The Teaching Which You Learned

Now I urge you, brethren, keep your eye on those who cause dissensions and hindrances contrary to the teaching which you learned, and turn away from them. (Romans 16:17)

I mentioned before that the teachings which we grow up with cannot be assumed to be right simply because we grew up with them or even that so many people around us embrace or enforce them. Paul is not saying here that whatever teaching you learned first must be the one that you need to stick with while resisting anything new or different. That is patently absurd even on the face of it.

In my own experience I clung to the teachings of my youth for many years but not because they brought me inner freedom or peace or joy but because my own conscience was like a harsh slave-master torturing me anytime I dared to stray from the demands of a fear-based, guilt-motivated, God-fearing religion of performance and striving for perfection. I was taught that I must perfect my life into pure holiness (in the old sense of the term) to prepare for the Second Coming of Jesus and when I couldn't contain or control the sin in my life that I needed to simply get more help from God. As a result, most of my prayers were “help prayers” – God, help me be good, help me stop sinning, help me...

This produced in me at a very early age a state of mind that could easily have been diagnosed as schizophrenia and paranoia. It also resulted in a seething anger inside of my heart that I constantly tried to keep suppressed and hidden from others but came out in acts of rebellion and a spirit of bitterness and resentment that still plagues me to some extent yet today. It affected the formative hard-wiring of my personality and warped my character in ways that are now extremely difficult to repair.

So, for someone to come along and claim that I need to return to the original teachings that I learned and get away from all the “heresies coming into the church” will likely trigger me in ways that might be disproportionately intense as compared to others I grew up with might react. The oppressive nature of any religion that is founded primarily on fear and guilt damages the heart and distorts its view of the face of God. Because of this I have no doubt that these teachings are nothing like what Paul had in mind when he referred to the teaching which you learned.

In my case, and most likely in the case of nearly everyone I know today, it is essential that we realize that the teachings of the early apostles was so radically different than what we think they taught from our distant perspective and through our present heavily biased filters, that we need to be extremely cautious about advising people including ourselves to trust in “that old time religion” to be good enough for us. What do we really have in mind when we talk about our old time religion?

But when I stop to think about this carefully I find it frustratingly easier to identify many of the teachings that are not part of what Paul was likely referring to than it is to delineate the teachings that he may have been referring to that are accurate portrayals of the truths about God. On the other hand though, I cannot deny that God has been introducing me over a number of years to some of the truths that energized and motivated the early believers and challenged the assumptions of all the religious and non-religious people of the whole world in Paul's day.

One thing that is becoming more and more evident to me is that many of the teachings that I need to embrace that were more commonly known in the early church are teachings having to do with the condition of the heart, teachings that are difficult to articulate with spoken language but that are powerfully conveyed through the other 90% of the ways humans communicate. The disposition, the attitudes, the atmosphere surrounding each person who had dared to join themselves to the early group of radical believers in Jesus spoke far more eloquently about the nature of the truth that was transforming their lives than any words they could possibly articulate.

But their words were also indeed ways which they used to portray the startling new truths about God parallel to the witness of their hearts filled with the passion of God. Their whole being was so charged with the love that they were increasingly experiencing from heaven that they simply could not contain themselves from seeking to draw others – anyone who would respond – into this fellowship of joy and peace in the Holy Spirit.

For a period of time after Pentecost the early believers were living so close to God and so filled with the passion of the Holy Spirit that their natural righteousness was frighteningly pure and became threatening to every other religious establishment. Because the truth about God and His passionate love for humans was so obvious in their lives and their interactions with each other, their lives acted as a brilliant light that by contrast exposed the false assumptions and teachings of every counterfeit in the world. This kind of confrontation always produces anger, fear and hatred in the hearts of those who resist this exposure and they have to make a decision to either surrender their falsehoods and embrace this glorious new life or they are driven to resist it and fight its presence in the world with everything they can muster to suppress it.

But the question keeps coming back around inside my head that I cannot as yet completely answer very clearly. This may sound absurd to some who have read much of what I have been sharing over the past few years and maybe it should. It also may have to do with the fact that I struggle with a weak memory and often cannot recall easily what I have written, even recently. But the question that haunts me when I read these words by Paul is this: What really is the teaching that was originally delivered to those early believers that so radically made them misfits in the world around them? What was the teaching that so charged their hearts that it could be described as a fire in their bones? What really constituted the original beliefs of those early believers that transformed them into little imitations of Jesus so completely that they became labeled by others as “little Christs”, which later morphed into the word Christian?

I really want to know more personally the answer to these questions for myself, for I want to experience the kind of transforming passion and new birth that became the norm for those early Christians. I want my own life to glow with the fire of God's passion in my bones, to abhor evil with a perfect hatred and at the same time to unconditionally and passionately love every sinner caught in the deceptions of Satan. I want to be radically born again the way Jesus insisted must happen before a person can even perceive the kingdom of heaven.

I am tired of playing religion, of depending on arguments to prop up truth, of clashing with others over differences, of living a selfish life and using religion as a means for getting me out of trouble instead of vindicating the truth about God. The little glimpses that God has given me over the past few years have awakened in me a hunger to enter into the kind of rest that God talks about, the kind of joy that energizes me so powerfully that all fear is overcome in my life, the kind of passion for glorifying God that causes me to see all self-interest as worthless and even a liability.

But I cannot make myself holy in the ways that I am now seeing true holiness – a total devotion and obsession with revealing the truth about God to those who don't know Him intimately. I have to keep seeking God's Spirit to do in me what I simply cannot do even though I have attempted to for many years. I have to learn to live as a mirror and become so enamored with the growing revelations of the glory of God to my heart that my life will be transformed into a spectacle of glory reflected from the very throne of God.

So how do I get there from here? I can't answer that definitively yet, and I'm not sure I ever will be able to. I have to trust God to lead me day by day in ways that still remain very mysterious to me but that accomplish what He is planning for my life as I trust His heart and motives. But I can turn the mirror of my soul toward the light that I find in the Word. I can choose to turn my mirror away from the contaminating influences of the counterfeit systems and the entertainments of the world designed to confuse and warp my pictures of God and myself. In fact, about the only thing that I have the freedom and ability to do at all is to keep choosing to come to Jesus in every way I can think of so that He will do whatever it is that needs to be done in me while I learn to cooperate with that work.

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