Sufficient Unto the Day are the Blessings Thereof

I have nothing but good news to report. At least for me.

I thought I was saying something positive, but now that I’ve typed it, it looks sad.

It is sad.

When I was working on a kibbutz in Israel, I spent time pruning olive trees. They told me that in order to get one productive tree, you have to plant about 800 trees. About 1 in 800 produce olives. The rest are cut and burned.

Is that true? Search me. I only know what they told me.

People are not much better off than olive trees.

Americans are very spoiled. We used to honor God fairly well, and he made us rich and strong. We still have a lot of wealth piled up, as a result of our former humility and gratitude. Because of this, and because we are isolated geographically, we think the world is a nice place. Most of us are only familiar with the US, and things here are good, so we think the world is okay.

The world is not okay. It’s a horror. There are people all over the globe who don’t have running water or electricity. In 2016. People die from diseases that can be prevented with soap. Freedom is fairly rare. Slavery is common. Look around. The world is a mess.

We tend to see the world as a pleasant place in which we spend time trying to be good until we move to the next level. We see it as heaven’s anteroom. In reality, it’s much more like hell. It’s hell’s roof, literally.

Satan runs the earth. Jesus said so. He called Satan “the god of this world.” That’s why things don’t work well here. That’s why there is pain and injustice. We elected Satan and made God an alien.

God interferes with Satan’s work a lot, but Satan still holds the lease.

Most people serve the devil all their lives, obeying the compulsions of demons and their flesh, and then they die and go to hell to burn, like the 799 olive trees that didn’t bear fruit.

God probably designed olive that ways on purpose, as a symbol. In the Bible, trees symbolize people. Olive oil is God’s anointing. Fruit are people who develop in God’s kingdom. They are future trees.

The primary purpose of our existence is reproduction. We are like eggs, and we have the potential to become God’s children (not just his creations). Most of us are like eggs that are never fertilized and wash out with a woman’s monthly fluids.

If you don’t produce fruit, there isn’t much purpose in keeping you around. There is even less purpose in helping you. It would encourage you to continue walking in rebellion.

God told me powerful things almost thirty years ago, and I basically spat on them.

He owed me nothing. I was not his child. I was like a deserving convict on a penal island. By “deserving,” I mean deserving of punishment. He reached out to me, and instead of showing gratitude and amazement, I decided his gifts were unimportant and optional. So I wandered around, weak and lost, much longer than I had to.

He told me to pray in tongues a lot every day. That, alone, would have made me a success. But I put it off and inserted around 15 years of dead time in the center of my life.

A few years back, he started giving me grace to pray in tongues, and I reached a point where I prayed for hours every day. I started receiving real power and revelation, and my status changed. Now I’m much stronger than I used to be; I’m like the Karate Kid after discovering Mr. Miyagi and listening to his wisdom. The enemies that used to beat me are taking a beating, themselves.

That’s very good. But I can’t transfer it to other people.

I’m just like God. All I can do is persuade and urge. People are just as stupid as I was, and they do whatever they want. They are incredibly blind.

God has a way of making us suffer with the problems we have inflicted on him, so I can see why life is like this. He couldn’t tell me a thing, and now I can’t tell other people anything.

I don’t think it will change. The pattern is not going to change before Jesus returns. Most people will harden their hearts and go to hell. On the other hand, there is no reason why God won’t let me reach more people. The ratio of rejection to acceptance is not going to change, but if you reach more people, the absolute numbers can increase. If you only change 1 in 800 people, and you reach 8000 people instead of 800, you get 10 instead of 1.

Something to wonder about.

To get back on point, I have positive things to report about myself.

I feel like I’ve achieved escape velocity.

In the oversimplified physics they teach to undergrads, they tell you that if you’re on a planet, and you move upward fast enough to give you kinetic energy greater than the potential energy you will accumulate as you leave the gravity field, you will escape and leave the planet. That means you’ve reached escape velocity. Gravity may still be pulling on you, but you’re going to win.

It doesn’t really work like that, because of air resistance. But it’s still a neat analogy.

I believe I have reached the point where I am not going to lose any more.

Last year, I believe it was, I received the words, “I will have total victory for now on, because you are for me.” I believe I have that right. Does that mean I’ve never lost a video game since then, or that I always find a great parking space in front of the store? Does it mean I’ve never cut myself since then? Does it mean I never have to take medicine? No. It just means I eventually come out on top, in every conflict.

That’s good enough, believe me. That’s all anyone can ask. A friend of mine said something the other day, and it gave me confirmation. She said the Bible says no weapon formed against the servants of God will prosper, but it doesn’t say weapons won’t form. I’ll take it.

The 34th psalm confirms this, saying, “Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivereth him out of them all.”

I keep getting delivered. There are plenty of annoyances in my life, but they aren’t making any headway.

The other day I was arguing with someone who is very crabby, manipulative, and childish, about a minor inconvenience he had had to endure. He was essentially asserting that it was my job to make his life free from all discomfort and effort. I argued a little, and then I remembered my supernatural tools. I spoke defeat to him and to the demons that use him against me. I spoke it right there in front of him, quietly, while he wasn’t paying attention. That was the end of the yelling. Instantly, he started cooperating, and we resolved the issue. I won. God’s authority overcame the problem.

This kind of thing happens to me all the time. It won’t work if you don’t have faith, and you won’t have faith unless you’re praying in tongues every day. But it does work.

The things that are happening with my hands are extraordinary. I’ve written about how God has allowed me to play instruments, even though I used to have swelling, pain, and stiffness from guitar exercises. The adventure has not stopped.

Over the last few weeks, there have been a number of times when I’ve awakened and felt like my hands were swelling and starting to be a problem. I sat up and prayed in the Spirit, and I spoke defeat to the illness and the spirits that caused it. I spoke defeat to my own flesh and said it was forbidden to harm itself or to have joint issues. Every day, I have been able to practice without problems. I have had slight discomfort at times, and I have a tiny bit of detectable swelling in one joint, but that’s all.

I have spoken defeat to the spirits of joint problems during the day. I’ve actually said, “I’m too strong for you now,” and, “You don’t have enough juice any more.” Not glorifying myself; just acknowledging the work God has done in me.

I have even picked up the flattop guitar and the mandolin again. These are instruments that wreck your hands. The strings are very stiff, the action is horrible, and the picks are like quarters. I play both every day, and my hands feel better today than they did weeks ago.

I’ve found that God won’t always destroy a problem instantly, for good. There are some enemies you have to crush every day, just as you spray your house for bugs once a month. Hey, as long as they stay crushed, I’m ecstatic. I can play my instruments, and I have extra motivation for prayer and submission. What’s not to like?

I’ve been fixing my amps up. I got my old Fender Bassman clone cleaned up, and I use it for practice. I also revamped my “Wingman” amp, which is a Bassman front end with two 6BM8 tubes for output. I used to have two output transformers and four tubes on it, but it sounded flubbery when driven, so I removed one transformer and two tubes. Now I love it. It sings.

I just need to make wooden cabinets for them now.

A Christian buddy of mine–the former head of the armorbearers at Trinity Church– has decided he wants to learn guitar, so we are going to work on a new amp. That will be a lot of fun.

He has been dealing with the sudden challenge of prostate cancer. Instead of going the TBN/Osteen route and blaming the devil and claiming it’s not his fault, he acknowledged that he opened a lot of doors with a lifetime of sexual sin, and he took responsibility. He has ramped up the prayer in tongues. He is very excited about seeking correction and subduing the flesh. It’s wonderful to see.

The amps give us an excuse to hang out.

I feel that God has said that music will be my last great adventure. I certainly hope so, because it’s the only one I ever really wanted.

It’s very hard to get used to being blessed. Yesterday I prayed for God to help me with it. An inability to trust your blessings and put your weight on them reduces the joy you get from them. I want to settle into it.

My left hand feels wonderful. There are a lot of things I’d like to do on the guitar, but a little part of me says, “That will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. That will put you in the doctor’s office, and dust will start settling on the guitars again.”

I prayed for God to help me with this, and faith rushed through me.

I realize how much I deadened and contaminated myself when I was living for Satan. I often feel like I’m at the bottom of a well dug in granite, sealed with hardened material I packed in from above. I feel like I buried myself down there, under a column of petrified excrement. I did not understand how I was supposed to live or how good life was supposed to be, so I created my own ridiculous, counterproductive, weak defense mechanisms and hid down there under them, waiting for death.

Traditional Christianity teaches us to suffer and wait. In reality, the Holy Spirit wants us to have hearts and minds like God’s. That implies healing and restoration. You can’t be like Jesus if your heart and mind aren’t whole! It doesn’t make sense.

God will rebuild you from inside. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. It doesn’t matter how much time you have left. True, you probably won’t make as much progress if you repent at 90, but you will make progress, and it will be worth it.

Only God has the solvent that will penetrate and dissolve the column of crud you’ve piled on top of yourself.

Apart from salvation, this is what we should be pursuing. Forget the TV money lies. If you have this, the money and women and so on that other people crave won’t matter to you.

I am offering my testimony, even though I am tempted to hold it back in case my hands swell up again. I am putting it out there. This is what God has done for me, as of today. Every day, his method works. If it worked yesterday, and every day so far this year, surely it will work tomorrow and every day for the rest of my life. I’ll take the chance that I might have to retract all of this, just so you will be encouraged to set out on your own voyage.

Pray in tongues every day, speak defeat to your flesh and the spirits that want to control you, exalt the Holy Spirit, and ask God for correction and healing. It works. It’s free. You can do it from your couch. You don’t even have to tell anyone.

Or you can be like me and come back in about 15 years.

OOPS

I have to apologize. My brain must have been in the wrong gear. I worked on ALMOND trees, not olive trees. I was told that only one almond tree in 800 bears fruit. I suppose, then, that you can disregard my guesses about olive oil and the anointing and so on.

Aaron’s rod was almond wood.

Steel Rusts

One of the nice things about cooperating with God and getting his power flowing in your life is that stuff that used to not work will start to work. Right now, I am having that experience with music.

Longtime readers with incredible memories will recall that I took up the guitar and quit because I developed strange knots on the finger joints on my left hand. Last year I started playing again.

I am not a hundred percent positive what caused the joint problems, but I do know that I was doing a highly questionable exercise routine at the time. It was called “Hands of Steel,” I think. I found it on an online teaching site. The motions were repetitious and stressful.

I thought I had repetitive-motion injuries.

I’m not so sure now. Last year I banged my right pinky on my compressor, and weeks later, a knot developed on one of the joints, just like the knots I had had on my left hand. I didn’t think I had injured myself. There was no real pain or bruising. But the knot rose up anyway, for no other apparent reason.

It’s almost gone now. I still don’t know that happened. You would think that if repetitive motion was the problem, my right hand would not have developed a knot, since I don’t do much of anything with the pinky on that hand.

I will definitely stay away from “Hands of Steel.” I think it’s a really stupid and dangerous method.

Last year I picked up the banjo again. There is something about the banjo that improves my playing on other instruments. When I play the banjo regularly, my musical memory improves a great deal. It’s also good preparation for the guitar. There is a lot of work for both hands, and none of it is strenuous.

I got back to the piano, and I started sight-reading practice again. Then I picked up the guitar.

After playing the banjo for several weeks without touching the guitar, I apparently changed my touch. I used to have a “death grip” issue with my fretting hand, but it appears to have gone away. Fretting too forcefully is bad for your playing, and it also leads to fatigue and injuries. It may be what made my joints hurt. Anyway, now the guitar is much easier.

Several of my guitars were messed up in one way or another. Two had pickups that were too shrill, and I had put off trying to figure that problem out. One, a Telecaster, needed a different neck pickup, and although I had bought one (Strat Texas Special), I hadn’t installed it.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve straightened the guitars out. I learned something interesting: piercing “icepick” tones from a guitar pickup can be caused by putting the pickup too far from the strings. Most people say it works the other way around, so if you listen to them and try to fix it, the problem gets worse, and then you give up. I moved the pickups on a couple of guitars and got better sound from them, and I went from a Seymour Duncan Pearly Gates bridge pickup to a Seymour Duncan Alnico Pro II on one instrument.

Today I moved the Strat pickup to the Telecaster. I had to get a special pickguard, because the Strat pickup is bigger than the original pickup. You can hack up the original pickguard, but it’s not a good solution. I bought a pickguard from Guitar Fetish. I now wish I had spent more and gone with Warmoth, because the Guitar Fetish pickguard required some filing and sanding to get it to fit. Anyway, it’s on the guitar.

I made myself a new pedalboard. I have a big Pedaltrain about two feet wide and 20″ deep (I guess), and it’s just too big. I took a piece of wood about 9″ across and 12″ long, and I cleaned it up and glued another piece of wood to it to prop up one side. I painted it with truck bed paint, and I screwed rubber feet to it. Then I added some velcro from Home Depot.

It’s really excellent. Storebought pedalboards start at about $35, and even small ones are big. And they don’t use solid wood the way I did. This one is perfect for three pedals. I have a daisy chain transformer that powers it. No fancy low-noise stuff. I’m not totally sure why people need those things, although I do have one on the Pedaltrain.

I tried to get my pedals in good shape. I fired up a Boss Blues Driver and a Way Huge Fat Sandwich. The Fat Sandwich has a magnificent tone, but it’s too distorted. At the lowest setting, it’s pretty crazy. I’m going to try to find out how to modify it.

I considered getting a Way Huge Red Llama, which is an overdrive pedal (less distorted than a distortion pedal), but then I remembered my old Tube Screamer TS-9.

I got this thing in about 1997, when I got the Strat I never play. I never liked this pedal. It had no edge, and it didn’t sound warm. I should have sold it.

I checked around and found out that there were some modifications that might make it better. The original Tube Screamer is the TS-808 (I think), and it had different resistors in the output. I found out the correct values and stuck them in there, and it sounded a little better.

Then I read that it was possible to warm it up by making the clipping asymmetrical.

A guitar signal is AC, which means it’s a voltage that goes up and down around some zero point. Most of what we call “distortion” is clipping. That means part of the voltage extremes gets cut off. Imagine an arch shape with the top sliced off. That’s what it’s like. The voltage ordinarily goes up, hits a round peak, and comes back down. When you clip, it goes up, hits a flat ceiling, and comes down.

The Tube Screamer has a couple diodes in it that affect the clipping. Because the factory diodes are identical, the clipping is the same regardless of which direction the signal is taking. If you change one diode, you get clipping which is different on one side of ground than the other.

For some reason, this makes clipping sound warmer. Look it up; I have not bothered to study it, so I can’t explain it. I could say something about “even harmonics,” but really, would that make it clearer? Doubtful. It would sound like an explanation without actually being an explanation.

I opened the Tube Screamer up again, pulled out a clipping diode, and replaced it with an LED. Then I put it together and tried it out.

It’s just about perfect now. The tone is warm and inviting. It responds well to the pick. It’s somewhat louder than it used to be. Now when I use the pedal, sometimes I just sit picking notes so I can enjoy the tone.

