Dear Fellowship: This week we have a treat. Susan wrote an essay for the Fellowship Meeting. (See below.)
Susan’s story is compelling because she testifies of a changed heart after submitting her life to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. I think she has identified the most important aspect of the conversion/born again/salvation experience. For me, as a youth, going to church focused on accepting Jesus as my Savior to go to Heaven. We were taught about the transformation of our hearts, but Susan’s story brings that part of salvation to the forefront. Many people may not see the need to transform their hearts, so they see no urgency or benefit in this claim. Nevertheless, I think we should share this because we live in this body every day, feeling our hearts and minds. If we, by the Salvation experience, change from a person who is motivated by the approach and avoidance of the passions of our animal nature, and God changes our hearts, and we are able to incorporate the gifts of the Spirit, then our experience of life is better, regardless of what experience we may have in the afterlife. If we focus on living in God’s Spirit, we will be more likely to choose good and Godly acts in this complex life we live in.
Thomas
Why Seek The God of the Bible?
(For those who do not believe)
By Susan Gutierrez – 9/4/2026
This is a challenge from me to anyone who does not believe in Christ. In this short presentation, I set forth one good reason to find out for yourself whether the God of the Bible is real and willing to have a relationship with you.
Here is a little background on me: I was raised to believe in Christ, but I rejected Christ and the Bible in my mid-twenties, coming back to Christ maybe 15-17 years later. During the years that I did not believe in Christ, I became very focused on trying to find a solution for the terrible crime and wrongdoings that people do to each other. I thought there must be some way to motivate people to choose to do right. I didn’t imagine it would have anything to do with God, though. During those years, I had not yet found a solution.
Years later, I returned to a belief in Christ after 4 months of diligent prayer and daily Bible reading. I had intellectually come to believe that the Son of God was born of a mortal woman, lived a life in obedience to God the Father, was without sin, was tempted, persecuted, accused, tortured, and was crucified without a just cause, and rose the third day. I had come to believe that he died for our sins and if we believe in him, we will be saved on judgment day. I did not expect major changes in my heart. I was shocked to find that the day of, or the day after, I was filled with the most beautiful joy, peace, and love for God.
I kept reading and eventually found verses that explained to me what had happened to me. Like these next Bible passages:
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance: against such things there is no law. (Galatians 5:22-23)
I realized that I had been filled with those first three fruits of the Spirit. And those fruits of the Spirit are still with me. By the way. I also recognized the description of these verses:
Therefore, if anyone be in Christ, he is a new creation: old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. —2 Corinthians 5:17 (NKJV)
Jesus answered and said to him, Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.—John 3:3 (NKJV)
He restores my soul, He leads me in the paths of righteousness For His name’s sake. —Psalm 23:3 (NKJV)
I did and still do feel like I became a new creation, and I feel like I was born again. I also feel like He leads me in paths of righteousness, though it is a challenge to follow His lead. I find it is really a process to learn how to follow Jesus, but my heart is so changed that I desire to follow Jesus.
I have listened to countless testimonies of ex-criminals, ex-addicts, and some who were in some kind of destructive lifestyle. These people have somehow, or otherwise, come to believe in Christ and have been changed, sometimes radically, and usually some changes came immediately. Do you find these and other testimonies compelling enough to look into this for yourself? My thinking is this: For anyone who would like to be able to do something to be part of a solution to the problems in this world, wouldn’t it be worth spending the time to earnestly pray, read the Bible, and seek to discover if the people that testify that Christ has changed their hearts have really found the true God? Based on my own experience, I can tell you there is a true and living God who is willing and wanting to be in relationship with you. If you gain a relationship with the true and living God, I believe that relationship will be extremely meaningful to you, and you will be on the path to spreading this good news to people who desperately need God’s help. In fact, Christ makes it clear that he is inviting us to join him in his work in this passage, where he uses the analogy of a yoke, which is an instrument used in farming to “yoke” two animals together so they can plow a field together. His work is saving souls. He is inviting as many people as will come to him to help him do his work. See these verses:
Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart.: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.–Matthew 11:29 (KJV)
For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost. — Luke 19:10 (NKJV)
Here is one more last idea. Have you ever felt loved so deeply by someone (like a grandparent or aunt, for example) that you could not help but love them back? That is what happens in a relationship with God. A woman goes to Jesus with an alabaster box of ointment. She washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and wiped the tears off with her hair. She kissed his feet and anointed them with oil. The man whose house they were in silently judged this woman because he knew that she was a sinner. Jesus recognized the man’s thoughts and asked him, “Who loves more?” One who has been forgiven much, or one who has been forgiven little? The man answered that it would be the one who had been forgiven much. Jesus affirmed that he was correct and then explained all the things this woman had done for him and the things the man had not done for him. She had been forgiven of so much sin, but as a result she loved Jesus so deeply. (See Luke 7:36-50) This is part of the great power of having a relationship with the true and living God. God fills those who earnestly seek him and find him with a precious love that makes the person love God back, and then they have enough love overflowing to love others!
