Welcome to tsoul
Welcome Message from the Founder of The Light Ministries Inc and tsoul.com
What, you might ask, is tsoul.com? First, a minor note on pronunciation: the “t” is voiceless, so speaking tsoul is pretty much like saying “soul”. If my English lessons are still intact the “t” is what is referred to as “aspirated”. I like how the “t” is silent because it makes me think about a characteristic of God. Although I can’t hear God speaking to me in an audible voice, I see overwhelming evidence He does exist. So, in a similar manner the “t” in tsoul is silent yet I see it is there. When introducing tsoul to others it is helpful to say: “T-SOUL”; and follow-up with: “T as in Thomas…. soul S-O-U-L”, spelling out “soul” letter by letter – tsoul.com.
Secondly, may I point out what tsoul.com is not: It is not yours truly dictating what the Christian community needs in the way of a premier internet site. Neither is it a handful of corporate execs or MBA’s deciding what kinds of internet tools or resources would best serve the furtherance of Christianity.
In fact tsoul is an opportunity for millions of people all over the world to contribute, each in their own unique way to advancing knowledge of God for themselves and others and to foster interaction among His people. That’s what makes tsoul “The Christian Place”. A place where Christians can gather to share how God has touched their lives, to grow in their understanding of God, to sustain one another in our human needs (both physical and spiritual), to study what contemporary scholars and Christian leaders are saying and what has been said over the centuries about the message of Christ and what it means to humanity, to dig deeper into the teachings of the Bible and to seek out fellow Christians not only to fellowship with but also to enterprise together.
How it all began: In 1990 a “the question” popped into my head: “If I were Christ, would I be satisfied with what John McIntosh has done so far in his life for Christ?” Almost before the question was formed in my mind the answer “No” reverberated about my being. I still periodically ask myself that same question and the answer has not changed.
That’s the reason I get up everyday and dedicate myself anew, in my irrefutably flawed and woefully inadequate way, to the cause of Christ. Hoping one day I might hear a different answer. So for what some might consider rather selfish reasons this place was created for Christians (and Christians to be) in the hope that it might, in some measure, evidence my devotion to the cause of Christ.
You see I am faced with the same dilemma all Christians face. Being all too well acquainted with the knowledge of the terrible sins Christ (by His blood and horrific suffering on the cross) washed from my record, what could I ever do to repay Him? To repay that most selfless of acts ever consummated here on earth?
If we, as Christians are honest with ourselves we know there really is no way to humanly repay Christ for the peace He spilled over in our hearts. Yet a true Christian will go to his grave attempting to do just that. We cannot repay Him yet we cannot stop trying - that’s our dilemma. And in a very real sense, I believe, that is one of our greatest strengths.
So because we Christians must ever give our best for Christ, I humbly ask you to join in this exciting way for Christians to advance the cause of Christ and to connect and interact with each other. In so doing I sincerely hope and especially pray that, with input from millions of Christ loving individuals all over the world, God might look at the place we have created on the World Wide Web and see it as, certainly not perfect, but a good work, one for which we may hear him say: Well done good and faithful servants. ….…
Now to utilize tsoul as a tool to add to your contribution to the cause of Christ it is not necessary that you believe exactly what I believe. History buffs are quick to tell us that over the centuries Christianity has, from time to time, had some rather heated debates over some beliefs not shared by all Christians
Christian scholars like to refer to these as “in-house” debates; arguments or discussions within and among the family of believers(Please see What We Believe for details on our specific beliefs).So I’m sure it is not news to you that not all Christians agree on everything. And of course not all Christians belong to the same local church; nor do we all belong to the same specific denomination
But all Christians belong to Christ
Thus, in a real sense all those who are saved, whether living or dead, are members of the “family of God” as spoken of in Ephesians 3:14 & 15. In that sense tsoul is “The Christian Place” where all family members, i.e. all living followers of Christ all over the world can fellowship together with the goal of advancing the knowledge of God (for ourselves and others) and to interact in positive uplifting ways with fellow believers.
Now, please do not misunderstand me I’m not saying that if you are not a born again believer then please keep out of “The Christian Place”. Please forbid such a thought on the part of any individual - Almighty God. No, no, no, I want as many non believers as possible to come to tsoul believing with all my heart that if they examine the evidenced for Christ we have accumulated here, then they will reach the same conclusion we followers of Christ have reached – He Is the Salvation of the world and the source of unending life (tsoul).
