Beyond Types & Shadows Part One: My 40 Years in a Christian Wilderness

Right side Up or Upside Down?

My life has been turned right side up since coming to daily dine with the Lord Jesus at His Table. In the eyes of most of my kind and loving brothers and sisters in Christ, however, it appears to them that my world of faith has turned upside down.

COMMNIONFIRE: When you Become Bold enough to Believe in the reality of the bread and wine and offer it to Jesus for His blessing, He takes it, blesses it, breaks it and gives it back to us as something transformed by His eternal power. Jesus calls Himself the bread of life and then says that if we eat the bread He blesses to become His glorified flesh, and if we drink the wine He blesses and it becomes His glorified blood, we partake of His eternal life with the promise that He will raise us up on the last day. He also said when we do this we are within Him and He is within us. "Christ in you the hope of glory!" 

In Jesus, the vail of the law is torn away.. the Passover is replaced by the Eucharist...
and when you sit down with Jesus and say, "Lord I believe, help my unbelief", He does!

As a young believer, who asked Jesus to be my Savior on Superbowl Sunday 1971, my muster for daily witnessing, prayer and Bible study was relentless for the next 20 years.

Every day gave birth to another opportnity to share the Good news, pray for the lost and study to show myself approved of God, a workman that need not be ashamed. I was always ready to give an answer for the reason my faith. I lived in the types and shadows of the Old Testament, New Testament and the witness of all that went before me.

I had heros of faith, role models of faith and ministries that I paid attention to to stay in tune with what the Holy Spirit was saying to the churches. It was my way of orthodoxy or as one article called it, inadvertantly I cultivated my own form of orthopraxy!

I also learned early in the 1970s that there were enemies of the faith because of street witnessing and college campus open air evangelism, passing out tracts and Jesus Papers (a form of newspaper that had a counter-cultre feel. We did this in the evenings, twice a week, while working in factories to care for my young family and provide work for people we rescued from cults was a way of life. Our earliest and biggest warfare was with groups that had such cool, biblical names like:

The Children of God a fast growing christian cult that went global almost overnight from California beaches to colonies set up throughout the United States and various parts of the world. Others included The Way (Bible Institute); Jesus Saves; The Local Church, Greater Grace World Outreach and Jesus Only.

We tangled with these folks for years. They would even try to imitate us to gain new followers. The early church faced off with similar cults like the Judaisers, Arianism, he Knostcs and the like. The late Fr. Jack N. Sparks wrote our handbook called Mindbenders. We were always on the radar learning to identify the "new cult of the week" sprouting during the evangelical/charismatic revival and renewal poured out from heaven in the early 1970s that ran to the early 1980s.

After 45 years I am still fighting the good fight of faith but this morning, (thank you Jesus), the Lord showed me how there were precious truths that got buried under my pursuit to stay "New Testament". I'm not sure how it happened, but it did. The "we" became the me.

When I was left and alone after almost 2 years of stoking the revival fires of the 70's, I burned out. I lost my family, my ministry, and my personal sense of mission. 

As an act of total surrender to the failures of my own efforts for the Lord, I spent the next 20 years trying to be succesful as a full commission salesman. I lost no love for Jesus, but I was living in the wilderness of my sojourn caring for the demands of a temporal life. In my heart was an anchor called Matthew 6:33.

I tried my own business and my goodness was taken advantage of until I came to the end of that track for 6 years. Then I was on the road selling various forms of media, marketing and advertising. Monday through Friday blurred into one day to me. I worked hard and became independent enough to pay my bills but never quite got passed living paycheck to paycheck. I became a top ten guy in an international company and even won the prestigious "Professional of the Year" at one point! More good effort but in my own strength.
 
I wasn't getting younger and the effects of working so hard and being on the road 5 days a week  for 14 years was diminishing my vision and aspiration. Trying again in my own strength to maintain a commitment to professional excellence and sense of mission, at least on a personal level, began to give way and I became less and less able to maintain a winning attitude. I had tried to climb the corporate ladders but each ladder had its own set of built in flaws and I was exhausted.

Then in 2012 something remarkable happened that stirred all those years into a sense of destiny and eternal purpose. My wife and I made a decision to have the bread and wine of Communion as a husband and wife, at home, as often as we could and daily if possible. I was finished and then I found out Jesus wasn't. But He was about to let me in on a new understanding of 3 words He declared on the Cross...