Good response, NFNL. I would expand on these two sentences:
Quote:
Originally Posted by NeitherFirstnorLast
Stay in the Word, and call on the Lord.
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Staying in the Word is not only a solitary thing. Neither it is a closed thing. Be in the word and consider what others have found there. Do not be closed to differing thoughts or interpretations. If God wants to speak to us in it but we reject the very sound of the thing he has to say, then we have not really been in the Word — just around it.
I am a little concerned with this one phrase:
Quote:
Originally Posted by NeitherFirstnorLast
He lead me into the ministry . . .
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This makes it seem that "ministry" is the private domain of Lee and the LRC. This is far from the truth. Ministry is found all around us. It comes in ways that we appreciate and sometimes in ways that we do not appreciate. To others, the preference might be reversed. Do we dare say that the others are not "ministry" or that theirs is somehow inferior?
Besides, if that one truly was "the ministry" then we would not be lead away from it except by the evil one.
And while I'm not sure that we can go this far, I wonder sometimes how many seem convinced that the very fact that they were ever in the LRC, under Lee's ministry, was some leading of God and not a distraction from the evil one appearing as an angel of light. We think that other religious, even Christian groups can be this, but not the LRC. We think that because we had a positive sense while there that it was not just fooling around with our emotions for the purpose of feeding us junk along side any good that might be.
Why do we think we were not deceived but those poor Lutherans are? They were not lead to believe that they were following the minister of the age, the 4th of the 4-in-one. They were not taught that they were the chosen elect standing as a representative for all those other poor, broken, damaged Christians. And they don't seem to need to be lead away from it like many in the LRC are.
Maybe we were actually the ones who were captured in an error, and have now been rescued from it. Maybe we just don't like thinking that we were fooled into joining an error. It is too easy to think that it is the Anglicans, the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Baptists, the Church of Christ, the Brethren, the Lutherans, the Reformed, even the Catholics — in short, every one but us — that was fooled into error. Never crossed our minds that we were fooled. And some of what we have retained as "better teachings" may not actually be so. We just may have not yet gotten the garlic out of our nostrils.
No. It was God's mercy that he brought us somewhere that he eventually had to bring us out of. (When I reread this, I missed my own sarcasm. This is somewhat of a mockery of our thinking. I even once thought it. I could never go back, but I had this "rich teaching" that no one else had.)
I'm now less high on myself as incapable of having been fooled.
"Hi, I'm Mike. I am a recovering cult member."
"Hi, Mike."