Tell the World What You Believe – Part 12

Long-awaited Pieces of a Puzzle

Find your piece, it's within you.

“Wherever two or three are gathered in my name …there am I in the midst of them.”

Because of what I had been taught by the religious organization into which I came, shortly after making the declaration, “…Jesus if you are real, I want you to take over my life” (condensed version); some of the puzzle pieces were missing …it would be years before they all came together for me, forming a singular picture, which clearly depicted just WHO was providing the promise in the opening quote above.

I had to come out and away from every last vestige of organized, unorganized and disorganized Christianity for the puzzle pieces to be face up and form a clear picture.

The first key piece came when I realized that Jesus is very much alive and well, living in me.

We gather in His name.

He has given me and the others in our mastermind group permission to refer to him as Jay. He also has said to me that it doesn’t make any difference what I believe about him or what I call him and he pointed out that it wasn’t him making the promise I’ve quoted in the opening paragraph above, but it was our SPIRIT-PARENT making the promise through him.

To many mainstream Christians this is a seemingly bizarre belief, but then this is what this series is all about; sharing with everyone who wants to know, what Brad Cullen believes.

My publisher and webmaster, Ryan Bruce, refers to me often as a “religious whacko” …I used to think it was in jest, but I’m no longer sure.

Let’s go back to the quoted promise at the opening of this little treatise and see why it causes confusion among the very people who should “get it.”

What I was taught was that coming into a church and sitting in a pew and declaring that we were gathering together “in the name of Jesus” meant he was there, whether anyone sensed his presence wasn’t important …he was there (period).

Do you really have to prove your faith?

I began to get serious about wanting all that God was willing to give to me – a view that is sorely limited simply because whether God (by whatever other term or name) is willing or NOT willing to give us anything and everything is not the obstacle …what I had to learn was that I to remove the biggest obstacle to receiving and that obstacle was located in all parts of the mind of this body I occupy.

The next piece to the puzzle was turned picture facing up when I began to see the disparity between what I heard was “faith” and seeing so little of it in action. Part of the confusion was what constituted “faith healing.” Two stories in the New Testament illustrate the confusion and the clearing away of it. When we read or hear comments about either of these stories there’s almost always a reference to Jay doing the healing; NOT SO!!!

In both stories, Jay is quoted as having said, “Your faith is what healed you.” There are at least three other stories and probably more, but the distinction between what many folks think of as “faith” and what became the “real thing,” to me, and which I began referring to as “results-getting faith,” as opposed to the kind that results in nothing changing.

I remember an old definition of “institutional advertising” and it fits like a glove: “…it’s like peeing your pants while wearing a dark blue wool suit. Nobody knows you did anything, but it gives you a nice warm feeling.”

Of course Jesus healed her...intentionally.

One story is about a woman who had a nonstop period for twelve years. She had spent all her money on doctors and nada, nothing helped.

She heard about Jay; that he went around healing people and that he happened to be fairly close to her home. The way some might define faith is that she could have remained at home believing that he could heal her.

The difference is that she determined in her mind to hike to where he was meeting with a large crowd. She also had a picture in her mind that all she had to do was touch some part of his clothing and she would be healed.

When she arrived, the crowd was pressed in so closely that there was no way to get close to Jay. A person of lesser faith would have sadly turned around, sorry that she couldn’t get close enough to complete the picture she had in her mind.

This lady was determined! So she pushed and shoved until she got close enough to just barely get a grip on the edge of a sleeve or whatever. BANG – job finished, end of the interminable flow.

Don't miss this piece of the puzzle.

Jay felt something and asked one of the guys with him, “who just touched me?”

“You gotta be kidding me, with all these people milling around, how would I know?”

Jay spotted the woman sitting nervously nearby and knew it was her. He told her not to be nervous and, what really hit me was what he said next: “Your faith has made you whole.”

So, what was her faith? I asked. It was obvious …it was all the above, doing exactly what she saw in her mind which would bring about the desired result and expecting to get the exact result that she ultimately received.

Another piece that made the picture in the puzzle start to become even clearer is the story about a guy named Bartimaeus a beggar who was blind from birth. Same deal, he’d heard about Jay and purposely sat on the road side where he knew Jay would be walking. Sure enough, he heard the crowd approaching.

Jesus healed him, not his faith...is a lie.

Bartimaeus begin yelling at the top of his lungs, “Jesus, have mercy on me …over and over. Some of the others standing nearby, tried to get him to be quiet and he just yelled all the more – Jesus, Jesus, have mercy on me!

As Jay approached and heard Bart, he told one of the guys to bring him over. “What do you want?”

“I want to be able to see!”

“Okay, you can see now,” Jay told him. And, understandably Bart whooped and hollered – again, Jay told him, “Your faith has made you whole.”

To hear others tell about the story, again, it is a story of Jay healing somebody …when, sigh, again, that’s not what happened.

The last piece of the puzzle was seeing what Jay said about anyone who believed enough could be who he was and do what he did and even more. I didn’t fully understand how this could take place – until I did what he told me to do, finally; and that was to refuse to any longer refer to myself as a Christian and to correct anybody who referred to me with that label. MORE TO COME . . .

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