In the beginning..

On January of 2015 LifeGate church put on their first “Greater Glory” conference.  

Clay and I were still members of the church at this time.  In fact Clay was providing security for David Perkins, the speaker at the conference. 

The last day of the conference was the last day we attended LifeGate Church.  

The next day I went in, sat down at the computer and removed as much of our information as I could from their database, emailed the pastors to tell them that we would not be back, I put my set of keys on the desk, and we left.  This wasn’t planned.  We hadn’t set a date to leave LifeGate, we hadn’t discussed it with anyone, we hadn’t found a new church.  

We just left.

I had wanted to leave for almost a year prior to that but Clay wasn't ready.  But something happened at the conference that sealed it for him and at that moment he was ready to go.

Maybe I'll explain what happened in another blog post..

For the first four years that we attended LifeGate we were happy.  

Really happy.  

It was our first experience belonging to a church and we were devoted members. 

We made friends with leadership quickly and volunteered constantly- helping our friends prepare meals for everyone on Wednesday nights, setting up luncheons for funerals and I made two thousand phone calls reminding people to give money to the church (not even kidding).  

Clay took care of repairs that their maintenance people didn’t know how to do themselves and he helped form the security team.  

For the last year I volunteered in the office four or five days a week making phone calls and doing data entry.  

Clay and I would stand in the senior pastor's office and pray over him before he would go out and give his “talks” on Saturday nights. For 5 years we practically lived at LifeGate church.  

We were popular, and we liked it.

But we were naive about the whole church thing.  Aside from the boring church services we were forced to attend as children (that we never paid attention to) this was what we thought church was supposed to be. 

Colored lights, fog machines, loud music, people dancing and singing to feel-good songs played in upbeat tones to get us all hyped-up and ready to listen to a feel-good sermon all about us.  

The pastors were funny, they threw candy from the stage, and handed out free copies of Jesus Calling, Heaven is for real, The Circle Maker, The Shack and any other self-centered heretical book they were promoting at the moment.  They even used props and drew pictures to keep us all engaged.  It was fun.  We were “doing life together”.

From the beginning there were things that didn’t sit right with me and at first I chalked it up to being a new Christian.  After all, I was still learning “church”.  Even as I read more of the Bible and began to see that what I was reading wasn’t lining up with what I was seeing or hearing at LifeGate, it didn’t sway me.  These were my friends!  They were like my family.  In fact, I liked a lot of them more than certain members of my real family.

So what if something they preached from the pulpit didn’t exactly line up with what I read in the Bible?  There are so many different ways to interpret the Bible right?  Was it really a big deal that they used verses completely out of context as long as they loved Jesus?  That’s what’s important isn't?  That we love Jesus? 

 Everything else is religion and legalism.  It’s the relationship that counts!  

Besides, just because I thought that particular verses meant something else didn't that just prove that the Bible means different things to different people?

The Bible was alive.  We were told that all the time.  

And things that have life change all the time.

Duh!

Yeah, for real..  I actually believed that..

At the time I had no idea what a Confession was or why they were so important.  Plus if anyone had told me about them at that time I would have ignored them or said something like "how do we know that the people who wrote the confession were right?" which is exactly what the people who still attend that church (and others like it) say when I mention a Confession now..

At the time I truly believed that how you feel was what was important.

Besides, they were pastors!  Obviously they knew much more about the Bible than I did.  So I disregarded what I read and how I understood it and went with whatever they said while pushing aside the “but that’s not what the Bible says” thoughts whenever they came into my head.

But then my husband’s cousin sent me a Bible class in the mail.  The Levitical Sacrificial System.  Wow!  This was the “meat” that I read about in the Bible! I completed the class and then took it again.  I learned and wanted to learn more.  

This was when I started asking questions about what I was reading in the Bible.  

Simple questions like:

Are the 10 Commandments given in the order they are given for a particular reason?  

Every single person I asked (six pastors including the senior pastor and one person who was actually employed at a bible college at the time) couldn't give me an answer except to say “I’m not really sure” or “I’ve never wondered about that, let me know what you find out”.  

How do we know that certain books of the Bible are actual historic events and not just parables to teach a moral lesson?  

I mentioned three books of the Bible specifically when asking this question- Job, Esther, and Ruth.  

