Too Heavy, and it Smells

This entry will contain what may well be TMI (Too Much Information) concerning a very disgusting physical issue, so don’t say you weren’t warned.

For years, I’ve known our iniquities (our evil inclinations, also known as habits) come between us and the power and love of God. I was talking about it in 2009 at Trinity Church in Miami, in my microscopic, illusory authority as an armorbearer. No one wanted to hear it, because Trinity is built around making people feel good just as they are, without improving them, in order to get them to give the greedy, crooked pastors irresponsibly large donations of money.

I knew about the problem of iniquity, and I worked on it personally, but somehow, there are different levels of knowing you have problems, and the level I was on at the beginning was not that deep.

Think of it this way. You know you’re fat. You don’t do much about it. Then one day–I will assume you’re a woman, here–you see yourself on video in a bikini, and you have to go in your bedroom and close the door and cry. You wish you could find every picture of you at your current weight and burn it. Then you don’t eat for 10 days. That’s a great example of different levels of knowing you have a problem.

I won’t say I didn’t work to change. I certainly did. I never stopped praying about it. But somehow my knowledge and motivation weren’t at the forefront in my heart and mind. I struggled to put them there, but results were slow in coming.

I didn’t feel an immediate need to avert catastrophe.

I think a Christian who turns away from God can get himself sentenced to years of wandering in the wilderness. You spend years filling yourself with filth, and then you turn around, and it takes time to get rid of it, even if you try.

I had a problem with anger and cruelty. When I turned back to God, I didn’t think of myself as a particularly angry or cruel person. I disliked angry and cruel people, and in my heart, I equated that feeling with not being angry or cruel. But I have learned that hating an iniquity is not the same thing as not having it. You may have an iniquity you resist successfully and never act on. It’s still there. You can’t say you don’t have it just because it never wins.

Generally, I was not cruel, but cruelty did leak out of the box from time to time, especially in ways that I thought were acceptable. I made mean jokes and told myself it was okay because I wasn’t serious. Usually I wasn’t serious, but why would I want to say those things, regardless? Why would I be comfortable with them, given that they were part of the realm of cruelty? How did they help the world?

One night several years ago, I drove to church to run security for the evening service, and I felt love descend on me. I felt God’s love for people. I loved everybody. It was great. I was very relieved. I hoped it would stay. It didn’t, however. It was a momentary thing. I didn’t know how to hold on.

I didn’t realize I lived in a way that kept love away.

I was working to get God’s improvement all the time, but I lacked knowledge, and you know what Hosea said about people who lack knowledge. They perish.

There was no one to teach me. There still isn’t, quite honestly. There are all sorts of preachers out there who will give you obvious, powerless advice. “Stop being bad.” “Don’t do that any more.” “Change.” But they are simpletons who don’t acknowledge the supernatural power of habit. They are useless guides who give people burdens they can’t carry. You can’t just change because you want to.

Being good and doing right involve more than choice. We put very real chains on ourselves. Tell a crack addict to knock it off, and see what happens. Even if he would rather kill himself than smoke again, he’s not going to quit just because he knows he should. Iniquities are strongholds. Before you build an iniquity, you have a choice. Anyone can put down his first cigarette and walk away from it. Once you have a habit, you are literally a slave to sin.

Drug rehab has a success rate of something like 2% or 10%, depending on whom you believe. That’s probably lower than the success rate of people who quit on their own. It’s very bad. Almost no one loses weight and stays thing. Anger management classes don’t work. Habits are stronger than the people who possess them. Anyone who says otherwise is ignorant, self-righteous, or unfeeling.

Anger is a habit. Depression is a habit. Anything you can’t quit is a habit.

I had no one to teach me, because Christianity, like Judaism, is about separating people from God. God raises up witnesses and prophets (and one great messiah), and they teach us useful things. Then the fable-writers and bureaucrats take over. They build big buildings for us to sit in. They put on absolutely ridiculous costumes. Have you seen the pope’s hat? It’s beyond comical. Can you imagine wearing that hat to the store?

