I Remember His Goodness

We were in the middle of the lawsuit and everything was stacked against us.

We had already had to withdraw it because of statute of limitations issues and other reasons and now Bill Gothard was threatening sanctions against us for even filing a lawsuit in the first place. Sanctions that involved paying him money and what he called 'biblical reconciliation' among other things.

I couldn't understand it.

God had given me specific direction years before that this was what He wanted me to do. Not just me, but a few of the others also. Why was He now not coming to our rescue. Why did He not intervene? I was getting angry with God. It was my go-to reaction when things got bad. It's God's fault. He doesn't care. He doesn't listen. He won't even answer prayer.  He doesn’t do what he says he will do - in his own Bible, no less. 

I was mad, angry, disappointed, hurt that God would tell me to do something and then leave me all alone. 

The experience of the lawsuit allowed me to see God in a different way. I thought that, because I’d grown up in a pentecostal church, I understood spiritual battles, but this was a completely different experience to what I’d ever seen before. It was as though I was shoulder to shoulder with God fighting something so dark and oppressive and the onslaughts never stopped. They just kept coming and we just kept fighting back. It began in 2014 (for me in 2012), and didn’t stop until 2019. This was the period of time personally for me that was fraught with danger. My husband nearly lost his life through cardiac arrest, our finances were decimated, my children faced health issues-we’d just get through one thing and something else would slam us. It felt like a Job-of-the-Bible experience. I would never, never, ever recommend anyone going into something like this without reckoning and understanding that your life might be shattered.

Why were the onslaughts so powerful? Why did it feel that we were up against an evil so great we weren’t going to survive to the end, literally? 

And where was God? Why was He not helping?

Then the answer came. It came in the morning one day and I was pleading with God for help. Not just for myself, but for the other amazing women who were also on this battlefield. We were being pounded and we were battered and bruised. We needed help.

That still, small voice - those old words hidden in my heart from childhood.

“No one comes to the Father except through Me.” John 14:6.

It was like a light went on that day. “No one comes to the Father except through Me.”

Why had I not seen that before?  Was I guilty of ignoring Jesus?

“For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus.” 1 Timothy 2:5.

Once I understood this and processed it, my belief system began to make sense and change, but it was small steps at a time.

I changed my approach. I began praying to Jesus, not God. I began asking Jesus to stand in the gap for us girls. To go to our Heavenly Father and ask Him to help us. Every morning, faithfully, I would pray the same thing. I also asked Jesus to shelter each one of us under his wings of protection. I took our names, one by one, to him, every day.  I asked Jesus to remind God of us fighting down here for Him.

“He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust… He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge: his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.”

I prayed this every day for two years.

We began to climb out of the battlefield. We began seeing victories and triumphs, ultimately leading to our finale in the court room in January 2019. We were safe. We had done what we needed to do, what God had asked us to do. God had stood with us and fought along side us. The battle was over.

This experience for me, was more than this fight though. It was getting to know God in a different way, a new way. It allowed me to process the doubts and questions and showed me what had been missing for so long from ‘organised religion.’ 

Jesus.

I know that is a bold thing to say. I know that it will cause many to recoil and look askance at me. But it’s true. The church, both liberal and conservative has lost its way collectively and found ways to circumvent Jesus. While it doesn’t deny Jesus, it struggles to accept him.

They’re ignoring Jesus.

They’re going straight to God. Trying to understand God. Trying to reconcile the Old Testament God with the New Testament God. Does God have a personality disorder that in one time in history he’s horrible and in another he’s merciful? If you understand God through the eyes of what is written, and man’s trying to understand it, it would seem so.

But if you start looking at everything through Jesus and what he stands for, it changes everything.

I come back to the question I asked before, because it’s important and needs clarification.

“It was as though I was shoulder to shoulder with God fighting something so dark and oppressive and the onslaughts never stopped. They just kept coming and we just kept fighting back. Why did it feel that we were up against an evil so great we weren’t going to survive to the end, literally?”

