Up is the New Down

I keep asking God to show me my faults, and–I am tempted to say “unfortunately”–he is coming through. When he does, I feel like I’m on the down slope of a very high roller coaster. I’m thrilled that he heard me, and I’m excited to receive the knowledge. I find myself looking forward eagerly to the improvement that will come of it. But at the same time, the things I see are surprisingly nasty.

I wish there was one thing I could be proud of. I wish my history did not exist. I wish that a thousand years from now, in my purified form, I could look back and not see the disgusting acts and thoughts of my time on earth. But I’m very glad to have pride and denial taken out of me, because there is no way my biased self-image can be permitted to continue to exist.

I don’t receive the knowledge continuously. Every once in a while, I get a burst of it. I don’t think God expects to clean out the Augean Stables of my heart in one session. It’s too big a job, and he isn’t going to subject me to an arduous cold turkey ordeal.

Last night while I was praying, it hit me again. I thought of all the sick things I had done and felt in my life. How can such a person be loved by anyone, let alone a God who has never done anything but good? It’s hard to accept.

It’s true; I’ve done some good. That doesn’t matter much. Would you come to my house for Thanksgiving dinner if you knew there was half a teaspoon of cat manure hidden somewhere in a 25-pound turkey? Of course not. If you’re mostly good and partly bad–and I’m not saying I’m mostly good–there is a word to describe you: “bad.”

We live in a tee ball society now, where everyone gets a prize even if they miss. People can’t be good. They can’t succeed. The solution? Pretend they’re good! Pretend they succeeded!

We judge ourselves against a standard of total failure instead of God’s perfection. So we feel a lot better about ourselves than we should, and we think we deserve things to which we are not entitled.

You can’t grow if you can’t acknowledge fault. You are a product, and products must be subject to quality control. If every product passes, quality drops to an unacceptable level. It’s that simple.

Pride is poison. We try to raise kids to be proud, because pride and confidence provide motivation, but it’s a mistake. It’s a substitute for the power of God.

If you think you’re a pretty good person, you will feel entitled to things. When your neighbor does better than you do, you will feel cheated. A lot of life’s unhappiness comes from the sense that we’ve been cheated, especially in America, where our unrealistic expectations are so entrenched we have collected them in a package and named it “the American Dream.” The truth is that we are only entitled to hell. Every second that we spend here on hell’s doorstep is a great blessing and a reprieve, and we should never complain about anything.

I don’t mean that we should not criticize. God forbid we stop criticizing. I mean we should not take the attitude that we have been deprived of good things we deserve. That simply does not happen on earth. We receive good things we do not deserve, but after we reach the age of accountability, we never receive evil that we haven’t earned.

The modern charismatic church is poisoning people as though they were weeds, spraying them with self-approval which stunts their growth. They always talk about God’s love and lack of judgment. Yes, he loves us. That doesn’t mean he thinks we don’t need to change. And as for judgment, he piled it on us, with great brutality. We don’t feel it because Jesus stepped in the way. It still exists, however. God’s wrath is real, and it had to be satisfied. The bill was not discarded. It was paid.

If you accept salvation and then quit examining yourself, the improvement you experience while you live on the earth will be very limited, as will your power and peace. Correction is not a punishment. It is an opportunity to avoid punishment. If only we could learn to love it and embrace it.

America just witnessed an event which serves to illustrate my points. A male senior citizen just posed for a photo in women’s underwear, the photo was published on the cover of a major magazine, and many Americans responded by declaring him a hero. That shows how the culture of mindless approval has poisoned us.

Of course, I’m referring to Caitlyn Jenner. I respect his right to change his name, even if the gender change is a sad delusion.

He lived a life of sexual confusion, and he did not have a corrective connection to the Holy Spirit, so he never received a solution to his problem. The result? Surrender and intellectual perversion. He lost, so he and his cohorts declared victory and decided to call an evil result good.

If he had really known God, he would have received knowledge and discernment. The man he could have been would be horrified by the man he has become.

Very few Americans have a corrective connection to the Holy Spirit, so we are surrendering, too. We have decided that the strange inclinations we can’t change are normal and healthy. We call evil good and good evil, largely because we see no alternative. The church wandered off into a swamp of effort, pride, and greed centuries ago, so it has failed to connect us to the help we need. Now we drift without anchors or compasses, and there is no limit to our deviations from God’s healthy course.

We have reached a point where all correction is called “judgment” and “hate,” unless it’s the judgment and hate of people who dislike God’s ways. If you call a Christian or an Orthodox Jew a bigot, few people will criticize your obvious hate, but if you say an old man with chemically induced breasts has problems, even if you say it with empathy, you can expect to be excoriated as though you had endorsed child molestation.

The enemy has done a wonderful job of sealing out correction and targeting those who are bold and caring enough to provide it. It’s as though he had convinced people that water was poisonous. Amazing. He even has the people he has misled, continuing his work for him. He destroyed them, and they reward him with fervent service.

They remind me of the Jews who worked in the death camps, stripping the dead and shoving them into ovens. The difference is that the hearts of the Jews were not in their work.

If you can understand your own guilt, you can be rid of pride. If you can be rid of pride, God will stop fighting you. The Bible clearly states that he fights the proud and helps the humble. If you deny guilt and hold onto pride, you are poisoning yourself and your children. It’s pointless for a proud person with a sense of entitlement to complain about his enemies, because they are only doing that which is just. We need to look at ourselves in order to uncover the gaps that let our enemies in.

America will let Jesus sit in the doorway and beg, because we like to pretend we respect him as a really nice person, but it hates the Holy Spirit. It hates truth. We have reached a point where people who listen to God will not be tolerated in mainstream society. Christians love to say we need to stand up for God and make ourselves heard, but that boat has sailed. We need to pray and repent, as individuals. It’s very unlikely that this country will turn from its course of hatred and persecution. Things will almost surely get worse. Like the Jews in Europe, we will be seen as necessary sacrifices, to be burned in the oven of the common good. The country will not help us, and if we stay proud, God will not help us, either.

I encourage you to pray in the Spirit and think about pride and denial. Stop being satisfied with what you are. Stop listening to the positive opinions of people who don’t really know you. Help is available, but it only comes to people who admit they need it.