Christ is the unifying force that brings us all together and it is Christ, specifically a deeply rooted desire to advance the cause of Christ, that motivated me to create first The Light Ministries in 1990; and then tsoul.com in the mid nineties
Tsoul of course has no walls and is not limited by any physical realm – in cyberspace we can come together and worship our Lord and Savior; and allow Him to work through us to help build each other up, strengthen one another and extend His love to a world in dire need of His saving grace.
Let those who like to tear others down spend their time on social networking sites which are not too particular about what kinds of content they permit. Regrettably there seems to be a plethora of such sites with a kind of “Wild West” mentality. You go there because a friend has invited you to view their “space” through a small “tube” and you are repulsed by what might be adjacent to what your friend is offering. Frankly much of what is present on some of these sites goes beyond poor taste and wholeheartedly embraces vulgarity. Such venal, corrupting debasements demean humanity and can only serve the cause of Satan.
Call me a “prude” if you wish, but I fail to see how humanity is served when cyberspace is turned into a giant playground for “school yard bullies” serving up the “N” word like it is ice cream or “adolescents” of all ages willing to do anything for their “fifteen minutes of fame”. Does the term infamy mean anything to them? Apparently not! These sights (I meant “sites”) do one thing for me, they reinforce my conviction the world is in great need of our Lord and Savior
Now you may not always totally agree with every opinion expressed here at tsoul, but I have faith you will find that our proprietary screening process does an extremely effective job of eliminating “hate speech”, “attack speech”, “vulgarities”, “indecencies”, “obscenities” and other repugnant content. We have devoted considerable resources to creating and maintaining our proprietary Content Review and Analysis System (CARS) to insure the kind of content most Christians would find offensive will not appear at The Christian Place.
This added insurance that our content will always be wholesome and family friendly does come at a price. It does require some time lapse from the time a content creator uploads content to when it is made available to the public. For the vast majority of our content providers who are individuals and organizations that would never knowingly do anything to blemish the name of Christianity we apologize for any inconvenience this delay in the availability of their content might create. Unfortunately that is a price we all have to pay to have the assurance that tsoul will always be a Christian friendly place.
We may also have to sacrifice something in the way of the kind of “worldly” popularity some of these “Wild West” sites enjoy. And this likely will cost us in lost advertising revenue. So be it! “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Matthew 16:26 KJV …
About My Walk with Christ: I am not a “Johnny come lately” to the cause of Christ, even though, as a child and teenager many of my friends did call me “Johnny”. In fact I’ve been a believer since 1973 and have been actively engaged in a daily quest to expand my knowledge of God and advance the cause of Christ since 1990. It was in 1990, shortly after “the question” first popped into my head, that an idea was born. The idea (for which I give all praise and glory to God) was to create a non-denominational Bible study guide and offer it free of any charge or obligation to all churches. Daily Bible devotionals help believers grow in our knowledge of God; our understanding of what being a Christian means, how best to apply the precepts of the Bible to our everyday lives and, sometimes, a devotional is a non-believer’s first introduction to Christ because some contain God’s Plan of Salvation.
Back in the day when friends still called me Johnny most churches could afford to provide all their members with a daily devotional. Today, with elevated print and distribution costs only the larger churches do so. I noticed this when I began visiting churches in 1990. And since the vast majority of churches are relatively small I concluded free Bible study guides given to churches could make a contribution to the cause of Christ. (I think it was
American Church Listthat told me the average church has 100 members).
The problem was, although I felt called by God to create such a devotional and with a master’s degree in education I might even have the capacity to create a simple yet effective planned system of Bible study; I did not have the personal financial resources to sustain the ongoing distribution of such guides to ten of thousands of Churches. I think it was Hank Hanegraf (The Bible Answer Man) who I originally heard saying: “The gospel is free but someone has to pay to put in the plumbing”. Our Salvation is a free gift from Christ, but someone has to underwrite the cost of spreading the good news to others and to continually encourage them in God’s word. So I hit upon the idea of permitting businesses to advertise in the guides as a way of underwriting the costs associated with giving away, what amounts now to millions of copies.
I said: “…I hit upon…” truth is - God gave me this also. In fact God is the author of all good things in my life – the bad things; I’m the author of those. To my knowledge our printed devotionals are the only ones in which a business can advertise. A strange kind of ministry you would not be faulted for thinking. But isn’t the Bible filled with mysterious ways God has used to meet the needs of His people and bring the lost to Him? For believers, the explicit purpose is to reinforce Christianity's core values and to help them advance from believers to followers of Christ. For non-believers the aim is to reveal the peace that is found in an abiding faith in God and His only begotten son, Jesus Christ.
