Maybe I’m not Applying Myself

It’s 10:31 a.m., and I’m already having an interesting day.

Every day I ask God to schedule my time and prevent it from being wasted. You would think the answers would be obvious. I would get up and clean and arrange and repair. I would study. I would help this or that person. It’s not like that.

God loves the sneak attack.

I watch the tube more than I used to. I watch when I’m taking the birds out for air, and I am hopelessly addicted to mealtime TV. But TV is terrible, so I have had to master Youtube and the DVR. If you can connect your PC to your TV, and you can learn to use the DVR well, you will always have something worth watching.

Okay, often. Not always.

I started recording old movies, because I felt like my cultural literacy was expiring. There are some movies everyone should watch, simply to have the experience in common with other people. There are also some old flicks that got very little attention, yet which have something to recommend them.

This weekend I watched Canon City, which is a 1948 movie named for a prison town in Colorado. It currently hosts the United States Penitentiary, an all-supermax facility. It’s the king of all American prisons. It’s the closest thing we have to hell. It’s where we put people we really, really do not want to see among decent people again.

Supermax is where you go when the thought of you escaping is too much for the corrections people and your judge to bear.

The movie was about another prison in Canon City; the Colorado State Penitentiary.

Canon City is a docu-drama. Some of the players were actual convicts and prison staffers, and it was about a real escape that took place in 1948. One of the escapees was James Sherbondy, a man who murdered a deputy when he was 17.

In the movie, Sherbondy is a model prisoner. He runs the prison darkroom. When the other prisoners come to him to try to get him to hide guns in the darkroom, he turns them down, hoping instead to make parole. They sneak the guns into the room against his will, and he decides to go along with the plan.

When the convicts escape, Sherbondy is the last one caught. He invades a home and holds the family hostage. One of the children, a little boy, has appendicitis, and the mother pleads with Sherbondy to let her take him to the hospital. After she promises to keep quiet, he lets her go. That actually happened.

Prior to the appendicitis scene, Sherbondy (the film version) stands up and makes a whiny speech about how hard his youth was, and he tells the family crime doesn’t pay. He praises the deputy he killed.

Of course, he gets captured, but not until the husband, moved by Sherbondy’s behavior, tries to drive him past the police.

Naturally, I had to look this up.

James Sherbondy killed deputy sheriff Oscar Meyer (his real name) during a traffic stop. Sherbondy was a truant and a thug. Meyer, who foolishly did his job unarmed, confronted Sherbondy, and Sherbondy shot him in the chest. Sherbondy fled in Meyer’s car and left him to die. A good Samaritan stopped, and Meyer fingered Sherbondy before he died.

Sherbondy never expressed remorse for the killing. He lived to be 49 years old, and he never said he was sorry.

Sherbondy was eventually paroled. He got into trouble again when the cops stopped a car he was riding in. They were looking for the three other occupants, not Sherbondy. Unfortunately, Sherbondy was armed, and he had some pipe bombs with him. He shot a policeman four times, and the police killed him.

There was a surprising deep message in the film’s narration. The narrator said the prison housed people who always had to have things their own way, and who were willing to break the rules to make it happen. That is a perfect summation of the criminal mind. I actually heard a psychopath say she took drugs because of the stress she felt when she didn’t get her way.

Why relate all this? Because it’s a lesson in misplaced sympathy.

James Sherbondy was hopeless. He was never rehabilitated. He tutored kids and did prison jobs in order to get time taken off his sentence, but he remained a criminal. Releasing him was a mistake that got a good man shot. It was a waste of effort.

The world is full of Sherbondys. I am related to at least one. They’re not rare. Like the clay bottles in the Bible that can’t be reshaped once the necks become stiff, people reach a point where they can’t be fixed, and the only rational thing to do is to put them in hell where they can’t torment the rest of us or contemn God any longer.

You can’t tell who is who, because you can’t see men’s hearts. A long time ago, I learned that I can’t tell when people are lying to me, and I can’t tell who is or is not worth saving. We tend to look for existing goodness in people. That’s wrong. The thing that qualifies people for help isn’t goodness; it’s the potential to continue becoming more good.

A child molester in a federal penitentiary may be worth more of your time than your local priest.

I wasn’t trying to connect molestation with the priesthood, but I’ll leave that anyway.

If you can’t change, you’re much worse off than someone who is filled with iniquity and evil yet who is willing to admit fault and submit to God.

Pride is what makes improvement impossible.

Our culture is in love with pride right now. We have become convinced that it’s a good thing. This is a new thing for America. In the past, we always thought pride was dangerous. Now we cultivate it.

Because of our love of pride, necks are stiffening all over the place.

The rise in immorality is very bad. It’s bad when we sin. But the thing that is bringing judgment on us is the pride more than the sin. You can get past sin and please God, but that’s not possible if you’re proud. Pride is a vaccine against sanctification.

I bring this up today because I keep feeling like it’s time for me to withdraw even more than I already have, and I think bad things are in our near future. Maybe I should say “your” near future, because I don’t see it landing on me.

I feel like God is helping me understand his actions before he takes them. We are becoming too proud to help, so abandonment will be God’s only rational option.

I don’t require any explanation from God. It’s not my place to demand one. But it’s interesting.

Sooner or later we will reach a critical point, and America’s protection will be gone in a hurry. We may be there right now.

I feel like it’s time to cut way back on the list of people I pray for. You’re not required to keep priming a pump on a dry well. You put in the time God thinks is appropriate, and then you move on. Hopefully there are some people out there who will respond better.

If you’re Spirit-led, you can’t really waste time. Everything is redeemed. Even the time you spend watching Turner Classic Movies. Things are planned in advance. They’re not always obvious.

I don’t know what’s going to happen, but stay in prayer and keep your knees bent. It’s working for me.

Blot it Out and Find Rest

I’m red-hot this month. I used to blog several times a day. Then I went away for weeks at a time. Then I came back and blogged a couple of times per month. Yesterday I blogged twice.

It’s an eruption. I’m a juggernaut of Internet bombast.

I do not know how long it will last.

A few days back I dumped Twitter and Instagram. I thought they were boring, and Twitter was also tawdry. I rarely participated in either service. Today I woke up and prayed, and I started to feel like it was time to cut back on Facebook.

How will my 61 “friends” live? I’m sure it will be rough on them.

When I went back to church in 2008 (is that the right year?), I started making new friends. I found myself faced with a new experience. For the first time, I had to deal with Christians who were complete hypocrites.

That’s harsh, isn’t it? But it’s true.

I went to Miami’s Trinity Church, which is something like 80% black. The pastors there (white) only cared about fame and money, so they were extremely reluctant to correct anyone. They were terrified that people might leave and take their credit cards with them. The people were generally on board with this. Correction wasn’t their favorite thing, either.

As a result, the parking lot was full of Obama stickers. How can you have Obama stickers on cars in a charismatic church? It’s like swastikas on BMW’s parked at a synagogue. But there they were.

I couldn’t tell anyone anything. That’s an exaggeration, but it was nearly true. The people were used to being told they were victims. They were never held accountable, except for not giving the pastors enough money or free work. They didn’t want to hear that it was hypocritical to vote for convenience abortion, or that socialism is covetousness. They just wanted the false monetary promises of trashy preachers who dressed like rodeo clowns.

If you read this blog post to them today, 90% would have no idea what I was talking about. That’s how ignorant people at Trinity are.

I was not the greatest Christian on earth, but I was not completely dim, either. God told me more and more about the problems with the church, and as I wised up, I went from ardent supporter to supporter with reservations to happy refugee.

I knew more than they did when I got there, and by the time I left, God had shown me so much, I felt like I might as well have been attending a Hindu temple.

I moved on to New Dawn Ministries, and they were a lot better, but they had horrendous problems with pride and anger, and the pastors were very lazy. They grew a certain point and then got hung up, like breech-birth babies digging their heels into the side of the birth canal.

The pastors were rude to me publicly, even though I was a deacon, so I took the hint and stopped going. But I continued writing stuff about God on Facebook, as I felt moved. I would get up and pray every morning, and God would show me great things, and I would pass them on. I figured God had a purpose in it.

Now I feel like letting Facebook go. Anyone there who is willing to listen has already listened, and the rest are a waste of time. It’s a bummer, looking at the same people posting the same garbage over and over, proving their development is arrested. It affects my own morale; that’s not a small thing. I have a right to consider that and protect myself.

Apart from that, Facebook is a plantation, like The Huffington Post. It runs on unpaid labor.

Arianna Huffington managed to convince dozens of people she was doing them a favor when she allowed them to write for her for nothing. Jeff Zuckerberg has done more or less the same thing. Every day millions of people fill his site with free content, and they surveill themselves continuously, which is a big help to the government. In exchange we get almost nothing, and when we have issues with Facebook, they treat us like the unimportant, powerless, fungible creatures they perceive us to be.

That’s how life is, when you’re the tail and Jeff Zuckerberg is the head.

