One More Thing I’ve Done Wrong

I am repeatedly amazed at God’s ability to surprise me by telling me things I already know. How can such a thing be possible?

Last night during prayer, I thought about the problems in my life, and I wondered what I was still doing wrong. I’ve been baptized with water and the Holy Spirit. When I was baptized with water, I committed to dying to the flesh, so I believe I did things correctly. I have a strong prayer life. I have been getting a lot of help with sanctification; God has given me the grace to give up a number of things that were holding me captive. I’ve also been asking God to change me so his love flows through me; Christians barely mention love these days, but it’s God’s top priority.

God gives me phrases from time to time, and here is what he gave me last night: “I forgot about the sacrifice.”

While I was at a Last Reformation event a little over three weeks ago, Torben Sondergaard criticized what he called “the American gospel.” It works like this: if you figure out what you want to do with your life, God will help you do it. It’s selfish, and if it worked, most of us would end up in the wrong situations.

It reminds me of something that happened when I was a kid. Teachers would ask me and my classmates what we wanted to be when we grew up, and the boys always said they wanted to be cops, firemen, or Superman. The girls said they wanted to be ballerinas. Think how stupid our society would be if we got the choices we made as children.

Christians want high-status jobs and lots of money. We also try to turn our desires into tempting packages for God. A Christian will say, “Make me a famous singer, and I’ll sing about you all the time,” or, “Give me a big, wealthy church to lead, and I’ll serve you all of my life.” Feel-good preachers tell us God will honor our choices.

What does the Bible say?

“He who loves his life will lose it.”

“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.”

If you want God on your side, you have to be on his. You have to put everything on the altar. You have to look at all the things you cherish, including ones you don’t yet have, and let God know you are willing to give up every last one of them in order to be put on the path he has chosen.

Many of us think we’re dying to self and crucifying the flesh when we stop fornicating and doing other things that are obviously wrong. There is more to it than that. You have to offer God your dreams. You have to be willing to give up your career plans. You have to tell him it’s okay if you never marry or have children.

You can be a teetotalling virgin who is nice to everyone while still turning your own desires into idols.

The Bible says God will give us the desires of our heart. How can that be true if we have to put them on the altar? First of all, his promise doesn’t apply to all of our desires. If your desire is to be a successful pimp, don’t expect help. If you have a set of desires when you decide to follow Jesus, God will only help you with the ones he approves of. Second, God will give you new desires as you grow, and he will definitely fulfill those desires.

I told God he can have whatever he wants. If I’m supposed to die single, fine. If I have to give up activities I love, like writing, music, STEM pursuits, shooting, and using tools, I will go along with it. If he wants me to live in a place I wouldn’t have chosen, I’ll comply.

I also told him there was no possible way I could give up my plans and cravings without his help. The Bible says we put the deeds of the body to death by the Spirit, not with our own strength.

A Christian is supposed to be the head, not the tail. God told me this: “The head sees things, and reaches them, first.” If you’re the head down here on earth, you will have to lead, and that means you will have greater obligations than everyone else. You can’t look at other people’s lives and tell God it’s not fair that they get things you don’t get. They get trivial things. If you serve God, you are on track to receive great things of eternal value. If you complain about what you have to give, you have to consider what you stand to receive.

Your friends who don’t give much up for God will not get as much from him as you will.

Jesus gave up wealth, longevity, popularity, and family. He was our head. He sacrificed himself before we did, and he gave up more. Now he sits in heaven beside the father. That’s a pretty good return on 33 years of service. If God asks you to give up more than your neighbor, it’s because he intends to give you more.

Today I read about Yitzhak Perlman, the violinist. He discussed his childhood. He struggled with practice. You can imagine what it was like. He was indoors with the violin, and kids he knew were outside having fun. It sounds rough until you compare their futures. The other kids went on to become ordinary people with ordinary jobs, and Perlman became a famous and wealthy musician.

In some ways, this life is like a childhood full of violin practice. There are movies you can’t watch. There are things you can’t say or do. There are emotions you can’t allow yourself to have. There is a lot of deprivation. The payoff comes later, and while you’re here, you’ll have a life of peace, fulfillment, and miraculous help.

I know God doesn’t take away everything we put on the altar. That’s a comfort.

I already knew I was supposed to “die to the flesh,” but until last night, I didn’t have a deep, heartfelt understanding of it. I don’t know how I could have been wrong, since it was so obvious.

We will see what God takes and what he leaves behind. I will keep posting updates.

No one is Wrong all the Time

I saw an interesting story today. Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, warns that the Antichrist will use the tightening web of technological gadgets to control us. I’ve been writing about this idea for a long time.

I’m always amazed when anyone from a typical blinded mainstream church says anything that makes sense. I’m not naive enough to get the idea that it means a lot. It’s hard to be wrong about everything, even when you aren’t in touch with the Holy Spirit.

Kirill says the information gadgets collect will be used to control us. That’s not terribly perceptive. It already controls many of us. Say the wrong thing in a tweet or while someone else is filming you with a smartphone, and you can lose your job in under a day.

One of the weird things about technological lynchings is that there is no way to recover. There is no mercy. Once you’ve been targeted, you can’t get forgiveness, and you can forget about getting your life and career back.

I should not be surprised. Technological lynchings are generally performed by leftists, and leftists are intolerant and ruthless. They will forgive rapists and killers and demand their early release, but they never forgive people who disagree with them.

He says, “Control from a single point is a harbinger of the coming of the Antichrist,” and, “The Antichrist is a personality that will be at the head of the world wide web controlling the entire human race. Thus, the structure itself presents a danger.”

Will the Antichrist run the worldwide web? Yes. Any global dictator would have to run the worldwide web. Failing to take control would be gross incompetence. It would be like taking over a country without taking charge of the military.

We already see authoritarians taking control of the web in some countries. China is a great example. They ban many western sites, and the government hacks into accounts and deletes things people write. The Antichrist would have to be an idiot not to use the same tactics.

It’s strange that we accept surveillance with eagerness. For me, it underscores something I concluded a long time ago: people don’t really have a burning desire for freedom.

In America, there is a cherished myth that says people will do anything to get their freedom, but it isn’t true. When people flee countries where there is no freedom, most of the time, they’re not fleeing oppression. Most are fleeing lack of financial opportunity. Some flee political or religious persecution, but their desire isn’t for general freedom; they just want freedom from certain aspects of authoritarianism that impact them disproportionately. Many people are happy as clams in authoritarian nations. As long as they’re not the ones being rounded up and tortured, they are more than happy to exchange freedom for peace and relative prosperity.

When colonists in North America threw off British tyranny, they didn’t do it because tyranny itself bothered them. They did it because British tyranny conflicted with certain pet interests they had. Some wanted relief from burdensome taxes and a bigger piece of the economic pie; money is always a big motivator. Had the British been fairer to them in financial matters, they probably would have stayed loyal to the crown.

The royals were tyrants before the colonists arrived, and they remained tyrants for many decades after the colonies were established, but the colonists didn’t make much of a fuss until well over a century had passed.

The English were just as oppressive at home as they were in North America, but there was no revolution in England. If human beings had a universal desire for freedom, English subjects would have joined us in rebellion.

Castro was extremely popular in Cuba. Exiles get furious when they hear that, because he confiscated their wealth, but it’s a fact. Castro murdered, tortured, and imprisoned people who disagreed with him, and his laws were extremely oppressive, but Cubans were very sincere when they mobbed his personal appearances and listened to speeches that lasted as long as several movies. They still line up to visit his grave.

We don’t mind oppression until it affects us personally, in ways that are hard to bear. That’s the truth.

It amazes me that there are people who find Alexa tolerable. I can’t imagine having an eavesdropping machine in my home; my phone is bad enough. We love anything that makes us say, “Gee, whiz!”, and we love convenience, so there is no limit to how deeply we will let the technological tentacles penetrate.

There are people who want to connect their burglar alarms and all their major appliances to the Internet. I can understand the logic with regard to burglar alarms, because you need to be able to react to burglaries when you’re not home, but why on earth would you pay for a refrigerator that tells you what’s in it?

We are addicted to excessive electronic connection, so there is no point in complaining about it. The battle is already lost. It’s going to get worse and worse. The government will know exactly where you are all the time. You will have a self-driving car that won’t take you where you want to go if the government disagrees (and it may take you places you don’t want to go). You will be on video every time you walk outside. You will have a social media account you’re not allowed to cancel.

All of these things are inevitable. When we find out we can do something, we feel we have to do it, regardless of whether it’s a good idea. We created atomic weapons because we could. The USA and the British knew the Nazis and communists would build them whether we did or not, so we built ours first. There is no legitimate use for a nuclear weapon apart from violence. Doesn’t matter. We had to build them because we are too much like monkeys for our own good.

We can change technology, but we can’t improve ourselves so we are capable of using it ethically. That’s the sad thing. Man is the same fool he was 4,000 years ago. He has no more sense than he did then, but now he can build bombs that can make cities evaporate. It’s remarkable how technology advances while we remain frozen in adolescence.

The only thing that can change our hearts for the better and bring unity is the Holy Spirit. Our own efforts have produced very limited results. In fact, we are degenerate. We are not as good as we were 50 years ago. Every day, real life looks more like the movie Idiocracy. Watch a clip from this movie, and then think about Rashida Tlaib.

Mr. Kirill or Father Kirill (whatever the correct term is) is right. The Antichrist will be too stupid and weak to communicate with everyone in the world simultaneously through a spirit, so he will have to use technology. It will be easy to put the bridle on us, because we will welcome it. We already do.

He also says we need to avoid too much central control, “if we don’t want to bring the apocalypse closer.”

He got something right, and then he wandered into error. He believes the apocalypse is something we should try to put off. In reality, we are supposed to pray God will hasten it. Look what Peter wrote:

Therefore, since all these things will be dissolved, what manner of persons ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness, looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be dissolved, being on fire, and the elements will melt with fervent heat? Nevertheless we, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.

We should be eager to see the end come, and we can make it happen faster. The end will be painful for many people, but it’s better than having the messianic age put off forever. This world is a mess, and we need to get the present age behind us.

Why doesn’t the head of the Russian Orthodox Church know this? Shouldn’t he be an expert?

I have started praying for God to speed up the end of this age. I should have been aware this was a priority with him, but I wasn’t.

I hope I will never have an Internet fridge or an oven that tells me what to do. I hope I never get that snowflaky. Some technological ideas are just plain stupid.

It’s nice to see a church leader acknowledge the reality of prophecy. Maybe some of the people who listen to him will think about it and realize they need better knowledge than what they receive from crippled denominations.

The Mustard Seed Keeps Growing

I haven’t been up very long. I woke up a little before 8:30, and it’s about 9:22. I already have a testimony.

If you’re wondering why I get up so late, the answer is that I wake up in the middle of the night. It happens almost every night, so in order to avoid sleep deprivation, I turn off the alarm clock and go back to sleep when it’s over.

This morning when I woke up, I did what I usually do. I gritted my teeth and checked the news. I always feel a certain amount of dread when I look at the news, because it’s so filthy. I read about disasters and catastrophes, and I see venomous people, including beloved performers and politicians, tearing at each other like unsupervised children in a schoolyard. There is also the danger of temptation; certain “news” sites throw revealing photos of women up all the time.

I should not have gritted my teeth. Reading the news is different today.

I used to fight anger when I read disturbing things about venal, cynical celebrities. I didn’t want to let them annoy me, but they succeeded. Look at the people who get obsessive favorable media coverage today. Some examples are Kathy Griffin, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Tlaib, the Kardashians, Alec Baldwin, Jim Carrey…they live to provoke people. They’re good at what they do.

I fought something else when I saw revealing photos posted by outfits like The Daily Mail and The Sun!

These days my experience is not what it used to be. For example, when I read that Christian Bale thanked Satan for inspiration in playing Dick Cheney in an attack movie, I didn’t get irritated. I didn’t have any problems with the publicist-submitted photos of morally lax actresses, singers, and models.

I’m not saying I felt nothing at all; just that things were very muted compared to what I would have experienced a month ago, and I was able to feel goodwill toward the misbehaving people in the news.

As I realized what was happening, I felt joy running through me. I’m not a teary person, and I think men who run around crying are silly and disgraceful, but I was not that far from tears today.

It’s good to resist negative urges and feelings. It’s much better not to have them in the first place.

I think I understand Luke 2:14 now. Here is what the angels sang when the birth of Jesus was announced: ““Glory to God in the highest,
And on earth peace, goodwill toward men!” Jesus died partly to enable us to have goodwill toward each other instead of anger. Many of us enjoy anger and don’t want to part with it, but there are also many people who have a habit of anger and want to get rid of it. You can’t just make it go away by concentrating. You have to run off the spirits that drive it, and you need the Holy Spirit’s joy and love to flow in you, to fill the place anger and other negative things used to occupy.

Yesterday I wrote about the joy I had started feeling, and I said I didn’t know if it was permanent. I’m into my second day. That’s all I can tell you.

Most Christians (not including the fakers) are obsessed with improving themselves with effort. We have the idea that we can please God by working very hard to restrain and compel ourselves. We think God wants us to earn things from him. That’s completely wrong.

Over and over, the Bible calls us “heirs.” An heir inherits something someone else worked for. As for wages, the Bible says, “The wages of sin is death.” Sinners get what they earn; believers get what Jesus earned. If this were not the case, the Bible’s emphasis on humility would make no sense. If you could change yourself and earn a ticket to heaven, you would have every right to be proud.

