Raised on lies

My daughter told me last night that the only thing she sees when she opens a Bible is lies. She doesn’t think the Bible is filled with lies but to her the Bible represents everything she grew up being told and believing and because my faith, my belief, the way I see Scripture has changed that has taken all those lessons she learned as a child and made lies of them.

When she said that it sent waves of shock through me but after the surprise of what she said and how she said it wore off I realized something…all those years I spent going to ‘church’ services, all those years I was raised as a ‘Christian’, all the things I was told and taught to believe…when I started seeing the truths in Scripture I came face to face with the exact thing she was describing last night.

I remember those early days of seeing Scripture as a monergist. When I knew what I was seeing. I would come across a verse that said one thing and I had to erase everything I believed because I’d been taught wrong.

I had a very hard time with the verses about the elect, about the Lord choosing those he wishes and not saving the others. Not for myself but for my children. I’d always raised them to believe in Jesus, that they had to not only believe but also keep His commandments. Admitting, even to myself, that nothing I said or did was going to make a difference in their salvation was a very hard step to take. Letting go of the belief that if I could just ‘lead them to Christ’ and instill a deep enough belief in them that they would be saved was a step I struggled to take.

I stumbled everytime I came to a verse that said all who believe, or if you confess and believe, or any of the other verses that said similar things. I struggled because my mothers mind didn’t want to let go of the belief that I could teach my children to believe so that they would be saved.

There were other things I struggled through too, where what I’d been taught all my life came up against what I was reading and seeing in Scripture, but none of those things were as hard to change my belief on as the belief that if I just taught my children right, raised them right, that they would be saved.

But with every  belief I had challenged I began to lose a little more of my confidence in the ‘Christian’ upbringing I’d had, I lost more and more faith in everything I thought I knew. My foundation was shaken. Lies…I had been fed lies. Lies at the hands of those entrusted with the spiritual well-being of so many people. Lies at the hands of those that raised me to be a ‘Christian.’ Lies at the hands of those that assured me my salvation was set.

My daughter was right. We were fed a pack of lies and I swallowed a good number of them. Not only did I swallow them but I turned around and fed them back to my children. Time after time. Day after day. And as I put each spoonful of lies into their young souls, souls that were soaking up everything I taught them, I firmly believed what I was teaching them because it was what I had been taught. And all the preachers and all the Bible study and Sunday school teachers couldn’t be wrong. Nor could all those ‘Christian’ books. I fed those lies to my children, piece by piece, bite by bite, teaching them to believe so they’d grow up to believe.

And I did it all because I loved them and I was worried about their souls.

Now here I am…so many years after becoming a mother for the first time…and discovering I raised my children on lies. There were things I told them over the years, taught them when they were young, that truly were lies. Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny….outright lies. Lies I corrected. But the lies of being a ‘Christian’… I don’t yet know that all those lies have been corrected in me.

And even now, knowing what I do, believing as I do, there are still things I hesitate to tell my children. Verses I don’t want to introduce them to. Because some of those beliefs they hold, some of the things taught to most ‘Christians’, are so much easier to swallow than the real truths are.

When my daughter told me everything she’d ever been taught to believe was a lie it made me pause, made me stop and think, made me wonder. It pushed me out of my comfort zone, it challenged me. And it made me think, and think, and think.

There was nothing I could have done to stop the change in the way I believed. I didn’t choose to believe the way I do, didn’t choose to see things the way I do. But back when I first started understanding what I was seeing I tried to share that with my daughter. I tried to bring her on the journey with me. Because she was my daughter, because she was my sidekick. Because what I did she did with very few exceptions. And because I decided I didn’t want to continue going through life not showing my children the depth of my faith.

So I showing them.

And in doing so I pushed my daughter further from the Lord than she had ever been. All because I was trying to correct the lies. To show her the truths that I hadn’t shown her before. But it wasn’t until she told me that what she’d been raised on was all a bunch of lies that I realized that I too had been raised on lies.