Love God; Share God’s Problems

I am not at church today.

God is giving me a clearer picture of what is happening in my life, and much of it involves things I have experienced at my church. He doesn’t want me there today. I am being pulled back, and during this time I will reflect and learn from him.

A few weeks back I told the volunteer leader I was taking time off from serving. I showed up later than usual last week and the week before. My church has a group prayer session every Sunday morning before the service, and I have been skipping it, because it’s for volunteers. I have been showing up when the music starts.

Several weeks ago, I stopped going to the church’s Wednesday services. They started a Tuesday night prayer service, and I was attending faithfully, if not religiously, and going two nights in a row was just too much. Because only two to three people made it to the prayer services, most people had no idea I had been going. People assumed I wasn’t going at all during the week.

During Sunday services, two of the church’s leaders came to me expressing concern because they though I had quit!

I am not sure what to say about that. In the past I have generally arrived earlier than both of them, and my attendance has been very consistent, so I suppose that when they came to church and didn’t see me there, they assumed I had stopped going.

Staying home from Wednesday services was good, because it gave me rest, and because the services had been decreasing in value. Tuesday nights were great. Of course, given that there were only two or three of us there, I might as well have prayed at home.

I don’t know why the pastors never came. Actually, the lowest-ranking pastor made it once.

God has been showing me the reality of my status at church, and it’s not flattering. Wonderful things have been happening in a very small circle of people I know, mostly outside of church, but when it comes to church itself, I have done nearly nothing. That will not change if I continue serving. My position has been determined, firmly.

Now he is telling me to stay home.

Will he send me back? Maybe to visit, or to attend more or less regularly, without serving. But I am not going to be used to do anything big, because that is not possible. People have made a choice. I gave it the old college try for three years. I should consider myself blessed. Noah and Methuselah had to preach to unwilling people for 120 years before they were withdrawn.

Of course, they lived a lot longer than I will, so maybe that was compensation.

Things are going very, very well in my own life. My prayer life keeps improving. I am being blessed and freed. I am learning important things. My priorities are shifting. Joy is increasing. I feel so much relief. I am succeeding at things I used to fail at. I am being cleaned up, inside and out. I’m even losing weight and exercising, not that those things are important. They just reflect inner change.

But now people are going to come to me and ask me what’s wrong! With ME!

Oh, well.

I know what’s going to happen. “You have to pray for Brother Steve. He is under a spirit of bitterness.” “He has a problem with rebellion.” “he has fallen away.” They are going to think that because I am not hustling for that particular church, Satan has neutralized me.

Charismatic churches have a real pharaoh problem. The pharaohs enslaved the Jews, not to glorify God, but to glorify themselves as man-gods. The Jews were not used to build a temple to Jehovah. They were used to build treasure houses for the pharaohs themselves. Most charismatics are under the same spell. We think it’s all about the organization and the super-holy people at the top. That’s a lot of garbage.

If you’re doing things right, the vast majority of the good things God does in your life will not happen in church. The week is 168 hours long. What kind of Christian are you if your relationship with God consists of four hours of church plus five to ten minutes of daily prayer that doesn’t work? You should be in God’s presence every day, for a good long time.

Your house is your primary church. You should be having prayer sessions there every day. If you’re married, you should be doing this with your spouse. If you also find time to make it to church, that’s great. But what you do outside of church is far more important.

Many preachers will blanch and shriek if you tell them this, because they have the pharaoh bug. They’ve been dreaming of seeing the church satisfy their carnal desires. They’ve been telling themselves, “I gave up striving for money in the secular world, so now God is going to give it to me because I’m building a church.” They’re really counting on that, so if you tell people to quit worrying so much about the church, you will be goring their ox. You will be attacking their monetary income and their potential source of future fame and admiration. You can’t expect them to be happy about that.

All over the US, there are disgusting monuments to greed and the lust for admiration. We call these monuments “megachurches.” Charismatics think the men and women who run them are the nation’s religious leaders, appointed by the Lord. In reality, most of these bloated icons are screwing up our relationships with God.

