Spiritual Autobiography

So there I was, a Christian boy growing up and fighting my battles with sin. Sometimes I won and sometimes I lost. Unfortunately, I wasn’t getting much help from my church. I am pretty sure that my Presbyterian pastor was not even a Christian. How is that possible?

Remember when I was writing to you about science and the Bible? It isn’t really a struggle between science and the Bible, it’s a struggle between bad science and bad theology. But that’s another story. Many of the professors in seminary have come to believe the bad science and this has resulted in bad theology. Because of this, you can go to seminary to learn to be a pastor and … loose your faith! As a matter of fact, if you pick the wrong seminary, they will go out of their way to help you loose your faith!

If you decide that some parts of the Bible are not true, that they are fables, then where do you draw the line? At what point in the story do we stop reading fables and start reading history? At some seminaries they go so far as to doubt the resurrection of Jesus Christ. They also don’t believe in the virgin birth. To them Jesus was just a great teacher who died as a martyr. They teach that His followers started up a story about Him being raised from the dead, it caught on, and here we are today. When these guys and gals get out of seminary, they usually don’t tell their congregations exactly what they do and don’t believe, because they know that this would make some people angry enough to either fire them or leave the church.

There is only one human being who was born without this sin nature inside of Him. His name was Jesus of Nazareth. You’ve probably heard that story about the virgin birth, right? Well, it’s an important part of the larger story of Jesus’ life.

If sin is somehow passed on physically from one generation to another, the male is the one providing the contamination. Why do I think this must be so? Because in the one case where we took a human father out of the equation and the Holy Spirit impregnated the woman directly, the resulting baby was born without sin.

Do you know that none of Jesus’ brothers believed in him until after the resurrection? I think I may know why. Could you imagine having Him as an older brother? Never got mad, even once. Always kept his room clean. Always did his chores. Never stole a cookie. How many times do you think that Mary and Joseph said, “Why can’t you be more like your older brother?” He would have been a warm and loving older brother. You would always know that He would be there for you and help you in any way He could. But you would also have that example to live up to. Yikes!

The only reason Jesus is able to save us is that He was without sin. If he had sinned, when He died, He couldn’t be dying for my sin; He would have been dying for His own sin. But because He was absolutely pure God was able to put every sin Mark Cummings ever did or will do on Him. All of the stolen candy bars and cookies. All of the unclean thoughts. Jesus took all of that as a burden and He died on the cross to pay the penalty for my sin so I wouldn’t have to pay for it by going to hell. And on the third day God raised Him from the dead as a sign that His sacrifice was acceptable. If you don’t believe those facts, then you are not a Christian. You may be a church member, you may be a pastor, you could even be the Pope, but if you don’t believe those simple facts you are not a Christian.

I don’t think my pastor was a Christian. He never really talked about this stuff. He never really preached about all the stuff that was in the Bible. He was never any help to me at all, spiritually. And then, I think it was in my junior year, he left to go pastor another church. And when he did that, he stole something. No, it wasn’t a candy bar. It was another man’s wife. He had been sleeping with the organist. When he left, he divorced his wife and she divorced her husband and they got married. How sad is that?

Now I don’t want you to get confused here. He could have believed all the facts and had the Holy Spirit living in his heart and still cheated on his wife. Believing in God gives you extra power in your fight against sin, but it doesn’t guarantee victory. We can use all the help we can get. I wish I had a truly Christian pastor, who had the Holy Spirit flowing along with the words he spoke from the pulpit. That would have been a big help. Alas, it was not to be.

Let me tell you how bad it got to be at our church. I was attending Sunday school pretty regularly in high school. Do you know what we studied during my junior year? The president had appointed a study group to report on racism. The resulting report was like five hundred pages long in this huge paperback book. And that’s what we studied. And we never once, in the whole year, had anybody open a Bible and comment on what the Bible has to say about this kind of thing. Nobody ever mentioned sin in human nature and what it does to us. Don’t get me wrong, I’m against racism, but if you are going to study it in Sunday school, you should at least mention God once in awhile, don’t you think?

