Hearing God

Did you know that God speaks to YOU? He loves you and like any loving parent, He desires to have a relationship with you.  And guess what?  Communication is key in any healthy relationship. Jesus said His sheep know His voice. What are some of the ways Father speaks to us? This is what Loren discusses in this podcast.

It's All About Relationship

A new episode of Untangled is up. Almost everybody has heard the line, "Christianity is not a religion, it's a relationship." However, amidst all the programs, expectations, and requirements it's pretty clear to most people it's a religion. We've lost sight of the most basic truth that God our Father created us for the sole purpose of relationship. That being the case, we believers should be the most relational people on the planet - and the fact is, in many cases, we're not. This is what Loren discusses in podcast.

Movie Monday!

It's the second Monday of the month. Do you know what that means? It's time to talk about movies! Loren is joined by his buddy Movie Man Bob to talk about super hero movies, the upcoming X-Men movie (Days of Future Past), the Lone Ranger, and J.J. Abrams' last Star Trek movie (Into Darkness) and the much anticipated Star Wars Episode 7.

Listening To Your Good Heart

A new Untangled podcast is up. 

Did you know the desires of your heart are good?  When Christ came into your life and gave you a new heart He also placed within that good heart the desires that He wants you to have. That's not to say every desire you have is of God.  But the desires of your new heart are. God most often speaks to us through our hearts.  That's why it is so important to listen to our hearts.  The challenge is that following Christ by listening to His voice within our hearts we'll often be lead on roads that won't allow us to conform to the agendas of others.  Loren is once again joined by author Jim Robbins to discuss this topic which is also found in Jim's book Recover Your Good Heart: Living free from religious guilt and the shame of not good-enough.

You can order Jim's book or Solo Piano CD here: http://www.robbinswritings.com/

Recover Your Good Heart

A new Untangled podcast is now available.  I'm really excited about this one.  I spoke with author Jim Robbins about his book Recover Your Good Heart: Living free from religious guilt and the shame of not good-enough.  

The "gospel" many are preaching today looks more like the Old Testament way of relating to God than the new way Jesus intended.  We pressure Christians to be good and ignore what the Scriptures say about their restored hearts.  Pressure to be a good Christian only produces shame and guilt.  But what does the Bible really say about your heart?  This is what Jim and I talk about in this podcast.

If you'd like a copy of Jim's book just click on the link  http://www.robbinswritings.com

God is Love

I'm really excited!  I just launched a new podcast called "Untangled."  The focus of this podcast is untangling people from the lies religion tells us about God and ourselves.

This first episode focuses on God being love.  Many people have a wrong picture of who God is.  Sure we talk about God being love but few live in the reality of that.  God is not the demanding, angry, arrogant being that has been presented to the world by so many.  This episode is all about getting untangled from the lies we've been told about God's heart for us.  I hope you enjoy!

You can listen to it here on the player or you can click the link and go to the Untangled website and leave comments.

You can subscribe to this podcast by going to the website and clicking on the iTunes link on the right.

(By the way, my daughter composed the music.)

http://untangled.podomatic.com/

A Cursed Religion

Hey!  Here’s an idea!  Let’s start a religion that sucks the life out of people.  Let’s pull a “bait and switch.”  Let’s promise people life but give them a big ‘ol cup full of death.  Let’s promise people the cure for the disease that ails them and then inject them with an even bigger dosage of the deadly disease.  Let’s let people taste little bits of life here and there to keep them coming back but saturate them in death so they won’t even know the difference.

My friends, this is modern day Christianity.  The other day while scrolling through Facebook I ran across a post a friend shared titled, “An 11-Step Religious Guide to Sabotaging Your Life” by Jim Palmer.  One of the ways to sabotage your life listed was, “Focus on behavior modification, checklists, do’s and don’ts, appearances, obedience, and keeping the rules when it comes to living your life.”  Then following it was, “Make everything black and white.”  As one who once adhered to all eleven of those ways listed to sabotage my life up until fourteen years ago when Jesus began untangling me from all this junk, I excitedly reposted this list on Facebook.  But it occurred to me later, when many of my Christian friends read the statements like the ones I quoted they’d be puzzled, shocked, or even offended.  “So you don’t believe in right and wrong?!”  They’d think I’d gone off the deep end.  They’d think I’m advocating living a life of immorality; that I joined the “Church of do whatever you want to.”  How do I know this?  Because that’s what I would’ve thought over fourteen years ago.  

There is a horrible thing that has taken place in Christianity.  A belief that was once simply about following Jesus and living in His life and joy was high jacked and became a cursed religion; a religion of death.  How did this happen?  Simple.  Christians exchanged the life of Christ for a religion of morality.  Christianity, for the most part, is no longer rooted in Christ, rather it is rooted in knowing right from wrong.  This is a far more dastardly thing than most people realize.  Most people think, “Okay, so we keep the rules but we need to fall more in love with Jesus.  Got it.”  But what they fail to realize is it was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that brought the entire curse from which Christ came to redeem us upon humanity!  The Christianity of do’s and don’ts is actually causing people to eat the fruit of the same tree that cursed all of humanity.  It is a religion of death!