We love him, because he first loved us.—1 John 4:19
By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.—John 13:35 (KJV)
Jesus helps us discern between people who are his true followers and those who just claim to believe in him, as shown in the previous scripture verse. This is so helpful because so many people turn away from Christ because of the unloving behavior of some who claim to believe in Christ.
You see, God loves us and wants us to come to him in relationship, and the love we receive from him is priceless; his love enables us to love others and to desire to tell others about this relationship that is possible for them to have as well. It is so beautiful, meaningful, helpful, and healing. Nearly every problem in this world can be helped by people getting into relationship with the true and living God! Doesn’t that sound worth seeking for yourself? Here are three great testimonies. I hope you will at least watch one. There are so many more available on YouTube. I recommend Delafe testimonies, but they tend to be long.
Here is a link for a gang member who turned to Christ. He became a new creature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxroAZ8Hzcg&t=81s
Here is a link to a testimony of a doctor, an atheist, who started reading the Bible to discredit Christian neighbors and ended up believing in Christ and becoming a changed person. He and his wife explain how he has changed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtEZMgUHnRg
Here is a link for a testimony given by a former lesbian and lgbtq activist. She describes her process of believing her lifestyle was good to believing in Christ and repenting. This is a very intellectual, level-headed account of a conversion story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJc0McjBo3o
The Changed Heart
A Response to Susan’s Challenge
By Thomas – 9/6/2026
Susan’s essay illuminates the fact that most of us who grew up in church were taught salvation as a transaction with a future payoff: believe in Jesus, and you will go to Heaven when you die. We were taught about a changed heart, but it seemed out of reach or abstract. How is that done? Susan did not expect her heart to change; she had done the intellectual work of coming to believe the claims about Christ, and she assumed that was it. Then, within a day, she was filled with joy, peace, and love for God, and she has carried that for years since. She believed, but it was more than a new belief; she noticed a dramatic transformation. I think she has experienced what is available from the salvation relationship.
The heart we are born with
To see why this matters, it helps to be honest about the heart we start with. We are born as creatures of approach and avoidance. We move toward what feels good and away from what feels bad. Hunger, fear, desire, pride, the wish to be admired, the sting of being slighted, the pull of comfort, the dread of loss: these are the drives of the natural life. They are not evil in themselves. They kept our ancestors alive, and they keep us alive. But they are blind. They do not know the difference between the good and the merely pleasant, or between the harmful and the merely painful. An animal nature can be trained, and it can be restrained, but it cannot be made good, because goodness is the property of God.
Susan spent years of her unbelieving life looking for a way to motivate people to do right. That is the oldest problem in ethics, and I think she could not solve it because the tools available to an unbeliever are all external. Law tells you what to do. Punishment makes the wrong more painful. Reward makes the right more pleasant. Education informs the mind. All of these operate on the surface of the same human value system, adjusting the inputs of approach and avoidance without touching the heart itself. Paul describes the result exactly: “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do” (Romans 7:19). Knowing the right and wanting to do it are not the same thing as being able to want it more than you want everything else.
What conversion actually changes
Here is what I think Susan’s testimony, and the many testimonies she has listened to, are describing. Conversion does not remove the animal nature. The appetites and fears are still there, and every believer knows it. Conversion installs a new governing desire above them. The fruit of the Spirit that Susan quotes—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance—is not a list of behaviors to perform. It describes what a heart wants when God’s Spirit lives in it. Love is the first fruit for a reason. A person who loves does not need to be commanded to be kind; kindness is what love does. A person at peace does not need to be restrained from grasping; the grasping has lost its urgency.
And this new desire is not manufactured. That is the point of the woman with the alabaster box. She did not decide to love Jesus as a discipline. She loved him because she had been forgiven, and she knew the size of what she had been forgiven. “We love him, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Love is received before it is given. This is why exhortation fails and encounter succeeds. You cannot argue a person into loving; you can only bring them to the One who loves them, and let them find out for themselves.
Why this matters today, not only in the afterlife
We live inside our own hearts every waking hour. Whatever we believe about the life to come, the quality of this life is the quality of the heart we carry through it. A heart governed by fear experiences the world as a threat. A heart governed by appetite experiences it as scarcity. A heart governed by pride experiences every other person as a rival or a judge. Such a heart can have money, health, and success, and still be miserable, because misery is what those desires produce when they run unchecked.
A heart filled with love, joy, and peace experiences the same circumstances differently. The bills are still there, the body still ages, the people are still difficult, but the inner weather has changed. This is not a promise of an easy life. It promises a different way of being inside a hard one. And it is a benefit that begins the day it is received, as Susan found. Nobody has to wait until death to collect it.
As a physician, most of what people bring to me are symptoms, and most symptoms have a root. The crime and cruelty that troubled Susan in her unbelieving years are symptoms. The root is a heart that wants the wrong things, or wants the right things too weakly. You can treat symptoms forever. Only changing the root changes the patient.
Choosing good in a complex life
None of this means that a converted heart is handed a rulebook. Life is complicated. The situations we face at work, in families, in this Fellowship, rarely come with a verse attached. What the changed heart provides is not a map but a compass. When love is the governing desire, the thousand small decisions of a day lean toward good without deliberation, and the hard decisions are approached from the right direction. Character precedes choice. This is what it means to be led in paths of righteousness: not to be told each step, but to have become the kind of person who wants to walk that way.