Another clarification: I know I said I am not a “Johnny come lately” to the cause of Christ. Maybe I should have said I am not “now” a “Johnny come lately”. The fact is I have traveled through every possible “belief” system one can possess regarding the existence of God. You can be an atheist insisting there is no God, an agnostic claiming not to know either way or you can be a believer. I have been all of these and now struggle everyday to do all within my substantial human limitations to follow Christ in the individual path I believe He has laid before me. “With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.” Matthew 19:26 KJV
My atheistic period was heavily influenced by my deeply troubled atheist father. When my father was sixteen he had a very unfortunate thing happen – a shattering event that had a profound impact not only on his own life but the lives of my mother and their eight children. Have you ever committed a childish indiscretion like skipping school? At sixteen my father skipped school and while his father went looking for him, his father was killed in an automobile accident. The Grandfather I never knew died at age thirty-seven while looking for his truant son.
To make matters worse, my father’s aunt, at the wake screamed hysterically: “You killed him – you killed my brother”. My father was blamed for the death of his own father. Christians know that when bad things happen we either move closer toward God or drift further away. My father went in the wrong direction. Perhaps he asked himself: “How can there be an all powerful God if something that awful can happen? And if there is such an all powerful God and He let it happen then I don’t want anything to do with him.”
My father began drinking at an early age and by the time he was the father of eight, he had persistently worked to acquire his post doctorate in alcoholism. Perhaps he drank to drown out the echo of his aunt’s condemnation rumbling in his mind, but I seriously question whether it was ever a very effective curative. His life stands as a testament to the fact that alcohol not only solves nothing it dramatically escalates all problems.
My father died of cancer at age fifty-one. Certainly young enough in sequential years to have a fighting chance of beating cancer, but my father was very old in a body he punished not only with drink but multiple packs of Camels everyday. By the time cancer invaded his body he had weakened it to the point where it did not have a chance of survival. And it is possible there was a part of him that did not want to survive. Carrying his kind of burden one might develop a desire to end what must have been for him an agonizing existence.
In a strange way there was a benefit to my fathers smoking and drinking. As a child I would hear my father awakened by his own coughing. The first thing he would do is reach for a Camel. Some days he smoked five packs. Then he would reach for a bottle of beer – sometimes a case a day. Because I saw the evils these substances can wrought in a live I never developed a taste for either. My father was fond of saying: “It is an ill wind that doesn’t blow some good”. God can take a bad situation and use it for good. Joseph’s brothers meant to harm him but God used their mistreatment to create a great visionary. Joseph was so sure his people would one day be free he insisted his bones leave Egypt with them.
The real tragedy for my father is, when this tragic event occurred he did not turn to the only One capable of healing any hurt, lifting any burden and restoring any lost soul. My father’s philosophy of life was summed up in what I often heard him say: “Life is a cruel joke barely worth living”. The impact my father’s tragedy had on his children is recounted in a modern day Parable. I was inspired to author this story by several songs my brother James had written over the years which he shared with me after our mother died of pancreatic cancer in 1996.
Our mother Alice Esther McIntosh is the role model for Esther Russell, the mother character in the story. I have completed a screen play based on this story and my hope is one day God might cause it to be made into a feature length movie. It’s a potent testimony of the power of Christ in a life.
As a child I remember my mother scrubbing her children for Sunday school and my father always getting very agitated. He would frequently stop me at the door as we were leaving and say something like: “How many times have I told you there is no God. And even if there was what makes you think he would care about a buck toothed kid like you?” On another occasion he said: “Johnny when you see the preacher ask him: ‘Can God build a rock bigger than he can move?’”.
As I said my father was an atheist and this is a favorite atheist ploy – to attempt to confound believers with illogical questions. Like most parents he tried to raise his son in a way that would lead to sharing his world view.
Remember he believed that “life is a cruel joke barely worth living”. My mother on the other hand believed that life was a wonderfully precious gift from God. As you might well imagine I was a very confused young man. But my inclination, especially by the time I was a teenager, was to adopt my father’s belief system because he was a very persuasive individual. He was given an aptitude test in his late forties and they considered his education level equivalent to a post doctorate degree.