The modern day church has forgotten about Jesus. Both the liberal and the conservative.  It has set the culture of its own christianity as an idol before the people. It is arrogant. It speaks for God as an authority. Men and women interpret the Bible from their own cultural perspectives.

This was why our battle was so fierce. We were exposing some of the greatest hypocrisy and heresy and abuse the christian world had ever seen. It hadn’t just gathered in the confines of a cult, it had spread widely across all denominations. The fingers of this heresy, had touched many places, many people, ruined lives and turned people away from God. Slowly, subtly, over generations, the darkness had undermined the very cornerstone of faith and belief through men who were hungry for power and lusted after glory and it had warped the true message of the Gospel. 

Jesus.

And God was angry.

I don’t think I will ever truly understand the implications of our little group of women going up against something so dark and evil and much more powerful than us, or the man we were fighting in court. I have tried, but I don’t think I will ever know the significance of that in the spiritual. 

But what it did do for me was open my eyes to Jesus. Somewhere I had lost him. Somewhere between the years of 5 and 45 I had lost Jesus. 

Why had I lost Jesus? Because I thought I knew who Jesus was and the battle in the lawsuit showed me I didn’t. My construct of Jesus was man-made and idol-like. 

I needed to find him again.

Little Idols Everywhere

What does this quote mean in context of christianity?

When I was 15 years old I travelled to Thailand with my family and some members of our church on a missions trip to take materials and encouragement to the struggling churches in the north of Thailand and to take medical supplies across the border to the refugees in Burma.

As we travelled through a country where Buddhism is the main religion, my parents would point out the little idols everywhere and make points along the lines of ‘look at the crumbling idols they worship here. Why would you worship something man-made that’s going to decay and rot?’

But idols are everywhere and they don’t always come in the likeness of an image. What if my beliefs also had crumbling idols. Ones you couldn’t see made of wood or stone, but were still there, still idols? What if my beliefs were man-made ideas about God?

Until I began to study sociology I didn’t have the words to articulate what was already causing doubts in my mind about the type of christianity I was into. 

Cultures are made up of values, beliefs and symbols. 

Religions too are a mix of values, beliefs and symbols.

Cultural christianity is no different to this.

I’ve been trying to pin point when my doubts began. Where those little lights of truth tried to creep in. 

When those doubts and questions started intruding into my safe, comfortable belief system. I’m not sure I can pinpoint it exactly, but it was lots of little, trivial, sometimes not trivial events or observations that made me file them away in my brain to ponder. Sometimes I think living in and experiencing other cultures helps to broaden your world view-you start to see life through the eyes of other people who have different backgrounds, different cultures.

As I’ve been thinking back on it this last week, I’ve struggled to write it down. It’s not easy to put your idols on display before you and realise they have no power, and are man-made, even now when I have worked through all this.

What I started to question went against everything I had been raised to believe. Everything I’d been taught about God and christianity. I’ll tell you about a few of them.

In the early days of my doubts, I kept coming back to this question: what do I know?  “I know that I know that I know’ - as we used to say in YWAM. What I knew was at the core of my belief was:

• the existence of God

• That He created the world

• That Jesus His son came to Earth.

Beyond that, I was open to anything. I was prepared to start over, from scratch. I said to God that I wanted to find the real Him and would He help me please, on my search, because I was scared as hell to do it.

When I was a child growing up in my beautiful, safe christian community fairytale, I was a timid, quiet creature with no obvious beauty or talents, but I was good at one thing. Remembering things, and specifically, Bible memorisation and knowledge. During church time and the long sermons instead of taking diligent notes as some would, I would totally switch off, open my Bible and read the ancient stories or study the maps in the back. I got to know the Bible very well.

It wasn’t until we joined the Bill Gothard cult in my late teens that Bible memorisation became mandatory and rote and took the life out of it. I felt that I had gained a good knowledge of the Bible just from those Sunday mornings in church when I found ways to entertain myself without getting a growling from the parents. This helped me later in life as I looked for God. 

My mother tells me that one of her proudest moments is when I won the Bible quiz at a community night when I was about 11 or 12 years old. 