The honesty of Susan’s challenge
I want to close by defending Susan’s challenge. She is not asking the unbeliever to accept anything on her say-so. She points to evidence—her own life and the lives of the people whose testimonies she has gathered—and invites the skeptic to run the experiment: pray earnestly, read the Bible daily, and seek. That is what she did for four months. The cost is time and the effort of sincerely trying to accept the truth of the Bible’s story about who Christ is. The potential return is a changed heart and a changed life. Any honest person who claims to want the world to be better ought to at least be willing to test the one remedy that so many witnesses report has worked.
Questions for our discussion
- When you think back on your own conversion, was the change in your heart something you expected, or something that surprised you as it did Susan?
- Where in your life does the old engine of approach and avoidance still run the show, and what has it looked like when the Spirit’s governing desire took over instead?
- If a skeptic in your life accepted Susan’s challenge and asked you how to begin, what would you tell them?
- How do we, as a Fellowship, make the changed heart visible, so that the “unloving behavior” Susan mentions is not what people see when they look at us?
Real but Not True
Reflections on Rosaria Butterfield’s Testimony
By Thomas – 9/6/2026
This is the third of the three testimonies Susan attached to her essay. Rosaria was not a lost soul looking for meaning. She was a tenured professor, a feminist and LGBTQ activist who spoke at pride rallies, testified before the New York legislature, and, by her own account, taught thousands of students to hate the Bible. She opened the Bible as an atheist, and only in order to write a book explaining why Christians would not leave people like her alone. If a changed heart can happen there, it can happen anywhere. What follows are five things I think her story adds to Susan’s challenge.
1. The Word of God works on a hostile reader
Rosaria did not pray for help. She read the Bible as a cultural document, expecting misogyny and superstition, and instead she found it making claims on her. Her first reaction was outrage: who has the right to say that I must repent? She notes, rightly, that if the Bible were merely a human book, that outrage would be justified. But she kept reading, and the words began to work on her in spite of her intentions. This is the claim of Hebrews 4:12, the passage that she says undid her: the Word of God is living, and it discerns “the thoughts and intents of the heart.” The Bible knew her better than she knew herself. She could not tolerate that intimacy as an enemy; she could only tolerate it by going all the way across to the Jesus who offers rest. Susan’s challenge to the skeptic was to read the Bible earnestly. Rosaria’s story shows that even a skeptic who reads it in hostility is not safe from it.
2. Non-transactional love
The human instrument in Rosaria’s conversion was a pastor named Ken Smith and his wife Floy. Ken did not argue her into the Kingdom. He and Floy took her to dinner week after week for years. When she quit the project and tried to hand back the Bibles, Ken kept showing up at her door with a book or fresh bread. Rosaria says what made this powerful was the contrast with the rest of her life, where relationships were transactional. The Smiths wanted nothing from her. They loved her as an enemy of God because God had told them to, and they did not consider God finished with her until she became His friend.
This is the point in our first essay made flesh: love is received before it can be given. Rosaria did not first decide to love God. She was loved, persistently and without conditions, by two Christians who were the nearest visible form of God’s love she could see. Susan’s essay warned that many people turn away from Christ because of the unloving behavior of those who claim Him. Ken and Floy are the other side of that coin.
3. Real but not true
The crux of Rosaria’s struggle was the one every person with a deeply held identity faces: how do you repent of a sin that is who you are? She had built her whole self on her sexuality, and the Bible was telling her to repent of it. She saw the trap precisely: when your identity is the sin, you become the sacrificial lamb, and there is no room for Jesus to be the lamb instead.
Ken’s answer was simple and, I think, profound: perhaps it is a false identity. It is real; your girlfriend can confirm that. But is it true? He took her to Romans 7, where Paul says, “Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me” (Romans 7:17). The lesbianism was real, but it was not her. It was sin dwelling in her, and Jesus was waiting on the other side of it. This is the same distinction I tried to draw in my last essay between the animal engine we are born with and the person God made us to be. Our desires are real. They are not the last word on who we are.
Whatever a person’s particular struggle, this distinction is the door out of despair. You cannot hate yourself, because God loves you. You must hate your sin, because Christ died to free you from it. Those two are only compatible if you and your sin are not the same thing.
4. Nobody flipped a switch
Rosaria’s story differs from Susan’s in an important way. Susan was filled with joy, peace, and love within a day. Rosaria says plainly that no one flipped a switch in her, that her old desires did not vanish overnight, and that the Christian life is rugged, “feet on the floor.” Conversion took years of dinners, arguments, and reading before she could say she was a Christian. Repentance came first; sanctification, the growing to be like Jesus, is a lifelong work.
Both testimonies are true, and together they are a more complete picture than either alone. The changed heart is a change in what the heart wants, in its governing desire and its direction. It is not always a change in what the heart feels on any given day. Some are given the joy at once; others are given the desire to walk toward it and must walk. What both women share is that the direction of the will changed, and stayed changed.