I asked three of the pastors. 

The first one said “I know they are real historical events, but I will have to check some of the books I kept from college to explain why and I’ll get back to you.”  

He didn't.

The second one answered with a couple questions of his own- 

“why do you need to know? Why can’t you just have faith that they really happened?”

 He never actually answered any of my questions.

Now that I think about it, he never answered any of my questions that pertained to the Bible specifically.   

The third pastor said “I'm not sure, I'll look into it and let you know”.  

He did come back later with an answer and then admitted to me that while he was online looking for the answer he also learned that Luke was not one of the twelve apostles. 

He actually said “I didn’t know that”.  

He had been a pastor for 20 years and he didn’t know that. 

*sigh*

If you didn’t pick up on it, one of the books I asked about was the book of Ruth.  

Ruth!  The wife of Boaz and the mother of Obed.  Obed was the father of Jesse.  Jesse was the father of David.  How can it be that not just one pastor, but THREE pastors did not know that Ruth was the great-grandmother of King David?  

The Bible clearly says so.

I'm not talking about new Christians here, I'm talking about pastors.  It’s literally their job to know this stuff!

I realized that if I wanted to know more about the Bible that I wasn’t going to learn it from the leaders of the church (ironic eh?) so I enrolled in theology school.  By this time I knew that LifeGate was seriously selling people short as far as educating them in Scripture, but I still stayed. 

 I still wanted to stay.  

Sure I grumbled occasionally because I wasn’t learning anything that I didn’t already know, but all in all LifeGate Church was a great place to be.  

By this time my husband and I were even more popular, we were part of the in-crowd. Everyone knew us, and some of the pastors were telling visitors about me and my “amazing testimony”.

I really did have an amazing testimony. Something that can only be described as a “God thing” really did happen, and it lead me to the pastor’s office where I repeated the prayer that saved me got me started on a journey toward my salvation four years later.  The problem though, for those first four years I really did think I was saved.

I wasn’t and neither was Clay.

I’m not going to go into everything that happened leading up to the moment that I sat in that pastor’s office repeating a prayer that would save me give me a false sense of security for the next four years but suffice to say that all at once I was aware that everything I had believed about God and myself up until that moment was a total lie and that I needed to know the truth.

So, I sat in the pastor’s office and told him what had happened.  

Then for the next hour or so he told me about himself and how he used to be a selfish guy who wasn’t interested in who Jesus was, but one day while he was visiting this little red church he ran down to the front, fell on his knees and cried and then confessed that he was a sinner and needed Jesus and then he was saved.  There was quite a bit more detail than that but that’s the gist of it..  So I repeated the prayer, admitted that I was a sinner, asked Jesus to please come into my heart, and I was saved!

I wasn’t though.  

I thought I was.  

I really did.  

I was doing everything I was supposed to be doing.  Serving, attending every event, leading a table at Hearts, giving money so people could go on mission trips, joining prayer groups, volunteering at the homeless shelter, handing out money to anyone and everyone, and was part of a small group full of other popular people.  

I read my Jesus Calling book every day, read the bible for two hours every morning, and then studied it for another two hours at night. If there was something a Christian should be doing, believe me I was doing it.

But I wasn’t saved.  

I was simply a person who went to church a lot and did a lot of stuff there while handing out a lot of money. 

And then one day I watched a video on Youtube by David Platt talking about how it doesn’t matter what any particular scripture means to any particular person; what mattered was what the bible said it meant. 

I actually jumped off my couch and yelled "YES!"

Over the next few weeks I searched for more videos.  

That David Platt video led me to a video of Todd Friel and that led me to videos from the Strange Fire Conference put on by John MacArthur and that led me to a video seminar by Justin Peters, and that led me to a video called 10 indictments against the modern church by Paul Washer, and that is what led me to God.  

That is when I really heard the Gospel and understood what salvation was, who Jesus really was, who and what I really was, what it was that Jesus was saving me from and why I so desperately needed Him. 

People please, seriously..  

Saying a prayer inviting Jesus into your heart is not going to save you.  

Nothing you do is going to save you.  

Not a choice or a decision that you make.

No one is saved without hearing the gospel and no one hears and understands the Gospel without God giving them the grace to do so.

You don’t have to believe me.

Read the bible and find out for yourself.