All those times reading and re-reading, I feel like I was hiding God’s Word in my heart, as Psalm 119:11 says. 

Two incidents stand out for me in the beginning of my questioning.

A member of my family really got into the debate between Armenianism and Calvanism. It was the topic of discussion wherever we went for awhile and it made me feel uncomfortable. To give a brief summary of what the two schools of beliefs are, Calvinists believe that God is 100% sovereign and knows everything that will happen because he planned it. Armenians believe that God is sovereign but has limited control in relation to man’s freedom.

Of course it is much more complex than this. But my issue with it was multiple:

1. Why must God be limited to these two concepts. What if neither is right?

1. I recalled the Bible verse from Matthew 18:2-4. “He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them, and he said: ‘truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” It seemed to me that making faith complicated with debates about God’s sovereignty and more importantly, teaching about God’s sovereignty was perhaps not what we were supposed to be doing.

The other incident that occurred happened on social media and was the one that really shook my faith up. The one that really got me digging deep for answers.

I happened to know two acquaintances - both christian - who had sick newborns with life-threatening conditions. They, of course, were asking all the people to pray for their babies.

But one died and one lived.

The family of the one that lived praised God for the answer to their prayers. God had saved their baby. God had shown them mercy. God had saved their child’s life.

But what about the other baby? The one who had died? How does God decide who lives and who dies? 

Does God decide who lives and who dies? Do prayers en masse make a difference? 

But both families had prayers en masse. Did one family have more people praying than the other and that made a difference? 

None of this seemed right. None of this seemed to be fair. Did I want to know a God who made decisions like this based on the numbers or fervency of prayers? Did one family have more sin in their life than the other, so God punished them? How can I follow a God like that? 

I can’t.

So was this a man-made idea of God.

Probably.

I kept coming back to these Bible verses, ‘For the Lord your God is a God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes.’ Deuteronomy 10:17. Or this one: “Then Peter began to speak: ‘I now realise how true it is that God does not show favouritism.” Acts 10:34

Of course God also says to pray without ceasing “rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, so I am not saying that prayer in these times is pointless. 

I have come to see it as an act of faith. A comfort in troubled times, an open expression of worship and acknowledgement of God. I do not believe anymore that - unless it is in very special circumstances such as a spiritual battle against evil which is intercessory prayer, which I might get into later - that prayer should be used as a bribery of God to give you what you want or need or show how good your faith is so God will reward you.  God is not Santa Claus. 

Then someone mentioned the Old Testament and the angry God we sometimes see in those old stories. God does seem angry at times. God did wipe out entire generations - sometimes ruthlessly, cruelly. There were a lot of rules and harsh punishments if the rules were broken. Like - really harsh. Unthinkable harsh.

In reading the stories of the Old Testament we often forget that actually something is missing from God’s perspective. A doorway to the truth.

It wasn’t until we were in the middle of the lawsuit battle and crying out to God for help when everything was stacked against us, that I learned about this. It surprised me.

Little Lights Everywhere

When you've grown up as I have, surrounded by a christian community, beginning to question your faith feels scary. It also feel dangerous. 

Who dares question God? 

It would have been more comfortable to accept everything.

It would have been more comfortable to just believe what I'd been taught and not rock the carefully constructed, safe boat of beliefs which sailed in that ocean of my world.

It would have been more comfortable to overlook the inconsistencies, the hypocrisy, the bending and manipulating of the Bible. The bending and manipulating of the Church and the people.

But safety does not always go hand in hand with truth, and I would rather have truth. Everytime. Even if it's painful and hard and even if it meant facing God's wrath. I had to know. I had to find out who I believed in and I wanted answers. Was God the God of my parents? Was God the God of my church? Was God the God of the books I read or the christian radio station I listened to, or the contemporary music I loved. Was God the God of the hymns? Was God the God of the end time preacher or the guest speaker from a far away nation? Was God the God of Bill Gothard? All these voices. All these opinions. All these interpretations? What was truth?

How do I shut out the voices - all those messages - and how do I find the God of the Truth?