In numerous places, the Bible tells us to give God the credit for things. Why would he want credit for what we do? It would be absurd. He wants credit for what he does. He is the one who changes people.

The Bible says Jesus carried our sins, iniquities, and physical problems on the cross. In the Bible, Jesus did things like making withered limbs grow back. He never charged people. He never told them to earn their healings. He gave it to them for nothing. He never charged for forgiveness of sins, either. If forgiveness and healing are free, why is the third thing–relief from iniquity–something we have to earn? It’s not. God removes our iniquities supernaturally and replaces them with his virtues.

To make sure people understand what I’m talking about, I’ll define “iniquity” again. An iniquity is a sinful habit, not a sin.

Taking heroin is a sin. A heroin addiction is an iniquity. Hitting someone in anger is a sin. Wrath is an iniquity. What God is doing in me is the supernatural destruction of iniquity. The fruit of the Spirit are God’s answer to iniquity. When iniquity is removed, the fruit of the Spirit are supposed to replace it.

God calls our own puny righteousness “used menstrual rags.” That’s how highly he esteems it. How would you like it if you tried to send your son to a tailor to get a custom-made suit at your expense, and he saved the money and came home wearing used menstrual rags? Would you be pleased?

When we puff ourselves up with fake righteousness through hard work, God is not pleased at all. It’s just another form of iniquity.

I can’t tell you how excited I am to see myself being improved. I feel like I’ve waited forever for this. It’s like going to heaven. We all think about it, but it’s such a blessing, it’s hard for us to imagine it as something that will really happen. When God removes iniquity and replaces it with the fruit of the Spirit, it’s hard to believe.

It makes sense that I would be moved to compare it to heaven, because “the kingdom of heaven” refers to something we’re supposed to have inside of us. Heaven is a place; the kingdom of heaven is not. The kingdom of heaven is a state of being, in our hearts and minds.

The Bible calls us ambassadors. I’ll go further. We are living embassies. The ground inside an embassy belongs to a foreign country. The inside of a Christian should be part of heaven. It should be a place full of love, peace, faith, and joy. If you’re not full of the fruit of the Spirit, your insides are like hell. You’re full of lust, anger, covetousness, and so on. You may fight these things. You may know they’re wrong. They’re still there.

I don’t know what to do with myself. The blessing is overwhelming. I feel like I just received a pallet of gold bars.

Can it really be that God wants the rest of my life to be like this? Would he do that for me? How can it be?

We call the gospel “good news,” and then we hand people a bunch of burdensome rules coupled with anger and self-righteousness. That’s not good news. Good news is something that makes you want to exclaim. It’s good news when you get healed of blindness. It’s good news when God resurrects a dead child. It’s also good news when you realize the inner shackles you could never hope to cut have been taken off.

I want to hold onto this, and I want it to increase. I don’t care what I have to give up. It’s just like Jesus said: the kingdom of heaven is like a pearl a man would sell everything he has to own.

I can tell my recent baptism broke a stronghold and made these changes possible. That’s exactly what I was hoping for. Before I was baptized correctly, even though I was trying to get God’s help with inner change, I was doing things out of order. I needed to go back and fix my foundation. God had given me this sentence: “I have built on a rotten foundation.” I didn’t know what he meant at the time, but now it seems clear.

In some ways, God is completely inflexible. He didn’t give us dozens of ways to become like him. He only provided one, and if you don’t accept it, you will only end up spinning your wheels. Baptism, meaning full immersion accompanied by intelligent repentance and dying to the flesh, is mandatory. You may get to heaven without it, but you will always be a stunted Christian.

I learned something fascinating the other day. The Bible has a “hidden verse.” It’s Acts 8:37. Many translations omit it. When the Ethiopian eunuch asked Philip if he could be baptized, Philip said, “If you believe with all your heart, you may.” That’s what the verse says.

Old copies of the New Testament only go back so far, and the oldest ones omit the verse. That’s the excuse that was used for removing it. The problem with this logic is that the verse was quoted in works written before the oldest existing copies of the New Testament. The verse was quoted in about 180 AD, not long after the New Testament was committed to writing, and that establishes its validity.

Why would scholars remove the verse? Because they had concluded, wrongly, that babies should be baptized. They wanted to support this false doctrine. A baby can’t understand baptism, and without understanding, baptism is just a pool party, as Torben Sondergaard says. The verse says God only permits baptism for those who believe, and that excludes babies.

By creating the institution of invalid infant baptism, the old churches removed baptism from the church. They replaced it with something that is not baptism. As a result, generations of unbaptized Christians never reached maturity, and all sorts of bad doctrine grew up around them like thistles. Generally, Christians were not baptized, and they didn’t receive the baptism with the Holy Spirit, so naturally, we entered an era of heresy and apostasy.

It’s amazing how much damage Satan did by taking baptism away from us. It was a master stroke.

I feel tremendous, and because this business is just getting started, I expect to feel even better in the future.

If Christianity actually works, what do we have to be worried about?

If you’re reading this, I strongly suggest you get yourself baptized correctly. You don’t need a priest or a preacher; just a Christian who is full of faith. You don’t need a church. You can use a bathtub or any container that will allow you to go completely under.

You have to examine yourself and repent. You have to make a quality decision to give your life to Jesus and forget the goals your flesh has turned into idols. You have to be baptized in the name of Jesus, not the Father and the Holy Spirit. In the Bible, believers were not baptized in the name of the Father or Holy Spirit.

When you do it, ask for the baptism with the Holy Spirit so you will be able to pray in tongues. If you can’t get it to work, ask yourself if there is anyone you need to forgive or any sin of which you need to repent.

Ask God to rid you of iniquity and fill you with the fruit of the Spirit.

God has given us tractors, and we are still plowing with arthritic mules!

That’s it for now. It ought to be sufficient!

No One Ever Promised Us Instant Results

I continue to chronicle the changes I experience in the wake of my December 19th re-baptism under the authority of The Last Reformation.

I had a remarkable experience last night and this morning. I didn’t want to write about it until tonight, though, because I wanted to make sure it was real. I can explain.

My dad has chronic back pain. I am in charge of his pain medicine. His doctor has never seen him, and I have never spoken to her. I work through a nurse, and I don’t get as much information as I would like. It’s hard to get coherent guidance on what to give him and when.

He has two pain medications. Both are opioids (mild ones), so apart from blocking pain, they may have other effects. Everyone knows about opioids. They can make you euphoric, sleepy, dizzy, unnaturally relaxed, and so on. Also, different opioids work at different rates. Some work fast and last a short time, and others take a while to kick in and work longer.

My dad isn’t awake all that much these days. He usually sleeps over 12 hours per day. That’s fine at this stage of his life, but it can make it difficult to space out his prescription doses. I need his pain pills to work soon after he gets up, but the dose he takes before bed doesn’t have to start working quickly.

Because I am concerned about his balance and the timing of his doses and so on, I decided the best thing was to try one dose of each of his two painkillers. I figured that would tell me what he was experiencing. I took one dose yesterday and another earlier today. Now I have a better idea what the effects are, and I think I know what to do.

I don’t understand how people get hooked on these things. They give you pleasant feelings, but they also cause constipation, liver damage, sleepiness, and so on, and you also risk addiction, a total breakdown of morals, poverty, prison, and death.

It may not be strictly kosher to do things like this, but I am pretty much on my own, and I have zero interest in recreational use, so it seemed like a good idea. I don’t think they’ll put me in the pokey. Anyway, because opioids can affect your mood, and because my testimony involves the way I feel, I had to be sure what I felt wasn’t related to the pills. Now I’m sure, so I can proceed.

One of the things every Christian should know is that it’s important to hold onto the tools God gives you. The people who teach us doctrine are generally ignorant, so at this point in history, you have to go to the Holy Spirit himself if you want to learn anything. God has shown me a lot of things that have helped me a great deal, but I tend to forget to apply them when I need them.

Years ago, God showed me something about getting prayers answered. Unless you get an instant result, you should continue thanking God, in the name of Jesus, in advance. If necessary, thank him over and over for hours. Sometimes prayers are answered gradually over a period of time, and if you quit early, you may cut off your help because you are under the mistaken impression that God has denied your request.

Even Jesus failed to get instantaneous results on occasion, and we are not better than he is.

I have received some miraculous healings, and some involved prolonged prayer. I got a couple of blisters to disappear that way. I kept thanking God and commanding my body to be healed for maybe 45 minutes each time. It worked.

I have had a very slight cold over the last few days. It’s so weak, I haven’t had to blow my nose. It annoyed me, though, because it caused headaches, tiredness, and mild depression. I always find that things like colds and the flu have psychological effects. For example, a cold can cause a very bothersome increase in the sex drive.

When I started getting sick, I attacked supernaturally, praying and speaking defeat and casting out the spirit and so on. I got some results, but I wasn’t totally healed. I felt pretty good, so I didn’t push through for complete healing. That was lazy of me, and I think it goes against God’s will. I think you should always push through to the end. Otherwise, it’s like giving place to Satan, and we are not supposed to do that.

Last night, I felt bad about failing to follow through, and I was tired of the faint symptoms I was having, so I got back to work. I thanked and praised and so on for a long time. I didn’t get an instant healing, but I got tremendous peace, and I felt a lot better. I didn’t sleep well because my nose was a little stuffy. I woke later and started up with the supernatural tools again.

When I got up, I felt wonderful. I still had some minor symptoms, but mentally and emotionally, I felt very free. I felt free of anger and worry. I felt great about the future. I felt God’s joy, which is supernatural, flowing in me. God’s joy is one of the fruit of the Spirit. You can look it up.

I’ve felt great all day. I have had energy. I have felt more love running through me. I have felt physically strong. That’s no surprise. The Bible says the joy of the Lord is our strength, and when God said that, he meant it literally. We blow off scriptural statements as flowery words and hype, but God hates idle talk. He means what he says. We forget that. Being insincere, we are in the habit of assuming others flap their lips like we do, without meaning what we say.

God’s joy is not a special present we get occasionally for being good little boys and girls. It’s mandatory, and it’s supposed to be an everyday thing. We need it. We should be pursuing it. It sounds selfish, but we need strength in order to persevere, and joy gives us that strength. Turning it down isn’t unselfish or admirable. It’s dereliction of duty.

The book of Galatians says the fruit of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faith, kindness, and self-control. Wouldn’t it be great to have these things? The good news is that you can, and you are expected to.

I wasn’t praying for joy and deliverance from anger and worry. I was trying to get rid of a cold. I received the other things anyway. I don’t know how that works. My experience suggests that when you fight one demon, others in the area may take off, too, perhaps because the spectacle discourages or scares them. Perhaps that’s what happened to me.

I feel great relief. Over the last few years, I’ve had problems with worry, fear, and anger. Longer than that, I’ve been frustrated at the difficulty of getting God’s love and joy to flow in me. Christians love to talk about the peace and happiness God brings us, but how many of us are telling the truth? I have times of great peace and happiness, but my times of stress have been longer. I’m hoping that what I just received is permanent and will increase.

Joy and love will make me feel good, but they will also make me more helpful to others. Love is our proper source of motivation. It drives us to forget about ourselves and make sacrifices that would be very hard to make purely out of duty and willpower. Joy keeps us strong. It kills discouragement.

I want to add something. My circumstances didn’t change. When I got up in the morning, I still had the same worldly problems I had when I went to bed, apart from the change in the cold symptoms. I felt better anyway. If you think you’re unhappy because of your circumstances, you’re wrong. It’s a lie from the devil. Unhappiness comes from us and the demons that live in us. The Holy Spirit can give us happiness and peace that can’t be affected by our earthly problems.

I can’t promise anyone that the change I feel will last. Like I always say, I’m just documenting things.

Last night, I had what I think is a revelation from God. Remember how Paul and Silas were freed from prison? They were beaten and jailed, and midnight found them singing hymns and praising God. Their chains fell off, and they were set free. I believe they were praising and singing because they knew what I know: if you want to have a prayer answered, you keep thanking and praising until you see the result.

I think they prayed to be released, and they knew they had to keep going until they got their answer. I think their persistence is what made the chains fall off, and God has shown me the same “trick.”

They probably prayed for the jailer to be saved, too. They knew unforgiveness blocked answers to prayer. After they were freed, the jailer and his household baptized. They must have prayed for the other prisoners to be freed, because their chains came off, too. Praying for other people is a good way to get God’s power to flow through you so he helps you with your own problems. They knew that.

I hope I can continue bringing you good reports, and that what I have learned is even more helpful to you than it has been to me.

All True Leadership is by Consent

I keep thinking about what Paul said about women keeping silent in the church. It’s amazing how we resist it.

Is scripture the true word of God? If so, isn’t the first book of Corinthians the true word of God? If so, wasn’t Paul correct when he said this?

Let your women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak; but they are to be submissive, as the law also says. And if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is shameful for women to speak in church.

If you disagree with this, then you disagree with scripture, and you are not a Bible-believing Christian. Most people who claim to be Christians don’t believe the Bible is true, so you are not alone, but you can’t expect to impose your beliefs on Christians who trust the Bible and consider it the word of God.

If it’s a man’s duty to lead, and to shield his wife from conflict with other people, and to protect her from the world, why would he not be expected to be her spokesman in church?

The more I think about it, the more incidents I recall in which women caused turmoil in churches or introduced error.

During my time at Trinity Church in Miami, we had a “pastor” I will call Betty. She was a leftist, which tells you she was not on the same page as God. She was highly valuable to the church because she was able to apply for and receive government grants. I don’t recall anything in the Bible about making churches dependent on the government, but this is what she did. God didn’t bless the church financially, so they came up with their own solutions instead of asking what they were doing wrong.

