I turned away for over ten years. I returned to faith a few years ago. Praise God for His mercy and grace. He pulled me out of a pit of misery that was my own making.
I haven't been a Christian very long, around 5 years, but about 2 years in I fell away from Church because I felt it wasn't living up to "my" expectations. Later I returned to the church I became a Christian in trying to help my dying father know Jesus, and discovered it was me God was calling home. Through my brothers and sisters in the Church I was revived in faith, and was called in to a deeper and more obedient service of our Lord. People certainly aren't perfect but Jesus is and in his love for me he called me back to the church I call home. I am now 53 years old and I live a life committed to Jesus through my church. Praise God for giving us Church to be a part of the body of Christ, until he finally calls us home in the age to come.
Oh my, thank you so much for your honesty. I never left the church, but continued living so hypocritically. In the church! It took me 20 years to surrender to the Holy Spirit, allowing him to draw me to himself and clean up my life.. show me how much he loved me. I wouldn't go back to that cesspool for anything and God is replacing the years the locusts have eaten! I'm old enough to be your mom, but you teach me in so many ways! Thank you again for your honesty and transparency and your discipling of us. May God continue to use you in a mighty way 🙏🙏🙏
This is so much of my own story. In my time away the Lord led me to write a book about this very topic, how to discover the strength and beauty of the Church again. What I found is that whatever is wrong in our gatherings, is within me too. We do need each other, to sanctify one another, and learning to choose responses filled with love, mercy, and grace. I've recently returned to the very place I left, and to say it has been humbling is an understatement, but we don't grow without humility. Like you, I find myself hungering for the unity of Communion...our common union through Christ. Thank you for sharing your experience and wisdom so openly.
You know the Holy Spirit is speaking directly to you when this is the first video up in my feed, especially when I moments before had this specific conversation with my wife. Thank you for articulating what I could not in my conviction. Christ is calling me back to the church.
I appreciate you saying this. I understand why people are discouraged but separation keeps us seeking our own desires and not each others interests. I see many people with all knowledge but they stay weak in faith because they don’t exercise their trust muscles. 💪 It’s the one who is bloody in the ring not the critic who is respected. 🫡 Welcome back!
I have been praying for my husband and family now for years. He left church going a long while ago, his behaior changed for the worse to the point that 5 years ago I left, we had been married nearly 40 years. This video gives me hope that perhaps he and my children may some day return. Meanwhile I live in a different state and keep them in prayer daily. I sort of think people go 'luke warm' and then slowly get cold. It is easy to think you could do it on your own, that is the first lie of the enemy and our flesh loves to imagine a nice quiet coffee sipping Sunday morning, and so we listen. Before we know we are in misery and blaming God for it or other Christians, we need to point the finger at ourselves I think before we can come back.
Amen brother Chad! Lots of great points here. We all need the Church and the Church needs us. Christ died for the Church (Eph. 5:25) and is sanctifying her, so we must treat the body of Christ with a great amount of value.
I love how God brought me back to church after a period of not knowing what to do. But when I found one, I also found my future wife! Looking back I now realise just how good God's plans are, and He always has the best things for us if we do what He's designed us to do, especially being part of a church family, who love us no matter what we are going through. Thanks for this reminder, God bless you. X
As pastors, sometimes WE don't want to go to church. For various reasons, many pastors quit the ministry and church altogether. Humanity is a messy business, but it's God's business and He knows what He's doing. WE are the church, but it is VITAL for believers to assemble themselves together, worship together, lift each other up, for where two or more are gathered, HE IS in the midst! That's where people can go from being a baby Christian to a powerful, successful Christian. THANK YOU for sharing this! God bless!
Humanity is messy. My husband molested my daughter 22 years ago. He's been in prison because of it. The church we belonged to at the time visited him in jail but never came to see me or even my daughter. The pastor never even called. 20 years later, I told 2 elders in a different church about this and was asked for the case information, which I gave them freely. They said they'd get back to me, but never did. I left. I don't talk about my marriage anymore, obviously. So, what do I tell people? I don't go to church because I don't want to tell people and I don't want to lie. And I'll be treated with suspicion no matter what I do.
