High Hopes for December

I am still looking forward to seeing The Last Restoration in action at an upcoming event. In case you haven’t been following my blog, TLR is a charismatic group that provides people with proper baptisms and helps them to operate in the gifts of the Holy Spirit. They don’t just pray for you and give you advice; they expect you to do the same things for others. If you get healed at a TLR event, they will expect you to turn around and get someone else healed.

One of the big problems with modern charismatic Christianity is selfishness. We don’t go to church to serve God. We go to help ourselves. We want to be forgiven. We want to be healed physically. We want God to give us money, spouses, and houses. We want to feel better. We want to be saved from hell.

That’s not how it’s supposed to work.

The other day, I saw a link to a TLR video criticizing the sinner’s prayer. I was amazed. I wondered what they could possibly have found wrong with it. It’s the prayer people say in order to receive salvation.

I took a look, and it turned out they had a point. The sinner’s prayer is about salvation. You confess, forgive, say you believe, and ask for forgiveness and salvation. You do not beg God to help him give your life to him. If you don’t ask Jesus to help you follow him, praying the sinner’s prayer is selfish!

We don’t want people to go to hell, so we run around making them say the prayer. We think this is the most important thing we can do, but is it? Jesus said he would return after the gospel of the kingdom was preached to all peoples, but we are focusing way too much on the gospel of salvation, which is not the same thing. A pimp can pray the sinner’s prayer and get back in his fancy car and go back to work. We’re supposed to repent and have the Holy Spirit put the kingdom of God inside us.

I felt selfish when I thought about the video, but then I remembered something. When I turned back to God in 2007 and started going to Trinity Church in Miami, I wanted to serve.

Twice in my life, I have decided to start attending church. Both times, I expected to be helped and guided by people who knew what they were doing and could put me on the right path. Both times, I was wrong.

When I joined Trinity, I became an armorbearer. I joined the prison ministry. I joined the prayer team. I drove buses to homeless shelters to bring people to services. I cooked. I showed up to help them build a set for a drama production. I did lots of stuff.

As an armorbearer, I was walled off, the way an oyster walls off an irritating piece of sand in its shell. The prison ministry went nowhere and did nothing at all, and the supervising pastor ran off because he realized the church was jerking him around. The church quit supporting the buses. They drove me out of the kitchen. I gave up on the drama team because they dropped part of a set on me and nearly killed me. They were unsafe and inept, and they would not listen to correction.

When I moved to New Dawn Ministries, things went well at first, and then I got walled off again.

I have also made outreaches in other very significant ways.

I had some selfish desires when I was at Trinity; no doubt about it. On the other hand, I tried very hard to serve. Sometimes they made it impossible, and other times, they merely made it unpleasant and pointless. Same goes for New Dawn.

After I left New Dawn, I felt that God did not want me to join any more churches or serve any more pastors. I still believe these things. Pastors do a tremendous amount of harm. They are very effective obstacles.

I have been somewhat too hard on myself, remembering the selfish desires very well and forgetting my sincere efforts to serve.

I feel that over the last couple of years, I have forgotten about service, or at least I have put it on the back burner. Jesus didn’t go to the cross so I could have a big house and hide from the world every day. He wanted me to help him reach others. The Bible says this is the reason why we don’t drop dead and go to heaven as soon as we ask for salvation. It makes sense. What other reason could God have for leaving us in this filthy place, surrounded by hate?

The driving reason that makes me want to see TLR at work is a desire to get my baptism done correctly and obtain whatever supernatural freedom and power I was supposed to get the first time around. That’s fine, but without more, it’s selfish. The video about the sinner’s prayer reminded me that there was a price. I’m going to have to have some involvement in evangelism.

I don’t look forward to standing on the sidewalk with grinning Danish people, trying to get random individuals to submit to prayer. I am way too shy to accost strangers, and in Florida, there is always the possibility of a shooting. Still, I have to reach people in some way or other, or I am wasting my time here on earth.

God’s power is like electricity, and electricity won’t flow well without a completed circuit to ground. The people we help are the ground.

I think TLR is the real deal. I don’t think they have every piece of the puzzle, but they seem to be right about what they’re right about, and they appear to heal people.

I saw an interesting video the other day. They were in an airport in Russia. A young man had a disgusting hand problem. A bone in his hand was loose, and it could be seen pushing up the skin when he manipulated it. Torben Sondergaard prayed for him briefly, and the bone stopped moving. That was really something.

TLR coaches Christians who have already spent a lot of time praying for the sick. Their disciples say they generally failed to get healings in the past, but after the TLR training, they get them quickly and often. That interests me. I find I have to push a lot to get healed. I have to pray and then spend a lot of time praising and thanking. It seems I’m doing something wrong. I’m working too hard.

I don’t know how well their methods work on longtime Christians. Another healer reports that it’s easier to get unbelievers healed than Christians. He says we stay in our sins, and it blocks our healing. You can see this in Isaiah 59. He believes God gives unbelievers more slack, because they don’t know what they’re doing wrong. Does TLR have the same problem? I’ll bet they do. We’ll find out.