In the beginning of my senior year one of our adult teachers suggested that we study the sermon on the mount. Actual Bible study in Sunday School. What a radical concept! I had just recently discovered the sermon on the mount on my own and I was fascinated by the thought of spending a couple of months discussing it in Sunday school. So we started to study the sermon and I learned a whole bunch of stuff that really helped me in my life, and … no, wait, that’s not what happened.

The adults put the question of what we would study up to a vote, and the kids voted not to study the sermon on the mount. I could have just screamed. I don’t remember anybody ever opening a Bible, even once, throughout my high school Sunday School years. (The sermon on the mount is Matthew 5-7 by the way.)

To be continued . . .

Spiritual Autobiography

I've had to clean up the posts dealing with my autobiography. What follows is from the beginning until the last post in the month of May. Some of you may have read all this already. If so, just go on to the next post.

So here’s my story. This is my spiritual autobiography.

I died as I walked down the hill into my neighbor’s yard. I was probably about four or five years old at the time. When I say that I died, I’m trying to describe something that happened inside of me. At the top of the hill I had what I came to call “that spring time feeling” in my heart. By the time I got to the bottom of the hill it was gone. What had just happened to me?

Moments before my mom had asked me to help her by drying the dishes. As you will come to see, I had two of my most important moments connected to my mom doing the dishes.

It was after supper on a summer day. And it was during what is now called the baby boom. That meant my entire neighborhood was simply crawling with little kids. We were everywhere. And I could hear a whole bunch of them, just down the hill from our house in our neighbor’s back yard. I could hear the laughter and the loud voices. And I wanted to go play. No way I wanted to dry the dishes. Drying the dishes would take time, and my time was limited because I couldn’t stay out after dark. I wanted to go right away. So I told my mom that I really wanted to go and play.

Mom had a very interesting response. I’m sure it was an impulse thing for her. When you become a parent, you seem to be a godlike person to your little kids, but the reality is that you are just a grown up doofus doing the best you can not to mess up your kids too badly. And my mom had this little bit of inspiration and she decided to use psychology on me. She didn’t say, “Listen, buster, you get you little buns over there and grab a dish towel or else!” Instead she said, “Mark, I don’t know what’s getting in to you. You used to be such a good boy. You were always willing to help me.”

Well, that had no impact on me whatsoever. So much for psychology. I could hear those kids having fun and I wanted out of there right away. So I said something like, “Can I go and play or not?” And she said something like, “Well, if that’s what you really want to do (sigh), then I guess I’ll just have to dry the dishes without your help.”

No problemo! I was out the door and down the hill as quick as I could run. The old guilt trip didn’t work while I was in the kitchen. The reason that it didn’t work was that I hadn’t reached the age of accountability yet. The age of accountability is a theological term that refers to that point in your life when your conscience first begins to function.

The conscience is probably the highest functioning part of the human brain. It is one of the last things to develop. I am very much aware of this because I work with mentally retarded adults. My staff are always ready to forgive the lower functioning people who can’t speak or anything. A person may get mad and try and bite them, but they don’t get mad back because they know the person trying to bite them doesn’t know any better.

But they struggle with the more advanced people who can speak fairly well. I would say that the better a person can speak, the more likely staff are to have their feelings hurt when that person misbehaves. The reason they get their feelings hurt is that they think that the person they are dealing with actually has a functioning conscience but is just choosing to ignore it. For most of the people I work with there is no conscience to ignore. They are just like little Marky was running toward those playing children. Guilt? What guilt.

This is why most of our people should not have been taught by their parents to say “I’m sorry.” They learn to say it, but mostly they don’t really know what it means. If you are really sorry, you aren’t going to do it again. But I have people who say “I’m sorry” as they are actually in the act of doing something they shouldn’t be doing. I have one guy who says he’s sorry even when he hasn’t done anything wrong.

I gotta interrupt to tell you a funny about this guy. The three most likely things he has to say are, “I’m sorry,” “I want to go to the hospital,” and “I’m moving out!” He wants to go to the hospital because he likes attention. He threatens to move out if something is going on that he doesn’t like. So this one time I actually have him in the hospital. He has fallen and hurt himself, and I’m trying to get him up on the x-ray table. But he doesn’t want to climb up there, and he goes into one of his default modes and says, “I wanna go to the hospital.”

