The Spirit of the Matter

D. L. Watson

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781666735499, 9781666792621
• eBook ISBN: 9781666792638
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Spirit of the Matter is born from a love of truth and a love of God's word. When these two loves come together, we find the Scriptures are not only reliable and consistent, but a brilliantly designed set of instructions for life, reaching a depth of profundity that most Christian teachings fail to address.This book carefully examines the Christian notion that the Mosaic Law (Torah) no longer is applicable to believers and guides readers through an understanding of how and why the words of God spoken to the Old Testament writers are intensely relevant to people today. Readers will take a thought-provoking journey through topics such as: -Are we supposed to believe a literal seven-day account of creation in the book of Genesis?-Is it possible that the New Testament instructs those who believe in Jesus Christ to also obey certain commands in the Torah?-Is it conceivable that the Sabbath day as established in the creation story could also hold truths for the events of Revelation and the end times?This book will encourage you with a confidence that God's word holds much more for believers than most have been taught to expect.

Part 1

Set-apart Gatherings

Before You Feast on This Part

I was born in Omaha, Nebraska on October 22, 1987. My mom tells me this story from when I was a toddler. Our family went to a Christmas pageant at our church. During the pageant, I fell asleep in her lap. When I woke up at the end, amid everyone getting up and clearing out, I looked around, confused, and started saying, “More baby Jesus, more baby Jesus!”

We moved to South Carolina when I was four. My dad was the preacher of our church. I grew up in a small town called Six Mile. In the summers, I attended VBS and Bible camp. In the winters, our youth group went to a Christian conference called Winterfest in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. When I was thirteen, my heart broke from hearing the Gospel. When we returned from Winterfest that year, my dad baptized me at our church. We had a big yard, so in the springtime we would have the church over for Easter picnics and egg hunts. In the fall, I had Halloween-themed birthday parties.

During my high school summers, I traveled to Mexico with a group from my church to build houses for families in poverty.

I went to Florida State University. Throughout my four years there, I stayed involved in a campus ministry called Ambassadors for Christ. One year I was the president of the group. During my college summers, I went to Oklahoma to be a counselor at a Bible camp for inner-city children. I studied abroad in London during the fall of 2008. While I was there, I attended Hillsong Church.

After graduating college, I moved to Montgomery briefly, attended a church there, and then I moved to Greenville, South Carolina. At my church in Greenville, I served as a youth leader for two years, and then I moved to New York City. I attended a church in lower Manhattan for about three years before I met my wife, Kendra, online (Coffee Meets Bagel, for those of you who are curious).

Kendra and I continued attending church in New York for about two years after we got married, and then in June of 2019, we left New York.

I’m telling you all this upfront because I want you to know that my life has not just been affected, but completely shaped by the culture of church. Church is one of a few things about which I feel comfortable calling myself a subject matter expert, not in the way of academia, but in life experience. As you read this book, you will understand why I am telling you this, and that all of this is not me boasting. Far from it.

We moved to North Carolina, where we lived for two years. Then, in June of 2021, we packed up and moved to Colorado. This book covers a timeline of about two years. It mostly represents my thoughts from our time in North Carolina.

The Beginning of the Weird

Kendra and I were living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 2018 when things started getting weird at our church in Tribeca. It was one of those weirds where some people said, “This is a good weird,” and other people said, “This is a bad weird.” Nobody was denying that it was weird. People just assessed the weird differently.

Our pastor was going through some stuff. Spiritual, Holy Spirit stuff. He told the congregation that he had not been letting God have total control, and that this needed to change. He started giving sermons without preparing for them in advance, to let the Holy Spirit speak through him as opposed to him speaking for God. He said things were going to change, and he told us that if we weren’t on board with that, then it would be best to find another church.

Remarkably few people found another church at first. I say “remarkably” because a large portion of the congregation didn’t seem to be on board. Even so, our pastor powered through, changing things up and telling people to leave if they didn’t like the new direction.

When January 2019 rolled around, Kendra and I experienced our hardest month of marriage, for a slew of reasons. As much as it all hurt, though, it was a good thing. It hurt because walls that we had built around our hearts were being destroyed. We ripped them down and cleared out the rubble. It was not fun, but we would come to find that it was very beneficial.

Right in the midst of this, in early 2019, our church had its annual retreat. This event exacerbated the already exasperated crowd. There was much grumbling afterward. Things were getting too “charismatic” for some people’s tastes. They didn’t understand why this was happening. They loved the church the way it had been—the people, the community groups, and even the pastor. I completely understood this. I had been a part of the church for five years, and it had come to be my family.

Even so, there was truth in what the pastor was saying. We certainly didn’t understand everything that was going on, but Kendra and I both felt a confidence that what was happening was from God. So we opened ourselves to it.

When springtime rolled around, Kendra and I were starting to feel better. We were healing and moving forward. We had decided that we were going to leave New York that summer.

Things at our church, meanwhile, continued to escalate. Sometime in May, our pastor called a meeting at his apartment. He told us that he and his family would be moving to Rwanda, and he doubled down on everything that had been happening at the church, saying that it would continue in the direction of giving God control.

In the weeks that followed, the pastor and his family moved to Rwanda, and Kendra and I left for Raleigh, North Carolina, our heads spinning. We didn’t know exactly why we felt so compelled to move to Raleigh. Neither of us had a job there. Neither of us knew anybody there. The only reason we picked Raleigh was because it was exactly four hours from both of our parents, mine in South Carolina and hers in Virginia. Other than that, we didn’t know why we were moving there. We just knew we felt led in that direction.

So we moved down there, not sure what to expect.

This was the beginning of this weird story.

Knocking It Out

After everything that took place at our church in Manhattan, I had resolved to write a book called The Spirit of the Matter. What had become so clear to me was a breakdown in humanity’s understanding of “spirit”, whether it was the Spirit of God, some other spiritual entity, or the general spirit of any given situation. Like so many other words in the English language, we throw the word “spirit” around haphazardly without a clear idea of what we are intending to say.

I wanted to write a book on this. I believed it could help Christians recognize whe...

Table of contents

• The Spirit of the Matter
• Note on Translation
• Before You Feast on This Book
• Part 1: Set-apart Gatherings
• Part 2: The Beginning and the End
• Part 3: The Law of Religion
• Part 4: The Great Light
• Part 5: The Law of God
• Part 6: The End and the Beginning
• Part 7: Set-apart Regathering
• Closing Content
• Bibliography