Stop blaming your former pastor …

I truly wish the Hebrew Roots adherents and those who end up “leaving Jesus” to hang with mean-spirited, Jesus-bashing Jewish counter-missionaries, would quit insisting that they came out their churches “because they were LIED to.” Except in some cases, it is simply not true that every pastor on the planet is a lying ogre who purposely “kept you from knowing about Torah!”

If you were honest with yourself, it's more like that it was YOU kept yourself from knowing about Torah, because you “went to church” on Sundays to warm the pews, open the Bible to whatever passage the pastor told you to, and then you went home. For many (if not most) “church” is and was just a social event. They didn’t bother to actually READ and STUDY the Bible, where they could and would have discovered the need for Torah themselves.

Every Bible has the Torah - those first five Books of Moses that contain all the "thus saith the Lord" verses, which perfectly outline that ALL who accept the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are to do exactly as HIS people do....

So, if they had taken the time to read the Bible from the beginning, they could have started bugging their pastors about those "thus saith the Lord" verses and asking intelligent questions, such as, "since we're all one in Christ, aren't we all accountable for obeying some of those original commands that seem to pertain to everybody?" Or, "Since the Seventh Day Sabbath is a SIGN between God and his people, shouldn't we be keeping it, too? After all, we're His people, too, right?" (See Exodus 31:16-17; Ezekiel 20:11-12.)

Things might have turned out differently, if they had asked those questions of their pastors ... those men and women who had learned the “New Testament-only, grace-only” stuff in their seminaries where they typically had to sign a document before graduation that commanded them to never veer from the dogma of their respective denominations…. At least THAT could have opened a dialogue that caused YOU to learn and grow, and perhaps influence others.

But no – it seems many prefer to sit on their haunches now, to lament about the past and place all the blame their former pastors … people who simply didn’t KNOW that God’s people are to be Torah observant. How can you blame someone for not teaching something they don’t know? Furthermore, if coming into Torah suddenly made you THAT smart and "all-knowing," then you surely know that it's not nice to gossip and bad-mouth those who helped you grow during your spiritual "formative" years...

While there certainly ARE some weirdos and crooked “mega-pastors” and other hooligans in Christianity (what man-made religion DOESN’T have them?) whose only goal is to use the Word of God as a way to line their pockets, most pastors are sincere in their faith – a faith that led most of us “to Christ” at some point. THAT is what we need to concentrate on. NOT on what the pastors DIDN’T do.

We need to remember that “not knowing” something doesn't make pastors "bad" people. It just makes them "lost" people..

Here is the real crux of my little rant: It is lashon hara to go around insisting you were lied to in church and that your pastor deliberately led you astray! Honestly, if you HAVE to blame someone, blame yourself, chalk it up as "lesson learned," and move on.