@@madjackie523 I don’t have the right words. I’m so sorry this happened to your precious daughter. I’m sorry this happened to you and your family. I’m sorry those churches did not show love and support to you during such a horrible time. Please find a good, Bible preaching church-do not give up. There is a church that needs you and that you need to attend. Ask the Lord for guidance. He is full of mercy and is quick to help when we sincerely call on Him. I don’t know the depths of your hurt, and I pray you find comfort in the Lord’s love and strength. May His peace be with you. ❤✝
TY for sharing Pastor Chad.I have gotten "angry" before at "The Church." Left for a short while as a teen and before turning 50. I felt completely lost and empty; sick;This song explains why: "I come expecting JESUS to meet me in this place!" Jesus is in me, and in my brothers and sisters. It is a community where I find strength and solace. I grow. I learn. I Worship corporately. I'm "Home." ❤
I shared this with friends. I know they will agree with every word you say. But as the wandering lost people that we are, all of us, they need nourishment too. And this is it.
Thanks for sharing this Chad. I'm from South Africa and we experience the same thing over here. People don't go to church anymore. What they don't realize is that they're removing themselves from the body of Christ....
I backslid about thirty years ago. I’ve struggled coming back for many years. I’ve tried and tried, but for some reason I just can’t do it. It’s a struggle. 😢😢
Hang in there and keep trying. The Lord rescues those who cry out to Him. Keep asking Him to find the right church, the church you need and that needs you. May the peace and grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you, now and always
We know what to do. It's plain in scripture. We just can't do it. We don't want to do it. This is why we need other believers. This is why we need grace.
I believe that leaving church is part of spiritual growth. There is much more to learn about life, God and the Christ outside church. We have to dissolve many of our prejudices, like being in or out, that is only in our minds, everything belongs to God and he is everywhere.
I have been much encouraged by sermons of pastors of a number of denominations and I have even learned some things from a variety of pastors of some of those denominations. I'd like to think I've never discouraged people from attending worship services. On the other hand, followers of Jesus don't "go to church". We ARE the church and there are few things more inclined to encourage me to stay home than someone telling me I "need" to hear someone preaching the word.
Thank you for this. I fully concur that 'we are the church' if by "we" you mean not just you. You are not the church. I am not the church, anymore than a thumb or ear are body. We are individual believers. So when people say "go to church" they mean (at least I mean) go to where the body has gathered. And there hear the Word preached, celebrate the Supper, sing hymns and psalms and spiritual songs. In other words, do what the believers in Corinth or Rome or Ephesus did: gather with fellow believers as the church, shepherded by pastors from their midst.
I recently decided to abstain from attending service in my current congregation, mostly over a lack of accountability and biblical grounding, how would you advice to go on from here and how to recover from the hurt I have undergone?
If reconciliation with your previous congregation in impossible (due, for instance, to false teaching there), then seek a congregation where the Word is taught rightly. I know that sounds simple, and I fully realize it is often complicated. But it is worth the effort. Regarding being hurt by congregations, I highly recommend this video by Rod Rosenbladt: ua-cam.com/video/tTAV3pjPpz0/v-deo.html
church is not a building or a denomination its a group of believers in his kingdom whom make up a tabernacle for God to dwell in the new heavens and earth
Brother Chad, loved this testimony, but may I ask this; when you mentioned the Lord's Supper, you seemed to have generalized what it means, and we do need this in Remembrance of Him, but your generalization seemed close to transubstantiation; is that what you meant?
See my video here, and note too the comments where I explain how this is *not* transubstantiation: ua-cam.com/video/KOJnhbnHRhs/v-deo.htmlfeature=shared
Chad, you're doing what God wants you to do. I left the church in the '80s because I wasn't allowed to speak in Sunday School. I was shut down with. We don't believe in that. No scripture reference just we don't believe in that. Every church I've went to has faith in their denominations. Not God. Luke 18:8 nobody's perfect! Yet I haven't found a church church that loves God more than themselves
I am amillennial in my eschatology. If you’re interested, one of the best and clearest presentations of this is the shorter commentary on Revelation by G. K. Beale.
That does not answer the real question, what Church has someone chosen by God to speak his words to me or anyone? Define chosen by God with some compelling details because humans just like having some power over others who by the way are just like them, so, who qualifies?
