Quote:
Originally Posted by Igzy
The common symptom I see with people who never seem to shake oppressive memories of the LC--and that includes these people you see floating around the fringes of it for years, going back, trying to fix it and forever worrying about it--is this:
They never developed their own personal relationship with God.
I'm not talking about feeling or "enjoying" God or having some general appreciation of him. I'm talking about those who pray, read the word, are hungry and thirsty for righteousness, who ask, seek and knock, and do not let God go until they know they have encountered him and gotten a direct speaking from him. And they do this over and over and over again.
The LC, for all its claims of being so full of reality, steeped us in a pseudo, group-based, feelings-based spirituality that, when push came to shove, could not carry its own weight. Take away the support mechanism of peer approval, familiar culture and good feelings, and we fell apart.
Why? Because we had no real relationship with God. Our Christian experience was based on feelings, assenting to the correct doctrines, and being approved by others. Sure, we had some shallow "enjoyment." But few of us ever dealt with God to the point where (1) we really got to know him and (2) he really changed us. Very few.
The result was we remained "infants, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine." And that includes these guys who think they have to fix or get back in the LC. Sorry but that's my assessment, and my experience.
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Great comments here Igzy.
In my view, we also must expose to current LC members the methods used by LSM to rob people of their personal relationship with our saving God and Father.
One prominent technique is to obsess about the so-called "body of Christ." Their unhealthy and extreme views of "The Body" are absolutely self-serving. LSM constantly instills fears into all their members lest they became "independent." To a loyal member of the Recovery, being independent is far more serious than being sinful or mistreating other Christians.
In order to follow The Lord faithfully, we all must be willing to be condemned for being independent, acting on our own, or making decisions on our own, all the while being obedient to the Lord. The Recovery by design has created a system of man-pleasers, much the same as the Pharisees of old. Too many LC leaders have sacrificed their own conscience in order to oblige Anaheim, resulting in group think, rather than the real body of Christ, which He desires.