5. You must go one way or the other
The moment of decision came when her partner found her praying and reading the Bible, and berated her for it. Rosaria realized she had become a closet Christian in an out gay life, and that she could not stay in the middle of the intersection. Everyone has to go one direction or the other: Jesus, or not Jesus. Jesus wants exclusive rights to His people because He bought them.
This matters because our culture prefers to keep faith as one option among many. Rosaria’s story insists it is not. A faith that asks nothing exclusive of you is not the faith of the Bible. But she also says what makes the exclusivity bearable: it is the one relationship you cannot sabotage. He will never leave you nor forsake you.
Questions for our discussion
- Rosaria’s conversion depended on a pastor who kept showing up at her door after she told him she was done. Who in your life is the person you have been tempted to write off as finished with God?
- “Real but not true.” Where have you had to make that distinction in your own life, about a desire, a habit, or an identity?
- Susan’s heart changed in a day; Rosaria’s changed over years and is still changing. Which pattern is closer to your own, and how do we avoid making either one the required standard for everyone?
- What does it look like, practically, for this Fellowship to offer the kind of non-transactional love that Ken and Floy offered?
What More Could There Be?
Reflections on Dr. Greg Viehman’s Testimony
By Thomas – 9/6/2026
The second testimony Susan attached demonstrates the difference between believing the Gospel and being changed by it, because he did the first without the second for a while, and knew exactly what each felt like. If Rosaria’s testimony shows the changed heart from its hardest starting point, Greg’s shows it from its most respectable one: a successful, intelligent man who had every reason to think he was fine.
The engine running at full throttle
Greg describes his life before Christ as a sequence of acquisitions. A new car; when that did not do it, clothes; then a trip; then hobbies, triathlons, running, wine. Each was supposed to produce the fulfillment his career had promised and not delivered. Underneath was sadness and emptiness, mixed with anger that he could not explain, and embarrassment that kept him from telling anyone. So he took it out on others. His wife Ruth’s description is blunt: good, but a short fuse, arrogant, always right, always number one.
This is the approach-and-avoidance drive of our first essay running exactly as designed, in a man who had won every race it set him. The lesson is worth pausing on. The natural heart does not become satisfied by succeeding; it becomes more frantic, because every success proves that the next one will not work either. Greg had run the experiment for a lifetime and had the result.
Belief without change
Greg opened the Bible for the same reason Rosaria did: to use it against Christians. His neighbors had, he thought, snubbed his family, and he intended to prove they were not practicing what they preached. What stopped him was the discovery that Jesus claimed to be God in the flesh. Greg saw immediately that this was either the most important event in history or a fairy tale, and as a scientist he could not leave that question open. He spent weeks on the resurrection, going through every alternative, and found that none of them held together. The swoon theory failed; even the Journal of the American Medical Association had concluded that Jesus died. The stolen body and hallucination theories could not account for the guards, the empty tomb, or the disciples’ transformed lives. What finished it for him was Paul, a Jew killing Christians with nothing to gain, who became the greatest evangelist in history. There was only one explanation: he saw the risen Lord. Greg concluded that he had to believe it.
Having accepted that Christ rose, Greg summarized what he now thought Christianity was: it really happened, and if you believe, go to church, and try to do the right thing, then when you die you go to heaven. And he asked, “What more could there be?”
That is the transactional Gospel, stated by a man who had arrived at it by honest reasoning. He had the doctrine correct. He had the historical evidence in order. And nothing in him had changed. He was still angry, still frustrated, still unable to fix what he knew was wrong with himself. Belief, by itself, had left him untouched.
The visitor
What broke the deadlock was not another argument. A walk-in patient looked him in the eye and asked whether he had accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as his personal Savior. Greg nearly passed out and bolted from the room. Days later, alone with the things in his life he wanted to change and had no power to change, he broke down, asked God’s forgiveness, repented, and asked to be made new.
When he went looking for the patient afterward, the handwritten name was gone from the schedule, and there was no record that he had ever been in the office. Ruth had been praying for years and had just told God she gave up, and He would have to do something. Hebrews 13:2 says some have “entertained angels unawares.” Whatever the visitor was, he asked the one question that Greg’s research had not, and it was the question that mattered.
The physician checks his medicine cabinet
The next morning Greg woke up peaceful. No frustration, no anger, content for no reason. He expected it to wear off, and it did not. Then he did something: he reasoned that if he felt completely different, something in his biochemistry must have changed, so he checked whether his antihistamine had somehow been switched for a tranquilizer. It had not.
Greg wouldn’t believe a feeling; he’d rule out the mundane explanations first. When he had ruled them out, he went to the Bible for the remaining one and found it in Romans 6: the old man dies when the Spirit comes in, cross-referenced to Galatians 5:22, the fruit of the Spirit. His reaction was the same as Susan’s: that is the list; that is how I feel. Three witnesses, Susan, Greg, and Rosaria, converged independently on the same passage to explain what had happened to them.
Whatever the mechanism, a change in a man’s baseline emotional state that arrives overnight and persists for decades is a real event in a real body. It is not a metaphor. Greg is right that something changed in him, and it is entirely reasonable to want to know what. The Bible’s answer is that a Person took up residence.
