"Fine Tuning Your Belief System"

     "Natural" growth is easy, because it occurs without conscious effort.  But the conscious adjustment of ones own belief system, although critically necessary, is not for the "faint of heart".

      Your belief system has been built piece by piece since childhood, and is solid.  Although there may be many "blocks" in your belief  "structure" that are erroneous, they are still part of it's solid conglomerate.

     As you really mature, you must periodically go back and review some of your  earlier belief system blocks  to determine if they still line up with what you now know and understand.  Too often many of the blocks to our belief system structure have no Biblical basis, they're just merely "he saids" or "she saids", past down over the years.   So, much of what is believed is either not in the Bible at all, misunderstood, or completely taken out of context.  Since most people really don't study Bible scripture... they have no idea... and are easily victim to ignorance and/or manipulation.

     We see in America today, Christians desperately trying to get a "breakthrough" (sickness, addiction, lost loved one, financial trouble, etc.,.) and in their dire emotional state, are coerced into believing that if they give the minister money... their need will be remedied.   If they had only  studied the Bible for themselves, they would have known better.

     We must look at where we are now and what we believe, and compare it to what Jesus taught (see Beatitudes, for example).  It is easy to recognize that we've deviated from his teachings.   Start where you are in your belief system, and work your way all the way back to Jesus... and you will find benchmarks of tremendous deviations.... in your own life, as well as in the Christian church.

      To tinker with your belief system structure is to open the heart to probe and operate while it is functioning.  When you open up the structure of your beliefs, and begin tinkering and feeling around that pumping heart....  examining the heart of your belief system structure, you'll begin to see things that don't make sense.... things that shouldn't be there.  But as you try to remove it, you find that it's attached to something else... something vital.  Still, you can't allow it to stay...  So you must delicately remove it from that which is vital, with  skill that you've never been taught.

     I have correlated this process to surgery... as it is a critical and delicate operation.  It is imperative that you don't damage what is necessary, but it is as imperative that you remove that which shouldn't be there.  Your peers will not understand you.  They may even begin to think you've "lost it".  But, after the surgery, they will no longer be your peers.

Amen.