Is it strictly biblical advice to teach that it isnt enough to read the word but we must specifically hear it spoken aloud by someone else to us? Your explanations all sound like they refer to the psychological help in this, but is it necessary for more than being an emotional aid? It also sounds like speech act theory or Herder?-- which is fine, but too particular to a quirky liittle american philosopohy as its been adopted by one little sect of midwestern lutherans with their own peculiar set of vocabulary and norms etc...but how is your philosophy grounded in historic Church teaching w regard to the power of the Word and how it's to effect converted lives? The Augsburg Confession (Article V) affirms the necessity of the external Word and Sacraments but doesn’t limit it to oral proclamation by another person. God’s Word, whether read or heard, is the means by which the Spirit works faith. Why blur these lines and make it sound like a necessity / obligation? Because one man called Luther (who lived with my great great etc grandfather who may be spinning in his grave rn...) emphasized the oral proclamation as a pastoral preference? Now, as a recent convert, it looks to me like a whole sacramentology--and even soteriology has sprung up as a result of this tradition of emphasizing the help we have from pastors reading the word, or speaking the absolution, and so on. It looks de facto necessary for salvation that we literally hear these from our pastor even though it remains (in a way we strangely want to obscure with tradition) de jure not necessary. Which is it? Can I know Christ in his Word alone or is the delivery method not just preferred but essential?
And still you have learned nothing. You are still in love with your own mind and think it is superior to everything and everyone else. You were given some talent not rule over the universe. Perhaps you would have been better to study another spiritual course, maybe Jack Kornfield. When we are students we have more humility than when we are the experts. I see and hear nothing coming from your heart. P.S. Perhaps you could do an episode on Mark 8 14-21 Yeast of the Pharisees and Herod. I still don’t understand it.
One thing I have learned, thanks be to God, is to feel mercy and pity toward those who use online platforms to speak ill of others. May our merciful Lord Jesus bless you, heal you, and draw you into his forgiving love.
@@chadbird1517 God bless you for your humble, loving, forgiving ways. His light shines through you. I appreciate you and all you do to teach and build up His church. Thank you. Soli Deo Gloria!
I turned away for over ten years. I returned to faith a few years ago. Praise God for His mercy and grace. He pulled me out of a pit of misery that was my own making.
I haven't been a Christian very long, around 5 years, but about 2 years in I fell away from Church because I felt it wasn't living up to "my" expectations. Later I returned to the church I became a Christian in trying to help my dying father know Jesus, and discovered it was me God was calling home. Through my brothers and sisters in the Church I was revived in faith, and was called in to a deeper and more obedient service of our Lord. People certainly aren't perfect but Jesus is and in his love for me he called me back to the church I call home. I am now 53 years old and I live a life committed to Jesus through my church. Praise God for giving us Church to be a part of the body of Christ, until he finally calls us home in the age to come.
Oh my, thank you so much for your honesty. I never left the church, but continued living so hypocritically. In the church! It took me 20 years to surrender to the Holy Spirit, allowing him to draw me to himself and clean up my life.. show me how much he loved me. I wouldn't go back to that cesspool for anything and God is replacing the years the locusts have eaten! I'm old enough to be your mom, but you teach me in so many ways! Thank you again for your honesty and transparency and your discipling of us. May God continue to use you in a mighty way 🙏🙏🙏
This is so much of my own story. In my time away the Lord led me to write a book about this very topic, how to discover the strength and beauty of the Church again. What I found is that whatever is wrong in our gatherings, is within me too. We do need each other, to sanctify one another, and learning to choose responses filled with love, mercy, and grace. I've recently returned to the very place I left, and to say it has been humbling is an understatement, but we don't grow without humility. Like you, I find myself hungering for the unity of Communion...our common union through Christ. Thank you for sharing your experience and wisdom so openly.
What is the name of your book?
Being part of a church is important and many times I thought I could leave and then I get back…God has placed in me Love for the church
You know the Holy Spirit is speaking directly to you when this is the first video up in my feed, especially when I moments before had this specific conversation with my wife. Thank you for articulating what I could not in my conviction. Christ is calling me back to the church.
I appreciate you saying this. I understand why people are discouraged but separation keeps us seeking our own desires and not each others interests. I see many people with all knowledge but they stay weak in faith because they don’t exercise their trust muscles. 💪
It’s the one who is bloody in the ring not the critic who is respected. 🫡 Welcome back!
Thanks you brother Chad.
Chad, love you brother, have greatly been blessed by your work, I have a similair story, I keep looking up!
Thank you for this message.
I have been praying for my husband and family now for years. He left church going a long while ago, his behaior changed for the worse to the point that 5 years ago I left, we had been married nearly 40 years. This video gives me hope that perhaps he and my children may some day return. Meanwhile I live in a different state and keep them in prayer daily. I sort of think people go 'luke warm' and then slowly get cold. It is easy to think you could do it on your own, that is the first lie of the enemy and our flesh loves to imagine a nice quiet coffee sipping Sunday morning, and so we listen. Before we know we are in misery and blaming God for it or other Christians, we need to point the finger at ourselves I think before we can come back.
