[Trapped]

Just as an addendum, having looked at the questions from the latest fireside chat.....

The questions actually show just how desperate the situation in the local churches is. "Desperate" is probably the word I would use to describe the emotions behind many of the questions.

Uh oh. I used the word "emotions". How unspiritual! But somehow, the Biblical record is of a God who has emotions, and His Son who had emotions, and His people, made in His image, who also have emotions. So it's important in our human life to pay attention to emotions, because they can reveal a lot about what's going on inside of us.

Question 1 from FSC #13: "As I go on with the Lord, I see more and more how my natural man is only fit for death and burial. It feels like He only made me in order to replace me with Christ. Which to me sounds like He only loves Christ, and not me. So, what is the Lord referring to, when He tells me He loves me?"

This is a great representative question that probably resonates with a lot of church kids. The God church kids were shown was a God who loves all the parts of them that are ------ not them! All the parts of them that are Christ. All the parts of them that have been replaced with something else. But the parts of you that are still you? "Bleechhhh," God says. Apparently.

But this is so dead wrong. The love of God is the overarching landscape of the entire Bible, and yet we've got saints who are trying to have a relationship with this god who doesn't love them in the way they were made to be loved by Him.

I didn't listen to the co-workers' response just yet as I've had my fill of listening to them for now, and I hope they didn't bunt that incredibly basic and fundamental question, but instead really leaned into it to try to begin to dispel what has been decades of this kind of impression imparted to young ones. But the fact remains that the existence of the question itself shows the impression that has been given in the local churches for a long time: God doesn't wholly love you; He only loves the you that is not you.

It's tragic. And it actually is a reversal of the gospel. It's an inside-out representation of who God is and what He is.

Many of the other questions could easily have been written by people with my moniker, Trapped, because that's how many of them come across. People who are trapped. Unable to make a move without permission. Bound up by rules and practices that are unscriptural. Collapsing under the weight of the imposed requirements of the church life. Many of them show that these believers are wrestling internally with all the ways they don't measure up, rather than resting in the knowledge that they are accepted by God, and Jesus has done it all.

This knowledge, that this is the situation with the believers in the local churches, is why this forum exists. Because the trash is what these believers are buried under, and are desperately digging to come out from under so they can breath again. But in this case, they can't dig out from the trash unless they know what the trash is. So we process the trash for those who make their way here and read, and who can hopefully be helped by finally having words put to what's been oppressing them for so long.