BTZ Blog

"When we think "sin" we think, disobedience to God, breaking the Law of God, sinful behavior, i.e. that which offends God, and so on. But is that really what sin is?" Check it out on Chucks Blog. Does Sin Exist Anymore?

Glenn's sayings;  A number of years ago I moved away from a denominated critique way of Bible study, where I studied the Bible from the point of trying to validity to what I was taught to believe, to a more objective critique of Bible study to where I allowed the Bible, as seen through the lens of Jesus, to formulate what I believe. That technique led to a radical change in some of my beliefs. The change was, not then, nor is now to disparage people caught up in the myriad of denominated beliefs under the broad banner of Religion; rather, my verbalization of my  change was in the hope that some people would feel free enough to lay aside...if they so desired...preconceived ideologies of traditional belief systems, God, the cross-work of Christ and the Gospel so they could think and reason for themselves, uninfluenced by man-made doctrines and traditions and to come to conclusions based on their God given ability to reason and hear the Spirit of Truth for themselves regar...

 Glenn's sayings; One of the subtle dangers that believers face in pursuit of Godliness is ending up being religious instead of being spiritual! Religiosity is often mistaken as spirituality by those religiously inclined whether they are believers or not. But the difference between the two spans the oceans of the world. Religion is man-made, man-indoctrinated and man-controlled. Spirituality, on the other hand, is a divine reality that is divinely led by the Divine. Religiosity majors on external things, the keeping of rules and regulations and the do’s and don’ts. Spirituality is a matter of the heart, and a life living relationship experience. The scriptures tells us that there will be many in the last days who have a form of godliness without its power...could that be, they will be religious, but not spiritual (2 Tim. 3:5)? They will go religiously to meetings, pray and read the Bible daily and even attend all-night fasting and prayer meetings, tithe their income, etc. But ...

Glenn's sayings; The scripture used to validate religious spiritual abuse is; Matthew 18:15-18. In this passage, Jesus says “If your brother or sister sins against you, go and correct them when you are alone together. If they listen to you, then you’ve won over your brother or sister. But if they won’t listen, take with you one or two others so that every word may be established by the mouth of two or three witnesses. But if they still won’t pay attention, report it to the church. If they won’t pay attention even to the church, treat them as you would a Gentile and tax collector. I assure you that whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven. And whatever you loosen on earth will be loosened in heaven." Preachers and others on different levels of the establish hierarchy of their theological persuasion quote this passage with emphasis on "treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector" as a justification for shunning someone. This passage records the word...

Glenn's sayings; Sharing the Good News should be spoken in the language of the Gospel of Grace...the language of life, light, love, hope, peace, mercy, compassion, forgiveness, encouragement, strength, redemption, transformation, revelation and blessing! Not the bad news language of speaking curses and damnation. The concept of hell's torturer chamber of everlasting fire and brimstone, the idea that the Devil is living in hell as the chief superintendent ruling over demons and forking out punishment to the thousands of people who die daily and go there is a myth not a Gospel truth. Hell can only exist to be populated by people if God....Who is LOVE...at some point ceases to be LOVE and morphs into being HATE. But LOVE will never become HATE because "God is the same yesterday, today and forever." He also is Lord, and said: "I am the Lord and I change not." "How precious is your unfailing LOVE, O God! All humanity finds shelter in the shadow of your ...

Glenn's sayings; What Kind of God is God? The thinking of some people is that He is a God who demands perfection. If we hope to gain entry into heaven, we had better tow the line, otherwise we could expect utter abandonment and damnation. This God of religion is not a God who gives people permission to embrace life in all of its ambiguity and complexity, let alone to embrace our humanity in all of its ambiguity and complexity. This, in fact, is a God who refuses to recognize ambiguity altogether, who forces people to see the world in dualistic categories...good and bad, black and white, right and wrong...with no allowance whatsoever for anything in between. This God, like the fundamentalists who invented him, views the believers life as a steady ascent toward holiness. Once a person is born again, once the “sinners prayer” is prayed, you could expect to move onward and upward in your faith, and if you didn’t maintain that course, if you falter along the way, well, you were mad...

Glenn's sayings; Are you Guilt Ridden? The practice of “church” by much of the world is fueled by two ingredients; judgement and condemnation causing people to be guilt ridden and fear-mongered. People are saddled with guilty conscience if we fail and God is portrayed as being the "big bad wolf" in the sky waiting for us to do wrong so He can punish us and is we don't confess the wrong send us to the torture chamber of hell for eternity. Professional preachers in religion know how to nourish both concepts to where the pew-warming listener receives the teaching and accepts it as if it were scriptural, through the one man pipeline by which God is supposed to communicates spiritual truths that He wants the "spiritual ignorant" pew-warmers to know. Being controlled by a guilty conscience is perpetuated by the religious idea of a “do and don’t” mentality rather than a “being” reality. The focus is on how we must do better, pray more, read our bible more...

