We are Seated in High Places, not High Chairs

I failed to write about the stuff that happened over the last week. I’ll give it another shot.

On Saturday, my church had a meeting for all the volunteers and staffers. Actually, I think we only have four staffers.

We were meeting so the pastor could encourage us to do some obvious things, like not being late, and so he could tell us about some personnel changes.

I’ve been an armorbearer for about two years, and I also work on the prayer team. I have not been particularly anxious to take on more responsibility, because my prayer life is very time consuming already, and the prayer team adds two hours per week. I do nearly nothing as an armorbearer, but I do make myself available, and I show up for church an hour early.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working to align myself with God’s agenda. It started with food. I knew it was wrong to bless food, because food doesn’t really need blessing. The Bible says we are to bless God. But how do you do that? It’s not like he needs a car or a watch.

I decided that when I ate, I would say things related to God’s goals. For example, I might speak defeat to the convenience abortion movement in America and Israel, and I would speak God’s protection to the unborn and to women who were being coerced to murder their children.

When I started doing this, my faith made a quantum jump. If you’re not a physicist, I will explain. A quantum jump is an instantaneous movement from one defined energy level to another. It’s not a gradual thing. I moved from a very good level of faith to a much better level of faith, very quickly.

Why did that happen? It was because God directs his resources to his children, not to idiots who send money to TBN preachers in the hope of becoming rich.

Let me digress. Last night I realized that a person who tries to buy God’s favor with offerings is exactly like a father who thinks he’s doing a great job because he spends money on his kids. All over the world, there are fathers who would rather die than get deeply involved with their kids, and the way they avoid it is by spending money and telling themselves it proves they’re great dads. If you give God money but not your heart, you’re actually using offerings to distance yourself from him.

To return to the point, we are supposed to be God’s children, working devotedly in his family business. If you had a factory that made tons of money, and your son was the manager, and he spent every day watching porn in his office, would you give him raises and send him new resources?

No.

You would back up whoever stood up and tried to do your will. That person would get unlimited support.

That’s how the kingdom of God works, and in the kingdom, faith is money. I just got a raise.

Now when I pray and bless and curse, I try to start out with God’s issues. I speak defeat to the enemies of Israel. I speak faith, revelation, revival, and contrition to the people of America and Israel. I speak defeat to the gay movement. When I cover everything that seems to need attention, I move on to my own issues, and when I do, I have more faith to use in my own behalf.

More and more, I have been serving God, and I have been thinking of myself as his son, involved in the family business.

At the meeting, I saw our pastor make great moves. I have been speaking victory and promotion to the Spirit-led among us, and I have been speaking demotion to the carnal, and what our pastor did was very consistent with my efforts. I consider it a testimony. He put some very effective people in the right positions.

I will admit that I was a little disturbed when he named the armorbearers and didn’t mention me. I started wondering if he was aware I was on the team. If so, was I out? I did not want to be named Grand Poobah, but it would have been discouraging to get the boot from the position I had. I would have felt that nothing I had done had been noticed.

Toward the end of the meeting, he really shocked me. He mentioned me, and he said I had been serving as an armorbearer–whew!–and then he said I was being moved to the position of minister.

That was not expected. This is a position where your duties are almost purely supernatural. You don’t have to mow the grass. You don’t have to drive to the dry cleaners. You pray. You are allowed to lay hands on people, which was something I really wanted to do. You can counsel people. Of course, you can also do things that are not quite as supernatural. You can carry things and so on. But that’s not your reason for being there.

I really didn’t know what to say. They could have made me a deacon or an usher or something. That would have been an honor. But they put me in the exact type of position I wanted. I don’t mind making coffee or running errands. Not at all. But I have some tools that can be very useful, and if I’m constantly doing manual labor, I won’t be able to get much done.

How does this tie into the stuff about serving God? Simple. A minister is a servant. I decided to serve God with serious intent, and the first thing you know, God gave me the title of minister.

Of course, I have concerns about screwing up and being an embarrassment. While our pastor was speaking, he said, “When you become a parent, it changes everything.” He wasn’t talking about ministry, but I still felt it hit home.

These things are connected. When I withheld, God withheld. And this shows why the TBN teaching is so evil. It teaches people that God wants to serve them, and that as long as he gets their money, he doesn’t want anything else. It teaches people to send God telegrams instead of going to see him.

That’s all I have for now, but I think you can see why I’m freaked out.