When Faith Becomes Personal: Knowing God Beyond What You’ve Been Taught | Marcia McFarland

Sometimes what we personally experience does not fit what we have been taught.

Did there come a point where your own experiences with God challenged something you had previously believed? And was there anything you had to unlearn in order to understand your faith differently?

Well, this whole part about speaking in tongues, even though I had read about the Pentecost in the Bible, um, it's just, it was kind of foreign to me because, again, there was nobody in my Presbyterian church that speaks in tongues.

So, um, that and some of the prophecy that God was giving me, it was all just new to me.

And a-a-again, it's not that-- I mean, it is in the Bible, but the church that I was attending, um, it just was, um, that was just not part of the service.

I enjoyed going to church.

I enjoyed the fellowship with my other, you know, other churchgoers.

Um, but this was, yeah, this was something that I was not expecting.

You know, I was not expecting it.

I had heard about it, but I certainly did not expect to experience it myself.

Okay.

Uh, my second is another.

Is there a difference between knowing about somebody and actually knowing them? In your experience, what is the difference between knowing God and actually having a relationship with them? And where does faith move from something we are intellectually known to something that have become?

Well, you know, when we're-- If we were raised in the church and went to Sunday school when we were kids, we learned about Jesus.

We learned these Bible stories that, uh, were pretty profound, but we didn't really learn how to have a relationship with God.

We might have been told that we can have a relationship with God, but we weren't really told what that looked like.

It was all about, you know, just learning the, learning the stories of the Bible.

That's how I was brought up.

Um, so having that relationship, I mean, that didn't happen until I was in my thirties, um, you know, well into adulthood.

Well, some people would say that's still pretty young, but, [chuckles] but I was certainly an adult with a child.

Um, and I can't, I can't really pinpoint when and how, uh, it came, but it was, it was after I was divorced.

I was in a very secular marriage.

We did not go to church.

We did not practice religion at all while, while I was married.

But I longed to get back to, you know, reading the Bible and, and, and studying, studying God's Word.