You Qualify

I’ve run into an interesting problem when telling people about God. They say they’re reluctant to ask him for things because they don’t deserve them.

This is an extremely destructive problem. It’s rooted in the poisonous teachings of traditional churches. For 2,000 years, preachers who knew nothing whatsoever about God told us we were supposed to look out for ourselves and work really hard. Someone even made up a Satanic saying which many people mistakenly believe is in the Bible: “God helps those who help themselves.” Obama’s press secretary quoted this nonsense and attributed it to the Bible.

God does not help those who help themselves. If you think you can help yourself, you’re completely deluded. You can’t take your next breath unless God helps you. He has been helping you every second of your life. If you think you built your career, your fortune, or your family by yourself, you are disconnected from God. Everything you have is in danger.

The belief that you can help yourself is based in pride. It’s more toxic than hate, lust, greed, or any other fault. If you read the Bible, you will see that the worst evils humanity has suffered were caused by people trying to help themselves. Adam and Eve tried to help themselves by taking a forbidden drug to give themselves the knowledge of good and evil. Read Genesis for yourself. They were trying to improve themselves.

Somehow, Satan has convinced us that pride is a virtue. There are still people who are against other character flaws, but in America, we exalt pride. Some of us even say, “Christian pride,” which is sort of like saying, “Christian rape,” or “Christian abortion.”

I supposed it’s not a coincidence that people who are snared in sexual sin use the word “pride” to label their movement. They’re right. They think they know better than God.

We really need to get this through our heads: God wants us to ask him for things all the time. He wants us to ask for little things, not just big things. You should ask him to help you what you should have for lunch. You should ask him which brand of aluminum foil to buy.

Get over the idea that God is busy. God has never, ever been busy. You can’t be busy unless your a limited being who lives in time. There is no time where God lives. Get over the idea that God does not want to be bothered. He loves us with extreme intensity, and he craves interaction with us. He is full of desire to do things for us.

Stop thinking you’re imposing on God. Everything is easy for him. He has said so. If you ask him for financial help, he doesn’t have to work extra shifts at Target. He doesn’t have to do without. It’s impossible for God to lack. If you ask him for healing, he doesn’t have to strain and pant and work up a sweat. He is not inconvenienced. He sits on the throne of heaven and wields infinite power. He has infinite resources. After he helps you, he still has as much as he had beforehand.

You have to ask for things and give God the glory when things work out. James said you can’t even do normal business without God’s help. Look:

Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that. But now ye rejoice in your boastings: all such rejoicing is evil.

In the same chapter, he says God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. When you say you do things so God doesn’t have to, you’re saying you are your own god.

What is grace? Anything God does for you is grace. Some people think grace is a supernatural ability to suffer and live in misery. That’s insane. Here are some examples of grace: miracle healings, the ability to prophesy, supernatural faith, supernatural love, financial success, marital success, and the next beat of your heart. Anything at all that you receive from God is grace.

You have to understand that God is a testator. He is a person who gives his heirs what they have inherited. He is not interested in your hard work. He is not adding up your hours so he can pay you what he owes. He is giving you things you could never earn. You deserve hell and defeat, all the time. God doesn’t owe you one good thing. The reason you’re not in hell right now is that he is patient and full of love.

God never owed you anything except failure and pain on earth and then damnation followed by perpetual agony, and because he didn’t want to pay that debt to you, he paid it to himself.

God gives gifts, not salaries.

It doesn’t matter what your need is. God wants to help you. Turning down his help will not make him happy. Would it make you happy if your son were crippled and he insisted on hobbling his way through life instead of letting you heal him?

I ask God for little things all the time, just for the purpose of nullifying pride. Hamburger or peanut butter and jelly? The grey shirt or the blue one? A lot of the time, I don’t really care what happens. I just want to acknowledge my total inability to do anything without his help. I want his help to keep coming. I want to be used to receiving it.

