Lift Your Snout up to Heaven

Another weird week has gone by.

A day or two ago, someone told me Kanye West had gotten married, and that a pastor from my old church officiated. Once again, that place affirms the worst things I’ve thought about it.

Eventually people from the church expressed their approval online. That was to be expected. When you’re blind, and you lead the blind into deeper blindness, they will be impressed whenever you wander into a new ditch.

I saw an online defense of this grotesque affair. The usual excuses were made. We aren’t supposed to judge. Anything that increases the size of the church is justified, because it means more people go to heaven.

Of course, that stuff is wrong.

First of all, we are REQUIRED to judge. Matthew 7 is not a ban on judging. It is a warning that before we judge others–which is one of our duties–we have to judge ourselves. Otherwise we lose perspective, and we start demanding more of others than we demand of ourselves. And we start to think of ourselves as righteous, which is a big mistake. We are supposed to judge ourselves, and having done that, we are expected to judge others. We are not expected to scream and yell and tell them they’re going to hell, but we are supposed to point out their errors so they can correct their courses.

So I am tired of hearing “Judge not.” It’s the motto of the people who are using homosexuality to destroy Christian lives.

Second, as a pastor pointed out in my church Tuesday, Jesus did not shoot for the biggest church possible. In fact, he shrank the church. On Pentecost, out of the thousands of people who claimed to love him, only 120 were left. That’s just the way the kingdom of God works. Most people don’t get in. Most people will not listen and change.

The gate is small, and the path is constricted. It’s just like the birth canal. We are supposed to be quality believers, not fair-weather Christians. If we are strong and full of knowledge, we will be able to raise up future generations of believers. If not, no matter how many of us there are, we will fail, and the church will either cease to exist or cease to be relevant because it’s so weak.

Jesus doesn’t want people to go hell, but then again, he’s not the one who sends them there. God does force people into hell after they die, but while they live, their own choices determine their paths. Because of free will, God is not able to save everyone. That’s a fact of existence, and it can’t be changed. Nothing we can do will prevent hell from being filled up. We can reduce the population, but that’s about it.

If we whore ourselves out and stop teaching about sin and transformation, we will become part of the world, which is exactly what happened at my old church. It’s not really a church. It’s a whorehouse. It belongs to the secular world. It does tremendous harm. I know because I deal with the refugees.

So numbers do not justify resisting God. What we gain in the present day, we will lose, with interest, in the future.

I’m all for evangelizing Kanye West, but that’s not what’s happening. He’s evangelizing the church for Satan. He is teaching kids they can fornicate and grovel for society’s approval and still be good Christians. That’s wrong. He should not be held up as a role model. He should be held up as a warning. He is ignorant. He is obnoxious. He is arrogant. He makes his living corrupting children. He lives a cursed life, no matter how it looks to the simpleminded. No pastor should be associating with him publicly until he repents. Once again, the world is leading Trinity Church, when Trinity Church should be leading the world.

It’s sad, because the young pastor who performed the rite is headed down a blind alley. He is trying to make himself famous using his natural abilities. The hard truth is that he doesn’t have a lot of natural ability. He’s not particularly smart. His personality can be off-putting. He has no talents to speak of. What he did have, way back when, was the ability to receive revelation and pass it on to others. That was his only real hope of success. But it’s not what he is relying on.

There are talented preachers out there who have hit the big time because they have talents. Benny Hinn has a giant ego, a complete lack of shame, and a fair talent for showmanship. Keith Craft is a talented speaker with a big bag of motivational tricks he took from people like Zig Ziglar. Kenneth Copeland is a gifted manipulator, and he has the ability to intimidate and dominate people. Joel Osteen is shrewd and cunning, and he knows what people like to hear. The pastors at Trinity look up to people like this, and they want to be like them, but they don’t have their gifts. In the natural, they are mediocre. They need God’s help to make it.

