ChristianSpeak: Puzzling Things That Christians Say, Pray, and Sing, Part Five

In this week’s post, we will need to temporarily leave our current topic of Thoughts on the Last Days and return to the topic of ChristianSpeak: Puzzling Things That Christians Say, Pray, and Sing.

It just never seems to end.

Teaching abounds in the Western church about following the dream that God has for your life.

Here are a couple of quotes from the website of a well-known preacher:

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ChristianSpeak: Puzzling Things That Christians Say, Pray, and Sing, Part Four

When the Christian lady prayed for the young woman and then said, “Keep saying, ‘I am healed,’” it didn’t surprise me. I had heard this positive confession teaching for a very long time. However, in my own little snarky self, I said, “Perhaps she should rattle some snake bones, too.”

ChristianSpeak: Puzzling Things That Christians Say, Pray, and Sing, Part Three

One of the puzzling things Christians have been saying for the last fifteen years or so is, “God has a purpose for your life.”

However, that doesn’t sound puzzling, does it?

But it is.

It’s puzzling because there’s some truth running around in that sentence, but there’s a lot of cranial smoke and theological fog swirling around it.

ChristianSpeak: Puzzling Things That Christians Say, Pray, and Sing, Part Two

Why do Christians say things that are so puzzling? They learn them from others without questioning, without doing due diligence to discover if what a teacher or leader is saying has any basis in Scripture.

For instance, it seems that many Christians have gone into the “I declare” zone. Here are a couple of random, typical examples from a blog site:

ChristianSpeak: Puzzling Things That Christians Say, Pray, and Sing, Part One (5 parts)

I cannot tell you with any accuracy where I picked up some of the strange things that were inserted into my Christian vocabulary as I grew up in the church. These words, thankfully, were not implanted into my belief system because, truth be told and to my shame, I didn’t really think about them and therefore they didn’t take root. They just became inattentive ChristianSpeak. I didn’t pause to consider whether some of the things I prayed and said were actually biblically true. However, as I have (hopefully) matured a bit over the years, I look back on some of these statements, sayings, and proclamations and wonder, “Where on earth (or anywhere else) did they come from?”