"The Main Things, are the Plain Things, and the Plain Things are the Main Things" - John Wimber
This is one of my ponderings and meditations of scripture and Christian living written out. I used to post these on my Facebook, but I decided to just post this one to my website.
What does it really require to live a "Christian Life"? I spent decades trying it the way I was told and taught, and I was miserable and ultimately very disappointed. So many failures and disappointments later, I had to question if what I had been taught were legitimate.
This is not an extensive study, you will not find any bible verse chapters or numbers to refer to, if you want to check any of them, Google Search is very capable of looking them up based on what I wrote when I refer to a bible verse or scripture and show you them on Bible Gateway.
I am not a pastor, I will not ask you to make a donation. I am not an evangelist, you will not find me taking up an offering as a conference. I tried YouTube videos a few times, I got so few views, they were probably people who visited and left, thinking it was a music video.
I am not a teacher in a church, I do not pretend to have all the answers.
I am an artist, I am a musician, I am a filmmaker, I spend ten years at a bible university studying taking night classes while I worked a full time job. I took a couple of classes at a famous seminary.
I was trained under to overseeing mentor pastors. I was trained under two prophetic people in the areas of ministry.
I "sat under", John Wimber the founder of the Vineyard Church movement for many years. I was taught under many key leaders of the original Vineyard in Anaheim an also at two different bible universities where some of them proctored as professors.
All that said, my interests are in creative arts. I am an artist at heart. I went to art school and later to film school.
All this said, keep these in mind if you continue reading, because in all honesty, I'm just writing these things out as I process them and ponder them. As a creative person, writing things out helps me be more precise and clear about what I am thinking about, pondering and trying to resolve.
Also as an creative person, I am very verbose. Being creative is all about being able to convey a message in extreme detail in a tiny space like a picture, a song, a short film. Unfortunately, when it comes to writing, that's just isn't possible, so I tend to be very verbose, long winded, wordy.
Think of it similar to a phone app. You open your phone, click a little picture, and suddenly you can do all kinds of amazing things that even your laptop computer can't do. But if you were to look at the written code that makes the app work, the information the app has to retrieve from a massive computer network to process, you'd see volumes and volumes of writing.
That said... here begins this pondering.
I'm in a pondering moment. I'll just summarize without preaching, or teaching.
1. It is impossible to please God, without Faith. (Bible)
2. Faith comes by hearing the Word of God. (Bible)
3. The righteous live by Faith (Bible)
So my pondering is after a long many years attempting to follow God, based of things I was told by pastors, their belief's about how one does that, and the verses they use to support their view, and in every church I've even associated with, the wrath one encounters by that pastors followers if you question their positions with other scriptures, or in other words, most pastors are held as being divine advocates called by God and so they can't be challenged.
My ponderings are usually my final assessments after many years of studying, research, bible university studies, observations, and life experiences.
So in my current pondering, I've fully assessed all the things I was raised to believe in how to live for God, and I've concluded that a large percentage of the teachings I put in to practice were taught to me in error and scriptures that simply were not meant to be assigned to everyone, but were specific to one time, place, event, and person or people.
It's good to be able to in hindsight see, have an accurate take on it here in the present, but I wasted tons of time, opportunities, made poor life decisions and was never happy or at peace the whole time I was in the bondage of self-doubt and fighting what I thought I was understanding in the bible with what people in religious vocations had taught me. In other words, I was conflicted, and I had many friends growing up who reinforced most of those errors.
My final conclusion start with something I heard Pastor, John Wimber once say in the mid-90's. He said, "The main things, are the plain things, and the plain things are the main things".
That stuck in my head from the second he said it, and it's taken decades to realize what he was saying.
In essence he was saying, "Don't sweat the small stuff" and "The things God wanted to make clear and are most important to obeying God, are very clearly written, and repeated more than one time in other books of the bible, by it's other authors.
So how am I supposed to live as someone who has asked Jesus Christ into my heart, repented of my sins, etc.