People are getting strongly addicted to the Internet plantations. Sooner or later, people like Zuckerberg will have a lot more power over us than they do now. There will be a price for the free advertising and networking.

If you’re not dependent on it, you won’t care.

A blog is more like a ranch than a plantation. A blogger owns his medium. Until persecution gets really bad, I’ll be able to say anything I want here. No one can report me to a gang of pimply genderless twerps who have the power to censor me. That’s nice.

There is a dark side to all this. I definitely get divine revelation, and I have been sharing it. If I feel that I should stop doing that, then it’s likely that God is giving up on some people.

Hunter Thompson, the immature, miserable humorist who died in disgrace and defeat, once wrote about going to a doctor. He complained that he was sweating a lot. He was taking a lot of drugs and drinking a great deal. He said the doctor told him he shouldn’t be worried unless the sweating stopped, because the sweat was his body’s way of flushing out the poisons Thompson ingested.

People who tell others about God are like Thompson’s sweat glands. While we maintain the flow, there is hope. If we stop, it means God is giving up on people who wouldn’t listen. It’s a bad sign.

If you serve God, you’re supposed to have a life of victory and peace. That can’t be true if you spend the entire thing pleading with people who waste your time and refuse to listen. There is a limit to what God will require you to do. He will take you aside when needed and give you rest. I believe that’s what’s happening to me. It doesn’t mean I’m a great person. It just means I’m not the world’s toilet paper. I have certain rights as an heir, and they can’t be entirely nullified, with no respite.

Just as you have to approach God with gratitude, thanks, and humility, you are limited in what you can do to his people. God can’t be God if you treat him like a churlish servant who owes you, and a Spirit-led person can’t function correctly if he is perpetually frustrated and disrespected.

I feel that things are getting worse faster than I expected. Jesus said he would return at a time when we didn’t expect him, and he was not a liar. We’re waiting for God to count to three, but he’s actually going to say, “One, two,” and then drop the boom on us.

My emotions are mixed. I am tired of this world. It has a stink that rises to heaven. Americans have no gratitude or humility. They have no sincerity. This is one of the better places on earth, and we have made ourselves disgusting. I would love to see the world reformed.

On the other hand, I am one of the reasons the world stinks. I didn’t get pulled aside as a reward. I was helped in spite of what I was. How can I be happy to see other people like me miss the boat? “Reform” also means the destruction of a whole lot of people.

You can’t question God’s choices, though. He chooses whom he will, and he is right.

I have been thinking about Enoch. I envy him. If what old books say about him is true, he spent less and less time with people as he aged. Eventually, he appeared once a year. Other men showed up to hear what he had to say (not to argue and spew), and then he would leave again. He didn’t have to mud-wrestle every day and stain himself with the manure of the pigs he tried to feed.

Paul, on the other hand, spent a lot of time in the mosh pit. During his ministry, he was beaten and stoned. He appears to have been very engaged with humanity. I don’t find that appealing at all.

The more you understand the world, the more you want to put a buffer between the world and yourself. I suppose this is why God’s throne is in heaven, not Las Vegas.

You don’t actually have to wade into the throng every day to serve God. There are different ministries. Maybe God will have the extraordinary kindness to limit my dealings with people who are sources of frustration. That means nearly everyone!

I can’t make demands, though.

I hope I will not have to fool with Facebook any more. I would love to delete my account completely. That would require some help, because I have the habit of looking at it throughout the day. I deleted the application from my phone, but that just makes getting to Facebook a little harder. It’s not the same thing as quitting.

Look around and see if other people are shutting down. If so, God’s patience is probably just about out. If not, maybe I’m just tired of banging my head against the same stones.

We’re About to Get a Global Worming

I tell you what. You can learn a lot about the increasing danger of mob-think from watching the global warming crowd.

They have no notion of basic scientific ethics. They don’t understand the importance of impartiality. They don’t understand the importance of free discourse, which is a nice way of saying they don’t understand the importance of not threatening and insulting every person who thinks they may be wrong.

I’m a scientist, technically. I have a BS in physics plus some grad school. I was not the world’s premier physicist, or I would have gone on to get my doctorate, but I have a basic grasp of the scientific method and the dangers of bias. These are things you learn about in grade school (maybe not, if you’re going to “school” now), but just to assure people that I have a clue, I went all the way to 25th grade or whatever it was, and I heard a little bit about scientific ethics and professionalism.

I’m also a lawyer. In law school, I was drilled pretty thoroughly on the importance of fairness and civility (at least in the courtroom). Lawyers are taught that certain evidence can be excluded based on its tendency to inflame emotion to the point where it counteracts reason. We are taught that certain hearsay evidence can be included if the emotional state of the speaker meets certain standards. We are taught that there are certain causes we can’t take up, because of conflicts of interest.

It may seem like conflation when I mention conflicts of interest and emotion in the same paragraph, but it’s not. In the law, conflicts of interest pervert justice, and emotion creates conflicts of interest. For that matter, conflicts of interest can give rise to emotion.

Either way, you end up with something on your mind, other than the truth.

This stuff is extremely important in the law. You can get in serious trouble for continuing in a representation when you have a conflict of interest. You can be forced off a case. It’s not trivial.

It’s also important in science.

Bias is so hard for scientists to avoid, we had to invent double-blind methods and endure the misery of statistics in order to try to drive the partiality out of our work.

Here I will tell the story of Clever Hans.

Clever Hans was a horse that supposedly did math. Its owner or trainer or whatever would ask it questions, and Hans would tap out the answers with its foot. Problem: it only worked with one person. When that person was out of the room, Hans lost his mathematical ability.

The reason? The person who worked with Hans was giving off unintentional cues. Hans was not really solving the quadratic equation; he was just banging his hoof when he saw the owner make an unconscious movement.

Now I will tell the story of M rays. I’m not sure M is the correct letter, but it will do.

Back when scientists were discovering a new form of radiation every week, a man said he had discovered M rays. Some people believed it. Some people didn’t. Naturally, the man who discovered M rays really wanted to believe it. Grants, jobs, whatever type of seductive groupies scientists attract…all that lay before him.

He put on a demonstration. He had some sort of apparatus, and he got an audience together. He turned on the machine, and voila…M rays.

Then a man in the crowd stood up and held up a part of the machine, which he had removed earlier. The machine could not work without it, but people’s imaginations could.

This is why we don’t go to the doctor for M rays today.

These are historical anecdotes, so they may be 95% false, but the principles they illustrate are true, and there are plenty of other examples.

The point I’m getting at is that people believe what they want to believe. This is why nine Supreme Court justices who were top-five in their classes can look at the same cases and draw two equally firm, completely incompatible opinions. And it’s why you usually don’t get three opinions. The division is usually conservative/liberal. The political spectrum has two wings, not five.

Liberals want to see a right to publicly funded sex changes in the Constitution, and conservatives don’t, and they see what they hope to see.

The global warming gang has no ethics. This applies to the lawyers, scientists, and engineers among them, not just the yoga instructors, welfare recipients, and medical marijuana addicts. They don’t understand the importance of free discourse.

Their favorite term for anyone who disagrees with them is “climate change denier.” The term itself is a breach of ethics. It comes from “Holocaust denier,” which comes from the discussion of neo-Nazis and Muslim extremists who pretend the Holocaust never happened. It comes from the discussion of rabid idiots who killed tens of millions of people. It equates scientific disagreement with claiming Dachau was a spa for fat Germans.

Not acceptable.

We shouldn’t have to have this discussion. Maybe the climate is changing, and maybe it’s our fault. Maybe the answer is more socialism and the crippling of industry in certain nations (USA cough cough). That doesn’t mean it’s okay to form lynch mobs and drive people out of their jobs for thinking otherwise.

You don’t have to be a moron to think climate change is a crock. Freeman Dyson agrees. William Gray agrees. But even if agreeing does reflect poorly on your intelligence, you should not have to deal with labels like “denier.” You should not have to worry about losing your job or having your academic credentials revoked.

When people are afraid to talk, science dies. It’s that simple.

The Soviets tried persecuting scientists (as did the Catholic church before them). A character named Lysenko came up with a bad theory of genetics that somehow seemed to support leftist notions, and the government got behind him. He said what they wanted to say! Amazingly, they agreed with him and helped him out. Who could have seen that coming?

Lysenko’s followers persecuted other scientists. This is probably why we don’t hear a lot about great Russian advances in genetics in that era.

Lysenko was such a big deal, a movement was named after him: “Lysenkoism.” Today it’s a synonym for persecution of scientific dissenters. In other words, it’s practically a synonym for “anthropogenic global warming.”

In Russia, scientists succeeded not because they discovered and disseminated truth, but because they pleased a bunch of fat murdering imbeciles in Moscow.

Today’s Lysenkoists see nothing wrong with what they’re doing. And it’s not subtle. It’s not like trying to measure the spin of tiny particles in a supercollider. It’s extremely obvious. It’s like going to church expecting to attend mass and finding pole dancers up at the altar.