For every Led Zeppelin, there are a thousand local bands that play in filthy bars. For every rock musician who becomes a millionaire at 20, there are a thousand who find themselves living in rented trailers at the age of 60. That’s how the natural world works, and pastors who chase the TBN sideshow barkers are at the mercy of that system. They always think they’re on the verge of success, but for the vast majority, it will never come. Satan gives a few people the illusion of success so many others will chase the same mechanical rabbit. It’s like a lotttery. Not everyone can win.Lotteries give, but their purpose is to take.

So I’m not happy about the Kanye West marriage, but I don’t think it matters, because that church was going nowhere anyway.

Things keep going crazy in my own walk. Having escaped the shadow of the curse on the other church, I am growing in the light in the new one.

I have received a lot of revelation lately. The pieces of the puzzle keep coming to me because I pray in tongues. I can only scratch the surface here, because it would take 10,000 words to cover it all, but I’ll give it a shot.

I’m learning more and more about grace, which means everything–things we haven’t earned–that God does for us.

It’s very clear that we are not supposed to try to help God. We should obey, but we shouldn’t do anything he hasn’t told us to do. If you go out and build an orphanage when God hasn’t told you to do it, you have sinned, no matter how many kids you help. Imagine what God’s response would have been had the Hebrews built an orphanage for the children of Jericho.

The Bible calls us “heirs,” and an heir is a person who has already received title to things that belonged to a dead person. If you’re in your dad’s will, and he’s alive, you’re not an heir yet. Legally, it’s incorrect to call you an heir until he dies.

On the other hand, there are little hints as to how God feels about carnal people. He calls us heirs, but he says the “wages” of sin is death. So sinners have to work for wages, and we don’t. That makes sense. Work is a curse, found in the book of Genesis. Jesus died to remove it from us. If you choose to pick it back up, you will have to be satisfied with what you can earn instead of receiving the fortune God built.

These days, a lot of people hate heirs. We admire any fool who calls himself a self-made man. A big percentage of Americans support stealing money from heirs via the estate tax, simply because they don’t like to see other people receive things they themselves can’t have. They learned this attitude from Satan. He’s evil, and so are we, but unlike him, we have a way out. He has to be humiliated and burn forever while we enjoy a beautiful life in the presence of God. We are like spoiled younger children whom older children hate. We are like Joseph, Isaac, and Jacob.

We are not comfortable with the idea that we should go to God and seek things we don’t deserve. Churches love to tell us that we have to earn God’s help, which is just stupid. God came down to us and literally died so we could have a fortune he created, and the church ran in front of it and told us we could not have it. And to this day, it sits largely untouched. Healing. Freedom from internal wickedness. Financial success. Victory. It’s all sitting there, with the shrink wrap still on it.

If you think about it, opposing inheritance is moronic. Look at the way it works on earth. A man is born with nothing, and he ruins his life in order to obtain skills, money, land, and possessions. What happens if he doesn’t leave it to his kids? They have to do the same thing. Over and over, succeeding generations end up serving Mammon and their bellies, building the same heap of dung up, over and over again.

Is that intelligent? Why would anyone think that was a good idea? Yes, sure, you can spoil kids, and you may destroy their work ethic. But in reality, that has nothing to do with inherited money. There are plenty of rich kids who work hard even though they don’t have to, and God knows the poor are lazy. Other factors are at work.

God never rewarded ANYONE in the Bible for hard work. Some people point to Ruth, but she didn’t work. She was a charity case. She took grain someone else grew. She paid nothing.

God rewards faith, not work. Faith is more important than need. God will let you die in misery if you don’t have faith. Faith is the money of his world. And he told us the way to get it: habitual prayer in tongues. That’s in the book of Jude.

The Bible is like a catalog. God has put a lot of offers in it. He has made a lot of promises. If you want something from the catalog, you have to BUY it. Isaiah said we would BUY without money. And when you want something from a catalog, you don’t REQUEST it. You ORDER it. You have a legal right to it. So you can decree things that are consistent with God’s promises, and if you have faith, they will come to pass.

