{"id":11258,"date":"2020-05-31T15:46:19","date_gmt":"2020-05-31T15:46:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pjhmail.wordpress.com\/?p=11258"},"modified":"2020-05-31T15:46:19","modified_gmt":"2020-05-31T15:46:19","slug":"good-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/11258\/good-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"Good Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"

Good morning,<\/span><\/p>\n

I really loved the reading on Friday night. Sometimes, it\u2019s not about the words on the page as much as the feelings from the words on the page. I loved what I felt when we were reading those pages.<\/span><\/p>\n

So many things stood out to me. The second paragraph on page 2 really packed a punch! (But the whole top half of page 2 is so good)! You wrote:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe holy Spirit is God\u2019s answer to everything human. It is the answer to all that is wrong with you and all that you think is right with you. The Spirit of God was not sent to us to take sides; it was sent to take over – completely! And all the options that Christianity provides to walking in the Spirit are slanderous lies against the One who sent it. That is why God\u2019s children around the globe keep hearing a \u201cstill, small voice\u201d whisper in their ear, \u201cCome out of her, my people.\u201d God is not calling His children out of the world; they are already out of the world. He is calling them out of the institutionalized slander they have joined, and into his pure, eternal life.\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

That is so true! The holy Ghost is the answer to everything! Yet, slander against the One who sent the holy Ghost has tried to convince us that we don\u2019t even need it! As a matter of fact, in all my years in Christianity, I never once heard that there was such a thing as being baptized with the holy Ghost! Many of us sat in congregations for years and were offered any and everything except the joy and peace of being filled with the Holy Ghost and walking in that! We were told that baptism with water was the One baptism and that was all we needed. We were told that if we repeated a few scriptures and \u201caccepted Jesus\u201d as our Lord and Savior, then we were saved and not to dare let anyone make us doubt that! We were told that when we drank a little cup of grape juice and ate a small, dry cracker that we were having communion with the Father! We were told not to go by our feelings. We were taught that the Bible was the word of God! We were taught that the Father and His Son were part of a divine trinity wherein they were separate and they were one, all at the same time. It was total confusion! And it was all lies. It really was institutionalized slander! Slander that was intended to come between us and our Father! Those rituals and doctrines only served one purpose, and that was to take the place of the real relationship we can have with Jesus through the holy Ghost. The holy Ghost is everything! If that\u2019s left out, then Jesus can be nothing more to us than an unattainable being who lives far away in the sky.<\/span><\/p>\n

What if we had been satisfied with calling the crackers and grape juice our communion with Jesus? What if we had believed that sprinkling some water on a baby\u2019s head or dunking someone in a dirty river was the One baptism that Paul talked about in Ephesians 4? What if we had remained in those pews for all those years like dead men walking?<\/span><\/p>\n

But so many of us felt that there must be more to Jesus than the dead rituals and doctrines we were experiencing in Christianity. And with a sincere heart, we took this simple thought to Jesus, \u201cThere has to be more to You than this\u201d. And little did we know that Jesus was just waiting for us to come to Him with that thought! By being open and sincere with Jesus, He was able to show us (through His Spirit), that there really is so much more to Him than the dead rituals and false doctrines of Christianity. He gave us the truth by leading us to a place where we could be fed good, clean food that leads to \u201cpure, eternal life\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

Thank you for feeding us more good, clean food through this writing! I know it has taken hours and hours to get it all down, but I\u2019m hoping a sincere heart who is still inside those walls of institutionalized slander will read these pages, and then feel free to go to Jesus with the questions he\u2019s had in his heart. He\u2019s waiting…<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m looking forward to reading the next section (or rereading this one)!<\/span><\/p>\n

Lee Ann<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Good morning, I really loved the reading on Friday night. Sometimes, it\u2019s not about the words on the page as much as the feelings from the words on the page. I loved what I felt when we were reading those pages. So many things stood out to me. The second paragraph on page 2 really […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-netmail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11258"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}