Why is this interesting to me? I gave up science. Thank God for that, because had I not, look at the people whose boots would be on my neck right now. It’s interesting to me because it’s a measure of Satanic power of the mind of the mob.

People have more than enough brains to make good decisions about simple matters, but we screw up all the time, and often we screw up in huge waves. We screw up en masse, as though choreographed by an invisible George Balanchine. When that happens–when large numbers of people draw the same patently stupid conclusion simultaneously–the supernatural is at work. We’re stupid, but we need help to be that stupid.

People have a natural herd instinct, and it easily outweighs the mind. Probably ten billion psychology experiments have proven that. It’s why Goebbels said it was important to repeat lies. Satan whispers in the ears of the herd, and they have no resistance. The lie is supernatural, and in order to defeat it, the immune response has to be supernatural. People don’t hear from the Holy Spirit, so they don’t hear the response.

It’s okay to persecute people who disagree about weather. It’s okay to fire people and destroy their families because they won’t bake cakes for homosexuals. Bruce Jenner is a woman. A pervert who wants to display his genitals to your little girl in a locker room (or on the street in New York or San Francisco) is a victim, not a predator. These statements are obviously false, but the little Goebbels demons have been hard at work turning us into suckers, so we think they’re true. Worse than that, we think anyone who disagrees is evil. Not wrong. Evil.

So anything society does to people who disagree with the devil’s lies is okay.

When the Germans machine-gunned Jews beside ditches, they didn’t think they were doing something bad. They thought they were getting rid of wrong people. The Jews weren’t victims, and the object wasn’t to take the things they had earned. The Jews were subhuman monsters who were destroying Germany. Killing them was a good deed. It will be the same way when non-Christians and weak Christians start killing the Jews and strong Christians in America.

The Bible talks about people having veils over their eyes. It’s not a joke. It’s real. You can tell supernaturally deaf people the obvious truth all day, and they will never get it. They’ll just feel enraged.

It’s not that important whether the leftists cripple our economy with ridiculous environmental measures. It’s important, yes, but it’s not the big enchilada. What’s important is that we are seeing the sharp end of the nail. A few crazy ideas got past us, and now the point of the nail is past our defenses, and the shaft of the nail is right behind it. The shaft is bigger.

Man-made disasters start small and then take off. That’s what happened in Germany.

I don’t care that much whether the greenies force me to use terrible light bulbs, or whether they force me to pretend to recycle paper, which actually goes to the dump because no one will buy it. Things like that are going to happen, so I don’t want to get accustomed to having high blood pressure over it. I can’t stop it. They’re going to win big.

I do care about guarding the gates of my mind.

If you’re not praying in the Spirit, you will be susceptible to deception. If you can be deceived sufficiently, you can be turned. Then you have a real problem. The mark of the Beast won’t seem like such a bad idea. Denying God will seem like the smart move; you can always acknowledge him in private, and anyway, he knows your heart, right? You’ll rationalize and go along, and the first thing you know, you’ll be outside of God’s protection. You may lose your salvation, and then what do you have? Eternity in agony.

It seems like a paradox. Strong Christians will attract persecution, but you need to be strong when persecution comes. It’s not a paradox. They’re going to hate all Christians who have any sincerity in them at all. You will be hated one way or the other. But if you’re full of the fruit and the gifts of the Spirit, you’ll have more tools to help you bear it and win individual battles.

Things seem to be coming to a head faster than I expected. Technology is very close to destroying free will, which will negate God’s incentive to keep the world going. America has already been defeated by Satan, and if we elect the wrong people this time around, our problems may accelerate drastically. It may only be a couple of years before we’re just like the Jews under Hitler. I can’t see it taking longer than ten under the best circumstances, but I’m a pessimist. Maybe we can stretch it out.

I wouldn’t tell people to pray for God to spare America now. That bus has left the terminal. I would tell them to ask God to slow things down and help the humble prepare. I think that’s the best we can do.

I’m going to try to quit arguing with global warming adherents. It’s a complete waste of time as far as I can see. I learned a lot from it, but I’m pretty sure no minds were changed. After all, I was using natural tools.

Draw close to God. Ask him what you’re doing wrong. Pray in the Spirit all you can. Whatever happens will be a whole lot better than what would have happened had you done nothing.

Every Dam has a Bursting Point

Right before a hurricane, you get a day or two of weather which is peaceful yet has an ominous feel to it. It brings overcast skies and gentle breezes that raise the hairs on your neck, with a few drops of rain now and then.

I have that same feeling now, as if the earth is charging up to receive a lightning strike. I feel like the USA is about to be hit by something.

God doesn’t write things down on pieces of paper and hand them to me. I haven’t received a fax saying a nuclear weapon is about to go off here. But things don’t feel good at all.

Maybe it’s just me.

Respect Will Turbocharge Your Prayers

New stuff.

Well. Old stuff I should have known already but didn’t.

Our little monkey brains aren’t very big. We can’t contain enough information to understand everything that goes on around us, and we can’t process it adequately. You may be smart by monkey…I mean “human”…standards, but you’re crazy if you think that means your brain is up to the challenge of taking care of you by itself.

I get glimpses of things, but I can’t really understand them completely. That’s where submission comes in. You have to let God be the smart one. You don’t have to understand. You just have to accept the fact that he knows what he’s doing.

He has helped me to understand that the universe has a hierarchical structure. Beings exist on various discrete levels of authority. God is at the top. Satan is at the very bottom; all of his authority is stolen, or more accurately, provided by beings he conned into giving it to him.

If you’re having problems that drive you nuts, you’re going to have to move to a higher level of authority, by drawing closer to God. If you stay where you are, you can push things around, like rearranging furniture, but you can’t really improve your situation.

Relying on carnal solutions is like buying a bear to chase your mice. You end up swapping problems, with no real progress. In fact, you go backward, whether or not you realize it. God is your only source of real, permanent help that comes without regret.

You have no alternative. There are opiates and delusions that can ease your pain, but God is the only answer. This is why Jesus kept telling people he was the only way.

In order for a person of authority to function correctly, he has to have honor and cooperation. That’s just how it is. You can’t be an authority and grovel, beg, and manipulate, which means 95% of charismatic preachers are not effective authorities.

Being in authority is like being a parent or a husband. In order for you to function, when you show up, everyone has to shut up and defer to you. Otherwise, extremely offensive words and acts are performed and spoken, and nothing gets done. It is very offensive when a true authority is treated with contempt.

Gender feminism (male-hating feminism) is a great example of rejection of the benefits of authority.

It’s not easy to be a husband and father. You fight the world all day, and then when you come home, you’re expected to have all the answers. You’re expected to provide a cocoon of safety and abundance for your family, and that’s a scary burden.

If you come home to a spoiled, emasculating witch and a bunch of kids who think your purpose in life is to be corrected by pimply twerps with safety pins in their faces, it’s not going to work. You won’t be able to teach them anything. You won’t be able to bring healing order. If you have anything useful to tell them, it will go to waste.

Your wife will become even more of a shrew, your kids will grow up to be old, incorrigible morons, and you will accomplish nothing.

Feminism is Satan’s way of making this happen.

Men haven’t listened to the Holy Spirit. They haven’t submitted. They haven’t developed true authority. God hasn’t backed them up. That opened the door to feminism. Their women and children treat them like retarded toddlers. In a proper household, God commands the man, the man commands the wife, the wife commands the kids, and the kids suck it up, listen, and thrive. In a feminist household, everyone just rots.

There is also an anti-age movement, but Satan has managed to prevent us from naming it. I would call it “youthism,” for lack of any other term. “Mom is dumb, but Dad is an utter imbecile, and Grandma and Grandpa are basically chimps.” That’s what the youthists think.

You can’t bless the feminists and youthists. It’s as if they and wisdom were both positively charged; they actively repel it. They literally (not figuratively) hate it. Many of them dedicate their lives to the destruction of wisdom. It’s an amazing spectacle. It’s the mindset that caused God to schedule two annihilations for mankind.

When a plant needs water, you water it, and it grows. No problem. When a plant becomes unable to absorb water, you have to pull it and burn it, because there is nothing else you can do for it, and it takes up valuable space on the earth.

I really don’t care who disagrees with this stuff. It’s revelation, so believe it or don’t. Misguided opinions mean absolutely nothing to me.

Satan is like God in that he tries to turn people into little copies of himself, and that’s unfortunate, because Satan is living excrement. He has no future other than eternal suffering and humiliation. Satan loves feminism and youthism, because they make our hearts like his.

God is like a husband in heaven. He took care of everyone there. He had all the answers. There was no basis for anyone to worry. But Satan decided he knew better, so shrew that he/she is, he came to earth and tried to replace God’s perfect plan with his idiotic plan. He decided to treat God with contempt, put him aside, and be the dad. And it worked. Because of Satan’s program, most people live like monkeys and then go to hell.