When his father died he quit school in his senior year to support his mother and three siblings, yet he remained an avid reader till he died. He read the works of all the great philosophers and many other books. He read many of the great contemporary books. He devoted most of Sunday to reading the entire Sunday paper; and, believe it or not, in those days we actually had newspapers worth reading.
When my father died at fifty one I was twenty-four years old. That began my agnostic period. This feeling of not knowing whether or not to believe in a superior being left me as empty as when I was just as sure as my father that there was no God. But when I was twenty nine I had the most incredible experience of my life. It was a Sunday service in a small Methodist Chapel, I don’t even remember the sermon topic and it is very possible I wasn’t even listening to the preacher. I don’t remember. What I do remember is my life was a mess and I was hopelessly lost.
I felt totally alone and saw the world as a most inhospitable place. This was the sixties. President Kennedy had been assassinated. Martin had been taken; Bobby was also dead. Every day I would pick up the paper and another member of Congress or another Corporate Executive was under indictment or suspicion of one crime or another. Everybody seemed to be living according to their own rules. And rule number one seemed like: “There are no rules”.
Nobody in my circle of friends seemed to have a clue as to what life was about, why we were here, what was the point of it. Life started to look more and more like a “cruel joke barely worth living”. And if that was the case, why not follow the TV commercial’s advice and “go for the gusto” while you still can? After all it’s a dog-eat-dog world and when you’re dead your dead – right?
Then suddenly in this small chapel, in an instant I went from feeling completely alone and empty to being totally embraced by a force so incredibly powerful yet somehow not terrifying in any way. A comforting presence - like being held by my mother after a childhood hurt yet amplified a thousand fold. My heart was overflowing with a sense of peace so immense I wondered for a moment if I might explode. In that moment I was touched by something outside myself yet something that could reach into the deepest core of my being. Tears were spilling from my eyes releasing years of accumulated pain that had resulted from not having any sense of connection with my creator. From that moment forward I was a believer.
To share how you came to Christ go to: ADD YOUR STORY now or look for this same link on the left side of nearly every tsoul.com page.
Now at that very instant I became a believer but I did not immediately become a follower of Christ. In fact I didn’t graduate from believer to follower until age forty. Honestly, like so many I didn’t even know there was a distinction between the two. That moment made me realize there certainly is a God – who else could touch me like that? And in some measure this belief in God made me a better person.
But perhaps my progression from believer to follower could have been greatly accelerated if my conversion from non-believer to believer had occurred in a different setting. What has always been very curious to me is: even though it had to be obvious to the Minister and to those seated about me that something of great consequence was taking place in me, no one came up to me after the service to say: “John do you realize what just happened – do you know what it means?” Or, “May we help you take the next step?”
Perhaps this was the case because it wasn’t an evangelical setting, or maybe because the Minister had to dash off to another service. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not second guessing God’s timing for coming into my life. It truly remains the greatest day of my life and I’m comforted knowing He has never left me. But I still wonder what my thirties might have been if I had been as close to God then as I feel I am now. I’m sure they would have been better for me.
Perhaps, though it was all part of God’s plan. Eventually I came to realize it is possible that if I had moved more rapidly from believer to follower I never would have started my ministry. You see it was reading the Bible that led me to understand the distinction between believer and follower. Maybe if I had moved quickly from believer to follower I might have concluded everyone moves from believer to follower in short order. In that event I would not have been aware of the need to encourage people to study the Bible and the power of God’s word to help people make that transition from atheist to agnostic to believer and ultimately to follower of Christ.
If you have stuck with this thesis thus far – hats off to you! I probably don’t have to confess how much I like to talk; especially when it is on the topic of what God has done in my life and what I’m trying to do to contribute to the cause of his only begotten son Jesus Christ.
Tsoul.com will never accomplish the fullness of what it can do for the cause of Christ without input from Christ loving people just like you. I encourage you to join us here at tsoul.com and together we can make a real difference in the lives Christ will touch through us. And one day, in heaven and possibly right here on earth you will hear that: 1) your story of how you came to Christ, or 2) your prayer, or 3) your sermon, or your 4) Christian Friendly Business has touched someone in a way that will make you know you have been used by God for the cause of Christ. Believe me it is a wonderful feeling.
I thank you from the bottom of my heart for all you may do here or any where for the cause of Christ. May God richly bless you in all that you do.
John McIntosh
Founder
The Light Ministries, Inc & tsoul.com
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