I look at him and say, “Dude, you are in the hospital!” So he holds real still and thinks about that for a moment. I’ve got him there! He is in the hospital! So he’s holding still and thinking, and then he goes to a different default mode. He looks up at me and says, “I’m moving out!”

I have another funny x-ray story. I’m in the hospital with this woman who lived in one of my homes. She’s getting an x-ray. Now this woman is about my age, and if she were quiet, you would have no way of knowing that she was developmentally disabled, but if she talked to you, you would instantly know that was DD. So the x-ray guy looks at me, and says, “Sir, would you like to help your wife get up on the table?”

As if that wasn’t bad enough, when we go back to the waiting room to wait for the x-rays the woman is muttering under her breath (which she does a lot). I lean a little closer to her, and I could just swear she is saying, “My husband? I could do better than that!” (She wasn’t actually saying that, but it makes a pretty good punch line.)

Anyway, to get back to the story, here I was at the top of the hill ready to go down and play with the other kids. And all of a sudden I can hear my mom’s voice in my head. “Mark, you used to be such a good boy.” And for just a moment, I become aware of the fact that going back to help mom is really the right thing to do. But I don’t do that. I head down the hill. And by the time I got to the bottom of the hill the springtime feeling in my heart was all gone.

For the first time in my life my conscience had begun to function. Conscience is when that little voice in your head tells you that something is wrong even if there is no consequence and indeed, you seem to be getting away with whatever you are doing. You can’t really sin until your conscience comes alive within you.

Paul talked about this in his letter to the Romans, chapter seven. “I was once alive apart from the Law; but when the commandment came, sin became alive, and I died.” The Law can be either the written laws in the Bible or the law of God written on the human heart, which is the conscience. When the commandment came (the conscience became activated) sin became alive (I realized that what I was doing was wrong) and I died (the springtime feeling in my heart went away).

What was that springtime feeling in my heart? It was the presence of God, like a melody in my soul. I think all really little children have this inside of them. Most of us don’t remember the first time our consciences came alive and the springtime feeling died, but whether you remember it or not, it happens to everyone. I think God allowed me to remember so that I could use that memory in teaching others.

I thought about that springtime feeling in my heart from time to time as I went through grade school. I really wondered if there was some way to get that back.

. . .

I was sitting in the brown chair in the living room. I was somewhere between the ages of 5-7 I think. And this thought comes into my head. What do I have to do to take care of this hell business? I wasn’t afraid of dying right away, but I remember thinking that I could get hit by a car or something. It just seemed to make good sense to get this thing taken care of, if only there was some way to do it.

Now here’s an important point. I didn’t realize it at the time, but throughout this little story that I am telling you, my mind was being influenced by God. With time, you can begin to sense when your brain is being influenced by a spiritual source. This letter is an example of that. I’m telling you this story because I have a clear sense that it is God’s time for me to tell it and God’s time for you to hear it.

My mom was in the kitchen washing dishes, do I decided to ask her about this whole hell business. “Mom, what do you have to do to make sure you make heaven and miss hell?”

Looking back, I can clearly see that God was guiding my mom as she answered. I know this because of the answer she gave me. She nailed that sucker. She said exactly the right thing. And the reason why that was so amazing is that my mom wasn’t even a Christian yet. She was a Presbyterian, but she wasn’t a Christian. That happened some years later, when I was in fifth or sixth grade.

This is what she said to me. “You have to believe that Jesus is the Son of God. You have to believe that He died to pay for your sins. And you have to believe that God raised Him from the dead.” If you went to school and got a master’s degree in theology, you couldn’t put it any better than that. She absolutely nailed it.

Most people, when if they think about heaven and hell at all, assume that God puts all the good stuff you did on one side of a scale, and then all the bad things you did on the other side of the scale. If the good outweighs the bad, then you get into heaven. And since we tend to think of God as a kind of a nice guy these days, we all sort of assume that He will be grading on a curve of some kind. Hitler in hell? No problem there. But not little old me. I’m not perfect, but I’m not that bad.

