[Curious]

Hello again,
Thanks for your encouragement for me to post more. I know that I’m declaring the following to outsiders reading, I see that those running this forum etc have insight and victory in these matters already. I want to expand on my thoughts that people can get hooked into the LC particularly if they are young and fearful or anxious about the future or life in general. I want to say this….seeking security in this way can be a shortcut to becoming a pharisee.

Pharisaism can be summed up as follows: It’s a focus on:
Details, alarm bells, and ways to keep yourself safe.
Avoiding tombs and all the hygiene rules, etc externalises sin and harm. God wants the circumcision of the heart, not the body. Not external signs, but internal faith. A very good book on this subject is “Extreme Righteousness, seeing ourselves in the pharisees” by Tom Hovestol. I highly recommend it. Being concerned with fear and self-preservation is the opposite of walking in faith. It is about building a fortress of protection that avoids any faith-based action. That’s why Jesus was such an unwelcome confrontation to them.

Faith is the only antidote to fear. A person can’t develop faith while invested in self-protection, elimination of risk, driven by fear. The prophet Jeremiah was put down a well and left to die there. God had promised to preserve his life, that was the only hope he had to hold on to. He didn’t know any way in which it could happen. That’s the level of faith I am talking about. A very real danger of being badly harmed or killed, but being able to rise above it and trust God for the outcome.

It is impossible to reach maturity without vulnerability. Admitting a mistake or a deliberate wrong is the only way forward for any human, to repent of it and be sorry. This makes us vulnerable and requires humility. Witness Lee did not demonstrate this nor do those who have continued after him, as well documented on this forum and elsewhere. He remained immature as do the blendeds following after him. We would all have respect for them if they admitted to mistakes and wrongdoing. That’s the crazy thing, they would find safety and grace if they turned and changed their ways.

I want to add, as so many of what he did and said turns out to be unoriginal, so too is his fortress of self-preservation, and justifying of himself. Another book, “the ugly Chinaman and the crisis of Chinese culture” by Bo Yang, (also Taiwanese man, incidentally). Bo Yang’s big beef with his own culture is exactly that, hostility to any correction by others, that he calls a crisis. He was jailed for his efforts to confront his own culture towards a healthy respect for the opportunity to develop through hearing the honest evaluations of others. He praises American culture for its ability to make use of these evaluations on order to grow and develop in business as well as other spheres of life. His comments are sometimes a bit crass, possibly his frustration showing through. Interestingly, he also points to the bible of western culture as being the source of their wisdom in this matter. So traditionally Chinese culture is baggaged with inability to hear a critique. The breakdown between Lee and his American followers was destined to happen.

One of the words God gave me about the LC as I pondered about them during my time of association was, I just asked,” what’s going on with them?” and the answer came just like this: ’They are stuck in immaturity and futility’. That’s what I felt God say. I will leave it at that today. I hope it all doesn’t sound too harsh or critical, we are all fallen, after all, its just which direction we are going in.