What if your belief (that you offer the best services) is unfounded and completely wrong (it's just your belief after all)? Your belief can never be proven, it's just your belief. How then can you claim to care for humanity when you do make the effort to go out and tell others? Advertising unproven claims regardless of ones beliefs doesn't change the end results.
If someone came to you and were selling some sort of equipment that they "believe" is the best for doing a particular job, would you just "buy it" or would you want some sort of proof?
Example: The government thinks (believes) its welfare programs help people, but the truth is, all it does is create a wealth of people dependent on the government with no incentive to provide for themselves. A small percentage truly need the benefit to help them get back on their feet, but the majority just like having someone do the work.
Note: I'm not directing this towards anyone, just playing off the words used (hopefully, staying in context).
All I can say about that Derrel is there is huge value in two words.....I'M SORRY.
Keeping it in context here is an example:
I grew up in a church where I was taught that my salvation relied on my ability to keep my slate clean from sin. I was taught that once I was baptized it was my responsibility to remain sinless after that otherwise my salvation could be lost in an instant. I was taught that I remain in a "lost" state until I ask for forgiveness for that sin, or, if it was a public sin, I confessed it to the church and asked for forgiveness publicly.
The most extreme example frequently discussed was the scenario where a man remained sinless his whole life, yet, in a state of fear he swears at his car that is broken down on the train tracks and dies there in the split second before he has a chance to ask for forgiveness for that sin. Most in the religion I was raised in would say that man is lost for eternity.
That left me in a constant state of fear as a young man. I can't tell you how many times I walked down the aisle as a teenager to confess sins that I had done in public to ask for forgiveness from the church and from God.
It just didn't make sense to me that God would send his son as a sacrifice for my sins, yet it all fell on me to remain sinless. If my salvation was so cheap that it could be lost in an instant over and over again, why did God even bother to go through all the trouble of sending his only son to die for a salvation so precarious?
That led me to a rejection of the whole concept. I still believed in God, but I just gave up and accepted that I was just simply lost. I was so full of sin there was no way I was ever going to make it to eternal life unless I was lucky enough to die in those short periods between the time I asked for forgiveness for the last sin and the time I committed the next one.
That was the darkest time in my history. I fell into every type of sin imaginable. Marriages (2 eventually) were destroyed. I was in trouble a lot. I had no direction in life. I made decisions that hurt others and didn't care. I would lie and cheat with no thought of how it might affect others. I had become exactly the person the Gospel of Christ was made for. Hopeless, and a danger myself and to everyone around me.
Once I saw everything crashing around me
I cried out to God for help (more about that later). At first I tried to do it all on my own as I had been previously taught. I wanted so badly to please God. I went back to my previous religion and vowed to start fresh and do it right this time. I enrolled in a seminary to learn more about how to control my own sins and how to teach others about how to do the same thing.
After almost a year there I began to notice that I did not fit in. I was surrounded by a lot of young men and instructors who were like lions who were ready to pounce on "sinners" who didn't understand the scriptures exactly the way they did.
We were allowed to speak at surrounding churches. I spend a few weeks in Arkansas preaching at a small church who was in between regular preachers. I parroted exactly what I had been taught. After they hired a full-time preacher I began going around visiting and talking at any church that would allow me there. I made the mistake of accidentally going to a church the school considered "unsound" or "liberal". To those who don't know what that means, it is a church that has the same name as the one operating the school, but teaches a more lenient Gospel, or does something in their worship service that is considered "unauthorized".
In the school I asked a lot of questions. Some of the things I was being taught made no sense or took scripture out of context so badly that it butchered the entire meaning of God's word.
Some of the other "future preachers" didn't like me asking questions and one was so frustrated that I wouldn't just accept what I was being told that he got up in the class and threatened to beat me down physically right then and there. When the instructors defended his actions claiming he was simply on "fire for the Lord" I knew I was in the wrong place. They suggested that if I wasn't going to just simply accept what I was being told that I should resign from the school and move on. Which is exactly what I did.
