Derek Weller lives in Bermuda, which is a small island with limited resources for anybody who wants to take their knowledge of God beyond the sermons at church. Without any substantial income, traditional methods of Bible training would have been impossible for Derek, but when he discovered that Christian Leaders Institute offers an Online Bible School in Bermuda he was able to find the training that he needed.
Derek Weller Talks About His Need for the Online Bible School in Bermuda
Hello and Blessings in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. My name is Derek Weller and I live on the islands of Bermuda which is located off the east coast of the USA in the Atlantic Ocean. I am the last of seven children. My father was the pastor of our church until he went home to be with the Lord on March 11th, 2011.
Bermuda is only 22sq miles but there is probably a church on every corner. Religious beliefs are protected here although a lot of people either don’t believe the true gospel or don’t live what they once believed.
I was born in the church and was brought up to serve the Lord, however I made my decision to really serve the Lord in my teens.
I currently play the organ at my church as well as sound and media.
I am pursuing this Ministry course for my own spiritual benefit and to strengthen my relation with the Lord.
My prayer is that I will be ready and equipped for whatever the Lord wants for me to do and that I will forever walk close to Him and be in His perfect Will.
In recent years I have been teaching courses online for a secular university. My students want to gain an understanding of what I call the truth about life. But sometimes, it gets to be very difficult for them to discern just what might be the truth. For many, it’s a matter of evidence.
The reason is that there are many competing voices which claim to be the truth or which attempt in various ways to deny that we can ever actually know the truth. Instead, these voices tell us that it is hopeless to figure out where truth is to be found in our world. One day, a student asked me in our online classroom, “So here is a very big question – Is it better to become one with god (therefore becoming god) or to serve God and bask in his glory for eternity?” We were discussing the teachings of various Eastern religions at the time and he wanted to compare what we were learning about Buddhism in particular with what he could recall he had been taught in a Christian church as a youth.
The question he asked was difficult to answer in the context of the secular university. There we, as faculty, tend to try to keep our religious commitments to ourselves. To do otherwise is to proselytize which is frowned upon as not being academically sound. What has taken place over the years is that the many different universities in the world have made a commitment to doubting anything which is not scientifically or rationally provable. In the secular university, there are only two ways to gain knowledge that is solid and worthy of being called truth. The first method is by means of carefully evaluating evidence that shows the matter under consideration is true. The so-called scientific method of investigating the world fits into this mold. The second is by the careful, systematic rational evaluation of an existing object or an historical thought can lead to the truth. This is the way that many in the fields of literature and history develop their theories and conclusions.
The problem is that neither of these ways of addressing the reality we find around us will give a reliable way of knowing God. God cannot be known by means of the scientific method nor of a rational, cognitive approach to our world. We end up with the evidence pointing to two irrefutable conclusions: ‘If God is good, God is not great. If God is great, God is not good.” This is where the evidence points when we approach it from a rational point of view.
God is not Found by Dissecting Scientific Evidence
So we, who are people of faith, need to take a different approach. This is the approach of faith. We who are people of faith begin by saying as the Bible does, “In the beginning, God…” We start from the point which can posit the truth that God is real and God is active in the world. That is a matter of faith. Faith is the source of the evidence. Faith is the basis for the (apparently) irrational statement that God is real.
The issue then becomes which God we find taught by various spiritual leaders in the world is the true God? Hence the question from my student. The course we were studying was called “Religions of the World.” During the course of a mere nine weeks, we were looking at the central teachings of a total of twelve different religious faiths broadly speaking. He wanted to know which one was the truth. Why spend his time wandering around in darkness when he could just ask me and get right to the truth?
His question is similar to the story told by one of the students at Christian Leaders Institute. The student writes,
My faith in Christ really flourished just a couple of years ago. I’ve always known of him, but now I know that I never knew him. And since I was just a toddler, I’ve always felt this strong pull towards the light…but refused to surrender until a couple years ago when the world was no longer a distraction for me. I was in jail. I had never been arrested before until the end of 2009, and for the next year and a half to follow, I continued to get in extreme trouble. I didn’t care about myself. Why? Because at that point in my life, nobody in my life cared about me, so why should I care about me? So I fell apart.