In order to be God, God has to receive a certain amount of honor. It is not possible for him to abase himself past a certain point without ceasing to be what he is. He already allowed himself to be murdered by a bunch of beings who were like insects compared to him. That’s abasement enough. Now, if you want something from him, you have to approach him with awe, respect, and the intention to obey. You have to acknowledge the fact that he owes you absolutely nothing good, and you have to be grateful for whatever you get.

We don’t approach God correctly. Charismatic Christianity is full of standup comedians posing as men of God, and they teach us that God is our buddy. They teach us we can go to him abruptly and demand things, with no preparation and no respect. As a result, he is not able to give us many of the things we ask for. To allow himself to be contemned successfully would be to disrupt the order of the universe.

Preachers are unbelievable. They tell us to pray on the toilet. They tell us to pray while we’re drunk. They tell us to be familiar with God, the way we would be with a little brother or a drinking buddy. No wonder our prayers aren’t answered.

If you’re in a hurry, pray however you have to. But if you have time, give God honor before you start in with the begging. Exalt him. Tell him how much higher he is than you. Tell him how low Satan is, and how you hate him for lying to you about God. Think of the things God has done for you in spite of your evil nature, and thank him sincerely.

When you ask for things, be humble. Behave like a convicted child molester who got paroled and wants a cookie from the pantry at the halfway house. We’re not taught to do that. We’re taught to ask for silly things and then say, “I pray in the name of Jesus, so now you have to do it.”

Jehovah is a judge. He sits in a big chair before an audience, like a human judge, and he listens to evidence and requests, and he makes decrees. When you go to court, you don’t wear a thong and a straw hat and hold a beer in your hand. You don’t interrupt the judge. You don’t insult him or argue with him. You kiss his feet and give him honor, and if you blow it, you can be jailed indefinitely for contempt. “Contempt of court” means showing contempt for the court.

The reason contemnors are jailed is not to pump up the egos of judges, although many judges see it that way. We do it because to permit contempt is to threaten the functioning of the court. It threatens the order that holds society together.

Honoring God is necessary because it preserves the order of the universe.

The ancient Jews were allowed to kill their children. That sounds crazy, coming from a pro-life Christian, but it’s true. Look it up. If you had a worthless, snotty, disrespectful son, you could take him to the city gate and have him stoned.

A woman who showed contempt for a man by squeezing his genitals to make him lose a fight had to have her hand amputated. Look it up. God does not like emasculation of authorities. He really hates it.

God showed me another aspect of the principles of honor and authority: you have to limit your circle.

Depending on where you live and who you know, you may be surrounded by people who are impossible to save because of their pride, cruelty, and contempt. This is especially true if you live in a ghetto. There are places where anyone who submits to God and spreads knowledge will be treated with extreme contempt and brutality. You need to avoid those places. You need to cut off people who won’t change, even if they’re your parents. You can’t complain about the way you’re treated if you seek out imbeciles.

God himself only permits a certain amount of contemptuous behavior, and then down comes the water or the burning sulfur. The rapture will be God’s way of removing people of authority and humility from the presence of people who are determined to act and think like monkeys. God drowned such people in the flood, and he’s going to kill again.

He’s going to kill again, and it will be a relief to the rest of us. That sounds awful, but it’s true. The presence of the incorrigible is painful, and we are not going to miss them all that much, because we will be too dazed by the pleasant sensation of their absence.

I have cut a lot of people off. Sometimes it made me feel cruel and self-righteous, but now I know how right it was. I don’t miss a single one. When I imagine having them back in my life, it makes my stomach hurt. May I never see any of them again, unless they change. I can’t thank God enough for removing them from me. I know I have made him suffer the way they made me suffer. My presence was a burden to him.

Next time you talk to God, remember to honor and thank him. Approach him the way a guilty murderer would approach a judge. Expect help and have faith, but remember that it’s charity, not your paycheck for being awesome. You will get better results.

Think About Your Future

Today I came back here and read things I had written about God.

I’ll tell you something funny. When you write things under the influence of the Holy Spirit, and then you come back and read them again, it’s as powerful as reading scripture. After all, the Bible was written by men, inspired by the Holy Spirit. God didn’t come down and pick up a quill and write Acts and Hebrews.

Anything God says is “the word of the Lord,” even if he says it today. Does that sound like blasphemy? Well, let me ask you this: does God wear a gag?

Can God still speak? If so, then the word of God can continue flowing, and if it can continue flowing, it can be written down.

I’ll wait now and see if lightning hits me.

No; I’m good. We can continue.

If you have Spirit-given discernment, you will be able to tell revelation from nonsense. You should be able to look at the Koran and The Book of Mormon and realize they’re hoaxes. You should be able to look at books by people like Larry Huch and T.D. Jakes and realize they’re wrong. On the other hand, you should be able to tell when something is correct. So don’t be afraid of new revelation. Unless you’re also blind and deaf. Which is probably the case at the moment. Very few people have built themselves up.

I’m not saying you should print out my blog and call it scripture. Think of all the crazy things I’ve said. But there are some useful things here.

The Bible talks about “meditating” on the word of God. That refers to repetition. Yes, Jesus said not to engage in vain repetition, but not all repetition is vain. If you repeat phrases and sentences from the Bible, and you have Holy Spirit perception, you will feel things changing inside you. New understanding and power will come.

This works when you repeat stuff you see in the Bible, and it also works when you repeat things God has told you privately.

Okay, yes, the Bible cautions us about private interpretation. Arggh. That doesn’t mean God doesn’t tell you things in private. If you ask God to tell you where your keys are, do you think he has to tell everyone on the planet? Come on.

I can almost feel the misguided nitpicking start when I write a sentence.

People who aren’t Spirit-led need to be quiet. One of the purposes of hell is to silence them forever. You can’t have peace while you’re contending with puffed-up people who think they know more than they do. And heaven is peaceful.

Try this. The next time a word from God makes an impression on you, sit quietly and repeat it to yourself 40 or 50 times. See what happens. Look for things like new understanding or changes in the way you feel. It will happen, unless you’re spiritually dead.

When I come back here and go back over things God told me to write, it’s like looking at something someone else wrote. Part of that is age, but even if I remember writing it, it still has new life, just like the passages I re-read in the Bible.

You can’t be Spirit-led if God can’t tell you things outside of the printed page, and he can’t tell you things if you don’t listen. You can’t listen if no one speaks, so speak to yourself.

God tells me useful stuff. A lot of it is highly disturbing. A day or two back, he moved me to ask him to show me how I was fighting him.

How do you react to a thing like that? You think you’re on God’s side, or at least you tell yourself that, and then he tells you to ask him to list the areas where you’re fighting him.

I don’t want to think about that. It’s intimidating, because it could be discouraging. It’s a serious jolt to my pride. And part of me thinks, “Do I really want to change all these things? Do I have to be that good? Do I have to give up so much?” Will I have to get rid of cable TV and the Internet and go live in a hut in the wilderness?

I gave in and asked him, though. I hate the devil, and I am disgusted with the flesh, and I want to see them put in their place. I am tired of being undermined and attacked from behind. I don’t care what I have to give to God; I want to see my enemies suffer instead of me.

A friend came over for a prayer session today, and we talked about the big increase in revelation we’re seeing. We both had the same feeling about it: it suggests that something is about to happen.

The normal response to increased revelation from God would be gratitude and maybe amazement, and we felt those things, but the thing that made the biggest impression on us was the sense of portent.

If God is suddenly releasing information, and that information is of a type highly suited to the needs of people who will face persecution combined with destabilization of nations, it would seem to imply that things are coming to a head.

You could argue that God’s revelation has been available since the crucifixion, but who has been paying attention for the last two millennia? Almost no one has received anything. The mainstream churches have done a thorough job of killing the power of Christianity. They have substituted fantasies and guesses for useful information about God. They prevented people from receiving revelation.

Our deafness left us feeble and unprepared. Fifty years ago, we were headed for two possible outcomes: total destruction caused by ignorance, and a helpful jump start from God. He gave us the jump start.

I don’t want to get ahead of God. That’s for cultists. They panic and decide the world will end on a certain day, and the first thing you know, they’re drinking poisoned grape drink in the jungle. That’s not good. But if you’re a Christian, you have to believe the world will have an end. It had a beginning, and the enterprise will some day conclude. Eventually, someone will say the world is ending, and instead of an embarrassing continuation of the status quo, we will see the apocalypse unfold. So I can’t discount what I feel, especially as my connection with the Holy Spirit improves.

I feel increasingly disconnected with the human world. It’s starting to look sort of unimportant. The things that get us stirred up appear increasingly silly.

I am losing respect for human institutions like government. I feel like my involvement with them should be aimed principally at placating them and keeping them from bothering me. I don’t want to get sucked back into the mosh pit. The world reminds me of Black Friday at Wal-Mart.

I don’t want to contribute to political campaigns or join blog crusades. I want to think about permanent, important things. I want to think about my future, which is not on this earth.

This is a healthy outlook. One of the most crippling symptoms of immaturity is an irrational obsession with remaining alive.

