Hello friends, I want to wrap up my journey-to-now entries today if I can. For the past several weeks I have been sharing my heart and experiences that I have endured over the past several years. (Please go back and read all of the “What a Journey” blog entries before going further.)  I understand that much of what I have said sounds way out there, or a little rocky. I will say again; I do not claim to KNOW anything. All I have done here is shared what God has done in me.  I am sure you can tell by my writing that I am not this big educated bible scholar. I do not have a PHD or some fancy title in the front, or at the end, of my name. I am just a messily old, good for nothing, sinner boy that without God would be a lying, cheating, murdering rapist. Jeremiah says it this way “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” That is what we all are without God…deceitful and desperately wicked. I do not know why God would choose me; however, this will be one of the first things I will ask him when I see him. I have done nothing in my life that can possibly warrant God’s attention; those of you who know me can amen that. All I can say is He has chosen me. He did not leave me in my hypocrisy. That is what I was dear reader… a hypocrite. 

Sure, I loved souls, and I wanted nothing more than to see them come to Christ. I cared about people, and the things I did in the ministry where not for the money I assure you. On the other hand, I would preach that people should live holy and virtuous lives before God, yet I did not understand what I was preaching. I would preach things such as we need to love one another, walk as Christ walked, go to church, win souls, and –God forgive me- church doctrine. I am sure I was telling people some truth; however, it was coming from a lack of understanding. I had knowledge; that is all I had. I had knowledge that I had obtained from my many different teachers over the years, and from bible study, which relied on those same teachings. I had knowledge, but I lacked understanding. Knowledge is not difficult to get. All you need to do is listen and retain what is taught; however, to get understanding you must physically experience something. If I told you not to put your hand in the fire because you would burn it, you would have that knowledge; moreover, if you put your hand in the fire and received a burn, you would then have understanding. I was preaching to people warning them not to put their hands in the fire when I myself, had never been burnt. It is not enough to know how Jesus walked, talked, and responded to diverse situations. If all we have is knowledge of all that Jesus taught, we have fallen short. We must experience Christ.

We must leave our old lives behind, put our own selves aside, walk in a world that we do not belong, become a servant to all of humankind, pick up our cross, and carry that cross to the place that we must die. It is not until then that we come to understand what Paul was saying to the Galatians when he said… “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” It is here when we find not our understanding at all, but that we share in the one who understands all things.

I believe if we where to really look at the life of Christ, and truly LEARN HIM, or should I say UNDERSTAND HIM, we would have a real hard time finding him in our church, and most importantly, in ourselves. The truth is most of us have not so learned Christ.  Eph 4:20-24 says “But ye have not so learned Christ; If so be that ye have heard him, and have been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus: That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness”.  The Greek word “learned” in this verse is manthano meaning, you guessed it, understand. That is what God showed me. When I would stand in the pulpit to deliver “God’s message”, they did not see Christ, they saw Frank Lee, and believe me he is not much to look at. -God may have used something I said to drive something into someone’s spirit a time or two, but remember what He used to speak to Balaam- (Num 22:28).

No one can come to Christ without first seeing Him. No one can see Him unless he is on us (the new man) and we are in Him. We cannot be in Him if we do not have an understanding of Him, and if all we have is knowledge of him with no understanding, where does that leave this lost world? These are just a few of the things that God was revealing to me during this time.

Look, I know that there are good people in the church system. There are people who may even have the Love of Christ. There are preachers who stand every week and plead to their congregants to live a life pleasing to Christ, and they do the best that they know how. There are men and women who are on their faces before God weeping for the souls of this world. I have worked alongside of some of them; I was one of them. My prayer is that God would give to them a Damascus experience, then send to them their Ananias, and have the scales fall from their eyes.

 All the things that you have read in my blog have been my Damascus experience. Up to that point, I thought that I was on the right path as Paul did. I believed I was doing the right thing and serving in the right capacity. My Ananias, however, would not be found in these experiences. My Ananias was found in a little town in southwest Tennessee called Selmer where I now reside. It is a people, a people of God, and when the scales fell from my eyes I seen the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. It was the body of Christ.

In my next blog entry, I will share a more about this place in which I now LIVE, and I will tell what makes it the most beautiful place I have ever seen. Until then, may we all come to understand Christ.