A Case Study in Lack of Discernment – My Life B.C.

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits…no longer be like children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming…

I had a wonderfully, refreshing weekend being exposed to so many different online worship services. I pray you did as well. Especially helpful and important was the message from John MacArthur that was streamed from Grace Church recorded from the 2008 Ligonier Ministries conference. Equally important and edifying was the Q & A from the evening live-stream service.  If you missed them, you NEED to go to gracechurch.org to see them. I will probably watch them both again very soon. What Pastor John had to say in the Q & A of how we should be dealing with the Covid-19 situation exudes the very wisdom of God through one who has walked with the Lord for a long time. I love the heart of John MacArthur for so many reasons, not the least of which is his passion for discernment.

On Friday, I was in Jeremiah 17 and was talking about the contrast of the tree planted by the stream of living water and the tumbleweed blowing along through life with no roots. I said I would possibly go to Jeremiah 17:9-10 (a favorite passage of mine) today. Well, something came up that has caused me to take this verse in another direction than I had originally planned. Jeremiah 17:9-10 says: “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it? I, the LORD, search the heart, I test the mind, even to give to each man according to his ways, according to the results of his deeds.” The word for deceitful can mean deceitful, sly, insidious, or slippery. Desperately sick can have the idea of being terminal or incurable. This is a description of what it means that man is totally depraved. Romans 1-3 give a more complete picture for us of what that means. In essence, this is why unredeemed man needs salvation and why the church so desperately needs discernment.

I have had a passion for discernment for as long as I can remember once I knew that I was truly saved. Why is discernment so desperately needed in the church, yet so readily attacked by the majority when it is shared? To give you a little background, I want to begin with a somewhat condensed, but still lengthy, statement from my testimony as it relates to this topic. My life could be a case study on the need for discernment.

In 1979, I was just graduating from high school, when on the eve of my high school graduation, the boy I had loved since 7^th grade was killed in an accident. We had “dated” (whatever that looks like at that age) from the beginning of 7^th grade through the end of 9^th grade and had just made a date for our graduation party a few days earlier. He was Catholic. I was nothing, really. (At the time I had been confirmed into the Methodist church and was what you could call a “C & E Christian”, and then only to get that feeling of “self-righteousness” that comes with doing good works just for the sake of getting that feeling we are doing something right—all the while having absolutely no real knowledge of the Bible or of God.) At his funeral, Patrick’s mother stood up and talked about the Holy Spirit and about salvation. These were things I had never “heard” before. From that moment on, I was compelled to find out everything I could about how to get to heaven so I could be with Pat. My uncle sent me an album by his favorite gospel singer as a graduation gift that came just days after Pat was killed.

Within weeks, I began attending a Charismatic prayer meeting at a local Catholic college with Pat’s mother and brother. At the same time, my family and I began watching televangelists like Oral Roberts, Rex Humbard, and others. In less than a month’s time, a travelling evangelist and his wife came to town. Extremely charismatic, Pat’s mother opened her home to this couple for a Ligonier (the town I lived in) “crusade” of sorts. At his invitation, I went forward to give my life to Christ. This man ended up planting a church in our hometown. I began dating Patrick’s brother, Greg, and this preacher began discipling us. Greg attended the local Catholic church, and I attended this new church plant.

Two things stand out in my mind very clearly looking back at this situation. I was taught to spiritualize all Scripture and I was, at the same time, leery and hesitant to participate in any charismatic “manifestations of the Spirit”. Some warned us that we were unevenly yoked (we probably weren’t, really). Greg and I didn’t believe we were unevenly yoked and had few problems because he had no problem spiritualizing the text as a Charismatic Catholic. I had a hunger for the Word, but only as a prophetic tool to be used much like a fortune teller’s crystal ball. I loved Scripture for one reason – I could make it say anything I wanted it to say. In reality, I was not saved and had no spiritual eyes to see the truth. I had no real heart for repentance.

Six months after I began dating Greg, we were married. At the time, he was attending Colgate University in Hamilton, NY. I will never forget a conversation we had on the way to our one-night honeymoon at the Inn in Hamilton. We were driving along, and I made some statement about something I had read. Greg casually answered, “Yes, well, you know Peter, as the first Pope, holds the keys to the gate of heaven.” I said, “Excuse me, what?” Through the years, we would wrestle through many differences in ways that struggled for control in our flesh. It became evident that being unequally yoked, as some had warned, was not a small matter.

Our first year together at Colgate, we continued to watch televangelists while attending the Catholic Church in the small town of Hamilton. Greg had gone to Colgate to play football. While there, he had reached out to a big university in Oklahoma. At the end of that school year, a letter came saying he would receive a full scholarship to come play for them. We were both excited. As we read, prayed, and listened to these men who were twisting and distorting Scripture on television, however, we got “the call” to give up these dreams. We believed the Lord was telling us that Greg was to finish his education at Oral Roberts’ University. We believed that was the seed we needed to plant for God to bless us in a big way! Doing a 360-degree turn, we left the next school year with a six-month old baby in tow. With no job and no place to live, we set out in faith!

Within a matter of a couple weeks, we had a rent-free home to live in and I got a job at the evangelistic association directly connected to ORU working in their special mail department. They were in the process, at the time, of building “The City of Faith”. That’s a whole other story. During the course of our one year in Oklahoma, we became disillusioned with the whole Word of Faith movement, and we walked away from “Christianity” for good convinced that the majority of ministries were only out to get rich off of poor, unsuspecting people who were being duped by them.

