I Need God To Clean Out My Cultic Experiences
There was stuff that happened to me from the time I was nine or ten through when I was a teenager, a metaphorical shelf that I kept stuffing with things that were unclear in my mind and emotions, a shelf that might someday break and over which I have no real control. I want to hand over my “shelf” into God’s care.
As a child I was given a print Bible by my congregation, one of the prizes for memorizing a verse, and I asked my mom to read Genesis for me because I am visually impaired. We got through the first 15 chapters of Exodus, then life got so busy for her, and she didn’t have much time available for intensive reading.
When my folks stopped going to the First Congregational Church it was right at the point when I was very interested in Sunday School. Our teacher was going to compare the evolutionary view with the Bible’s view, investigating which had the superior claim on our origin story—but we quit going to church. My dad invited my two elder brothers to hunt and fish with him, or to just sit around watching football on Sundays and share family time. I couldn’t fully participate because of my vision, so I ended up twiddling the dial of the radio, hearing gospel ministers on the radio proclaim the gospel, and then I got into listening to the Adventist H.M.S. Richards and his brothers, and Garner Ted Armstrong of the Worldwide Church of God, and dabbling with different prophetic schemes. Between this mixture of strange prophetic formulas and all the historical books and novels I was assigned to read in high school, I became afraid of being beaten, of having my fingernails ripped out for observing the Sabbaths and Feasts of the Lord, and for having a testimony that was different from those around me.
I think now of Jesus’s warning that after His disciples had done everything that He had commanded them, to call themselves unprofitable or unworthy servants. If a master has a servant who comes in from the fields, would He thank that servant? Would the master have the servant sit down and eat the meal, or would the master command the servant to make ready the meal, while the master eats and drinks? And then the servant can eat and drink after the master has relaxed.
I have been afraid to witness and answer people’s questions all this time. I want my trust and enjoyment of safety with Jesus Christ to increase. That will improve my relationship with Him. I know this shelf of unresolved beliefs and memories stuffed into the back of my mind will break one day, and that will be a significant improvement, and God will get me through the experience.
No, the bricks haven’t come through the window for observing the Sabbath as I feared they would for years. In fact, I have quit doing “keeping” the Sabbath. I take some time out over the weekend to study and to attend services Saturday or Sunday, wherever they’re held, or wherever I can hear the Word preached, and often take some time out during the week, like on a Wednesday night, to search God’s Word or read a book or join in a Prayer and Bible Study Fellowship, etc.
I’ve prayed about this, but please could you pray sometimes for me to further turn this over to God for His leading and corrective intervention and intercession so I can tread the path to the brighter and clearer day? Of course now I have audio Bibles on cassette, Braille Bibles, audio Bible downloads, small devices and digital players to play and read them on, and study materials.
When will I be a friend to Jesus Christ? A better friend? I always pray to God, “You’re a friend and Father to me. There’s nothing wrong with Your relationship to me. The problem is in how I relate towards You.” I’ve got unclear areas, defects of character, and shortcomings.
—VIA EMAIL
Response: Yes, I will pray. Have you listened to the whole gospel of John? My suggestion to you is that you just focus on listening to John as He describes the Lord Jesus and His ministry. Then, I suggest that you listen to the book of Galatians every day for a month and then the book of Colossians and Ephesians and Hebrews. I also suggest that, if you haven’t yet, that you listen to our Former Adventist Podcast episodes through the book of Romans. We are still in Romans 12, but those first chapters are rich and tell the whole story of who we are, of what God did, and of how He keeps His covenant promises and transforms us with His Spirit.
Here is a link to our introductory episode on Romans; it is number 271, and we are currently on number 331. Here is the link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/former-adventist/id1482887969?i=1000663063435
You have ingested a cocktail of various cultic interpretations—I know I don’t need to tell you that! But these interpretations are very hard to get out of our brains because they literally build the synaptic framework of our worldview.
The gospel is simple—and those cultic teachers you listened to obscured the pure gospel and mis-taught the old covenant and the law. The bottom line is that all of us have to come to the place where we see that we simply cannot do anything to get ourselves saved. We have to learn to TRUST God as Abraham did. He believed God, and that was counted to him for righteousness. Now the Lord Jesus has told us what to do: “Believe in the One whom He has sent” (John 6:29).
I’m sure you know all of this, but the reality is that entrusting ourselves to the Lord Jesus and knowing that He has fulfilled every single shadow of the law by being the One those laws prefigured is hard to do when we learn that God expects us to honor a day or to perform good works to stay in His grace.
The actual reality is that, like the thief on the cross, we have nothing to offer God. Not even our sincerity and good works recommend us to God. We have to trust the Son and His sufficient, shed blood on our behalf. When we realize that we are by nature dead in sin and unable even to seek God much less to please Him (Romans 3:9–18), our response is to be thankfulness to Him that He is revealing Himself to us (Romans 1:18–20) and asking Him to give us the faith to entrust ourselves to His finished work.
When we believe Him and trust ourselves to His sufficient sacrifice, realizing that He has destroyed the curse of death into which we are born, He makes us new. He teaches us to trust him and to thank Him for His finished work.
Our trust in God is all that’s needed—and He Himself gives us that faith (Ephesians 2:8-9). He gives us new life; we pass from death to life, and He places His Spirit in us. Going forward our marching orders are to walk as we came to know Him: by faith!
I pray that the Lord will show you how to entrust yourself to the Lord Jesus and to rebuild your worldview with the truth of His word.
I really do not know anything that will “work” except the continual commitment to ingesting God’s word in context consistently. Even if you’ve listened to those books before, I suggest that you do so again, asking God to reveal to you what is real and true and to protect you from deception. He Is faithful, and He will change your view of life and reality little by little as His word rewires your brain. Truly. I speak from experience—and I know how HARD it was for me to figure out how to experience God—and I wanted to! It was constant immersion in His word that rescued me from my own brain.
I understand your feelings. I so get it.
Do Adventist Pastors KNOW what the Bible says?
Do Adventist pastors know verses have been obfuscated to protect their doctrine? For example: we were told to follow Leviticus 11 instructions, but we were never told about Leviticus 20:23-25. And if you connect that passage to Peter’s vision of the sheet full of animals, it becomes clear that chapter 11 is no longer in force?
How can a “godly” minister not know this, and still preach it?
—VIA EMAIL
Response: What a great question. I really think the answer varies from one pastor to another. Some simply do not know what the Bible says. If they read these obscure verses (and I suspect many do not—or that if they do, they read them once and then ignore them), they explain them to themselves from their perspective of the Adventist worldview. As an Adventist I was continually “interpreting” confusing verses from a great controversy, physicalist perspective. I would “spiritualize” passages that didn’t make sense and say that they referred to some abstract spiritual reality rather than the clear commands or descriptions given in Scripture. I HAD to make these things fit the Adventist worldview.
Have you read Dale Ratzlaff’s book Truth Led Me Out? In it he explains how many Adventist leaders admitted to him that they didn’t believe (or couldn’t explain) the core Adventist doctrine of the investigative judgment and what it says Jesus is doing in heaven. Yet they advised Dale to teach it on the basis of tradition if he couldn’t anchor it to Scripture, and one leading Adventist told him that his problem was that he was “too honest”. If you haven’t read the book, it is truly fascinating. It’s a fast read and keeps one turning the pages. I highly recommend it:
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