Understanding Who You Are

Understanding Who You Are

A Survey of 21st Centruy Christian Beliefs

Cameron D. Conway

UNDERSTANDING WHO YOU ARE

Copyright © 2018 Cameron D. Conway

Cover photo courtesy of Dave Terpening

Cover design by Cameron Conway

All rights reserved. This book is protected by the copyright laws of Canada. This book may not be copied or reprinted for commercial gain or profit. The use of short quotations or occasional page coping for academic, personal or group study is permitted and encouraged. Permission will be granted upon request.

CONWAY CHRISTIAN RESOURCES INC.

P.O. Box 71204, New Orleans PO,

Delta British Columbia, Canada, V4C 8E7

https://conwaychristianresources.com

Discover your purpose, Build the Kingdom, Support the next generation.

ISBN-10: (paperback) 1775369005

ISBN-13 (paperback): 978-17753690-0-4

ISBN-13 (eBook): 978-17753690-1-1

Scripture quotations are from the New King James Version®.

Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Dedication

|To my loving and wonderful wife, Christine—

for putting up with my shenanigans

and making this book possible.

Contents

Dedication

Preface

Introduction

1. Can I Trust the Bible?

Revelation

Inspiration

Inerrancy

Canonicity

Illumination

Interpretation

Authority

2. Who Is God?

The Existence of God

The Nature of God

The Names of God

God Is Perfect—the Omni’s

Sovereignty and Providence

God Is Personal

3. Who Is Jesus?

Jesus as Preexistent and Corporeal

Equally Divine and Human

One with the Father

A Real Person

Prophesied in the Old Testament

What Shall I Do with Jesus Today?

4. Who Is the Holy Spirit?

Our Direct Connecting Point to God

A Distinct Personality

The Power of Jesus Was the Holy Spirit

The Holy Spirit’s Presence in the Old Testament

The Purpose and Mission of the Holy Spirit

5. The Trinity

Beyond Our Natural Comprehension

The Three Are Not One, But One Expressed in Three

All Present at Creation

The Trinity in Action

6. The Nature of Man

A Dualistic Nature

In the Image of God

Life as a Spirit, Soul, and Body

The War Within

7. The Origin of Sin and Evil

What Is Sin?

Adam’s Fall and the Transfer of Authority

Free Will

The Rise and Fall of Satan

Natural Disasters

8. The Spiritual Realm

Another Dimension

Angels

Demons

Jesus’s Power over Demons

9. Atonement Through Christ Alone

According to the Scriptures

The Cross

The Resurrection

The Ascension

What Is Atonement?

The Order of Atonement

By Faith, Not Works

10. The Normal Christian Life

Baptism

Imitating Jesus

Reading and Studying the Bible

Hearing God’s Voice

Faith

Prayer and Authority

Forgiveness

11. The Church

The Need for Community

Examples from the Early Church

The Two Models of Church

The Kingdom

Worship

12. The Gifts of the Spirit

The Holy Spirit Never Stopped Working

What Are the Spiritual Gifts?

The Difference between a Gift and an Office

How We Live Matters

13. Beyond the Veil of Eternity

When the Clock Runs Out

Judgment Gets Passed

Hell

Heaven

Conclusion

Bibliography

About the Author

Preface

Why does this book even exist? Do we really need another book about Christian beliefs cluttering up our shelves?

This book exists because I was commissioned by Tom Gardner, director of Leadership Encouragement and Development for the Foursquare Gospel Church of Canada, to coauthor a survey of Christian beliefs class for their Foursquare Ministerial Diploma program. This program—created for people recognized by the church for their ministry giftings but who had not had a postsecondary education—provided such people with an opportunity to become licensed ministers.

Thanks to a combination of my work on the class and the lack of an appropriate textbook to go along with the course, this book was conceived. However, rather than being a dull theology textbook, I wanted this work to be available for everyday Christians so they can understand what their belief actually involves and how to live it out. This book is also intended to address the issue of biblical illiteracy, which is becoming more prevalent not only in everyday believers but in active members of the ministry.

Personally, I was raised Catholic in the small town of St. Norbert, Manitoba, but after five-year period of agnosticism (there’s an impersonal God somewhere), I experienced a radical road to Damascus conversion at the age of sixteen. I then found myself surrounded by Charismatics, and those early experiences marked my spiritual upbringing and my hunger to seek out more of the Scriptures to balance out the active power of God I was witnessing. Over my eighteen years as a believer, I’ve been a member of various churches such as the Salvation Army, Word of Faith (AFCM), and a second Charismatic fellowship. I’m now a member of a branch of Evangelical Pentecostalism known as the Foursquare Gospel Church of Canada.