I have piles of guitars, and several are pretty nice, but I keep going back to the cheapest one: the $300 Epiphone P93 Riviera, from China. The action is a wonder to behold. It plays itself. The sound of the Lollar P90s is open, with an inviting edge that grabs you by the throat.

It’s actually a little frustrating. I would like to get this kind of experience from my more expensive instruments, but it’s not happening. My Japanese Burny Les Paul clone is the closest competitor, and it’s only about 90% of the guitar the Riviera is.

I would like to have one more guitar I really enjoy using, because no matter now much you like a guitar, sometimes you want to play something else, and you don’t want to go from a perfect guitar to a really good guitar. You want to make a lateral move.

I keep watching my finger joints. They haven’t gotten sore or swollen, and I practice a lot these days. I speak defeat to the spirits that work against my flesh. I forbid my flesh to have joint problems. I use the tools I’ve been given. So far, no issues.

My playing is getting better very quickly, and I’m finding the way through doors that seemed closed in the past.

One big help: I found a good instructor. The guy I was using a couple of years ago was great in many ways, but he did not have a systematic approach, which I needed. This week I found Justin Sandercoe, and right now, he’s my teacher.

He’s a Tasmanian guitarist, and he created a website full of free videos. He goes step by step. He explains everything. He even creates practice lists.

He doesn’t teach people to fake it and flail, the way most teachers do. You have to learn proper technique, scales, and so on. He eventually goes into the CAGED system, which is something I would really like to conquer, even if I don’t rely on it much.

You can find him at Justin Guitar.

Things are breaking loose. I can do things I couldn’t do before. Suddenly, I am much better at writing blues licks. Instead of writing stuff that sounds like a white kid from Connecticut wrote it, I write stuff that sounds like the blues, and I do it easily. What a relief. And I actually play sometimes, instead of just practicing. Isn’t that really the point of all this work and expense? You can sink your life into music and never learn how to do anything but practice.

I’m thinking about making a slightly larger pedalboard and finishing up the two-speaker cabinet I never started, and I may put my Bassman clone in a different chassis, to kill the noise. I have parts for a few more amps. I should put them together. But mainly, I’m excited about the music.

I will let you know if things continue to improve. I has been great so far. I can’t tell you how great it is to wake up every morning and realize my hand doesn’t hurt. If you’ve ever been healed of anything, you know what I mean.

Not Just Good News; Better News

Powerful stuff keeps coming to me all the time. This is what happens when you pray in tongues. Without it, you depend on other people to tell you about God, and a lot of what they tell you will be guesswork or lies.

The Bible tells us we are supposed to be the head and not the tail. That sounds pretty good. It sounds like it means we’re supposed to win instead of losing. We all want that.

Here is the fine print, though: the head has to lead. If you want to win, you also have to lead.

A leader will have to fight a lot more than a follower.

A follower does what everyone around him does, right or wrong. A follower will go to a prosperity church and kiss the pastor’s backside and swallow every fable he spouts.

It’s nice to be a follower. Everyone loves a follower. A follower doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable. A follower confirms the garbage you already believe. He never tells you you’re wrong. He never demands that you wake up and change your beliefs. He never tells you to give anything up.

A leader does that which is right. He will always be among the first people to turn and go in a new direction. Followers will fight him. They will sabotage him. Followers cruficied Jesus and killed the prophets. You have to have a backbone if you want to be a leader.

Watch the misguided on TBN some time. They sit in a circle and confirm each other’s Satanic, materialistic lies. They pat each other on the back. They circle the wagons and heap vituperation and slander on anyone who disagrees with them. They accuse dissenters of serving Satan, just as the Jews who knew Jesus called him a sorcerer and a demoniac.

They are followers. Benny Hinn and T.D. Jakes are followers. Joyce Meyer is a follower. The devil made their lives easy, so now they don’t rock the boat. They say and do whatever he tells them.

As a result, they have no real power or revelation. T.D. Jakes can’t even control his obesity, which is caused by gluttony. His flesh rules him, but he teaches people how to be Spirit-led?

A lot of these people will be in hell soon. I’m sorry to say it, but it’s true. A number of them are actually atheists and psychopaths. They just talk nonsense in order to get money. From time to time, one comes forward and admits he was always a fake.

God will make you the head, but you will have to repeat what he tells you and do as he says. You will have to be willing to stand against man every day, because almost all human beings, Christians included, serve the devil.

If you refuse to lead, spirits won’t respect you. Why would a demon respect an obese preacher or a greedy televangelist or a teacher who sneaks around with sluts? If that’s you, you’re not above a demon. You are his COWORKER. In fact, you’re lower in the hierarchy than he is.

When you try to cast a spirit out, unless it’s very weak, it will just laugh at you. Your prayers won’t be answered. You will not be taken seriously in the supernatural realm.

This is why we can’t heal anyone or deliver anyone from iniquity. This is why gays die gay. We have nothing to offer them except criticism and unsatisfying sex lives.

Right now, you serve demons. They get to do things to your body. They erode your self-control and make you the slave of bad habits and evil thoughts. You are a child of Adam, and Adam gave away his inherited authority. His servitude is now your inheritance. To get back on top, you have to align yourself with God, drive out the spirits you serve, and receive the inheritance of Jesus, who has never lost his authority.

When you start praying in the Spirit daily and taking charge of your heart and mind, you will start to gain authority. Things will get better. How much better they get depends largely on how willing you are to submit to God and die to the flesh. If you’re determined to hang onto your earthly desires and let them rule you, don’t expect much from God.

Here’s another thing God showed me: you are not your flesh.

The secular world has an obsession with coercing us to embrace our disgusting weaknesses. If you’re gay, it’s normal! Accept it! The notion of two animals who can’t possibly procreate, having sex, makes complete sense! If you’re fat, you’re fine! The world is wrong because it “shames” you! If you’re sexually filthy, great! Sluts aren’t the problem. “Slut-shaming” is!

In choosing this mindset, the world has made defeated people even more subordinate to demons.

Centuries ago, many people believed in a concept called “dualism,” and the basic idea was that the mind and the flesh are not the same. In modern universities, which are run by confused, neurotic, unhappy people, they tell kids that dualism is quaint and outmoded. But it’s correct.

You are immortal. Whether you are accepted into heaven or not, you will persist. Your flesh will not. It will die soon. It should be obvious to us that we are not our flesh.

Your flesh is an animal into which you have been inserted. It carries you around. It’s supposed to serve you and do whatever you tell it to do, but in this world, authority is inverted, so we let the animal call the shots.

The flesh is very stupid. It has poor judgment. For example, it told Esau a bowl of soup was a better prize than Israel, and he bought it!

The flesh tells us thirty seconds of pleasure without contraception is worth eighteen years of child support or a long period of suffering with a disgusting, disfiguring venereal disease. It will tell a childish man that the pleasure of punching his wife is worth jail time and forced unemployment. It tells women nice shoes are more important than good credit.

The flesh tells addicts all sorts of ridiculous things, and they believe them right up to the moment they die. They probably continue believing a lot of it in hell.

The flesh has no business running anything, but it has tremendous control over us, and it messes up our lives. It gets sick and refuses to get well. It drives bad decisions. It craves destructive things.

The flesh loves demons. It welcomes them. They offer it food, sex, power, and so on. It takes the bait. They move in, and then they take control. They invite friends. First thing you know, you’re just one tiny voice in a crowd of demons, and if they vote against you, you do what they want.

Demons are the gods of the flesh.

If you’re a smug Christian and you can’t be tempted by obvious sins like fornication or theft, demons will get you with sins like gluttony, gossip, or pride. There are a lot of sins we have stamped with the church’s seal of approval, and they are still very destructive.

If you want to be the head, you have to control your flesh and drive the demons out. This is why Jesus went into the desert and fasted. He was establishing his domination over the spirits that wanted to rule him. He did such a great job with the little spirits, Satan himself had to show up and try to save the situation. The most powerful evil spirit in existence showed up, because Jesus was such a problem. And that spirit lost.

After that, Jesus was able to command spirits. He was able to command flesh. He was even able to command inanimate objects. His authority was absolute. He was the head, because he stood up and decided to lead.

God also showed me that you don’t have to fight everyone. You just have to fight your flesh and the weaklings who are closest to you.

Satan uses your flesh and the weak people around you to get at you. You don’t have to defeat Satan directly in order to win. If you defeat your flesh and the weak, he won’t have access to you.

Think of the old joke about the bear. Two hikers saw a bear coming their way, and one took off running. The other said, “You idiot; you can’t outrun a bear.” The other one said, “I don’t have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you.”

That’s how it works. If you can shut the doors in your flesh and defeat the weak people Satan sends to manipulate you, you will have outrun the bear’s lunch. Satan may still get your friends, but you’ll be okay.

I have a drug addict in my life. This is a person who is a walking demon collection. She doesn’t care. She likes it. Evil pleases her. She loves humiliating people and causing them pain.

When this person has a problem, she tries to make it roll downhill onto me. The demons drive her flesh, her flesh makes bad decisions, the bad decisions cause problems, and she starts looking around for an innocent person to take the punishment and make it go away. These people are called “enablers.”

I can’t free this person from addiction or demonic influence. She likes those things. She clings to them.

God gave her the ability to make that choice. He won’t interfere. He doesn’t enslave people. He told me to quit praying for her, because it’s a quagmire where I will make no progress.

I can’t free her from her controlling spirits, but if I defeat her, and I defeat my own flesh when it wants to give in to the manipulation, then I win. I keep my peace and safety.

It’s not an ideal situation, but then most people go to hell. There are some burdens I was never meant to carry. I can’t carry every wicked person I know. If I choose to try, then I choose to share in their defeat. If I do that, can I seriously expect God to answer when I ask him to get me out of the mess?

You can speak defeat to other people and to spirits. You can say, “I speak defeat to Bob and the filthy spirits that use him against me, in the name of Jesus.” If you have the faith that comes from a habit of prayer in tongues, and if you’re not submitted to demons, it will work.

I’ve known that for a while. I use it all the time, many times a day. It is an extremely powerful tool. But it was only recently that I learned I can treat my own flesh the same way. I can speak defeat to it.

This stuff will sound crazy to many Christians. I do not care. That’s the cost of being the head. I see it coming. I expect it. I accept it.

Be mad. Foam at the mouth. Call me a heretic. Wet your pants and roll on the floor. Throw me out of your church. Block me on Facebook. Cite scriptures you misunderstand and claim victory. Knock yourself out. I’m not budging.

Leadership is my inheritance. You’re not going to deprive me of it, even if you go to hell. Sorry to tell you this, but you’re not worth it.

If you apply this stuff, you will see results. Your authority will increase, and so will your obedience. Things you couldn’t make yourself stop doing will start to fall away. You will become more intimate with God, too.

I suppose the worst part of this is watching other people fail as you succeed, but it could be worse. Noah had to listen to his friends, whom he had known for centuries, claw on the hull of the Ark.

You’ll lose people, but on the whole, you’ll save more than you would have, had you continued in weakness and rebellion. That will have to be your comfort.

Give this stuff a try. Lead, don’t follow. Submit to God. Kick the daylights out of your uppity flesh.

When it works for you, tell someone else about it.

I hope it works as well for you as it has for me.

No; better.

Not Every Inheritance is a Blessing

I got some interesting revelation about corrupt churches.

Churches generally pattern themselves after theaters. They have stages, seats, and backstage areas. A few people have access to the backstage areas. Most people are not allowed to go there.

Theaters are built for show business. The interesting thing about that is that show business involves deceiving crowds. That’s an essential part of it. If you work in show business, you try to create a false impression for people. Even if all you do is present musical acts, you try to make the performers look and sound as good as possible, and you will have people running around fixing things so the audience won’t see technical problems and so on. If there’s a problem, the management and performers will usually try to cover it up.

This mindset makes sense when you’re putting on a production of Sweeney Todd, but it’s very counterproductive in church.

I was an armorbearer for several years, and I’ve seen how churches keep things from their audiences. “Audience” is the correct word for the people who sit in a typical church. They to go observe, not to participate.

I am hearing things I don’t like. I’ve heard about bookkeeping irregularities. I’ve heard about pastors telling people to shun friends who left their churches. I heard that one of my former pastors ended up with his own church because he was so arrogant he could not get along with any of the ministries he worked for in the past.

People kept this information from me and from others, and as a result, pastors were able to get away with some truly shabby behavior. People ended up serving under crooked and immature leaders, because they didn’t have enough information to allow them to make better choices.

Pastors love to cut the throats of honest people. They call them dividers. They say God will curse them. They tell people to cut them off. They use unity as their excuse, but the truth is, they simply like getting away with things.

What if there was a church with no stage? What if people bought a big warehouse and put chairs in it, and every week, they went there to pray together for a few hours? What if the only locked doors were on the toilets, and anyone in the place could walk up to whoever was in charge and speak directly to him?

That’s more or less what I deal with now. People come to my house, and we pray together. There is no “us” and “them.” There is no leadership, except for the leadership of the Holy Spirit. It doesn’t have to be at my house, either. I don’t even have to be there. They can meet somewhere else, without me.

I can’t take an offering. I can’t take people’s money and use it to buy couples massages, plane tickets, hotel rooms, and restaurant meals. I can’t make anyone shun anyone else.

If something weird happens, we’re all in the same room. We all know about it.

It sounds sort of socialist, but then socialism is a cheesy, poisonous copy of the kingdom of heaven.

New Dawn broke with some individuals years ago, and the pastors told people not to talk to them. Now I’m finding out that the people who got ejected had questions like mine. They didn’t like the tithing pressure. One of them is a Facebook friend now, and he posted something about giving up on churches and meeting people for prayer in houses.

I never got to meet this guy. I got to meet the rock-headed pastors and the false prophet. I got to meet the “apostle” who tells the pastors they’re doing great, while the church shrivels and insiders talk privately about leaving.

I don’t like the show business mindset.

I’ve also been thinking about transference of spirits.

I keep doing better and better. Life never stops improving. On the other hand, my dad and my sister are doing worse and worse.

She lost everything and ended up in a long-term rehab facility. She went because she had no choice, not because she chose to. My dad is now dealing with dementia and increased health problems. He is angry and frustrated, and he has lost almost all control over his circumstances. Quite honestly, I will be surprised if he’s around next Christmas.

We know that spirits infect us. Even if you’re baptized with the Holy Spirit, you can have demons, and they can control you. They don’t leave automatically, any more than the Canaanites left Israel when the Hebrews showed up.

We also know that spirits follow families. If your dad has a spirit-related iniquity like alcoholism, you are likely to have it, too. If your mother is slutty, you are more likely to be promiscuous.

What happens to rebellious people when their relatives start serving God and getting free of demons?

In the story of the demon-possessed man who lived in the cemetery, Jesus cast demons out and then told them they had permission to enter a herd of pigs. The demons infected the pigs, and the pigs ran downhill into a lake and drowned themselves.