Everyone dies. If I manage to get another 35 years, I’ll be doing great, but 35 years ago seems like a minute, and that means I have a minute or less left. Less, because time passes faster now. It’s a mistake to invest myself in it.

I don’t want to end up like Madonna or Cher, paying doctors to paste me together and dressing in age-inappropriate clothes while I pretend to be young. At its best, this life was not that great. When I’m 85 and my memory, eyesight, hands, and teeth are failing, it will be like a dirty paper towel I really want to throw away.

You’re going to die, too. Everything you build on this earth is going to be destroyed. No one will care about your accomplishments a thousand years from now. If you get too caught up in earthly affairs, you’ll be like Peaked in High School Rob Lowe.

https://youtu.be/h9tZ1RmMNRw

I’ve often thought Satan was like a person who peaked in high school. He loves trinkets and costume jewelry. He has the values of a two-year-old. He wrote the Koran; no wonder the Muslim afterlife looks like a high school boy designed it. Stuff yourself, stay drunk, have sex with women and young boys…you might as well go to Thailand. Why go to heaven if you remain immature?

I remember watching a “Christian” seminar salesman named Brian Klemmer, claiming he had a 500-year plan for his life. He was trying to convince a crowd of churchgoers to buy expensive Werner Erhard-style seminars. It was just sales talk, and when he died shortly thereafter from a torn neck artery, I doubt he gave the plan a thought. I thought he was foolish, and I don’t want to sound like him. I am not claiming I have a plan for the afterlife. But God has given me some clues on how to get ready, so I am using them.

Klemmer actually fooled a lot of Christians. Check out the prices on his seminars, if they’re still available. Ask yourself if God sent someone here to teach EST instead of Christianity, for that kind of money, when Jesus and the Apostles taught the real thing for nothing.

If Klemmer had not used classic Scientology-style tiered pricing for his seminars (It’s free! Did you like it? The next one costs $300!), I might be able to treat him with some respect.

You’re going to die. It’s going to happen sooner than you think. Your life here is as good as over, and if you’re a Christian, there’s a fair chance you will be required to give up your life voluntarily.

The God-haters will get more power. Today they’re happy if you bake a wedding cake. Tomorrow, they’ll tell you to renounce God or die. You’ll need to improve yourself substantially if you want to pass that test. You really don’t want the consequences of giving in.

Among gays, there is a widespread preoccupation with youth. It was one of the things that drove gay mass shooter Vester Flanagan to kill. He was infuriated because he had gotten fat and dumpy, and other men no longer looked at him with lust or paid attention to him.

Interesting.

Keep praying in the Spirit. Keep listening. Ask God to help you love correction.

It’s the mature thing to do.

Starting with the Sack of Meat That Runs Your Life

I keep getting new revelation, and it’s relatively useless if I keep it for myself, so here I am to pass it around.

It’s funny, but God can give you revelation without telling you anything new. He can take old information and give you new understanding of how important it is, or he can help you remember to apply it in the heat of battle. It’s a reminder of how much we need him. He can put a tool or weapon in your hand, and you can still be unable to use it unless he gives you additional grace.

He can instantly provide you with the ability to use a tool you already have. That’s a wonderful thing and a relief.

Today he increased my understanding of the importance of battling the flesh, and he gave me greater desire to do it.

If you go to college and petrify your brain with philosophy courses, they will tell you about “dualism.” It’s an idea modern academics feel they have discredited. Basically, it divides man into two parts: mental and physical. More or less. Academics think this is silly, and that you have to integrate the two parts, which means giving in to the flesh and co-governing your life. If you’re lecherous, look at a little porn, or fornicate. If you like weed, smoke it. Win by surrendering unconditionally.

That’s incredibly stupid and dangerous. It assures that you will fail, and that you will live in defeat. It may be pretty defeat. It may feel like victory to you. But when you get to the throne of judgment, you will be shown that it was defeat and rebellion.

Dualism is valid. It’s Biblical.

The flesh is a narcissist and a sociopath. It craves pleasure and admiration. It craves immediate satisfaction. If you don’t train it, it will do unbelievably stupid things that go against even its own interests. For example, it will tell you to smoke cigarettes, which cause cancer, which kills the flesh.

Bad decisions are among the major problems sociopaths face. A sociopath is extremely selfish and wants to look out for Number One, but a sociopath also has poor impulse control, so they get in trouble a lot. They commit crimes. They fornicate like crazy. They destroy relationships. They invite poverty.

Think of Esau, who was a great example of a fleshly man. He sold Eretz Israel–not just modern Israel, but a huge piece of the Middle East–for one bowl of soup. One bowl.

Adam sold the world for a piece of fruit, but at least he expected to receive wisdom.

Letting your flesh rule you is like going on a road trip in an SUV full of toddlers and letting them tell you where to stop and what to do. A one-day trip would take a month. You’d stop at Chuck E. Cheese three times before dinner. You’d stop at Toys R Us and load up your credit cards, buying a trailer, if necessary, to haul your new junk. You’d plow off into the swale to look at horses. You’d eat Skittles until you threw up, and then you’d eat more. You’d turn around and drive the wrong way.

Kids are foolish. That sounds mean, but it’s Biblical. They don’t know much of anything. You do not put them in charge.

When you own a dog, you walk the dog. You don’t let the dog walk you.

Your flesh is literally no better than a dog. Look at the self-destructive things people do every day and tell me I’m wrong. I dare you.

People get face tattoos. They buy time shares. They pay unlicensed kooks to split their sex organs and put rings in them. They jump off bridges wearing wingsuits. People who know crackheads try crack!

You will never win this argument, except maybe in your own mind.

Take a look at this well-known Youtube video. It shows an abused child ordering his mother to give him cupcakes.

People think he’s cute. Especially ghetto people who are used to defeat and immaturity. I know a lot of ghetto men, and many are just like this boy.

They thought it was cute when my two-year-old relative of mine put her hands on her hips and told adults off. Now she’s homeless and has lung cancer and a felony conviction.

It’s easy to look down on this kid and feel superior, but think about this: he is a picture of what’s inside you right now.

Your flesh is just like the brat in the video. You don’t rule it. It has very little respect for you. It’s not afraid of you. You negotiate with it. You plead with it. You give in so it will shut up. As a result, it has great power over you. The structure of authority in your life is inverted. You may have the flesh partially trained, but you’re not the master of the house.

You may think you’re not like that. Do you overeat? Do you stay angry at people? Are you proud? Can you resist sexual temptation? Do you have debt? Are you out of shape because you don’t exercise? Are you a bad housekeeper? You didn’t agree to failure in these areas. The flesh forced it on you.

One of the worst things the flesh does to us is to convince us that we’re in charge.

I’ve spent a lot of time fighting spirits. God showed me that Christians have demons, so I worked to cast mine out. I had a lot of success. But sometimes the results came undone. Sometimes I could not conquer the problems. Now I realize I did things in the wrong order. I was throwing these spirits out of the house, but the flesh was holding the front door open and inviting them back in, and I was not fighting the flesh directly.

The flesh is worse than Satan. Satan doesn’t owe us loyalty. The longer he can screw creation up, the longer he will stay out of the lake of fire. The smartest thing he can do is to fight God and work to destroy you. What choice does he have? It’s not right, but it’s not like he can enter a program and change course. The flesh, on the other hand, belongs to us. When it fights us, it’s a betrayal.

In war, enemy soldiers are imprisoned and fed when they’re captured. Traitors and spies are executed. That’s because what they do is lower. It involves treachery. The flesh is your traitor. The devil is just an enemy.

God has told me I’m going to live in victory. Is it just because I run around saying no weapon formed against me will prosper? No; you can claim God’s promises and die full of tumors. It’s because God is fixing the authority structure in my life, and that means he is putting my flesh in its place, supernaturally.

I want this. I want a victorious life.

Look at Jesus. He had one bad day in his life, and he chose that. The gospels contain no example of anyone defeating him. He is never depicted as ill or afraid. When he told the murderous Jews of Nazareth he was the Messiah, they took him to a cliff to kill him, and he turned around and walked away. He walked through the crowd. They couldn’t see him.

I want that. Maybe I can’t get to that level, but I can be unafraid of other people. I can be confident that my illnesses and injuries will be undone. I can live in peace, regardless of what goes on around me. Those things can happen, but only if my house–my temple–is in order.

That’s worth whatever God asks of me, which is not much. A little prayer and honesty is all he wants. If you take care of those things, the rest will come about on its own.

The problems we face in this life are just manifestations of the problems with our relationships with God. Up to a certain age, we can’t be held accountable, and we can’t defend ourselves, but if you’re 40 and you are mentally able, you are responsible for your own vulnerability.

Jesus understood this. Because he was smart? No. Sorry if that sounds like blasphemy. He understood it because the Holy Spirit told him.

Jesus knew the flesh was his main enemy, so before he started his ministry, he went into the desert, fasted for 40 days, and broke his flesh like a horse. Modern ministers don’t do that. They accept salvation, then they decide they’re perfect, and then they go out and use God as an excuse to swindle people and take their houses and IRA’s.

