Producing Fruit
Van Robinson
Jesus Christ stated that "by their fruit you will know them" and that is the absolute criteria that determines who and who is not a fruit producer. Some produce sour grapes. Some produce lemons. Others produce honey.
Fruit in the lives of human beings is public. What preachers and pastors produce is public and the fruit of many preachers is GREED and personal VANITY. Greed and vanity are not desirable fruits. Humility is a good fruit. Being a peacemaker is a good fruit. Taking vain titles such as "elder", "pastor", "senior pastor", "bishop" and so forth are NOT good fruits. It doesn't matter what the "apostle" Paul said, because he is not the source of truth and light, but rather Jesus Christ is. Paul was not and is not "master", although millions seem to think he is. How often I have heard speakers from the pulpits say "Paul said", "Paul said", "Paul said", "Paul said" as if Paul was God in the flesh. He wasn't! I care not what Paul said, but rather I care what Jesus said. Offended? Follow Paul if you wish, but know this, Paul was not and is not God.
Herbert W. Armstrong was not God either, nor is any leader of any splinter group of the WWCG. All men are clay or if you wish dirt. If you think otherwise, just stick around awhile and see how many men wind up in the grave yard and return to dirt (100%). Every religious guru who stands in a church pulpit and pounds the pulpit with his peculiar beliefs will eventually fade from this life and this world. Why follow them as if they are somebody? They are nobody! Quality fruit is naturally desirable. Rotten fruit is repulsive! It is amazing how much rotten fruit stands in pulpits.
Rotten religious fruit is vain, haughty, demands obedience, demands money and compels the naive and the gullible to conform or else, and thrives upon instilling FEAR in the simple minded. Rotten fruit seeks followers and wants an endless supply of free money to build buildings and provide a lifetime of free income for its control freaks. Rotten fruit produces NOTHING of value and makes sick those who eat it.
Van Robison
25 comments:
Speaking of titles, how many "doctors" are there in the ministry? What is the purpose of letting people know that one has a PhD? If I had a doctorate I don't know if I would like to go by the name "Doctor Dumbhead'. More like Mr. Dumbhead. Seems more humble
HWA, and then COGleaders like Dave Pack, defined fruit, not as fruit of the spirit, but as sign of church affluence. They even stated that "fruit" was a measure of income and growth (increase in membership, not spiritual growth).
Use your head. Think critically. Treat teachers as resources. They are your library. Get nuggets from each, but “follow” none! You, as an individual, are responsible for your own fruits. If you’re following a human guru, you are automatically on a corrupted path.
BB
Does this web site have ANYTHING good to say about any pastor? Any church? Any Christian religious organization? If not, it seems like the whole idea is to destroy the church of Jesus, all the while pretending to love "Jesus". Not too many people are going to follow Jesus on their own. They need a religious community. Kill off all the pastors and you have no religious community. That of course, seems to be the real intention.
4:48: Why would I have anything good to say about something that messed up my early life and led me to not only help to mess up but totally destroy a multitude of others based on erroneous interpretations of a book that is a hodge podge of lies and baseless mythology from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22? I was able to come to my senses and pull myself out of the fire slowly and painfully, but I helped lead others into an abyss they have never escaped, and some of them have probably committed suicide. It was conceived as a Jewish priestly lie, modified as an imperial Roman lie and has maintained its mixed up and convuluted forms through blood drenched centuries of ignorance, hate and untold suffering. Armstongism is just one of the more extreme manifestations now extant, but the original monster, Catholicism, lurks in the background and still condemns much of humanity to squalor, misery and all forms of ecclesiastical tyranny. I don't want to kill off anybody, but I want to expose the evil I now understand.
4:48 This blog is NOT about other churches out in society around us but deals with Armstrongite splinter cult churches of the Worldwide Church of God. I think all of us here acknowledge that there were a FEW good ministers out there in the COG, but not in the long run, and certainly NOT in any top leadership positions. The Church of God, for the most part, is NOT the church of Jesus as it avoids as much as possible any dealings with Jesus and what he taught. If you think they are then you need to get your head out of your ass.
"Not too many people are going to follow Jesus on their own. They need a religious community. Kill off all the pastors and you have no religious community. That of course, seems to be the real intention."
Denis Diderot noted:
"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.". Diderot lived (1713-1784) during a time when Freedom, in its various forms, was swirling in the desires of the underclasses.
Church and ministry do provide community but also conformity, so it's a toss up as to whether one wished to conform, go underground to keep community, or just be themselves by themselves. Can you be a Christian outside a specific Community or the True Church? Depends whose Community and which True Church you ask.
it seems like the whole idea is to destroy the church of Jesus
No. As Byker Bob once put it, we are troubleshooters, and I generally put it as critiquing the Mythical True Church of Armstrongism.
As for turning some to atheism and agnosticism, one can argue who was worse, HWA for creating morphed fruit, or the Tkatches for shaking the tree.
Kill all the kings and priests and you have anarchy which means you are back to the animal level before civilization began. Of course that is the goal of the radical left: to collapse the system so they can put in their brutal commie one-party rule.
Atheists have no moral system to replace the one they are destroying. They are armchair critics who can't produce anything better.