If God hadn’t been guiding her, I’m pretty sure that’s the answer my mom would have given me. And that would have been the wrong answer.

So here I am sitting in the brown chair, and thinking about what my mom just said to me. I have to believe three things. I have to believe that Jesus was the Son of God. Well, I remember learning about that in Sunday School, and I had no problem with that. I believed that Jesus was the Son of God.

I also had to believe that Jesus died to pay for my sins. I had also heard about that in Sunday School, and I already believed that. No problem there.

Lastly, I had to believe that God raised Him from the dead. Now this was an amazing moment. You’ve probably seen the cartoon image of a little devil on one shoulder, and a little angel on the other shoulder, both of them whispering to you at the same time? I think something like that was actually happening to me at that moment.

Believe that God raised Him from the dead? I remembered thinking, that’s a big one. That’s a lot to swallow. Of course that whole line of thought makes absolutely no sense. If He is the Son of God, and if God is the supreme being, then it wouldn’t be a biggie for God to raise Him from the dead. Believing that shouldn’t have been a problem. But I remember the thought coming into my head that this was a pretty hard thing to believe, and asking myself, “Do I really believe that?” All of that came, I’m convinced, from the spiritual equivalent of having a little devil on one shoulder whispering in the one ear.

But as I was sitting there and asking myself if I believed it or not, an angel, or God the Father, whispered in my other ear. “What would you rather do? Believe that God raised Him from the dead, or go to hell?” Well, that seemed like a no brainer. I decided right then and there to believe that God raised Him from the dead.

Now, looking back on this with an adult mind, once again that doesn’t make much sense. Either God raised Him from the dead or He didn’t. You don’t decide to believe something is true so that you won’t go to hell. A thing is either true or it isn’t, whether you are going to hell or not. So my thinking wasn’t the clearest here, but you have to remember, I was about six years old at the time.

What was really happening was that God was speaking to me and calling me to Himself. And I was responding to Him. I was believing what He wanted me to believe. And in doing that, I was beginning a relationship with Him. From that moment on I was born again.

. . .

So what did it mean to be born again? What impact did it have on my life? Did it restore that springtime feeling permanently? Sadly, no. I have experienced some of that springtime of the heart, but not as much as I should have over the years. But that’s another story.

When you believe the message of Jesus Christ, the Spirit of God comes to live in your heart. Your awareness of the power and the presence of the Holy Spirit might be very dim, but He is in there working to influence you. And He did influence me throughout my childhood and adolescence.

The main impact of that influence seems to have been in keeping me from getting too deeply involved with sin. That’s not to say I didn’t sin. I did and do sin. No one reaches perfection in this life. But there were certain lines I refused to cross. I had a whole bunch of my friends walk across those lines, but something inside of me kept me from going with them.

I can remember several instances of this. 

When the weed became available, very late in my high school career, the little voice said don’t go there. Alcohol came on the scene, but the little voice said don’t go there.

There are two memories I have that really kind of sums the whole thing up. I remember one day walking down the street and thinking about the Boy Scout Law. Every Tuesday night we would recite the law at our meetings, and I wondered if I was living up to it. I didn’t want to be a hypocrite. So I started going through the various parts of the law and comparing them to my life. As I was doing this, I realized that I was doing something that was going against the flow of popular culture. Being a Boy Scout was definitely not cool, and as a society, we were headed toward the moral swamp we find ourselves in today where almost anything goes, and anyone who disagrees with that is a self righteous moron. So I had to ask myself about that. Was I willing to be different? Was I willing to be weird? I decided that I was. I remember thinking, if I am the only person in the world who tries to lives these values, so be it. I’m going to do the best I can.

The other memory happened in the same living room of my house where I got born again, although I wasn’t sitting in the brown chair at the time. I was standing up and thinking about things, and I decided at that moment that I would never drink until I was of legal drinking age and that I would be a virgin when I spoke my wedding vows. All of this was due to the Spirit of God living inside of me, influencing me.

