward glance. Guy and I rather quickly became ENGULFED in the charismatic church. Despite all my Christian education (one class shy of a minor in theology, decades of decent teaching) there were a LOT of theological things that I didn’t understand at the time, things about hermeneutics in particular. I also rather deliberately shut my mind off. This was encouraged.
For awhile, things were great. The pastor and his wife were viewed as inaccessible celebrities in the little world they’d created, yet somehow Guy and I were singled out for attention. We felt empowered by and optimistic about the name-it-and-claim-it teachings. I mean, yeah, my old doctrinal muscle memory would nag me sometimes about how unbalanced it was to use some random opening greeting from 3 John (“Beloved, I wish above all else that you be in good health and prosper”) as the foundation for basically everything we were taught about how it was always God’s will to heal people and bless them financially. But I silenced those voices, in large part because I’d always come back to my experiences in the church.
After a few years there, though, things seemed to get wackier. Pretty soon, I couldn’t quiet the nagging thoughts that kept bubbling to the surface. I started to do some serious reading and research. Even though I kept assigning my experiences a great deal of weight (like, because I had such a great experience, the teachings can’t be coming from a totally wrong place), I also started critically examining the name-it-and-claim-it stuff.
It was this questioning that eventually led us to leave our charismatic church and find Sovereign Grace. We were drawn in by SG’s purported commitments to charismaticism and “sound doctrine.”
Anyway, warning, seemingly random segue here, but I promise it will come back around…
Mormonism has actually been an interest of mine for years. I educated myself on this religion when I first encountered some friends who seemed so Christian in their behavior but were actually LDS. I had to know how their beliefs differed from my own. I ended up learning so much about Mormonism. (It’s hilarious, when the Mormon missionaries roll up to our doorstep on their bikes, Guy will sigh because he knows I’m going to invite them in, feed them, and have a rousing discussion with them. More than once, they have actually admitted I know more about the doctrinal intricacies of their faith than they do.)
The entire foundation of Mormonism is Joseph Smith. Was he a legitimate prophet? Did an angel come down and give him a new revelation? Why do we accept or reject his claims?
Anyway, how this connects to my faith journey is, one day I was reading about hermeneutics and it suddenly occurred to me: If I’m willing to assign my own personal experience so much weight so that I can put up with teachings that are incompatible with the “whole counsel of God” as it is revealed through a straightforward reading of scripture, then why is it OK to reject Mormonism?
Along those same lines, how do we determine whether something is truly from God? What standard do we use to determine if Jesus is actually speaking to us?
People will talk about meeting Jesus, being encouraged to love like Jesus, encountering Jesus. And all of that is fine and dandy…EXCEPT, why do we reject some Jesuses (like the Jesus of Mormonism, or the Jesus of Marianne Williamson and the New Agers) but not others?
The standard answer has always been, you run it by the Bible. If it contradicts the Bible, if the Jesus you are encountering is different than the Jesus portrayed in the gospels, then your Jesus is a counterfeit Jesus…the product of your own imagination or maybe even of satanic forces.
Likewise, if you are a Christian and feel like you’re being told to do something and you think it’s Jesus/God telling you to do it, the standard answer has always been, does this behavior contradict what is commanded for believers in scripture? If it does, then the desire to engage in that behavior is coming from your unregenerate old sin nature, not the Holy Spirit/God/Jesus.
Nowadays, though, that standard answer is somehow not satisfactory to a lot of people. Nowadays, even otherwise earnest, committed believers think it’s “mean” or “harsh” to say a straightforward reading of scripture condemns something like homosexual activity.
I blame the seeker-friendly movement for some of this wimpiness about the Bible. Many of us have been conditioned to accept incorrect beliefs about evangelism and what “church” is supposed to be. We have been conditioned to see Jesus and church as products we need to sell to people. Our megachurches offer up endless sermons about having a better family, or managing your money better, or improving your marriage. You can find food banks and addiction recovery groups. What’s confusing, of course, is that there’s nothing exactly wrong about any of those messages or services…but all too often, it’s something of a bait-and-switch at best, where our churches first hide the hard truths of the gospel – truths like, you’re a sinner, lost, an enemy of God, dead in your sins, completely helpless and unable to save yourself or make yourself right with God – and only slip the less appealing parts of the Christian faith in later. At worst, the harder stuff is NEVER mentioned, because we’re afraid our “converts” will be turned off to a Jesus that might make demands on their lives or ask them to change anything.