Demons want flesh. I suppose that’s because God drowned them in the Flood and killed their bodies. They’re jealous now. They don’t like to be homeless.

In the Bible, pigs symbolize unclean, carnal people. Water symbolizes words, including the huge ocean of curses that covers the world. Going downhill symbolizes spiritual decline.

If you get free of a demon, and your brother is a heroin addict who laughs at God, where do you think that demon will go first?

It seems obvious to me (now) that the demons who have to leave Christians often end up in their weak relatives.

What if you’re a weak Christian, and your sister is constantly fighting to be cleansed by God? What do you think will happen to you? What if cancer follows your family? What if the spirit that wanted to make her a pedophile has to come to you instead?

Not good. You will be the pig that drowns itself.

This is something weak Christians need to think about. Demons don’t die. We come and go, like students at a college, but they stay, like professors, waiting for each incoming class. When a spirit leaves you, it has to go somewhere.

If you’re weak, you may become a boarding house for demons. Defeat will be your regular daily portion.

If your relatives get right with God, you better join them. Otherwise, you’ll be a demon safe house.

I’m sure these things will be useful to you if you put them to work.

Consider Forming a Splinter Cell

A friend of mine has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. His name is Leo. He used to be the head armorbearer at Trinity Church (where I used to serve). He got disgusted with the leadership and left, just like many other armorbearers.

God keeps showing me things. A lot of it has to do with my faults. Correction is important, because error causes suffering and weakness. Most people don’t want to hear it. They get very angry when you tell them they contribute to their own misery. Leo, however, has been listening.

For quite some time, I have been having prayer sessions in my house with my friend Travis. Over the last two weekends, Leo joined us. Now he says he has a friend in his area who is going to join him in sessions up there. He says this is a splinter cell from my own group.

This is what I have been hoping for. I will never lead a church. I will never have another title. I want very little to do with churches, because inevitably, they become controlled by men who are controlled by the devil. But I do want to see people get together in highly effective meetings, and I don’t want to be there, because if they can’t do it without me, I wasted my time talking to them. I pointed them to me instead of God.

Leo used to have a lot of sin in his life, and he feels that he opened doors to things like cancer. I can’t argue with that. That’s how I feel about my own life and problems.

It’s really something to see someone embrace this idea.

Back in the time of Jesus, people were obsessed with justice and painful punishment. They were really excited about these things. Jesus came along and steered them toward love and humility. Satan said, “Fine. Let’s see what I can do with that.” So now we talk about love, and we pretend it’s all God cares about. We pretend justice doesn’t exist, that God thinks all people are wonderful just as they are, and that we don’t have to change. We have the insane idea that what God really wants–his main priority–is for us to be nice to each other. We teach that he doesn’t really care about salvation or repentance, because that’s “legalism.”

It’s amazing that anyone can call preaching the crucifixion, which ended legalism, “legalism.” But there you are.

Now people don’t like to hear about accountability. We hate it the way the religious Jews of Jesus’s time hated permissiveness.

Leo feels differently. He is not just praying for healing; he is praying for inner change. This is wonderful news, because this will bring him results.

I told him that if he and the people he prays with keep praying in tongues and putting the Holy Spirit first, they’ll be fine. They will make mistakes, but God will keep steering them back onto the right course.

I can’t micromanage them. I am not God, and anyway, you can’t go through life with training wheels. This is not God’s plan. It’s tempting to try to be a compass for other people, but you have to limit the frequency of your corrective messages. If you over do it, they will never grow, and you will start to think you’re God.

In my own walk, I am getting all sorts of unpleasant but welcome revelation.

God is increasing my self-control. Who wouldn’t want that? It’s obviously good. It’s a fruit of the Spirit, so we know we should have it. But what happens when you get increased self-control, and you find that it’s hard to make yourself use it? What if you find yourself in a position where you know you can use supernatural self-control to prevent you from doing something bad, and you resist using it?

That actually happens.

The horrible lesson here is that I don’t want to serve God with all my heart.

You have to be honest about things like that. God knows already, so the honesty isn’t for him. It’s for you. It will help you get his help. Denial is pride, and God resists the proud. Like a drug addict, you have to admit fault if you want to get better.

Now that I know the truth about myself, I admit it to God. It is literally sickening. I feel mild nausea when I do it. It is disturbing. I feel like I’m asking him to destroy me. But I know it’s actually part of the healing process. It will definitely increase your humility, and to increase your humility is to increase the assistance you get from God.

Today God told me that correction is better than physical healing. That’s true. No one goes to hell for being sick, but plenty of people who resist correction are burning there right now.

God did not force Jesus to accept being tortured to death so God could become our genie and make our lives perfect. He did it so the Holy Spirit could come into us and turn us into copies of Jesus. This is what matters. The other stuff is peripheral.

In connection with this, I have come to understand what “dying to self means.”

We think dying to self means behaving less selfishly. Some of us think it means working hard at church. Some think it means devoting our lives to the poor. The main meaning, however, is to give up on the project you were building in yourself.

We decide whom we want to be. We see behaviors, attitudes, and personality traits we consider desirable, and we try to incorporate them into ourselves. We don’t have complete control, but we have substantial input. Who we become, in large part, is a reflection of what we consider admirable and desirable.

When you start asking for correction, God shows you that some of the things you like about yourself are filthy garbage. They have to be burned off, no matter how much you like them.

Culture plays a big role here. I can give a lot of examples.

I know a lot of black people. Black men are taught that anger and physical violence are good. They are taught that if they reason instead of using their fists, people will think they’re soft, and they will get no respect. As a result, it’s very easy to get black men to commit crimes. You just have to insult them. Hitting people is a crime, unless you have a reasonable fear that you’re in danger. It doesn’t matter what they say to you; you can’t touch a person who offends you verbally, even if he says your mother is a whore. But black men are taught that you hit people who insult you.

Hispanics are taught that pride is everything. A real man doesn’t listen. He tells. And they’re taught that it’s good to be highly emotional. So if you try to give them advice, the walls go up, the chin rises in the air, and you’re done.

I’m from Appalachia. People up there think acting crazy is a good thing, and they like solving their problems with firearms. They think it’s flattering to be told that they can’t be controlled. So people act stupid when they’re young. A lot of people get shot. There is a lot of alcoholism and drug abuse.

You can come up with examples all day. Our cultures destroy us with attitudes we think are cute.

To die to self means to give up the stupid parts of yourself which you think are cute, cool, attractive, profitable…whatever. You have to give them up. And you don’t know the person you will be when God is finished removing the garbage. That’s scary. Will you like that person? Will you want the life he leads?

That’s dying to self. And it’s also dying to Satan. In creating a misguided personality, you have given demons permission to rule you. When God cleans you up, instead of demons who rule you by force, you will have the Holy Spirit, ruling you by consent.

It’s a bitter pill to swallow. It would be nice to say it isn’t, but that would be a lie. Accepting and embracing the rehabilitation takes the power of the Holy Spirit.

That’s where I am now. God keeps showing me the filthy parts of myself, and I am trying to be honest and get them fixed. When the nausea hits, I do not tell God to take it away, because I’m not praying so God will make me feel better. I’m praying so he will repair me, and if pain is a sign that I’m being repaired, then I want it.

Knowing these things makes me even more disgusted with the Joel Osteens and T.D. Jakeses. People who could be transformed go to them for help, and they receive a poisonous package that prevents them from finding the door. Misguided preachers don’t just fail to help people. They assist in their destruction.

In Jesus, there is only one race, one family, and one people. They have one culture, and that is the culture of heaven. To the extent that you preserve your earthly culture at the expense of heaven’s culture, you make yourself weak and vulnerable. You unlock your doors and take them off the hinges.

If change sounds appealing to you, the Holy Spirit may be talking to you. Get baptized with the Holy Spirit. Learn to pray in tongues. Spend long sessions praying in tongues every day and asking for correction and honesty.

If you can manage it, find someone else to do it with you. Every married couple should be doing this daily.

Try this: get together and say a brief prayer for God to help you with your session. Then talk briefly about the issues you want to cover. Put on some peaceful worship music (not dance music) and pray in tongues for 20 or more minutes. Then take turns getting up and praying, blessing, and cursing aloud.

This approach puts the Holy Spirit, not your misguided mind, in charge. It brings him honor. It will produce results.

If you don’t pray in the Spirit, you will eventually fail, because you will be easily deceived and drive off course.

Correction is what you’re after. The other things are just mission support.

I hope you get good results. I know God will come through if you do things his way.

For Getting us Through this Tiresome Secular Holiday

I hope my 12 remaining readers had a good Thanksgiving.

I was hoping to blow it off. Weeks ago, I asked God to help me narrow my interests, and since then I have lost the drive to cook. I am very happy about that. Cooking is fun (or was), but it’s time-consuming. It’s a lot of work. Doing it right often costs a lot of money. And I am SINGLE. That means all the stuff a normal family of five or six does together lands on me.

The only person I have left to cook for is my dad, so I don’t think huge holiday meals should be considered compulsory. No one flies in from around the country for an emotional reunion. In fact, my relatives had a big Thanksgiving get-together a few years back and didn’t tell us. I have no idea what that was all about. I have never done any of them wrong, and I don’t think my dad has either. My sister is another story, but including me and my dad doesn’t really require including her. They are used to visiting us and not telling her they’re in town.

I got the news during a post-Thanksgiving call that had to do with business. My aunt said something about the holiday, and she mentioned the big gathering. She is having issues with her memory and thinking due to an illness, so she probably didn’t realize she was letting the cat out of the bag. After she said it, the conversation got awkward, but it was helpful in that it let me know where I stood.

Sometimes I have local friends over for a holiday meal. As I have mentioned in other blog entries, a young friend of mine has a music scholarship at the University of Miami, so we see each other a lot. I will not run his family down, but they have a way of leaving him on his own on important occasions. This year they took off for South Carolina. I invited him to join us, so it was nice that the meal served a purpose beyond derailing my daily routine.

I am determined to get out of cooking future holiday meals singlehanded. I hate the idea of going to a restaurant on Thanksgiving or Christmas Eve, but I also hate doing dishes for nine hours so two or three people can stuff themselves.

I’m not interested in cooking any more, and that’s a blessing, but I can still do it when I need to. Also a blessing. I no longer care about getting a serious kitchen or a huge gas range, but I’m glad I can produce good food when I have to.

I fixed a boneless turkey this year, full of cornbread stuffing and andouille sausage. It was wonderful. You remove every bone except for the drumsticks, and then you stuff the bird and sew it up. When the bones are out, you have a flat piece of meat like a doormat, and you can marinate or season it very effectively. I put mine in a pot overnight with salt and champagne.

At this time of year, people start pushing fried turkey. It’s not for me. I’ve only had it once, and it was tough and dangerous. Burns can cripple you.

Years ago, before my sister’s issues blew up, she got a fryer and hosted Thanksgiving dinner. I had to do the frying. I think I did it wrong; I don’t recall turning the gas off when I lowered the turkey. The oil didn’t burst into flame or pour all over the yard; that was nice. But some escaped from the pot.

That made me realize how perilous turkey frying is. There are all sorts of issues with it. Once oil gets hot, it’s very flammable, so if you have the flame going, oil that goes over the side can start burning. The flames from the oil on the ground can light the oil in the pot. Then you have real trouble.

If you put the lid on the pot, it warps, letting oxygen in. The fire keeps burning. If you throw water in the pot, it blows up, sending more oil out, and the oil may be flying. The fire keeps burning. If you use a fire extinguisher, you will probably just blow oil out of the pot, increasing the size of the problem. The fire keeps burning.

If the oil spills on a flat surface, and you’re standing on it, the oil can flow onto your feet. That’s bad. If your fryer is near your house, the flames can set fire to your eave or wall. God help you if you put the fryer in your house, on your deck, or in your garage.

The fried turkey was not good. I don’t know if the seasoning was weak or if frying just makes it fall off, but the turkey didn’t have a lot of flavor. The texture was like rubber.

I don’t have any confidence in frying, but a lot of people swear you can get a great result if you do it right. I guess they must know something. Personally, I’m not going to waste three gallons of oil on a process that scares me and gives me a bird that contains no stuffing and produces no gravy.

As far as I know, the ultimate turkey is one that has been boned, marinated, stuffed, and smoked. I’m too lazy to do that, but I’ve done it once or twice, and it was incredible. Without the smoking, it’s still magnificent. It’s more tender that a roasted bird. It’s just as juicy. It cooks much faster. You can carve it without wasting anything; it slices like salami. You can store the leftover bird without the aggravation of dealing with a dried-up, picked-over skeleton that resists going into the fridge.

Boning and sewing up the bird will probably add an hour to an hour and a half to the job, but you will also cut the baking time down. I used a 12-pound bird this time. I put it in the oven at around 9:50 a.m., and in two hours, it had cooked so fast I had to cut the temperature to 170 in order to avoid getting ahead of the sides. I could have had it on the table in under three hours, easily. As it was, the bird cooked so fast it was at 165 degrees when it came out. Considerably higher than optimal.

When you stuff a bird that isn’t boned, cooking takes forever. And you can’t get much stuffing into it. I would guess that you can get three times as much into a boned bird.

It was spectacular. No doubt about it. Not my best work, but considering the halfheartedness of the effort, a bona fide home run.

I did a major cheat with the mashed potatoes. I baked them, refrigerated them, and then nuked and mashed them on the day of the meal. They were a little overcooked, but that added some browning which made them taste better. It’s really hard to go wrong with mashed potatoes. They will forgive almost anything except using a food processor.

If you ever feel like boning a turkey, get yourself a $5 Forschner bird’s beak paring knife and a small, sharp chef’s knife. Learn how to use a diamond hone so you can keep them super sharp. Get a cut-proof glove for your left hand. Your left hand will get cold and relatively numb while you work, and it will be wet and greasy, so a trip to the ER is a distinct possibility for anyone who doesn’t wear a glove.

The actual boning is not complicated. Cut the turkey’s skin all the way through, straight down the back, from one end to the other. Then start peeling it off the bones and carefully cutting the meat loose. You will want to cut the wings off at the elbow, because boning a wing flat is impossible. Flex the thigh bones so the stuff that holds the hip joints is accessible and cut the tenons and ligaments so you can free the inner end of the bone from the pelvis. Then cut the meat away from the thigh bone until you get to the knee. Cut that joint open, remove the thigh bone, and get back to work on the rest of the bird. Remove the wing bones the same way you took out the thighs.

You will actually be able to stuff the upper wings, since they won’t have bones in them. That’s really nice.

You will always be working from inside the bird so you don’t cut through the skin. You want the skin intact.

You’ll lose maybe half a pound of meat, but think how much goes in the trash when you throw the desiccated skeleton out.

When you get done, you’ll be able to salt and/or marinate the bird overnight. You can season it again right before you stuff it.