We have to break our flesh, and we can’t break the flesh with the flesh. We can’t do it by trying really hard to be good. We have to get the Holy Spirit behind us. We have to pray in tongues to build our faith, change our hearts, and give us knowledge and wisdom. Then the flesh has no chance, because it’s not fighting itself. It’s fighting God.

This is what God is showing me now, and it’s a gift of unimaginable value. For centuries, human beings have groveled at the feet of the flesh and doomed spirits. We have been tossed and battered by every wave. Now, thanks to the cross, we have the power to turn that upside down. This is what the Bible means when it refers to making our enemies our footstool. God made that promise to Jesus, but if we are Spirit-led, we are part of Jesus.

I am sick of worry. I am sick of uncertainty. I am sick of the things inside myself that I don’t like. I am sick of losing. God has been giving me more and more victory, and I want that to continue and increase. I don’t care what I have to give up. It’s all excrement anyway. I’ll be dead in 40 years. None of it will last.

The boy in the video will go to prison. That’s assuming he doesn’t change. He is already in prison. He is imprisoned in a body controlled by a human animal. He is along for the ride, but he can’t steer or brake. He’s not cute. He’s psychologically diseased, and he is headed for death. I do not want to be like him. I have felt that my own iniquities were cute. I don’t want that attitude in me any more.

Iniquities and illnesses are handles and doorways the devil uses to grab you and enter your house. It’s not a joke. It’s not something you can get away with ignoring. It’s very serious.

The future is bleak for Christians. Satan is going to win; we know this from prophecy. He is going to control the world and treat us the way Hitler treated Jews. The only people who will be able to bear it will be Spirit-led, not flesh-dependent. If Jesus had relied on his flesh when the Jews took him to the cliff, they would have thrown him over, and his brains would have been all over the rocks. You have to decide whether you’re going to be prepared for persecution. It’s already starting.

You can’t prepare with guns, walls, gold, dried food, or bomb shelters. God can sweep those things away in an instant, and so can Satan. He and his people are much, much stronger than you are. You have to prepare from the innermost part of you. Your heart has to be your panic room. You start building your stronghold there, and then it expands into the outer world.

Pray in tongues. Beg God for correction and humility. Listen. Drop your defenses and lying excuses. Let the healing in. It will work. But you have to start now.

Speak to your flesh as if it were a demon, because it’s a friend of demons, and it’s under your authority. Once you have faith, get up every day and say things like, “I speak defeat to my flesh in the name of Jesus, and I speak victory to myself and the Holy Spirit.” Do this only if the Spirit says to. It works. You can also use your power to fight urges. You can say, “I forbid my flesh to crave alcohol.” You can even say you forbid your flesh to have illnesses, depending on your faith. You will have setbacks and bumps in the road, but overall, you will improve and win.

By the way, your flesh will mount a counterattack. It may get sick. It may cause you to do something stupid, like committing a crime or a major sin that has repercussions. Don’t be surprised. Pray against it in advance so the effect will be blunted. Don’t be foolish enough to be surprised when an enemy fights back. I was.

If you try this, come back and let me know how it works. Or let other people know. I hope to hear stories of success. And remember, keep on not sending me your tithes, offerings, and “seed gifts.” That’s very important.

It Spreads from Left to Right

I am really looking forward to the end of this election.

My feeling is that Trump will get it. I can live with that. It will give Christians and Jews a little time to repent and get it together as the US descends into chaos. You can plateau on the way up; you can also plateau on the way down.

If Hillary or Bernie wins, the devil gets a big push, and our decline speeds up. It will be a rough time for anyone who cares about the church, the unborn, Israel, freedom of speech, or the right to self-defense. Increasingly, we will be treated the way worthless Cuban revolutionaries treated the successful, intelligent people they tortured and killed in their backward country.

It seems like none of what’s happening makes sense in the natural. That’s Christianese; “in the natural” means “not in the supernatural realm.” The Bernouts are completely irrational; no news there. That’s the left for you. But lunacy is increasing on the right.

Trump is attracting supporters who rival the Obamites in their refusal to see his faults. Cruz is a fairly good common-sense candidate, but he’s not going anywhere. He can’t catch fire.

Conservatives who hate or worship Trump are so irrational it’s startling. It’s a real education on the vulnerability of the flesh. Liberals love to talk about right-wing “rage,” but it has always been a ridiculous myth…until recently.

Trump-dumpers are calling Trump-pumpers bigots and racists. They’re calling them ignorant and hateful. Does that sound familiar at all?

It’s exactly the kind of slander we hear from the left, concerning all conservatives. How are we going to walk that back after maybe a third of us start repeating it?

Bigots and racists (only the white kind) are drawn to the GOP and Trump. It’s true. They share certain interests with the GOP, and it’s not because the GOP is a racist organization. It’s because racists can’t be wrong about everything.

Even Hitler got some things right. He built lovely tanks, and he is the father of the superhighway. He brought us rocketry and the jet engine. That doesn’t mean everyone who likes rockets is a Nazi.

Racists want Hispanics out of the country for racist reasons. Conservatives want illegal immigrants out of the country for common-sense reasons unrelated to race. If conservatives stand up against illegals, obviously, racists will support conservatives.

Criminals and their families overwhelmingly support Democrats. It doesn’t mean everyone who voted for Obama likes crime.

I thought conservatives understood these things, but as usual, I overestimated the human race.

Another liberal idea that has crossed the aisle is the empty threat to leave America. Some conservatives say they’ll leave America if Trump wins. No, they won’t. Come on. If America is too liberal, where do you go? Canada? No guns, and socialized medicine? Singapore? No guns and strict limits on speech? Japan? They won’t let you in; they really ARE racist.

I have even heard that Trump is a Clinton mole, and that he’s only running so Hillary will win.

People. Please. Think about this.

Let me explain why Trump is not a mole. If Trump ran fraudulently, it would be a felony, committed over 2 years, in front of cameras, in at least 51 jurisdictions. You can’t have a hoax campaign legally.

Trump is worth billions of dollars. He is healthy. He has grandchildren. He is constantly surrounded by fantastic attorneys who advise him minute by minute. There is no way he would put his throat under the boots of 50+ attorneys general in his autumn years.

He could be prosecuted in every state, Puerto Rico, the federal courts, Guam (does Guam have a court?)…actually I’m not sure about the territories. But anyway, it’s at least 51 jurisdictions. He would lose, and the attorneys’ fees would run to several hundred million dollars.

He would have to have dozens or even thousands of accomplices, and they would all have to keep quiet. They would all be liable, criminally. No way! That’s not a campaign. That’s a cult. It’s not happening.

He would have to trust the Clintons! Do I have to explain why that’s not likely?

But what if he fooled them all?

Yes. Trump fooled his entire family, every advisor, every ally, and every journalist. If he could pull that off, he’d be worth trillions, not billions.

So anyway, people are really losing it on both sides of the aisle.

Liberals keep comparing Trump to Hitler, the guy who walled off his country to keep people IN. The socialist who nationalized business after business. Does that make sense to you?

I got tired of wondering, so I looked up a few things, and it turns out Hitler really was a leftist. Because someone on the Internet said so? No, because he did what socialists do.

Hitler jacked taxes through the roof in Germany. He introduced socialized medicine and wrecked the German medical system. He created government busy-work jobs. He taxed wealth (not just income). He used tax money for social engineering.

It was like Bernie’s vision of heaven, except for the genocide and conquest.

Liberals say Hitler was on the right because he fought socialists and labor unions, but that’s a horrible argument. Socialists have always had internal fights. Trotsky was killed by a socialist. Hitler wasn’t trying to stamp out leftism. He was just trying to kill off the competition.

To a bureaucrat, priority one is always “my job,” not political principle. Hitler and his underlings were bureaucrats. If there had been a second Nazi faction with exactly the same platform, Hitler would have done his best to kill them.

So yes, Hitler was a socialist, not just in name, but in practice. Saying Hitler wasn’t a socialist is like saying a prison rapist isn’t gay. Own it.

I guess I’m digressing.

Trump’s only resemblances to Hitler are that he recognizes external threats and arouses emotion-based support by stirring up people’s spleens. He’s no worse than Sanders, Clinton, and Obama, demonizing “the rich,” the police, and anyone else who does anything worthwhile.

Hitler probably thought things out more carefully than Trump. I think Trump is planning as he goes.

How are we going to put the right back together after the convention? Will the Trump-dumpers suck on a pacifier and be quiet if they lose? Will the Trump-pumpers engage in rare white conservative riots if he loses? Will we hate each other forever?

I feel like God gave us a holiness-hating, carnal Democrat as judgment, and now he may be about to give us a carnal Republican, to prove to us that being right politically isn’t enough to solve our problems.

