Asking Right Questions, Believing Wrong Answers
Neil Peart penned the lyrics of this song “Faithless”
Faithless – Rush
I’ve got my own moral compass to steer by
A guiding star beats a spirit in the sky
And all the preaching voices -
Empty vessels of dreams so loud
As they move among the crowd
Fools and thieves are well disguised
In the temple and market placeLike a stone in the river
Against the floods of spring
I will quietly resistLike the willows in the wind
Or the cliffs along the ocean
I will quietly resistI don’t have faith in faith
I don’t believe in belief
You can call me faithless
I still cling to hope
And I believe in love
And that’s faith enough for meI’ve got my own spirit level for balance
To tell if my choice is leaning up or down
And all the shouting voices
Try to throw me off my course
Some by sermon, some by force
Fools and thieves are dangerous
In the temple and market placeLike a forest bows to winter
Beneath the deep white silence
I will quietly resistLike a flower in the desert
That only blooms at night
I will quietly resist
In some cases, the majority of the people who dared to ask the question with pure and noble intent end up discovering that maybe they did not have authentic faith and belief in God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Maybe they come to a realization that they instead had faith in ‘faith without works’ and a belief in a ‘belief system’.
There is a difference, a huge difference
Now they have neither Faith, faith, belief, beliefs, God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit. All they have is a ‘hope’ (based on the deepest demoninator of doubt) and ‘love’ that forms their moral compass that steers them from one day to the next that determines mental balance or not. That is their faith that is really defined as ‘fate’.
I will give them this. I too have seen the preaching voices of empty vessels shout out their dreams of utopia so loud moving among the crowd. I too have heard the shouting voices that have tried to throw me off the Christian course via their Sunday sermons and/or by force threatening the death of a nation if a particular political party ever got re-elected. I have witnessed how dangerous fools and thieves can be when they decided to take the greed of the market place as weekend policy within the temple instead of taking the polity of the temple daily into the marketplace to be a shining beacon of light to the lost, hurting, and dying.
How did I come up with a different and correct answer?
How did I come to embrace a different but obvious orthodoxy?
Because I came to the point where I realized that all this time, I had the Faith of Christ within me. Not in a humanistic realm of somehow self-obtaining it, but by the fact that I did make that original confession of sins, professed Jesus as my Savior, and repented for my sins asking to be washed in His blood. I had it all along when others told me that I lost it permanently when I walked out of their church (it wasn’t God’s church) being told that I would die at a very young age. I had it when I went through trials and crisis. I had it when I went through a three year ‘cave and wilderness’ experience of wind, weather, elements, and the dark tunnels of the cave and was told that the experience happened because I ‘deserved it’ for secret sin, lacking faith, disagreeing with a Word-Faith televangelist, not reading enough, not praying hard enough, not praising long enough, not giving enough money, etc. along with leaving the charismatic, third rave, Vineyard movement caused God to get very angry at me to where I needed a ‘Holy Heiney Kicking’.
It was the difference between tearing a house down to rebuild it and doing an extensive remodeling. These people decided to rip out the foundation of the Rock and rewrite and reconstruct it with a flawed foundation of sand. I kept the foundation of the Rock and am constantly going through an extensive remodeling of my belief and values to line up to God to meet the ‘building code called the Bible’. Their God changes with the times and so does their definition of whether God happens to love or hate you that particular day. My God never changes and loves me unconditionally.
It used to be that these questioners stood back in the distance and quietly resisted. No more. In many ways, they have proclaimed that they are the ‘new thing’ and that like The Who stated ‘They won’t get fooled again” to only realize later that their self appointed “new boss” ended up being “same as the old boss’.
Exactly what happened with the Old Testament Israelites when they went from the Judges to the Kings. They met a new boss name Saul that eventually turned out to be ‘same as the old boss’ like the Judges that preceded Saul.
Twenty years from now, they will come to the realization in their man-made utopia of church called ‘something-ism’ that they refuse to define that their new boss ended up being exactly the same as the previous boss.
Related Posts
- The Hard Questions Asked
- Too Scared You May Make The Wrong Choice
- The Wrong Groom
- Do You Have Every Spiritual Gift?
- I Wonder What Robert Ricciardelli Is Thinking
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I was on another email discussion list whose topic was spirtitual abuse. It didn’t last long because the moderator was wise enough to see it was going in the wrong direction. Post after post was basically people trying to up one another with how bad the abuse was that they went through. Instead of driving people back to God, the list seemd to veer into “how bad so many churches are.” If the list continued I wonder if the conversation would have veered into, “Well, since churches are so bad maybe we better leave the church.” And then, would it have veered into what you described in your post? Maybe that is another form of what Spurgeon called “the downgrade?”
Interesting article. The psychology of it all is very baffling.
You are right about the question that was asked and how did they get to where they are. I saw it with the Toronto Blessing and am seeing it everyday with the emergents going down a bizarre path.