Untwisting Scriptures and offering the Living Water, to help others (especially those who have been abused) experience the joy to be found in Jesus Christ
Untwisting Scriptures that were used to tie you up, gag you, and tangle your mind: Book 3 Your Words, Your Emotions is available for the next few days for FREE in e-book form. You can download it without charge here until Tuesday, November 9th, 2021, instead of paying the usual e-book price of $5.99. Continue reading “Paul Sure Did Confront Peter a Lot in This New Book”
Last week, when Paul Kingsbury (who I referenced in regard to “bitterness” in my first Untwisting Scriptures book) preached the sermon I’m critiquing today, I was busy putting the finishing touches on my third Untwisting Scriptures book and sending it out to the readers who will help me with my Book Launch when it comes out November 1st. Needless to say, I’m excited about this!
But now I’m able to turn my attention back to where it so often ends up going: Bad Sermons.
Paul Kingsbury is a former Chicago-area pastor who was the co-founder of Reformers Unanimous, the addiction recovery program that Josh Duggar attended a few years ago. Kingsbury has been named before and was recently named again in a news article about what appeared to be covering for someone who a missionary who had sexually assaulted a woman.
Continue reading “Let’s Compare Potiphar’s Wife with Tamar, Shall We?”
Last week I took a writing retreat to work on my third Untwisting Scriptures book, tentatively subtitled “Your Words, Your Emotions.” It will address good stuff like gossip and slander, and anger and fear and shame. My hope is for it to be out before the end of 2021!
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One of the “Untwisting Scriptures” topics I’m known for tackling is the topic of giving up or yielding your rights. That’s the discussion in the first few chapters of the first Untwisting Scriptures book, and it was the topic the first time I was invited to speak at an abuse conference.
One of the apparently audacious assertions I make about rights—besides the assertion that it’s basically impossible for us to give up our rights—is that Jesus never gave up His rights. Continue reading “What Did Jesus Mean When He Said “Turn the Other Cheek”?”
(aka, “Don’t Gossip about Offenses”)
Some time ago, the Victory Today Facebook page posted someone’s Bible study notes without context. As of this writing, 2.5 years later, it has been reposted (Shared) 88 THOUSAND times.
The original author said that in her original context, she was only talking about small things, and she was sorry this was shared without her context. So with that disclaimer I’ll proceed, because Victory Today gave only this chart, and this is the only context that 88,000 people had for reposting it. Continue reading “If Someone Offends Me, Should I Not Talk About It?”
Colossians 4:6 says,
“Let your speech always be gracious [or in some versions, ‘with grace’ or ‘full of grace’], seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.
This is one of the many Scriptures used to teach us to “speak sweet.” When I researched it, I found article after article telling us that having “gracious” speech, or speech that is “full of grace” means speaking in a kind and inoffensive way to and about everyone.
And to those writers, “seasoned with salt” means “pleasant tasting.” Again, inoffensive, causing no waves, just pleasant and smiling and plastic no matter what.
And for my non-American readers, here’s the rest of that old adage:
“If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” Continue reading ““If you can’t say something nice” . . . in Colossians 4:6”
Some of this is time sensitive.
(This isn’t the Time Sensitive part. That’s the second one.)
After 12 years of blogging, TWELVE YEARS, I finally made a Facebook page associated with this website.
Yes, that took a really, really long time. Continue reading “Two Bits of Big News about Untwisting Scriptures”
In May I recorded the audiobook for the second Untwisting Scriptures book, focusing on Patriarchy and Authority.
I’m happy to say that the producer is a professional sound engineer who has done audio work for Julie Roys, Dr. Diane Langberg, and other advocates.
It should be available within a few days, I hope!
I’ve mentioned before that most of the chapters of this book were blog posts before they were edited into chapters, going all the way back to 2013. But a few of them were written brand new for the book.
One of those new ones was chapter 18, “The Authority We Have in Jesus Christ.” A day or two ago as I was listening to the optimized version of this chapter, I thought, “Hmmm, this information is so important, I should probably make it available free of charge to those who for one reason or another won’t or can’t buy the book.” Continue reading “Yes, We Really Do Have Authority in Jesus Christ”
Dear friend~
In our correspondence, you referred to the parable of the talents as a story of a person being punished “because he feared the master’s severity. It was not about the cleverness of investing but about how he viewed the owner/master,” you said. “I hate it… but that’s soo me. And I know it displeases Him. Because if I BELIEVED in my heart what my head and you tell me of Him, I wouldn’t be feeling this. So I don’t. And it feels like I can’t.” Continue reading “The Parable of the Talents, for a Fearful Abuse Survivor”
I met Emily Elizabeth Anderson in January of this year, when she told me she had appreciated my Untwisting Scriptures books and asked to interview me on her blog, Thriving Forward. (You can find that interview here.)
I knew she had come out of the Bill Gothard cult (Advanced Training Institute, ATI), I knew she was now free from it, and I knew she loved Jesus. (A rare combination, it seems, for young people who grew up Gothard.)
But it was when I heard her being interviewed in a Called to Peace Ministries Facebook Live that I heard that story. I asked her to share more with me about it, and she sent me her testimony.
The thing is, my friends. The thing is, I was sure that the people who leave cults and also leave Jesus don’t really know who He is. I figured they couldn’t have really found out who He is, clear through, as He’s presented in the gospels.
And Emily confirmed these suspicions. Continue reading “How to Come Out of a Cult and Find Jesus “
NOTE: I’ve written about fear a number of times. Some of the most pertinent are listed and linked down at the end of this article.
We don’t want to ignore the fear signals that tell us to get out of an unsafe situation, and I’ve addressed those in other articles. But the encouraging “fear not” verses in the Bible will help us to shed inappropriate fear.
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Have you heard, as I have, that there are 365 “fear not” verses in the Bible, one for every day of the year? (And that this is supposed to help you remember to not be afraid.)
Well, that sounded a little suspect to me, so I decided to check it out. Turns out even websites like this one that claimed they were giving you all “365” fear not verses actually listed fewer than 150.
Maybe they thought no one would ever count? Continue reading “Those 365 “Fear Not” Verses in the Bible”