I’m the world’s worst evangelist. Unless you count my dad’s questionable request for salvation, I have never gotten a single person to accept Jesus. I’m tired of having a terrible sales presentation.

One of my oldest friends is homosexual and solicits masochist partners on perverted websites, and I can’t tell him for a fact that I can set him free. I know other people who need help, and I can’t promise fast relief. It would be nice to have something stronger and faster to offer.

We have to give our whole lives to Jesus. That’s a fact. We have the idea that if we move a few inches closer to him, our lives will go smoothly. In truth, it invites attack without preparing us to deal with it. A lot of our defeats are caused by our refusal to jump into the deep end.

Derek Prince said something interesting in one of his books. People think the baptism with the Holy Spirit will end their problems, but he said you don’t how what spiritual warfare is until you get the baptism. It’s a provocation. Unless you follow up, it’s like putting on an army uniform, insisting on living behind enemy lines, and turning down weapons.

I’ve learned there are additional things I have to get rid of. I call it “anger porn.”

Ever watch a Steven Seagal movie? How about Jack Reacher? How about violent Marvel movies? Ever watch people shoot criminals on Youtube? This stuff feeds self-pity and anger.

Anger porn movies often follow a common plot. A very, very bad person does something extremely cruel to someone the hero cares about, like John Wick’s ridiculous puppy. The hero finds out, and then he spends the rest of the movie working up to the scene where he doles out incredible cruelty to the villain. How many times have you seen it? The villain gets burned alive, crushed to death, slowly torn in half…something that would be a horror to watch, but for the earlier scenes in which he provoked extreme anger.

Moviemakers and TV people set us up to enjoy cruelty. They even make torture acceptable. How many times have you seen someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger torture someone? Americans are supposedly kind people who find torture repugnant, but at the movies, we root for it, and it makes us feel satisfied.

I have a self-pity problem. I know it. Without realizing it, I have used it to excuse all sorts of things. I overeat in order to comfort myself, because somewhere in my heart, I feel that life has been unfair to me. I say harsh things in order to punish people. I have cruel thoughts. I do things I should not, because I feel that past mistreatment makes them justified.

If you knew me, you wouldn’t think I was like that. I try to be nice to people and treat them fairly. These negative things are all very muted, and I fight them. Nonetheless, the drives are still there.

Self-pity and cruelty are siblings. If you pity yourself, you feel that cruelty is not only permissible but virtuous. You tell yourself rage is “righteous anger.” You make lots of excuses for yourself. BLM and Antifa are self-pity movements, and the small number of conservatives who are reacting with racism and hate are also motivated by self-pity.

Self-pity leads to jealousy. It leads to taking pleasure in the suffering of people who have things you think you have been cheated out of. It leads to stealing and vandalism. It’s a big deal. Rioters riot because of self-pity. They want to “get even” with far-off, faceless Caucasians or Jews or Asian storeowners who keep them down and seem to own everything.

Self-pity interferes with confession and repentance, which are gateways to peace, love, and freedom. Self-pity walls demons in and gives them job security. It’s like tenure.

I am all done with superhero movies, which are stuffed to bursting with egregious cruelty. I don’t care what Thanos or Lex Luthor has done. It’s not helpful to me to applaud while either of them is dismembered or boiled or whatever.

If you keep a door open, you can’t complain about the rats in your house.

I just threw out the only remaining DVDs I considered problematic, from the standpoint of cruelty and anger. One was an old James Caan movie called Thief. I also found a The Family Guy DVD set hiding in a box. I believe I bought it while my cable was out due to a hurricane. Sick stuff. I found a The Twilight Zone box set, which I also threw out. Too much occult content.

Derek Prince pointed out something interesting. God told the Jews to get rid of cursed objects in order to avoid being destroyed along with them. Fine with me. Anything is better than being on God’s bad side. God himself tried to kill Moses for failing to circumcise his son, and I don’t think I’m a bigger favorite than Moses.

I’m glad I don’t have tattoos God hates! You can’t just throw those out.

Christianity doesn’t work very well for most of us, but on the other hand, we do so many things wrong, there is no way we can blame the faith itself. It reminds me of what I say about recipes. If I give you a recipe, and you make changes when you cook it, you have no business coming back to me later and complaining about it. You didn’t really use my recipe, so you don’t know what it’s actually like. If you make up your own recipe for Christianity, you can’t comment on the validity of the faith.

I would like to continue getting rid of the things I mixed into Christianity, and I would like to keep gathering things I’m leaving out. I believe getting rid of cursed objects and practices is powerful, and I expect to get good results from outreach, too.

Maybe one day we’ll start doing Christianity nearly right, and then Jesus will be able to return for a spotless bride, as the Bible predicts.

If you read Ephesians 5, I think you will find confirmation that what I’m saying is right.