Self-Esteem is Just Mind Candy

I suppose I should take a brief break from writing about frivolous things and say a few words about God.

I know I will repeat ideas I have talked about in the past. I will probably repeat facts, too. These things are inevitable. My memory is not great, and apart from that, the things I’m going through today are related to the things I have gone through before.

Satan is real. The other fallen angels are real. Demons, the offspring they created with human women, are real. Human beings didn’t make these beings up in order to create the false impression that they understood the universe and had some control over their destinies. That’s something modern scoffers say in order to create the false impression that they understand the universe and have some control over their destinies.

Egotists who think they’re smarter than the ancients dismiss everything people believed prior to our enlightened age, in which we study at the feet of the body-modified sages of Instagram and Coachella. They don’t know what they’re talking about. The ancients got a lot of things wrong, but they weren’t stupid, and they were right to believe in the supernatural.

Supernatural manifestations haven’t stopped. Most Americans don’t talk about them, but that has more to do with embarrassment than observation. Put 10 educated Americans in a room, get them to loosen up, and several will tell you about their supernatural experiences.

People will tell you supernatural events don’t happen. Cash prizes for proof of supernatural events and abilities exist, and they haven’t been claimed. Skeptics will say this proves the supernatural doesn’t exist. Here’s a problem with this childish argument: if supernatural events take place, there is no reason why they have to be provable. Example: I saw a spirit in my dad’s house in Miami; I saw it clearly, in detail. How can I prove that? I can’t make it come back and pose for a camera. Many people have seen and heard spirits. Jesus has appeared to people in a visible form. If he appeared to everyone on earth tomorrow and didn’t allow photography, there would be no proof of his appearance. Would that mean it hadn’t happened?

Can you prove you’ve ever eaten a hamburger? Can you prove you’ve played checkers? Proving things is not easy, when eyewitness testimony alone is not considered proof.

A long time ago, one of my relatives was in a house where a child was sick. He had a fever. Back then, people didn’t believe in giving water to people with fevers. The child kept begging for water. There was a glass of water in the room. My relative saw the glass jerk toward the child. The child’s mother said, “Give it to him. He’s going to die anyway.”

I can’t prove it, any more than I can prove Jesus (or Socrates or Genghis Khan) existed. I think it’s true, because the story came from a male relative who was not interested in God or the supernatural, but if you want proof, I can’t help you.

Satan is real, and he has many angels and demons who work for him, trying to harm human beings and take us to hell. He works against us every day. We are always surrounded by spirits we can’t see, and they have a great deal of influence on us. If you’re not led by the Holy Spirit, you serve the demons that consider you their workplace. You may not be a serial killer or a witch, but you are a slave to your flesh, and in various ways, you work against the spread of the gospel of the kingdom.

I don’t care who you are. There are demons around you and, except in rare cases, inside you, and you are targeted for destruction. Satan’s crew knows your name, and they are working on you right now. They are with you as you read this.

A huge part of Christianity consists of getting rid of the demons that rule you and replacing them with the Holy Spirit. Jesus was all about demons and the Holy Spirit, but carnal people taught by demons have turned Christianity into a set of rules and/or a niceness contest. They cut the supernatural aspect out of it so successfully, there are many churches in which you can be a respected cleric and teach that Jesus, heaven, and hell (all purely supernatural) don’t exist.

Christians who do believe in demons generally think they’re rare. They think a person who has a demon levitates, lifts cars, beats up policemen in groups, tells the future, and reads people’s minds. That’s like saying every person who has a car drives in the Indianapolis 500. A typical person who is under demonic control has many demons (not just one) and does things like overeating compulsively, smoking cigarettes, beating their wives, feeling morally superior to other people, gossiping, procrastinating, fornicating, lying…nothing sensational. Just things that disgust the Holy Spirit and drive him away.

Most people, including most Christians, are under demonic control. Demons don’t make us 100% evil. They simply corrupt us enough to make us useful.

Demons also bring things like illness, dementia, depression, and psychosis. Even when natural causes seem to be present, demons are often involved.

Jesus intended for us to confess and repent. Modern Christians don’t do these things. We go to church largely for the purpose of protecting our sins. We want to go on sinning, but we don’t want to go to hell, so we go once a week and try to get forgiveness, not realizing how bad that looks to God.

If you don’t confess, you deny you need God’s help, and generally, he will honor your decision and back off. If you don’t repent, even if God helps you, the help may not last. Demons have God’s permission to harm rebellious people. You may get a healing or some other kind of help from God without repenting, but it will probably be temporary.

Getting rid of a demon is like a divorce. If you want to keep your ex-wife out of your house, you have to take the keys away from her.

The evangelist Lester Sumrall rose to fame after casting two demons out of a Filipina named Clarita Villanueva. He had to fast to get them out, and then they returned. He had to go after them a second time. No one should assume demons can’t come back.

Think of all the “false healings” we’ve seen from TV preachers. They claim they’ve cast things out, and the people they’re working on say they’re healed. Then later they turn out not to be healed. Is the problem that they weren’t healed, or is it that no one followed up with teaching on repentance?

We are supposed to confess and repent, and we are supposed to do it continually, every day. In the Bible, we see Jesus casting demons out of people, but we don’t see the follow-up. We don’t read the stories of people who didn’t repent, or who backslid, and then had their demons come back. We have the idea that once a demon is cast out, we’re done with it. Not so. Jesus told us they come back, and they can bring other demons with them.

We were given the practice of communion to keep ourselves clean. Paul said people get sick and die because they don’t do communion properly. That means demons–the spirits that make people ill and kill them–come back to them. The purpose of communion is to confess and repent so demons are kept away and the Holy Spirit is kept close.