The proof is the changed life
Ruth says she feels married to a different man, and that her old husband is no longer around. He was suddenly concerned about other people, which shocked her. That is the fruit of the Spirit observed from the outside.
Greg himself says that while he has no doubt the resurrection is true, the real proof is his changed life, and he offers the same challenge Susan does: call on Christ and put Him to the test. He will not only forgive your sins; He will change you now, so that you know it is true. Greg summarizes the difference between Christianity and everything else as this: every other religion is man seeking God; Christianity is God seeking man.
Questions for our discussion
- Greg had the doctrine right and the evidence in order before anything in him changed. Have you known believers, or been one, in that condition? What moved you from believing to being changed?
- Greg had to reach the point of admitting he could not change himself before he asked God to. Why is that admission so hard for capable people, and what does it look like to help someone reach it?
- Ruth’s testimony is that she is married to a different man. If our spouses, children, or coworkers were asked whether we have been changed, what would they say?
- Greg checked his medicine cabinet before he checked the Bible. What is the right role of that kind of skepticism in a believer, and where does it become a way of refusing what God is doing?
Belief, Confession, and the Changed Heart
Fellowship Discussion Recap – September 6, 2026
The meeting took up Susan’s written testimony and three recorded testimonies she had attached to it: a former gang member, a physician who had been an atheist, and a former lesbian activist and professor. The discussion moved from the common structure of those four conversions to questions about the nature of salvation, the existence and place of Satan, what heaven and hell consist of, how eternity might be spent, the authority of scripture relative to other claimed revelation, and how the group should understand the differences among its members’ traditions. This essay collects the points made and the responses given.
1. The common structure of the four testimonies
Thomas opened by summarizing the three recorded testimonies and identifying what he saw as the common thread among all four. In each case, the person first accepted the factual claims of the Gospel as true: that Jesus was born of a woman, was from God, lived without sin, was crucified unjustly, rose from the dead, ascended, and is God. The change of heart came after that acceptance, not before it and not as a condition of it.
Susan had described this sequence in the sharpest form. After four months of daily prayer and Bible reading, she reached an intellectual conviction that the claims were true. She expected nothing further from that conviction. The following day she found herself filled with joy, peace, and love for God, and she later found in Galatians 5:22-23 the description of what had happened to her. The physician’s account followed the same pattern: weeks of examining the evidence for the resurrection, a conclusion that it must have happened, and a period in which he believed the doctrine but remained unchanged, until he asked God to change him and woke the next morning at peace. The former activist’s account differed in that her transformation was gradual, and she reported that her old desires did not vanish; Susan had included her account for exactly that reason, so that the presentation would not suggest that conversion always removes the struggle.
Thomas connected this pattern to Romans 10:9: “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” He said he had struggled with what it could mean to be saved by believing a fact, and that the four testimonies served as a case study for answering the question. The verse names two elements: belief in the resurrection and confession of Jesus as Lord. Susan confirmed that both were present in her experience: she had prayed alone, repented, and confessed her belief in Christ, and was baptized within the following year. She agreed to add that detail to the written version. Thomas concluded that the testimonies establish what salvation requires and what can be expected from it. Belief in the fact of the resurrection and confession of Christ as Lord constitute salvation; sanctification, the learning to live it, follows and may involve continuing work.
Susan later qualified the contrast between overnight and gradual change. In her experience, and in the testimonies she has listened to, some things change immediately, and others require continued effort. She suggested that the former activist, who emphasized the ongoing struggle, almost certainly also experienced immediate changes she did not describe. The common element across both patterns is that the person now wants to please God. She compared it to being loved by a grandparent: one does not have to try to love such a person back, and one does not want to disrespect them. Thomas added that the difficulty of staying on the path in this life may reflect how easily Satan reaches the heart in a world that is, in some sense, his kingdom, and Susan agreed that distraction from the path continues after salvation and must be met with prayer.
2. Michael’s questions
Michael, who does not identify as a Christian, takes notes when others talk and raises several questions in sequence.
Literal belief and the Levitical law. Michael observed that claiming the Bible is real is one thing and claiming the whole of it is literally real is another; if the latter, where is the goat’s blood, and why does no one perform the rituals of Leviticus? Susan answered that the sacrificial system belonged to the first covenant and foreshadowed what was to come. Christ, being without sin and killed unjustly, deserved to live, and God raised him from the dead; Satan overstepped his bounds by inspiring the death of a just man, and Christ thereby gained authority over him. The Father accepts Christ’s sacrifice in place of the death each person deserves, and once a person trusts in Christ and makes him Lord, Christ shepherds him in paths of righteousness, as Psalm 23 describes.
Relativism and the question of truth. Michael noted that the former activist’s original position, that what is real for a person is real for that person, resembles the way a Mormon and a Lutheran might each concede the other’s beliefs are “real for them.” He also observed, without criticism, that Thomas’s own life had passed through several complete transformations, each believed at the time, and asked how one knows which was true. Thomas accepted that this is the central question and that it is not trivial. He returned to it later in the meeting in the context of scriptural authority.