Either you're a COGlodyte pretending to care about "falsely so called Christians" or you have not actually read "this blog" for any length of time.
"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.".
Of course the atheists here have no problem with killing off the priests.
“Does this website have ANYTHING good to say about any ........?”
It’s a blog, a collective. There are many individuals expressing their personal understandings and philosophies. Of that collective, you will find a few who actually don’t have anything good to say about anything based on any religion. But, that’s not the website saying it, and those individuals often make valuable contributions to the conversation in other areas which purely religious posters may not be equipped to make. If you are looking for a blog with a Christian perspective presented by former Armstrongites, you may want to check out “As Bereans Did.”
It can sometimes seem as if Banned is a battlefield between the atheists and Christians. I refuse in my own own perspectives to distill it down to such us vs them thinking. Ask yourself, would it be a bad thing if a reader’s faith in Armstrongism were surgically and precisely destroyed, but not his or her faith in God or Jesus Christ? You see, that is one of the possible outcomes on a blog which is not run by a specific church group that would be dictating new solutions. In other words, as a community, we leave you in a vacuum in which you are left to do additional research and to find your own solutions. You are responsible for refilling the vacuum. Nobody has ever claimed that this is the one true blog. Ideally, it is not a reader’s only source of information. Hopefully, you are reading widely, doing additional research, and getting on with your life.
Remember, sometimes we can learn from the people who are without something, because we get to see what is no longer being brought to the party, and what its absence means. That can be reaffirming in and of itself if you are realizing what you are observing.
Does that help? In the end, it’s all what you make of it. Our individual journeys are a highly personal thing.
BB
Strawmans argument. To suppress the truth is not helping the Church of Jesus either. God was allowed to chastise whole nations in OT times, babylonian captivity. Jesus himself called them a den of vipers yet God in 2018 is NOT ALLOWED to chastise any athority figure who proclaim to speak in HIS name and also benefit from money given in HIS name. Who are they kidding.
It is not the kings and the priests but the rabbis that control America.
RSK: stupidest thing you ever said. And that's saying a lot.
I disagree, 7:43. Back when I was an atheist, I did have a personal code of right and wrong. It just wasn’t based on God. There are certain activities that every civilization in the history of mankind has recognized as bad, immoral, or wrong. There are other things that are cruel, unkind, or inconsiderate. And, there are also activities that man has ruled as illegal, and penalties are attached. Christians invoke God as the source of this knowledge (and all goodness), while atheists credit logic, empathy, and solid reasoning.
There are any number of cliches that Christians have against atheists, and that atheists have against Christians. For the most part, all of the people around us except the criminal element have good intentions and try to do what is right. If you expect good of people, usually that’s what you’ll get. Before everyone gets their panties in a wad, I make that statement based on daily life here in my town in my state in the USA. Someone living in Kenya or North Korea or even in a bad neighborhood in the USA could be having a completely different experience.
BB
4.48
It seems that you missed what Christ said about the Pharisees. Shooting the messenger is not a admirable trait.
"Atheists have no moral system to replace the one they are destroying. They are armchair critics who can't produce anything better."
You are obviously ignorant of humanist ethics and principles. When you feel you have to defend an all-powerful god who somehow can't fend for himself, things get ugly.
Atheistic humanists can have OK or reasonable ethics. But they cannot stand up to coercive pressure. Only a Christian with his or her 'cause God says so' can.
Got a long way to go to catch up to you, Incognito. ;)
... because its really hard to lower my IQ down to the room temperature yours hovers at. ;)
Hey Byker Bob, there are good people in Kenya an North Korea too. And there are bad people in your state in the USA as well as in Kenya and in North Korea :) Ok, ok, I know that's exactly what you meant.
But on the flip side, a starving kid in North Korea goes in and steals a few lumps of coal from the railroad so they can barter them for food. Is that bad or good? A guy holds up a bank on Oregon so they can buy some medicine for their sick kid back home. Is that bad or good? You may be reading this on a smartphone as you enjoy seating on couch in your air conditioned house sipping a nice cocktail. Your smartphone was built in a slave-factory in China, your AC unit was built in China too under what you would call deplorable working conditions. But the workers did that so they could feed their families. What one person or even one society defines as morally right or wrong could be the extreme opposite elsewhere or what you define as right could be causing someone else somewhere what you would consider wrong.
My point? God(s) or no god(s), life sucks but we just have to go through the motions - of course trying to do the right as much as you can but don't look down on others because they are not doing what you think is right.
"... because its really hard to lower my IQ down to the room temperature yours hovers at. ;)"
RSK
Would you please in the future consider the international audience of this blog. re: fahrenheit, centigrade..................
Thank you, wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome..........
nck
BTW
I don't know about the atheists.
I do know that the coach of that Cavemen Thai soccer team is having a hard time at the moment!.........One can imagine regarding the responsibility he bears. But the Thai temples seem to be filling with people praying for him.
Also rumor has it that the godless Russians are preparing for the soccer team to be present at the finale this weekend.
I know, I am playing your emotions like the next Jimmy Swaggart. Still I love that kind of general humanity regardless of affiliation.
nck
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