“Pastor” Betty also taught yoga in the church. Not in a mall. Not in her home. Not in a park. In the church. Yoga is part of a demonic religion, even if you think you can separate it from its roots. Yoga is evil, and it leads to increased involvement with Hindu and Buddhist practices.

Betty’s husband was sort of a pastor, too. He rarely spoke. She overshadowed him completely. He taught wing chun, an Asian martial art, in the church. Asian martial arts generally involve spiritual teachings as well as things related to fighting, and they are dangerous to Christians.

The head pastor was married to an aggressive woman with a grating voice. She taught from time to time, and it was unpleasant to listen to her. She was very ambitious, and she her teachings were worldly, not Christian.

When I got driven out of my last church, the pastor’s wife was the one who did it. The church’s members used Facebook a lot, and “Pastora” would pop up from time to time, criticizing what I had written and/or demanding, in capital letters, that it be deleted. One day she blocked me without warning, and I was still a deacon at the time. I never went back to the church.

She was a very brassy woman, and her husband was extremely lazy. They only worked three or four hours a week. He put her in charge of the church’s Facebooking because he was too lazy to do it himself. His wife was not wife enough to ask him to talk to men with whom she disagreed. When his wife misbehaved toward me, he was never man enough to talk to me about it. Like Ahab, he let his wife do his fighting.

I have had aggressive and even unstable women set their sights on me in churches. I have only dated one aggressive woman in my life, and I would never make that mistake again. I find aggressive women repulsive as objects of romance, but I got targeted anyway. I think one of them drove off a sweet girl who would have made any man a wonderful wife. It’s great to have female friends, but when people start seeing you with one too much, they will assume something is going on, and it can cost you opportunities with suitable women.

I had two assertive women push me out of the kitchen at Trinity Church. They were cooking school graduates, but their food was not that great. The food I cooked was very, very good. I stood up for cleanliness and order, and the church sided with them against these things. We had drawers full of mouse excrement, and the church used food preparation surfaces for storing random objects. Trinity was a hypocritical church where problems were denied as a matter of policy, so the ladies got their way, and Trinity lost a profitable pizza enterprise. I could not teach anyone else to get it done.

The kitchen problem went beyond lost profits. I don’t care about the money, because I now realize a church should not operate a business. The main problem was that I was no longer to teach the kids who worked for me. I had been instructed to try to help ghetto kids learn productive habits, and to teach them about God, and when these women and the pastor who ran the kitchen dishonored me in front of them, the job became impossible.

God hates a punk. That’s the truth. He hates someone who shows contempt for a person who has been placed over him, and he hates those who contemn masculinity. I don’t know if he hates punks personally, but he definitely hates what they do. Psalm 11 says God hates certain people, so maybe he does hate punks.

In 2 Kings, God had 42 children torn up for making fun of Elisha. You should look it up. He sent two bears to maul them. In Deuteronomy 21, God instructs the Hebrews to kill their disrespectful sons when they become too burdensome. In Deuteronomy 25, God said that if a woman squeezed a man’s genitals in order to make him lose a fight, the Hebrews had to cut her hand off.

God commanded the Hebrews to kill witches. A witch is a person who sets himself up against God.

God hates disrespect. I should really call it “dishonor,” because respect is something you feel, while honor is merely something you display outwardly. You can’t respect certain people, so God would never ask you to try, but you can honor anyone. God hates it when we dishonor people of authority wrongly.

Women who dominate men and make it impossible for them to exercise authority are out of order, just like Eve, Jezebel, and the kids who made fun of Elisha. Modern women hate to hear this, but that doesn’t make them right. They’re just manifesting the curse of Genesis 3, which says women will desire to rule their husbands.

God created a chain of authority, and it looks like this: Jehovah, Jesus, Holy Spirit, man, wife, children, evil spirits. Jehovah is the supreme authority. His authority runs through the rest of the trinity to husbands and fathers. From them, it runs to wives and mothers, and children are at the bottom. Among children, firstborn males are at the top. In a healthy family, evil spirits are beneath every human being, as are pets.

When you see a family in which people are made miserable in order to accommodate spoiled pets, you know evil spirits are in charge. It shows there is an inversion of authority. The same is true when the wife is the king.

Preachers spend a lot of time cajoling and persuading when they talk about this. I’m not going to. I don’t have to sit up and beg when I tell grown people who are in rebellion obvious things about God. Helping people believe is God’s job, not mine. Believe it or deal with the consequences.

Everybody is under some kind of human authority, and healthy people don’t get upset about it. The Bible says envy is rottenness to the bones. If you are miserable because someone else has been set over you, you are the one with the problem. Envy leads to rebellion, and rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, according to the Bible. If you would not buy voodoo dolls and cast spells, you shouldn’t spend your time trying to bring down people God has put over you.

I don’t mean you can’t criticize a bad president or pray for him to be replaced. I don’t mean you have to let a husband beat you every night or that you can’t pray for God to take an evil boss away from you. I mean you have to be content with your normal place in life. If it bothers you that you’re not the highest and most powerful, you are messed up.

A man is supposed to be the head of his family. That doesn’t mean he gets to be an arrogant dictator who oppresses his wife and kids. It means he has to be responsible for them, get guidance from God, and tell them what they should do. Leadership is service. It’s a burden. People hold leaders responsible for their own welfare.

You can’t lead if your wife is an emasculating harpy who thinks men have to be managed. You can’t pastor a church or lead a ministry if you have to contend with manipulative feminist women who don’t know their place. Brats are even worse. Nothing is worse than being humiliated by children.

In a family or a church, leadership can’t be imposed without consent. If your wife and kids, or the women in a church, ridicule you and disobey you, you can’t lead them no matter what you do. You can’t do the job God put you there to do. It’s not possible to chain them to walls and force them to obey. The only option is to leave. If you’re married, you may not even have that option. God help you.

Human beings didn’t permit me to do what God wanted me to do in churches, so he had me leave. The people in those churches had free will. He couldn’t tame them without taking it away, and God will never take away free will, even if it means sending you to burn forever.

Men need to take their proper roles in life, and women need to stop trying to tear them down. Women in churches need to start following instead of trying to take over.

I’m so glad I didn’t marry an unbelieving, manipulative woman. Life as a single man seems hard sometimes, but a bad marriage is a thousand times worse. I know what life with a rotten woman is like, because I know so many married people, and I thank God I didn’t get caught. I always say that having the wrong woman is worse than having cancer, and I stand by it.

I recently made a comment on the Internet about giving up on depraved people. I shared a revelation involving a command from the Holy Spirit. I told about the way God had told me to stop praying for my sister because it was a waste of time. Some woman popped up and threw Matthew 7:1 in my face, as though she had the right. Many Christians think this is the only verse in the Bible, and they almost invariably use it to try to shut down correction. It’s the verse that warns us “judge not” and so on.

God gave me a wonderful revelation, and I revealed it while pointing out that it was a revelation, and a woman popped up, thinking she had the authority to correct me. She should have been silent, as Paul said. She hadn’t heard from God at all; in fact, she was fighting him.

When God gives you a command, it’s not condemnation (the proper word to describe what Matthew 7:1 refers to). It’s just a command. If God tells you someone is beyond reach, it’s not condemnation that comes from your own backward heart. It’s just a word of knowledge.

Within four or five minutes, I had a long list of scriptures that demonstrated that she was wrong and out of line, and I listed them in reply. I knew what to say, because I knew the Bible had more than one verse.

Jesus himself was heckled by a woman who tried to give his glory to Mary. Satan rose up in this lady, and she yelled, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts which you have sucked.” She had no business speaking up in a religious gathering, and she was driven by the spirits that caused the Jews to worship false female “gods.” She was probably a worshiper of “the queen of heaven,” as the Jews called Ashtoreth.

Modern Catholics still worship “the queen of heaven.” It’s what they call Mary. Not a coincidence.

Jesus wouldn’t have it. Knowing Mary-worship was going to be a huge part of Catholicism and the Orthodox churches, he said, “On the contrary, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it.”

He did not say, “even more blessed are they,” as some translations put it.

The anti-correction movement in the church is largely driven by women. Women are very self-righteous these days. They are convinced that they are inherently morally superior and more loving than men. They push touchy-feely concepts that aren’t found in the Bible. Compared to men, they are huge supporters of homosexuality. They figure prominently in witchcraft and militant vegetarianism and environmentalism. There is a female-driven movement to convince us that anything that is nice is Christian, and anything that isn’t nice is evil. You have to wonder what they think of God, who puts people in hell, where they burn in flames which are powered by his anger, not Satan’s.

Women are a big force behind the PC movement which has crippled discourse in much of the west. That movement has hit Christianity like a torpedo. Oddly, it’s a hit with women, even though it’s not “nice” at all.

Leadership is a masculine concept, like it or not. There is a reason why God is called “the father,” Jesus is called “the bridegroom,” and the church is called “the bride.” When a nation becomes feminized, the result is a disgusting maternal tyranny that turns everyone into nannies and children. We have the snowflake phenomenon today because of the long siege of masculinity.

I see why there has to be a rapture. Humanity has been striving to emasculate God and his servants ever since Genesis 3. In doing so, we have made ourselves increasingly ungovernable, like brutal, stupid teenagers in a school given over to ghetto values. When people become ungovernable, God withdraws his servants. He puts up with a great deal of dishonor, but in the end, he pulls the plug and gives his servants rest.

I’m not going to apologize for saying what is correct. When people are headstrong and wrong, their hurt feelings are their own responsibility.

Love of Food Still Suppressed

I don’t know if my spam filters are deleting legitimate comments. It’s hard to tell, because I don’t see the same things readers do. When I want to find out what’s happening, I have to log out and make comments. The system seems to be working. If it’s killing your comments, you can email me and let me know.

I’m blogging today about my baptism experience. I went to Clearwater to have my water baptism redone correctly, and it produced clear results. The problem with receiving supernatural help from God, though, is that it doesn’t always last. We are ignorant about things like miracles, healings, and deliverance, so we aren’t good about holding onto the changes God makes in us. People get healed and then relapse. Addicts get delivered and then fall back into addiction. You have to be careful not to be too quick to assume you have a lasting result.

On the day of the baptism, before I even went to the tank, I got re-delivered from the love of food. It happened before lunch, and the baptism took place later in the afternoon. My eating habits changed. I felt as though an inner voice was rising up in me to counter the drive to obtain and consume food and drink.

As of today, it’s still working. In fact, I have something interesting to report: I seem to be in danger of eating too little.

Yesterday I had breakfast and lunch, and I figured I was pretty well set for the day. Later on, though, I started to feel like lunch had not been big enough. I felt like my blood sugar was on the low side. It seemed that I needed to eat something more. I had a nearly empty container of ice cream in the freezer, so I took it out and finished it off. After that, I was fine.

I’m very happy about it. A person who had to be reminded to eat is very blessed.

Skinny people love to call fat people undisciplined, but the truth is that nearly all of them weigh less because they don’t like food as much. We all know skinny people who are irresponsible and weak. If people like that really liked food, they would be as big as houses.

Think of all the thin celebrity drug addicts and alcoholics. Here are a few: Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse, Robert Downey, Whitney Houston, Keith Richards, Jim Carrey, Shia Laboeuf, James Taylor, and Jackson Browne. Not models of self-control. If these people had loved food, they would have been morbidly obese.

We know of drug addicts who also became obese. Think of David Crosby, Robin Williams, John Belushi, Jim Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, James Gandolfini, Chris Farley, Elvis Presley, and Artie Lange. John Belushi used to go to restaurants and order entire fried chickens, somewhat like his character in The Blues Brothers.

Many people simply don’t care that much for food. It’s a great thing. It’s completely positive. It doesn’t lead to starvation, because even though they don’t care much for food, their bodies drive them to take in what they need. It just keeps them healthier, more fit, and better-looking than the rest of us.

I love the idea of not loving food. It will bring me a lot of things I want. Who doesn’t want their clothes to fit better? Who doesn’t want to avoid having two sets of clothing: the fat clothes and the “real” clothes? Who doesn’t want to be able to go up a set of stairs without breathing hard afterward?

I’ve never been huge, but I don’t want to be fat at all.

Here’s something interesting: the Bible is very hard on lovers of pleasure. Take a look at this:

But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away!

Paul criticized lovers of pleasures in the same sentence with blasphemers. Wow.

The kind of pleasure he is talking about is the selfish pleasure of the flesh, not pleasures like the good feeling you get from being in God’s presence or doing good.

Let’s check the Greek.

It comes from the same root as “hedonism,” and here is what Strong’s says about the pleasure involved: “pleasure, a pleasure, especially sensuous pleasure; a strong desire, passion.”

It’s not what you feel after a good prayer session or a miraculous healing.

These days, I find that I sometimes try not to cook as well as I can. I’ll be working on a dish, and I’ll think it’s important to get the very best ingredient or use the best method, and then I’ll correct myself. Food doesn’t have to be sublime. Good is sufficient. Why should I make food that intoxicates me? I don’t need that, and it usually takes more work. I don’t need to be my own drug pusher. The food I make is so good, I may be able to overcome my deliverance if I tempt myself too much.

All the things I’m writing apply to temptations like sex, covetousness, and provocation to anger, too. In modern America, we yield to temptation as a matter of course, but we should be toning it down. You don’t need the best sex possible. You don’t need the nicest car made. You don’t need to be around people who provoke you; it’s not really necessary to have a Twitter account.