Satan and eternal existence. Michael asked whether Satan lives forever and whether he can die. Susan distinguished between eternal existence and eternal life. Scripture defines eternal life as relationship: “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3). Satan exists but is cut off; Jesus says Satan has no part in him, so he is without love and without light. The group agreed that Satan lives forever, as do all persons, and that the difference between the saved and the lost is not duration of existence but fellowship with the Father and the Son.
How Satan can be outside a God who is everything. Michael pressed Thomas’s stated view that all things are in God: if Satan is cut off from God, then either God is not everything or there is something beyond everything. Susan said she had come to think Thomas’s view is supported by many verses but did not have an answer for how Satan fits, and offered only the image of a bubble within God that his light does not reach. Thomas proposed a different resolution using the model the group has developed in earlier discussions. The Father created the Son; the Son created all things (John 1:3: “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made”); the Father relates to the Son, who is perfect, and the Son’s creation contains the evil that the Father does not embrace, in the way one sees a person’s outward conduct without seeing his inner thoughts. On that model, when Satan rebelled and was cast out, the only place to cast him was within the Son’s creation, under the Son’s authority. Susan agreed, noting that the Father placed Jesus in authority over everything in heaven and earth, which would include Satan. Thomas added that the temptation in the wilderness supports this: Satan offered Christ the kingdoms of the world, which he could not have offered unless the authority had been given to him, and Christ declined the offer rather than denying Satan’s right to make it. No bubble outside God is required; Satan is simply under Christ’s authority.
Who is with Satan, and what it is like. Michael asked whether other persons live forever with Satan or whether he is alone. Thomas answered that those who choose not to be in relationship with God through Christ are with Satan; God has a particular nature, and those who have not been purified do not fit into that fellowship. Michael then asked what either state is actually like, since the Hollywood images of harps and clouds are not credible, and whether hell is simply a bad feeling that persists. Susan offered an illustration she had used in teaching children: two doors, behind one of which people love one another, are kind, and are in good relationship, and behind the other of which are those who do harm, cannot be trusted, and have no love among them. Everyone, asked which they would choose, chooses the first. Heaven is a place with no death or sickness and no one purposely doing harm to another, though there may still be occasions for apology. She did not claim to know what its occupations are, only that they will be good and more satisfying than the harp image suggests.
A counter-account of happiness and darkness. Michael responded at length. He said he had lived among communities with and without trust and kindness and that people adapt to their absence. He does not trust himself, since he breaks his own rules constantly, and has learned to accept that. His own happiness does not depend on anything physical; he is grateful every day he can breathe, and reaches an exultant state most waking hours even in severe pain. He compared death to a raindrop landing in the ocean, still existing but part of something larger. Asked where his constant good state comes from, he had once answered, from a darkness far deeper than the light could know: a daily awareness that tens of thousands die of starvation, and of other horrors, keeps him from walking through life oblivious, and the darkness itself gives capacities the light alone cannot. A woman raped by her father now runs a rape crisis center and can meet victims with an understanding a person who had lived only in the light could not offer. He draws on his own darkness to reach people who need to change, since telling them they are simply wrong wins nothing. He cited the saying that the church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints, and said he lives by much of the Bible’s teaching.
Susan replied on two points. First, on the use of suffering, she cited Romans 8:28, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose,” and the passage in 2 Corinthians 1 in which those who have been comforted by God comfort others with the same comfort. Second, on Michael’s own state, she cited the description of Christ as the true light “which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (John 1:9). His concern for people getting along and loving one another, and his distress at Christians who fight one another, is that light in him, and he is obeying it. She suggested this may be why it is hard for him to distinguish believing in Christ from obeying Christ: he already has much of what Christ gives. But more is available: fuller guidance, use, and filling with joy, peace, and love, which comes with making Christ Lord. She asked him to pray daily, asking God to teach him what is true, and to read the Bible daily with that invitation. He thanked her for that request as he left.
3. Observations after Michael left
Armond offered that life with Christ and life without it seem to be a matter of intention. Being intentional allows one to experience heaven on earth and the full satisfaction of bliss, while acting without intention or in ungodly ways produces a persistent sense that something is missing. Susan agreed and added a qualification she wished she had made to Michael before he left: even a person following the light Christ has given him will still have that empty place until he is in relationship with the Father, and that relationship is received only through Christ.
Armond offered an analogy between animal and plant life. Animals live by predation, so that in that economy someone always loses; plants grow daily in two directions, thriving without killing what is around them. Susan and Charlie noted that invasive plant species also exist, and they do their killing in slow motion. The analogy was left as a picture of the difference between a life governed by appetite and one governed by growth.
Susan remarked that she had spent most of the week writing a conventional essay and discarded it, writing the testimony fresh on the day she sent it, because she judged that a story touches the heart in a way an essay does not. Thomas agreed: facts tell, stories sell, and the question of how a heart is won is exactly the question the testimony addressed.
4. Leonard’s perspective
Leonard, whose background is in a restorationist movement descended from Joseph Smith and who now belongs to a covenant Christian group associated with a living teacher, offered his perspective on several of the questions raised.