They teach us that church is where you go to get rich and succeed and have all your earthly problems fixed, and of course, it doesn’t work. People stay sick and die. They stay poor. They go to prison. They get pregnant outside of marriage and have babies they can’t afford to raise. Their only benefit is denial. The church teaches them everything is okay, because those blessings are on the way, and they could be just a few days away. Just keep toeing the line; keep turning the millstone, and your windfall will come.

So we die, turning the millstone.

What God wants is to change us internally. That’s what the phrase “born again” means. Salvation is just conception. If you stop there, you are going to be stillborn. You’re supposed to grow and change, and in order to do that, you have to fight pride and denial.

This isn’t just where the blessings come from. It is the blessing.

This is the message Satan hates. This is why the Jews and the church kill prophets. Satan doesn’t like salvation, but what he really hates is what comes after it. If you can be like God in this world, you are getting what Satan thinks belongs to him. And he is jealous.

If you’re not rejected by churches, you can’t possibly be doing what God wants. I don’t mean that every church has to reject you, but generally, churches can’t stand people who got God’s message.

Churches have all sorts of defense mechanisms. The first is to accept you and put you in a time-wasting position. “Now you’re the Supreme Executive Commander of garbage collection. Serve God well in this, and he will promote you!” The second is to accuse you. “Why are you contradicting ‘Dr.’ Hinn? Who are you to disagree with a famous person who has millions of fans?” “Why bring division? Why be negative?” The third is to tell you to leave, and after that, I suppose the only thing left is to kill you.

We don’t teach people the basics. Respect for intelligence. Respect for age. Respect for anointing. Real love, as opposed to flattery. Charity. We don’t teach them to pray in tongues. We don’t teach them to critique themselves in prayer and look for God’s help in improving themselves.

We certainly don’t teach humility, except to people who say things that make us look at ourselves. We’re sure THOSE people are proud!

Charismatic preachers tend to be proud, immature, stubborn, greedy, and spiteful. That’s just the truth. Obviously, that’s a generalization, and there are plenty of exceptions. But as a movement, this is what we generally produce. Our leaders are babies, and if we let them teach us, what are we?

Today God told me something. I already knew most Christians don’t want meat, but I thought they at least wanted milk. That’s wrong. They want sugar water. They want to be told they’re wonderful, and that, yes, it’s fine to fornicate and smoke weed and have no prayer life, because God loves them just the way they are.

I’m sure many women feel love for their stillborn babies. They would still prefer to see them be delivered alive.

You can’t keep your greed and pride and lust and denial and still be a good Christian. You can be forgiven, but you’re not going to amount to anything in the kingdom.

This morning God showed me that Christians who won’t grow are like people who are accepted by medical schools, don’t go, and then try to treat the sick anyway.

Imagine that. Imagine receiving a letter saying you can go to Harvard’s medical school. Then imagine getting all excited and taking that letter down to your local hospital and demanding to be allowed to operate on people.

That’s not how it works. You can’t stop at insemination. You have to change.

My connection to church organizations will have to be loosened, because otherwise I will succumb to the pressure to repeat whatever pleases them. Real prophets always upset people. The fake prophet is the one who always has a good seat and gets invited to the pastor’s house every weekend.

So I am at home on Fathers’ Day. I am healing. I am resting. I don’t have to spend this particular Sunday striving with people who do not listen.

I want to belong to a church, and I hope God will make me part of one, but I am not going to fool with titles or jobs any more. That stuff is for team players, and I don’t mean people who are on God’s team. I accept what I am. I am not going to fight God’s plan for me. He knows better than I do.

It’s funny; the two people from whom I receive the best teaching are a woman in the panhandle and a young man who is struggling to get through college. They are people I was able to reach, and now I get help from them. I haven’t been getting much useful teaching from preachers and so-called prophets.

I wish I could bring everyone with me as I make progress. This has to be how Jesus feels.

I think this will be useful to you if you read it with openness and humility. I certainly hope so, because no one should spend as many years as I did, banging their head against a wall of denial.