Half-Truths

Satan wants to do anything he can to keep people blinded to the truth and lost. He knows all of us are created with a longing for God that we often confuse with a longing for anything ‘spiritual.’

The good news of Jesus Christ was running rampant all over the Middle Eastern part of the world in John’s day and heading north, south, east and west. Jesus was a hot topic of conversation. Once Satan established that he couldn’t squelch spiritual hunger or stop the talk about Christ, he determined to supply a new story that made best use of both. He suggested through false teachers that Christ indeed came but not in the flesh. Therefore, the spiritually hungry could still have a belief system involving God but remain, as my relatives would say, as lost as a goose. Why? Because our access to God is through the torn flesh of Jesus Christ. To deny the incarnation is to deny the one and only means of salvation.

I imagine your know someone at work or elsewhere that may be very ‘spiritual’ but doesn’t believe in the incarnate death of Christ as the means to salvation. Do you see what Satan has done? He has tried to feed their need for the spiritual and still keep them blind to the truth. Clever and terribly destructive, isn’t he?
Don’t judge them. Pray like mad for them! Pray for the veil to be removed and the torn veil of Jesus’ flesh to be made clear! Pray as well for those who teach such false doctrines.

Quoted from The Beloved Disciple by Beth Moore
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After reading this chapter in Moore's book, I was reminded of one of my students. I want to share her story…

One of the things I LOVED about Chrysalis was getting to work one on one with my high school English students. I’d see each of my English students for one hour a week (sometimes two half hour segments, sometimes a one hour segment) and we’d go over their work, talk about what they were reading, check their homework together and then go over their assignment for next week. (By the way, it’s a FANTASTIC way to make sure a student who is struggling gets the help they need, or a student who is excelling gets to move at their own pace…)

Anyway, I had this one student, (I’ll call her Christy, that's not her name) a 16-17 year old young woman who excelled in the sciences and mathematics- was doing trig/calculus with the math teachers. Christy had written a lot of research papers and wanted to work on some literary stuff, so we had a lot of fun working on poetry, some short stories and her reports on the novel she was reading. I thoroughly enjoyed her! Christy was bright, funny, intelligent and did good work. Not highly imaginative, but solid a+b=c type writing. In the process of reading some of our books together, and through some of her more journal-type writings, I found out she was a Christian....

It wasn’t until January or so that I finally found out that her ‘version’ of Christianity included a Christ who was just a ‘good man’, not divine… She brought in one of her research papers and let me read it and I was way weirded out… Don't get me wrong. I didn't flip out on her or anything, but I did talk with her about what exactly she meant by a couple things, and a running theological conversation became part of our meetings. I wanted to understand what she believed and witness to her about the truth. I think she wanted to 'save' me from the 'lies' I'd been fed, much as I wanted to see Jesus save her...

The more I learned about her ‘Christianity’ the more freaky it got. Christy’s dad was a pastor who’d dropped out of a major denomination- I want to say Methodist, but I really don’t remember exactly which one it was. He’d started a home church, which was basically her family and a couple others and they met on Sundays and he taught. His lessons included that Jesus had historically been lied about since the days of the early church, that he wasn’t divine and that the church fathers had just cooked that up to keep control of the masses. There was more half-truth involved, but those are the major points of his doctrine.

I had some answers for some of her contentions, but I’m not a good apologetics person… I tend to go completely blank and I can never remember anything I’ve studied or memorized. Most of the time I find that arguing about something doesn’t really change anybody’s mind and it gets us both upset in the process. Christy was SOLIDLY grounded in her dad’s belief system and had answers for my probing questions. In fact, while I wasn’t shaken in my faith by any of her beliefs, I was taken aback by some of the bizarre historical things her dad had cooked up… And it was her dad! Have you ever tried to talk with someone who’s DAD is the false prophet when they agree with him? Very hard to convince them that he’s not right…

I didn’t teach at a Christian school or even a public school. We had guidelines for how we were to conduct ourselves in matters of personal belief… (I actually agreed with those guidelines, too.) We never went over those lines, but I know that I ended up making her think about some of the things her dad said about Jesus… And her half-true/ half-false beliefs had me remembering exactly what it is I do belief about Jesus and his role in salvation. I guess that’s all God had in store for me in our relationship. Maybe I planted some seeds in there... I don't know. I do know that there was no way I was gonna persuade her about Jesus’ divinity…

And then I got put on bed rest at the beginning of March and wasn’t allowed to go back to school to finish out the semester… So, no other conversations came up and no other truths were shared…

She has haunted me since then… I have prayed about her, wished that I could go back and say something stronger- have the magic tongue of Paul and convince her of Jesus’ love and divinity and truth… I want to know that the truth of who He is pierced her heart… I want to know that she came to know Jesus truthfully and accurately. I want to know that she’ll be in heaven with me. I want to know that I did the best job I could with the time I had with her…

God, you know Christy and you love her way more than I do… You know her dad and whatever happened to him that caused him to lose his way. I don’t know if he ever believed in you- if he ever had a full grasp of the truth. Please reach her. Really, regardless of what I said or did, you are the only one who can pierce her heart with the truth and take the blinders off her eyes. Oh, Jesus, reveal who you are to her! How amazing your divine love is... Jesus, the amazing sacrifice you made for us really becomes the heart of Christianity because you are God’s son… That you alone could do that- that you alone are perfect- that you alone were sinless- that you alone saw the dawn of creation, saw your mother’s eyes on the day you were born and then looked at the faces of the crowd as they crucified you… Christy needs you. She needs the lies to be ripped away and replaced with your truth. She needs your love to reach past her logic... Reach her, Jesus…