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 . . .