I don’t think Cruz is going anywhere. I think the Enquirer story will continue to develop. A real journalist from The Washington Times has confirmed that Cruz had at least two mistresses, and The Enquirer’s batting average in this area is devastating to politicians. It appears that The Enquirer exposed itself to big-time liability by publishing identifiable photos of the two non-public-figure “mistresses,” and they are not stupid enough to do that without something to back it up. The National Enquirer will falsely say that Liz Hurley got a facelift from Martians, but it won’t falsely say an obscure identifiable person slept with a politician.

I think Cruz has offended God by allowing crooked dominionist prosperity preachers to proclaim him “anointed.” If Cruz wins, those jokers will be all over the air, saying it proves their demented doctrine is right. If Trump, a very hands-off Christian, wins, it won’t prove much of anything with regard to religion.

I can’t endorse anyone. I will vote for Trump if he gets the nomination, but no one will ever hear me say God approves of him. I will vote for Trump for the same reason I would run into a Mormon temple during a tornado.

I’m so glad I don’t get agitated about this stuff. Things will get worse and worse. The socialists or Muslims will eventually take over, and we will have no rights at all. We need to be prepared spiritually. If I can’t deal with a Democrat in the White House, how will I have peace when we’re part of the caliphate, or when morons from the ghetto come to my house with government badges and tell me it’s now an Obama field office?

I hope a Republican wins, and that we get two or three more Supreme Court justices who aren’t nuts, but in the end, my peace has to be based on my relationship with God, not external circumstances. Some people are “prepping” by buying bullets and dried food. That has a little value, but the only prepping guaranteed to work is spiritual prepping.

If you’re still tossed around by political waves, I highly recommend getting right with God. Get baptized with the Spirit, pray in tongues as much as you can, and learn how to dominate instead of being dominated. If you don’t, you won’t be ready when the S really HTF, and you will be pawing around in the dirt with carnal tools, like an animal displaced by a mudslide.

It’s Our Cruz to Bear

I am wondering what most charismatic Christians think of Donald Trump.

I’m too lazy to read blogs, and I don’t really want to get into the mud-wrestling this time around, so I guess I’ll never find out.

The impression I get is that some of us are all fired up for him, and they refuse to hear any criticism. They’re a lot like the Obamites, many of whom would vote for a black man or a handout even if the candidate swore under oath that he was possessed by Satan and shot a baby during a debate.

I can’t get completely behind Trump. He owns casinos. He has never led a Christian lifestyle. If he’s a conservative, then he converted in a hurry, because it hasn’t been that long since he was supporting leftists and talking like a liberal.

He’s proud; I think he beats even Obama on that score. He is incapable of admitting fault. He is childish and vindictive. He doesn’t act like a president. He’s always baiting people on Twitter, which is not the kind of thing you would have expected from Lincoln or Jefferson.

He has said some bizarre things. He encouraged his supporters to physically engage with people who threw tomatoes ate one of his rallies, saying he would pay their legal bills. He said Republicans might riot if he showed up at the convention with a lot of delegates in his pocket and then failed to get the nomination. A guy speaking for his campaign said he (the speaker) didn’t “accept” the idea that rioting is violence, and I haven’t heard Trump contradict him.

People have a tendency to whitewash their allies. Hitler paid “scholars” to “prove” the Japanese were Aryans, which, now that I think about it, is whitewashing in a nearly literal way. Hitler thought a small group of Caucasians should run the world, so he found a way to include a bunch of non-white Asians who were helpful.

Some Christians seem to be doing the same thing with Trump. That’s dangerous. He is not Elijah. He’s the same guy he was ten years ago, “evolution” notwithstanding.

I voted for Cruz in the primary, but part of me felt like voting for Trump. The Donald bullies the people who bully people like me; that’s hard not to like. By “people like me,” I mean conservatives and Christians, not Caucasians. Trump appeals to our desire for deliverance from anarchists, brats, and morons who will destroy the nation if they get enough power.

I feel the urge, but I’m not crazy enough to think it’s rational.

The weird thing about Trump (one weird thing) is that his enemies help him more than his friends. When Obama got into the White House, his determination to dilute our civil rights spurred a gun-buying frenzy the likes of which America has never seen. I call him the greatest gun salesman in history. Similarly, the nuts who disrupt Trump rallies and publish lies about him move people like me to support him, even though we don’t want to.

Right now, we have MEXICANS inside the UNITED STATES interfering with OUR election. And the press thinks that’s okay. How can you battle that kind of ignorance? Some people are too ignorant to understand why they’re wrong. If it’s not immediately obvious to you that non-citizens are not supposed to be involved in our elections, then you are probably not capable of being taught.

It’s insane that these activities are permitted and condoned, while no one seems to mind seeing Trump’s crowd–citizens–deprived of the Constitutional rights to assemble and speak. It has to be a supernatural blindness. No one is that stupid without help.

Here’s something else that makes no sense in the natural realm: by and large, black people hate Donald Trump. They joke publicly about beating him up. But they would benefit more than anyone from a border wall. Illegals are harder on blacks than whites. They compete for jobs blacks usually take, and they nullify the minimum wage and the power of unions by working under the table, union-free, for pennies.

Black people should be out in the street waving Trump signs, but they talk about him like he’s the Antichrist. And they’re excited about Bernie, who would be a huge help to their enemies.

Some people are saying Trump is the new Cyrus. I think they’re probably right.

Cyrus was a heathen emperor who helped rebuild the temple and Jerusalem. He was anointed by God, even though he worshiped false gods. Look it up; I’m not imagining it. Along with figures like Ahasuerus, Darius, and the pharaoh Joseph served, he looked after the Jews and advanced their interests. Did you know that God called Nebuchadnezzar his servant? God doesn’t always pick believers to do his will. Sometimes he picks people who worship other spirits. It doesn’t mean he approves of their religious stances. It just means he has jobs for them to do.

My best guess is that Trump will win, and he’ll look after Christians and Israel for four to eight years. During that time, we’ll have space to repent and evangelize. After that, I expect things to fall apart. God is merciful, and he puts off his justice, so this sounds like the way he would do things. He gave Noah 120 years to preach to his neighbors before sending the rain.

Trump will surely do and say embarrassing things if he is elected. But he’s the most capable person in the race, far and away, so he will be extremely effective at whatever he decides to do. He is running against people who have never done anything productive and who have never managed people in a capitalist (non-subsidized) enterprise, so none of them can do what he can.

Should Christians feel bad about voting for him? I don’t think so. When have we ever seen a man of God in the White House? Let’s be honest; politics doesn’t attract prophets and apostles. It attracts people with gigantic egos and a desire to control. Some of our Presidents have been real Christians, but we’ve never had anyone Spirit-led. Trump is probably as much of a Christian as Bush I or Nixon.

I have learned that God tends to give carnal grunt work and big titles to carnal people. This frees his real servants up so they can do things that are important to him. If you look at churches, the pastors are usually carnal people who like attention and control (just like politicians), and the most effective Christians are generally people who lack titles or church jobs.

God can’t find an apostle to run, and we wouldn’t vote for one, so Trump is about as good as anyone, as long as he will do some things God wants.

Cruz is associated with charismatic preachers. Does that make him a servant of God? Not necessarily.

Cruz’s dad Rafael hangs out with prosperity preachers like Larry Huch and Kenneth Copeland. I saw Kenneth Copeland say he thought God had anointed Cruz to do something or other. I think he said Cruz was going to transfer wealth from the wicked to the righteous, but you can check Youtube and find out. Anyway, God hates the prosperity gospel, and he hates it when greedy, mean, egotistical people put words in his mouth, so frankly, I think God is not going to bless the Cruz campaign.

The prosperity gospel is a lie from hell, and if you believe it, you may curse your ability to make money or succeed. Cruz is aligning himself with some truly filthy people, so it may be that God can’t bless his campaign. If Cruz wins, the prosperity hucksters will come out and say it proves they were right, and people who don’t know right from left will be deceived and follow them.

Trump isn’t polling too well compared to Hillary, but Trump’s enemies are doing a great job of attracting support for him, so when the time comes, he may do well. Also, a lot of Republicans are lying to pollsters, saying they’ll vote for Hillary over Trump. That’s just spite. I think Cruz would make a better president, but if Trump is the GOP candidate, you better believe he will have my vote, and he will also have the votes of 95% of the conservatives who claim they will never help him.

I’m not too agitated about the election. If you follow this blog, you know how upset I used to get about politics. I have come to accept the fact that humanity is lost, and I have zero hope for America’s future, so I am focusing on fixing myself and the people I know. If we’re on solid ground with God, this other nonsense won’t be able to get to us. Sometimes the Ninevites repent, and sometimes you sit in the Ark and listen to drowning sexual deviants and giants bang and scratch on the hull. If all I can do is look after myself and a few other people, then I am content with that.

Things are coming to a head. Thanks to technology and the immorality of the people who design and wield it, free will is about to come to an end. Surveillance (and behavior control) will be universal in a very short time. Without a certain amount of free will, the earth serves no purpose. Men can’t be judged when they can’t do what they want. I don’t believe God will let a 1984-style world exist for very long. I am hoping I’ll be ready when things really go nuts, and even if I die first, serving God and receiving correction and growth are the correct and profitable things to do.

