August 17, 2025

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On January 1, 1975, I was appointed to the office of Student Pastor of North Birdwell Lane United Methodist Church in Big Spring, Texas. I was 19 years old. There have been many ups and downs, twists and turns in ministry over the last 50 years. I will not bore you with my personal roller coaster ride through the carnival show of liberal mainline churchianity. But one thing may be interesting. I nearly died once. On September 10, 2000, on Penobscot Bay in Maine, I had a near death/out of body experience that completely changed my life. I lost my left leg above the knee in a boating accident. The ladder on the swim deck broke, dumping me into the propeller. I’ll spare you the details, but I nearly bled to death! Knowing that I was dying, I said goodbye to those in the boat with me, including my older son who was working heroically to stop the bleeding. I told him that I loved him and to give that message to the rest of our family. Then I laid back on the transom seat of the boat and we began to pray, “Our Father …”. At that moment I had a terrible fear that the Father would not receive me. But suddenly the sky went brilliantly white. Then, I was no longer in my body. I was up there, about 65 feet in the air. But I was not in the air but in another kind of place. I looked around to see bright stars against the darkness of empty space.

I’m alive today because, when I went up there, between heaven and earth, where I saw both the portal of heaven and the struggle below of those in the boat trying to save me, God spoke to me. In that beautifully serene and painless place, free of my body, he gave me a choice: whether to go on to be with him in heaven or stay here below. I had a series of visions, as the Lord helped me with the decision. The part of that dialogue relevant for us today is that God told me up there that my ministry down here was “not yet finished.”

I spent a month in Mass General Hospital in Boston, had nine surgeries, and fought a massive infection. Recovering from that accident gave me a chance to understand what I experienced up there. From Scripture I learned about body/soul dualism, and that I was in the second heaven when God spoke to me and gave me those visions.

But I also needed to solve a nagging question that had bothered me for a long time. It was the question that frightened me in the boat. The question was this, “Is my faith the faith found in Scripture?” As if starting seminary again, I spent most of every day for a year studying the Biblical concepts of grace, faith, justification, and works. That continued through 6 years of teaching religion and philosophy at the local junior college back in my hometown of Snyder, and then two years as I read for orders in the Anglican Church. Toward the end of this healing pilgrimage through Scripture and prayer, I looked at every verse about “eternal life.” There are 118 of them. If eternal life is our goal, it seemed logical to me to look at what the Bible says about it. What are the causes, conditions, the actions, the “how to” of inheriting eternal life?

There is a symmetry and poetry in God’s purpose. What I found, alone in my condo in Bangor, Maine, 25 years ago, with Greek texts, lexicons, concordances, and other study guides laid out all around on my desk, put me on the spiritual path that led eventually to LifeSpring Church in Tampa, Florida, where today, on August 17, 2025, by the grace of God, I am being ordained a bishop in the Anglican Church. The Lord led me from Big Spring to LifeSpring. Jesus told the Woman at the Well, John 4:14, “Whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

I’d like to share with you the core truth of Scripture that I’ve learned in my second life of the last 25 years because it is the primary reason that God has called me to be a bishop in his Church. We have a crisis of leadership in the churches today. That crisis is the preaching of man-made doctrines for money. Most churches promote a people-pleasing religion that does not fully explain to otherwise sincere and God-fearing souls what the Lord expects of us for salvation. It avoids discussion of sin, so the Holy Spirit has little opportunity to convict us of it. It avoids the sanctifying way of the cross like it was the plague. It does not sufficiently project the goal of moral perfection in love. Jesus said, John 13:35, “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples – that you love one another.” Yet there are thousands of man-made divisions among his children that break the Father’s heart.

The reason for these divisions is that true doctrine is not taught in the seminaries. The seminaries were built by the established denominations who send them students. The denominations want non-threatening, conformist, weak, compromising, worker bee pastors and priests to maintain the ecclesiastical institutions, treating congregations as cash cows. So, bishops and professors have an unholy agreement to avoid producing prophetic clergy, lest they offend someone! If anyone is offended, they might not come to church, right? If they do not come to church, they will not give money.

But the situation is worse than that. It is not that the seminaries fail to teach their denominational doctrines well. There are many good teachers in the seminaries. The problem is that the doctrines themselves are wrong! Nearly all the wrong doctrines run in the vein of antinomianism.