Food isn’t the only thing I resist better now.

So far, the baptism seems to have been a big success. Our ignorance about baptism may explain why Christians are so much like other people. We divorce just as much. We look at porn. Many of us are as fat as pigs; we even follow obese preachers who are clearly controlled by their flesh. The Bible says we’re not supposed to be slaves to sin, and it wouldn’t say that if God hadn’t given us the tools to get free.

In order to stay free from an addiction, I believe you have to refrain from tempting yourself with occasional plunges into self-indulgence. I believe you also have to go easy on other people with the same problem, because if you’re self-righteous about it, God may let you fall back into your old habit.

I’m about two and a half weeks into it. I can’t tell you where I’ll be a year from now. I feel very hopeful.

The outfit that baptized me is called The Last Reformation, and I found them on Youtube. I had a habit of looking up street healers and watching their videos. Here’s something strange: I found a number of healers before I found TLR, and now I’m seeing Youtube comments that indicate that they know the TLR people. Some of them have attended TLR events, and some are just friends of TLR veterans.

I think God is knitting people together outside of churches, just as I have been predicting for years. I believe God told me it would happen.

I will never join TLR. I’ve said that before. I’m all done following men and movements. I won’t join a church, either. I know TLR will eventually fall into corruption unless Jesus comes soon, and I’m sure they’re not correct about everything. I don’t want to be part of the mess if they fall. Nonetheless, they seem to be part of a very solid quasi-denomination that has arisen without much human planning.

Once you put a name on a movement and name officials, things start to go south. I suppose it defines a target for Satan and gives him a choke point to attack. It’s normal, and it should be expected. It has never failed. I don’t want to be permanently identified with anything that is likely to fail, but TLR does very good work for the time being.

I will keep reporting on my status. If you want help with your own compulsions, consider getting yourself baptized properly.

Missing Piece Looks at the Puzzle

Yesterday I spoke to my cousin “Martha” for the first time in 4 years. This is the cousin I wrote about a few days ago. She is my father’s sister’s stepdaughter. My father’s family is highly dysfunctional, and our own branch has been pretty well shut out of things, so I don’t know any of them very well.

If you heard this woman tell her story, it would break your heart. Her birth mother and her father were divorced soon after she was born. Her mother hit the road and didn’t look back, and her father married my Aunt Norma, who brought an older daughter to the marriage. My uncle brought–I have to count them because I can never remember who they are–three older boys plus Martha. My aunt gave her own daughter a great deal of love and affection, and she rejected and beat Martha.

Sometimes Martha had to share a bed with her older stepsister, “Lulu.” Martha says that because Lulu was heavier, Martha slept on a sort of hill and had to hold onto the bed. My aunt would come in at bedtime and kiss Lulu and so on. In order to do this, she would lean over Martha, who was on the near side of the bed, and ignore her.

Imagine that.

Norma encouraged Lulu to be cruel to Martha, and Lulu complied readily.

Martha was not allowed to go to the doctor when she got sick or hurt herself. She had to pay for her own clothes or wear hand-me-downs from her brothers. She had to do the cooking while holding down jobs. She had to do most of the work of raising her younger sister, who showed up when she was 11.

Norma had a paddle made from a 4-inch-wide board, and she used it on Martha a lot. If she broke a dish while cooking dinner, she got the paddle. If she got home late from her paper route, she got the paddle. Norma hit her hard enough to leave marks.

My Uncle “Melvin” was no help, because he didn’t care for Martha. He let Norma do as she pleased.

When Martha finished high school, her parents (a full professor and a tenured teacher) abandoned her. A relative scolded them for refusing to help her pay for college, so they sent her $35. One wonders how they arrived at that figure. It was their entire contribution to her college education.

The story gets considerably worse, but I can’t reveal everything.

When Norma died in 2014, I was at the funeral. I don’t recall much. I wasn’t all that excited about the trip. I don’t remember a great deal about what was said at the graveside, although I know I heard some stories which portrayed my aunt and uncle as childish. I remember hearing about them rolling on the ground fighting about something.

My cousin Judy, whom I don’t know, supposedly got up and spoke pretty bluntly about the rotten way Norma and Melvin treated Martha. As I understand it, she didn’t get up and call them rotten parents. She merely made sure she recounted memorable events that included facts that should have shamed them.

You can get away with a lot at a funeral. If you have a smile on your face while you speak, and you behave as though what you say is intended to be funny and nostalgic, you can really drop some bombs. Sometimes airing out dirty laundry is the right thing to do, if you do it with the correct motivation. Abuse victims are usually portrayed as whiners and liars, so they need public affirmation, and it’s also important to expose unrepentant abusers publicly.

The weird thing about all this is that Martha is the family’s best product. She is full of love and kindness. She and her husband are successful college graduates, and she has four successful married kids. She was rejected by three parents and four out of five siblings, yet she is the only member of the family I have the slightest interest in knowing. I don’t dislike the others, but it would be like accosting random strangers.

One of her older brothers died young. Another is crabby and mean, according to Martha. The third seems like an okay guy, but he divorced his first wife. I don’t know what Lulu is up to, but she was cruel when she was young, and the youngest daughter has supposedly inherited some of her mother’s temper.

If her parents had a saving grace, it was that they taught her to be responsible and independent. They did it out of selfishness, but it still paid off for her. My dad was abusive, but he taught me to be lazy and to avoid confronting things. When I was in high school, I was not allowed to have a job, because it would interfere with my studies.

Of course, there were no studies. I did my homework between classes, and although I was probably the smartest person in my class, I had a B average. I think my class rank was 29th out of about 100.

Even if I had been allowed to work, I could not face people well enough to go out and apply. I felt crippling shame and self-consciousness all the time. I suppose that’s what systematic verbal abuse does to a person. When people insult and criticize you all the time, you eventually start insulting and criticizing yourself, silently. Also, there is the demonic aspect. I’m sure demons of shame and self-hatred were all over me.

At some point a long time ago, I realized my life would probably have gone better had my father died when I was a kid. That’s terrible. A parent’s function is to make his children better than himself in every way. They should live in a way that makes their children thank God for them and look for ways to repay them.

People should cry when their parents die, instead of shrugging and feeling relieved of frustration.

When my mother died, people were very sad. When my aunt died, people were very sad. When my cousin’s husband died in a plane crash, people were very sad. When Norma died, the small crowd at the funeral seemed pretty cheerful. I don’t think they were glad she was dead, but I’ll bet they don’t miss her much. It’s hard to touch a person’s heart by taking.

On the whole, abusers who make their kids work are probably less toxic in the long run than abusers who don’t teach their kids good habits. Martha and her brothers were ready to fend for themselves when they left home, because they had to fend for themselves as children.

Keeping a child soft, irresponsible, and afraid of the world is a great way to extend control. You know what they say about keeping your enemies close.

I don’t know what to make of my dad’s family. It truly looks like there is a streak of sociopathy that won’t quit. My grandfather beat his wife, my dad and his sister are abusive, and my sister is abusive. Martha is lucky she isn’t related to me. She might have given birth to a clone of her mother. Or four clones.

I found out what happened to Norma, who was killed by dementia. She had a major stroke while she was visiting Brownsville. I don’t know why she was there. If I have my facts right, three months later, she had another major stroke. Imaging showed that pieces of her brain were destroyed.

For the last two years of her life, she didn’t know who her husband was.

I have wondered why she died younger than my dad will, and I may know the answer. She continued smoking cigarettes years after my dad quit. Cigarettes cause strokes. Also, Martha thinks it’s likely that she didn’t pursue good medical care.

Martha told me how Melvin is doing. He is my dad’s age. He has a girlfriend who resembles Norma. That news really hit home. My dad could never have a girlfriend. If you put him across the highway from our house, he wouldn’t be able to find his way home. If he met a lonely woman today, he wouldn’t know her tomorrow.

Melvin is still playing golf. I gave my dad’s clubs to the Salvation Army without asking him.

My dad has often complained that he had no paper calendar. As a lawyer, he used a calendar constantly. He wants one so he can track his appointments. I won’t get him one. Twice, calendars have arrived in our newspapers without my knowledge. My dad took them out and started writing things on them. I threw both of them out without asking permission, and he didn’t notice. When he has a calendar, he badgers me constantly about things I’m already keeping track of.

Melvin and my dad live in different worlds.

It’s strange that Martha has done so well and appears to be so blessed, given that she and her husband are Mormons. Mormonism is unquestionably wrong in very vital ways, and the history of Mormonism is full of glaring warning flags, yet her family appears to be blessed. Martha is very religious. She believes Mormon doctrine. She has worked as a paid instructor. Why would God permit a family to appear to do so well, when they are caught in a supernatural trap?

It’s not because Mormonism works better than Christianity. Her dad is a Mormon, and he ruined his family. Her brothers are Mormons, and they didn’t turn out all that well.

Mormons have a somewhat lower divorce rate, and many do well financially, but they have problems just like the rest of us. They seem to work harder than most to paint pretty pictures of their lives. Appearances seem very important to their church. They are very aggressive about promotion.

A pleasant life can deceive you into thinking your relationship with God is fine when it isn’t.

A life of stress and disappointment can bring you closer to God. Suffering provides motivation.

I don’t know what would happen if Martha found my blog and learned how I feel about Mormonism. She knows I don’t agree with it, and I told her I don’t bother people about their religion, but I say whatever I think is right on my blog, and I will always do so, no matter who cuts me off. God comes first. I don’t think she’s the kind of person who would get offended and write me scorching texts.

I wish I could go back in time, round up the problem parents in our families, and give them a good slap. It wouldn’t do them any good, though. Sociopaths see correction as aggression. Correction doesn’t do my dad much good today, and it has never done my sister any good, so going back in time and lecturing people would be a waste of effort.

I’m not going to develop real relationships with my other cousins. I’m glad I can communicate with Martha, but I’m not going to get drawn into awkward reunions and Christmas dinners with the rest of the bunch. I hope none of them get the idea that they owe me anything, because they do not. Our family turned out a certain way, and we were young and powerless when the course was set. We didn’t cause the problem.

I still have two uncles and an aunt. I’m not going to their funerals unless my dad is dead or in an institution. He’s definitely not going. I would have to hire a special van and a traveling nurse.

I feel like I’ve reopened the book on Martha and closed the others. Good enough. I expected nothing at all, so I’m happy to get anything.

Romney Shanks Trump in Hopeless Bid for Another Failed Candidacy

Mitt Romney has done something interesting. He has written an extremely divisive opinion piece in which he undermines his party’s incumbent president by claiming the president is a divisive person who undermines America’s position.

Ordinarily, one expects a president’s party members to back him up in the lead-up to a reelection campaign. Romney has done the opposite. He has decided to give the left a big torpedo to aim at Trump’s hull.

Romney cannot be elected. He needs to knock it off. He belongs to a fringe religion which is unpopular with a large percentage of Christian voters, and the GOP can’t seat a president without strong Christian support. Romney is the proverbial dog in the manger; he can’t eat the straw, but he is willing to sit in the manger and bite anyone else who tries to eat.

Obama, a weak president, beat Romney by about 4 percentage points in 2012, and there is no reason at all to think he will do better against a more competent Democrat in 2020. The same Christians who snubbed him in 2012 will snub him again, and he has already proven incapable of converting Democrats. On top of all that, having lost one election already, he is, correctly, perceived as a loser. He probably can’t even get the nomination.

Romney’s presidential campaign will flop. He can’t do himself any good, but he might damage Trump and the US. He may help a socialist kook get elected. If Elizabeth Warren makes it to the Oval Office, we may have Mitt Romney’s selfishness to thank.

It really is selfishness. Trump can win in 2020, and Romney knows it. He also knows there are other candidates who can draw more votes than he can. He knows he is rolling the dice with America’s future, in order to hang one more title around his own neck.

He also chose to go negative right out of the starting blocks. That’s startling, coming from a Republican. He could have promoted himself without trying to kneecap Trump.

Romney’s attack is surprisingly harsh. He goes so far as to call Trump a racist. This is shocking behavior from a so-called Republican. There are liberal commentators who won’t go that far.

Trump has never shown any sign of true racism. He stated, correctly, that Mexico sends us criminals. Correctly but tactlessly, he criticized African countries with appalling, completely self-inficted standards of living. He has worked to secure our borders against all illegitimate visitors regardless of race. Those things don’t make him a racist, and Mitt Romney knows it. Romney has shown that he is willing to abandon honesty and sink to the level of a Michael Moore or a Kathy Griffin, in hopes of launching another hopeless campaign of his own.

Romney wants to get America back on the one-world government bandwagon. Look at this snippet:

Trump’s words and actions have caused dismay around the world. In a 2016 Pew Research Center poll, 84 percent of people in Germany, Britain, France, Canada and Sweden believed the American president would “do the right thing in world affairs.” One year later, that number had fallen to 16 percent.

Let’s think about that. Trump has upset people “around the world.” Isn’t that a little vague? He has upset some people, but he has pleased others. He has definitely upset some of our enemies. Isn’t that a sign that he’s putting us first? When the Chinese are happy with America’s president, it’s not a good sign.

Romney thinks it matters what Canadians and Western Europeans think about our president. Here’s an interesting fact: Trump isn’t their president. He’s not their advocate, either. He is the president of the United States, and he’s supposed to support us against our allies as well as our enemies. Trump wants to put an end to the obscene leeching our allies subject us to. Naturally, that would upset them. It will cost them money. It’s also important to point out that the nations Romney mentions are farther to the left than the USA. Wouldn’t it be a little odd if their citizens liked Trump more than Obama?

