Increasing Faith

I recently started a facebook group as a supplement to this site.  In that group I wrote an introduction of myself, so I decided to include one hear as well.  Thank you everyone who has visited this site. By way of explaining my motivation for starting this site, I want to give you a bit of my history for those who do not know it.

First though, I must warn you. I tend to have a very odd, somewhat British sense of humor. This might make some of you a little uncomfortable. You may read something and think, that was not funny at all. Don’t worry, you do not need to feel obligated to laugh on my account. I laugh at all my jokes enough for the both of us.

My Story:

I was born at a very young age into a Christian home. Around 4 or 5, I became a ticket holder Christian. By this I mean, I became one of the many Christians who believe and teach that accepting Jesus is about getting a ticket to heaven.

There is a passage where Christ is talking about this in Matthew 7:21-23. He talks about many who will come and say Lord, Lord, and Christ will tell them to be gone from him. So just naming the name of Christ is not enough?

No it is not, we need to be making him Lord of our lives. That is a whole different paradigm which I hope to explore more deeply here in this group. In my blog post about appearances, I wrote about Christ converting me out of the legalism that saps our faith. This conversion took about four to six years. The conversion from ticket holder to Christ follower has been much longer and is still ongoing. We will explore this more in a future post.

Now I have gotten ahead of myself, so lets go back. I last left myself at around four or five old when I had claimed my ticket. For the next approximately 10 years, I was a pretty good kid. You can ask my parents, I was an angel. Ok, not an angel, but I was pretty low key on the trouble side.

I would love to tell you that this was because of my relationship with Christ, and wanting to follow him, but that would be a lie. The reality is, I was afraid of the consequences of being bad. Living for Christ to avoid consequences is far different than living for Christ because you love him.

Yes, I had my ups and downs, but for the most part, I was a good kid at school and at home. Around 15 or 16, after a lifetime of being taught that God had a specific will for my life plan and a specific person for me to marry, I began praying for that to be revealed to me. Every night for 2-3 years, I would pray for God to reveal both to me.

At 18, I started dating my wonderful wife, and I also felt the call into ministry. I am now married 10 years, and have 4 kids, but that is a story for another thread. So at 18, I went off to Bible College and got a degree in Pastoral Ministry.

A major dilemma developed during my years at Bible College. It became very apparent that I was not a gifted preacher. Through various preaching classes, and a few trial runs in some churches, (my apologies to everyone who suffered through this) my longest sermon was thirteen minutes. I also would break out in hives.

What a crisis, God you called me to ministry, but now I am Moses with no Aaron, what the heck am I supposed to do God? With no clear answer, I have spent the last 10 years in the secular workforce. I hear of people being fulfilled in their jobs, but have never experienced it. I was made for something else, just not sure which puzzle my piece fits in.

For the past two to three years, God has been tugging on me again. God has been tugging and saying, “Your time is coming soon.” No, I did not hear an audible voice, it was just one of those things, you just know when God is speaking with you. I still talk back to God and say, “But I cannot preach,” in classic Moses fashion. God comforts me though, because he reminds me that he never asks more of us than he has given us the ability to do. How cool is that.

So now I am left with great anticipation, what do you want me to do God? “Take it one step at a time.” So my facebook group is a first step on this journey. I really have no idea where this is going to end, this past week, God has been pulling even harder, so I had to take this step. In fact, this post is step two.

I hope you will continue on this journey with me and we can walk it together. Thanks for reading and feel free to comment.