I have a friend who, a few years ago, found himself falling in love with a divorced woman. No big deal? Well, it was for him. He had been brought up by a fundamentalist father who belonged to a fundamentalist church that taught fundamentalist doctrines that must never be questioned - and he’d been taught that a woman who divorces her husband and then remarries, commits adultery.
So for the first time in his life my friend began to read his Bible with an open and questioning mind. And he made some startling discoveries; many of the things he read were in direct contradiction to what he had been taught. And that offended him.
It offended him because the leaders of the little community he had grown up in could not possibly have missed the things he was seeing for the first time. Had they lied to him? Were they lying to each other? Or were the ‘teaching elders’ conniving to keep the ordinary members in the dark? Rightly or wrongly that was his conclusion, and so he began to ask awkward questions, and he was branded a heretic, and ‘cast into outer darkness’ – where he bumped into Jesus and discovered the truth. Jesus love and accepts us warts and all.
Have the courage to believe that if you don’t already, and your life will never be the same again.
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