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.