Amen brother Chad! Lots of great points here. We all need the Church and the Church needs us. Christ died for the Church (Eph. 5:25) and is sanctifying her, so we must treat the body of Christ with a great amount of value.
I love how God brought me back to church after a period of not knowing what to do. But when I found one, I also found my future wife! Looking back I now realise just how good God's plans are, and He always has the best things for us if we do what He's designed us to do, especially being part of a church family, who love us no matter what we are going through.
Thanks for this reminder, God bless you. X
As pastors, sometimes WE don't want to go to church. For various reasons, many pastors quit the ministry and church altogether. Humanity is a messy business, but it's God's business and He knows what He's doing. WE are the church, but it is VITAL for believers to assemble themselves together, worship together, lift each other up, for where two or more are gathered, HE IS in the midst! That's where people can go from being a baby Christian to a powerful, successful Christian. THANK YOU for sharing this! God bless!
Humanity is messy. My husband molested my daughter 22 years ago. He's been in prison because of it. The church we belonged to at the time visited him in jail but never came to see me or even my daughter. The pastor never even called.
20 years later, I told 2 elders in a different church about this and was asked for the case information, which I gave them freely. They said they'd get back to me, but never did. I left. I don't talk about my marriage anymore, obviously. So, what do I tell people? I don't go to church because I don't want to tell people and I don't want to lie. And I'll be treated with suspicion no matter what I do.
@@madjackie523 I don’t have the right words. I’m so sorry this happened to your precious daughter. I’m sorry this happened to you and your family. I’m sorry those churches did not show love and support to you during such a horrible time. Please find a good, Bible preaching church-do not give up. There is a church that needs you and that you need to attend. Ask the Lord for guidance. He is full of mercy and is quick to help when we sincerely call on Him. I don’t know the depths of your hurt, and I pray you find comfort in the Lord’s love and strength. May His peace be with you. ❤✝
@@kgebhardt1187 Thank you 😊 That is very encouraging to hear. May the Lord bless you 🙏
TY for sharing Pastor Chad.I have gotten "angry" before at "The Church." Left for a short while as a teen and before turning 50. I felt completely lost and empty; sick;This song explains why: "I come expecting JESUS to meet me in this place!" Jesus is in me, and in my brothers and sisters. It is a community where I find strength and solace. I grow. I learn. I Worship corporately. I'm "Home." ❤
Thank you, brother.
I shared this with friends. I know they will agree with every word you say. But as the wandering lost people that we are, all of us, they need nourishment too. And this is it.
That is a very encouraging, life-giving word, Chad. Thank you!
Thanks for sharing this Chad. I'm from South Africa and we experience the same thing over here. People don't go to church anymore. What they don't realize is that they're removing themselves from the body of Christ....
Thank you for encouragement to be where I should be and to share supper with other believers.
Amen and Amen❤🙏🏽!!!
So very well said! Amen.
Yes. Amen. Thank you. Love.
I backslid about thirty years ago. I’ve struggled coming back for many years. I’ve tried and tried, but for some reason I just can’t do it. It’s a struggle. 😢😢
Hang in there and keep trying. The Lord rescues those who cry out to Him. Keep asking Him to find the right church, the church you need and that needs you. May the peace and grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you, now and always
@@kgebhardt1187 thank you for your kind words of encouragement. I truly appreciate that.
Amen!!! Excellent.
I so appreciate your honest testimony.
We know what to do. It's plain in scripture. We just can't do it. We don't want to do it. This is why we need other believers. This is why we need grace.
I believe that leaving church is part of spiritual growth. There is much more to learn about life, God and the Christ outside church. We have to dissolve many of our prejudices, like being in or out, that is only in our minds, everything belongs to God and he is everywhere.
I have been much encouraged by sermons of pastors of a number of denominations and I have even learned some things from a variety of pastors of some of those denominations. I'd like to think I've never discouraged people from attending worship services.
On the other hand, followers of Jesus don't "go to church". We ARE the church and there are few things more inclined to encourage me to stay home than someone telling me I "need" to hear someone preaching the word.
Thank you for this. I fully concur that 'we are the church' if by "we" you mean not just you. You are not the church. I am not the church, anymore than a thumb or ear are body. We are individual believers. So when people say "go to church" they mean (at least I mean) go to where the body has gathered. And there hear the Word preached, celebrate the Supper, sing hymns and psalms and spiritual songs. In other words, do what the believers in Corinth or Rome or Ephesus did: gather with fellow believers as the church, shepherded by pastors from their midst.