When it’s time to stuff it, get a big needle and some dental floss. Sew up the torn-up area down around the bird’s former anus. You will want to restore the original pouch shape of the skin. Then start packing stuffing in.

Start sewing, pulling the edges of the skin together as you go. Shove the stuffing around to make it fit where it should. Pack it in there good. You can use a lot.

When you have the bird closed up, put it in your roasting pan on its back, season the skin however you want, and cook it normally. I like 200-250 degrees, covered with foil, with a 425 finish (no foil) to brown it. My roasting pan has a rack that holds the bird up out of the grease so it doesn’t soak.

There are Youtube videos which probably explain the boning process better than I do.

When you serve the turkey, put it on a cutting board and twist the legs off. The slice it like a cheese log. When you find the floss, pull it. The skin won’t be strong enough to hold onto it, so the floss will come out without breaking.

Obviously, this also works with chickens. I guess it would work with anything that has bones, although you would lose precious rib meat if you boned a pig.

Today I realized Thanksgiving has nothing to do with God or thanks. There is no way you can cook and eat and still have time for God.

I lost a lot of prayer time. I had to go start working early and keep at it until bedtime, two days in a row (usually, it’s three). You can’t work God into that in any meaningful way. You just do it out of obligation and accept the fact that your Christian walk will resume the next day.

When I got up today and knew I didn’t have to wrestle with turkey or side dishes, it was wonderful. I took as much time as I wanted for prayer.

I guess I sound like a downer, but people have been chasing their tails all week. They struggled to prepare during the days when they still had to go to work. They scrambled and toiled on the day itself. Then half of them went to the mall after dinner. The other half went today, to beat other people senseless in order to get three dollars off on a Chia Rihanna or whatever the big gift for 2015 is.

Next time, there will be help, or there will be a drastically abbreviated menu. And I’m not going to harbor any delusions about honoring God. This holiday is all about gluttony, shopping, and drunkenness. Get it done and get back on track. That’s my plan.

I hope all of you had a nice Thanksgiving. Maybe the turkey tips will help you. I strongly suggest avoiding fried turkey, although I did come across one good reason for doing it: it gives the men an excuse to go outside and get some peace. Maybe it’s worth it.

I only took one photo, and it’s not that great, but I’ll post it. It will help you understand what I’m talking about.

The Tuition has Been Paid

Today I’m not in church. This will not be news to anyone who reads the blog.

I have friends who have suggested churches, and I can tell some of them feel that a person who doesn’t have a church is in danger.

I would have said the same thing a few years ago. It’s true for most people. My situation is different, though.

I’ve known people who felt they were too holy to go to church. They got mad at the other congregants, usually. They stayed home and criticized, and sooner or later, they got way off the path. I have advised people to stay in churches that are 85% good and 15% bad, because that’s about the best ratio you can hope for.

Am I a hypocrite, then, for staying home?

Short answer: no.

I used to have much more respect for Christian leaders than I do now. I thought Kenneth Copeland was a genius (there may be some truth to that, if it means he has a natural talent which is used to damage people’s lives). I probably thought Benny Hinn was an apostle; I don’t recall.

When I started going to Trinity Church in Miami Gardens, I thought I had found the real thing because I felt the presence of God. I thought Rich Wilkerson was doing a great job. I didn’t know very much. I hadn’t heard about the things that went on behind the scenes, and I didn’t have a great prayer life, so I didn’t have as much discernment as I should have. I was not that hard to fool.

I didn’t know that God’s presence is unrelated to his approval! God will show up and let believers feel his presence in places where people are in the process of failing.

I started praying in tongues three minutes a day, and when I got up to 15 minutes, I felt like I had accomplished something. I didn’t know I was only scratching the surface.

God started showing me things. I got up to thirty minutes, and he continued showing me things. One of the things he showed me was that Trinity was very screwed up. He showed me that the leaders were only interested in money and fame, that they used people, that people didn’t grow much under their care, and that the main purpose of the church was to promote the Wilkersons. I also realized Wilkerson was using the deranged theological fantasies of his pal Steve Munsey to collect money, even though he probably knew it was a scam.

I started to see through the TV idiots. If Kenneth Copeland came into my house today and used a glass, afterward, I would soak it in bleach to kill the cooties.

Trinity started to wear on me. I couldn’t tell the pastors anything, and it was almost impossible for me to tell other members anything. They wouldn’t listen. Only a few paid attention. The rest assumed that anyone who disagreed with a pastor was “out of submission” and headed for some kind of divine punishment.

After a long period of prayer for a new church, I ended up at New Dawn Ministries. The pastors there were better, but as my prayer time increased, I started to understand that they were proud and ignorant. They were like the character Jade Fox in the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, who stole a martial arts manual, became powerful by looking at the drawings, and then hit a plateau because she couldn’t read.

They were able to make a certain amount of progress in the kingdom because they were open to the Holy Spirit, and they really did want to see people do well. But their arrogance made further progress impossible.

Like the Wilkersons, they had the attitude that anyone who disagreed was out of line. That’s not a bad attitude, if you have the revelation to back it up. But they didn’t. Revelation doesn’t soak into hardened bricks. The ground has to be ready to receive it.

They seemed lazy. The church was not open except during services, and they traveled and vacationed a lot. I don’t think they had serious prayer lives, because if they had, they would have learned.

The church is still tiny, forty-three months after I first showed up. They talk about “breakthrough” and so on, but they are going to be in their little rented room until someone new takes over or the church collapses.

As for famous preachers, I liked Perry Stone and Fred Stone. I still like Fred, but he died a few years ago. Perry receives all sorts of wonderful information from God, but it’s not very helpful with changing your heart. It’s about prophecy and the hidden meanings of things in the Bible. You can only get so far with that.

He has pride and anger problems. He has a very haughty way of talking about unbelievers and Christians who don’t know as much as he does. Sometimes he seems excited about the possibility that they will suffer for their unwillingness to listen.

I used to receive Perry’s monthly CDs, but they got repetitious. Any time a preacher seems to be going in circles, there is a problem. Circling is symptomatic of a loss of anointing. The Hebrews circled in the desert because they wouldn’t listen.

I like John Bevere a lot, but he doesn’t seem all that excited about prayer in tongues, which is the most important thing in our arsenal. He does encourage it, but I remember him complaining about a time when the church was too caught up in it. He has also said things that show he doesn’t have the kind of prayer life I need to see in a teacher.

Andrew Wommack is pretty good, but he clearly has a discernment problem, because he is palling around with prosperity preachers. That’s a major issue. If you’re sitting down and dining with the wolves, and you see nothing wrong with it, what other deceptions have you swallowed?

I don’t listen to anyone now. I don’t know anyone who is teaching the whole package in a way that makes it worth it for me to sit down and listen. I hear error most of the time, and when I hear the truth, I don’t hear anything new. They’re talking about things they consider major revelations. I heard the same things years ago, directly from God, and could not get anyone to listen to me.

I put in several hours of prayer every day, so I hear a lot of things from God without man’s help. I don’t want to learn something and then have to sit for an hour and listen to someone else repeat it. Usually, it’s not a profitable use of my time, and it’s boring.

It can be nice to get confirmation, but it’s not so nice I want to go on Youtube and listen to every John Bevere sermon.

Is it a bad thing to have no teacher? Yes. But I do have a teacher. I have the only good teacher.

John taught that we would learn directly from the Holy Spirit, and he made it clear that this teaching was an antidote to the false teachings of men. Here is a passage from 1 John:

Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last hour.

They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out that they might be made manifest, that none of them were of us.

But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and you know all things. I have not written to you because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and that no lie is of the truth.

Who is a liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist who denies the Father and the Son. Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father either; he who acknowledges the Son has the Father also.

Therefore let that abide in you which you heard from the beginning. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, you also will abide in the Son and in the Father. And this is the promise that He has promised us—eternal life.

These things I have written to you concerning those who try to deceive you. But the anointing which you have received from Him abides in you, and you do not need that anyone teach you; but as the same anointing teaches you concerning all things, and is true, and is not a lie, and just as it has taught you, you will abide in Him.

Ask yourself this: was John serious? Surely. This is the Bible. If we can’t rely on this, then nothing we believe is trustworthy. If John was serious, then a Spirit-led believer does not need a human teacher.

This sounds horrific to the institutionalized Christian mind. The Bible says we should not neglect the assembling of ourselves together! But consider this: the Spirit-led are not under the law.

It’s a good idea to assemble. For some of us, it’s necessary. But it’s not law. For some Christians, it’s inappropriate and a waste of time.

Jesus cautioned us not to linger where our peace was not received. He was not kidding. If you’re hearing directly from God, and churches keep mistreating you, the best thing is to stay home.

This is not a new idea.

Adam walked with God and learned from him. Enoch was set apart for God, and he was eventually taken to heaven without the intermediate step of physical death. Moses got away from people so he could learn from God. At least some of the prophets were solitary. Elijah ran off and hid by a brook, where the ravens fed him. We have no record of him living among people. After Paul was converted, he went to Arabia and Damascus and learned from God. John was living in exile on Patmos when he wrote the Revelation.

Here is a passage from the fourth psalm: “But know that the Lord has set apart for Himself him who is godly; The Lord will hear when I call to Him.”

Every humble person who prays in tongues a lot learns the same things from God. When two people hear from the same Spirit, the things they hear will always agree. This knowledge will not agree with what carnal people believe, and most Christians are very carnal. So the closer you get to God, the further you will get from humanity. You will get further from other Christians. People who have a huge amount of knowledge will be separated from people who only have a great deal. That means they will infuriate pastors and teachers.

Enoch and Elijah probably couldn’t stand life on earth. That’s probably why they were removed. They had so little in common with humanity, they didn’t belong here.

Why write about it? Because it should give everyone hope. It’s hard to find a decent church. It’s hard to find good teaching. But anyone can find the Holy Spirit.

The availability of the Holy Spirit neutralizes the danger of bad teaching. You can compare what other people say with what the Spirit says. What they leave out, he will fill in. What they don’t know, he knows.

That’s a big deal. As the Bible says, people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Through the Spirit, knowledge is available, right now, wherever you are.

You may think this was only for special people, like Paul and John. If that’s true, why did John tell us otherwise? “You do not need that anyone teach you.”

When did God become a respecter of persons?

If you’re starting at square one, by all means, find a church. But once you get the ball rolling, if you do it right, you will find that you need church less and less, and that it needs you more.

This stuff is important, because persecution is really ramping up. You will need power and knowledge.

The gay marriage surrender was a disaster. We didn’t get earthquakes and plagues, and no one set off an H-bomb in Times Square, but America lost its protection. Doors are now open that used to be closed. Fallen angels and their children the demons now have authority and access they didn’t have in the past.

Christians who don’t hear from God think our mission is to spread peace and love. They think we’re supposed to be super nice, and that this will correct the world.

That’s not how it works.

We are supposed to bring people to repentance, help them get to know the Holy Spirit, and help them to throw off the spirits that rule them so they can serve God. To get this job done, sometimes we have to say things that don’t sound nice. We have to criticize. We have to be willing to be excluded.

By obsessing on making people love us, we are giving up real power. We’ve turned Christianity into a popularity contest. Paradoxically, this will make our enemies confident, bring more hatred out into the open, and enable them to destroy us.

We get power by turning from the world and leading it in righteousness. By kowtowing to confused perverts and letting them lead us, we opened our gates. Now America is becoming more and more corrupt. Trashy, cruel people who used to lose now defeat us, and they will continue to do so. Their triumphs will increase.

Look around you and ask yourself if this is the America you knew eighteen months ago. People who are controlled by demons are bold now; they are oozing out of the woodwork and assuming command over us.

Right now, it’s hard for a Christian to own a bakery. A few years from now, you may not be able to have a credit card or a bank account.

To understand the way the enemy works, think of the Muslims and Israel. The Israelis gave up one piece of land after another, thinking their enemies would be satisfied and make peace. The problem is that their enemies don’t want peace or small bits of land. They want everything, and they want Israel to disappear from the earth. They will never stop attacking. This is how people who hate God see Christians.

They aren’t going to stop when we give up bakeries and academic jobs. They’ll take everything. Wait and see.

They don’t even know they want it. Not yet. But they will. The masks will fall off, and people will treat us the way the Nazis treated the Jews. There will be no shame. They will be proud of it. The things they’re doing to us right now are very much like the things the Nazis did in the 1930s. Read up and see.

If you know the Holy Spirit, and you continue listening to him, you will receive a certain amount of power to protect yourself. You will be able to defeat persecutors and the loser spirits they’ve given their souls to. That’s very important. Many of us will have to suffer and die, but there is no law that says every Christian has to be a punching bag.

Satan owns America. Christians hate hearing that, but it’s true. We gave it to him. God is not going to swoop down and fix things. America is going to continue to rot. You are not going to be able to set the kingdom of heaven up around you. That’s a fantasy. The thing to do is to set it up inside yourself.

Now that we’ve dropped our pants for the devil, things are accelerating. It’s not clear how much time is left. How crazy will God let us get? Will he let us design babies the way we design fantastic CGI creatures for movies? That technology is not far off. Will he let computers become so powerful our governments can have us under complete surveillance at all times? Will he let us destroy every church building and every book and recording? Things like this are rapidly becoming possible.

Today God told me something. Many Christians have done well without churches, but every Christian who has no prayer life is a failure. Every single one. So don’t get your priorities screwed up.

I hope this is useful to you. Things are going sour fast, and I hope you have the time and the inclination to prepare as well as possible.

Sober up and Ride Off

The enemy is funny. If you say you don’t need to be changed or informed, and that you can do it all by yanking on your own bootstraps, he says you’re proud. If you say you hear from God daily, and that God changes you and makes you stronger and smarter, he still says you’re proud. He says you’re proud of your relationship with God. And that it’s imaginary.

Okay, whatever. I can’t even make human beings happy, so getting Satan to lay off me is not a priority.

I have a strong prayer life. It is not perfect; I don’t pray enough in the middle of the day. But compared to the prayer life of your average Christian (or to me three years ago), it’s very good. I pray in tongues maybe two and a half hours a day, on average. I spend a lot of time blessing and cursing. I pray with my understanding. I have lists so I don’t forget things.

Why tell you this? So you will know I am not talking out of my rear end when I say I hear from God.

As far as I can tell, almost no well-known Christian leaders have good prayer lives. They love to brag about the things they do for God, so if they were praying several hours every day, we would have heard about it over and over. They’re not doing it.

One of my favorite teachers, John Bevere, recently spoke of a time early in his ministry, when he was so gung-ho he prayed a couple of hours per day. Something like that. I don’t recall the exact figure. While encouraging people to pray in tongues daily, Perry Stone spoke admiringly of old people who sometimes prayed as long as twenty minutes at a crack.

If I only prayed in tongues twenty minutes per day, I would expect to collapse in a month. If I thought praying a couple of hours every day was a burden so large I needed to mention it publicly, I would consider myself lost and in need of revival.