. . .

While I was more focused on right and wrong than some of my peers seemed to be, I wasn’t without sin. Far from it. The main sin I remember is stealing. I became quiet adept at stealing cookies from the cookie jar at home. This required some careful manipulation of objects. There was this open space where our living room, dining room, and kitchen were sort of connected. And if mom wasn’t in the kitchen, she was usually in the living room, where it would be very easy to hear what was going on in the kitchen.

So this is what you have to do. As you approach the cookie jar (I remember we had one shaped like a squirrel) you must softly, slowly pull the lid until it touches one edge of the opening of the cookie jar. Then you can very slowly lift the lid, keeping it against the edge of the opening, without making any noise. If you just try and lift the lid straight up it is too easy for you to bump the lid against the side of the jar, and that would bring you on to the screen of mom’s radar in a hurry. So you had to open the jar in just the right way or you were busted.

Stealing cookies. Big sin. Bwaaaa ha ha! I was the king of evil! Okay, maybe not. But let’s take a minute or two to think about stealing cookies. There were four kids in our family and even though my mom worked her butt off in the kitchen, there were never enough cookies. As a matter of fact, now that I think about it, even though I am 56 years old, I’m pretty sure that there are still never enough cookies. But I digress.

Stealing a cookie from the cookie jar doesn’t seem like a big deal, and it wouldn’t be, if all I was doing was stealing a cookie from the squirrel shaped jar. But I wasn’t stealing from the jar. I was stealing from my family. Every cookie I scored was one less for someone else (except for my older brother who taught me how to get the lid off the jar quietly and was usually present at the time of the heist). He always got his share and then some. But it meant that baby brother and baby sister didn’t get their fair share. It also meant that my hardworking mom and dad didn’t get their fair share either. So yes, it was the wrong thing to do, but I did it anyway.

And I kept doing it, until I graduated into shoplifting candy bars.

. . .

That’s right. I shoplifted candy bars. Mr. I will obey the Boy Scout law and remain a virgin until I got married was a shoplifter. Until one day I had a crises of conscience. Interestingly enough, it was in the same place I was walking when I found myself thinking about the Boy Scout law. When I was thinking about the Boy Scout law I was walking toward the store (but not to shoplift). When I had my crises of conscience about stealing, I was walking away from the store with a stolen candy bar in my pocket. Both incidents happened on the same block, only walking in different directions. Weird.

I am pretty sure that the candy bar crises of conscience happened before the incident where I was meditating on the Boy Scout Law. I remember walking along, not feeling very good about myself, when all of a sudden this thought came into my head. “If you are a Christian, you CAN NOT steal candy bars.” Stealing candy bars was something a Christian simply shouldn’t do. And from that moment on I never stole another candy bar – although I continued to raid the cookie jar.

Once again, I am sure that the thought that came into my head came from the Holy Spirit living inside of me. This force inside of me kept me from crossing some lines, and in some cases, called me back after I had already crossed over a line.

So what’s this stealing candy bars all about? Why would anyone do that? Have you ever thought about that? Why don’t we all do the right thing all the time? Most of us know what the right thing to do is, but we don’t always do it. Why? What’s happening here?

What’s happening here is a birth defect. I remember the birth of both of my children, and I remember counting fingers and toes and looking for abnormalities and sighing a sigh of relief that they had turned out “normal.” But I also knew that normal included a severe birth defect: a human nature tainted by sin.

This is the way King David expressed it. “I was born a sinner – yes, from the moment my mother conceived me.” (Psalm 51:5) How did this happen to us? What’s wrong with us?

Here is an interesting thing. As I was typing this, I called up the internet to go to a program that would help me remember what Psalm that passage was from. Yahoo news in on my home page. And what did one of the headlines say? “Behind Bullying: Why Kids Are So Cruel.” The story was about this poor Irish immigrant girl who was treated so cruelly by her classmates that she went home and hanged herself. So what did the article have to say? It turns out that bullies want admiration, status, and dominance. How about that! Problem solved! Question answered!

I don't think so. The real question is, why do bullies want admiration, status, and dominance so badly that they are willing to commit emotional torture to get it?

