The Vessels of the Temple are not Man’s Spittoons

Last night I had some fun. My chef friends Liz and Donna volunteered to prepare food for a fundraiser at my church, and they asked me to help, so I got to work in the big commercial kitchen Donna manages. There were about seven of us, all told.

I didn’t do anything all that interesting. I followed other people’s recipes. I chopped herbs and made herbed cream cheese spread, and then I grilled a whole bunch of chicken breasts and sliced them into hors d’oeuvre portions. I also got to use a deep fryer for the first time in my life. We have one at church, but I never fooled with it. Last night I used it to make piles of fried plantain slices.

This kitchen uses knives provided by a service. They come and pick up the knives every week, and they replace them with sharp ones. I didn’t bring any of my own knives, so I grabbed a 10″ chef’s knife off the wall and went to work on the herbs. I was very impressed. It took an edge very quickly, and it made short work of the herbs, much as a Chinese cleaver would.

I decided to check the brand and look into it further. The name is “Mundial.” It’s a European company, but they manufacture in Brazil to keep prices low. They’re not fancy. The blades are thin and somewhat flexible, and they have plastic NSF handles. But they seem to work extremely well.

Anyone familiar with this blog knows I have had bad experiences with expensive Japanese knives. They chip easily, they can’t be put in a dishwasher, and they cost a fortune. I think they’re a complete waste of money. My favorite chef’s knife is a $22 Forschner, and my favorite all-around knife is a carbon-steel Chinese cleaver that ran me $9. I love a good cheap knife.

I found the Mundials on Amazon, and I decided to try a cleaver, a santoku, and a 14″ slicer. I’m hoping the cleaver will work as well as my Chinese job, with the added convenience of stainless. We’ll see.

I don’t know if the fundraiser will work. I got an invitation, but I’m not going. I will make a total of four trips to or for church this week. I felt like that was plenty. On the way to the commercial kitchen, I got a text asking me to start teaching a class in a discipleship program. I’d love to do it, but I can’t do everything.

The church has a gigantic mortgage, and I don’t think there is any possibility that we will be able to pay it off, so the fundraiser doesn’t seem like a good idea. I think we would be better off moving to a building we can afford. Most people who attend the church are poor or middle class, and the size of the congregation (and therefore the offerings) is limited by the size of the sanctuary. It’s very obvious that this is not a good situation.

I don’t think God is going to swoop in and save the day, because we don’t take care of the things he has already given us. We’re doing many, many things badly instead of doing the important things well.

We’re also having problems because we attract the wrong kind of people. We’re using secular music and prizes and all sorts of other tricks to get people to show up. The problem with this is that we get people who want to party, while we offend serious Christians. Over and over, people come to me complaining. They hate the loud music. They find the rap beats offensive. I can’t defend these things. I just tell them not to worry about the services, because they can get what they need in the prayer groups.

We have something like 2,000 young people coming to the youth services every week, but an awful lot of them come to socialize, not to meet God. Let’s face it. They come to get laid. Kids have always used churches as cheap substitutes for clubs, and we are helping them by making our church as much like a club as possible.

Some people believe that anything that gets people to come to church is a good idea. They say, “It’s all about souls.” That’s wrong. The problem with that kind of thinking is that it grows a church full of weak people who will eventually fail. A human being is like a seed in dry soil. When you receive salvation, you’re like a seed that has sprouted. If you don’t get the right teaching after you sprout, you rot. You can’t grow a healthy church with stunted Christians who never grow up.

I believe we’re trading strong future souls for the weak ones we’re getting now. These people won’t have power in their lives. They won’t be blessed. They won’t have anything going on that will make other people want what they have, so they will be very poor evangelists. If we taught people to live for God and walk by faith, and if we made them understand that they are not to conform to the world, great things would happen to them, and down the road, they would be so blessed the unsaved would find their testimony compelling.

We worry too much about pleasing men. We never hear anything about the anti-Christian things our President does, because so many people in the church think he’s great. We have given special treatment to rappers, and I don’t mean the Christian kind. We hear a lot about the great things God will do for us, but we don’t hear much about getting in touch with him personally and submitting to him, and we don’t hear much about his angry side. God kills people. God gives people cancer. Sin and iniquity are still very dangerous. We don’t talk much about that. That puts the people in danger.

What can you do? No church is perfect. Some churches let the mob lead. Others reject the Holy Spirit. Every church has a weakness. At least our people acknowledge the Holy Spirit’s existence. He still has a foothold.

I would like to move north and find a church where I would not be faced with the amazing paradox of liberal Christians. How anyone can claim to serve God while voting for enemies of Israel, the church, God-given sex roles and the unborn is beyond me. People who know God well and study his ways inevitably become conservative, because the left is doing everything it can to oppose God. I never imagined I would see a charismatic church were so many people preach one way and vote another.

I know many wonderful people at my church, and I would really miss them if I left, but I know there will eventually come a point where the church changes or I move on.

God is still doing powerful things in my prayer group. More people are praying in tongues and learning about the Holy Spirit. The other day someone who has been heavily into carnal effort came to me and started talking about the way prayer in tongues was changing his life. This is someone who has become extremely intolerant of any kind of dissent, so it surprised me to see him talking this way. He hasn’t been learning this in the sermons, I guarantee you.

My friends are I are seeing more and more blessings in our lives. That will continue. We are getting more revelation. We are getting help with our character flaws. God is bringing people to us and slowly increasing our numbers. Maybe a time will come when there are enough of us to draw attention to God’s power, so others will turn away from baby food and try what we’re having.

The other night I felt God’s presence more strongly than I have in twenty years. I could physically feel the Holy Spirit moving in my body. For a time I felt a strange pressure in my head, and it reminded me of a tree root growing in a rock and splitting it. For a long time, I’ve been saying that the Holy Spirit is the living water that feeds the mustard tree within each of us, which is the kingdom of God. I’ve said it grows and splits the rock and changes us from inside. When I felt it inside me this week it struck me as funny. I felt that God was reminding me that my head is one of the hardest rocks there is.

What is happening to us is as real as dirt. I guess that means persecution is coming. Oh, well. I’ve started keeping a diary of revelations that come to me, and here is the latest thing I felt God was saying to me: “Satan isn’t that tough.” It doesn’t mean Satan is weak or stupid, or that we don’t have to give him the same respect we would give loaded guns or rattlesnakes. It just means he isn’t as hard to beat as you might think, and that you should expect to win. It should not surprise you. He has made himself seem bigger than he is, but he’s just a mortal spirit. He is very small compared to our God. He has an end, and we don’t.

I have to order parts for my next tube amp now. Hope this material is useful to someone.