Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Against the Grain (Choosing truth versus tradition)

Changing to follow the truth can be the hardest thing anyone ever faces in their life.  We don't choose when we are born, where we are born, and how we are raised.  We are ingrained with a lot of things as children that quite simply aren't true.  At some point, we grow up.  It's different for everyone, but you come to point where you have to ask, have I built a life on truth or is it all built on lies covered with fig leaves like Adam did in the garden.  YHVH could see His nakedness and sin, but Adam believed by covering it, he would be safe.
 
I have tired my best over the past ten years to be a man of the word of Adonai.  This means I have had to make the hard choices that cost me friends, family blessings, acceptance by those who think they know things (e.g. Seminary professors, pastors. etc.)  What this means is that I order my life and the raising of my family to fit what Elohim's word says, not what I have been taught about what it says or grew up practicing.  I could never escape the questions in my head of whether what I was doing was what YHVH really desired me to be doing with my life.

And frankly I have lost nothing because of my choices,  What I have gained is Shalom (look it up to understand the depths of it) and a love from a Father that will never fail me.  I know that what I practice is done in His Spirit and in His truth.  He has condoned ways for us to live and He has told us ways we should not and things we should have nothing to do with.  He does not force His will on us just as I do not force my will on my children.  Sure I discipline them just as the Father disciplines me.  Any "good" father steers his children in the way that is for their good.

I see so much compromise in this world because let's face it you don't receive any immediate consequences for attributing profane things to the Creator of the world; for changing His feast days to suit your whims and desires.....but is it righteous????
Is it the right way of doing things???  Do you care???  Maybe you don't and you have that right.  When we choose to follow our ways and not Adonai's, we lose.  We miss out.  Adonai never changes.

This is why I celebrate the birth of the Messiah at Sukkot when He truly was born and reject the ways of the world and that which is not true.