I want to emphasize something here.  I think when most people hear the words “The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” what they actually hear is “The Tree of the Knowledge of EVIL.”  But that’s not the tree that brought the curse on humanity.  It was the Tree of the Knowledge of GOOD and evil.  Yes!  Knowing good from evil is part of the curse! 

At this point many are scratching their heads.  “Aren’t we supposed to know good from evil?”  The answer to that is actually, “No.”  We were created to only know God.  We were supposed to live in relationship with Him and He would be our everything and meet our every need.  That includes that He would be the One who shows us the path to walk and the way to live.  We were created to be like children living in worriless freedom through our complete dependence on our ever so loving Father who cares for our every need.

When the serpent tempted Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil he said, “You’ll be like God, knowing good from evil.”  In other words, “You won’t need Him anymore.  You will be your own guide.  YOU will be able to tell what is GOOD and what is Evil for YOURSELF.  You will no longer be dependent upon Him to guide you.  You will be able to live independent of Him.  You will no longer need to have any kind of relationship with Him.  You will be able to do it all yourself.”

So basically what happened is humanity turned to God and said, “We know right from wrong.  We got this.  We can manage ourselves.  You can go away.”  We see this same attitude in the Hebrews when God delivered them from slavery in Egypt.  God wanted to speak to them and have a personal relationship with them but they were afraid.  So they turned to Moses and said, “You go find out what He wants us to do and we’ll do it.”  Once again we see the curse at work.  The people we’re saying, “We want to be our own counselors.  We want to manage our own lives.  We want to do this ourselves.   You go get us the rules so we’ll know right from wrong and we’ll follow them.”  This is what Moses did and as Jesus pointed out, they couldn’t keep the rules.  It was too burdensome for them.  Yet they kept trying.

And this is also what Christianity did.  Jesus came and was nailed to a tree because it was a tree that brought the entire curse upon humanity.  He became the curse and removed it from the world.  God said, “Alright, the curse has been broken, the penalty it demanded has been paid so now this whole knowledge of good and evil thing is off the table.  You no longer need to know your sin.  I’ve removed it.  Now we can freely be in relationship.  The very thing I’ve always wanted with you!”  But as the decades rolled by Christians began to say, “You know what, we got this God.  You just tell us what to do and we’ll do it.”  Like the Hebrews, they picked out people from among them to go hear from God for them and tell them what to do. They took the letters beautifully written by the apostles to the early churches, the gospels, and the writings of the Hebrews and turned them into a book of rules.  “No relationship with God needed, we’ve got the list of do’s and don’ts. We can manage this.  But of course we’ll still honor God with our lips for giving us these rules to live by.”  This is why Paul, when addressing those in the early church that were attempting to make it a requirement that Christians be circumcised in order to follow Christ wrote, “Mark my words! I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all.”  In other words, “If you’re going to try to justify yourselves by following a set of rules then Jesus came for nothing.  You think you don’t need Him.  You’re still under the curse.”

Having been raised in a Christianity in which the Bible was a rule book and it was all about morality, I’m sure many are pondering, “Then how is it we’re supposed to live?”  We’re supposed to live out of our relationship with our Father, in complete dependence upon Him. Jesus gave us the very picture of this.  Notice how Jesus often broke the rules of religion and society and went against social norms – which completely offended the Pharisees.  “Oh, so we’re supposed to be rebels!”  No, because at other times He flowed with the rules and adhered to the customs of His day.  “Wait!  So what’s the pattern here?  Tell me the formula so I can go write it down and follow it.”  There is no formula.  (This is what drives religious people CRAZY!)  Jesus lived in a daily, moment by moment relationship with His Father doing whatever He saw Him doing.  Jesus wasn’t trying to set rules NOR break rules.  He was of a completely different and foreign mindset to the rest of humanity.  He lived in close relationship to His Father.  Jesus wasn’t His own guide and He didn’t adhere to any particular set of principles.  He only listened to His Father.  His Father was His everything.  So one day His Father would show Him to attend synagogue. (Such a good Jewish boy!)  And the next day He would show Him to go talk to a Samaritan women at a well. (Bad Jewish boy!  Bad!!!)  Jesus was directed by His love for His Father.  Jesus was not under the curse of the rest of humanity.  He didn’t know the world of right and wrong and do’s and don’ts, He knew only His Father’s Kingdom.

Jesus, being the first born of many brethren, showed us the way to live.  He made the way for us also to live like He did, solely in relationship and continual fellowship with our Father; the source of life.  But sadly, many Christians have sold out this beautiful relationship for a piece of cursed fruit.  They’ve chosen to live out of principles, obligations, rules, and codes of conduct that they control so they can be their own governors rather than in a joyous relationship with a loving Father.

Now can you see why the Christianity of rules and obligations is a religion of death?  That’s not who we were created to be.  When we choose to live under codes of conduct or sets of principles we choose to live cursed.  We aren’t pointing people to Christ, we’re pointing people to the Law, which as Paul pointed out so clearly, leads to death.  Jesus is held up but then when people draw near He is exchanged for the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Now you know why so many Christians are nasty and mean and look like they’ve been sucking on sour lemons all day.  They’ve been sucking on something far worse!  They’ve been sucking on the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  And since sucking on that fruit leaves you cursed and empty so much of Christianity just goes on sucking.

Loren Rosser