I’m not doing enough, but I’m doing a lot. I have the authority and the standing to say a few things.

Feel-good pulpit pimps like Joel Osteen are telling people to relax. They’re telling people things are going to be fine. They don’t want to offend anyone, they don’t hear from God, and they don’t really care about us, so they say anything that will increase the size of their audiences and their income.

We have developed the habit of going to church in order to feel better. We are not all that interested in why we feel bad. People like Osteen and Jakes realize that, so they make us feel confident and inspired. Then we give them our money, which is all they really wanted, and we go home and continue to live in defeat.

I am hearing from God, and he is not telling me to relax or that everything is going to be fine. He makes me very agitated. He urges me to change. Something bad is coming, and if I’m not ready, I’ll be in the wrong line when we go through the pride detector.

Last night I had a disturbing dream, and I woke up. In the dream, I was Christopher Reeve, but I could walk, and I wasn’t rich. I had an idiot younger sister who had borrowed my bicycle. She had been thrown out of a place she was renting, and she had left the bicycle there. She led me to the place, and I went to the front to talk to the landlord. The area around the door was enclosed by a chain-link fence. The owner was a centaur. He came out and talked through the fence, but he wouldn’t let me in.

I was something like seven feet tall, and he was about five feet tall. I could have reached over the fence, lifted him out, tossed him aside, and gone in for the bike, but I didn’t have authority to do that, so I didn’t do it. He blew me off and went back inside.

I felt uneasy and started to pray. I spent a long time praying. The Holy Spirit made odd noises come out of me. When I say “made,” I don’t mean I had no self-control. I was submitted, so I did what he moved me to do.

I felt that I was being shaken and twisted, the way you would wring out a dishrag.

I started thinking about my iniquities and sins. I focused a lot on things I usually try to think of as inconsequential. If you have the urge to sin, it’s never inconsequential. The sin itself may not be a big deal, but the fact that you have the compulsion should alarm you.

I became very uncomfortable as this stuff rose to the surface. I didn’t like it at all. No one likes to think of himself as having qualities he considers trashy or disgusting. But I told God to keep pouring it on. I told him I didn’t care about feeling good. I wanted to know myself as I really was, and I wanted to change.

At my old church, they would have told me I was condemning myself. They would have told me to swallow the poison instead of throwing it up and being healed.

Until now, I didn’t really know what the dream meant, but suddenly it seems clear.

The little sister is the influence of people controlled by weak, feminine spirits that rule the church. She was silly. She was poor. She was a person no one respected. She did not own the land she lived on.

Christopher Reeve played Superman, but he wasn’t super. He was just a man. He had no skills, talents, or knowledge anyone would consider impressive.

In the dream, he had grey hair. Superman is immortal; his hair stays black. In the movies, he wears a costume made from indestructible Kryptonian cloth. It represents authority, power, and invulnerability. In the dream, he wore jeans and a button-down shirt, with loafers.

In the dream, he was strong by human standards, but it wasn’t helpful when the law was against him. He didn’t have the authority to take back what was his.

A centaur is a man supported by the body of a beast. It’s a man with a carnal foundation. It represents an unbeliever. In the dream, a little centaur was able to defy a large, strong man and take what was his. In a way, it had been given to him, because the man entrusted it to his stupid sister, just as we entrust Kenneth Copeland and Benny Hinn with our money and time.

The thing I wanted wasn’t even a car; it was a bicycle. To a grown man, a bicycle is a symbol of defeat and shame. It’s what you ride to work when you have a DWI, or when you don’t earn much. Most churches ride bicycles. They don’t have the power of the Holy Spirit, which is like a hot-rodded car engine.

I was not myself in the dream. I was a carnal Christian who walked in defeat because he tried to do things in his own strength.

This is what happens to people who don’t pray in tongues. They will usually lose to people who don’t believe in God at all. They won’t get to ride in cars, and they can even be cut off from their puny bicycles.

Eventually, the praying and groaning wound down, and I had to reset my alarm because I had missed so much sleep. The alarm interrupted another dream.

I dreamed I saw my father. He appeared to be over 100. He had no hair, and he was skinny, like a cancer patient. His body was just about gone, but his mind was absolutely clear, and he was energetic and at peace. In real life, he is dealing with dementia, he has a terrible weight problem, and he has no peace.

He had just cleaned a bathroom that had been filthy. I was amazed. In the he dream I had been trying and trying to get him to understand how nasty it was, and to clean it up. It stank up the whole house, and he couldn’t smell it.

I was relieved to see it clean. It was like winning the lottery.

I tried to say things that didn’t sound like backhanded criticism. I didn’t want to say “Finally!” I told him I would be happy to help him keep it clean.

Then we were driving. We were north of Miami. We drove through a little planned neighborhood that was very neat and peaceful. There was a Chick-Fil-A just inside the entrance.

We decided to have lunch. When we went in, the waiters stood in a group and started singing to us. They were that happy to see my dad.

It’s not surprising that it was a Chick-Fil-A. That’s what the atmosphere is like at their restaurants. They don’t sing to you, but they treat you like an honored guest. Also, Chick-Fil-A has become a symbol of Christianity.

When my dad expressed interest in tables, people rushed to get out of the way, even if they had been there first.

Christians have made themselves toilets for demons, which are our dead half-brothers. They are the children of angels. They express themselves in illness, mental problems, and iniquity. They take the place of the Holy Spirit. We are supposed to listen to God’s prophets and clean them out of ourselves.

Preachers aren’t teaching us how to be cleaned up and sanctified. They serve demons. They just want our money, so they don’t tell us we have become dirty bathrooms. They say we smell like roses, but in reality, we stink inside.

We can’t smell the stink because we lack discernment, which comes from praying in tongues. Often we think a horrible stench is a delightful aroma.

Sometimes the church has to go through terrible, wasting persecution, which is like cancer, in order to be put right.

When we are raptured, we will be taken to God’s wedding feast, in the planned community of heaven, where every one of us has a home, and the angels will be so glad they sing over us.

The sooner a person repents and develops a real prayer left, the less chastisement he will have to face before he straightens up.

You don’t have to look like a cancer patient when you leave the earth. You can be fit and strong, with all your hair.

Hair represents the glory of God, which accumulates around people who commune with the Holy Spirit on a daily basis. Prayer in tongues is the primary method for communing with him.

The conclusion I drew is that just before the rapture comes, God will succeed in changing a lot of Christians. They won’t have much time to get to know him or to make great progress in becoming like him, but he will manage to change their direction enough to get them in the door.

They will change during a time of affliction. That’s the reason for the weight loss and the sickly look. The baldness represents the fact that the change and the rapture came too close together to permit them to accumulate much in the kingdom.

The bathroom is the heart. It’s a place where you should meet with the Holy Spirit and get rid of the demons that inhabit it. You should be bleaching the walls and floor to get rid of their excrement. You should be flushing the residue away.

I represented people God sent to warn others.

Judging by the dream, they won’t listen any time soon. They will wait as long as possible, and it will cost them, both here and in heaven.

At least they’ll make it.

According to the book of Jubilees, Noah got 120 years to warn his neighbors. He didn’t do well at all. He saved his wife, three sons, and their daughters. A legend says he saved a giant named Og; even if that were true, it would be a pretty poor harvest.

In the Flood, God destroyed the world with water. We know that he’s going to destroy it again, with fire. We know that it will happen in a time of pride and perversion, like the times of Noah and Lot. Here we are, stoking the flames and laughing at the one who is holding them back.

The end of this age will not come on a day when we expect it. We know that for a fact. We have been informed of that, expressly. When it comes, we will be hit like Ronda Rousey, flatfooted, wondering where our confidence came from.

It’s interesting that her most painful and damaging injury was to the mouth she used to say nasty things.

Persecution is increasing very quickly all over the world. Even in “Christian” America, you’re in danger. If you’re a Christian, and you plan a career or business, you have to ask yourself whether it’s safe from gays.

Do you design websites? You may have to design some promoting bathhouses and depraved gay organizations. Do you have a restaurant? You may have to rent the banquet room out for gay weddings. Are you a professor? You may have to endorse homosexuality in order to be allowed to work, and you may have to endorse it off the job, not just on campus.

Satan is squeezing the world like a boil, and we are the pus he is trying to expel. God is letting him do it, because we evicted God from our lives.

God is not an enabler. God is doing what addiction counselors call “raising the bottom.” If you let an addict hit bottom, it means you don’t help him. You let him go broke and live on the streets so he’ll go to rehab. If you raise the bottom, you do things that accelerate the process so it will move faster.

Things are going to get bad much faster than we expected. You can’t change yourself overnight. It may already be too late to pray in tongues and be rehabilitated. You need to start so you can preserve as much as possible.

I’m very glad God isn’t stuffing me with cotton candy and root beer. That’s what televangelists do. They fill us with morphine and vodka so they can see our nakedness. They don’t care if we go to hell or if we are Satan’s slaves here on earth. God cares, so he tells me the truth. He’ll tell you the truth, too, but you have to turn on your radio. He’s not going to come down on a hang glider, shouting through a bullhorn. He will let you go to hell before he will let you change his ways.

He has thrown thousands of people into hell today, and you and your children are no better than they are.

My advice is to get started. Set time aside each day. Keep asking God for correction. Keep begging him to spare you the black harvest you sowed. That’s what I do.

Get to know him yourself, so you won’t have to rely on lies from imaginative preachers.

I can’t even imagine what he is going to be showing me in the months ahead. I do know that things are as good as they’ll ever get.

Warnings from Enoch

It’s unusual for me to have a sad day. Well…”unusual” is not a strong enough term. It’s rare. But today I feel a little down.

America is clearly in the grip of a spiritual seizure very much like the one we underwent in the Sixties, and I see little hope that we will come out of it. I think we will end up under the thumbs of exactly the kind of sleazy, grasping, cruel, trashy, stupid people who took over Cuba and North Korea. Decent people with common sense will be abused with increasing intensity, with the consent, support, and participation of the state. Filthy, irrational cretins will have power over us. The only way to be relatively safe will be to sell out and become a tool of oppression.

I remember how things were a few short years ago, before the latest eruption of political “correctness” and sexual perversion really got going.

I told people homosexuality would be the stick the enemy’s people used to beat Christians. It sounded crazy to hardheaded people who don’t listen, but I was correct. History proved me right. I knew the people who favored sexual deviation and sin would never be satisfied with tolerance and coexistence. I knew they would use their new power to label the rest of us as haters (a new word I can’t stand), and that it would give them a pretext to persecute us.

Look how right I was. In 2015 America, you don’t have to do anything affirmative in order to lose your job or have your business taken away. All you have to do is refuse to participate in the celebration of what God calls abomination. It’s not enough to say, “Do as you wish, but I would like to be left out of it.” You have to choose a side, and there is only one side the left will let you choose.

Recently two day care workers in Katy, Texas were fired because they refused to call a boy a girl. A six-year-old boy has either decided or been convinced that he’s a girl, and the gay men who are raising him have insisted that day care workers call him “she” and “her.” Because they refused to lie–a very reasonable position prior to the new era of thoughtcrime–they were forced out of their jobs.

This didn’t happen in San Francisco. It happened in Texas. Possibly the state liberals hate, and wish to conquer, the most. If the pink tide has swept over Texas, there is nowhere you can consider yourself or your family safe.

The boy is six. Think about that. His “parents” have made a life-altering decision for him involving concepts he can’t possibly understand yet, and they are projecting their soul-destroying motivations and sensibilities onto him, exactly the way gays tell us we project heterosexual drives onto normal children. If this boy shows up in your school, and you have to interact with him, you will have to lie to him and be an accomplice in the assassination of his masculinity. Or you can change careers. You will have a very hard time finding work that involves kids once “progressive” childcare employers find out you refuse to involve yourself in the destruction of children.

Changing careers will not be an option forever. The LGBT[insert new letters here as they are invented] army knows you’re looking for a rock to hide under, and they want to take it away from you before you get there. They will find ways to blackball you eventually, even if you’re satisfied with digging ditches. You will be allowed to believe whatever you want, as long as you don’t mind living like a hobo.

They believe they can change the world by crushing entire generations of dissidents. They think that if children grow up in a world in which everyone who agrees with the Bible suffers economic and social hardship, the children will, universally, deny God and embrace perversion.

Then Biblical morals will be gone. It’s like killing a generation of sick plants and starting a new crop with healthy seed. Future generations will not be “infected” with the Christian disease. Hitler and the socialists had the same idea, with regard to ideas they saw as threatening.

I was right before, and I’m right now, because I was repeating what God said. But not enough people will listen to turn the tide. A few here and there will get it. Overall, though, people are a lot like monkeys. They have no internal compasses. They just do whatever makes their cages most comfortable in the short run. Those of us who refuse to play along will be sacrificed, and those who refused to help us will rationalize.

Conservatives think they have the answers. They think that if we all go out and vote, things will change. They believe the problem is that we don’t educate, contribute, or vote enough. That’s completely wrong. What’s happening to America has supernatural roots, and we can’t fix it with natural tools. Relying on natural tools is what got us into this mess. We were supposed to be a prayer army that obeys God and receives his help. Instead, we glorified, and relied on, ourselves. So God quit helping us.

God wants us to be defeated by sexual sinners, aliens, criminals, other nations, and so on. He WANTS it. We are against him, so he is against us. We can’t beat God. We can’t even hide from him. We think we’re fighting deluded counterculture eccentrics, or that we’re fighting the devil. No; God is helping those people defeat us. We’re fighting God himself.

The church is almost useless.

The old churches aren’t even Christian. They preach salvation, but that’s about it. They’re wrong about almost everything else. They’re against the baptism with the Spirit, prayer in tongues, and being Spirit-led. They have never had much supernatural power. They teach us to work hard or to be really nice; things that don’t work without God’s help.

Newer churches are whorehouses. They love the supernatural. They toss out a few phrases in tongues once in a while. They tell us God will do miracles. But they teach us God’s plan is to satisfy our flesh. He wants to give us money and spectacular healings. They don’t teach correction, confession, and submission. They teach moronic, legalistic schemes to help us get rich by giving God money.

In the new churches, we worship TV stars. We don’t have prophets. We have Joel Osteen, who curries favor and seems to cringe. We think that anyone who has a camera pointed at him has to be an apostle.

Charismatic evangelists like Osteen and T.D. Jakes are blood drinkers. They don’t care much about us. They want our money. They’re deluded by greed, and they use our own greed to get at us. They tell us God will give us wealth, because he wants us to be rich. They don’t teach much about the internal riches God actually wants us to receive. They don’t know about those things, because they’re ignorant. They do know how to manipulate, so that’s what they stick to.

These characters bleed us and drink our blood to make themselves and their spoiled children fat. They don’t teach anyone anything powerful or helpful. They fill our hungry ears with fakery, and because we’re too blind to recognize it for what it is, we think we’re being fed. We stop looking for the truth, so we remain undeveloped, like unfertilized eggs.

