welcome to the story.

Here is a continuance of the idiot thinking prevalent in our churches. Edward Deese writes: Brother, I would caution you to be careful about trying to find an experience to validate your knowledge. The truth of the Word of God validates itself without any need of an experience. 27 years in the ministry has taught me that too many people are led astray with "experiences" that they somehow find contrary to the Word, but overlook that because no one can invalidate their "expereince". I do think that God's Word is alive and living and should be experienced on a daily basis, but to the degree that it conforms us to the image of Christ. (Rom. 8.29)God's grace is there to bring us to that point of Christlikeness and then truth can validate our experiences. Me: first . . . i'm not trying to find an experience to validate my truth. unlike 50% of the good southern baptist church members, I've had an experience with grace. when i had this experience, it illuminated all the truth that I heard about grace for the 16 years that i lived in darkness. it wasn't until i experienced grace, that the truth made sense. biblical experience validates truth as well. the problem is that to many people know the truth, but don't flesh it out. therefore their precious truth is invalidated. the word of God is incarnational, just as He was. its not just about truth, but about experience as well. as long as that experience is grounded in the truth about grace and as long as the truth is grounded in an experience of grace, then i have no problem. its both/and. its both experience and truth. its not either/or. thats the way the modern world encountered God. they either had truth or experience. so the two extremes were fundamentalists who had such good, perfect, solid doctrine (in their minds) but had no experience. the other extreme was a liberal version of Christianity where experience was the only important thing. truth meant nothing. thats why you had people who only cared about social reform, political reform, or a social gospel. and you had the charismatic movements in the late 80s and early 90s. thats the problem with our churches today. we have to many pastors who are either stale, dull fundamentalists or they're say anything, do anything liberals. theres nobody walking the middle. so instead of the fundamentalists being incarnational in their truth or the liberals being grounded in their actions, they'd rather sit around all day and point fingers at each other and say the other party is the reason why the church is going to "paradise outside of sheol" in a handbasket. they're to busy doing "church" their way and blaming the other, that they can't walk the middle together. but then again it would be way to easy for people to pull the plank out of their own eye. what i'm trying to do in my faith, is find the happy middle where i'm not a staunch fundamentalist or some whacko liberal. i'm trying to let the truth be incarnational in my life. but the fundamentalists don't like that and neither do the liberals. but thats fine with me. i'll walk the middle road. and i'll do it by myself if i have too. its both/and for me. its both experience and truth. its a beautiful double ring (to quote leonard sweet in his book soul tsunami).