Upon resignation the school froze my account there which consisted of donations I had raised to attend and to pay for the living expenses of myself and my family. They claimed that all donations belonged to the school and since I resigned, even though the donations had come from my family, church members from my home town and other friends, since I had resigned I no longer had claim on them.
I was in Memphis Tennessee, 13 hours from my home, with a wife and a newborn child, living in a horrible crime infested apartment complex with nothing to my name but a 1987 Ford Taurus.
I called church after church to ask for help in moving my family back home. One by one each of them refused to help me when I told them the reason I resigned from the school.
Eventually there was no one left but the "liberal" church. They were meeting in a school building and there were only about 100 of them. The minister there told me to come there on Sunday and they would take up a special collection to help us out.
The people there raised about $2400 for us that day. We had a yard sale and sold or gave away what meager belongings we had and moved back home with nothing but our clothes and enough money to get into an apartment.
When we got back I went to a similar "liberal" church and met a man who changed my life. He was a minister who later became a best friend. He was a sinner like me, a repeat sinner, but a sinner with hope who didn't live in a constant state of fear. He taught me about God's grace. He taught me how to not only hate the sin within me, but to love myself at the same time with the knowledge that I had been important enough for God to sacrifice his son so that I could spend eternity with him. He showed me from the scriptures that God wants us to put our trust in HIM and not so much in our own abilities and that a life the pleases God only comes from trust in HIM to change us from the inside out.
I studied with this man, a frequent sinner, and watched the Lord change him from the inside out. He taught me how to quit trying to change myself and lay it all before the Lord and ask him to change me.
Unfortunately, during this time, my wife did not share my newly found conviction. Perhaps the scars from early in the marriage were finally bearing fruit, but for whatever reason, our marriage was broken and she moved in with another man.
A couple of years later, when my friend, who had taught me so much, died in a single plane crash it led to confusion and a few short years of backsliding into some of the things that had caused so many problems before. He died six months before he would have performed the wedding ceremony for Shelly and me.
It was a time of choosing for me. I eventually chose to follow the path that I knew in my heart was right.
A couple of years into our marriage Shelly and I turned fully to the Lord and have not looked back since. We still sin all the time, but the difference is we don't live in a state of fear all the time because we know that the blood of Christ is valuable enough and strong enough to cover our mistakes while we allow the Holy Spirit to work within us changing us from the inside out.
That was God's answer to my cry for help. ABOUT 8 YEARS passed since that cry. A marriage fell apart, a friend died, I fell into confusion and went back to some of my old ways, but God brought me back by his power, not by mine.
Since then we have had almost a decade and a half of relative peace in our lives.
I am, however, thankful for the way I was brought up. God knows what he is doing. He knew that, with my personality, I would need an unconventional path to salvation that took me from legalism to grace. I believe the church I grew up in exists for that reason and for people like me. That church will draw those who are truly looking for God's will, as I was, as well as opportunists looking for ways to control others and who seek power. But God will sort them out.
Back to the subject at hand. As I look back on my early life I WAS WRONG. I stood in a pulpit at churches and taught people the wrong Gospel. I taught lots of people wrong things. I've gone back to as many as I could find to tell them "I'M SORRY".
I'm sorry to every person who lost hope or gave up when they tried to follow the "works-based" Gospel I taught.
That's all that can be done. Sometimes mistakes have consequences that can't be fixed and "I'm sorry" is all that is left.
If I find that I am wrong about the Gospel I've followed for the past 13 + years I will be back to apologize again.
And, Derrel, as far as your comparison to the government goes, the fact is, it isn't the government who believes they are helping people with the current welfare system, it is the people who vote the representatives in. The representatives, on the other hand will have a lot to answer for because a huge portion of them KNOW the current system doesn't work, but they vote to increase it as a way to ensure re-election. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for "I'm sorry" from any of them.