Today I’ve been reading the book of Enoch. There is a long prophecy in it, in which God shows Enoch the history of the world, from Abraham to the time after the Messianic Age. In the prophecy, God shows how he has sent us his representatives time and time again, to open our eyes and help us get back on track. It tells how we ignored them and even killed them. It says we are going to continue doing those things until Jesus comes back.

It’s not a rosy picture. It describes the people who should be following God as sheep, and it says they are blind. It says foul spirits tear the meat off of them because they don’t submit to God.

The prophecy describes the Babylonian exile. It says Enoch begged God to help, but God folded his hands and took pleasure in what happened to the Jews. We’re no better than the Jews. He will treat us the same way.

Here is, perhaps, the worst part: according to the prophecy, the blind sheep will be cast into hell. Sounds unfair, doesn’t it? They identify as Jews and Christians, and you would think that would please God. The reason they don’t please God is that they’re blind. Is it fair to burn them?

Yes, of course it’s fair. They made the choices that led to their blindness.

In the American justice system, you can’t avoid a conviction by saying you were drunk or high when you committed a crime. The rationale is that you chose to drink or take drugs, so you’re responsible for what you did when you were out of your mind. The same principle applies to sin. If you turned away when you had the chance to do the right thing, and later you became unable to tell right from wrong, too bad.

One more time, God is going to raise up a man like Elijah. That man will speak the truth, and he will help other people who are capable of hearing and changing. The vast majority of human beings will be against that man, and all the spirits that serve Satan will be behind them. But he will prevail. Jesus will return to help him, and then the real suffering will begin. Jesus will be angry.

If you’ve disagreed with the Satanic agenda, people know about it. Things you said fifteen or twenty years ago will come back to you. God help you if you blog, because it will make gathering evidence that much easier. You are slated for destruction already. It’s probably impossible for you to fix things unless you sell your soul and recant falsely. Think about that. A choice is in your future. It is already scheduled. It will come sooner than you expected.

My advice is to start praying in tongues every day. You’re going to need the ability to hear from God, and you’re not going to develop it in a day. It may be too late to start, but at least you can try. Put in as much time as you can every day, and ask God for correction. Ask him for the supernatural ability to change. It looks like America is descending into the toilet pretty rapidly, so you need to get to work. I don’t think we can fix America. Don’t worry about that. But you may be able to build an ark around yourself.

It may not be long before you lose your job. You may lose whatever licenses and accreditations you have. You may have to kiss your profession goodbye. Sooner or later, they won’t be satisfied with taking your earning potential. They’ll want what you already have. Anything that enables you to be a “hater,” they will want to take away, even if it’s your life. It will be best for you, because hitting rock bottom will help you convert, and if you die because you refuse to change, that will be good for society. Either result will satisfy the enemy.

God provides protection to people who are truly close to him. He went so far as to carry Enoch, Elijah, and Jesus away. He is stronger than the people who hate you for living. You need to give him a reason to be on your side.

Martyrdom is a likely end for strong believers, but I believe we will lead victorious lives until they come for us, and even when we are killed, it will be because we chose to surrender.

Grumpy Christians Make it to Heaven

John Bevere is currently the best teacher I know of. He is telling people something that sounds very original, yet which we should have known for 2000 years: being nice is not the same thing as serving God.

He doesn’t put it quite that way. He has written a book called Good or God?, and the basic idea is that we don’t please God by being “good” by our own standards. We have to identify his standards and be good according to them.

I just read something on the Internet. A Mormon injected himself into a Christian comment thread. As Mormons often do, he kept his religion to himself until after he had been exposed by someone else. Then, as Mormons often do, he started claiming his religion was Christian, and that the people who were rejecting it were cruel and mean and probably climate change deniers who don’t even eat organic. Or something like that. He took on a shameless victim stance, which is a familiar Mormon tactic. I assume this is a strategy they have been taught, because I have seen it a number of times.

He said something about how caring and loving Mormons are. I’ll go farther than that. They do a lot of charitable works. They work hard. They don’t commit a lot of crime. They promote kindness and traditional Christian morality.

That’s great, BUT it’s not good in God’s eyes.

It’s hard–no, it’s impossible–to make most people accept this, but here is what’s truly good: hearing from the Holy Spirit and doing what he tells you to do, even if it conflicts with the Jewish law or traditional Christian morality.

Mormons can’t do that. They are not Holy-Spirit-led. They venerate spirits such as “Moroni,” the messenger that supposedly spoke to Joseph Smith before he found his magic golden plates and read off of them as they sat in his hat. Mormons are out of alignment with God’s authority because they reject grace and humility, so they can’t advance far as God’s empowered servants. In this respect, they are like gays and Buddhists and all the other characters who try to “correct” Christianity.

We are supposed to receive salvation, which comes purely as a gift, through faith. We do not have to perform any works in order to go to heaven (contrary to Mormon teaching). Then we’re supposed to be baptized with the Holy Spirit. Then we’re supposed to pray in tongues daily, ask God for correction, fight our pride and the spirits that controlled us before we were saved, and become Spirit-led.

Then you do what the Spirit tells you to do, not what Christian law says to do. Yes, I said “Christian law.” We treat the Ten Commandments as though they bind us. We take the things Jesus taught and turn them into rigid laws. We have law, even though we are not supposed to.

The Holy Spirit will usually tell you to do nice things, but sometimes he won’t. He told the ancient Jews to kill babies and old people. Was that good? This may be hard to acccept, but yes, it was good. It was good, because it was God’s command. That’s what made it good. Niceness does not make an action good. God–not Satan–throws nice people into hell every day. He’s doing it right now. That’s not nice. But it’s good.

Do I expect God to tell me to kill babies? No, of course not. That’s exactly the kind of ridiculous question a carnal person would ask in order to “debunk” Spirit-led Christianity. But I do expect God to tell me to go against Jewish law and Christian law.

The “Jesus only wanted us to be nice” crowd is heavily pro-homosexuality. They see nice gays, and they think they must be okay with God. After all, Jesus was very hard on people who were self-righteous and unforgiving. And many Christians are not as nice as random gays.

The strange thing about people who believe this is that they think they’re fighting legalism, but they actually promote it.

If you think you’re going to heaven because you’re nice, then you think you’re being rewarded for good works. That’s legalism. Under legalism, you are rewarded for what you do, not what you are or what you believe.

Real Christians do not believe that. They believe that they will enter paradise when they die even if they commit a substantial number of sins during their post-salvation lives. Many of us take it too far and do as we please, treating salvation as though it cost God nothing, but this is how it works. So a rude Christian who believes in forgiveness by faith will enter heaven, and a really nice Mormon, homosexual atheist, Buddhist, or Hindu will not be able to escape hell.

Going further, a Christian who is not friendly, warm, or relentlessly nurturing may please God much more than an unbeliever who is nice all the time. If the Christian does what the Holy Spirit tells him to do, then he’s doing what is right.

It’s nice to be nice, but what counts is obedience, and you can’t be obedient if you can’t hear the Holy Spirit, because you don’t know what he’s telling you to do.

If we’re saved by grace, why does obedience count? Because we’re supposed to go past salvation. God has things he wants us to do in this life. If we obey, we will be improved, we will help others to be improved, and we will build strong, Spirit-led people who can help others receive salvation, serve God, and humiliate Satan.

Jesus talked about this when he discussed people who would come up to him at judgment and tell him what they had done for him. People will approach him and say, “I built an orphanage. I gave money to the poor. I never criticized anyone else’s sins. I accepted homosexuality because I refuse to judge. I worked in my church for nothing.” Essentially, they will tell him what he owes them because of their works. They will say, “I was good. I did what I thought was good.” But what you think is good is not necessarily good. Only God knows what is good. Jesus said he will tell the people who try to collect on the debt to depart from him. He will say he never knew them.

When you decide what’s good, not only do you fail to discern God’s will; you try to correct God. You substitute your judgment for his. Doesn’t matter whether you have what you call “good intentions.” Even your intentions have to be judged by God. If you intend to do what you think is good, instead of listening to the Holy Spirit, then your intentions are bad.

Mormons are not Christians. They belong to a faith that involves Jesus, and they believe faith is PART of salvation, but they don’t believe faith alone saves us. If you believe that anything other than faith is essential to salvation, then you’re not saved. You’re under the law, and no one can fulfill the law.

The doctrine of following the Holy Spirit sounds very harsh to self-righteous people. They think their man-made doctrine is better, because it tells them to be so nice. Consistently nice. They think they’re better than Spirit-led Christians who are not always nice, and they will use their own niceness to condemn us. When they use it to put us in chains, take our homes, and kill us, this will be part of their justification. Expect it.

If you want more of what God has for you, give up the Christian law. Get to know the Holy Spirit. Ask for correction, and ask God to make you crave correction. He will answer these prayers, and the blessings you receive will be greater than anything you will ever get for being nice.

Creepy Pastors do the Opposite

Today I had another remarkable revelation concerning the last two churches I belonged to. They are ruining people’s relationships in a manner not unlike the damage done by the Nazis and by Americans who owned slaves.

I don’t know why I didn’t see this sooner. I suppose I didn’t care enough about being rejected to think about it.

After World War Two, many people found themselves isolated from family and friends. The Nazis tore relationships apart. It’s obvious that they murdered people, but there was more to it than that. They destroyed neighborhoods so people had to leave as refugees. They imprisoned people and moved them around. When the war was over, the Nazi infrastructure was gone, and there was no one capable of determining where people were.

Many people got back together shortly after the war. Others stayed apart for years. Some never found each other again. Slaveholders also tore families apart, and many were never restored.

I’ve known for a long time that Rich Wilkerson and the crew at Trinity Church discouraged people from talking to those who leave the church. A friend told me she had been sat down for “the conversation.” I know there were secret meetings about me. Big deal. I’m not the kind of person who suffers a lot when people drop me.

I knew about Trinity, but it was only recently that people started telling me that the pastors at New Dawn discourage people from communicating from people who leave.

If what I’m told is correct, they’re not always relatively subtle about it, as in the recent situation where a pastor preached about people like me without using my name. I am told they mentioned people by name and told others to shun them.

Here’s the interesting part: these things are generally done in secret, because many church pastors are gutless and sneaky. The problem with that is that the people who are shunned don’t know what’s going on. They don’t know the pastors are behind it. They may assume their friends don’t want to be around them.

They can’t take away true friends who are close to you, because you will communicate with those people in spite of the pastors. But they can cut you off from people who had the potential to become friends.

They can also cause people who leave to cut off the people who stay. When you leave, you may assume the pastors have turned everyone against you, so you may stop maintaining relationships.

So now I wonder: how many ruined relationships are these people responsible for?

This is really something. Many people are very dependent on their churches for help and comfort. I’m not one of those people, but not everyone is like me. What happens when such people lose their church circles?

It’s not a small problem. Even a little church can interfere with dozens or hundreds of friendships.

Thinking about this, I realize how important it is to expose this nonsense. It has to be exposed because its power comes from the fact that it was done in secret. I feel like someone should start a Facebook group or website for victims, so they can come in and announce their feelings toward people and possibly reclaim them.

I’m so mad right now. How can anyone do something this vile and cowardly and pretend to be a man or woman of God? It’s all done from a desire to get money and/or power. It’s dishonest, because it’s secretive. It’s cruel. And what benefit does it bring? Spoiled idiots with delusions of grandeur get to preserve their little empires and avoid honest work. People who would otherwise have very limited access to wealth and power–people who would be doing blue-collar jobs–get to ride around in German cars and go on expensive vacations. That’s about it.

I don’t know what to do, except for talking about it openly so that people’s eyes will be opened.

Let the Bedbugs Starve

This morning during prayer I got more revelation about churches.

My prayer life keeps improving. These days I will often get up in the morning, go to the den, put on worship music (not Christian dance music), and pray while walking around. I am getting very aggressive, and I expect it to increase.

Today while I was praying, I thought about the way my life had changed since getting out from under a pastor.

When I was serving at churches, I had to deal with a lot of immature, ignorant people who were in authority. They did not pray much. They did not get revelation from God. They just repeated what other people told them. Nonetheless, for one reason or another, they were put in charge of ministries.

If you’re a pastor’s brother in law in a charismatic, money-centered church, you can pretty much count on running a ministry, unless he doesn’t like you. The wife will automatically be a pastor. Buddies and people who agree with everything the pastor says are likely to be promoted. Sometimes these people belong in their positions, and sometimes they don’t. The rest of us have to deal with them.

When the people in the Bible needed guidance, they went to men who were in contact with God. That’s what they did when they were doing things right, I mean. They went to Moses or Samuel or Jesus. They didn’t go to the high priest’s uncle or wife.

We are different now. We go to whichever crony or sycophant is available.

You can tell church leaders are useless when they have to brainstorm in order to come up with things to say or do. People who are anointed always have something on the stove. God doesn’t put a real servant in charge of something and then sit back to see the wonderful ideas the servant’s tiny, unaided brain can come up with.

When I was serving at Trinity Church, they used to come up with nutty projects. One was called “the 2020 Vision.” Rich Wilkerson said they were going to save a certain number of people by 2020.

I looked it up on the web, and it turned out about a billion churches had also had the 2020 vision, but it meant totally different things to them. And they had had the vision long before Wilkerson did, and you probably know how preachers love to steal hot ideas.

The 2020 vision lasted a few months, I think. It’s only 2015, so something is not quite right.

Wilkerson’s son Richie once preached about “microwave sermons.” The day you’re supposed to preach approaches, and you realize you have nothing to say, so you call a buddy and have him email you a sermon. You then serve his moldy garbage to your congregation, like a microwaved burrito.

He thought he was telling us about the problems preachers have, but he was really telling us God had not chosen him to teach us. If God had chosen him, he would have had something to say.

Rich Wilkerson manipulated people with Steve Munsey’s “Seven Blessings of Passover” nonsense, telling them God would give them a great year if they gave him lots of money. Then I exposed that lie, and he reinvented it as the “Heart for the House” offering, meaning the people were supposed to devote themselves to building his corporation.

In the Bible, “house” means something different. It refers to a human being God is trying to build. This is not something Rich Wilkerson has a heart for.

My last church put the pastor’s brother in law in charge of various things. It seemed like they were impressed because he had a career that involved IT. He put the church on Indiegogo (yes, I know) and tried to raise money. He led the men’s ministry and made us do silly team exercises which almost certainly came from corporate training. We were asked to participate in a tug of war to demonstrate how important it is for everyone to pull. I refused. A tug of war is a great way to put yourself in the hospital, especially if you’re over 40. You can’t make uneducated people understand the forces involved when several tons of men pull in different directions on a rope.

We also went bowling once, at a really dirty facility that served rotten food. That was pretty bad.

People who don’t pray have bad ideas, or they take bad ideas from other people. They have no business running anything. Even if you do pray, you need some time to mature. If you were stealing cars last year, you probably aren’t ready to be a youth pastor.