Not my truth. Not their truth. Not even 'truth'. But 'The God of The Truth?"

It takes courage to find it. Some have the search forced on them. Others seek it out. The majority prefer the safety of their carefully constructed boats and never think of leaving the shore. But truth has a funny way of making its presence known - creeping up on the complacent, knocking at the doors of passivity. Who chooses to listen? Who wants to listen? For if you do, it will overwhelm your soul and there will be no turning back and nothing will ever be the same again.

I found Jesus when I was five years old, at the same time as both my parents who had been raised in traditional churches such as the Anglican and Methodist church. My father was not a church goer in his early adult years, but through my mother, they heard about this new movement in town and were curious to find out more. They eventually immersed themselves into the pentecostal church community, which in a few short ten years influenced my life so dramatically, that by fifteen years of age I was living away from my hometown in the big city and my father was about to start pastoring a small community church. We took short term missions trips to places like Thailand, Malaysia and Burma (Myanmar) and travelling to Australia with Barry Smith, the end times preacher and a close personal friend of my father and mother.

The last ten years had been full-on, evangelical, pentecostal immersion. The church we attended in my childhood hometown was no slouch in the scene of New Zealand pentecostal churches either. It was a hub of dynamic preachers, guest speakers and church launching. Looking back through my childhood autograph book, (a popular trend in the 1970s and 1980s), I have the signatures of some of the christian world's best-known teachers in there from the 1980s. People like David Wang from communist China and the famous evangelist Ray Comfort.  My parents moved me from the local public school and into the newly established christian school. I thrived. It was a wonderful time - a wonderful community. It was total immersion into the pentecostal world and the church was at the centre of it and my family in the middle of it. Hook, line and sinker.

When I went off to YWAM in 1990 to Australia on a big adventure, I was barely 18 years old. Looking back this is one of the best times of my life. YWAM was perfect for me. I made lifelong, beautiful friends and it really cemented the call in my heart to give my life to God's service - regardless of denomination. Regardless of culture. Regardless of church politics and christian politics. I was, as we used to say then, 'sold out for God.' I really meant it.

Two important things happened to me when I was with YWAM. The first experience was a night on the Goulburn base when I told God I would go anywhere and do anything for Him and I meant it.  I gave God permission to take over my life. I then expected He would send me off to the countries I feared the most like North Korea or Iraq because it always seemed that missionaries told tales of going to places they never wanted to go to and that God laughed at them and sent them there. The second was in Sydney, Australia after we returned from Indonesia. I had gone to the bathroom with my friends early in the morning and while I was at the basin, a woman I had never seen before approached me and told me that God wanted me to know He had a job for me to do in the years ahead. 

This was the first of what I now call the little lights. Little glimpses into the true character of God. Little moments of light that I would remember years later, when I needed to.

I listened to her and took on board what she was saying, but at the same time I was self-effacing. There were others more fervent and more gifted than me. I even wondered if she'd mixed me up with my friend. I also had come from the background of hyper-spiritualism and had a hesitancy and natural questioning towards anything smattering of the supernatural. My parents, while believing in the spiritual world and 'spiritual warfare' (a christian term for battles of God against Satan), were cautious about all the fringe activity that went with this. They never totally bought into the 'demons behind every lamp-post' craze that swept through the Pentecostal Church in the 1980s.

You know how when you look back on your life you see forks in the road. Decisions made that controlled destiny.

I made one of those in 1991. I was in Hawaii at the YWAM university and a ministry opportunity came across my path. To go and work as an assistant to the widow of Keith Green in Texas. But I let it go. I turned away from it and came home to New Zealand. A year later I met Bill Gothard, and all my life changed.

I don't want to dwell on that time because my experiences are well documented in other places. 

But I was 20 years old when I met Bill and my family had became involved in IBLP (Institute in Basic Life Principles) while I was away with YWAM. So I went to work for him as his secretary in his beautiful, plush office in Chicago. This was - as I would discover years later - the 'job' I had to do for God. This was my Iraq and my North Korea. 

In many ways, this was my martyrdom, because it did suck the life out of me.

