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TOXIC FAITHTOXIC FAITHTOXIC FAITHTOXIC FAITH
󰁂󰁹 󰁒󰁥󰁭󰁹 󰁄󰁩󰁥󰁤󰁥󰁲󰁩󰁣󰁨 󰁃󰁥󰁤󰁡󰁲󰁢󰁲󰁯󰁯󰁫 󰁃󰁨󰁵󰁲󰁣󰁨
 
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How to Escape a Toxic Faith
40 Days of Grace in Galatians
by Remy Diederich copyright 2004 – Cedarbrook Church
 This document contains the following titles: 1.
 
An Overview of Toxic Faith 2.
 
Why We Embrace Toxic Faith (Chapter 1) 3.
 
The Anatomy of a Toxic Church (Chapter 2) 4.
 
Dismantling Toxic Thinking (Chapter 3) 5.
 
Breaking Free (Chapter 5) 6.
 
What do we do with Eva Eber? (The Nature of True Faith) – (Chapter 6) This morning, I’m starting a six week series called, “How to Escape a Toxic Faith”. To start off, I want to tell you how I was able to escape a toxic faith. In 1982 I was part of a church of about 2000 people in downtown Minneapolis. Then one of the leaders of this church started another church in south Minneapolis. So I joined that new work. We started with 20 people and slowly grew to about 75 people over seven years. This little church is where I got my start pastoring. I worked my way into a part-time position there, teaching, preaching, leading small groups and leading worship. I don’t know how it happened, but that church slowly and subtly, became toxic. What I mean by “toxic” is that – instead of emphasizing how God accepted me because of what
 Jesus had done
 
the emphasis was more on what I should do to become acceptable to God. After a series of very negative events, I decided to resign. After investing my life there for seven years, I was out the door and churchless. I tell you this because it had an interesting and disturbing effect on me. And this is how I knew that my faith had become toxic. For the next four or five years, I went into a spiritual funk where I couldn’t pray or read my Bible or go to church. I tried. I tried really hard. I just couldn’t do it. It was all very confusing to me. The Bible had always been so alive to me, but suddenly it was like reading a phone book. Dry as toast. I’d try to pray and …nothing. My mind was blank. I’d go to church, and everything that was said or sung was at best shallow and at worst, offensive. I decided I couldn’t go to church until that feeling changed. The problem was, it didn’t change. I‘d go to church about every six months just to see if it got any better, but it didn’t. It really grieved me because I loved God, I loved the church, I loved the Bible. And it scared me because I thought my condition might be permanent. I thought I might be the equivalent of church road kill, left to die from my bad church experience. I asked God a thousand times what was wrong. And I apologized a thousand times for not being able to do these things. Then, out of my frustration, I asked God what I was missing. I said, “
God, is there something  you want me to see through all of this?”
 And there was. I felt like God was telling me to relax and not worry. He wasn’t concerned about me my condition. In fact, I felt like God was teaching me a powerful lesson:
 
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 Remy, it’s not church or prayer or Bible reading that makes you acceptable to Me. I love you unconditionally and accept you in spite of what you do.
This might seem simple to you, but it was a big deal to me. I’m very task oriented by nature and my early years of faith were defined by my performing for God. You see, God was showing me that my faith was toxic. And I slowly learned how to escape a toxic faith. Well, over the next six weeks, I want to help YOU escape a toxic faith too. You may not think you have a problem with toxic faith, but I believe it’s common to every human being. As humans, we naturally drift to a performance based religion and have to keep being pulled away from it. So listen carefully to see if your faith is toxic. To do this, we are going to study the book of Galatians. And for those of you that want to go deeper than what I have to say on Sunday, I’m going to start sending out a daily email devotional on Galatians every morning, and then we are going to start a class on Sept. 27 – that’s a Monday night, for people that want to study the book in depth. If you want the daily email, you can sign up for it on the feedback form. So let’s get into it.
The Setting of Toxic Faith: The Church
First, let’s look at the setting of Toxic Faith. Where are we going to find toxic faith? I’d like to say that you only find toxic faith outside of church – like in other religions or cults. But, unfortunately, the purveyors of toxic faith are not only in other religions and cults but also in our biggest and most successful Bible believing churches. I don’t think it’s intentional or malicious, at least most of the time. I just think we don’t understand grace very well so we naturally encourage people to perform better if they want to please God. That’s what happened in the church of Galatia. Let me tell you what happened. The apostle Paul went on a tour of towns throughout the region of Galatia – Turkey. Wherever he went he would preach the message of how Jesus Christ had died for their sins and was resurrected from the grave. The book of Romans gives us an idea of the simple message that Paul preached…
 If you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him  from the dead, you will be saved…
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For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile--the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him,
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 for, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved."
Paul’s message was very popular among the Galatians. Part of the popularity of Paul’s message is mentioned here. He said that there was no difference between Jews and Gentiles – that is, non-Jews. That was good news to the Gentiles because they had always been told that the Jews told them that they were second class citizens to God. But Paul told the Gentiles that God had made a way for them through faith in Jesus. So Gentiles started responding to Paul’s message and became followers of Jesus. Now, it’s important to understand the dynamics of what was going on between the Jews and the Gentiles in those days. The first Christians were Jews. And they kept all their Jewish customs.

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