I can think of two people in my past that showed me things about Christianity. One was the pastor of the first church I went to when I got saved in college. It was a little tiny charismatic church that had a lot of yelling and fainting and screaming and Allelujahing. The only thing I remember from the pastor was he was always prophesying and all the people would get so excited and happy about whatever he said. I went to the weekly on-campus bible study sponsored by this church, and I remember half of it was praying in tongues, and half of it was sitting around talking about the Bible. I didn’t know about the whole tongues thing, so I would beat-box and pray to myself. At first I did it quietly, then as I got more confidence after a few weeks I did a full out ooomph ooomph ooomph ooomph bass beat to all of their prayers and danced a little. I’m sure it was totally crazy, but I fit right in and nobody minded.I prayed and worshiped in my own way there, and it was the only discipleship connection I had, and I think I grew in it some.
The other guy was named Keith. He was a retired Presbyterian preacher and my wife and I met with him every week leading up to our wedding. He was going to be marrying us, and so we had many meetings talking about marriage and then for the last month just talking about the ceremony. He was a very quiet and humble guy. One week I came and made some statement about the NT and Greek and some word and he said I was wrong. He said it really gently, but he said I must have missed something. He then went and got his interlinear Greek New Testament and showed me all the words I missed that made what I said wrong. Another time we were talking about other sects of Christianity and he had experience with a group that I was really starting to get into. We talked about their love of nature, and he talked about an experience where he heard someone from this tradition praying to the Sun and the Moon and the whole time all he could pray was “God, this is B*$@ S&#*!”
He didn’t always say what I wanted to hear, but I knew the things he said were true. The prophet of Terre Haute, on the other hand, always said fun and nice stuff, but I don’t think it was all true.
To a new believer, of these two I would say that Mr. Terre Haute was showing more of the POWER of God. But now that I’ve been walking with the real Jesus longer, I see which one of these guys showed me more of the Wisdom and the Power of God.