The Church is not perfect by a long stretch, but God IS! He waits for us with a fatted calf! Return to Church and gather at the feast!
I recently decided to abstain from attending service in my current congregation, mostly over a lack of accountability and biblical grounding, how would you advice to go on from here and how to recover from the hurt I have undergone?
If reconciliation with your previous congregation in impossible (due, for instance, to false teaching there), then seek a congregation where the Word is taught rightly. I know that sounds simple, and I fully realize it is often complicated. But it is worth the effort. Regarding being hurt by congregations, I highly recommend this video by Rod Rosenbladt: ua-cam.com/video/tTAV3pjPpz0/v-deo.html
@@chadbird1517 thank you for coming back on my questions brother Chad.
church is not a building or a denomination its a group of believers in his kingdom whom make up a tabernacle for God to dwell in the new heavens and earth
Brother Chad, loved this testimony, but may I ask this; when you mentioned the Lord's Supper, you seemed to have generalized what it means, and we do need this in Remembrance of Him, but your generalization seemed close to transubstantiation; is that what you meant?
See my video here, and note too the comments where I explain how this is *not* transubstantiation: ua-cam.com/video/KOJnhbnHRhs/v-deo.htmlfeature=shared
Chad, you're doing what God wants you to do. I left the church in the '80s because I wasn't allowed to speak in Sunday School. I was shut down with. We don't believe in that. No scripture reference just we don't believe in that. Every church I've went to has faith in their denominations. Not God. Luke 18:8 nobody's perfect! Yet I haven't found a church church that loves God more than themselves
❤❤❤
❤️
I'd like to hear your thoughts on the Rapture or pre mil, mid mil or post mil I've been getting a lot of mixed views.
I am amillennial in my eschatology. If you’re interested, one of the best and clearest presentations of this is the shorter commentary on Revelation by G. K. Beale.
❤❤❤🙌🙌🙌
You have to find a real church (that fits the description in this video), though. Those are few and far between these days.
Yes, agreed, but definitely worth the search.
@@chadbird1517 Definitely!
That does not answer the real question, what Church has someone chosen by God to speak his words to me or anyone? Define chosen by God with some compelling details because humans just like having some power over others who by the way are just like them, so, who qualifies?
Is it strictly biblical advice to teach that it isnt enough to read the word but we must specifically hear it spoken aloud by someone else to us? Your explanations all sound like they refer to the psychological help in this, but is it necessary for more than being an emotional aid? It also sounds like speech act theory or Herder?-- which is fine, but too particular to a quirky liittle american philosopohy as its been adopted by one little sect of midwestern lutherans with their own peculiar set of vocabulary and norms etc...but how is your philosophy grounded in historic Church teaching w regard to the power of the Word and how it's to effect converted lives?
The Augsburg Confession (Article V) affirms the necessity of the external Word and Sacraments but doesn’t limit it to oral proclamation by another person. God’s Word, whether read or heard, is the means by which the Spirit works faith. Why blur these lines and make it sound like a necessity / obligation? Because one man called Luther (who lived with my great great etc grandfather who may be spinning in his grave rn...) emphasized the oral proclamation as a pastoral preference? Now, as a recent convert, it looks to me like a whole sacramentology--and even soteriology has sprung up as a result of this tradition of emphasizing the help we have from pastors reading the word, or speaking the absolution, and so on. It looks de facto necessary for salvation that we literally hear these from our pastor even though it remains (in a way we strangely want to obscure with tradition) de jure not necessary. Which is it? Can I know Christ in his Word alone or is the delivery method not just preferred but essential?
And still you have learned nothing. You are still in love with your own mind and think it is superior to everything and everyone else. You were given some talent not rule over the universe. Perhaps you would have been better to study another spiritual course, maybe Jack Kornfield. When we are students we have more humility than when we are the experts. I see and hear nothing coming from your heart.
P.S. Perhaps you could do an episode on Mark 8 14-21 Yeast of the Pharisees and Herod. I still don’t understand it.
One thing I have learned, thanks be to God, is to feel mercy and pity toward those who use online platforms to speak ill of others. May our merciful Lord Jesus bless you, heal you, and draw you into his forgiving love.
@@chadbird1517 God bless you for your humble, loving, forgiving ways. His light shines through you. I appreciate you and all you do to teach and build up His church. Thank you. Soli Deo Gloria!
Thank you Chad.
I really needed this.
Thank you and God richly bless you, @birdchadlouis 😇