Pleading and Sweet Talk are for Calmer Times

I keep waking up every morning, considerably earlier than I would like to, and when I do, I go into prayer. I learn a lot during these sessions.

Today it happened again. I found myself talking to God about the world and myself.

The closer I get to God, the better I understand how far away I am. I really messed things up. Over several decades, I forged myself into a useless tool, and it’s taking God quite a while to shape me into something useful.

That’s okay. As long as you have breath in you, all criticism is opportunity. It’s someone showing you the door that leads out of your problems. You just have to walk through. I ask God to criticize me every day.

Unfortunately, the news for the world at large is not as good.

Most human beings are going nowhere; Christians know that. A big portion of the world belongs to Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. There are many other cults out there that compete with the truth. Many people are atheists, so they have no faith at all.

That’s not news. It wouldn’t surprise most Christians. The thing that would shock them is the utter uselessness of the church.

It would be bad if church doctrine were wrong about 5% of its claims, but I would say 5% is closer to the percentage of things we get right.

One of the worst things we’ve done has been to turn Christianity into the new Judaism. The Jews had hundreds of laws to obey, and modern rabbinical Judaism teaches that God weighs your obedience against your disobedience and decides whether to save you. Most Christians believe something like that. They think “good” people (everyone except serial killers and child rapists) go to heaven and extremely “bad” people go to hell.

The single biggest gift we received as a result of the crucifixion is freedom from the law. We don’t have to stay home and refrain from work on Saturday. We can eat bread during Passover. We don’t have to tithe. We don’t have to put in years of study just to have some idea what the law actually means. All that stuff was swept off our plates, but traditional churches pulled it out of storage and set it before us again.

Most of us think we have to earn our way into heaven. That leads to a couple of major consequences. If you think you have to earn your salvation, you’re not saved; salvation comes by faith. It also makes you proud. Anyone foolish enough to think he is so good he can put God in a position where he owes us salvation is mired in pride.

We keep telling God we’re supposed to fix our own problems. We think it’s selfish and wrong to ask for help, so we say, “I got this.” When you say you don’t need help, God stops helping you. Satan, however, keeps right on attacking. It’s a bad situation to be in, and many churches encourage it.

The new legalism is bizarre. In many denominations, it tells us God doesn’t care about horrendous sins like sodomy and fornication, but it says he saves nice people because they’re good to others. That’s a lot of nonsense. Hell is full of nice people who didn’t believe in Jesus.

We have the insane idea that Christianity is about what we do. We think there’s a big scoreboard, and we have to rack up points. That notion came from Satan, not God. Christianity is about what we ARE. It’s about inner change that comes from the Holy Spirit.

The ancient Jews were very interested in sin. They wanted people to obey the rules. Jesus came along, took the burden of obeying rules off of us, and gave us a new burden: we were supposed to change the way we felt. We were supposed to change our desires. Judaism didn’t make these demands because without the Holy Spirit, we could not comply. Jesus gave us the Holy Spirit to clean us out and change our natures.

The new legalists don’t care that much about what you are. They just want you to act nice.

Yes, Jesus said people should obey his commandments. The problem is that he was not referring to the Ten Commandments or the rest of the fixed law. He was talking about the real-time commandments relayed to us by the Holy Spirit.

How could the apostles teach that we were under the law while telling us to obey it? It’s facially absurd.

A lot of the time, the Holy Spirit will agree with the written law, but often he won’t. He probably won’t require you to circumcise a son or give up pork. The Jews had hundreds of commandments, not just ten. If Jesus was talking about the law when he said we should obey his commandments, he was telling us to become Jews. That’s not what he meant. It should be obvious.

The church has denied the Holy Spirit for almost two thousand years. We have been cut off from the source of our power and growth. There are almost no preachers who can teach you anything useful. Almost all of them are like goalkeepers; they will do nearly anything to keep you from winning.

A typical preacher will help you receive salvation and then let you starve. Actually, it’s worse than starving. He will not feed you anything good, but he will fill you with poison. He may tell you to pray to dead people. He may tell you God will make you rich for sending him money. You’ll think he’s giving you treasure, and you’ll stuff yourself with it. The poison will take up the space the truth is supposed to fill.

The church isn’t experiencing a setback. It’s suffering a catastrophe.

The devil won. We had a few decades of freedom, and we gave it back. The Catholics ousted the Holy Spirit and turned the church into the biggest terrorist organization on earth, in order to intimidate people who might bring the Holy Spirit back. Now we have little pockets of people who are on the right path, but on a percentage basis, just about all of the world’s Christians are backward. They serve Satan all day and all night, even when they think they’re serving God.

Constantine made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire. Maybe that’s when things went to hell. The world hates all true children of God, and it hates their ways. When Christianity becomes the world’s religion, something has to give.

It’s not possible to serve God and be accepted by the world. Read the New Testament and see. For that matter, read the Old Testament. The prophets were hated. The king who was greatest in worldly terms was Solomon, and he was a disgusting failure who practiced Satanic religions.

I thought about the state of the world this morning, and more than ever, I saw its corruption and hopelessness. We are at the point where the world is so filthy, God is going to have to start pulling his children aside. Just as he could not let Lot live in Sodom his entire life, he is going to have to put some distance between Spirit-led Christians and the stinking, vicious world of Satan.

When people insist on loving excrement, there comes a time when merely being in their presence is intolerable. That day is just about here. We will soon reach a point where the negative effects of keeping Christians in the world will outweigh the desirability of saving more souls.

I can’t believe the gross things people say on TV these days. I can’t believe we have entire cities where public nudity is legal. I can’t believe the government is forcing us to allow unvetted male perverts into locker rooms and bathrooms set aside for women. Humanity has become deranged. Up is down, and black is white. And because we don’t know the Holy Spirit, we can’t fight the world. Instead, we assimilate and fight God. When you can’t fight evil, you make good the problem.

I wish there were more time, and I wish more of us had the knowledge and power to help others. I wish the free will of those who hate God wasn’t set against him. But wishes aren’t horses, so I guess I won’t ride.

All you can do now is carve out a bubble of prayer and obedience and stay in it. If you’re not trying, you’re going to suffer a lot. God is kind, but history shows that he will allow believers to be tortured and killed almost without limitation if they’re not doing things his way.

We still perish for lack of knowledge. It’s not a joke.

There is hope for you. The world can’t be fixed, but you are not the world. Get with the program ASAP if you don’t want a lifestyle of defeat and despair. Don’t let the smooth seas fool you; they will kick up again before you know it. We’re not receiving a reward. We’re receiving time to arm ourselves.

Maybe someone will listen and apply my advice. I hope so. Maybe this blog will be up after the church has been removed from the world, and someone will read it and see the truth in it.

Whatever happens down here, God is still in heaven, and as long as there is blood in your veins, he is willing to change your destiny. Think it over. There is no alternative.