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Thirty yeas ago this June while attending summer church camp as young teen, I sat in the open-air tabernacle listening to the evening evangelist give a dynamic and passionate sermon about Jesus’ 2nd coming.  The words he spoke, the Scripture verses he read aloud, the entire tone of his message struck a chord in my inner being.  In fact his sermons each previous night of the week-long camp were just as good and weighed heavily in my mind progressively.  But this final sermon of the week - on the final night of camp, seemed like God Himself was speaking through this man to give that particular sermon to ME.  At the alter call at the end of that service this minister asked if anyone else there in attendance wanted to accept Christ as their Lord & Savior (many had the previous nights & were also baptized).  A warmness overtook me and though at first my feet felt like they were nailed to the ground, the moment I decided I had to walk towards the front of the tabernacle, I could have sworn I floated like a feather down the aisle and up the front.  With tears in my eyes I knelt and confessed with my words and every emotional fiber within me, that I believed in and accepted Jesus of Nazareth as my Savior.  The next day before camp broke up, I was baptized in the same stream that my own grandmother had been baptized in some 50 years before.

A couple of my recent weekly posts have been about people who made a journey from one set of Biblical beliefs to another because of their investigation of the literal truth of Scripture.  This search for truth led one former trinitarian woman to see that her old beliefs in the trinity did not match up to what Scripture actually showed.  Another long-time Oneness preacher/singer/songwriter was led to finally see that Jesus is not the same literal being as God, but is really His Son, the real human Messiah.

Now I wish to present a slightly different perspective of a Jewish man who rekindled his ancestral faith while realizing that Jesus (or using his preference - Yeshua) was/is the human Jewish Messiah.

A few weeks ago I posted an article (”From Trinitarian to Unitarian“) that was a faith story of a woman that had been a long-term main-stream trinitarian Christian who came to take a long hard look at her beliefs versus the truth of Scripture.  After doing so, she changed her beliefs to align with what she actually found in Scripture.

Today I’m continuing in my quest to post more works from my collection of old theology writings that are now out of print and as far as I know are not yet out there in any digital form among the “ether” of the internet.

The following little poem is from a very old newspaper clipping that my parents had saved in a theology file they had put together over the years.  I truly do not know just how old it is, though from the looks of it it very well could be from the era of the 1940’s - 1950’s.  The author is listed as “H. A. Owens”.  But I have not been able to find any information about that person anywhere.

Many of us here at Kingdomready have talked about “Agency” in Scripture before and how much it is a part of the Hebrew thought world & the culture of the biblical writers. A “shaliach” or agent/emissary represented someone and was treated as that individual because legally they were.  In our modern society, the closest we get to that is to appoint “Power of Attorney” to someone.  They can make legally binding decisions for us because we have designated them to serve in that capacity for us.  But in ancient Hebrew culture, the shaliach (or sheliah) wasn’t just that person in a legal sense only.  They were also respected, treated, and thought of AS THE ONE THEY REPRESENTED.  Back in 2005 a man by the name of David Burge of New Zealand wrote a terrific article about how much this Hebrew ”law of agency” plays out in God’s dealing with man throughout Scripture and how vital it is to understand the concept in order to prevent a host of biblical errors.  Here’s the article in its entirety.  It is long, but extremely well done!

I was looking through some old copies of Anthony Buzzard’s “Focus on the Kingdom” newsletter today and re-read an article in it that I enjoyed reading all over again (though it has been over six years since I first read it).  The following is from a woman who attended the 2004 Theological Conference in Atlanta GA and presented the story of her own personal faith journey during the yearly segment that centers on that subject and allows people in attendance to tell the audience their own stories. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.

My Spiritual Journey

by Diane M.

This is a revised version of a presentation made at the 2004 Theological Conference.

What is the most well known Bible verse in all of Christianity?

People who grew up through the Seventies and Eighties might reply with John 3:16 – especially if you went to or watched any televised football games during that time period. I fondly recall seeing signs and banners like the photo above being displayed by people in the end zone sections of games for years and years.  Plus it was always a staple verse of instruction/memorization in Sunday School, Vacation Bible School and summer church camp classes everywhere. I imagine if you took a poll of mainstream Christianity and asked about John 3:16, a great many people could quote it back to you verbatim.

This is something that has popped into my head here and there for some time now.  And I’ve read other answers to this kind of question out on the web (see links below).  But I wanted to ask it in more of a theological setting to see what others here could add to the subject. Please note that I’m not trying to be callous regarding death and the intense emotions it brings.  As an only child who lost both parents at a young age, that vile enemy death has had a far-reaching and deeply emotional effect on my own life.

So here is the question: Why are people who believe death leads immediately to immortality so sad for those who “pass-on”?

Continuing in my quest to convert many of my father’s collection of out-of-print theology works to the digital medium, I thought I’d post a short work from an old Central Advent Christian Mission Society booklet.  The title of the booklet is “What’s It All About?  - Life, Death, Then What?” and is a collection of works by three AC ministers.  I do not know the date those works were originally written, but I’m guessing the booklet itself was from the 1960’s or before.  The price of the booklet was 25 cents or five for $1.  This particular small piece is from a larger work by the Rev. A. W. Sibley entitled simply “Resurrection“.  I’ll post more at later dates - perhaps when I buy a new scanner/optical reader to make the whole conversion process much easier.

A few weeks back a cousin in my large extended family (my mother was one of 8 brothers and sisters) died of cancer at the extremely young age of 21.  Since her death I have wanted to write her mother (my first cousin once removed) and her grandmother (my first cousin) a sympathy note that included a few words of Biblical encouragement.  Of course the difficult thing here is that my extended family is primarily all Baptist.  And as such they’re believers in going to heaven at death instead of remaining non-existent in the grave until The Resurrection at the return of Jesus.  So for me the challenge is how do I express sympathy while planting a few “truth seeds” about the biblical truth of The Resurrection?  I don’t want to be rude or preachy. But at the same time I wanted to express the hope that Scripture presents and see if God carries those seeds to fertile soil at some point in the future.