How does one find the truth? What is the truth? Jesus tells us that we can know the truth and the truth will set us free. (The Gospel of John chapter 8) Then later he explains, “I am the way the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father, except through me.” (John ch 14) Jesus is the One who embodies in himself the truth of who God is. He embodies the truth of what God is like. He tells us, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John ch 14) Taken all together, what we discover is that in order for us to know what way to follow, we need to give up our ideas of how we can discover God on our own. Instead, we need to rely on Jesus who is the One who reveals God to us. We cannot experimentally prove God to the scientist who demands proof in a laboratory. We cannot rationally prove God to someone who demands that we be entirely logical and committed to rationality alone. No, we lay hold of Jesus by faith. We know him by seeing his work in our lives and in the lives of other Christians. And by means of his Word, the Holy Bible, we know the True God. (John ch 17)
At Christian Leaders Institute, we are committed to training our students to know God from his Word as they see Him at work in their lives. We do so in order to give the students the training they need to help others who are still in darkness to find the light that is seen in Jesus. He alone is the Light of the World. (John Ch 8)
Do you know what it is to be rejected? Have you ever had that feeling that you just are not good enough for your family, for your friends, especially for God? I have known many people like that over the years I have spent in ministry.
One young woman had dropped out of school and her single Mom had gotten very angry with her. She felt that she had so disappointed her mother that all she could do was run away from home. I met her a few years later. She had been living on the streets of New York City with no hope and without God in her life. God gave me the opportunity to help her get her life back on track. While she did not reconcile with her mother at the time that I knew her, she had that as a goal to be achieved in a year or two. First she had to get herself out of the gutter of her mistakes, she told herself, or her mother would still not accept her. She wasn’t good enough even for her mother.
A man who had a bad temper had, some 20 years before I met him, gotten into a fight and his opponent had ended up mortally wounded. He then spent his next 20 years in a prison to pay his debt to society because he had lost his temper one night. When he was due for release from his prison, he was afraid that his family and friends would not take him back after all he had done. His friends had “learned” from his mistake and had straightened out their lives. Now they were husbands and fathers with kids of their own. He doubted that any of them would want to introduce him to the kids for fear his might “infect” them with his temper. He wasn’t good enough for those with whom he had gone to school and with whom he had enjoyed friendship. He was sure he would be rejected as soon as they saw his face.
A group of friends gathered regularly in a little coffee shop to talk about faith and their own personal approaches to faith. They were what one might call the underclass of the city in which I lived at the time. They had found each other somewhat by accident. It was the love of a great cup of low priced coffee that brought them together. They would intentionally get together with each other at least weekly to discuss Wiccan, Native American Spirituality, Buddhism, and agnosticism (each one’s faith perspective). It was somewhat by accident that I came to know one of them and was invited to join the group as the one who would take the Christian perspective with them. So each Wednesday afternoon, I made my way over to the little café to share a cup of coffee and my perspective on faith. What I discovered as I talked with them was that each had decided to pursue the faith they were because they were convinced that they did not fit into the Christian faith. They knew they were not good enough for God. They told themselves that they, if they showed up in a congregation of Christians, would not be happily received. Quite the contrary, they were sure they would be ushered out if only because of their poor dress. They were not worthy of being in the company of Christians as they knew them and they knew they were not worthy of Jesus as they had heard of him. They were not even good enough for the people who looked at our motley little group with a look of scorn each Wednesday.
Good Enough for God – Because of Christ
My heart breaks for people like this. They all have a very special characteristic that they find it very difficult to accept: each one is made in the image of God and God calls each one to come home from the far country to which they have gone. In the Bible we find a story which is called the Parable of the Prodigal Son. It tells us about a young man who takes his inheritance while his father is still alive, goes off to a ”far country” and loses everything in wild living. After a while he “comes to himself” and decides to go back to his father with this thought, “I will say that I am not worthy to be called your son. Make me as one of your servants.” He discovers that his father will have none of that idea. He is welcomed as the long lost son that he is.
One of our students at Christian Leaders Institute, as she reflects on growing up in the church in her homeland of South Africa writes the following,
“I didn’t really understand what I was being told. I was just going through the motions. Then I fell pregnant before I was married. Even though I was engaged to the father of my baby and had never been promiscuous, the church turned its back on me and I was ‘condemned to burn in hell’. I left the church and for many years just drifted in and out of faith. In 2009, God answered a very big prayer!! Since then I have grown and grown.”
She goes on to tell us about a talk she had with God.
“The talk-with-God wasn’t the proverbial whisper, it was more like a hit to the solar plexus. I now know that the Almighty Father wants me to use the talents He has given me, to spread the word, to show others the way to reaching Heaven. There are many people who think they are rejected by God, all because someone else told them so, and all because they fail to reach what they think is the “mark to reach” before God will accept them as they are. Mostly, I wish to help the youth of my country who are so lost.”
Our own perceptions are often so wrong. We need to come to our right mind and discover the awesome truth that God will welcome us when we humbly come in the name of Jesus. That is the message we are training people all over the earth to carry to others on behalf of God, the Great King of Heaven. It’s a message for you too!