Ask many of those who are in the vocation of religion, (aka they chose to work as Pastors, Choir Directors, Missionaries, Counselors, etc) and you'll get a some very near impossible guidance to follow and a whole lot of scripture that seems to make since and support each other when mumbo jumbo'd together. But they don't follow the concept that John Wimber presented which actually makes more sense if you take the bible as a whole, it's stories as a whole, verses that Jesus himself quoted and felt were important, the "The Main Things are the plain things, and the Plain Things, are the main things" idea.
So I've winnowed decades of contemplations and experiences, study of scripture into what God actually said.
1. Faith is required.
2. Faith comes from hearing the word (bible/scripture taught) correctly.
3. It's not possible to please God (our goal) without Faith.
4. In faith, I can do anything. (Jesus repeatedly told those he healed, "You're faith has healed you". Yes, it was their faith in Jesus as the messiah and Christ, but it was still "your faith".
5. The "righteous" shall "Live by faith".
Number 5 is the final conclusion. As a follower of Christ, we don't stop having free-will. I can make any decision or choice I want to. I can hurt someone, I can hurt myself, I can steal, I can engage an any sexual act I want to.
In my own experience, I sometimes consciously choose to do what I know is displeasing to God. I have to ultimately pay whatever penalty is required for doing those things. If I steal, I'm probably going to get caught and go to jail. If I kill someone, I'm going to jail and I might even be put to death.
Only in extremely rare situations have I observed God stepping into a situation when I was in rebellion, angry, depressed, or whatever brought me to that place, in which God had someone or something intervene.
We have free-will. I can believe in Faith, that God is God and his son Jesus actually existed and died for my sin, and by repenting of my sin, and believing in Jesus as the Son of God and savior, or I can not, if I choose to.
If I am forgiven of my sins through Jesus Christ, i'm forgiven. I may still live with consequences here on earth, but in God's eye's my slate in that matter is clean.
The apostle Paul taught about being Free in Christ, not being heavy burned with tons of rules, religious obligations, legalism, which is what pastors, Sunday School teachers, etc. dumped on me. I lived in bondage by religion, more bondage than before the time I had decided to put my faith in Jesus.
Jesus said, "I've come to set the captives free". Not, "I've come to put a bunch of new rules on you that you'll never be able to do.
The freer I've become in following Jesus, the happier I've become in my life and more content I am during times of life that suck.
I trust God more, as my faith grows, and my religiosity decreases. I wouldn't have survived the last twenty years without Faith in God.
What is faith, in part it is hope. Without hope, I would of not made it to today. Without faith I would not be here writing this.
So the bottom line is, God's will for us, plan for us, answer for us, is to live our life in Faith. We were made aware of what sin is before we decided to follow Jesus. We know sin doesn't make us happy, it does the opposite.
There is a verse in the bible that say's, "Without a vision the people perish". That's been heavy on my mind for several years as I've gone through a time in my life, my personal vision is cloudy, even though I have things I am obligated to do and finish before I could move forward anyway.
A vision, at least a correct vision, depends on faith. The ability to see something ahead that gives us hope. Something that encourages us to have faith that we will live to experience and see come to pass.
So, when the bible says, "It's impossible to please God without Faith", it really means it. Faith is the core foundation of our lives as followers of Christ. Its what keeps us hoping, moving, surviving, when everything else has failed.
I had heard it taught, but I didn't understand Faith as a concept. Pastors and churches, placed it as a tiny bullet-point among a massive list of rule, obligations, restrictions, pulled from all over the bible, the Jesus all ready set me free from when he died on the cross.
This is just a pondering written out. Part of my processing as I meditate and reflect of Scriptures, verse that come to mind, circumstances of life, etc.
[image credit: I created the amazing image used in this pondering, with my favorite image generator: Deepai.org via an instructional prompt I wrote. I am not required to disclose this, for all commercial usage purposes I retain the licensing. For not commercial usage, please give attribution credit to RDG 2025 RGAP Creative and DeepAi.org]