I made one of my rare appearances to the Sunday meeting today...and really picked a doozy for a talk to have to sit through! Misery loves company, its said, so I'm sharing the latest on "Serving with Jehovah's Unified Organization" (please bear with me....)
The speaker(who was actually quite entertaining with his illustrations and props!) opened up with a definition of belonging to an organization: it was, he said "complete conformity by a person to the standards and requirements of an organization"....then he used the example of how any org will kick out a member who chooses not to follow the standards and requirements of the organization...but in fact, in J's org THEY KICK THEMSELVES OUT! (He used that phrase several times to drive home the point during the talk.)
I won't bore you with all the ins & outs of the talk but he hit on 3 areas...
(1) How the Org is likened to a family: (Jehovah, his wife, the woman above who is the symbolic heavenly org, and children who are the annointed as well as the other sheep.)
(2)How we can be invited to be part of that family and our role in it: The speaker actually spent a little time discussing Jesus' ransom and how that sacrifice makes us righteous for life...and how our role as the other sheep is to support and back up the annointed who are Christ's brothers.
(3) How our attitude shows our unity or DISunity with the Org: He discussed a dangerous attitude vs. healthy attitude. The dangerous attitude is taking a HUMAN viewpoint of the org....that its easy to view it as human, fleshly, earthly instead of being heavenly....and that if we reject the org then we are rejecting Jehovah...which puts us OUT of the org. One cannot think that it is ok to just read their Bible, be a good person, and claim to love God....its NOT enough, one must bring themselves completely in line with the standards and requirements that J's org has set....and one of those is the meetings....it is NOT A SMALL THING to not be at the meetings!
We were reminded at the end that the FDS is not perfect, but our leader is Jesus Christ, not a man. And he ended with Heb. 13:17 about being obedient to those taking the lead, to be submissive to the elders so that we didn't make them sigh(ahhhhh), for it would be damaging to US...not to the elders!! His final thought was that by rejecting the requirements of the Org that we "kick ourselves out when we don't conform 100% to what the Org says."
I had thought I might stay for the entire meeting, having brought along the WT(and Blondie's comments for it!), but after that talk I had to leave, it was just tooooo much for me. So posters...not much has changed....if anything they are coming down even harder on not allowing for any personal thought on anything....we are to be robots, parroting exactly what we hear come from Brooklyn. Don't use your minds, don't think it is enough to read your own Bible(w/out the WT telling you what it means)... repeat after me....blah blah blah.....
And I promise I will never share another Sunday talk with you again unless I hear it from the platform that Armeggedon is the following week!