One rationale for the church’s avoidance of addressing specific sinful behaviors is that many of us have also somehow bought into the idea that “all sins are equal in God’s eyes.”
Really, this was actually HUGE within SGM and is why child molesters were regarded as no worse than someone who was struggling with unforgiveness. There has been this TOTALLY STUPID embrace of thinking that Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7 somehow means engaging in adulterous sex isn’t any worse in God’s eyes than merely thinking about it. Or that being gay – engaging in homosexual behavior and building your entire identity upon the foundation of your sexual proclivities – is no worse a sin than gossiping.
Yes, it is true that all sin separates us from God. That was Jesus’ point in Matthew 5-7, that no one among His Jewish listeners could ever hope to follow the law well enough to please God. Jesus was establishing their need for a Savior, someone who was both perfect man AND God, someone who could keep the law perfectly in both outward AND inward ways.
But Jesus was not saying that if you tell a lie, for example, you are going to experience an equal amount of destructive consequences as the person who sins sexually. Later in the New Testament, Paul explains that sexual sin is in a separate category (check out I Corinthians 6, for example). Sexual sin does unique harm to the sinner.
I’m NOT saying there’s somehow not grace for the person who has fallen sexually. Obviously there is! (Because the Bible says there is…)
But – to bring this rambling comment back around to clearly address the original question – if someone reads here and is asking about “refreshment from Jesus” or whatever, sure. Absolutely! We can talk about Jesus and celebrate forgiveness and God’s love all day long. As long as we are clearly discussing the Jesus of the Bible and God’s love as it is portrayed there, balanced equally with God’s perfect and incredible holiness and our utter abject failure without Christ to approach God and meet His holy standards.
You see, my faith journey has led me to resoundingly reject anything that does not go with a straightforward reading of scripture. You wanna celebrate gay pride like Josh Harris did this past weekend? Do so somewhere else. Wanna talk about how Jesus provides salvation and grace for us? Sure, absolutely – as long as I can tell there’s a balance to your comment and you aren’t leading people astray to assume the Bible has somehow suddenly become OK with behaviors it clearly deems sinful.
Because…I mean…why do you believe anything about Jesus, if you feel like rejecting some of scripture? If you’re basing your Jesus on some experience you had, how do we assess whether it’s the Jesus of the Bible or the Jesus of your imagination that was affected by that bad pizza you had last night? This is where I applaud Josh Harris for at least (for now) pretending to be intellectually consistent in his rejection of the Christian faith because he’s rejecting the Bible’s sexual ethic.
Anyway, I’ve reached a place in my own personal walk with the Lord where I’m not going to coddle people here by shying away from standing up for the truth of scripture. Even if those people have been badly hurt by their Sovereign Grace pastors’ misuse of scriptures. Truth is truth. The good news of Jesus is quite literally all we have between us and an eternity in hell. We get the good news of Jesus from the Bible, and pretty much only the Bible (because all other subjective stuff has to be judged BY the Bible or else it is worth no more than Mormonism). Life is too short and the times are evil.
It’s not “mean” or “harsh” to say so. If anything, it’s the least kind thing you could do, to affirm someone in his or her journey to hell in the interest of being nice.
© 2019, Kris. All rights reserved.
Hey Survivors, I thought you might like my latest Tweet poking fun at SGC/Mark Prater.
https://twitter.com/ThouArtTheMan/status/1478215365180022784
@Todd. I have to admit that I looked on the Sovereign Grace web site to see if they really listed a Hush Fund.
“Development Fund”. Riiiight.
I remember the enlightening moment when I discovered that “Mission Fund” didn’t really mean the funding of “missions” as would be commonly understood in the rest of the evangelical community. To them it meant, “Building Fund”.
In hindsight, over the 20 year period that I was in their Mob-run Family of Franchises, what they said and what they did were not one-and-the-same. Masters of misdirection. They would have made a much larger fortune in politics. (Instead they decided to stink up the church world.)
