Pearson - God is not a Christian, nor a Jew, Muslim, Hindu--: God dwells with us, in us, around us, as us

GOD IS NOT
A CHRISTIAN,
NOR A JEW,
MUSLIM, HINDU

OTHER WORKS BY BISHOP CARLTON PEARSON

The Gospel of Inclusion:
Reaching Beyond Religious Fundamentalism
to the True Love of God and Self

God Dwells With Us,
in Us, Around Us, As Us

BISHOP

CARLTON PEARSON

ATRIA BOOKS

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Copyright 2010 by Bishop Carlton Pearson

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First Atria Books hardcover edition March 2010

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pearson, Carlton.

God is not a Christian, nor a Jew, Muslim, Hindu : God dwells with us, in us,
around us, as us / by Carlton D. Pearson.

p. cm.

1. God. 2. Christianity and other religions. 3. ReligionsRelations. I. Title.

BL473.P43 2009

231dc22 2008045780

ISBN: 978-1-4165-8443-8

ISBN: 978-1-4165-8504-6 (ebook)

No matter what Gods power may be, the first aspect of God is never that of the absolute Master, the Almighty. It is that of the God who puts himself on our human level and limits himself.

Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity

It was the spring of 1983, and I was about fifteen days into a thirty-day fast honoring my thirtieth birthday: March 19. I had dozed off to sleep while lying across my bed in what was supposed to have been a time of meditation. It was a sunny afternoon sometime between two and three oclock, when I was awakened by what I thought was someone whispering to me, Pssst, Carley Moses, the nickname only my grandmother used to call me. I looked in the direction of the voice, and I saw an image of her over in the corner of the room, standing behind the soft blue recliner I liked to sit in while watching television. My mother is her only child, and we affectionately called her Big Mama. She was a slightly built, fair-complected woman with beautiful mostly black wavy hair. She had passed on nearly twenty years earlier in January 1964, when I was just ten years old. She was only fifty-three, two years younger than I am at the writing of this book. We were close; in fact, I was told I was her favorite of the six grands. Not sure why. During the last two years of her life, I spent every weekend I could with her. We spent literally hours just talking, driving in her big blue Cadillac with electric windows that I loved to play with. I actually got to sleep in bed with her until she was in too much pain for my sometimes thrashing and active sleeping habits.

At first, I thought I was just hallucinating, since I hadnt eaten in nearly three weeks, and strange things were already happening to my body. Having fasted as many as twenty-one days before, I knew how the body and mind could play some fairly strange games when they perceived that you were trying to starve them.

Fasting was common in our family and was an esteemed practice in our particular Pentecostal discipline. I was fasting for special faith, spiritual strength, wisdom, and a more powerful anointing with which to carry out my ministry and fulfill my lifes destiny. Jesus had started His ministry at thirty, and the Apostle Paul had encountered Christ in Consciousness at around that same age, as did my mentor, Oral Roberts.

I had founded my church, Higher Dimensions Evangelistic Center, a year and a half earlier in a small storefront building in Jenks, Oklahoma, a sparsely populated suburb just south of Tulsa and only about a ten-minute drive from Oral Roberts University, my alma mater.

What was so strange about this experience, daydream, vision, or whatever you want to call it was that when I located the sound as coming from my beloved grandmother, she wasnt looking at me, but at the foot of the bed. She had this warm and excited smile on her face. She seemed thrilled about what she was seeing. I followed her eyes, and as I did, there appeared at the foot of my bed several other people who had also passed on to what I assumed was heaven, paradise, or somewhere in some wonderful eternal abode.

Needless to say, I was captivated by a scene that seemed to fill the entire room with warm, effervescent light and a peaceful ambiance I hadnt experienced before. This was an unusual encounter, but not an unbelievable one. After all, Id been taught about the resurrection all my life, and my familyparticularly the womenwere given to dreams, visions, and premonitions.

Wed been taught about a great cloud of witnesses who had gone on before us and were in the grandstands of eternity, cheering us onas recorded in the New Testament writings of an unknown author (Hebrews 21:1).

To us, both death and life were states of illusionary limitation. Even God had somehow found a significant place for death, and, according to our Christian doctrine, used it to purchase our redemption and salvation.

I had accepted the presumption that God used lifes number one limitation, which was death and dying, to accomplish a divine purpose. In other words, the Christian dynamic articulated itself through the common limitation of life, which was its opposite: death.