Jon the Baptist.

Well!  Things are going superb as of today.  The weather is around the 20 and I’m finally getting long periods of time in the sun.  This upcoming weekend we are going on a three day feild study to the Negev, Dead Sea, and Southern Judah in general.  We get to go swimming, (or should I say floating) in the Dead Sea.  The salt content is so high that you can’t actually stay under very easily.  I wouldn’t mind getting a jar of Dead Sea water and bringing it home… It would make for some good drinking…

This past weekend, as the pictures posted, we went to Northern Israel all around Samaria.  It was a great trip of seeing old things and celebrating the new.  There were three birthdays within a one week period, so we celebrated them on the bus.  These past week we must have sung happy birthday 15 times.  Once for every meal for every person. Samaria was one of the most beautiful places in all of Israel.  Many places actually looked like BC with loads of greenery and trees.  Northern Israel is actually quite green…  It is crazy to see the contrast.  Literally it will be dessert on one side of a hill and totally green on the other.  All the hills and mountains make for some crazy humidity levels and crazy rain whether.  So much of the life depends on the rain here that if there is none then living here is almost impossible.

Bus Birthday

This past week has been a climax in a lesson God has been showing me.  Though it was a really hard one to go through… it was very necessary.  It was the lesson of experiential faith verses text faith.  That is, faith that is encouraged by experience something, and then finding the explanation of it in the Bible verses faith that is encouraged through trusting what the text says about it even without experiencing it.  This whole past few weeks it seems my view of Jesus has been trampled on.  Having teachers that are Jewish who can prove Jesus as false with really good reasoning…  Having teachers that used to be Muslim, that just the same can prove both Jews and Christians wrong with good reasoning…  Reading books about people that experience intimacy with God without believing that Jesus actually is God…  Writing papers about people who even claim Jesus as God, yet still live their lives totally different then I would even imagine.  There were these people called Stylists in the Eastern church who would stand on poles for reminder to pray.  One guy stood atop for 38 years…  38 Years!  I don’t know if I wrote about this in a previous blog… but it just seems to be way out of my league.  What am I to believe about Jesus?  What am I to believe about hearing his voice?  Am I sure that I am hearing it when all he calls me to do is read the Bible and pray…  Or is my imagination getting the best of me…  Am I just trying so hard to hear God, that I am making things up?  …Perhaps I am exaggerating a bit…  But these questions are thrown in your face simply by walking through the city.  You see three section of people just as passionate as the other as to their experiences and their written text.  It has ripped my idea of experiencail faith into peices.  Or should I say God has…  It has been a hard lesson because no longer can I simply rely on telling people that God is real because I have experienced this and that…  No longer will I put my trust in such experiences in order for my faith to grow.  Though I will never forget them for remeberance of God’s faithfulness sake…  but it will no longer define my faith.  My faith… as God reminded me so graciously… is in Jesus…  If I were to begin going on the trail of experience over text, then where would my faith go?  If I were to base my faith on experience, then would it even be faith?  Would it not then only be something that I have to see to believe?  It would be based off proof rather than faith.

Looking at Mt. Ebal (right), & Mt. Gerizin (left), Shechem in the middle.

One of the biggest questions that I am waiting for God to convince my heart of is: What makes a follower of Jesus different?  if Muslims are just as worried about the poor as Christians…  If Jews are just as worried about interpretation as our leading Jesus-professing interpreters…  If there are thousands of people that experience intimacy with God without the means of Jesus… Then what is Jesus?  Perhaps you can see why my idea of experiencial faith has been crushed…  For there are many things that simply cannot be answered by experience.  There are things that only trust in the text can explain.  For if my faith is only based on experience then I will forever be stuck on the path that God let me experience for a few days here.  A path with no direction.  A path with no real truth.  A path with no real hope…  A path that just goes in a great big circle.  And man, was even a few days on that path hard.  I felt so lost.  I tried simply letting go of the Bible to see what would happen.  Thankfully the Lord kept to his promise to bring my back.  It reminded me of what my life was like before God truely revealed himself to me throught the base of his word, and the confirmation of his experiencial gift.

The Bible is the foundation…  Without it, experience can never be classified.  Without it, experience can prove anything.  Without it, you will never know if it truly is Jesus you are experiencing, or simply a counterfit trying to steal you away from the true vine.

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener.  He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful… Remain in me, and I will remain in you.  No branch can bear fruit by itself…”   — Jesus

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patients, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control”

Interesting that God proved it to me by showing me what happens when you take for granted being in the vine and then try living without it…  As soon as I let go I stopped desiring love.  Let me never take for granted being in the vine…  Let me never take for granted that I have access to the foundation of truth: the Bible.

Samaritans (They still exist) There of 800 of them left...