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About Jesus Steve Sweetman My Journey Through The Ecclesiastical Maze Part 6 Coming
Of Age I’ve been pointing out
the conflict between the tradition of men and the truth of Scripture.
I’ve also mentioned the conflict between extending grace while at the
same time proclaiming Biblical truth.
There’s another conflict that I experienced while growing up in
the church that I think others have experienced as well. The altar call is a
product of the Revivalist Movement of the 1800’s.
Biblical men like Paul never held altar calls and if you notice
these men would merely proclaim the gospel and let the Holy Spirit do
the calling without even leading people in the sinners prayer.
Evangelicals use the altar call as a form of evangelism which presupposes that there
are non-Christians in the meeting which wasn’t necessarily the case
when I was young. I
certainly don’t doubt anyone’s salvation found at an altar, yet
sometimes the preaching associated with the altar call isn’t all that
Biblical. That’s why I
made my way to the nearest altar to get saved as often as I could.
Sunday morning meetings
in our church were
more formal than Sunday night meetings, although it wasn’t always that
way. One reason for this
formality was the time constraint. Since
eating out after the Sunday meeting was a sin our mothers usually had a
roast cooking in the oven at home. If
the pastor didn’t want to hear from our mothers he’d shut things
down by 12:30. So the Sunday
morning meeting ended with a hymn and a prayer while the altar call was
left for Sunday night. At some point in the
early 1960’s my dad “backslid” as Evangelicals call it. For
a few years he’d drive us to the Sunday meetings and pick us up when
they were over. During my
dad’s absence from church meetings our church installed a very simple
sound system. If you know
anything about sound systems and electronics you know strange things can
happen at times. One Sunday morning during
the pastor’s closing prayer a second voice besides our pastor’s
voice was heard through the speakers.
It wasn’t God’s voice, unless He introduces Himself by
saying, “breaker breaker good buddy. Got your ears on”.
Sometimes I think He’d like to break into our meetings and ask if we’ve got
our spiritual ears on. To my
mom’s dismay it was dad talking on his new mobile CB radio that the
sound system picked up for all to hear.
My mom wasn’t impressed even though I thought it was kind of
funny. Although my dad backslid
he did come back to church meetings in the late 1960’s but struggled
until 1975 after experiencing stress at work.
I recall New Years day 1975 while praying in my parents bedroom.
The Holy Spirit enveloped me as if I was in a vision.
My parents bed became a casket.
I was told that my dad was still spiritually dead, something I knew.
I was also told that he’d return to Jesus in mid June of that
year. Well, I’m not a prophet specializing in dates and times, but
come mid June my dad really did come back to Jesus. After yanking the
phone from its place on his work desk and throwing it against the wall
he knew things had to change so he quit his office job to become a
janitor and gave himself back to Jesus for good. I don’t know for sure,
but I think guilt was the reason why my dad backslid. Maybe
his smoking caused the guilt or maybe it was something else. Remember,
the general consensus in our church was that smokers couldn’t be
Christians. So if you
couldn’t stop smoking why even try being a Christian.
Guilt wasn’t just my dad’s problem, it was my problem too,
but my response was different than his.
Instead of giving up, I fled to the altar to get saved over and
over again. Preachers pleaded with us
back then to come to the altar. They’d
place fear into our hearts by telling us that we could be killed
in a car accident on the way home, so we’d better be ready to die.
If you didn’t feel guilty before the altar call, you were
certainly made to feel guilty during the altar call.
I didn’t want to be killed in a car accident and go to hell, so
to cover all my bases I’d head for the altar. I know now that there’s
only one way to get saved, one way to stay saved, and one way to get
unsaved. I know throughout
history this has been a point of contention so I won’t dwell on it,
but I’m convinced that trusting my life with Jesus saves me, and
continuing to trust my life with Him keeps me saved. It’s
only when one withdraws this trust completely and rejects Jesus that one
gets unsaved. Salvation is
all about trusting Jesus with your life and not about anything we do. Getting
saved by faith, and staying saved by works as I was taught as a child
isn’t New Testament thinking. Talking about staying
saved, we weren’t allowed to be friends with Baptist kids because
Baptists believed in “once saved always saved”.
We couldn’t have Pentecostal friends either because
Pentecostals spoke in tongues. My mom got quite upset with my dad once
because he considered accepting an invitation to play his guitar at a
Pentecostal church. He
shouldn’t have even entertained that thought. His guitar did get sanctified
as I mentioned earlier, but I guess it was only to be played within our
denomination or else it would be unsanctified.
We should never allow secondary issues to separate us from our
brothers in Christ.
Anyway, many altar calls
seemed to be more about stirring
up feelings of guilt than anything else.
I know now that guilt isn’t a feeling, but a position in
which we stand before the Lord. We’re
all guilty whether we feel guilty or not.
Feelings aren’t the issue here, but feelings of guilt were the
product of many altar calls when I was a child.
I don’t recall anyone ever telling me that I didn’t have to
feel guilty. Maybe I was
supposed to feel guilty because these feelings might make me sin less,
but once again, this isn’t New Testament thinking. It’s humanism.
I thank God that He views me as being totally righteous even as
He Himself is righteous, even though I’m far from being righteous
myself, and it’s all because of Jesus.
(Ephesians 2:8)
Well, one day all this
confusion ended for good, and it didn’t end at an altar, unless you
consider my bed an altar. It
was a Saturday night in mid February 1970 when I turned on our TV to watch Hockey Night In Canada.
The TV was on channel 8 when I turned it on and the hockey game
was on channel 11. We didn’t have remote controls back then so I had
to manually turn a dial from channel 8 to channel 9 to channel 10, and
that’s where I got stuck. I
never did make it to channel 11. I felt really let down
when I saw Billy Graham preaching away on channel 10.
I was in a real pickle now. I
really wanted to watch hockey, but how could a real Christian pass Billy
Graham by for a hockey game. Guilt
got the best of me again so I watched Billy Graham talking about God
spitting a luke-warm church out of His mouth. You know that fearful
verse found in Revelation 3:15 to 17.
Even though I took these
words personally, do you know something?
God wasn’t really thinking of spitting individual Christians
out of His mouth in Revelation 3. He was considering spitting the whole
church in I don’t think I watched
the hockey game that night. Instead
I knelt by the side of my bed and quietly asked Jesus to forgive my sins
if He hadn’t already, and then I went to bed. The whole event lasted 5
seconds. After all the tears
I shed at the altar, this one little unemotional prayer somehow changed
my life for good. I actually woke up the
next morning feeling like I was still saved.
I didn’t lose my salvation over night as I usually did.
I didn’t even lose it that whole week.
As a matter of fact, believe it or not, I’m still saved.
I haven’t lost it yet and don’t plan on losing it.
No longer did I do Christian things to appease my guilt.
I did them because I wanted to do them.
Immediately I had a strong desire to understand the Bible which
is our road map through the ecclesiastical maze.
I soon discovered that the street signs in the maze didn’t
necessarily match the street signs in the Biblical road map which makes
it hard to find your way around at times.
One might set out to find a brother in the Body of Christ to be
joined to and to work with and end up being joined to a large
multi-national organization that looks more like a
publicly traded corporation than a New Testament church.
By the way, I haven’t
had a trace of guilt or doubt in my life since that February night.
As Romans 8:1 says, “there
is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” , and I’m
definitely in Christ Jesus.
So here I was. “I came of age” so to speak in February 1970. No longer was I hanging on to my parent’s faith. Whatever I thought about church up to this point was a product of another generation. It was now my turn to walk through the ecclesiastical maze on my own and try to make sense of it all, and that’s what I’ve being doing ever since.
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