[aron]

Originally Posted by Ohio

All of us, I suppose, spent our earliest days disillusioned by religious traditions and hypocrisy. I was just plain bored ...I came across a few brothers who had the joy of Jesus all over their faces. Call it re-formation, re-storation, re-covery, re-vival, re-newal, re-juvenation, or re-whatever ... I wanted some of it!.

There is something to be said for the charismatic experience. We went from being back-bench pew sitters to first-row shouters. Fist-pumping, neck-vein bulging, bug-eyed shouters. So yeah it was fun.

All In the beginning things were great. So energizing in the Spirit! Life changing! But gradually, almost imperceptibly, the life-power of Jesus got replaced by loyalty and allegiance ...

At first it was loyalty to sitting in the front row shouting the name of Jesus, along with the amens and hallelujahs. We didn't pay too much attention to all the "poor Christianity" and "degraded Christianity" and "fallen religion" and "devilish Christianity" and "Babylon" and "daughters of the harlot". But gradually "God has saved me from the world" meant "Christianity" as much as it meant anything else. "I'll never go back anymore" became aimed at "religion" as much as the fleshly life.

And when the fun ran out, our brains had become pickled. When the "charisma" dried up and our meeting lives became forced and rote and functional, at Tuesday night prayer meeting and Friday night college meeting and Saturday night home group meeting, all we had left was allegiance to "I'll never go back anymore".

Titus Chu made a comment in passing many years ago that it was wrong for the children of God to be forced to take sides. I never forgot that principle because it seemed so right within. It was kind of like forcing children to pick which parent they like during a divorce.

The reason we got divorced was because we got married. We should have remained pure virgins for Jesus. But we got betrothed to a cause, an organization, a "process of recovery". So we made our bed, then we had to sleep in it (Rev 2:22). For a while anyway.

Again, we are supposed to be a separated people. From the world, from sin, from selfish living. We died with Christ and rose with Him too. We are not supposed to be separated from each other. Yet the very premise of the "recovery" predicated itself on this.