But the heresy of Bill Gothard only layered upon the constructed images of God and faith and christianity that were already there. Later, when I began to question, one of the big questions I asked was;

 Why was my family vulnerable to the deep deception of Bill Gothard's teachings? 

In Part 2 I'll talk about what questions led me to deconstruct everything I thought I knew about God and the little flashes of light in the answers that helped lead me back to God.

Disclaimer: I use Wikipedia to give basic information about some of the people and organisations I mention. Wikipedia is not always a reliable source - but I do not choose to link to some of the websites as I now disagree with their theology and don't want them getting an increase in visitor traffic.

Faith

I want to write a series of posts about my faith. I hesitate to use the word 'journey' because it is a word that is used so much for so many things. Faith is a journey, but it's more than just that one sweeping statement. It's a lifestyle. It's a set of beliefs and values. It brings meaning and purpose to life. 

I'm a deep thinker. My internal wrestling with the world takes me to some dark places but my natural inclination is to figure a way out. I have a pessimist brain with an optimist heart and a sunny approach to life.  It can lead to some interesting discussions and dialogue. It led me to question everything I've been taught. It led me to freedom. It led me to study sociology - the perfect academic subject for such a confusing personality. 

My faith began when I was 5 years old so I can say that I have been a woman of faith for 45 years now and what that looks like now is actually very similar to what it looked like at 5 years old. It's like a full circle, but it's changed and altered and grown and shrunk, nearly discarded - but now it looks more like it did at 5 years old than it did at 25 years old. But the difference is the knowledge of God that I have gathered along the way and yet, to many and to myself once, it is the knowledge of God that is often the stumbling block. 

I met someone this week who had been a christian missionary to a remote, little-known Asian village - the exact same place that I was at nearly 30 years ago. It was a joyous chance encounter to talk to someone who knew this place as I did. We exchanged jungle stories and I heard how the area has grown and is thriving. As I was thinking about it afterwards and remembering those days I thought about the saying we used to have when I was in YWAM (Youth with a Mission) which is the organisation I was with when I travelled to this remote village.

"To know God and to make Him known."

A village in the far north jungle of Sulawesi. Copyright Rachel Lees

Walking through the jungle into the village
Copyright Rachel Lees                          

I thought I knew God. 

I never imagined, when I was with YWAM and in the youth and fervency of my faith going to remote, isolated jungle villages that one day I would nearly walk away from it all. That I would be led into a deception so deep and dark and hollow that it would crush my faith and everything I thought I knew about God.

I stripped back everything I thought I knew about God and started over, not because I wanted to but because I had to. For my faith to survive - if it was going to survive, the culling was vital. I questioned a lot. I questioned how my foundation of cultural christianity had led to me being deceived. I questioned why God would take me into spiritually dangerous places.- and I'm not talking about remote Indonesian villages here, but rather the gilded, plush offices of a well-known christian organisation.  I questioned the image of God I had been taught and the one I had constructed in my mind. I questioned everything. 

I don't claim to have the answers, but I do want to record what has been for me, an extraordinary, revolutionary, sometimes rebellious experience and why now I feel a confidence in my faith and my beliefs that I've never known before. I was explaining to someone recently why I don't go to church anymore. I will cover this later, but in a short summary, the main original reason is that I did not want man's idea of God and man's interpretation of God to influence my life and my life decisions anymore. as it had done once, so catastrophically.  I decided to set out to know God and to know Him so well, that when a counterfeit was introduced to me, I would be able to see it. I would not be deceived again. But what I found is - the key here is that if you want to know God - really know God - you can't do it on knowledge alone. You have to have faith. It's vital, and often - paradoxically - the key ingredient that is overlooked.

So here's what my series is going to look like:

1. Creating an Idol out of God - a study into cultural christianity

2. Faith can never be anything but faith - it's not knowledge, it's faith

3. Counterfeit Faith - endemic lies in mainstream christianity

4. Jesus is the centre of everything - like it or not, and many - even christians - don't.

5. Simple Faith - like a child