They create pompous names for their offices. They tell us they’re holier than we are. They make up doctrine, or, like Augustine, they steal it from Satanic religions. Forget Astarte. Now you can pray to Mary!

Want to please God? Eat fish on Friday. Go to church on Saturday. Worship statues. Pray to dead people. Give all your money to a grinning white trash idiot who says he needs a jet. Don’t eat chicken with cheese on it. Shun technology and wear black clothes. Castrate yourself. Live in a monastery and never speak. Work really hard and quote Vince Lombardi, the noted man of God.

First thing you know, they’ve convinced us God doesn’t do miracles any more, and that we aren’t going to hear from him in our daily lives. No tongues. No prophecy. No healing. No help. Lots of duty, but not much love. And love is the reason God created the universe!

Satan? Oh, he’ll be with you all the time. He’s not as lazy as God. He’ll give you diseases, wreck your marriage, ruin your career, make you insane…he’s a hustler. But God won’t talk to you or do anything for you until you die. If he doesn’t talk to Father Garcia, who does such wonderful work with the boys’ dance team, why would he talk to you?

We are raised on other people’s excrement instead of the word of God.

God told me all sorts of stuff. He saved me from preachers. But he didn’t tell me everything at once. It unfolds, day by day. This is unfortunate, because I am mortal. It’s too late for me to have a good life as a young man. The bread is gone, so all I have to work with is the crust. I can forget about a normal family and grandchildren and so on. But I’m glad I’m getting what I’m getting. It’s better to have one good year before you die than to recant as a disgraceful coward on your deathbed.

What I’m getting is certainly preferable to what I deserve.

Lately, the knowledge that I have to get free of anger is pushing to the front of the auditorium. I am acutely aware of it.

The Bible says our righteousness is like filthy menstrual rags to God. If it says that, then it’s true. It is literally true. God isn’t exaggerating to make a point. He is saying we stink in his nostrils, and that the sight of us disgusts him. This is why Jesus had to be crucified in order for God to have a relationship with us. There had to be something put between God and our stink, so God could tolerate our presence.

For a long time, I’ve felt that I stank before God. I know what houses are like when filthy people live in them. In some cases, you can smell the feces, urine, mold, and rot from thirty feet out in the yard. In others, you may walk in the door and be hit instantly with the sharp smell of fermented urine, from bathrooms where no one ever lifts the seat or closes the door. You may smell rotten garbage because the bag in the kitchen is always full. I’ve felt like God was telling me, “I live in you, and I won’t leave you, but you have to stop making yourself stink.”

In the Bible, a body is a house. Things that happen to houses tell us about things that happen to bodies. In the Old Testament, a person who constantly spoke ill of others could develop a type of leprosy that infected the walls of his house. God didn’t do this to people because he had something against houses. He was telling them what they were like, to him.

If you think people can’t stink to God, think about this: prayers and sacrifices smell good to him. The Bible says so. Our prayers rise to heaven and perfume it. If that’s true, what do you think our iniquities and sins do? Look at part of Psalm 38.

For mine iniquities are gone over mine head: as an heavy burden they are too heavy for me.
My wounds stink and are corrupt because of my foolishness.
I am troubled; I am bowed down greatly; I go mourning all the day long.
For my loins are filled with a loathsome disease: and there is no soundness in my flesh.

That’s not about an unbeliever. It’s about one of God’s servants.

People think accepting salvation makes us perfect and clean in God’s eyes, forever. Really? Does salvation make God stupid or blind? You can sin after you’re saved, and God does not like it. You can even go to hell. You can renounce salvation if you feel like it.

There are naked Christian women on stripper poles right now. Does God see them as perfect?

God gets angry with believers. I used to think he didn’t, but I was misled.

In the book of Acts, a believer named Simon tried to buy supernatural gifts from the apostles. This was a man who believed and was baptized. Look what Peter said:

Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is not right in the sight of God. Repent therefore of this thy wickedness, and pray God, if perhaps the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee.

Peter wasn’t even sure Simon, a baptized believer, was forgiven.

