Portals can be rather inconspicuous and elusive, but when we find one of these obscure openings, we discover that it can be a divine door that ushers us out of darkness and despair into a whole new dimension of freedom. Unfortunately, because of negative encounters we may have had with churchy people, or the guilt and condemnation we may have suffered underreligious teaching, we end up being driven away, and rightly so, from any further involvement with religion.
After I suffered the deleterious effects of what I later learned were the consequences of being locked up in a legalistic dungeon (legalism stresses strict adherence to laws, rules, and regulations rather than to the Spirit), I became desperate to find a way out. It was the light of the glorious gospel of Christ that showed me the way out. A portal (for the purpose of this book)symbolizes a gateway of knowledge and understanding into God’s grace and truth intended to bring to light the gospel of Jesus Christ to lead us out from behind the iron bars of the false beliefs that may be enslaving us.
Let me share a little more about my personal journey of what led me to write this book. It was only after becoming a born-again believer at the age of thirty that I developed a voracious appetite to read the Bible, and I quickly realized just how much of the teaching coming out from the pulpit did not match up with the truth of scripture. It was out of that frustration that this book was born. I decided to write a book that would have helped me navigate through my own theological confusion at that time. This book is intended to “upset the apple cart” planted squarely in the middle of most mainstream churches today. It is meant to provoke you to reevaluate whether or not you may have been served a spiritual diet of “bad apples.”
The other purpose of this book is to present to you pearls of God’s promises and wisdom. These are pearls that have become very precious to me. These are pearls that I have come to make my own. Just as a pearl’s surface displays a rainbow-like play of various colors, this book was written to display God’s prismatic promises and the biblical wisdom God provides uswith as answers and antidotes to the various problems we may encounter in life.