What is done in eternity. Leonard answered Michael’s earlier question directly: we do what God does. God’s work and glory is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man, and the redeemed will share in that work, perhaps at different levels, since there are many mansions. “Eternal” is a proper name for God in scripture, so eternal life is a God-like life, and the joy and fullness of it consist in doing what God does under his purview, as Christ did everything the Father commanded.
Choice. Leonard said the discussion had circled something Susan had named directly: choice. Cain chose, and what he chose was to follow Satan’s temptation to kill his brother and take what was his. Agency exists so that one can choose; opposition exists in all things for the same reason. On being asked whether the detail about Cain taking Abel’s possessions comes from the Bible or from his tradition’s scripture, he said it comes from his own scripture, that others need not believe it, and that Susan had also quoted two different Bibles. Thomas said he was only asking about the source, and Leonard replied that anyone is free to scrutinize what he says against the Bible.
Heaven and hell. Heaven is being in the presence of God; hell is being cut off from it. In a sense, all of us now live in hell, having been cut off from the Father’s presence by the transgression of Adam, though each person is accountable for his own sins rather than Adam’s. Thomas and Charlie responded that Jesus said the kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:21) and that believers are temples of the living God, so one can be in the presence of God now; Susan added that scripture also calls Satan the prince of this world, so that we are in his playground and yet can carry a relationship with the Father within us. Leonard accepted that we can experience heaven in this life through the influence of the Father and the Son, and that the spirit within us can become holy so that we are one with Christ, but maintained that we are not in the Father’s actual presence, which is what heaven is. The purpose of the separation is a test: whether we will choose to be with God, exercise faith, and do what he commands. God cannot tolerate sin, so he has provided his Son as the way back, whose work is to forgive sins and make us holy.
Leonard offered word studies on the adversary. Lucifer means light-bearer and was a high being who chose to place himself above the Father and demanded his glory; a third of the host of heaven followed him and was cast out to this realm. Satan is a title rather than a name, meaning accuser, which is why Christ could call Peter Satan when Peter opposed his going to Jerusalem. Damned means dammed, stopped like a river; those who chose that course are stopped and miserable forever, and wish all others to be as miserable as themselves. Everything outside the presence of God- all deception, darkness, and violence- is hell, and one can be in it in this life as well as after.
How large is Christ’s tent? Leonard said the first question that came to mind when he read the testimony was how large Christ’s tent is, and whether he, or anyone who believes as he does, fits under it. He described his group’s position: it accepts all faiths, its members remain in their own congregations, it has no institution, and does not require anyone to follow its teacher, who has said that a fool is one who follows him. It offers the doctrine of Christ, which it defines as faith, repentance, baptism, and the baptism of fire in the Holy Ghost. The group maintains its own scriptures because it is trying to recover what its predecessors lost when they rejected and killed the prophets and usurped their authority.
Susan answered the tent question. When a person believes in Christ, Christ covers him, and the Father’s blessings reach him through Christ. On that basis, one can be in the presence of God now, here, though not in person, and salvation, if defined as relationship with the Father, is available now rather than deferred to judgment day. She said the belief that salvation cannot happen now was one she had held as a Mormon and found restrictive. If Leonard believes that he is covered by Christ and in relationship with the Father now, then he is in the tent. Leonard said that the teaching that salvation is deferred is what his group calls unbelief, believing something that is not true, and that it contradicts the founder’s own teaching; he reported that the current president of the mainstream church had recently called the second comforter a tool of the devil.
Leonard then added to Susan’s account. Confession of belief is the first step, and salvation is a gift given when one awakes and turns to Christ. But one who believes Christ will believe his words and commandments, and the next step is baptism, which Christ himself underwent, though he did not need it, as a sign to his followers of the burial and rising that were to come. He noted the Greek of the voice at the baptism, “this day have I begotten thee,” softened in the King James rendering. After baptism there remains the matter of receiving from Christ the wedding garment that covers sin, so that the Father can be part of one’s life. Beyond that, he said, more has been revealed, and he loves and cannot deny it.
Susan responded that her testimony had not included what follows confession and probably should have, since it is a large matter; she named it sanctification. Leonard named it repentance, and observed that all three recorded converts had repented. The two agreed that repentance and sanctification go together: one goes on as a new, repented person, and Christ continually calls one to recognize further things to repent of and change. Leonard’s closing question was whether one is willing: whether the heart is changed enough to do everything Christ asks. Most people, he said, are content to stop earlier, and at least they have done that much.
The yoke. The group returned to the passage Susan had used, Matthew 11:29-30. Leonard’s reading was that the believer is on one side of the yoke and the Lord on the other, and the Lord takes all the weight, which is why the yoke is easy and the burden light. Susan agreed, adding that we still do some things, but he sustains us; what he asks is that we follow him.
Fear. Leonard remarked that everyone is afraid, including Christians, unless they give that fear over to the Lord, who is not here to condemn but to bless and lift up. Charlie objected that he was not afraid; Leonard insisted he was. Armond offered that the fear is not of disobedience or wrong choices but of death, and specifically of killing the version of oneself that one has known for so long. Leonard accepted this and added that if one trusts Christ, death can be sweet, since the old man can be buried and washed and come out clean. Thomas added that Christ promised to overcome the last enemy, death, and that this life might itself be what heaven is, lacking only the full presence of God; Leonard said he hoped not, and that joy is available in this life but not its fullness.