The answer is that something absolutely awful happened to our ancestors in the garden of Eden. Before I explain what happened in Eden, I need to say a few words of about Eden, Adam and Eve, and science and the Bible. The popular position seems to be to consider the early chapters of the Bible as fables. I can’t begin to deal with all of the issues involved in this in a letter, but let me just say this much. Science now tells us that we are all descendants of one woman. They can tell this by looking at our DNA. How amazing is that?

Jesus believed in a literal Adam and a literal Eve. Me too. And now science has confirmed the Eve part of the story. When we finally get all the facts together, and when we finally understand those facts, we will find out that there is no real conflict between science and the Bible. Anyway, that’s enough about that. I had to address it because I was going to say something about Adam and Eve, and if you don’t believe in Adam and Eve, then I would be wasting ink.

So what happened? We all know the story. Eve ate the forbidden fruit first (it doesn’t identify the fruit in the story, but it might indeed have been an apple). Then Adam ate of it. So they both sinned. They both did a sin. That was bad. But that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing was that once they did a sin, they became sinners. Sin entered human nature and has been there ever since. It’s passed on from generation to generation.

Remember those stories I told you about how the Holy Spirit influenced me to keep me from doing some sinful things? Please believe me, something inside of me wanted to do those things. This is sin in human nature. This is what is wrong with us.

The really neat thing about all of this is that the Bible perfectly explains what’s going on in the world. We know what the right thing to do is because we are made in the image of God and we have consciences. We don’t always do the right thing because of sin that is embedded into human nature.

. . .

Everybody gets a chance to be a hero. Everybody gets a chance to fight a monster. The monster is inside of you. It is the power of sin, the inclination of the human heart to do evil. God expressed it this way. “Sin is crouching at the door, and its desire is for you, but you must master it.” God said that to Cain, and not long after that Cain killed his younger brother, Abel.

I wonder how many people who are incarcerated who are not really what we would think of as career criminals. They are just normal people who went a little too far, who stepped over a line. Every once in awhile we have someone around here convicted of embezzling. I always feel like I can identify with those folks. They aren’t out robbing liquor stores or mugging people. But once upon a time, they gave into temptation and “borrowed” some money. They fully intended to pay it back, but then they noticed something. No one noticed the money was gone. That became one of those moments where sin was “crouching a the door.” And you know what? They gave into it. They “borrowed” a little more. Then a little more. And eventually the were so deep in hock that they couldn’t pay it back. And then they get caught and go to jail. I wonder how many of these people stole candy bars and cookies when they were kids. Maybe none of them had the crises of conscience that I had that made me stop when I was “just” stealing “little things.”

Here is a good philosophy of life. The entire world is an insane asylum. Everyone is crazy. It’s crazy to lie, it’s crazy to be mean, and it’s crazy to be selfish; but we don’t see it as crazy because it’s normal. Everyone does it. So the whole world is a madhouse, and the only people who get locked up are the people who are just too unbalanced mentally or who cross over certain lines and get caught. But the difference between the ones who cross over the lines and get caught and the ones who don’t isn’t nearly as big as people realize. Everybody is a sinner. We are all in the same boat. Who is worse? Someone who once upon a time sold some drugs, or a man who betrays his wife and children by having an affair that leads to a divorce that results in little children being emotionally scared for life? I think the second thing is worse than the first thing, but we send the first person to jail and the second person gets on one of those truly disgusting day time TV shows where they can share the sordid details of what they did with millions of other brain dead people.

This is the thing we need to tell young people. There is a monster inside of you and you have to fight it. Some of you won’t fight hard enough and you may do terrible things. You may loose your temper to the point where you actually kill someone. You may embezzle some money. You may destroy your wife and children emotionally. Nobody completely defeats the monster. Everyone sins. But you have to walk as close to God as you can so that He can give you the strength to at least fight off the worst effects of this evil thing inside of you.

I’ll bet you half the people in prison right now wouldn’t be there if they had read that one little paragraph and really took it to heart.

This is getting pretty heavy, isn’t it?

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