The Natural is Born in the Supernatural

Satan pushes people off balance. If you want to please God by being nice, Satan helps you to be TOO nice, and the first thing you know, you’re endorsing homosexuality and every other iniquity that comes in the church door. If you want to please God by warning people about sin, Satan helps you to become so annoyed and frustrated that all you can think about is how much Christians sin, and it becomes impossible for people to perceive God’s love in you, because you’re so crabby.

My old church went overboard on “nice,” although they weren’t very nice to the poor or to the people who worked in the church for nothing. They put on a smiley face and refused to say anything bad about anything. Their excuse was that getting sinful people to church was worth any sacrifice. That’s so crazy. If you refuse to correct people, they don’t grow, and the first thing you know, God’s presence has left your church, and he has started drawing people to other ministries.

That’s exactly what happened to my old church. People leave all the time, and they all say the same thing. God’s presence is gone. I still can’t believe they put Luther Campbell in a place of honor and made us treat him like a VIP. That’s like something out of a Mel Brooks movie. It was right to speak up about it.

On the other hand, I have worried about becoming too enthusiastic about correction.

On the two occasions when Jesus came to me, what I perceived was not correction. I would say that what I perceived was the presence of a completely correct personality. Love flowed from him like a warm breeze. I felt complete acceptance. As long as he was there, I knew my future was assured. He was going to take care of me. I was in the shelter of his arms. It’s tough to make people understand his nature by hollering about their sins. And yet exposing and defeating iniquity is central to his mission. If we are to become like the warm, loving, reassuring being that came to me, criticism has to be part of the process.

Psalm 32 says:

When I kept silent, my bones grew old
Through my groaning all the day long.
For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me;
My vitality was turned into the drought of summer. Selah
I acknowledged my sin to You,
And my iniquity I have not hidden.
I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,”
And You forgave the iniquity of my sin. Selah

For this cause everyone who is godly shall pray to You
In a time when You may be found;
Surely in a flood of great waters
They shall not come near him.
You are my hiding place;
You shall preserve me from trouble;
You shall surround me with songs of deliverance.

You get deliverance and restoration when you confess. Confession is self-criticism. There is no way around that. Ezekiel says:

Moreover He said to me: “Son of man, receive into your heart all My words that I speak to you, and hear with your ears. And go, get to the captives, to the children of your people, and speak to them and tell them, ‘Thus says the Lord God,’ whether they hear, or whether they refuse.”

Also:

“Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel; therefore hear a word from My mouth, and give them warning from Me: When I say to the wicked, ‘You shall surely die,’ and you give him no warning, nor speak to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life, that same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood I will require at your hand.

Different people, independently, speaking prophetically, have told me I am a watchman in my church. That means two things. First, I see things before everyone else. I go through trials before the rest of the church, and I receive blessings before they do. Second, I have to speak up when there is a threat. So inevitably, criticism is part of my life.

Love and criticism are inextricably entwined. Our iniquities grieve the Holy Spirit, who is the only person who can make us like God. If we love God and people correctly, we do it not just with our own love, but with the love of the Holy Spirit. So sin and iniquity matter. They can block the Holy Spirit, and by doing so, they can prevent us from loving. Suppress iniquity, and you promote all the good qualities of God, including love. You promote the gifts (1 Corinthians 12) and fruit (Galatians 5) of the Spirit. This is the primary thing God wants to do in you. Salvation is just fertilization of a crude egg. The development that follows is also important.

You don’t have to be perfect to be a good Christian and live in power and virtue. But if you are an unrepentant idiot and you habitually do things your own way, you are going to have a hard time in this life, and you will live in defeat, unless God exempts you for some reason of his own. Sometimes God gives great power and help to someone who is still in sin, but it’s not something you should count on. To do so is to cheat yourself of the biggest benefit you can experience in a flesh body.