Obama went around the world bowing to people and apologizing for America. It was repulsive. Trump is willing to step on foreign toes in order to get us better deals. I’m all for that. I’m an American. I’m not Swedish or French. I want my president to help Americans first. Once he has looked after our interests, he can consider the problems of foreigners who don’t live here, pay taxes, or serve in our military.

Romney says, “The world needs American leadership, and it is in America’s interest to provide it.” That was true during World War Two and the Cold War. Is it really true now? Do we want to be the world’s unpaid policeman forever? The threat of a communist takeover is gone. We’re going socialist from inside now; we don’t have to worry about Russian tanks moving in.

Putin is aggressive, but he is not an imperialist. The Chinese have absorbed a few nations in their realm, and they have a completely legitimate claim to Taiwan, but they have never had any plans to conquer the world. Do we really care if countries like Venezuela cuddle up to Putin instead of us? They are not coming after us.

Japan committed widescale atrocities in China, but the Chinese don’t want to take over Japan. They haven’t taken over Korea, even though North Korea gives them headaches. They didn’t take over Vietnam, even though their proxies won.

Putin wants Ukraine, which is a Russian-speaking nation that borders Russia, but we don’t see him trying to rebuild the Berlin Wall or restore Russian control of Poland.

“American leadership” is expensive, and it inevitably involves actions bordering on imperialism. Here’s a thought: maybe if they know we’re not eager to wipe their noses and break up their fights, other countries will find other ways to solve their problems. Revolutionary, I know.

Donald Trump is coarse. He lies a lot, albeit about trivial things no one really cares about (life goes on regardless of how many people attended his inauguration). He is a serial adulterer. He runs casinos. He can’t admit fault. He is thin-skinned. He insults people unnecessarily. I know all that, and ordinarily, he’s not a person I would feel compelled to defend. He and his family have been attacked so unfairly and dishonestly for so long that I can’t help wanting to say something once in a while. It’s strange to find myself in this position.

Romney has disgraced himself with his selfishness and treachery, but I wonder if anyone will realize it. Will conservatives who worry about 2020 support Romney’s fragging attempt and put together a drive to replace Trump?

Back when Obama was on the way out, everyone knew Joe Biden was too eccentric to win. It was reported that Biden was called to the Oval Office and informed that the Democrats would not support him, and that Hillary was to be anointed. We don’t know if this really happened, because the Democrats, in what will surely be the only instance in history, had more class than Mitt Romney. Obama didn’t write a piece for the newspapers, tearing Biden down over known issues like exhibitionism, plagiarism, and instability. Whatever happened happened behind closed doors.

How can it be that we have reached a point where Democrats behave better than Republicans?

I truly hope we won’t be dumb enough to step on the same landmine twice. We let leftists and a misguided desire for unity drive our terrible choices in 2008 and 2012. We are unquestionably stupid enough to do it again.

We can do so much better than Romney. Cruz or Paul would be fine, and they are both electable. Romney is like Jeb Bush; he could walk on water and still lose.

I know what Trump is. I don’t support him for that. I support him for what he does. I wish he were a mature, well-mannered man who inspired respect in his personal life. He’s not. He is still a finer person than Hillary Clinton, and his agenda is much closer to the will of God.

New Change for the New Year

It’s January 1. I don’t do New Year’s Day posts. This holiday has absolutely no significance to me. I don’t like to get drunk. I hate staying up late. It’s just another day, except that I am inconvenienced by businesses that close.

Today is an important day in my life, however, because it appears that my dad is crossing a new threshold. He had a very hard time making it from his bedroom to the kitchen table this morning.

People with dementia shuffle. Their steps get shorter and shorter. My understanding is that it’s a balance problem. They’re afraid to take long steps because the parts of their brains that control balance are being eaten up. Short steps make them feel more secure, although therapists tell them what they really need is to take long steps.

My dad started using a cane off and on a couple of years back, and then he found he had to use one all the time. I believe that happened about a year ago. This fall I took his canes away and told him he had to use his walker all the time. He had started falling much too often. When you’re in your late eighties, one fall per year is too much. He fell maybe four times in 2018. Those are the falls I know about.

The walker hasn’t turned out to be a long-lasting solution. In a very short time, it has become inadequate for his needs. Today on his way to the kitchen, he was taking steps maybe two inches long, and he cursed repeatedly. He’s not just having balance problems. He says his feet stick to the floor.

He has a compressed disk. I don’t know if that contributes to his mobility issues. Maybe it does. Regardless, I believe dementia is the primary factor, because his gait issues increase along with his cognitive problems, and besides, shuffling, like death, is a normal consequence of dementia.

He is also on stronger painkillers now, but I can’t find any information indicating that painkillers cause leg weakness or shuffling. They can affect balance adversely, but his problems go beyond balance.

I am not an expert on the process of dying, but common sense tells me that when an elderly person with heart failure loses the ability to get normal exercise, it must surely hasten the end.

We have a choice now. We can get a wheelchair and make do, or we can opt for assisted living. It seems to me that an ALF is the only way to go. Once he starts using a chair, he is going to lose what little upright mobility he still has, and then we will be looking at new jobs like putting him on the toilet and giving him showers. That’s too much. I have accepted a lot of very dirty and emotionally distressing jobs, but I draw the line at carrying a naked parent around and attending to his most intimate hygiene needs. If you and your dad live in a shack in Rio de Janeiro, you accept jobs like that. It’s not mandatory or desirable in affluent countries.

I can’t really do it anyway. Try lifting 210 pounds off a toilet some time.

Some people have a martyr complex about caring for others. They love talking about wiping people’s behinds and bathing them. They talk about how natural it is, and they claim they find it fulfilling. Not me. Disability is humiliating, and some of the work caregivers do is offensive and taxing by the standards of my particular culture. I don’t think picking a dirty diaper up from the carpet is uplifting, and frankly, I think the people who rhapsodize about such activities are as full of something as any diaper. In millennialspeak, it’s “virtue signalling.” You hear it from the same kind of people who talk about eating their placentas and the supposed beauty of women’s monthly ordeals.

I don’t find bodily functions beautiful in the slightest. If I did, I’d be excited about boogers and earwax. Somehow, the virtue signallers never talk about how beautiful those things are.

I can’t celebrate curses. It’s perverse. You can learn a lot from caring for someone, and in some ways it will bless and improve you, but on the whole, life is better when people are healthy, clean, and competent.

Speaking of blessings, I have to say that I’m not very upset by my dad’s new problem, because it means the move to an ALF is going to happen soon. Also, because the increase in his mobility problem is making him so miserable, he is suddenly more willing to consider an ALF. I don’t have to have his consent, but it would certainly help.

The one thing that bothers me about it is that it drives a point home: this is real. The man I have known for so many decades is not going to be here much longer. I am going to have to endure the process of watching a second parent die. It’s really going to happen.

Watching anything die is not easy. When I used to fish, and I heard fish flopping around inside the cooler, I always had to stifle an urge to pull them out and throw them over the side. My dad is more important than a fish.

I have had concerns about deciding what measures to take to keep him alive.

Right now, I could take away every prescription that improves his health, and his medical providers would be completely on board. I could post an ad in the local paper, saying, “I am withholding medicine so my dad will die sooner,” and law enforcement would not come after me. I can do whatever I want. It’s not a good position to be in.

All the decisions are up to me. I have decided to keep him on his prescriptions. I asked him about it, and it’s what he wants. On the other hand, I would oppose any effort to give him major surgery. It would be cruel and pointless, even if it bought him a few months.

I have had a lot of concerns. I have wondered if I was right to give him pills that might extend his suffering by keeping him alive. Now it looks like I don’t have to worry about that. They’re not helping much, if at all. He is still fading. Nothing can help him, short of divine healing.

I can go ahead and give him his pills with a clear conscience. I won’t be prolonging his suffering, and I won’t be withholding medicine, which seems Macchiavellian and possibly sinful to me.

One day they may tell me to stop feeding him. That’s not for me. I don’t think it’s always immoral to turn off a breathing machine, but starvation is inhumane. So is death by thirst. As long as a demented person’s body will function without a lot of unnatural help, I think feeding should be continued.

My best guess is that God and nature will make the hard decisions for me. He’s not Terri Schiavo, who could have lived a long time had she continued to receive care. Unlike her, he has a progressive disease which will run its course quickly. If I make mistakes, they won’t cut years off his life or add unwanted years to the continued functioning of a nearly vacant body. If they have any effect at all, it will be small.

I think God has told me my dad will go during the early part of this year. We will see.

Seems like I have two major tasks: getting him into an ALF, and doing what I can to assure his salvation. That’s not so bad. It will be easier than what I do now.

There Go my Whole Frame, Outlook, Way of Life, and Everything

I had a fascinating online conversation today. I communicated with a cousin I have only seen a few times in my life.

I do not have a Facebook account, and I count myself blessed for that. My dad didn’t cancel his account after he became demented, and I thought it might be handy to preserve it, so when I got rid of his Twitter account, I left Facebook alone. On occasion, people he knows say things on his timeline. He had a birthday not long ago, and he got messages from a high school friend, a former partner, and a niece. I will say her name is Martha.

I blew off the messages from the school friend and the former partner. I didn’t see the point in encouraging them. I decided I should acknowledge Martha’s post, however. I sent a Facebook message explaining that I didn’t post things publicly, and I thanked her and so on. She messaged me back, and we started talking.

Her mother–my Aunt Norma–was my dad’s older sister. She died at age 82, in 2014. Like my dad, she had vascular dementia. I drove my dad to the funeral in Tennessee. Actually, we flew to Atlanta and drove from there to Oak Ridge. At the funeral, I talked to Martha. My dad was not diagnosed until 2015, but I knew his memory was fading. I wanted to learn about Norma’s illness, in case my dad turned out to have the same thing.

Norma died pretty quickly. You would expect a woman to outlast her brother, but Norma was even fatter than my dad. She may not have had the same grade of health care, either.

Norma’s history is complicated. Her first husband was a man from the town in Kentucky where she and my dad grew up. They had a daughter I will call Lulu. Norma got a divorce, and she married my uncle, a man I will call Melvin. Martha is his daughter from an earlier marriage. He also had several sons. In the end, the household was made up of Melvin, Norma, Lulu, the sons (I’m not sure of their names even though they’re my first cousins), and Martha. After Martha was an adult, Norma and Melvin had their first child together. I will call her Dagmar.

Martha was the last child from Melvin’s first marriage. She never knew her mother. I don’t know if she died in childbirth or what. Maybe she just ran off.

You can tell I’m not close to these people. I don’t know much about them. I’m not sure it’s right to call Martha my cousin. We are not related by blood.

After my mother had her first child, she was surprised that her husband’s mother and sisters didn’t come to help her out. Eventually, one of the sisters let her know that they were distant because they were so glad they didn’t have to deal with my dad any more. I have had very little contact with my dad’s relatives.

I barely know Martha, but on the few times we have communicated, we have had a special rapport. I remember a family picnic back in the Sixties; we went off by ourselves, away from the hard voices and quick hands, and talked. She is a gentle person with a kind heart. That means she’s not much like Norma or Melvin. Norma was a lot like my dad, meaning she was abusive, and Melvin is a spoiled Ahab figure who treated his kids like pack mules.

I was not interested in trying to get to know Martha when I sent her the message, but she isn’t like me, so she responded quickly and started engaging me. We had a long messaging session, and I learned a lot of fascinating things.

First of all, the rest of my dad’s family didn’t know we had a domestic violence problem. I guess when I was a kid I assumed the whole world knew. Martha had to ask me about it, so I told her some horror stories. She surprised me by letting me know Norma (her real first name) used to beat her black and blue.

I never would have guessed. I knew Norma was mean to her kids, but I had never heard anything about physical abuse. I have seen Norma rap her kids on the head with her knuckles, and that’s not an acceptable method of corporal punishment, but I didn’t know she beat Martha.

Norma hated Martha for some reason. She was mean to all the kids, but she really laid it on Martha. In addition to the beatings, she showered her with verbal abuse and humiliated her.

After Martha grew up, Norma told her something amazing. At one point during Martha’s childhood, Norma tried to murder Martha. When she told the story to the adult Martha, she said Lulu persuaded her to stop. Lulu said that if Norma killed Martha, Norma would go to prison, and Lulu would be alone in the world. That stopped Norma. When Norma told Martha this, in her house with Martha’s four kids, she didn’t apologize or show remorse.

This is not a story about a white trash family that sold meth out of a stolen camper. Norma was a respected schoolteacher, and Melvin was a professor of radiation embryology. The problem wasn’t caused by a lack of education or sophistication. It sounds like Norma was a true sociopath who had a hard time understanding right and wrong.

Long ago, my sister told me a strange story about Norma and Lulu. She said Norma used to buy Lulu candy and have her eat it in front of Melvin’s kids.

Melvin was not a great dad. He made his kids pay for their own clothes. He and Norma made them do all the housework. He refused to let Martha go to the doctor when she was sick, forcing her to go to school instead. He didn’t protect her from Norma.

His kids grew up to be independent and hardworking but also full of unnecessary pain.

While I was conversing with Martha, I learned some things about my dad’s father, who died in 1942.

There is a fable about my grandfather (it feels strange to call him that). It goes like this: He died from pneumonia or food poisoning. Later on, the pastor of the church his kids attended told Norma to stand up and tell the congregation her dad died from drinking bad liquor. The pastor was wrong.

I always thought the fable was true, and I thought it explained my dad’s hatred of Christianity. I believed something other than liquor killed my grandfather.