I want to be pampered by God. Anything he is willing to give me, I will take. I will gladly say I’m his charity case. It’s true whether I admit it or not, and it’s true of you, too.

I wish someone had shown me this when I was a kid. There were a lot of blessings that never arrived, but I was pretty good at receiving curses.

This was on my mind this morning, as was pistol ammunition. I’m trying to get 1250 fps from 180-grain Speer Gold Dots in a 10mm Glock 29. I’m getting numbers about 150 fps lower than expected, with known loads. Frustrating.

Yesterday I started to wonder if my primers were the problem. Back during the Obama ammo panic, I bought several thousand Wolf large pistol primers. I think they were all I could find. I’ve been using them. I’ve learned a few things.

People say Wolf primers are hard and that they are difficult to seat. Put these things together, and you end up with rounds that don’t go off. This is not a terrible tragedy when you’re shooting targets, but it could kill you in a defense situation. I’ve had a bunch of rounds fail to fire, and I’ve also experienced low velocities.

I believe I used CCI and Winchester primers when I made my original defensive ammo, which ran something like 1225 fps in a Glock 29. I have information dating back to my efforts with Wolf, and back then, I noted that they didn’t always go off.

Primers can affect bullet speeds. How much? I don’t know. But when you add the FTF’s in with the low speeds I’m getting, it’s obvious that I need to try a different brand. I have some Winchester large pistol primers, so today I loaded up 6 rounds for test purposes. I’m going to chronograph them.

I hope they perk up. If I can get 1225 or so, good enough.

I don’t see how a primer can knock 150 fps off a round. Maybe I got a bad box.

I have a new powder scale arriving today, so that will make me feel better about things. I may also get a powder trickler so I can load individual rounds accurately. I don’t need it for targets, but I want to be sure my defensive rounds are okay. It would be a real problem to have one get stuck in the barrel during a home invasion.

I’m avoiding looking at the news. That feels nice. I did take the time to check the local coronavirus figure. We are at 181 known cases for the county, even though testing is going on. Restaurants are open now. I am considering getting a haircut.

I don’t think the global or national coronavirus numbers mean anything now. As Trump said, apparent increases we see now are reflections of increased testing. It may not be possible to infer anything about the disease’s actual progress.

I’ve had an uncomfortable thought. What if the lockdowns don’t really hurt our economy that much?

This is an uncomfortable thought, because it could suggest that the lockdowns weren’t as misguided as I thought.

We have heard two very clear messages from the hysteria crowd: 1. we absolutely have to have lockdowns, and 2. we are definitely going to have a depression. I disagreed with the first claim and agreed that the damage due to lockdowns would be very severe.

If the economy isn’t really that bad, the lockdowns may have been worth the trouble, or at least they may not have been a disastrous idea.

T.B. Joshua prophesies that the world’s economy will do very badly and that there will be deflation. Bad if you don’t have cash. He says people need to grow food. Here I am on sand, with squirrels eating my peaches.

I don’t know if he’s right or not. If he is, then the lockdowns will continue to cause much more pain than the virus.

The last time we had a big recession, God told me it wasn’t for me, and I was fine. Hope I get the same grace every time.

I pray for God to create a huge grassroots Spirit-led church and for him to destroy the many big ministries that made people slaves and weaklings. How many Christians are confident about being blessed and protected? Bad ministries helped make them what they are. When times are easy, even people who don’t know God do well, but it’s different in hard times.

This is why the misery at the end of the age is called the tribulation period. A tribulum is a device for separating edible grain from husks. Hard times expose hypocrites.

I’ve noticed that the big charismatic preachers aren’t talking about the end of the church age. Why would they? First of all, they benefit from it by making people their slaves, and second, they have no idea what God is saying, so they don’t know what’s happening.

They must know Spirit-led people have been predicting the end of the church age for a number of years. They probably hate it. No more $7000 basketball shoes.

We need the Holy Spirit pandemic to start. We need to infect each other wherever we are, one on one, instead of counting on buffoons and human traffickers.