I’m not really comfortable with the whole “youth pastor” idea. We should learn from older people, because they’re the ones who know things.

This morning I realized how free I am. I don’t have to give big donations to wasteful people now. I don’t have to be on the prayer line for several hours a week. I don’t have to come to seven a.m. volunteer meetings and then serve until mid-afternoon, for pastors who show up late for church and then prolong the services by showing boring slides of their grandchildren.

I talk directly to God every day. He teaches me things that are true and useful. He isn’t repeating nonsense he heard on TBN.

Once nice thing about God is that he tries to improve me. He doesn’t try to convince me that Christianity is about money and miracles. He shows me the infected places on my heart. He shows me what I’m wrong about. He gives me motivation to admit fault and change.

The pastor at New Dawn was obsessed with grace. He rejected the idea that our own corruption causes problems. He believes that once you’re saved, God thinks you’re wonderful, and he does not expect you to show a lot of interest in repentance or improvement. He thinks our problems are caused by lack of faith, not iniquity or lack of obedience. He sees talk of repentance and correction as legalism.

If you tell him fat type 2 diabetics who eat everything in sight are sick because they’re gluttons, he won’t want to hear it. If you tell him we give evil spirits authority over our bodies, to cause disease, by hardening our hearts toward God’s correction, he will think you’re self-righteous.

It’s remarkable, really. He thinks talking about repentance and obedience is legalism, but he says God rewards tithes and offerings with wealth because of grace.

In the Old Testament, God told Malachi he would reward the Jews financially for giving to the priests. The people who got this promise were under the law. They had financial problems because they disobeyed the law. Restoring the offerings was a legalistic move. Obvious?

If you’re tithing, you’re obeying the law, not the Spirit. It shouldn’t be necessary to point that out.

He tries to get around this by saying Abraham tithed, but as far as we know, Abraham only tithed once. And the Jewish law of the tithe was never applied to non-Jews. Abraham was circumcised. Do we have to do that too?

I made myself unwelcome by telling people God expected us to fight our iniquities and obey the Holy Spirit. I said the prosperity gospel was a crock. That was helpful information people needed to have.

Now I don’t have to sit in the sanctuary wondering if I should say something because Albert or Rich wouldn’t like it. Or worse, because their wives, who are out of control, wouldn’t like it.

I don’t have to sit through an endless series of pastor appreciation events. I don’t have to watch the church give money to the pastor’s son, who treats older people like children and needs a boot in the rear.

It’s very good.

In the past, when I got away from church, I lost my relationship with God, but I have reached a point where churches interfere with that relationship. America’s churches are extremely screwed up. I’m sure there are good ones out there, but I don’t know of any. Definitely not around here.

The people who run our churches are doing tremendous harm. The prosperity nuts may be the worst. They fill people’s heads with promises that do not come true. They treat them disrespectfully. They use churches as their personal mad money funds. They promote their idiot relatives and give them money taken from poor people’s tithes. They even try to make churches cut people off socially for correcting them.

They do things people in the secular world go to jail for.

These swine on two legs are poisoning people against church and against God. I would hate to be in their shoes when it comes time to face him.

How can we expect people to trust God if the preachers who claim to represent him hurt us and lie to us? Is it really worth it, so you and your wife can quit working and buy things your skills and knowledge could never bring you in a secular setting? Many of the people you hurt have very little. Many were holding on by the skin of their teeth when they came to you, and you kicked them in the mouth.

I’m not sure when I’ll set foot in a church again. It seems like God has to work some positive changes in me, and he knows that every preacher within driving distance will only hinder him.

If a church has hurt you, and you don’t know where to turn, the best advice I can give you is to spend a lot of time praying every day. Ask God to correct you. Ask him to fill you with the Holy Spirit and the gift of prayer in tongues. Then use the gift as much as you can, and listen.

I don’t know what to think about the blood-drinkers in the pulpits. I assume their piglike behavior will be used to justify violent persecution eventually.

Don’t be too absorbed about serving at church. Be absorbed in knowing God and correcting yourself. The other stuff is much less important.

Do my Sideshow Barkers no Harm

I would say the drama continues, but it’s only drama if it makes you suffer, so I guess I can’t say that.

You will recall how I lost my old Facebook account, and the pastor of my old church, New Dawn Ministries, went on Facebook and said God cancels the accounts of people who go after men of God.

I thought I was done with the whole circus for a while, but this weekend I had lunch with friends who go to the church, and they told me that another pastor gave a sermon in which he told people they shouldn’t “like” things “haters” put up on Facebook.

You have to realize, this church meets in a room twice the size of a two-car garage. If you think they’re talking about you, they probably are. There aren’t a lot of targets to choose from.

My friends thought the sermon was ridiculous, and of course, so do I.

A young lady who used to be very close to them started chiming in on things I wrote. Her husband actually lived with the pastors for a while, and they helped him get his life together. It looks like the relationship has soured a bit.

She and her husband left the church a long time ago. I assumed they were just cooling off, but it looks like that is not so. The pastors pulled her out of a position she had held for four years, and somehow or another, things went south.

Now she has a lot to say. She doesn’t care who hears it. She said they mismanage the building fund and use it as a piggy bank. She complained about greed. She also said they had told people not to associate with her. She asked if they had done that to me, and I said they hadn’t.

Then I thought about the sermon. That was an effort to discourage people from communicating with me. So my answer to her question was wrong. They’re trying to get people to shun me.

She even thinks they got my Facebook account closed, which is possible, but they probably don’t know how to do things like that.

She referred to the pastor’s wife as the Facebook police. I thought I was the only one who had dealt with that.

It’s true that there are some people I don’t hear from now. But those people weren’t actual friends. Had they been friends, they would not have paid any attention to social pressure from people who run the church. The pastors can’t take friends away from me, but they were able to unmask people who only pretended to be friends. That’s a plus for me. I can’t always tell who is with me and who isn’t, so they gave me a hand with that.

I also found out that some people who appeared to be against me or neutral were actually for me.

So far, I haven’t gotten into the real purpose of this blog post, which isn’t about the microscopic details of a petty disagreement. The real topic is openness among Christians.

Long before I left New Dawn, I had two dreams that warned me about the upcoming problems. Rich Wilkerson, the pastor of Trinity Church, figured in both of them.

As far as I can tell, Wilkerson is totally useless as a man of God. I don’t think he ever thinks about helping anyone except himself or his family. I think his driving motivation in life is to accumulate money and become more famous. He’s like Mammon, wearing a flesh suit that used to be a man.

This explains his function in my dreams.

In the first dream, I went into New Dawn, and the whole church was dark. It was night, which is the time that belongs to the devil. There was only one light on in the church, and it was in the office. Rich Wilkerson was in there alone, counting money.

I told the pastors at New Dawn about the dream. Obviously, it was a warning that the same greedy spirit that ran Trinity was going to try to take over.

In the second dream, Rich Wilkerson followed me when I moved from Trinity to New Dawn. Again, it was night. I went into the church’s kitchen and saw him giving the volunteers orders, telling them what to do even though he didn’t run the place.

The meaning of this dream was that Satan would take people who volunteered at the church and use them to twist the pastors’ minds. They would come up with carnal plans that looked good to the pastors, and through these plans, the spirit would control the church. The kitchen is not the sanctuary; it’s a place where worldly tasks predominate.

I told the pastors about this dream, too.

I’m not the only one who warned them. A friend of mine stood up and told them they had to stay on the right course. I don’t recall everything they said. Another friend talked to them on the phone and told them they needed to listen to me, because I would help guide them.

The ironic thing about these dreams is that they could have helped the pastors, but in the end, they only helped me. The information God gave them through my two friends helped the friends. The pastors didn’t get anything out of it.

I’m still digressing.

I used to be somewhat cautious about what I said about preachers publicly. I had been brainwashed by the warped teachings on authority and submission, and by people who discouraged gossip without knowing what it actually was.

Now I will say just about anything, anywhere, as long as I believe God wants me to say it.

The Bible says we’re not supposed to touch God’s anointed. Crooks and frauds love to stand in the pulpit and repeat this, because it makes people afraid to expose them.

There are a couple of problems with the way people interpret the verse.

First of all, “anointed” means “authorized.” It applies to people who are doing what God authorized them to do. God never authorized anyone to teach the poor to give the church all their money. He never authorized anyone to teach the positive-thinking gospel. The characters who teach this nonsense aren’t anointed. They’re in rebellion. They’re wolves in sheep’s clothing. A number of them aren’t even Christians. They just like easy money.

Second, what does “touch” mean? If I disagree with you publicly, have I “touched” you in the meaning of the verse? Of course not. There’s nothing wrong with speaking honestly to a man of God. When the Bible was written, prophets were beaten and murdered. They had real problems, not Facebook posts.

If you look up the Hebrew word translated “touch,” it also means things like “afflict” and “strike.” So it’s kind of a stretch to apply it to someone who says maybe the pastors shouldn’t go on vacation four times a year at the congregation’s expense.

There is more to the subject, though. Almost no one considers this: if I spend more time with God than you do, and you’re wandering around doing your own thing, I have the right to correct you as God sees fit. Publicly or privately. Usually it’s best to correct people privately, but we are not under the law, so it’s not mandatory, and aside from that, when people repeatedly reject private correction, it becomes pointless.

Virtually nobody who fought with me has the kind of prayer habits I do. I am not bragging. It’s just a fact. God addicted me to prayer, and now I spend a great deal of time with him. The people who try to correct me pray very little. They have no right to open their mouths, because they’re not prepared.

It’s amazing how our confidence in our standing contrasts with our qualifications.

Every lukewarm hypocrite who goes to church once a year and only prays when he buys a lottery ticket feels entitled to air his opinions about God. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work. If you don’t know anything, you should shut up. You may have an opinion, but it’s worthless, and you should realize that.

I have the right to speak openly about the bad things preachers do. If you want to challenge me, develop a prayer life and ask God what you should do about me. Otherwise, be quiet. You’re in over your head.

I’ll go beyond that. Even if your prayer life is weak, if you know for a fact that a preacher is crooked or incompetent, you should say so, with reasonable discretion.

I used to think the pastors at New Dawn were great. I still believe they were much better than they are now. Anyway, other people left the church because they knew things I didn’t know. If they had spoken up sooner, maybe I would have awakened sooner.

The spirits that corrupt churches love the “speak no evil” mantra, because it protects them. Termites, roaches, and fungi love the dark. When the light comes in, it ruins everything for them. It will disarm evil spirits, and if a preacher isn’t totally corrupted by pride, it will wake him up and correct him.

If you’re sure something is badly wrong with your pastors, why would you keep it quiet? Malfunctioning pastors ruin lives. They hurt our friends. Yet we help them by adhering to a code of silence.

How are you a friend if you let someone like Benny Hinn take your friend’s money?

I am now beyond blunt when I talk about preachers. I don’t care about them or their jobs. If you hurt people for a living, your job should be taken away. Why should I help you drink the blood of innocent people?

I don’t know if I’ll ever go to church again. How am I supposed to find one that isn’t crazy? There must be a few out there, but I don’t know of any. I’ll wait, and if God sends me somewhere, I’ll go. Until then, I won’t worry. Worrying leads to carnal decisions.

My advice is to be honest but not vindictive or cruel. Say what will promote a positive result, and sleep soundly afterward.

I’ve been involved with preachers that had problems, and I have been fooled, but looking back, I can say that I never supported them in anything I knew to be wrong. I put up with a certain amount of error, because it’s inevitable, but I never pretended I thought something was right when I knew it was wrong.

If you want to argue with me, that’s fine. Just make sure you spend a few years praying several hours a day first. After that we can talk.

Your World is Upside-Down

I had a couple of interesting experiences this weekend. I watched two really bad movies and got some great revelations afterward.

Revelation is a funny thing. Sometimes it’s something you already know or could have figured out had someone asked you, yet somehow, after God points it out to you, it becomes part of you in a new way.

The first movie I watched was Lucy. This is a film about a girl who overdoses on a miracle drug and suddenly develops the ability to use more of the brain than the rest of us.

There is a persistent myth that people only use 5% or 10% of their brains. That may be true in certain parts of California, but people with common sense realize it’s a made-up “fact.” The brain sucks up a lot of energy, and it’s bulky to carry around. It wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense to equip people with a big expensive organ that doesn’t do much.

In Lucy, Scarlett Johannson is drafted as a drug mule. A mean Taiwanese drug kingpin sews a bag into her belly so she can smuggle it to another country. The bag contains a chemical pregnant women produce to make their embryos develop. It breaks, and she starts developing super powers.

At 20%, she has the ability to understand Chinese instantly. I wish I had that ability while trying to get new Chinese tools to work. I would be able to download manuals I could actually understand.

The movie is awful, but I needed something to kill time while the birds were out of their cages, so I sat through it. Any fourth-grader who gets Bs in science will realize the fake science in the movie is stupid even by movie standards, and the plot is also crazy.

Lately, God has been showing me how important it is to quit getting new things and to make the most of what I already have. Sometimes your problem is that you need new stuff, but how can you be sure if you haven’t given your old stuff a chance? Covetousness is all about abandoning what you have in favor of something new, and it’s not just bad because it puts you in debt or causes friction with the people who already have what you want. It’s bad because it prevents you from developing. The most important part of the old stuff you need to make the most of is you, yourself.

In the movie, Lucy got really smart. She figured out the secrets of quantum mechanics and so on. She became so smart everything was easy for her. She shot all sorts of bad guys. She outwitted everyone she encountered. You can probably guess. But she didn’t get new stuff. She didn’t build new tools. She didn’t need to, because there was so much new power in her.

When the movie was over, I got a sudden revelation: people fixate on fixing the world around them when they should be working on themselves.

Obvious, but I felt it take root in me, and that was new.

As the movie unfolded, this fictional character was in the process of filling a flash drive with knowledge that would help humanity with its technical problems, but she, herself, proved that what she was doing was a waste of time. Because she had been improved, she didn’t need more tools. The rest of humanity didn’t need her flash drive and the new knowledge. They needed a way to become like her.

Technology exists largely to help us with problems caused by our inner shortcomings. If we were truly connected to God and living in faith and submission, we wouldn’t need gadgets and cures. We wouldn’t have most of the problems those things are intended to fix.

When Jesus met people who had diseases, he didn’t hold telethons to raise money for research. He told them to be healed, and that was it. He didn’t need microscopes, centrifuges, imaging machines, drugs…not even an exam table. That’s what life is supposed to be like. We have to come up with complicated solutions to our problems because we lost contact with the simple solution.

That may not sound deep, but it’s very important. The more you work on yourself, the better your life will be. It’s easy to take away your toys and money. It’s very hard to take away the inner qualities and assets that make you powerful and successful. They will save you no matter what happens in the world around you.

Last night, I watched X-Men: Days of Future Past.

I can’t help it. I like the Wolverine. And nothing else was on. Believe me, I looked.