Here is what Martha told me: my grandfather used to get drunk and beat my grandmother. My aunts and my grandmother told Martha about it. He died from uremia caused by drinking bad moonshine.

Moonshine can contain chemicals that injure or destroy kidneys, so uremia could be explained by bad moonshine. Uremia just means your blood is full of urine ingredients. If your kidneys quit working, you get uremia.

The pastor was right about the cause of death. He wasn’t a slanderer. He was just an enormous clod.

Melvin is a Mormon, and Norma joined up, but she was really an atheist. My dad was an atheist for nearly all of his life, and although he asked for salvation in September, I don’t think he really believes at this moment. I wonder if sociopathy is the main reason for their problems with God. Sociopaths think everything they do is right. How can you want or ask for forgiveness if you don’t believe you’ve sinned?

It sounds like my grandfather may have been a sociopath. I wonder. He was not stupid. He educated himself as well as he could, and he went into politics and provided well for his family. It’s not like he grew up in a shack with a chicken tied to the kitchen table. His father had a lot of property, and almost all of his mother’s children went to college. He knew better than to beat his wife.

I also learned that my dad’s remaining sister has Parkinson’s and dementia. She looks better than my dad, but then women dye their hair and wear wigs and makeup.

I’m very glad I talked to Martha. My only other sources of information on the family are my dad, who is demented and in denial, and my sister, who is a compulsive liar.

My dad thinks his father was a saintly man everyone admired. At least that’s what he pretends to believe.

Tonight I told my dad I had talked to Martha. He had no idea who she was. He took a minute to remember her dad, whom he has known since 1962, and he could not recall his last name.

I told him his remaining sister has Parkinson’s and dementia. My feeling is that he needs to hear things like this so he can come to grips with his mortality and secure his salvation. It may sound cruel, but my dad is not the kind of person who would feel alarm over a sister’s dementia. He didn’t start crying and talking about how he loved her. He wasn’t upset when Norma died. The only thing that really bothers him about his sister’s predicament is that it reminds him of his own situation.

I did not tell him I found out his dad died from drinking moonshine, and I didn’t say I knew he beat my grandmother. I may mention it one of these days, just to see if it gets a reaction. It may offend him, but I don’t care about that. When a truth is important, you say it, and you don’t accept responsibility for the way other people receive it. Besides, he would probably forget about it later the same day.

Sociopaths feel little or no remorse, and they apologize rarely, if at all. My feeling is that Norma and my sister are in the category of hard core sociopaths, and my dad is on a slightly lower level. Maybe if he hears a little bit about the bad things his dad and his sister did, it might jar something loose and make him consider his own sins.

As a Christian, I assume there must be a demonic component to sociopathy. Either it indicates demonic control, or demons are attracted to young sociopaths and set up house in them. Serial killers, the best-known sociopaths apart from building contractors and telemarketers, often say they felt foreign presences driving them.

Can you fix a sociopath by casting a demon out? I don’t know. I believe a person who enjoys being evil and approves of it will continue to do evil regardless of whether a demon is present.

A person who wrote a convincing account of a visit to hell said there were people there who, in spite of the flames and torture, still hated God and refused to accept responsibility; they were basically sociopaths. They could not connect their suffering with their moral failings.

They were not full of demons. In hell, demons aren’t invisible beings that live in you and influence you in sneaky ways. They’re visible there, because people in hell are spirits, just like demons. Spirits can see each other. In hell, demons live outside of you; they don’t hide inside you and whisper all day. Presumably, whatever personality you have in hell is 100% you.

Martha has four successful married kids and 13 grandchildren, so it looks like she overcame her background. She says Melvin has a bad attitude toward her family and complains that she praises them too much. He says he still puts her down. She thinks he has always resented her for not being male. I told her it looked like she had a fine legacy and did not need his approval.

Martha is a very nice person. She is also a serious Mormon. When everyone got together for Norma’s funeral, I overheard Martha talking about the Lamanites. This is the Morman term for American Indians. They think Indians are descended from the Hebrews, which is pretty incompatible with modern DNA data. You can’t believe the preposterous Lamanite story without being a very sincere Mormon.

It’s terrible that she is caught up in the cult. I prayed for her, but I don’t see how I can talk to her about Mormonism.

Melvin raised his daughter as a Mormon, but he doesn’t buy into it, himself. A long time ago, he and Norma went to their high priest or whatever Mormons call their clergymen, and they told him they didn’t believe. The high priest told them to stick around for the social life. It’s too bad the pitch that didn’t work on Melvin and Norma succeeded with Martha. One more thing they did to mess up her life.

Now I know my grandfather died from drinking bad moonshine, and I know the abuse problem in my family is even worse than I believed. I won’t whine about it. It’s good information to have.

You Need a Shepherd to Guard You

I feel like commenting on my continuing experiences as a person who has been re-baptized by what, I hope, are proper New Testament standards.

I have already reported that I have had an easier time resisting temptation. If I were a reader of this blog, here is the question I would ask: after almost two weeks, is it still working?

Yes. It is still working. It has gotten better.

Let’s look at love of food, since it’s a particularly irksome problem that runs in my family. Along with drinking, it cost my dad and my aunt their minds. It killed my aunt, it is going to kill my dad, and my sister is obese. I have had problems, too, although I never got over about 213.

I don’t like being fat at all, so if it bothers you to see someone complain about weighing 213 pounds, tough. That’s not far from 50 pounds above what I believe to be a good healthy weight for me. By my standards, it’s disastrous.

Some people are happy if they can shoehorn themselves behind a car wheel. Some people think a person isn’t fat as long as he can buy clothes at normal stores. I don’t see it that way. If you’re uncomfortable and you look like a cherub in a Renaissance painting, you’re fat, even if you’re only “a few” pounds overweight.

Take a look at a 10-pound bag of sugar some time. Fat is lighter than sugar. That means 20 pounds of fat take up more room than two bags of sugar. It’s a lot of material. And you carry it everywhere! That’s something any intelligent person would want to fix.

There are many people out there who think being 50 or 80 pounds overweight is not a real problem. If that’s you, you have two problems: love of food, and supernatural blindness.

For a long time, I’ve known that demons make people overeat. If you have a hard time losing weight, you’re an addict, and addiction is demonic. When I’ve been out of God’s will regarding food, I’ve felt as though something behind me were pushing me, telling me to eat one more bite. I wasn’t imagining it. There really was something there. It was probably with me at birth, and I cooperated with it and cemented its power over me.

It’s unusual to hear a spirit speak in a voice you can hear the way you hear other people’s voices, but everyone hears spirits speak. Sometimes you’ll just feel an urge, but you may actually hear words form in your mind, in your own voice. If you haven’t been purged of evil spirits, you are hearing from them all the time, and they direct a lot of the behavior you think you choose on your own.

Based on my experience, spirits can speak to you in four different ways. I think there is a fifth way, but I’ll focus on the four I have experienced or witnessed firsthand.

First, they can stand outside you and tempt you, before you really have a problem. This is a fairly weak method of control. Say you’re 19 years old, and your best friend wants you to shoot heroin with him. You’re not addicted, and the idea is scary and off-putting, but something inside you wants to be included. This is the first way spirits speak to us, and it’s not that hard to resist. Because resisting is not hard, your guilt is very strong if you give in. You can’t say you were coerced.

The second way spirits can speak to you works like this: you’re in the grocery store, and you pass a display. Twinkies are on sale, two boxes for the price of one. You’re not addicted, but you’ve had Twinkies before, and you like them. Something inside you says, “It’s okay if I buy those, because I’ve been good all week,” and maybe you start to steer your cart over toward them. It’s harder to resist than something you’ve never tried, but you should still be able to break away.

The third way spirits speak to you is from the inside. You see the Twinkies, a spirit you have welcomed, fed, and praised for years says, “We’re buying those Twinkies, plus some chocolate sauce and root beer,” and instead of resisting, you say, “Of course we are,” and you buy the Twinkies and eat them until you can’t push one more bite in. You’re an addict, but it hasn’t ruined your life, and you can restrain yourself for short periods when you’re highly motivated.

On the fourth level, you crave things so badly you will steal from your mother’s purse in order to get them. You will break into people’s houses to get things you can sell. You will rob people on the street with a gun. You will loot your child’s college fund to please your demons. I have not been there yet, but my sister has.

It happens commonly with drugs, but it also happens with gambling, and I have seen it happen with food. America is full of people who ride electric carts because they’re fat. They literally gave up the use of their legs (and paid high social and economic costs) so they could stuff themselves.

I assume the fifth level is possession. I don’t know much about it, but my understanding is that when a person is truly possessed, it’s as though their own personality is strapped down while demons run the body.

I used to live on the third level with regard to some things. There were activities I didn’t see as sinful, so I didn’t try to restrain myself. Also, I was a washing-machine Christian. I figured I could do what I wanted, and God would forgive me later, washing me clean. I thought some things were only a little sinful, so I would sin and then ask for forgiveness. When I tried to break free of these things, I kept going back to them, because while I sincerely wanted freedom, I still had the demons.

To put it plainly, I was full of voices that were not mine. I didn’t hear what Christians call “audible voices,” but I heard them just the same. Even though the voices were not very strong, they still won regularly, because they could not be fatigued. They never gave up. Demons don’t have to rest. No matter how well I fought them with my own will, I eventually gave in. Human beings tire out.

Third-level demons are why dieters have cheat days. If you don’t have a demon, you don’t need to give yourself special holidays when you can sin. If your demon is still with you, you may be able to strike an unstable truce by setting aside days during which you pack yourself with food. I used to do it, and it worked fairly well for a long time. These days were like religious holidays, and the food was like offerings.

Before the new baptism, I heard the voices of my flesh, evil spirits, and other people very clearly, but when I was tempted, the Holy Spirit was not as loud. Now things are different. Let’s say the temptation is food. I’ll be in the kitchen, and something will say, “Go ahead and have a Coke. You behave so well these days, it’s okay.” Then I’ll hear something else, saying, “Or you could forget about it.” Then I’ll stop in my tracks and think about what just happened. Then I’ll drop the idea of having the Coke, and I will be conscious of great gratitude. I’ll feel like something inside me is pushing desire out of my stomach. At times like these, I know I’ve been saved by someone else.

If you have behaviors or thoughts you can’t control, maybe you can understand what a great thing it is to get victory over them. Some Christians have been delivered from drug addiction instantly. They are probably among the most grateful people alive.

People can’t change themselves very well. We struggle to change, we get temporary control, we hang on as long as we can, and then we fall back into our demonic habits. You can’t suppress them forever, because, again, demons do not get tired. Sooner or later, you will falter, and they’ll be as fresh as ever.

Fat people give up and get bariatric surgery because demons don’t get tired. Doctors prescribe drugs to neutralize or replace other drugs, because demons don’t get tired. Smokers who quit either start up again or get fat, because demons don’t get tired. When God delivers you, it’s different. The demons leave. If they stick around, outside of you, trying to catch you at a weak moment, the Holy Spirit rises up and responds, enabling you to resist or at least repent quickly.

Jesus said this:

Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. And a slave does not abide in the house forever, but a son abides forever. Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.

This essay tells you where I am today. I’m not promising anyone things will continue to go well. This is just documentation. I have ruined deliverance before. I am reluctant to prognosticate. Still, when I blew it in the past, I had not been baptized correctly. I had not made the proper agreement with God. My hope is that the repairs I have made to my foundation will help me stand permanently.

In the Bible, sand represents ideas that don’t come from God. Rock represents ideas that come from the Holy Spirit. Water represents voices and words. Jesus said that if you build your house on sand, it will wash away in the rain. The constant bombardment of demonic words is as persistent and hard to fend off as rain.

When you try to change yourself using strategies that come from men, you build your house on sand. When you let the Holy Spirit do the building, you build on rock.

Unless the Lord builds the house,
They labor in vain who build it;
Unless the Lord guards the city,
The watchman stays awake in vain.

I think Torben Sondergaard and The Last Reformation are right to believe that a proper water baptism is mandatory and powerful. That’s what I conclude from what has happened so far. It looks like true success without it is impossible.

Or Not

Yesterday I heard a little bit of a Derek Prince sermon, so I dug up the entire sermon and listened.

The short excerpt I heard was about people who don’t listen. The message was, “Don’t waste your time with people who don’t want to be helped.” I’m 100% behind that. I have enough burdens as it is, without dragging people who will never stand up and walk. My dad is the last such person who remains in my life, and he will never be replaced.

The entire sermon was about the way God intends to shake the world and the heavens.

Prince taught from 2 Timothy, in which Paul warns about the way mankind will become degenerate. We have already seen it. Prince was talking in 1993, and it sounded like he was talking about 2018. The year 1993 was pretty tame compared to the present day, yet Prince was appalled by it. It shows how our standards have changed. I would be thrilled to go back to the moral climate of 1993, but truthfully, it was pretty bad. It looks good to me because I live in a worse time.

He quoted a verse in which Paul told Timothy something about enduring hardship. I thought about what I wrote yesterday. I do not believe the Christian life is supposed to be hard, by earthly standards. I believe our main problem here, if we are really led by the Holy Spirit–if we don’t bring unnecessary misery on ourselves by doing our own thing–is persecution. I don’t consider persecution to be hardship, in the usual sense of the term. To me, hardship means things like poverty, disease, failure, addiction, depression, mental illness, defeat, and so on. Those are things God takes away.

I figured the verse Prince quoted had to be wrong. There had to be a translation error. I looked at the Greek.

