Lesson from Church Sunday

To quote a friend and co-worker: "You can be as good as gold and still bust hell wide-open"

~Tim O'Dell

This blog is not intended to offend a single person in my life. However, if it leads anyone to examine their beliefs, then that is awesome!

Michelle
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http://www.davidfoster.tv/?p=475
Sunday, October 7, 2007

Today @ The Gathering we continued in our current series:7 Lies of Organized Religion,with installment #5 which says, "As long as you are sincere, all roads lead to God."

One of the major problems people have with Christianity is its exclusive claim, its truth-claim that Jesus Christ is indeed the way, the truth, and the life, as He claimed. People believe that this seems too narrow and contradictory.

So in order to avoid facing the reality, we've invented new realities which religion has embraced and expressed in sayings like, "It doesn't really matter what you believe as long as you are sincere." Or, "If you go to church as much as you can, be as good as you can, you might have a decent shot at heaven." Or,"If your good outweighs your bad, you are in."

Issues of eternity are way too important to be left up to these irrational, religious excuses to avoid the truth.Today we talked about the three reasons why what we believe really matters.

1. There's such a thing as truth and non-truth. This introduces us to the law of non-contradiction. A thing can't be true and not true at the same time. If you ask a woman, "Are you pregnant? " She's either pregnant or not. You either are or you are not. You are not just a little bit.
2. There is such a thing as trust and non-trust. Trust is built on truth. If there is no truth, then there can be no trust.

3. There's such a thing as love and non-love. A thing is either loving or non-loving. Love can't exist where there is no trust. And trust can't exist where there is no truth. So you can understand why truth is so important to building an inner life.

4. Maybe the most important, there is such a thing as eternal life and judgment. No matter how much we try to avoid it, all of us face the end of our lives. At the end of a long road, there is a debt that we all have to pay; the debt of dying a physical death. And yet even Jesus said that the gift of God is eternal life.

We also dealt with the 4 Freedoms: the freedom from the fear of death, judgment, being abandoned, and being forgotten.