I don’t look at other blogs any more, so I have no idea what my old friends are up to. I would guess that they’re enraged, and that a lot of really mean memes are going around. God bless them all; I wouldn’t go back to that for all the tea in China.

Fix your own ark. Don’t be overly concerned with what goes on around you. You may end up doing more good than you think.

You Can’t Assert a Right You Don’t Have

A long time ago, my dad bought my sister’s house. He had already paid for most of it; his intention was to give it to her. He bought her out because she had ruined the place, and he was in trouble with the code enforcement people.

We started renovating it, so he could rent it out. The process was slow and full of problems.

Everything but the outer walls had to be replaced. People don’t believe me when I tell them how badly the house had been damaged. I shot video and took photos, because I knew people would not be able to grasp the magnitude of the destruction. After she left and took everything she could salvage, we spent four figures on removing junk, all of which went to the dump.

New floors (and subfloors). New drywall. New appliances. New wiring. New roof. New lawn. You name it. It all had to go.

The problems we ran into were ridiculous. We hired a contractor with glowing recommendations, and he did a tremendous amount of substandard work and then left. Neighbors who should have been thrilled to see work going on complained about the construction mess, and we had to fight the city. Construction was eventually halted because the work was no good, and the house was designated “unsafe.”

It took months to get that fixed. The City of Miami does not care if you lose everything you have while they wait to issue permits. They will literally let you go bankrupt before they will speed anything up. They sat and did nothing, and there was no way to motivate them.

Then Florida Power & Light decided the electrical service had to be switched from “residential” to “construction.” They never said what that meant, but for weeks and weeks, they refused to do anything to get the change made. They can’t be fired, and they have no competition, so it doesn’t matter to them if you lose rent money for two or three months.

We hired a new contractor (with glowing recommendations), and he was slow. He made a lot of excuses. He kept billing for new things.

The walls had been replaced, but because the first contractor didn’t follow the code, the new walls had to be replaced.

During all this time, I was praying and using my supernatural tools, but things kept getting gummed up. I did not understand it.

One day last week, I thought about the price my dad paid for my sister’s interest, and I realized something: one part of her payment had been held up.

When he bought her out, he held a mortgage on her part of the house. She developed lung cancer, and instead of saving money, she had spent everything she had. She had not bought health insurance. She started out with very expensive treatment. When she was broke, she came to my father and asked him to foot the bills. To teach her a lesson, he made her sign a note for six figures.

When he bought the house, the mortgage was part of the deal. He was supposed to record a satisfaction of mortgage and let it go. But when I brought it up to him, he refused to do it. I didn’t argue with him, because it was between him and my sister, and I didn’t want to wade back into the snake pit. I knew he would never hold her accountable for the debt, so I didn’t think it mattered.

Last week, I sat up in bed and realized that in God’s eyes, the house still belonged to her.

The house fell apart because it belonged to a proud, malicious individual who brought curses on herself. It seemed to me that the construction problems came from this root. Any spirit sent to destroy her possessions would still have the authority to do damage.

I got up the next day and made him sign a satisfaction of mortgage. I took him to get it notarized, and I recorded it by mail.

Why write all this? Because the house has gone nuts since I recorded the mortgage. Whenever one of us visits, there are several workers there, putting the place in order. That’s new. In the past, we would go over and see no sign that anyone had been there in weeks. We could not get the city or the contractor moving.

The contractor has stopped being belligerent and unreasonable. Things I thought were not being done are being taken care of. The stress is gone.

The reason I write about this, potentially subjecting my sister to criticism, is that God taught me something wonderful: our actions matter. Life doesn’t instantly fix itself when you accept salvation, and it doesn’t necessarily fix itself when you develop a strong prayer life (my expectation). You also have to find out what you’ve been doing wrong. You have to admit it candidly, without excuses (or as we like to call them, “explanations”), and you have to ask for help correcting things.

Maybe you have debts. Maybe there is someone you treat badly. Maybe you owe someone an apology. The most likely problem of all is pride coupled with denial. You have to ask God about these things and get his help putting them right. Until then, you’re bailing a boat at one end while water comes in a hole at the other.

My old churches, Trinity Church and New Dawn Ministries, did not teach accountability or repentance. They taught that if you believed God and gave preachers money, everything would work out. As a result, Trinity can’t pay its bills and New Dawn is a tiny, failed church in a rented room, after years of yammering about the prosperity gospel.

The pastors of these churches, personally, are failures, so the people who follow them are failures. The failure of Rich Wilkerson, the pastor at Trinity, is less obvious, because he borrows and hustles, but the church is not prosperous. No one who has a lot of debt is prosperous. They just look good until the bills come due.

This can be extremely helpful to you, if you take it seriously and put it to use. Start asking God what you’re doing wrong. If you think you’re not doing anything wrong, ask him to get off the throne, because obviously, it rightfully belongs to you.

I experienced something truly wonderful yesterday. I have been unable to make myself pray consistently in the middle of the day, and it has been a real problem, because prayer is like food. You can’t do it once and then forget about it. You have to do it over and over, at relatively short intervals. When you neglect it, things start to go badly, like the battle in which Moses held Aaron’s rod over his head. When he held it up, the Hebrews did well. When he lowered it, they started to lose.

I have been praying and praying for help with this. I like to pray at around 5 p.m., because it’s a good midway point. I try to go at least 20 minutes in tongues. I keep asking God to give me grace to do it. I don’t need willpower; that brings pride. I need supernatural help.

Yesterday I had a burger, and then I sat on the couch for a bit, to watch something stupid and digest the food. I started feeling euphoric. I thought it was just my blood sugar going up, but then I realized it was supernatural. I felt peace and joy, and an absence of stress and anger. I knew it was God, resting on me, so I gave in to in and started praying. It was great. I felt him moving, doing various things. I knew things were being ordered and harmonized. I was getting correction.

I can’t say enough about it. Being in God’s presence is a gift and an honor you can’t buy with money or earthly power. There is no way to get it unless you please God. People simulate it with drugs and alcohol, but those things don’t compare, and they always come with a cost that exceeds the benefit.

In summary, it has been a really good week, and I expect things to keep getting better. I hope people listen and try the things I’m doing so they get what I’m getting.

Music continues to go well. Sometimes I feel sure my hands are going to swell up and refuse to cooperate, but when practice time comes, they are always ready to go. I am starting to sound a little bit like a musician from time to time.

Last time, I wrote about my old “Wingman” amp. It started life with two output transformers and four 6BM8 tubes, for a total of 15 watts. Recently, I took two output tubes out and got a nice sound, so I decided to rehabilitate the amp.

I was not sure whether I should go with two tubes and 7 watts or four tubes and 15 watts. I played around, switching tubes in and out. I learned that I had the wrong rectifier (5Y3) in it, so I put a bigger one (5AR4) in it, and the sound got even better.

I have all sorts of amp parts lying around. I have a bigger power transformer, which I intended to put in the Wingman, thinking it would clean things up. Somehow, I had gotten the idea that four tubes added up to 30 watts, so the new transformer was the correct size for that amount of power. I found out I was wrong; it was only 15 watts. I checked the existing power transformer, and it was rated for 15 watts. I was all set!

I cleaned the amp up and built a new cabinet for it, and here it is.

The sound is very clear and warm, very much like the four-EL84 Rocketman amp I designed, but I would say it breaks up a little earlier. Not sure. In any case, it has a singing quality which is hard to describe. When you play through it, it’s like the guitar becomes a wind instrument, like a muted trumpet. It’s exquisite.

I have been modifying my pedals, and I decided to open up my Way Huge Fat Sandwich distortion pedal to see what I could do to cut down the gain. It turned out I had the internal drive pot set too high, so I turned it back down and fired the amp up. Magnificent. Like listening to an angel cry. Warm, round, expressive…marvelous. I liked it so much I found a second Fat Sandwich on Ebay, used. Now I’ll have one in the garage and one in the house.

I have bought a lot of pedals, but it’s not because I want a lot. It’s because I want a few really good ones. You have to try a fair number in order to find what you want. And even then, I had to open them up and change parts.

The amp parts I still have are going to have to go somewhere. I believe the best move is to build one more Rocketman, since the first one is a little rough, and I may make another Wingman. After that, I will be set for a while. I have a couple of speakers I need to put into a cabinet, so that’s also on the list.

For quite a while, I’ve been asking God to show me the things in my life that please him. I’ve been asking him to restore them, repair them, replace them, make them work, and so on. I ask this for everyone on my prayer list. The stuff with the amps and guitars seems to be his answer. Very nice.

I am not out of the woods yet, but at least I know I’m in the woods! That’s more than most charismatic Christians can say. They go down with the ship, thinking the Coast Guard is a minute away when it’s actually still at the dock.

As always, I hope this is helpful. Let me know if it bears fruit in your life.

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.