Guess what the word translated “endure hardship” really means. The word is “sugkakopatheó,” and it means “to share in evil treatment.” What “evil treatment” do Christians suffer? Persecution.

This is a great example of what prayer in tongues does for you. When you pray in tongues a lot, the Holy Spirit teaches you things. He makes sense of the Bible and good doctrine. Often, what you learn will seem to contradict the Bible. Then when you check the translation you’re using, you’ll find the translation is wrong and the Holy Spirit is right.

People say we are supposed to test the spirits, which is right, but many of them say we have to use the Bible as the standard. That’s not the best way. You should compare things you hear to what the Holy Spirit tells you. Do that first. Then look at the Bible, and make sure you know what the original text says. Don’t be satisfied with the loose translation in the latest hipster Bible.

If you can’t hear from the Holy Spirit, you have no GPS, and you will fall for anything. Even if you hear from the Holy Spirit, you will probably be fooled from time to time, but you will eventually be pulled out of it. As the psalm says of a righteous man, “Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down, for the Lord upholds him with his hand.”

If you can’t hear from the Holy Spirit, you can become a Mormon, a Seventh-Day Adventist, a saint-worshiping Catholic, a Jewish convert who rejects Jesus, an atheist, or a member of any cult you can name.

It’s very interesting how it works.

In other news, I keep thinking about the lack of love in the church. Even clever teachers who teach about the baptism with the Holy Spirit and transformation aren’t teaching much about love. They don’t teach FROM love. They like to show off the things they know. They are proud of their revelations, as though they somehow indicated that a man must be smart if he hears from God. They are plagiarists. Nothing good that they teach came from their dirty, weak little minds. If it’s true and worthwhile, it’s a gift from the Holy Spirit.

I’m a very smart guy, and I misunderstood the Bible until I started praying in tongues. Frankly, a lot of preachers who are proud of their revelation are not very smart, nor are they learned, so it looks odd when they try to impress people with their minds.

Like Simon the sorcerer, a huge percentage of charismatic preachers sell what they receive from God for money, and they use it to make people admire and worship them. They make buffoons out of themselves, capering and smirking for cameras. They compete for attention. God gave me a dream in which two charismatic preachers dressed as clowns had a foot race in a used car lot. Very appropriate.

Maybe clowns should dress up as megachurch preachers. Well, some do. Robin Williams used to do a faith healer impression.

We are supposed to have the love of God flowing through us, and it should be our driving motivation, but that’s not how things are. Many preachers are motivated by greed. For other preachers, it’s power. For some real pigs, it’s sex, sometimes with other men. We also have preachers who are driven by duty, which sounds good, but duty isn’t love. It’s inferior.

We do what we do for the wrong reasons.

If unbelievers visited churches and felt the love of God, they would be more likely to stick around and try to get what God offers them. Instead, we offer them hypocrisy, deprivation, obscene financial demands, and servitude to men.

It’s an extremely serious problem, but it’s also an opportunity. If the lack of love is a major factor that keeps us crippled, then surely getting love to flow will also bring us power. Maybe if we get love, we will see Christianity work the way it did for Jesus. Maybe healings and other helpful manifestations of the supernatural will be routine. Right now, nobody gets reliable results.

God created the universe for love, not for money, power, duty, or admiration. It’s his top priority, but we focus on other things.

I am going to keep working to get improvement in this area for myself, and I will keep praying for God to help other Christians get it. We can’t go on the way we are, if we expect to accomplish anything.

The Millstone of Discouraging Doctrine

I just saw a Spirit-filled preacher spend 13 minutes telling people how hard life is. I am not happy about it. People are going to believe him, and when life makes them miserable, they will assume it’s God’s will. They won’t fight it and find solutions.

If you want to know what God says about suffering in this life, read Psalm 91. It’s all about victory and deliverance.

Take a look at this passage:

A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.

Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.

Because thou hast made the LORD, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation;

There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.

It’s impossible to reconcile that with, “Life is hard.”

If you want a hard life, serve your flesh. That brings things like disease, addiction, strife, poverty, and prison. It brings wife-beating, bullying, incest, divorce, child molestation, and insanity. It brings demonic infestation and possession. Those things are hard.

If you’re a Christian, you should be free of things like that. Your problems will mainly fall into the realm of persecution. Relatives will desert you. Churches will drive you out. People will say mean things about you. So what? Things like that happen in junior high every day; we all get over it. Man up. Sticks and stones will break your bones, but names will never hurt you.

There are places in the world where persecution really means something, but in America and Europe, you should be able to bear it, and presumably, God is just as willing to protect his children in places like Burma, Indonesia, and China. I don’t see why he wouldn’t be; surely he will defend as vigorously as Satan attacks.

It’s true, you may be martyred eventually, but until that happens, you should live in victory. Jesus was crucified, but that was his choice, and until it happened, we have no record of him living a miserable defeated life.

Here are things we don’t see in the Bible: Jesus lacking money. Jesus lacking shelter. Jesus lacking food. Jesus working hard. Jesus having any type of illness. Jesus suffering with dysfunctional relatives or friends who poisoned his life. Jesus having an addiction. Jesus going to prison. Jesus losing an argument. Jesus having an accident. Jesus being disappointed. Jesus being startled. Jesus being rushed. Jesus being embarrassed. Jesus having his plans ruined. Jesus being physically harmed in any way prior to his consensual submission to crucifixion.

Jesus won every argument he ever had. We never see him lose at anything; not once. We never see him express despair, except when he became a curse for us on the cross. We never see him worry or doubt. We never see him compromise to build an audience. We never see him say he was wrong. We never see him suffer with a venomous, bloodsucking wife. He lived in complete victory.

When your life is a mess, it means you’re doing something wrong in your relationship with God. If you can’t accept that, then you can’t accept the knowledge that will bring you out of the mess. If you say God wants your life to be a mess, he will let you live that way. When God gives you a way out, you have to acknowledge the truth or stay where you are.

God’s criticism is not punishment or condemnation. It is his way of showing us the way to freedom. A criticism from God is a diagnosis that precedes a healing. The purpose is to expose problems and show us the things we need to do to get rid of them.

When you say, “Life is hard,” you pity yourself, and you also exalt yourself. “Look at all the things I suffer for God. Look at what I do for God. Look how he OWES me.” Jesus told us to hide our suffering. He told us to dress up and look nice when we fast. He told us to hide our alms. He doesn’t want us to go around fishing for praise, when not one of us has done right. No one has ever failed to let Jesus down, so why are we exalting ourselves?

Christians say, “Life is hard.” Jesus says, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Christians say, “Life is hard.” Jesus says, “For thou, Lord, wilt bless the righteous; with favour wilt thou compass him as with a shield.”

Who is telling the truth? Christians or Jesus?

If the Christian life is hard, why have so many millions of people accepted Jesus in order to end their suffering? He has healed people. He has freed them from addiction. He has taken the toxic people out of their lives. He has given them financial help. He has defeated the spirits that are against them. We testify about these things all the time, to make other people understand that God makes life better. How can we then turn around and say the Christian life is hard?

No one ever approached Jesus and said, “Whatever you do, don’t take these demons out of me, because life with them is fantastic.”

One way is harder than the other. Which is it? Let’s make up our minds and quit complaining about what God has given us. We are slandering him.

Before I straightened up, rotten, vicious people got victory over me all the time. I could not get healing; I had to go to greedy, bumbling doctors who caused me pain and embarrassment. When I had problems, I often failed to find solutions. I felt alone a lot of the time. I was full of compulsions like lust, anger, covetousness, and the love of food. I was depressed for most of the first 30 years of my life. How can I look at what I have now and say it’s hard? I would be a fool and a disgrace.

I cause my own problems, and so do you. If you want relief, admit it. Ask God to show you what you’re doing wrong. Ask him to help you stop. It works.

God told me some things. He said, “Carnality leads to humiliation.” He said, “My iniquities are humiliating.” He said, “Peace comes from authority.” He said, “Authority comes from time spent in the presence of God.” Christians who don’t spend time in God’s presence, especially praying in tongues, lack authority, so they lack peace. Instead of letting the Holy Spirit tell them what to do for God, they let their flesh tell them; they guess. This puts them in carnality and iniquity, and that brings them humiliation. When that happens, yes, life is hard. They shouldn’t respond by telling people it’s normal. They should look for the way out.

The preacher I listened to talked about things he had done for God, which had backfired. For example, he had been evicted because a pastor swindled him after signing a contract. If you do things for God, and he hasn’t told you to do them, you can expect things like this to happen regularly. My best guess, based on what happened, is that the preacher let his flesh tell him what to do. He got himself into arrangements God had nothing to do with, and God didn’t back him up.

I can’t imagine reading that God sent Joshua against a Canaanite city, and that Joshua did everything right and then had his behind handed to him. Can you?

“Joshua, my faithful servant, you have obeyed me in all my commandments, and therefore I have given you and your house to the people of Ai to be slaughtered like sheep.” Never happened.

In the Old Testament, when the Hebrews were defeated, it was always caused by sin, and they got relief by repenting. The Egyptians got relief from their plagues by repenting. God took a plague of hemorrhoids off the Philistines when they repented. God chose not to destroy Nineveh because the people repented. God sent the Hebrews to Babylon because of sin. He destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because of sin, and he spared Lot because he served God.

Does the connection between error and suffering no longer exist? If it does exist, are we immune to it simply because we listen to Chris Tomlin and put chrome fish on our cars?

In the New Testament, a demoniac stripped seven men naked and ran them off with injuries because they tried to deliver him in a carnal way instead of waiting for God’s command. Peter tried to save Jesus and failed, because God wasn’t with him. Paul was stricken blind for three days because he sinned. Judas committed suicide and splattered all over the ground because he rebelled. Herod was eaten by worms because he sinned.

The apostles had problems, but we don’t read that they were sick all the time or that they lived in poverty. We don’t read that they were miserable. They gave up a lot, and they had some harsh persecution, but I don’t see any evidence that they generally had hard lives.

We know that they made mistakes, by the way. For example, Paul and Barnabas had a sharp dispute which would not have been possible had they both listened to the Holy Spirit. It is likely that a good deal of the suffering of the apostles was caused not by their obedience to God, but by getting ahead of the Holy Spirit.

Paul was warned that he would be taken captive if he went to Jerusalem, but he went anyway, and the Bible doesn’t say God told him to go.

When I was heavily involved in church, I saw harebrained schemes all the time. It was rare for preachers to do things that were clearly inspired by God. They thrived on gimmicks and promotions. They got into business deals that looked good to them, when God wanted them to do other things.

Preachers buy big buildings on credit, when God is against debt, and then they lay guilt trips on church members when they can’t make their mortgage payments (sometimes because they overpay themselves). They go on mission trips to dangerous areas when God hasn’t told them to, and they get hurt or killed. They do all sorts of impulsive things, and then when they don’t work out, they tell us they’re sticking it out for God because they’re on fire for him. Nonsense.

I read a story about a preacher who did a fire walk in order to show up a heathen who was claiming his gods protected him from the coals. The preacher walked out onto the fire, insisting God would deliver him, and he got severe burns. He put God to the test with his own carnal plan, and suddenly, his life was hard.

Carnal plans put God to the test. Don’t jump off the temple roof unless you’re willing to fly solo.

The fact that something you want to do seems like it ought to please God means nothing. You have to be commanded, if you want backup.

The bad news is that the church is very messed up and that Christians don’t hear from God. The good news is that if we admit these things and look for help, we can end a lot of our problems and suffer less.

If you can’t see correction as the priceless gift it is, don’t expect your life to improve much.

For the rest of my life, I expect more love, more peace, more healing, less worry and fear, and freedom from lack. I expect things to get better and better until I die.

I expect to be corrected a lot, and I ask for it all the time. I expect to have to admit fault a lot, and I look forward to the opportunity.

Maybe people–mostly Christians–will say mean things about me (they already do). Ho hum; I’m used to it, and I have no respect for their opinions. Maybe some day after America really falls apart, I’ll be executed along with other believers. So what? We all die. They can only kill me once, and after that, I will live in peace and love forever.

My policy is to ask God what I’m doing wrong when I have problems, and I will continue until God himself appears to me and tells me to knock it off. I will never consider a problem to be normal or acceptable unless God says it is.

If you pray in tongues a lot every day, your life will go more smoothly. If you don’t, you should expect a fairly rough life, with nasty surprises. The book of Acts calls tongues “the word of God.” You need it. It’s not optional; it’s a mandatory part of the Christian walk. If something is blocking it in you, check your fundamentals. Do you have unrepented sin? Are you angry at anyone? Have you had a proper water baptism? Have you firmly decided to give your life to God? Have you simply been unwilling to open your mouth and start? God won’t grab your lips and move them for you.

If you pray in tongues a lot, you will hear from God more clearly, and you will have more authority. God’s kingdom will grow in you, and you will do better.

The alternative is to spend your life guessing, like the pope, the imams, and the rabbis. God has not provided a second option which works just as well.

God tells the truth, and he promises us good lives. I believe him. I hope you will, too.

Healer’s Wife has the Claws Out for Him

The other day I wrote about the problems women cause when they do inappropriate things to get attention in church. It was a revelation to me, so I shared it. I mentioned it to two friends, and they agreed wholeheartedly; they took the topic and ran. I touched a nerve.

Today I was watching a healing video in which evangelist John Mellor healed a man who had been injured in an industrial accident. The healing was wonderful, but the video was marred by a female voice. A woman who could not be seen kept yapping at Mellor and the other men at the front of the church. She gave orders they didn’t need to hear. She interrupted. When the man got healed, she made Mellor put the man’s wife on stage, and of course, that took the attention off the healing and put it on another woman.