Over the course of the next ten years, Greg and I had a daughter and moved from Oklahoma to West Virginia (WVU), and then to Pittsburgh. Before we got to Pittsburgh in the late 80’s we continued to profess to be Christians but never darkened the doors of a church, our Bibles gathered dust, and life was all about the pursuit of materialistic pleasures and the good things in life. Without a real foundation of biblical truth under our feet, however, our marriage was in serious trouble. My solution? Become a convert to Roman Catholicism. And, that is what I did. I became the best Catholic I could be and was inside the doors of the church every time it was open. My kids went to Catholic school, and life was much better than it had been for a long time. At least it appeared that way to us.

At this time, my husband, along with his father, had purchased a local brewery. Greg was driving about an hour each way back and forth to work. I was shopping and volunteering at the Catholic school in so many ways that I should have been on their paycheck. Everything was golden until Greg began listening to a program on the radio by a Baptist preacher. Begging me to listen in the evenings, I adamantly refused. I liked life the way it was, and I wasn’t going back to that! Initially kicking and screaming in protest, I was against anything that would upset life as I then knew it to be. Greg wanted to move back home to Ligonier. I will be honest, my only thoughts before the internet were, “Where will I shop in this small town?” I really did ask that question to a long-time family friend who lived there. She looked at me like I was crazy.

We moved home. Eventually, I opened my dusty Bible and I began listening to the preacher on the radio. We began watching his television program as a family, never even once considering going back to church. This television program was our church. After a year or so, however, we did begin longing for fellowship with like-minded believers. I had a deep friendship with a woman who owned a local Christian bookstore and would steal away any chance I could get to talk with her for hours on end. One Sunday, I took her up on her repeated offers to come to church with her. My husband followed the next week. The church we joined held to the same beliefs as the pastor on television—what I would later learn was an Arminian theology. We took our local pastor and his wife and flew to another state to the church where this television pastor ministered and were baptized by him (my third baptism at the time).

One month before we moved to Ligonier, we had our third child, another son. I turned on the television in the daytime while he napped and began watching a woman who was teaching women how to study the Bible as she taught Bible studies. These studies were nothing like I had ever known. Their importance in my life is that they got me into the text myself. Along with the messages from this other preacher, and a new-found radio program called Grace to You, I was beginning to see that real truth was nothing like the errors I had once been exposed to that were portrayed as truth. And, I began to study. I began to mine the Scriptures to find treasure that was more valuable than anything on earth money could buy. I couldn’t get enough.

Over the next ten years our lives took a lot of turns as a family, but I was getting grounded in the Scriptures. My third son was born, and my children were such a joy to me; I desperately wanted a church home for them. I can say that our greatest struggles were not being able to find a place where we belonged within the context of a local church. And there was so much confusion in our hearts and minds as to why that was. As we were sorting out truth from the errors we had been taught, the idea of discernment became my passion. Within the church, my “gift” seemed to create a lot of chaos. I did eventually learn to use the truth to confront in a loving way, but it wasn’t until after a tragic event that changed our lives forever.

In 2001, we came to a major crossroads in our lives. What did we believe? How important was our belief system? Could we stand upon that foundation? Our beloved daughter was killed in an automobile accident. At the time she died, we weren’t attending a local church because we just couldn’t find one that believed as we did. The night Melissa died my husband called the pastor of the most recent church we had left. He came and ministered to us immediately. Because of the outpouring of love and support from this church, we tried to go back there after the funeral. Eventually, we left there again on good terms. While we didn’t see things the same way, we loved these people dearly. A month or so after Melissa died, the lady who thought I was crazy above (in reference to my shopping statement) reached out to me with a group of women asking me to teach them the Bible “because of the way I had handled the death of my daughter”. It wasn’t until I began teaching those women, including a few who held to a Reformed theology, that light bulbs started coming on in my mind as I prepared for a study on Ephesians 1.

There is so much more to my story as I tell it in my soon-to-be released memoir. Trying church after church to find a place where we belonged, losing my daughter in a car accident in 2001, teaching Bible studies for 11 years to women in our community, trying to plant a church with doctrine like that of Grace Church in California, the new pastor to come to meet us the week before a federal indictment of my husband was handed down…an indictment that would also catch my oldest son and I in its net before it was said and done, spending time in federal prison witnessing a mass display of what seemed like all religions known to man trying to spread the light of the gospel to any woman who would listen, and finally getting to sit under our beloved friend and pastor, John MacArthur…there is so much more.

It is important to keep a balanced perspective on how discernment is wielded. What do I mean? It is easy to become that self-righteous Pharisee with an attitude of superiority once you have finally come to know the truth! That passion for discernment is good, but because of the pride in our flesh, it can get distorted as we begin to focus on what we know instead of Who we know. When that happens, we begin to push people away from Christ instead of drawing them to Him due to a lack of biblical love. In that, we must be so careful.

One thing I want to make clear in today’s post. I was not saved when I thought I was originally. There was no real fruit in keeping with repentance. I was being tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming. Even in all these years (years that would bring many heartaches), I can clearly see the Lord’s hand on my life, protecting me and delivering me from false teaching. It wasn’t until the Lord exposed me to believers speaking the hard truth in love, that I was truly saved. Why do I welcome discernment? Because it is the truth spoken in love…truth that brings salvation and deliverance. I want to know Christ. And I want to grow up to be like Him more than anything else in this world. The most loving thing for anyone to do for me is to give me even hard truths for my good. It is the love of the flesh that stands up to attack truth spoken against error that caters to our flesh. More on discernment in the days to come.