“Antinomian” comes from the Greek word α-νομία. It is a compound word that means “without law” or “lawless.” Antinomianism means to believe, suggest, imply, argue, preach, or teach that we do not have to obey God’s law to be saved. It is a heresy. Antinomianism has been a problem from the beginning, but the Church world today reeks of it. Describing the end of the world, Jesus said, Matthew 24:12, “Because lawlessness increases, the love of many will grow cold.” We see that today with our own eyes. Western society is undermined by the lack of a moral consensus. Churches fail because they do not uphold God’s laws; God does not and will not bless sinful churches or clergy. Our personal spiritual formation is stunted and we can fall away when we do not fully embrace the law of God and of his Christ.

The antinomian doctrines are sacerdotalism, faith alone, double personal predestination, once saved always saved, and universalism. Yes, this is how I intend to start my episcopal ministry – by “throwing down.” We have no better example in life or ministry than the Lord Jesus. He said, Luke 12:49-51, our text today, “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze! … Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!”

There are good divisions and bad divisions. The bad antinomian divisions arise from a misunderstanding of the writings of the Apostle Paul. Peter wrote, 2 Peter 3:16-17, “There are some things in [Paul’s letters] that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures. You, therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability.” Notice the word “lawless” in this passage. That is our heretical friend α-νομία. There is no sin called “legalism” in the Bible. But lawlessness is condemned 27 times in the New Testament. Peter indicates that lawlessness (α-νομία, antinomianism) causes us to lose our spiritual “stability” and leads to “destruction.”

What Peter wrote a long time ago is true today. We are destabilized by sin, guilt, fear, and shame because we do not understand the role of law in our salvation. I can say “we” because that included me until I nearly died that day. Our witness is destroyed because we violate God’s law – everybody sees it. So, let us review the true way of salvation put forth by Paul in his letter to the Romans; it is a unifying message. In Romans Paul employs a kind of logic called dialectic. It is a three-step process of finding the truth: someone posits a thesis, which is opposed by a counter-thesis; this creates a problem or crisis that must be resolved in the synthesis of a new understanding. Let’s see how this logic works out in Romans. We will follow the connecting concept of “law,” which runs through all three steps of the argument.

Step one, Romans 2:13b says, "It is the doers of the law who will be justified.”

The first time I saw that, I nearly fell out of my chair. Now, it was not the first time I read it, of course, but it was the first time I saw what it said. I got up from my desk and went over to the window, stunned. After a few minutes, it occurred to me that I had to start all over, that maybe I didn’t understand God and had been misrepresenting him.

The key word in that passage is “justified.” If anyone has been through catechism, attended seminary, or engaged in any kind of serious theological discussion, you know how important “justification” is to our understanding of salvation.

And there it is, big as the world, “Doers of the law will be justified.”

I started reading Romans again from the beginning. But this time I was looking to see how “doers of the law” fit the rest of the book. As I read things began to fall together. I got to the verses at 2:6-11, which are in the immediate context, “[God] will render to each one according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury. There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek. For God shows no partiality.” Notice the reference to eternal life? Eternal life and justified bear equal weight in a discussion like this.

But there is a counter point, step two. It is not law vs. grace or works vs. faith. Those are not Biblical dichotomies. They belong to the scandalous Protestant vs. Catholic split of the 16th Century. In Scripture, according to the logic of Paul, the counter point to obeying the law is sin.

Step two is found, then, in 7:14-24. Paul wrote, “For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. So, I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

Then in 8:1-4, 13-14, and 16-17, representing step three, we have the synthesis that solves the problem "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh (Christmas) and for sin (Holy Week and Easter), he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit (Pentecost) … For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. Whoever is led by the Spirit of God is the child of God … The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him." I inserted the holy days that correspond to each saving act of God that delivers us from sin.

To extend the logic, Paul tells us in 13:8-10 the relationship between law and love, "Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, 'You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,' and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law." The logic of Paul leads us to the ethic of loving one another.

Finally, on this occasion, let us consider the Lord’s loving provision for the Church, expressed in Ephesians 4:11-16, “He gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God … so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine ... Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.”

I hope this message has been helpful. Please, pray for me?

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