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Do not believe the best. Believe the evidence. And there’s plenty of that.
But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will also be false teachers among you, who will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing swift destruction upon themselves. Many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of the truth will be maligned; and in their greed they will exploit you with false words; their judgment from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep. For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of darkness, reserved for judgment; and did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a preacher of righteousness, with seven others, when He brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; and if He condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to destruction by reducing them to ashes, having made them an example to those who would live ungodly lives thereafter; and if He rescued righteous Lot, oppressed by the sensual conduct of unprincipled men (for by what he saw and heard that righteous man, while living among them, felt his righteous soul tormented day after day by their lawless deeds), then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from temptation, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment, and especially those who indulge the flesh in its corrupt desires and despise authority. Daring, self-willed, they do not tremble when they revile angelic majesties, whereas angels who are greater in might and power do not bring a reviling judgment against them before the Lord. But these, like unreasoning animals, born as creatures of instinct to be captured and killed, reviling where they have no knowledge, will in the destruction of those creatures also be destroyed, suffering wrong as the wages of doing wrong. They count it a pleasure to revel in the daytime. They are stains and blemishes, reveling in their deceptions, as they carouse with you, having eyes full of adultery that never cease from sin, enticing unstable souls, having a heart trained in greed, accursed children; forsaking the right way, they have gone astray, having followed the way of Balaam, the son of Beor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness; but he received a rebuke for his own transgression, for a mute donkey, speaking with a voice of a man, restrained the madness of the prophet. These are springs without water and mists driven by a storm, for whom the black darkness has been reserved. For speaking out arrogant words of vanity they entice by fleshly desires, by sensuality, those who barely escape from the ones who live in error, promising them freedom while they themselves are slaves of corruption; for by what a man is overcome, by this he is enslaved. For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world by the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and are overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first. For it would be better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than having known it, to turn away from the holy commandment handed on to them. It has happened to them according to the true proverb, “A dog returns to its own vomit,” and, “A sow, after washing, returns to wallowing in the mire.”
— 2 Peter 2:1-22
It is showing that one of Nathaniel Morales convictions has been set aside with a retrial that started this week.
Go the thewartburgwatch.com
Look for the post dated 2/16. For some reason this site is not letting me post links.
Morales should be convicted with the retrial, but you never know. Would be sad if Morales got off on some technicality.
Update
Go to their February 28 post for a later update. The Wartburg Watch.
Kris,
I would very much like to speak to you about something. If you don’t have my number, contact me at dee@thewartbyrgwatch.com Total confidentiality as always.
Dee
whoops
dee@thewartburgwatch.com sorry about that.
Funny how Sovereign Grace crap still pops up in my life. Brother and sister-in-law went back to attending the local SGC because “that’s where our friends are”. Daughter still struggles with how she views men and relationships because of the crap that was taught. My wife and I still struggle with lost friendships, the anger of being controlled, lied to, etc.. I haven’t commented on this site in a very long time. Good to see that it’s quiet. That means SG churches continue to die and their influence has waned. I don’t say that out of anger towards them, but in happiness that the church has caught on to the cult and no longer view them in high esteem. God will judge these leaders in eternity. I’m convinced of that.
Somewhereintime
Nice to see you posting.
Sad you have family still attending SGC due to that being where their friendships are.
There doesn’t seem to be that much new with SGC. A number of churches have left the “family” of churches including one person who was head of SGC for a period of time. He formed a new association of former SGC churches.
One of C.J. Mahaney’s latest claims is his blaming Satan for all he has gone through. I guess in C.J.’s mind he couldn’t even conceive of the idea that it might be his own actions that caused all of this. That isn’t suprising.
I am sure SGC will stay around in some form for a while. I am sure it is down to the C.J. Mahaney loyalists. Sadly, SGC’s money situation has stabilized last I looked at it.
A number of churches have left the “family” of churches including one person who was head of SGC for a period of time. He formed a new association of former SGC churches. who is this person you are referring to…and does the new association have a name?
Just Curious
Back in May 2020 Brent wrote about Trinity Fellowship Churches. These are the folks who left the Sovereign Grace Churches movement.