Thought Picnic: Come to my Virtual Church

The example is Jesus

When it comes to matters of religion, I have essentially been stridently against unreasonable things that put people in peril where traditions, creeds, tenets, rules or laws appear to be altars on which to sacrifice humanity.

My compass has always been Jesus Christ, the man and God at the same time with my constant reflection in the gospels.

He, as a man upturned the traditional way of doing things and He was most at conflict with the religious leaders of the day that had more concern for adherence to the laws than in the welfare of people.

Disease doesn’t do Sabbath

The friction always occurred when people were healed on the Sabbath, the religious leaders in their hardness of heart and hypocrisy even in one case clearly remonstrated that people should only seek to be healed on all days but the Sabbath.

That would have been sensible if diseases and illnesses took a holiday too on holy days but the fact it they don’t. He rebuked them with sound doctrine where he said the Sabbath was made for man and not man for Sabbath.

Breaking the mould

The Jesus Christ brand of Christianity basically turned the world upside-down and I am of the belief that it should continue to be case – for instance Jesus healed lepers many times and took almost over 1900 years for antibiotics to be discovered in the natural world to manage that ailment.

In my opinion, it is time for Christians to not only race ahead of the natural world again but give a renewed hope to humanity again, answering the difficult questions and touching lives well beyond what intellect and rote has helped define as professions today.

Walking the gospel streets

For the gospels, I find ways to relive the times of Jesus by listening to audio bibles, a free version of the King James (Authorised) Version can be found at AudioTreasure, a premium version of the Message Bible can be found at eStudySource.

The times I have listened to the gospels and allowed my imagination to put me amongst the crowd that throng Jesus as He spoke and then performed miracles has begun to give live to the kind of radical world-changing Christianity I desire to see in myself and about me.

Obviously, you probably have to do some MP3 tagging to ensure the books and chapters are in proper alignment from renaming the titles, creating books as albums and prefixing the books with the ordinal book number from 01 to 66, the chapters of the books should be numbered as tracks – this makes for the easy management of tracks on your MP3 device.

Evidence of the unexplainable

Christianity is supposed to be awesome and beyond the comprehension of natural analysis just as healings and the raising of the dead defy explanation but the evidence is there. Sadly, there are crooks that have crept into the stable and have all the paraphernalia of Christianity but are frauds, through and through.

As this text shows:

(2Ti 3:1 NKJV) But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come:

(2Ti 3:2 NKJV) For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,

(2Ti 3:3 NKJV) unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good,

(2Ti 3:4 NKJV) traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God,

(2Ti 3:5 NKJV) having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away!

The scary part of this message is found in the fact that they have a form of godliness but deny the power that comes with it.

There is going to be a whole lot of shaking and those who have thrived in the unconscionably reprehensible will soon be caught out.

The virtual church

Meanwhile apart from my church in Amsterdam, the C3 Church; I find myself by reason of Internet technologies a member of a virtual church too. I sometimes attend online or I listen to messages uploaded at the Eagle Mountain International Church of the Kenneth Copeland Ministries.

Now, Kenneth Copeland and many of his persuasion and calling do not preach easy-listening, but the Christianity of the gospel was never about easy-listening; in fact, the evidence in the gospels show that many could not abide what Jesus Christ had to say apart from his disciples – there will always be things hard to hear and whilst many might be pre-occupied with disputing, the ministry thrives providing solutions and impacting lives whilst critics do what they are good at - not helping people.

A good deal of what you hear will probably blow your mind, miracles do and you have to ask yourself whether you will not like to have one too – Let God speak to your heart and change your life.

You can find the EMIC media page here.

There is much more but let us start with this first.