Jesus told us that if we told a mountain to be thrown into the sea, and we believed in our hearts, it would be done. He was speaking of the strongholds in our lives. He didn’t just say we could ask for the mountain to be removed. He said we could ORDER it to move. And faith is the lever that moves it. That faith is not you trying to believe; it’s the Holy Spirit believing inside you, because you pray in the Spirit.

You can speak to the curses in your life and tell them to be thrown into the sea.

We don’t do this much. Instead, we beg. Because we have no money to buy. We have no faith. “God please do this. God please do that. Pity me. Feel sorry for me.” That’s not how a rich kid talks. A rich kid speaks with authority. “Here is my dad’s American Express card. Go get that red Porsche and bring it to me NOW, and I want the air conditioning running when it gets here.”

If you lack faith, you are poor in spirit. Literally.

I take an authority-based approach now. I tell my iniquities to be cast into the sea. I tell my persistent curses to be cast into the sea. It works. I’m not saying everything is perfect as of this second, but I am headed the right way, and there is no power that can stop me. I will arrive.

I got a few interesting revelations this morning, which I will pass on.

Remember when Jesus cast the demons out of the Gadarene, and he let them go into pigs, and the pigs drowned themselves? This is related to the story in which Peter walked on water. People love to say Jesus walked on water, but that’s not the important part of the story. What Peter did was more important.

We are born under curses, and we come into this world with demons (our cousins, because their mothers were human) assigned to us. Every Christian has demons, and they may manifest in things like disease, deformity, or iniquities. When you come to Christ, you are supposed to get rid of them.

In the Bible, waters represent beings, or more specifically, their voices and words. The Sea of Galilee was the Satan-hijacked world, full of human and spirit voices. When Peter stood on the water while looking at Jesus, he was showing that a Christian can rise above the evil voices and live in victory.

Look what Psalm 32 says:

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.

People aren’t afraid of actual water. We don’t sit up nights worrying that we will drown in flash floods.This refers to evil words. All the power in the world comes from words.

We are supposed to stay focused on Jesus and his power and promises. And we should be AFRAID to doubt. Peter could have died because of his doubt. As of today, I understand what “fear of the Lord” means. It means fear of doubting him. We should be afraid to slander him in our hearts by doubting him. The Bible equates faith with righteousness, so unbelief is sin. And it’s a very big sin. It cuts the extension cord that makes God’s power tools run for us.

The Gadarene symbolized a saved person. Jesus cast his demons out, and they ran into pigs, who symbolize wordly people. If you get delivered from demons, there is nothing to prevent them from going into your neighbor the Buddhist, because he has no covenant with God. What did the pigs do? They ran to the water–the voices of evil–and drowned. This is how life actually works. If you’re carnal, you will drown. If you can focus on Jesus, you will walk on the power of the world.

The supernatural is everything. If this world is a river, the supernatural is the rain that fills the source. Carnal people fight with natural tools. They work hard. They sin in order to get around problems. They believe in themselves. And eventually, their efforts fail, whether in their own generation, or those of their descendants. But God’s people are supposed to use spiritual tools like blessing, cursing, and prayer. We strike at the roots, not the leaves. And we get long-lasting results. As the Bible says, whom the son sets free is free INDEED. It’s not an illusion intended to lull you into more error.

Faith is a hack. It hacks reality. Using natural tools is like correcting a Microsoft Word error by putting white out on your screen.

Final thing: you can speak cleansing to your DNA. Science now says that events leave impressions on our DNA, and these recordings can be passed on. So believe it or not, curses can be recorded in DNA. It makes sense, since many generational curses are genetic. God gave me a crazy idea; he told me to speak cleansing to my DNA. And I did it. It works. I have no idea what the results will be, but I can tell you that God moved.

I could go on, but that’s all I feel like saying. Put this stuff to work, and you will see more success in your life. Your definition of success may change, but that’s a blessing, too.