For a long time, I’ve been disgusted by the prosperity and self-help preachers. On Facebook, I block people like Benny Hinn, T.D. Jakes, Paula White, Kenneth Copeland, and Joel Osteen. The older I get, the more I realize God is in this. It’s not self-righteousness. It is the Holy Spirit, telling me to avoid a path that leads to destruction.

If you had never heard of Jesus, and you walked into a megachurch today, what conclusion would you draw? Here are some of the top answers.

1. God wants you to have a lot of money.
2. God wants you to live in perfect health.
3. God wants you to be successful in everything you yourself choose to do.

These goals are distortions and abridgments of what God really wants. God wants us to do well and to be healthy, but to get to that state, we have to focus on other things.

Every one of us is attacked by the enemy. It starts before we are born. Some are spoiled, so they become aggressive, unsympathetic, egotistical, and self-confident (which is a fault). Some are abused, so they become afraid to love. They may become painfully shy, which is a very serious, crippling condition. They may become bitter. They may become convinced they can never succeed at anything. Even after their abusers die, they may internalize them and run themselves down in a persistent inner dialogue that can’t be stopped. And Satan sends demons to all of us–ALL of us–to foster and perpetuate all of these problems.

Without the Holy Spirit, even if we are saved, we have crippled minds and hearts. We may not know it, because we get used to our conditions. But it’s true. We don’t love very well. We lack the fruit of the Spirit.

The inner man has parts, just as the outer man has arms and legs, and if we could see our inner selves, we would see bodies with limbs torn off and eyes gouged out. Parts of us that God intended to function well are either damaged or gone. It’s very serious. If your leg came off, you’d be hysterical, but because you can’t see a mental part or a part of the heart, we don’t get all that upset about our inner damage.

The main thing God wants to do with you, after saving you from hell, is to put heaven inside you. He wants you to love without fear. He wants you to be free from inhibition and anxiety when you do the things he designed you to do. He wants you to be able to stop sinning, even in your heart. When the damage is undone and the torn parts are regrown, you can be like the being that came to me on those two occasions. You can radiate love. You can be free of worry and fear. You can be successful at what you do. You can be confident that every situation will have a good outcome, because that is what God planned.

The blessing-centered preachers don’t care at all about that. They think it’s more important to get your money, or to restore your misguided self-confidence, than to remodel your interior and make it a fit home for the most powerful, loving being in the universe.

For that reason, it is correct to criticize them. It’s beyond correct. It’s crucial. There is no way for us to succeed in God’s kingdom without demolishing their sick doctrines.

In my church, the pastor (and others) get prophetic words all the time. When God speaks, he usually doesn’t say something like, “You’re going to be a millionaire this time next year,” which is the kind of BS you will hear in other churches. He almost always tells people they are going to be healed inside. He says he loves them and that he has not forgotten them. He tells them they have a future in him.

This is what church is supposed to be about. God loves us. He burns with a desire to restore us and give us victory. He has to do it on his own terms, but he wants to do it. When someone wants to do a thing, we say he is “dying” to do it. That’s a figure of speech, but God literally died so he could restore us.

People tell me how nice Joel Osteen is, and how good he makes them feel. They put Paula White quotations of Facebook, thinking they’re helpful. The problem is this: when you need milk, a pacifier will starve you to death. We are getting a pacifier from the TBN preachers. The breast can’t find a way in when the pacifier is in the way. So the “love” of the blind preachers is really hate. It doesn’t just fail to help. It kills. They are not helping. They are ENABLING. And Christians who think everyone who is nice is serving God can’t tell the difference.

Never lose focus on the real goal. You are supposed to communicate with God daily. You are supposed to admit your faults and get his help in ridding yourself of them. You are supposed to covet God’s virtues and work to make them part of you, through his own power, not your useless effort. You are supposed to become like your father. Forget about getting rich. Put the kingdom first, and remember that it is inside you, not in your bank account.

If we can get a grip on this, we will see real love in the church, and we will truly know God. Then we’ll see power and help.