Because of the vast array of denominations, affiliations, and personal beliefs among Christians in our world today, I feel it’s best to artificially narrow down who and what I am, because that will flavor how I’ll be presenting this material. I’m first and foremost a follower of Christ, but if we were to follow the trunk of the tree up to the outlying branches, it would look like this: Protestant, Orthodox,¹ Evangelical, Pentecostal, Charismatic.

While I don’t blindly hold to every facet of all these identity markers, this is the easiest way to show where I’m coming from and what I’ll be presenting in this book. People are unique and complicated and cannot be crammed into artificial boxes that must always be checked in order to exist. We’re all different, and we all see the world a touch differently. But nearly all of us as Christians hold to the same truths—that Jesus of Nazareth is the virgin-born, incarnate Son of God who came to earth to restore our relationship with God by dying for our sins on the cross and being raised from the dead.

From that common starting line, what’s laid out in this book is a simple presentation of the great canvas of theology upon which each believer paints his or her own mural.

I understand that some who read this background of my life may be tempted to toss this book aside because of preconceived notions about Charismatics or Evangelicals. To that I respond with a cry of my heart: I strongly believe that to be a vibrant and effective Christian here on earth, one must have a balance of the Word of God and the Spirit of God active in one’s life. It’s like an eagle soaring high above the clouds, relying on both wings for flight.

This book is my attempt to aid you to in becoming grounded in truths of Scripture so that you can mature to the fullest degree in what God has called you to be. I want to help you understand who you are, who God is, and why the two of you even have a relationship in the first place.

May God bless you during this time, may Christ guide you into revelation, and may the Holy Spirit fill you with His wisdom.

Cameron D. Conway, BTh, March 6, 2018

Introduction

What is truth? These are words spoken long ago by Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judea during the time of Christ. The words are recorded in John 18:38. The previous verse tells us that Jesus had been asked by Pilate about his kingship, and He had answered, You say rightly that I am a king. For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice (18:37). The embodiment of truth stands before the agent of human authority declaring that those who are connected to the truth will know and hear Him. It’s no surprise that Pilate, in a cynical manner, scoffed at the very notion and existence of truth. He saw the world only in a certain way—that of politics, war, and personal promotion, none of which depended on the truth spoken of by Jesus.

But to ignore this decree of there being truth is like a person walking outside during a thunderstorm declaring, What is rain? So it is with our Western world today; it seems that we’ve come full circle, and now entire cultures and societies are declaring that there is no truth.

This is where the Western church finds itself today—as a lighthouse trying to shine into the night. But the ships, rather than seeing that light as a beacon, perceive it as an annoyance to be ignored.

We’re now a society drowning in knowledge but gasping for truth. Truth is seen as being whatever it is to each person, each with their own set of truths, and each is person right to hold those truths. This sounds all well and good until people of differing opinions confront each other. If they see things differently, they cannot both be right. If one person believes that two plus two equals four, and the other says that two plus two equals potato, both can’t be right.

Yet in our day and age the disregard for truth isn’t enough. There’s also the appeasement of error. For instance, if enough people thought that two plus two equals potato, it could create a small movement to create an exemption to the mathematical formula, because if the answer’s not potato, then the feelings of many would be crushed, and their sense of self-worth would be compromised.

While that example is silly, it does resemble what has happened to the church, the communal understanding of gospel truths, and how people view faith in general. While saying two plus two equals four generally doesn’t bring distress and anxiety, saying that Jesus plus repentance equals atonement does. Many people would rather have the answer be potato, or spaghetti monster—anything other than Jesus.

In our culture, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that if enough people got together, they could change the word water to poison and the word poison to water. Then when the next generation arose and read all the old books and stories, they would think these past writers were insane for saying such good things about something that was deadly, and they would find it odd that those ancient fools would be so cautious about something good.

It’s not about advancement, but about discrediting the old to make themselves feel better. Truth is seen as nothing but words, and the winning words are those spoken by the most people.

No longer is society interested in understanding the unmovable truths of the universe; it’s interested rather in affirming that no one can be morally, religiously, or intellectually wrong. Rather than encouraging people to become pillars of wisdom and truth, many instead have been groomed into resembling the Black Knight from Monty Python—those who have no legs to stand on, no arms to fight with, and nothing but a mouth full of teeth to bite passing ankles.

Even Christians are torn between those who believe Jesus was the Son of God and those who believe he was just a man. We’re divided on whether the Bible can be trusted, on the reality of the Holy Spirit, and even on the very nature of God. It’s no surprise then that there’s so much confusion among believers as to what they actually believe. This confusion becomes a major hinderance to evangelism, as many Christians feel overwhelmed by what others think and often have no answer to give, especially in matters of truth, morality, and the supernatural.

