4 min 48 sec: app reading time

December 18, 2024

GOD WANTS TO SEE YOU ALIVE!

Dear Friend:

Jesus said, "Don’t look for shortcuts to God. The market is flooded with surefire, easygoing formulas for a successful life that can be practiced in your spare time. Don’t fall for that stuff, even though crowds of people do. The way to life—to God!—is vigorous and requires total attention.

Be wary of false preachers who smile a lot, dripping with practiced sincerity. Chances are they are out to rip you off in some way or other.

Don’t be impressed with charisma; look for character. Who preachers are is the main thing, not what they say. A genuine leader will never exploit your emotions or your pocketbook. These diseased trees, with their bad apples, are going to be chopped down and burned." (Matthew 17:13-20-TM)

It's interesting to me that Jesus called a "bad tree," one which fails to produce fruit.

A tree can be impressive yet fail to produce fruit, which is the completion of a cycle of essential existence for that particular tree. 

There's a vast difference between looking good or saying good things (looking like a promising tree) and actually producing fruit, which indicates the completion of the tree's purpose for being a tree!

This was an evolving wake-up for me as I walked away from religion 18+ years ago and started to read my Bible with different lenses. I saw myself as a Pastor differently. I saw morality and behaviors differently. Much of my behavior and morals were shaped from my early age to conform to religious and cultural norms. It was a brutal realization to wake up to the fact that they had nothing to do with God.

Not doing what's wrong as "sinful" is often determined by religious and moral constructs that serve as guardrails. Yet they fail to become the fruit of love born within. 

According to Jesus's metaphor, "bad" people can actually do many good things yet fail to produce what matters in the end!

That's why Jesus rebuked the religious leaders by saying, "Be wary of false preachers who smile a lot, dripping with practiced sincerity." His word are replicated in Mattew 23:15-TM  with a hard-core statement: "You’re hopeless, you religion scholars and Pharisees! Frauds! You go halfway around the world to make a convert, but once you get him, you make him into a replica of yourselves, double-damned."

Beliefs produce attitudes, and attitudes produce behaviors.

There's no way around it.

One begets the other.

What you believe is who you are in the end. 

For me, the awareness that my religious constructs and my beliefs about God were the foundation behind my lack of fruit (love) and the engine pulling the strings of my toxic attitudes and behaviors was the moment of vulnerability that changed everything for me.

No matter how much I look like a tree, the proof is in my fruit (love), as incomplete as I am on my evolutionary journey toward wholeness! Life is ultimately manifested in the fruit as love is the manifestation of your deeper consciousness and belief system. 

No matter my do-gooding, Scripture twisting, or positive appearances, if my beliefs are toxic, I will become a "bad tree," affecting every part of me, whether I want to admit it or not.

For the first half of my life, my core Christian belief in salvation and a god who required the death of a "savior" to prevent God from drop-kicking people into hell had unavoidable consequences that I could not deny, rationalize, or subvert. Not to mention that "fallen" humanity must correctly believe in the "savior" in order to activate God's restraint from exercising God's default position to send humanity to hell. It sends chills through my spine as I write these words.

As it was for me, this fundamental belief regarding salvation dramatically and undeniably affects how people I meet see God, themselves, others, and the world. It affects how people define sin, grace, and love! Christianity, religion, or non-religion has very little to do with this core issue in the inner consciousness.

The common denominator of those who hurt, harm, oppress, condemn, judge, abuse, exploit, discriminate, or seek power over people is their inner loss of wholeness. A loss of love and God's more excellent views of humanity. Claiming to love God while not experiencing the love God wants to use to love others is religion on steroids.   

One simply cannot believe in hell, or final destruction, as it's explained in Christian circles, without willfully embracing a god whose best idea to solve a problem god actually created is to use violence, revenge, murder, and the torture of the very people God designed, all while gaslighting the world into believing God is acting with love and justice.

As I discovered, no matter how wishful one's thinking maybe, embracing this god can only lead to a deceived, twisted, dark, and toxic view of self and others, which can only produce attitudes of self-hatred, fear, insecurity, shame, unworthiness, and anxiety. All of which are intentionally and religiously designed to be medicated with behaviors of compliance, conformity, self-righteousness, self-deception, the condemnation and oppression of others, a sense of privilege, pretentiousness, favor, exclusivity, or the claiming of divine entitlement for position, power, and control over people.

Even “progressives” who hold onto any such toxic Christian beliefs carry the "Christian" title as a badge of honor or the "Christian" institution while rationalizing it all with "progressive" good works, branding, or slick biblical interpretations.

Because no matter what brand or flavor of "Christian" you wrap it in, you are what you believe, not the title or brand you choose. If you believe you are a sinner, then you will define sin according to how you see yourself. If you believe grace is a transactional divine formula, you will judge yourself and people according to how you define grace. 

That's why, whether we like it or not, the world is increasingly looking beyond good appearances and Christian labels. Churches are not emptying out because Pastors are not preaching or because funds are not available for missions. People are increasingly catching up to the fact that a tree that doesn't produce fruit is actually fake.  

I hear people saying to me as a Pastor, "Why do I want to become more like so many of the Christians I see?" In other words, why should I join or affirm communities of trees who believe in some kind of twisted, psychotic, irrational, sexist, phobic, nationalistic, racially discriminatory, inhumane state while paradoxically seeing themselves as inherently bad, broken, or in need of rescue or repair? Why do Christians see others as depraved, dirty, damaged, inferior, separated from God, or needing purification? Why do Christians often believe they have the cure and all the answers to the human dilemma with a stroke of Jesus?

What's your own thought on the tree and its fruit as love? Can you imagine God in your consciousness smiling as you become alive 

Could it be that, in the end, the fruit as the experience of life and love is not doctrines you can explain and believe but who you are? (Galatians 5:22-23-TM)

With you on your journey!

Pastor Harold