At Trinity Church, Simon wouldn’t have been scolded at all. If he had come and donated a lot of money, they would have assigned armorbearers to park his car, follow him around, and usher him to a good seat, possibly next to Kim Kardashian or Luther Campbell. They would have said salvation lasts forever, and that God could not be angry at him, because he was saved.

The fact that God chooses to cover your faults does not mean he is no longer aware of them, or that they don’t make him angry. Not if the story of Simon is true.

I felt that my iniquities made me stink to God. They certainly make me stink to myself. I had to deal with my dad and my sister, who made houses stink, and I felt that God was telling me, “This is what it’s like for me to live in you.” I felt God was using my relatives as teaching tools.

Recently I got a disgusting cyst on my back. It became inflamed and swelled. I have had several of these during my life, probably because of a peculiarity of my skin. Anyway, these things are known for having contents that don’t smell great. But this one…it smelled so bad, I noticed it not just when it was being poked or examined, but at random times throughout the day.

This thing contained a substance that literally smelled like a pile of dead bums rotting in the sun. If you’ve ever been close to a hardcore bum, you know the smell I’m talking about. Fermented excretions and rotten meat. I hope you never have to be exposed to a cyst that expels anything like this, because it makes rotten fish smell like a flower shop. A spray that smelled like this would be effective in wars or in breaking up riots.

I’m physically clean, so this is not something you would ordinarily expect to deal with around me.

I prayed and so forth, and eventually the cyst yielded a huge quantity of seemingly radioactive contents and subsided. Finally, I could stop checking myself and changing shirts all the time.

TMI, I know, but there is a point. It made me think about the things inside me that needed to be cleared up. God will stay with me and keep helping me even if I don’t improve, but I will always have limited power and peace. Certain things won’t be healed. Certain situations won’t work out the way they should. I won’t receive certain good things God wants me to have.

The cyst was on my back, where I couldn’t see it. It was like the iniquities I hide from myself. It was hard to reach. It was hard to work on. It was like the inner issues I deny.

I make God live in a house full of poop and garbage. It’s like he has to go around wearing a bum’s pants. And he’s God! He should never have to deal with any type of filth.

No one ever gets really clean, as far as I know, but I should be doing better than this.

The other day I saw a helpful video related to my issues. Tom Fischer, the street healer, met a young woman who had a problem with one eye. She had accidentally poked herself at work. This girl had been a Christian all her life. He tried to heal her, and nothing happened. Then he asked her if she was angry at her employer. She said she was. She was also complacent in her walk with God.

If you’re complacent, you won’t try to get yourself improved. You won’t examine yourself and take your iniquities before God and get rid of them. Rot will grow in you, and demonic activity will increase in the house which is your body. That’s just common sense.

He talked to her about her spiritual issues, and she repented. Then he was able to heal her.

The video contains a long segment in which he says it’s harder to heal Christians than unbelievers. We are more accountable, because we know when we’re in the wrong.

It’s interesting that it was her eye that had the problem. Jesus said we should take the splinters out of our own eyes–we should confront and get rid of our own iniquities–before helping others with their iniquities.

I’ll embed the video here.

I am not promoting this man as the answer to your prayers. You need to hear from God, one on one. No man can be trusted, and besides, God wants contact with his children. But Tom Fischer can be helpful.

I’m going to keep working on confession and change. People will tell me I’m condemning myself. Well, Peter rebuked Jesus for predicting the crucifixion. We’re supposed to crucify the flesh. If I criticize myself before God, it’s not an execution. It’s a way to get more life. It’s like lancing a cyst. I don’t feel condemned at all. I feel more free.

Anger has weight. It makes me feel like Satan gave me heavy armor to wear, after taking it off a bum. Blech.

It’s true that people do bad things to provoke me, but if I use that to justify anger, I give them control of my heart. I put a valve in their hands, and they can turn it to shut off the flow of God’s help. That’s a double victory for them.

I would stay away from the feel-good preachers if I were you. They’re just putting dirty bandages on your sores, to make the infection increase. Eventually, these things come to crisis.