My personal belief is that the century-old battle² in the church between orthodox/fundamentalists and liberals was won not by either of them, but by the Pentecostals. For while the two segments were engaged in a (mostly) bloodless civil war, the Holy Spirit was engaging in one of His greatest movements in the past thousand years. It’s like two people in an argument about the existence of certain sports car. One said it did not and could not exist, while the other claimed it did exist, and had been seen in the area long ago but could never appear again. As the two were bickering, the fabled sports car drove past them. Instead of accepting what they saw, they resumed their argument, while others down the street jumped into the car and drove off.

The same can be said about those outside the church. Too often, talks and debates between Christians and non-Christians tend to devolve into an argument of one saying there’s a God while the other says there isn’t. What God has done in many cases through the early twentieth-century Pentecostal movement and through the late twentieth-century Charismatic outpourings is to put an end to those arguments through the working of the Holy Spirit. It’s one thing for a person to say there’s no God; it’s another thing entirely for that same person to convince someone who has encountered God that there isn’t one. It’s like trying to convince someone in the middle of the night that the sun doesn’t exist; the effort is futile, because the other person has seen the sun.

These are then the primary false assertions we encounter in our day and age in the Western world: that there’s no truth, no God, no purpose, no hope. Because of our conflict with these assertions, we’re constantly finding ourselves at the crossroads of whether we’ll look like Christ or look like the world. I’m not speaking of superficial things like clothes, hair, tattoos, and the like, but of what we look like on the inside.

That’s the real battleground, the hidden place within us where no one but God can see who we are. It’s the place where our masks, arguments, doctrines, and the like all fall away, and all that’s left is the truth.

The truth reveals our answers to essential questions: Who am I? Who is my God? And how will I live my life? My hope is that this book will help you in answering those questions, and others as well. But first, here is my question for you: How do you look at the world? Is it dark, bleak, fallen beyond repair, hopeless, ungodly? Or is it a playground for the children of God, full of light and opportunity? I ask this because how you look at the world will shape how you live in the world.

1

Can I Trust the Bible?

The beginning of our ability to understand the broad scope of Christian beliefs means first that we must come to a firm understanding of how and why we can trust the book known as the Bible. For contained within that book is the treasure trove of revelations, insights, commands, and hopes that form our faith as Christians. Without the Bible there can be no Christianity, no faith in Christ, and no hope in God. Therefore, let’s come to a better understanding of why the book we call the Bible is recognized by many as being the voice of God given to men and women.

Adopting this perspective on the Scriptures means that we’ve established our worldview—how we see, perceive, and act in any given situation. By saying that we believe the Bible to be a record of various encounters between the Creator and the created, we’re setting ourselves up to live according to that knowledge. After professing to believe the Bible to be true, to then act however you want to act is what James referred to as double-mindedness (James 1:8), and what Jesus referred to as serving two masters (Matthew 6:24).

Our worldview then is what shapes our perception of society and reality; how you see the world will determine how you’ll handle what’s contained in the Scriptures. Will you accept that God moved and still moves miraculously? Will you believe it to all be one giant allegory? Will you believe that it was all just the creation of bored and scared people throughout the ages? These are questions that, when answered, will determine what you get out of the Bible and what kind of relationship you have with God.

We should see the Bible itself as being less about giving us a complete worldview and more about sharing the story of God’s interactions with His people. Biblically speaking, a Christian worldview must center in God’s self-revelation in Scripture and His supreme revelation in Jesus Christ and His reign. We’re to see the Bible as less of a checklist and more of a collection of living images, a collection curated by God for specific purposes.

What is written is sufficient to draw people to Him and to show us how to have fellowship with Him, despite the gulf of sin separating us from Him. However, to enjoy the benefits of what God has curated, we must first believe that it’s God who in various ways orchestrated the creation of the Bible; second, we must believe not only that God exists but that He’s the star of the show.

To understand these matters, we’ll spend the rest of this chapter talking about the basics of how the Bible was given, collected, and authenticated into the book it is today.

Revelation

The concept of revelation is one of unveiling; predominantly it’s the revealing of truth or wisdom. This is why in English the word reveal is related to the word revelation. In The Wizard of Oz, the great face of power was revealed to be nothing more than a man behind the curtain; but in the Scriptures, the simple curtain is the book that reveals, rather than hides, the face of power that’s over creation.

This unveiling then comes not from our world but from the realm of God, who bridges the gap between the eternal and the temporal to bring His words into our own. Even much of what Jesus taught in His parables can be seen as this type of revelation, as Jesus spoke in this manner to ensure that only those really listening for Him could understand Him (Mark 4:11). This is why