Came across this on the net, no author cited to give the credit to. Whoever he or she was...did an excellent job! The trial of Pastor Jones Judge: Mr. Jones you have been charged with multiple counts of extortion. Your crime spree covers 20 years and thousands of victims. You have defrauded people out of their money with fear and manipulation, telling them they had to tithe 10% of their income to your church and that God would bless them if they did. You also told them that if they didn't tithe God would curse them. How do you plead? Mr. Jones: I plead not guilty your Honor, I have done nothing wrong. I have only preached what the Bible says. In the Bible Abraham tithed to Melchizedek and God blessed him for his faithful giving. The Bible even says he was rich in silver and gold. Judge: Is it not true, Mr. Jones, that in Genesis chapter 13 verse 2 the Bible says Abraham was rich with livestock, silver and gold? Mr. Jones: Yes, you are exactly right, ...

The Name of Jesus is not a magic formula one says at the end of a prayer to provoke God to answer one's request. The power that is in the Name of Jesus is because of RELATIONSHIP!. Before my son (Sheldon) or daughter (Vanessa) were born the names they now have didn’t mean much to me. But say one of their names now and my heart fills with emotion, I can smell the freshness of their babyhood, I hear the sound of their voice as a toddler, I feel the pain they endured when they hurt themselves, their crying made me cry, what brought them joy brought me joy, that is the kind of power their name has on me now. If they ask me for something and it is in my power and their best interest they know beyond the shadow of a doubt that I will do it. Their names erupt with power as does mine to them because of our relationship. It is being in relationship with Jesus that gives His Name power in your life. Because of His LOVE and the relationship between you and Him, His NAME is POWERFUL! It is ...

If the spirit behind what you believe about God is not the Spirit of Christ...what you believe about God is not of the right spirit, including the spirit of the Old Covenant writers. Jesus is the only true reveal-er of who God is and what God is like thus, God is loving, forgiving, compassionate, merciful as Jesus is ...NOT angry, retributive or vindictive as the Old Covenant writers have recorded!  "As an epiphany of God, Jesus was a ‘disclosure’ or ‘revelation’ of God. He did not reveal God only in his teaching (as if revelation consisted primarily of information), but in his very way of being. The epiphany was Jesus—his ‘person’ as well as his message. As such, he was an ‘image’ of God, an ‘icon’ of God, revealing and mediating the divine reality. What he was like therefore discloses what God is like." Marcus Borg Many, like myself, who formally held to the authoritative and literalistic view of the Bible are becoming increasingly perplexed and...

Glenn's sayings; I find it somewhat ironical laughable when people believe, without any offense taken on their part to their pious sanctimonious self, that God showed up as a talking ASS... and a female ASS at that...but throw a panic fit at the suggestion of God could show up having human feminine qualities, even though it is the same Bible that records God showing up talking through a female ASS shows that God has feminine qualities! Why is it the religionists have no issue with God taking on the form of a female ASS which He did not create in His image, but go absolutely berserk and call people a heretic teaching doctrines of demons, who suggest that God can take on the form of a human female...whom He did create in His image? Well...as one person told me and I quote..."I don't believe in 'common sense', I believe in 'bible sense.'" I question if the above thinking makes any Bible sense. God is not a BURNING bush, God is not a F...

Glenn's sayings; "Fear him who has the power to destroy both body and soul in hell!" (Matthew 10:28) This verse is quoted as a proof text by people promoting the hell damnation theory and the terror of God in His sending people to suffer in hell for eternity. But is that the context of the verse...maybe...if it is wrenched from its context. This verse when quoted to justify a angry, terrorizing, loveless, retributive God is the same as quoting what the friends of Job said about God without providing the fact that later on God said that they were wrong in what they said about Him. If you consider the context of this chapter in Matthew, you will find that it is not that God sends people to eternal punishment in hell fire therefore, we should be afraid of Him. Notice that Jesus tells His disciples to go and proclaim the kingdom of God, the coming of which has the effects of restoring people...did you get that, RESTORING people, not DESTROYING people..."As you go, p...

 Glenn's sayings; Walls of Separation. The religious system has made by-laws, constitutions, creeds, rules, regulations and established denominated corrals to segregate like-minded people from different like-minded people to control and define who they are and who is “in” the a specific corral and who is “outa” a specific corral. Nowhere in the "Christian Holy Book" that is claimed to be the authority where these different corralled people get their beliefs, is such a thing mentioned let alone sanctioned by Jesus. In fact, the only people with whom Jesus, on a regular basis, took issue with were the elite self-righteous religious people who saw themselves as having all their doctrinal-ducks in a row regarding their theology and doxology and had ticked all the right boxes on the membership forms, while consistently ruling unlike-minded people...with different beliefs than their corral belief system...as outside of God’s love and favour. It is these very man-made st...

