WARNING PREACHY
11 For I would have you
know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man's gospel. 12 For I did not receive it
from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of
Jesus Christ. 13 For you have heard of my former life in Judaism,
how I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it. 14 And I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my
own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my
fathers. (Galatians 1:11-14)
The other day I was asked what I meant
when I said that I had met Jesus – the dead
man who was raised back to life. As
I write this, I do not have the words to convey what I mean. It is a spiritual reality in me that I cannot
really explain, but the Jesus I met is reality all the same.
My experience
differs from the Apostle Paul’s (above) in that I did not physically see, nor
audibly hear, Jesus when I met him, but the resultant change of my character
certainly was. Similar to Paul, I was
happy in my life and I was NOT looking for Jesus. Paul was actually looking to destroy
Christianity in order to protect his own religion, and I was just simply
looking to learn what was true about the spiritual, what was actually real.
There is a prominent
strain of thought today in Christianity, called Calvinism[1], which explains that man is not simply a Christian because he has
chosen to be but only because God has chosen him to be. I am not at all a strict proponent of this idea,
but I do recognize that God’s choosing is a requirement for each person’s
process of becoming a Christian. In Paul’s
experience, the appearance of Jesus was all God’s doing as Paul was actively
seeking to destroy the budding Christianity.
When Jesus appeared to him, on the road to Damascus, Paul was
dumbfounded and physically struck blind for a few days as he processed what had
just happened to him. As for myself, I
was not trying to destroy Christianity, but I was certainly not at all interested
in the idea of becoming a Christian either.
In both of our cases however, we were faced with the reality of a resurrected
Jesus – a man whom we believed did not
exist.
In the verses
above, I think the 12th verse is the pivotal verse for me, “For I did not receive it (the Gospel) from
any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.”
Of course there was much for me to learn as a Christian, but it was
not until after I had a very real encounter with the living Jesus that something
inside of me had changed.
When I met Jesus, something inside of
me died while a new spirit inside of me seemed to take over. It really was a spiritual something that happened
and I do not have better words to explain it.
My friend who asked me about my experience heard my story and in the end
decided that she was happy to continue to believe in reincarnation of all
things. I didn’t argue with her. What would the point of that have been? I simply told her that I would pray that she
too would meet with the living Jesus whom she is quite convinced does not
exist.
17 Therefore, if anyone is in
Christ, he is a new creation. The old
has passed away; behold, the new has come. (2 Corinthians 5:17)
[1]
Named after French theologian John Calvin from the 15th Century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Calvin
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