The X-Men movies center on a paranoid fantasy: humanity’s war on mutants.

In the X-Men world, genetic mutations are giving rise to a race of beings with magical powers. They can do all sorts of impossible things. Some can shoot fire out of their bodies. Some have unlimited healing power, so you can’t kill them. There was one that was able to disappear in one place and instantly appear in another, yards away. Just silly stuff. The Marvel people don’t even try to make it sound reasonable.

The humans in the movies are scared of the mutants, probably because this is Marvel’s way of lecturing the world about our evil deeds, such as making a responsible effort to watch our borders and refusing to bake cakes for gays. I’m not sure. Anyway, the idea is that the mutants have so much power, we can’t hope to fight them once they get it together, so mean humans decide the smart thing is to round them up and kill them. Or “cure” them of their mutations.

In last night’s movie, a midget named Trask manufactured evil robots called…you won’t believe this…”sentinels.” Yes, I know. This is the same name the Matrix people used for evil robots that killed rebels. The X-Men sentinels had qualities that came from research done on a murdered mutant. Trask took her DNA and used it to give the robots all sorts of mutant powers. So when they attacked mutants, the mutants were totally outgunned. Any given robot could duplicate any mutant power, and that’s bad if you’re a mutant and all you can do is turn everything you touch into pudding.

In the movie, some of the mutants hid their powers. A couple took a serum to suppress them. They were willing to stunt themselves in order to fit in and avoid trouble. What the mutants really needed to do was to get together, organize, make the most of their powers, and fight. The head good mutant, Dr. Xavier, had a special school dedicated to teaching mutant kids how to use their powers and survive.

Again, as if I need to repeat it, the movie was stupid. Even by Marvel standards. It was not good. But I watched it, because almost any movie with superheroes and explosions in it is at least mildly entertaining.

Afterward, I got the revelation. It was so strong, I stopped walking, stood in a doorframe, held on, and stamped my foot.

In this natural world, a developed Christian is a real-life superhero. A person who has built himself up in the Holy Spirit and aligned himself with God’s will can do absolutely anything God tells him to do. Jesus walked on water and turned water into wine. Those are things a comic book superhero might do. It sounds like a silly comparison, but it’s true. He cured diseases. He ran supernatural beings off just by talking to them. We are supposed to do greater things than he did, but we don’t.

Working to develop your power is well worth it, and you don’t have to part the Red Sea in order to accomplish amazing, helpful feats. Long before you find yourself walking on water and doing similarly spectacular things, you will find that you can defeat people and situations simply by praying or by speaking certain words in faith. Those are wonderful abilities no unaided human being has.

We are supposed to be a powerful family of invincible beings, but we’re not, because we are too busy focusing on fitting in and getting God to give us external blessings like money. To God, those things are like prosthetics. We are like cripples who turn down healing because we prefer Air Jordan wheelchairs.

The prosperity gospel has never worked. It’s a total waste of time and money. But it’s worse than that. It succeeds at the thing it was actually designed to do: it keeps us powerless. Meanwhile, the spirits around us, and the carnal people who serve them, walk all over us. We should be ruling over them, but they do with us as they please, because we don’t know who we are. And we are few in number because we don’t try.

It’s an odd way to look at Christianity, but it’s completely consistent with the Bible.

Satan created a race of superhuman beings called the nephilim; the giants. From a natural standpoint, they were better than we are. They were bigger and stronger. They were dominant. But God killed them off because while they were big in the natural world, they were spiritual midgets. They didn’t have the Holy Spirit. They had no love or compassion. They were not submitted to God. They killed his people day after day.

We are supposed to be supernatural giants. Instead, we focus on natural stilts like wealth and power, to make us look like giants in this corrupt world. Then we die, and we lose those things. All we have left then is what we have made of ourselves.

So we have nephilim hearts and human bodies. That’s a horrible combination. No wonder everyone pushes us around. We have the worst of both races.

We need to be building ourselves up in the Spirit. If we were doing that, we would be strong, and we would multiply. We would be dominant, as the Hebrews were dominant when they took over Israel. As it is, we now run from gays and illegal aliens. We even run from animals. We are reintroducing large predators into areas our ancestors had the good sense to run them out of, and we can get in big trouble for bothering them when they come into our yards, where our children play. It’s funny; one of the plagues of Egypt was a flood of wild animals that terrorized people.

This blog post will sound nutty to people, but if you’re a Christian, you already believe the first human being was made from mud, and you believe God made the sun stand still so Joshua could fight. It’s not a question of whether you believe strange things. It’s a question of which strange things you’re willing to believe.

Keep praying in tongues. Keep asking God for correction and humility. Keep listening. Keep admitting you can’t help yourself. Confess everything to God. Confess your negative feelings about him. He already knows about them, he knows you want to get rid of them, and he wants to help.

The future is assured, but if you want your place in it, you’re going to have to submit. Not just on Sunday, but all day, every day. Your whole life has to belong to God. I’m not saying you can’t survive without making mistakes. I’m saying you have to side with God against everyone, including yourself, all the time.

This will help you, if you can hear it. Time is getting short and patience is running dry, so get on board while you can.

We have Artificial Intelligence but no Artificial Empathy

A fascinating thing happened last night. Facebook killed my account.

I don’t pay much attention to the terms of service when I use message boards and Twitter and so on. I figure that if I behave, everything will be fine. I didn’t know, or I forgot, that Facebook has an unusual requirement: they insist that you use your real name.

Using your real name on the Internet is not a bright idea. If you have enough of a presence, determined people will be able to find out who you are and what your address is, but most people are not determined, so if you use an alias, they will leave you alone. I generally use aliases.

I used my real name on Facebook for quite some time, but one day I decided to change that. I altered the last name. Then last night Facebook told me I would have to send them a scan of an ID in order to get back in. And the name on the ID had to match my Facebook name.

This adds up to abrupt, permanent obliteration. I can’t produce an ID with a fake name on it, so I’m all done. I can’t get back in. Everything I posted on Facebook will disappear, and so will my photos.

Am I mad at Facebook? Yes, but only because they gave me no warning. They should say, “If you don’t give us your real name within x days, we will kill your account.” That would give you time to tell people your time was short, so they would realize you hadn’t blocked them. Other than that, I’m not mad at all. Facebook can do anything it wants with its own service.

Now that I think about it, it’s a form of social extortion. If they gave you time to leave gracefully, you would be in control of the situation. Because they slam the door with no warning, you end up in a position where you have to do what they want. To me, this isn’t important, but to many people, it’s a big deal. They use Facebook for business, or they have big networks of people they need to stay in touch with for one reason or another. Also, there are things on the web you can sign into using Facebook, and they may be more important to you than Facebook itself.

My guess is that the nerds at Facebook thought this over carefully and did it on purpose in order to coerce us. Maybe the NSA gave them the idea, or maybe it’s just typical nerd behavior. Nerds tend to have stunted hearts, and they like controlling other people. They are very dangerous because of their power, lack of maturity, and lack of empathy. Maybe the wedgies and red bellies they get when they’re young are society taking revenge in advance.

I lost like 1300 uploaded photos. That’s a relief. I saw the exact figure the other day, and the size of it bothered me. I didn’t realize I had uploaded so many things. I didn’t want them to have that much stuff. Now they don’t, in a way. It’s still on their servers, but they can’t publish it any more. They can still give it to Obama, I guess, but the Fourth Amendment is dead, so he can get his hands on just about anything he wants with or without Facebook, and as far as I know, he has no reason to bother me anyway.

I didn’t actually lose the photos. I just lost the online collection. I still have them. After all, I had to have them in order to upload them.

Facebook was a handy way to put things on the Internet. If I wanted to post a photo on a forum or my blog, I could upload it to Facebook from my phone. That’s very quick. Then I could copy it to my PC and upload it again, wherever I wanted. I will miss that. Now I’ll have to use email.

What’s really interesting is not the effect on my online presence, though. It’s the way it affects my offline life.

I was using Facebook too much. I’m a writer, and for me, writing is about as hard as breathing. I can produce huge amounts of content with almost no effort, and I enjoy it. Facebook was an outlet for me, and it was easy to use, so I filled it up.

I got in the habit of looking at my phone a lot. Once I caught myself turning away from Facebook on the PC to check Facebook on my phone.

Habits can be pretty crazy. Obviously, I knew what I did was irrational, but I was very used to looking at Facebook when I took a break from things, and I had just taken a break from…Facebook.

To a great extent, I let Facebook replace offline interaction with people. I am solitary by nature, and I got pushed out of my church–my biggest social outlet–earlier this year. I used Facebook to stay close to people I knew. This is a legitimate, possibly healthy use of Facebook, but only as an adjunct. Not when it becomes a substitute.

When I saw I was exiled, I felt like I was in withdrawal. I didn’t like the sensation. But I was glad, because getting rid of things you depend on too much is always good.

I had a long prayer session last night. God showed me some things.

He showed me my prayers are answered with much greater consistency these days. He showed me that he is restoring things. He showed me that he is changing my heart so I side with him, even against myself. He showed me how I had sided against him for most of my life.

You don’t just side against God by committing obvious sins like fornication and stealing. You side against him by believing lies about him and criticizing him in your heart. If you think, even for an instant, that he isn’t doing the best job possible, and that his intentions toward you aren’t perfect, you’re siding against him. You’re believing the devil and the spoiled people who think God doesn’t do enough for them. If you think he is slow to answer, or that he is withholding good things for no sound reason, you’re siding against him. If you feel resentment toward him when something unpleasant happens, even if your mind hates the feeling and admits it’s wrong, your heart is siding against him.

You have to side with God, because he IS right, and you have to do one more thing: you have to hate Satan and have utter contempt for him. He is nothing. He is the excrement of creation. The lake of fire is creation’s septic tank. That’s harsh, but it’s true. He is totally worthless. You have to despise him as well as his ways and his promises.

The supernatural is full of symmetry. If we are supposed to praise God, of course we are supposed to contemn the ridiculous loser spirits that are against him, just as law-abiding citizens contemn the sleazy, defeated, stupid individuals who populate the underworld.

Somehow or another, this was related to the Facebook problem, but I can’t recall how.

God reminded me of something I realized recently: my days of defeat are over. Because I have been asking for correction, I have been turned around so I am headed in the right direction. I have not received every good thing life has to offer, but I am now headed toward them, and I can’t be stopped. I can be deterred temporarily, but it is no longer possible to overcome me permanently. I will win. No one who is against me has the power to prevent it. They are all losers. They don’t have the capacity to win.

I will win because I am becoming aligned with the will of the only real power there is: the permanent alpha male of all creation. If I am for him in my heart, and I keep turning back to him, no one else matters. They are lower than bugs before his power.

That’s really something. Crazy things may happen, but I’ve already won. Things will never stop getting better for me. Never. I’m like a leper who just received a dose of a cure. I may have scabs and sores today, but tomorrow I will have fewer of them, and a month from now, even more will have fallen off. Meanwhile, new scabs and sores will continue to appear on my enemies.

I can’t ask for instantaneous victory in all areas, but life is now a continuous and perpetual series of victories, so I will live my way into blessings day by day as long as I’m alive, like a product on an assembly line, receiving new parts as it progresses.

The one big change I would like to see is this: I would like to lose the habit of anticipating defeat that doesn’t come.

God gives me victory, over and over. “Victory” pretty much implies “battle,” though. Things that seem like problems arise, and I do supernatural warfare, and my faith tells me I’ve won. Then I win. But often I still worry, and that prevents me from enjoying victory until my eyes see it.

I’ve been bitten in the rear end a lot in life. Many times, I’ve been in positions where victory was natural and seemed inevitable, and in spite of everything, I’ve experienced sudden, unexpected attacks followed by defeat. That got me in the habit of expecting to lose. The habit of losing creates the habit of expecting loss. I’m much better about this than I used to be, but I look forward to a time when the habit of worry is totally destroyed. That way, instead of enjoying victory when I see it, I’ll start enjoying it as soon as God tells me it’s mine. That’s how life is supposed to be.

I don’t know if I’ll join Facebook again. It’s nice to be away from it. It’s also nice to use it to communicate.

I am concerned about the controlling nature of the people who design technology, as well as the controlling nature of technology itself. People tend to pass their traits on to their children, and technology has many warped, cruel, amoral, unempathetic fathers.

When you use Facebook now, it sends you ads based on things you’ve seen on the web, even if you try to opt out. If you look at something on Amazon, it will pop up over and over on Facebook. If it’s doing that with wrenches and T-shirts, what happens when you go to political and religious sites? What happens if you look at pornography or you have cybersex? Are the warm, loving, forgiving nerds disposing of all that powerful information, because they respect your privacy?

If God lets the world persist, technology is going to become extremely oppressive. They already have enough cheap storage to contain all of our emails and cell calls. The power of technology will continue to increase. And because technology never forgets and always analyzes, weird things will happen.

The Internet will know when you’re sick, before your doctor does. It will know if you use drugs, just by correlating things about your web use with known information about drug users, even if you never mention drugs on the Internet. It will know things about your relationships, before you and the people in your relationships suspect them. It will start to predict the future with surprising accuracy, and eventually, lawmakers will decide that we have to defer to its conclusions. America will be like a giant, self-driven Google car.

We already have “pre-crime” interventions. Blogger Michele Catalano got a surprise visit from armed feds because someone in her home Googled “pressure cooker.” It won’t be all that long before the feds have the power to bring a van to your house, put you and your family in it, and whisk you away to indefinite incarceration without trial, simply because the Internet says you’re going to cause problems. This will happen to people before they even think about rocking the boat. The Internet will know their intentions before they form them. It will be wrong sometimes, but how will you prove that? If Mama Internet says you’re going to shoot the president, and they put you away before you can do it, and you never get the chance, how do you prove she was wrong?

Facebook may be the tool that turns into Big Brother, or it may be Google Hangouts, or it may be something we haven’t seen yet, but we are all being turned into cells in one big, diseased brain. Loss of liberty is inevitable. Privacy, like private property, is an essential part of liberty. We don’t think about that much. I’ve never seen anyone mention the connection publicly.

I wonder if the ability to post memes and look at cat pictures is so valuable it justifies jumping back into the cage. Maybe it does. Maybe resistance IS futile, so I might as well make hay while the sun shines.

The devil has a long history of constructing seemingly impregnable structures, which God crushes with surprising speed. He and the other angels had huge children who were much more powerful than humans, and God drowned them all in a few days. Satan condemned the entire human race to hell and won the earth as a prize, and God reversed it with the crucifixion. The huge artificial brain that surrounds the earth appears to be Satan’s latest stronghold. Do we run from it in terror, or should we just enjoy technology and rest in the realization that this stronghold, like every one that came before it, will be humbled and rendered harmless?

I don’t know the answer yet.

I may sign up again. I may not. I’m not sure staying out will help me. On the other hand, I’m sure that going back in will not hurt me. Not in any meaningful, lasting way.