She was very rude.

It looks like the stage mother was Mellor’s wife. She had an Australian accent (he’s Australian), and she called him by his first name. I could be wrong, though, because she acted like she was his mom.

It was really something. There were five men at the front of the church, and I doubt any of them were under 60. They didn’t need a woman to tell them what to do. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to run a healing.

At one point, she squawked, “You’re ruining the testimony!” Can you imagine trying to preach with someone like that humiliating you in front of the church?

Unbelievable.

Instead of stepping aside and putting her in her place, Mellor obeyed a lot of her orders. He skipped around like a poodle taking orders from a trainer in a carnival act. “Sit up!” “Do a somersault!” As soon as he turned to move one way, she yapped, and he turned and went another way.

It was very ugly to watch. He seemed completely intimidated. At times he seemed to resist her in a passive-aggressive way, while smiling and joking to simulate the retention of dignity.

I can’t respect him while he allows this to go on. What a poor example he is setting. It would be off-putting to see an unbelieving couple act this way, but it’s worse when they’re Christians teaching other people.

The Holy Spirit speaks to husbands, and husbands are supposed to pass the information on to wives and children. This is the system God has ordained. There is no other. There has never been a women’s liberation movement in heaven. When families get out of order, it causes problems.

It’s very hard to be a father and husband. You are held responsible for everything. If your family lacks, no one will hold your wife responsible, even if it’s because she lost her job. You will be blamed for being a bad provider. If your wife and kids are out of control, everyone will blame you, but if you’re out of control…everyone will blame YOU. You have to make hard decisions, and if your family rebels, you have to fight them as well as the difficulties the decisions present.

Imagine what would have happened had Paul been married to a dominating harpy.

“The Holy Spirit says we have to go to Ephesus.”

“Well, your precious friend the Holy Spirit will just have to settle for Tarsus. There are plenty of people he can save right here. I just made it into the ladies’ auxiliary, and if the Holy Spirit thinks I’m pulling up and starting over in Ephesus, he has another thing coming!”

The other day I saw a preacher talking about hard decisions he had made. He and his wife bought a house and started fixing it up, and they got into debt, which meant he had become a slave to the house. He had to keep his job and stay where he was, in order to pay bills. He felt God wanted him to be free, so they sold the house and moved into an apartment in an undesirable neighborhood. After a while, God told him to move to another town, when he and his wife had no money to make the move. Imagine what he would have gone through, with a woman who wanted to pull in another direction. He would still be in the house, helping her put up pink wallpaper.

Things can be even worse when a wife gets jealous and decides the Holy Spirit is giving orders through her instead of the husband. That’s not how God works. He won’t give you a system and then tell you to corrupt it. He won’t tell you to do something and then tell your wife to tell him to do something else. On the other hand, he MAY tell you to tell your wife to shut up.

God cursed the human race with female rebellion in Genesis 3. He told Adam his wife would desire to rule him. Look it up. It’s not a blessing.

Christians are supposed to form what is called “the body of Christ” or “the bride of Christ.” We are supposed to submit to God as a wife submits to a husband. When a man marries a spoiled hellcat, he finds out how we make God feel every day. We insist that God help us with our own bad plans.

While I was at the TLR event in Dunedin, Torben Sondergaard criticized what he called “the American gospel.” It says this: “God will help you do whatever you choose to do with your life.” Do you want to be a famous singer? God will make it happen. Do you want to be a rich businessman? God will make it happen. Torben reminded us that this is not what the Bible teaches. We are supposed to give up our plans and let God decide what we do.

Pushing God to actualize your dumb plans is manipulation, and God can’t be manipulated. He hates it. It’s like witchcraft.

Christianity is what happens after God wrecks your precious plans.

I’ve seen a terrible problem among Christians. I know people who married the wrong individuals and then turned to God and received the Holy Spirit. Because they were already chained to people who did not listen to God, they suffered a lot.

The world made them suffer, and their spouses made them suffer.

Their spouses made them suffer more than the world did.

What a curse. God told me it’s more important to get the wrong people out of your life than to put the right people in it, and how right he was. I always say cancer is better than marrying the wrong woman, and I have never had reason to backpedal. Cancer kills in a few years. A poisonous spouse does it over half a century, and he or she will also hurt your kids and grandchildren.

Cancer can only kill you once. A nasty wife will kill you 20 times a day.

Here is what Proverbs 21:9 says:

Better to dwell in a corner of a housetop, than in a house shared with a contentious woman.

Here’s Proverbs 25:24:

It is better to dwell in a corner of a housetop, than in a house shared with a contentious woman.

Yes, they’re virtually identical. God felt it was so important, he had to tell us twice.

I wouldn’t trade places with John Mellor for all the money in the world. I don’t care what his wife looks like. I don’t care how much she does for him (service and fawning can be the most powerful forms of control). The world supplies plenty of humiliation and emasculation; I don’t need a wife who will do her best to supplement it.

Speaking of burdens, I have decided I don’t like Christmas any more. I loved it when I was a kid, when other people did all the work and paid all the bills, but I’m fed up with it now. Yes, I said it. The whole holiday needs to be remodeled.

I like doing things for friends and relatives. I like having meals with them. I like buying them things. I do not like doing it all on command, as part of a secular lemming flash mob.

I’m having friends over for dinner tonight, and I look forward to it, but I’m only making four things: rib roast, potatoes, Caesar salad, and Texas trash. You can’t enjoy getting together with people if you’re working like a galley slave.

My feeling is that Christmas works best when you keep the materialism very subdued and you don’t stuff yourself. A lot of people are going to wake up on December 26 several pounds fatter and a few thousand dollars deeper in debt. That’s not merry at all. I’m pretty sure I’m spending less than three hundred dollars on gifts, I don’t plan to jam myself full of food, and I refuse to have cookies and cakes lying around all week. They’re fine to have around while we’re celebrating; after that, they go in the trash.

Christmas is like a bridezilla wedding. We get all worked up over it, trying to make it perfect. We act like it’s the greatest thing that ever happened to us. Then the day after Christmas comes, and BANG, it’s over. Life is just like it used to be, except you have a big mess to clean up.

Jesus is insignificant at Christmas. We barely mention him. I gave someone a gift card from Amazon, and I tried to find a “religious” card. They had ONE religious card. On CHRISTMAS. It was a ridiculous nativity scene with some text that seemed to come from a bored intern at Hallmark. The rest of the cards…snowmen and candy canes.

Thank goodness all those snowmen went to the peppermint cross for us.

Let’s see…Jesus allowed himself to be tortured to death so we could be healed of our diseases, freed from stress, saved from hell, and taken to heaven. Isn’t that more important than a new video game box?
We act like saying “Jesus” is the same thing as dancing and singing in blackface. He’s God! He’s the only God there is! Who cares if his name bothers people? They’re not in charge of the universe. They’re a bunch of deluded mortals we were left here to teach.

I think we pump holidays up in order to comfort ourselves because of the emptiness we feel the rest of the year. If you serve God, you should have ample opportunities to share love all year round.

You know a holiday has gotten out of hand when you look forward to getting it over with.

My roast has been in the oven since 8:30, and now I have to clean up the house and feed my dad. I hope he likes his gifts, and I hope we have no caregiver catastrophes to spoil the day. I expect this to be his last Christmas or birthday at home, so I would like things to go smoothly.

Warts Complete the Portrait

I sat down to breakfast with Youtube today, and I found a great video. Torben Sondergaard of The Last Reformation talked for almost eight minutes about the movement’s failures. The title of the video is “What you see on YouTube is NOT the full picture.”

When I went to their baptism event last week, I asked four veterans whether TLR posted videos of its failures, and one of them said, “NO ONE does that.” He was smiling when he said it; obviously, I am not the first person who has noticed the extraordinary online success rate of Youtube healers.

It’s very important for strong miracle-working ministries to expose their failures. If they don’t, a number of bad consequences may follow.

1. Other people who try to heal and so on may get discouraged because they think they’re way behind the curve.

2. People who believe in the ministries that don’t admit failure may become bitter and resentful when they find out what really happens, and they may drift away from Christianity.

3. People who don’t believe in God yet may lump the exposed ministries in with the endless river of liars and con artists, and they may be less likely to accept Jesus.

4. The secretive ministries may fail to improve. Who is going to pray for you to be corrected if you give people the impression that you’re a complete success? Nobody.

TLR is not doing enough to publicize its failures. It it were, I would know about it already. That’s the test. I’ve watched a lot of their videos, and I went to their event, and I didn’t get the message until today. Sondergaard says he says the same things at their events, but if he said them when I attended, I did not notice. If I haven’t gotten the memo until today, many other people are in the same boat.

That may look harsh when you read it, but I don’t mean it that way. I just think they need to make sure people hear what they’re saying.

The impression I get is that generally, healing ministries don’t have the full picture. Some are great with baptism, some are great with getting people relief (which may or may not last), and some are great at getting people to accept Jesus, but every ministry seems to be weak in one area or another. Maybe they need to watch each other’s videos so they can learn from each other’s strengths!

I’ve picked up a few things that seem to be solid.

1. The sinner’s prayer is not enough. It’s incomplete. You don’t just ask for salvation. You tell Jesus you want to follow him and continue his work. You can lose your salvation if you don’t follow Jesus, and you also won’t have real power or victory. He doesn’t save people so they can go on smoking weed and going to strip clubs.

2. It can be harder to help Christians than nonbelievers, and some of the reasons are known. God holds Christians to a higher standard than the ignorant, so a Christian who holds onto sin or iniquity (such as unforgiveness) may not receive help until he confesses to God and repents. Also, Christians can be full of bad doctrine that interferes with their faith, and they can also be very self-righteous and unwilling to admit they have iniquities, demons, or even physical ailments. It looks like it’s important to deal with these issues if you want a Christian to have an effective baptism, have the gift of tongues released, or receive healing. If you fail to get results, you should consider these problems and deal with them. Not all of the Youtube guys seem to be on top of this knowledge.

3. If you get someone healed, you have to follow through. A person who receives healing is supposed to go on and become a follower of Christ. If they don’t, they may lose their healing, and worse things may happen, the last of which would be damnation.

Jesus left, and he expected us to multiply and continue what he was doing.

Healing isn’t a good thing, in and of itself. Healing a person who doesn’t receive teaching afterward may just encourage him to continue living in rebellion. I won’t pray for someone to be healed unless it’s connected with repentance. The purpose of Jesus’ healing ministry wasn’t to end disease. It was to help them become children of God. What good is it to be in good health when you die and go to hell?

Healing unbelievers only serves one purpose: it’s a sales tactic. If you don’t make the sale, the samples are worthless and counterproductive.

If you heal people, and you don’t help them become children of God, you’re setting them up for attacks and defeats. You’re also setting the body of Christ up for embarrassment, because the people you let down will come back later and testify against God and his children.

People who have been healed by preachers like Kathryn Kuhlman and Benny Hinn have had their problems return shortly thereafter. It’s not enough to sweep the house and put it in order. You have to bring the Holy Spirit in and put him in charge.

God may not want you to be healed if you’re out of line. Feel-good preachers are terrified of saying so, but it’s just how it is. Look what he did to Herod, Miriam, and Gehazi. He gave the Egyptians boils. He gave the Philistines unbearable hemorrhoids.

When I saw Torben speak, he pointed something out. When the apostles helped people receive salvation, they didn’t use the sinner’s prayer, which did not exist at the time. They didn’t just have people say they believed in Jesus and wanted to be forgiven and saved. They invariably asked people to give their lives to Jesus. That’s completely different.

Modern Christians who still believe in hell are obsessed with salvation. They think that if 80,000 people go to a stadium, get excited by a sermon, and say the sinner’s prayer, those people will all go to heaven no matter what they do afterward. In the Bible, things are different. I learned this from Torben. New believers in the Bible take up their crosses and start doing what Jesus did.

Another interesting thing Torben points out: in the Bible, baptism and conversion happen on the same day. They didn’t say, “We have a baptism coming up in June, so sign up.”

Torben thinks you have to continue in Christ in order to be saved, and I think he’s right. One of the huge problems that turned me off of megachurches was their self-righteous insistence that refusing to correct people was okay because it helped more people “get saved.”

I always told people that human beings were the bricks that made up the church, and I said you couldn’t expect to add new layers to the building when the lower layers were rotten. I said that feel-good Christianity would attract more believers in the short term, but that those believers would be weak and hypocritical, so eventually, the process would generate FEWER salvations. We actually see that happening now; Christianity is shrinking in America.

Consider that. The oily guys in the $4000 suits and the little hipsters with tattoos and skinny jeans keep telling us we have to tell people what they want to hear in order to grow the church, yet on their watch, Christianity’s popularity in America has plummeted sharply. Obviously, they are driving people away. People are turned off by their insincerity.

America was overwhelmingly Christian when angry preachers were talking about hell every week. Now it’s going pagan under the sweet-talking hipsters and hucksters. Go figure.

If Torben’s view is correct, then what I said makes sense. Besides, why would you want to do a job badly? Why would you want to produce ignorant, weak Christians if you could produce apostles?

Look what Paul said in Philippians: “Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.”

If raising your hand in a stadium, and then going home to smoke weed and fornicate, will get you into heaven sixty years later, why do we have to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling”?

I have been right about a lot of doctrine, but I now think I was wrong about instant, permanent salvation without a change of heart. In the machine of Christianity, it’s a part which does not fit or function.