Gay Marriaae...I trust this makes you Thinken-Glad instead of Stinken-Mad! March 09, 2017 Speaking or writing, is merely a creative narrative to reveals our view of the issue...or...the way we want others to see and understand our view about the issue at hand, even if our narrative is not the reality of the of the issue present. The narrative we tell could be largely fabricated fiction born out of fear and desperation because of a sense of losing control over something…especially loosing control over people. Fear-mongering is a classic way to get people to carry the flag of conformity and keep them doing the do’s and not do the don’ts that are expected of them. One of the most used stories told to control biased people in today's world is the gay marriage issue and the threatening that “hell fire and brimstone story of eternal punishment” awaits them and those who side with them regarding their sexual orientation and their right to marry. Some of the fear-mongering stories of t...

Glenn's sayings; Is God Male o r Female ? From talking to people who stated that God in the bible is referred to as a male and for this reason they refused to read "The Shack" or view the movie because it portrayed God as a aunt J e mima black woman. Such reasoning can be a result of a theology that justifies the exclusion of women from positions of authority in the "Church" by affirming God’s maleness by claiming  that Christianity has a “decidedly masculine feel”, as preachers have done. According to Wikipedia "Complementarianism" is a theological view held by some in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, that men and women have different but complementary roles and responsibilities in marriage, family life, and elsewhere (such as  the religious system)...brackets mine. The word "complementary"  and its cognates are currently used to denote this view. For some Christians whose complementarian view is biblical-prescribed , these separate rol...

A video poem by Glenn Regular. If Jesus came to our town.

Glenn's sayings; I, even I, am he that blotteth out your transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember your sins. Isaiah, 43:25 Who dealt with man's sin?...God! When did God blot out man's sin?...The cross-work of Jesus! For whose sake did God blot out our man's sin?...His own sake! Why did God blot out man's sin?...the sin barrier would not be a factor in God dealing with man! Does God call into remembrance man's sin?...Never!   God,through the finished work of Christ on the cross dealt with the sin issue once and for ALL...that includes the sin of ALL people, past, present and future. That is the Good News Gospel people need to hear so they will turn from the ways of self-righteousness and the ways of the world to the path that Jesus has already made for them to follow.

Glenn's sayings; The Good News Gospel though initiated in the past and is good news for people's future, it is more about living in the present. The work of the Gospel is not about fear-mongering people with the threat of eternity in hell to get them to repeat the bible-less "sinners prayer" in order to escape hell fire after death. Telling the good news is important, but threatening people with the threat of hell as a means of convincing people that it is good news brings disrespect to the Gospel and pictures God as the worst egotistic terrorist of all times, causing the bad news God to override the good news God and impedes the true Gospel of God's grace and love. The presentation of the Good News Gospel is better effected by simply allowing the LOVE within us to do His work through us...sacredly, sometimes secretly and sometimes silently and those with hearts to understand, ears to hear and eyes to see will respond to the character of Christ Himself.

" U pon this rock". These are the words of Jesus. We have rightly understood that Jesus is the rock that He is building His Church on, but have we rightly understood the revelation of Who Jesus is that enables us to have a rock solid faith? Re ligious people today make the mistake of interpreting Jesus' words through focusing on self-effort and spending their energy on trying to fulfill the word of Jesus in their own strength through various religious expectations that are more man's attempts to build His Church than it is Jesus building His Church. We must understand that if we do not become a rock through the finished work of Jesus on the cross and His resurrection, an extension of the Rock Christ Jesus, and accept all that took place at those world changing events, we will continue to try to build His Church through man-made endeavors. The religious system that is practiced today has been in place for some 2000 years and beyond, yet it has not been successful ...

Why is it that believers in the religious system get so angrily defensive in defending the existence of a everlasting torture chamber of hell-fire and brimstone where God chooses to assign the vast majority of His creation to when they die because they reject that God is unable to save ALL even though Jesus said; "I did not come to condemn the people of the world, but that through me the world may saved. This type of bigotry in evident during Christ's ministry by the Jews, they thought they were the only people of God on earth and that Jesus came with a message only for them. They would never have accepted that the gospel was for the Gentiles if Peter had not had a vision from God to convince him to take the gospel to the Gentiles. Acts tells us, “On the morrow, as they went on their journey, and drew nigh unto the city, Peter went up upon the housetop to pray about the sixth hour. And he became very hungry, and would have eaten: but while they made ready, he fell into ...