Some of the Bible truths covered on this site are not studied or practiced in many churches. I pray you will be blessed and challenged to seek a deeper faith and a closer walk with Jesus and our wonderful heavenly Father.
Please pray for an open mind and God's guidance before listening to these topics.
Delphine and I knew each other for just six months before getting married at the ripe old age of nineteen. We had both been church goers as kids. Neither of us attended church anymore. Due to personal experiences, I had decided I would never walk into a church again in my life except to get married or buried.
The Minister who married us knew our track record and realised our future together didn't look very promising. He gave us a Bible on our wedding day and wrote the Bible text Psalm 127:1 at the bottom of the front page in the hope that we would read it someday.
Well, like many of us, we didn't have a marriage, we had a mess. We tried alternative spiritual lifestyles, business involvement, the hippy scene and many other things. But we still had no real peace.
There's an old saying, "Inside every human being there is a God-shaped vacuum that only God can fill."
King Solomon was probably the wisest man who ever lived. He was rich enough to try whatever he wanted in life in an endeavour to find satisfaction. Finally, he was quoted as the author of that Bible verse the minister gave us when we got married.
Here it is. Psalm 127:1. "Unless the Lord builds the house, they labour in vain who build it." Well the scholars tell us that 'the house' being referred to here can mean the home, the life, the heart, the marriage.
With our own marriage being far from perfect, we decided we could do with some help. We didn't go to a marriage counsellor, but we decided to take on a third partner, Jesus. It's the best choice we ever made.
Well, miracle of miracles, we have recently celebrated our 53rd Wedding Anniversary and we're not planning on quitting.
Here's how it happened. At age 26 when we read that Psalm 27:1 Bible verse, we decided to go along to a public lecture programme on Bible archaeology and prophecy. The evidence presented showed us that the Bible was seriously worth following as a guide to a better life. So in a nutshell, we decided to become Christians.
Well, our marriage changed for the better. Our relationship with each other, our kids, our family, and the world, made a quantum leap forward. When we saw the huge benefits in ourselves, we wanted to encourage others to experience it too.
I travelled with my camera and notebook to many countries to check on the accuracy of the Bible. Delphine often came too. We came back home with thousands of colour slides. We began to rent public halls and run screen lecture programmes, encouraging people to consider Christianity as a way to a better life of real happiness and peace.
As I read my Bible, I also studied the teachings of about twenty different church denominations to find out how to follow God and Jesus better.
What I found was interesting, confusing and not all good. Many church leaders and congregations were 'Christian' by name but not by Bible standards. Many of them didn't follow even closely what was taught in their own church manuals or Bibles. Also, many man-made traditions had crept in to take the place of what the Bible taught.
I picked up the book 'Pagan Christianity' that cited many of the non-biblical church traditions that actually have their roots in paganism. When churchgoers are confronted with these non-biblical traditions, they rarely address the issues and remain in the rut of spiritual mediocrity and an inadequate and unfulfilling Christian experience.
In the Bible, Jesus said to the church leaders in Matthew 15:3, "Why do you transgress the commandments of God by your traditions?"
The book 'Pagan Christianity' explains how that many church pastors are not straight. Yet we think we can trust them with their Biblical explanations. On page 182, Upton Sinclair is quoted as saying about church pastors, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Jesus spoke to the church leaders in Matthew 15:3, "Why do you transgress the commandments of God by your traditions?"
God's inspired words, penned in the old and new testaments of the Bible, explain that our love for God the Father and Jesus is not shown by whether we keep the traditional teachings of a church but by whether we will obey God's commandments in the Bible.
Some people who attended our screen lecture programmes started out by saying that many so-called Christians aren't really Christians at all. They look good on the surface but behind the masks they're not very good examples of Christianity at all.
They call themselves Christians but their lives show that they're not really followers of Christ. Mahatma Gandhi had a lot of time for Jesus and His teachings and Gandhi said, "We'd all be Christians if it weren't for the Christians." Obviously Gandhi had met many people who were 'Christian' by name and not by actions.
The 'Claytons' Christians were there in Jesus' day, Gandhi's day, and very much in our modern day too. In the lecture programmes we encouraged people to become only one kind of Christian - Real Christians!
My prayer for you also is, that as you listen to these audio lectures that were recorded some years ago, as the Bible confronts you with some truths that don't line up with your church traditions, that your God-given conscience will take over and you will stand on the side of truth, rather than tradition.
May Jesus and our wonderful heavenly Father walk with you on your journey to even greater peace, joy and happiness than you've ever experienced before.
Each of these audio lectures follow like chapters in a book. It is best to only listen to them in the order they are presented.
The early lectures help you to understand that the Bible is a brilliantly accurate book. They give a sure footing before you get into later lectures.
Then when you accept that the Bible is worth listening to, we move to telling you about Jesus, the Man of the book. When you really meet Jesus, life begins to change, hugely for the better. In the later lectures, out of a growing love for Jesus and our wonderful heavenly Father, we begin to understand that we can build an even more fantastic life as we get rid of some of our old religious ideas and embrace the best, God's best.
Thank you for listening to these lectures in the order that they are presented below.
Just one further comment - These lectures were originally recorded live on the old-fashioned cassette tapes. Each lecture was accompanied by about 160 colour slides on a big screen. We never did a video of each programme so unfortunately you cannot see all those colour slides that were used. I do hope that you still enjoy and are blessed and challenged by these audio programmes.
Blessings to you from Ray Archer