Quote:
Originally Posted by OBW
The LC was long on hooks to get us and keep us. We were the chosen generation. The ones who returned from Babylon (unlike the rest of Christianity). We found the talisman for the proper name of a church — and it was all tied up in the legally registered name of a city/town. We had the better lexicon, using the highest wording, especially when concatenated into almost meaningless, over-adjectivized banners at trainings.
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I've come to feel that the LC glasses were not only to get us to read things into the text that weren't plainly stated, but they also prevented us from seeing things that were plainly stated. On this forum we were discussing "pray-reading" as a means of "eating Jesus" and I asked for scriptural support. A whole host of verses came out, but none of them said that pray-reading was eating Jesus. It was a set of conflations.
But I also noted that some verses were not brought out as well. Like the one where Jesus said, "My food is to do the will of Him who sent me". Obedience to the Father's will is Jesus' food. Now, using that verse, Jeremiah's "Thy words were found and I did eat them" intimates Jesus obeying the Father's expressed will. Now, if you look at "Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God" you can see the man Jesus obeying every word of the Father. Etc.
But John 4:34 was not cited in the idea of "eating Jesus", so when he said, "He who eats me shall live because of me" nobody saw the possible relation to obedience, "As I obey the Father's commands, so shall you obey my commandments". And nobody mentioned the warning against "locutional mania" - "when you pray, don't pray like the gentiles do, babbling words".
Rather, let your yes be yes and your no be no, and obey my commandments. The gospel in this manner is simple: repent, believe, and obey. Pray-reading is not forbidden but it no longer seems like a "crucial truth unveiled in these last days." And avoiding dependence on largely manufactured esotericism - the proverbial hooks - allows us to see the things that are plainly stated, such as Jesus' obedience and his expectations for his disciples to follow.
I noticed the same thing about the "Spirit/spirit". Forcing verses together to manufacture meaning then precludes a whole host of other verses that might suggest, or even plainly state, other meanings.