The Earth is a Garden, not a Factory

I learned something interesting today. Preachers tell us the Bible says were are to “die to self,” but that phrase and variants of it are not in the Bible at all. I don’t know who made it up or how long preachers have been saying it.

Yesterday, I heard Derek Prince mention dying to self, and I got what I thought was a revelation. When I learned that “die to self” was not in the Bible, I wondered if the revelation was real.

I have always had the feeling that if I “died to self,” it would mean I became a sort of doormat vagrant, living in poverty and letting people treat me however they wanted. I thought it meant ascetism. I thought I would have to give up everything I liked. I knew there was no way I could do it.

Yesterday, I thought about something I have been doing over the last year or two. I find myself thinking too much, trying to solve my own problems using my own limited mind. When I realize I’m doing this, I start speaking in tongues and prophesying, and I tell God I have no interest in my own thoughts. They come from a very limited and corrupt mind, compared to God’s mind, and they cause trouble.

Psalm 37 says, “Cease from anger and abandon anger. Don’t worry yourself; it only causes harm.” When I have a problem, my natural tendency, like that of every other intelligent creature, is to chew on it and toss it like a dog playing with a bone or a kid licking a loose tooth. It’s stupid, because it leads to stress, and I come up with bad ideas that make things worse or, at least, don’t give me better solutions God has in mind.

This is how the Talmud was written, not to mention a huge percentage of denominational doctrine. It’s how Catholics ended up worshiping statues and coins and writing about the brilliance of ancient Greek perverts like Aristotle.

I spend a lot of time conceiving ideas and trying to make sense of life. A natural person would think these activities were smart, but through them, I wasted most of a human lifespan and came to believe a lot of harmful notions that were not true. This was related to pride. I should never have thought I could figure life out.

When I work to allow the Holy Spirit to flow through me and flush out my own garbage thoughts, emotions, and desires, life goes smoothly, and God gives me real revelation that benefits me and others. Prolonged prayer in tongues is the main way I do this. It’s necessary, and it’s for every Christian.

Yesterday, it occurred to me that maybe this is the real death to self. Not putting on a hair shirt, living in a park, eating from dumpsters, and relieving yourself behind bushes while disturbing pedestrians with loud exclamations about the end of days.

Prince quoted a verse I can’t remember. It may have been Matthew 12:35: “A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things.” I think he used the word “storehouse” instead of “treasure.” The Greek word in the text means a place where you store precious things.

The Bible says that through the Holy Spirit, God writes his laws on the tablets of our hearts. Not the written law of Moses and the blind scholars who followed him; the law of God’s own heart. If you’re a real Christian, you should have the Holy Spirit inside you, filling you up with good things and washing out the bad.

This is another reminder that Christianity is supernatural, just like voodoo and wicca. Cessationists throw out God’s supernatural power, which was demonstrated throughout the Bible, and tell us to leave supernatural power in the hands of our enemies. They say it isn’t for us. They’re no different from the people who said Yeshua had a demon because he was able to cast demons out. They’re like the generations of blind Jews who have said Yeshua was a magician.

It’s odd that any Christian could think God would allow witches and diviners to have supernatural power while denying it to his children.

A lack of supernatural power is a terrible evil. To the Jews, the absence of supernatural help was a huge curse. Because they were proud and could not benefit from hearing God speak, he cut prophecy off from them for 400 years, and afterward, it only came to those who accepted their Messiah. Jews who reject Yeshua haven’t had a prophet since Malachi, but ordinary Spirit-filled Christians prophesy a lot.

Satan is behind the church’s rejection of the supernatural. He created cessationism, and he uses people who swallow it to disarm the rest of us and open our gates to the enemy.

We are supposed to wear the armor of God. As used in the Bible, “armor” includes actual armor, shields, and weapons.

In Mark 16:17-20, God said this:

And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues;

They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

Every last one of those acts is supernatural. The natural isn’t even mentioned.

He didn’t say, “They will make a huge, impressive hat and put it on an elderly male virgin who has never raised a child, and he will tell people what to do.” He didn’t say, “They will go to church three times a week and do 20 hours of volunteer work every month.” He didn’t say, “They will fly to Mexico and India and badger heathens into building churches out of plywood and tarpaper.” He mentioned supernatural things.

The idea of dying to self is intimidating, because we look at it from the standpoint of the flesh. The flesh knows it can’t be good, and here, it agrees with God, who said no man can please God in the flesh. But if God’s own heart is growing in you, you won’t have to transform your own personality overnight and turn yourself into a new Yeshua. Instead, your thoughts and inclinations will change, filling your storehouse with new things. Then you will be a better person not because you have perfect human willpower, but because you are doing the things your new heart wants to do.

With all this in mind, I believe “dying to self” is a Christian concept, but I don’t think it means what people think it means.

Paul said it was impossible to obey the law. He said that sin increased under the law. It was possible to obey in the sense that if you sinned, you could get forgiveness through sacrifices, but it was not possible to avoid sinning all the time. The written law was of limited assistance in changing men’s hearts and minds. It was completely possible to live under the law and remain greedy, cruel, and corrupt, like the religious leaders who arrested and beat Yeshua and got the Romans to torture him to death.

If you let the Holy Spirit remodel your core, you don’t just follow rules; you become the rules. God’s righteousness grows in you, and behaving correctly becomes natural instead of burdensome.

I believe things are going better for me than I thought. I really am dying to self. It’s happening. I am still pretty corrupt, but I’m on the right course, and that’s what matters.

Christianity has never been a destination. It’s a compass course. Yeshua was better off while he was briefly in hell than Satan was when he lived in heaven. Yeshua was headed for glory, and Satan was headed for destruction. Their courses were what distinguished success from catastrophe.

I believe that if people can grasp these ideas and put them to work, they can save themselves a lot of discouragement, and it could prevent them from falling away. You may be in prison or a mental institution or a rehab facility, and you may be a rotten person, but as long as you are walking toward Yeshua with the help of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you, you are doing fine.