When you do communion, the cracker and the wine aren’t what matter. They’re not magical. What matters is the honest, deep, ruthless soul-searching, confession, and repentance that are supposed to precede the eating and drinking. When you eat the cracker and drink the wine, you’re just indicating that you’re one with God. It’s an affirmation. If you haven’t repented, your affirmation is fraudulent.

These truths have become more important to me with time. I have learned that confession and repentance aren’t just about feeling bad and trying to seem holy. They’re about gaining power and peace.

Jesus had perfect victory, even when he was on the cross. He had as much peace as a human being can have on this earth. He had no demons. He never grieved the Holy Spirit. He had all of God’s help. Most of us only get a small fraction of our inheritance. He got the works. We should be getting more than we are.

Our modern gurus fill us with poison. They tell us to feed our egos. “Don’t beat yourself up.” “Love yourself.” Loving yourself is “the greatest love of all.” The woman who taught us that drowned in a bathtub, surrounded by trash and drug paraphernalia. They tell us self-examination is “judgment,” and they say “judgment” is bad. They get this half-truth from Jesus himself, and even people who are against Jesus use it.

Popular wisdom says that if you criticize yourself, you will be depressed and lack the magical panacea, self-esteem. Self-esteem fixes everything. It’s the testosterone of the mind. It gives you strength and energy. It opens doors. Unfortunately, self-esteem only works in the short term, like heroin and cocaine. In the long term, it enslaves you to demons and makes you arrogant and unteachable.

God has been helping me criticize myself, and I’m here to tell you, it’s not depressing at all. It doesn’t weaken me. I feel great after I do it. Don’t you feel good when you get things off your chest? Hiding things is stressful.

When I was young, I suffered from depression. I found a book that explained how depression worked. It was caused by irrational thoughts. I would sit and think about what a loser I was. I would tell myself things would never get any better. I told myself things that weren’t true, and I believed them. The book was right about that, although the author didn’t know demons were behind the thoughts.

Back in those days, when I criticized myself, it sapped my strength. I lost motivation. I felt terrible. If that’s true, why does it make me feel so good today?

The difference is clear.

In the past, I insulted myself without a constructive purpose. The demons I listened to weren’t trying to improve me. They just wanted me to live in defeat and die unfulfilled. They exaggerated and made up my problems, and then they offered no solutions. They told me no solutions existed. That was their strongest tactic. It worked on Anthony Bourdain.

When I criticize myself now, I do it in the presence of God, guided by him. He doesn’t tell me to say stupid things, like, “I’m worthless,” or, “My life will never be any good.” He tells me to admit fault, ask for forgiveness, cast out the spirits related to my sins, and ask for change through the Holy Spirit.

When God moves me to criticize myself, he will get me to say things like, “I haven’t been praying enough.” “I mistreated this or that person.” “I get angry at this type of person for no reason.” “I have been lazy.” He gets me to open up about problems he can fix for me. When I’m honest, he can deliver me from the spirits that drive my faults, and he can increase the Holy Spirit’s influence in me.

When you confess, repent, and cast things out, peace comes back to you. You feel better. Things work out better. You find yourself winning instead of losing. A lot of the things the poisonous secular gurus promise you come to you, and they’re real. They’re not fake goods that don’t last.

The last church I belonged to had an allergy to self-examination. The very mention of it made them angry. They loved pride. They didn’t understand that pride and excuses bring weakness, turmoil, and defeat. Confession and repentance bring healing, victory, and relief from nagging problems. God uses nagging problems to tell you that you need to repent of things.

God doesn’t seem to have much pity for the proud, regardless of what happens to them. I don’t pity them much, either, so perhaps I’m right.

Jesus told us we had to be born again. The process is like gutting a house and rebuilding it. If you want to have your house remodeled, you don’t scamper around telling the contractor everything is fine as it is. You look for things you want to change. You have to be very critical. “I hate this wall.” “I need a window here.” “The kitchen is too small.” If you tell him the house is already perfect, he’ll leave, and nothing will change. If you want to be born again, you have to admit you’re a mess, and you have to be willing to part with a lot of your existing personality.

We don’t teach these things, so we don’t live in the supernatural. God doesn’t do all that much for us. Miracles aren’t commonplace, as they should be. Prophecy is hard to come by. Biblical figures who obeyed God had great supernatural help. You can see it all through the Bible, from Genesis to the Revelation. Somehow we think God changed his ways in about 300 A.D. He didn’t. We did.

It should be uncommon for a Christian to have an incurable disease, but it happens to many or most of us. Confession, repentance, and deliverance are keys to power, and we reject them.

God has been very helpful, showing me these things and helping me to comply. I have confessed some really revolting truths about myself. I don’t feel condemned at all. I feel stronger and more confident. It works. It will work better in the future, because God will make me better at it.

My prayer time is very strange for me now. A couple of times a day, I confess, repent, and cast things out. When I do this, my insides start gurgling. It’s not my imagination. I feel things moving around, and I hear sounds. Physical things a doctor (or anyone sitting near me) could confirm happen. Spirits set up housekeeping in people’s bodies, and when they are disturbed, it causes physical reactions.

I could put my phone on my stomach and record these things. They’re not subtle.

I can’t make my insides gurgle at will, any more than you can. It’s not me. It only happens when I’m spending time with God.

I hope God is showing a lot of other people these things. The world is full of defeated Christians. The situation needs to change. Evil keeps getting stronger, and we seem to do nothing but tread water and hold onto excuses.