5. The authority of scripture and other revelation
Susan asked what Leonard would share if he were presenting the Gospel to someone who did not know it, and whether he would include the additional knowledge his group holds. Charlie, formerly a missionary in the mainstream church, described what he had taught: the gospel defined as faith, repentance, baptism by immersion, and the gift of the Holy Ghost, but always tied to the restoration, meaning the founder’s vision, the Book of Mormon, and the great apostasy, and noted that some four hundred groups have descended from the founder, all restorationist, which he finds confusing.
Thomas lays out his position on this material. The central question is whether the core claims are true: that Jesus died for sins, rose, lived sinlessly, was God and man, and that his death and resurrection accomplished something eternally significant. Discussions of heaven, of where Satan is, and the like serve to make that center understandable, and the restorationist tradition is, in its most benign form, another way of making the Gospel acceptable. His concern is with what is added. Much of that tradition’s sanctification consists of service and doing, attached to an authority who has heard from God and says what must and must not be done. He compared this to the Eastern path of devotion to a teacher who has seen God. The liberty of Christ, as Susan’s testimony displayed it, requires belief in a small set of claims and confession; the additional prophets, covenants, and rituals add to what must be done and can become a yoke placed on a person by other people and traditions, and he suggested this pattern has the look of a lighter form of the adversary’s religion. He acknowledged that Leonard would say his teacher demands nothing and only gives more light, and that he himself cannot judge whether any burden has been placed. He recalled Paul on circumcision: if one must be circumcised to have Christ, Christ profits nothing, since one has bound oneself to the whole law (Galatians 5:2-3).
On the epistemic question, he said he has no way to know whether other claimed revelations are true. The Bible is as close as one can get to the original source, the apostles who were there and recorded what they saw; that is the level of authority he gives it and nothing else. Someone who reports a vision or an angel might be reporting the truth or be Satan appearing as an angel of light to deceive; he cannot say it did not happen, since he was not there, and he can’t judge the spirit without confronting it directly. His rule is to put the Bible first and everything else second. If a claimed revelation contradicts the Bible, he goes with the Bible. If it does not, he cannot say it is false, but he treats it as secondary literature: on the bookshelf, not on the altar. He reads Shakespeare and gets something from it; he puts the Book of Mormon in the same category. He has also drawn from mystical literature of other traditions, which gives him a glimpse of a world beyond this one and strengthens his faith that such a world exists, without his following those traditions. Anything that moves him toward faith in the transcendent is welcome on that footing. Salvation, he said, has to be simple; if it required a degree from a Bible institute, something would be wrong with it. The core package Susan described is sufficient. Further study of the prophets, the law, or the proverbs can help one believe and live better, but it is not part of the minimum.
Charlie added, in Leonard’s defense, that a person raised in that tradition cannot easily separate what came from the Bible from what came from the Book of Mormon; he and his wife still ask each other which source a given idea is from. He does not believe the Book of Mormon is historical and thinks the founder or someone near him composed it, but he finds much truth in it and objects to a few specific errors. Thomas took those errors as the indicator that the book is secondary rather than primary literature: the parts identified as wrong are excluded from the canon, and the rest, being elaboration of events no one present witnessed, is accepted only on someone else’s authority.
Susan raised the test the Bible itself gives: when a messenger claims to speak for God, the hearer is to apply the tests Scripture provides, because accepting something untrue plants a kernel of deception in the heart. She then noticed a difficulty with her own advice: little is known about the authors of many biblical books, so it is not clear how to apply the messenger test to them. She left the difficulty unresolved. Thomas said this returns to the question Charlie has repeatedly asked: what truth is and how it is determined when one did not witness it, and that the question is not trivial.
6. Depth perception
Susan offered an illustration for the problem of conflicting interpretations. Charlie had been treated for a visual condition in which, because his eyes were not aligned, his brain suppressed the input from one eye without his knowing it. He saw with both eyes open but received only one image and had no depth perception. Vision therapy briefly broke the suppression, allowing both eyes to register, and exercises then worked on alignment. She applies this to Bible reading. Many passages appear to contradict one another, and reconciling them takes real work. What people tend to do instead is grasp the verses they feel deeply about and suppress, without realizing it, the verses that don’t fit, so they cannot see them at all. If one looks at both sets and asks God what is true, she believes he can give depth perception, so that verses which seemed to contradict can both be seen as true under some condition. She has not reconciled every passage but has reconciled some in this way, and regards it as a process that may last a lifetime.
7. Closing
Susan’s closing prayer asked that everyone present continue to have something to contribute, and that the two participants for whom she had written the testimony be drawn to seek God deeply. Thomas noted that having a member other than himself write the essay had worked well and that the load should be shared. Charlie was asked to propose a topic for the following week, and Susan was asked to write, at a later date, an account of her reading of the patterns among Ephraim and Manasseh, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, and Cain and Abel, which Thomas has not encountered elsewhere and which fits his understanding that God speaks in metaphors, case studies, and shadows.
— Thomas
Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute
Of one heart to make Christ King – 1 Chronicles 12:38