Michael Furlonger on Let’s Chat
Welcome, everyone
Michael Furlonger is the author of God: The Master of Sin And Satan The Beautiful. While the title may seem confusing, it focuses on who God is and why we desperately need Him. He also wrote a step by step book called Assurance of Salvation which offers an in-depth look at his coming to trusting faith.
Michael loves to consider the things of God and yearns to be in His presence. He tries to help and encourage other Christians and authors in their faith walk. He also created a website to help advertise Christian authors and bloggers called www.ChristianWritersBookstore.com.
He is married to his lovely wife, Jennifer. They live in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
Michael Furlonger: In His Own Words
My story cannot be started without addressing the car accident at age six. While standing on the side of the country road outside of my house, the driver of a car wasn’t paying attention and hit me. In the hospital, with no hope of survival, the doctors told my parents that they would make me comfortable.
But I suppose the doctors didn’t know that my God is bigger than their science.
When I pulled through the first night, the doctors were surprised. How could this little boy survive the collision with a car driving down a country road? they likely pondered. They put me in a medically induced coma to avoid any movement because an x-ray showed that my neck was broken.
You probably don’t believe it, but my God does the impossible. When the doctors went in to operate on my broken neck, the lead surgeon ran out of the operating room. He ran to my mother and asked, “Do you believe in God? Because your son’s neck is no longer broken.”
Years later I was sharing this story at high school. A student asked, “If your God was going to heal you, why didn’t he just do it on the side of the road?” I didn’t have an answer then, but I do now. Consider, “How would God get any glory for Himself if no one knew?”
Michael Furlonger: No Sunshine Or Rainbows
This is an amazing story. I wish I could tell you that my whole life was in earnestly seeking after God. But it wasn’t: Brain damage, anxiety, depression, thoughts of suicide, school bullies, this isn’t what God wants for me. Did God abandon me? Or, maybe, I abandoned Him with my sins?
Seriously God?! I go to church and play in the band. I’m your miracle child. Don’t you remember?
First John 1:6 tells us that, “If we claim to have fellowship with him, but walk in the darkness (sin), we lie…”
As rich in mercy as God is, He couldn’t tolerate my sinfulness.
The Church Highs and Lows
As mentioned, I grew up in the church. Starting in a very legalistic, Hell fire and brimstone, small town Baptist church for many years.
As I grew in my teens, at a new church, I learned about GRACE. Not grace as it truly is, but a grace that told me that Jesus Christ and God the Father had two different agendas. As though God the Father was all about Hell-Fire and Jesus Christ was all about forgiveness. As though Jesus Christ was in disagreement with the Father and he had to yell, “NO!” to make him change plans. This taught me I could live a life of sin because Jesus’ death on the cross protects me from God of the Old Testament. And I lived by that version of grace.
I definitely liked this God (tongue in cheek) better. So, I looked at pornography, I disrespected my parents and teachers, and I had sex with my girlfriends.
Then, in my 20s, I attended a new, hyper-Pentecostal church, became “experiential”. The Word of God took a back seat to personal experiences: Speaking in tongues, shaking on the floor, claiming prophetic dreams.
Not to disregard these spiritual gifts, but it’s easy to lie about such things. I’m embarrassed to say, but that’s what I did: I lied. I started “speaking in tongues” and shaking in an earnest desire that I would fit in, find something. Friendship in the church, family, maybe a place to belong.
Michael Furlonger: One Story Ends
As you can see, I attended three kinds of churches, and they all held on to various biblical truths. But how can they all hold to truth, but be so divided?
And where am I? Anxious, depressed, suicidal, going from girlfriend to girlfriend trying to find some… SOMETHING. Trying to find purpose, hope, love, a place to belong.
I realized that I needed to truly know this God I worship. Sure, he created cool stuff, and he freed the slaves from Egypt, and took Israel to the Promised Land, but what about me? I’m not a slave in Egypt and I live in Canada (The Promised Land of the North?), not wandering the desert.
So where do you start when learning something new? You start at the beginning: Genesis 1:1- In the beginning, God created…
God: The Master Of Sin and Satan The Beautiful by Michael Furlonger
As I go through my learning curve, I start with the Creation Story of Genesis 1. Then I go to Genesis 2 where God put Adam, and created his wife, in the Garden of Eden. And I considered this Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. God needed to have knowledge of good and evil to create such a tree, didn’t He? Consider Genesis 3:22, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil.”
This is where the title of God: The Master of Sin comes in.
Continuing my research, I discovered this serpent that convinced Eve to eat the fruit of this tree. I read about Adam and Eve hiding from God, naked and afraid, after eating this fruit. And I realized that, although it was the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge that set things in motion, God banished them from the garden to keep them from the Tree of Life. As Genesis 3:22b-23a reads: “He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden.
This book continues on from Genesis to Revelation 22:2 where we see the Tree of Life once again.
This easy to read, 120 page book, discusses the nature of God, the wickedness of sin, and how Satan makes it so “Beautiful”.
Michael Furlonger’s Links
Website: www.ChristianWritersBookstore.com/Michael-Furlonger (ChristianWritersBookstore is a website created by Michael Furlonger to support Christian authors. Purchases on the website are made through Amazon affiliation to support both Michael and the authors)
Facebook: www.Facebook.com/groups/ChristianWritersBookstore
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mikefurlonger
YouTube: www.YouTube.com/channel/UCiuJjIj8qzvyhJmFjaXNTzg
Amazon.com: https://amzn.to/2LudplN
Amazon.ca: https://amzn.to/38DeJeL
To join Michael in supporting Christian authors, bloggers, and You Tubers: http://bit.ly/3snu23e
~ ~ ~
Dear Lord, please bless each word Michael writes for you.
For Jesus’ sake