Sherry Shriner is quite popular on the web.  In fact, she was a big help to me while I was conducting my research for the book

Pam Sheppard, 30 years a minister for the Lord Jesus.

“The Fake Jesus: Fallen Angels Among Us.”  I found her knowledge of the ascended masters to be quite helpful.  However, her writings on the Apostle Paul are blasphemous, considering that Paul wrote 1/3 of the New Testament.  I won’t go into Sherry’s contentions about this phenomenal apostle because I refuse to spread her point of view.  Instead, as a former atheist who had never been to church and no one had ever witnessed to me, Paul has been crucial to my spiritual understanding of what happened to me that strange but marvelous day when I became born again. For when I had my own Damascus Road experience with the Lord Jesus Christ, I knew of no one else who had ever had one.

Even though I got born again before I ever heard of the Apostle PAUL, I would not have understood why on March 29, 1977, I felt “so different.”  The newness.  The cleanness. The past seemed so far away.  No shame or guilt for ANYTHING and I had been quite the sinner in my first 33 years of life.  Why on this strange day in March did I feel like “I had JUST been born?”  A few minutes after I was “born again,” I opened my brand new bible and it turned to John 3, the words of the Lord, “you must be born again, that which is flesh is flesh and that which is spirit is spirit.”  After I read this, then the Holy Spirit spoke and said “Pam, you have just given birth to your new spirit in Christ Jesus.  Go run a bathtub full of water, and baptize yourself in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost!”

Wow!  Yahoo!  I never felt so great in my life!!! 

No, Paul did NOT cause me to be saved.  No one did but God Himself.

I did not go to church for two years.  All I had was the Apostle Paul and the 4 gospels.  As a babe in Christ, home alone in my apartment, Paul caused me to understand my faith by confirming to me how and why God saved me.  Too many people read Paul’s letters in order to be saved.  In other words, they desire to be saved to escape hell,  and so they mechanically DO what Paul wrote about.  They think that if I SAY a confession, I  will be saved and I will go to heaven  because Paul wrote, “Confess the Lord with your mouth and believe in your heart that Jesus was raised from dead, you are saved. That settles it.  I accept Jesus.  I choose to be saved.  I seal it with saying the sinner’s prayer.  I’ll stamp it by going forward to the altar at the invitation.   

You see, when I read Paul’s words, I said “Ah, that is what happened to me.”  I did not repeat  or confess words.  When the Holy Ghost saved me, I felt like a coin was dropped into me, like I was  a soda machine. But  Lo and behold, what came out of the machine was not soda, but faith in the resurrection of a dead man that I not only did not believe in, but I claimed that Jesus Christ never even existed, but that He was merely a white man’s myth!!!!”  I said nothing from my mouth but “Jesus.” “I am crying for what we did to Jesus!” That was it.  I said nothing about the resurrection.  I just knew that I knew that I knew that Jesus was dead, got up in His body and walked out of His own tomb, three days later.  My belief on the resurrection was the rock or stone that dropped into me and never left in 34 years, not one time! No doubt Jesus is alive in His body not one time in 34 years!!!!

So when Paul wrote  that we are saved by grace through faith, I understood the first time I read it because it had happened to me two years before reading Paul’s words to the Ephesians.  I knew beyond a  shadow of a doubt that my salvation was a gift from God because I never even sought the gift. On top of that, I was the last person that anyone who knew me would have believed what happened to me. So I could nod my head in agreement with Paul because I knew that my salvation had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH ME.

However, what Paul taught me that I did not already know as a babe in Christ,  is that the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the son of God.  Without Paul, I would not have known or even understood that I can’t please God with my flesh.  Paul has been for me one of the best biblical examples of a spiritually fruitful child of God.  Once filled with pride over his scholarly achievements, his heritage and his cultural and religious attainments, Paul taught me how to die and yet live at the same time.  He taught me how to stand against the enemy, how to press on to victory, how to walk in the spirit and not fulfill my lust of my flesh. He taught me how to press on to the mark of my high calling in the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

No, Paul did not cause me to be saved.  What he did was train up a babe in Christ to become a minister.  Once I entered ministry, I had a number of elders and a few bishops that I was mandated to submit to.  However, none of them taught me a thing about what it take to be a minister.  It was Paul who did that.   I thank Paul for that. 

 In fact, I love Paul the Apostle.

 If you would like a trained minister to mentor you, call 518-477-5759.