Grace and Grease

Yesterday I tried my jug of cheap blended olive oil. I slapped some rolls together without kneading the dough. My only fresh garlic had mold on it, so I used garlic powder. Good enough for an experiment, I figured. And no one would ever know.

Oops.

The rolls were surprisingly good. In fact, it’s surprising that they were good at all. I let them rise for a total of 45 minutes, which is ridiculous. But they worked.

The oil blend is not good. There’s nothing offensive about it, but the olive oil content is so low, you can barely taste it. It reminds me of corn oil. It would be okay for pizza, which doesn’t require as much flavor as rolls, but it would not be as good as extra-light olive oil.

I’m going to add olive oil to it, to create a 50/50 blend. If that works, I can save the church cash by buying olive oil and some other oil at Costco and mixing them. I’m pretty sure I can beat the price of the GFS 50/50 blend. Costco sells extra-virgin for about five bucks a liter. I don’t know what they charge for their other oils, but I can get corn oil for five bucks a gallon. I think corn oil would be a little heavy.

Someone is selling a nice commercial slicer on Craigslist for $200. I may snap that up and lend…ow…ow…ow…okay, GIVE it to the church so they can save money on food.

Sometimes when God pushes me to do something, I feel like Cliff Clavin getting zapped with his psychiatrist’s electric behavior modifier. But I’ve mentioned that before.

I had a remarkable experience this morning. At church this week, my pastor mentioned Psalm 127. I guess I might as well publish the whole thing, since it’s short.

Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.

It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep.

Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.

As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth.

Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.

He was talking about children, but the part that interested me was the first sentence. This is a belief I hold very firmly. The things you do in this life, no matter how worthy they may seem, are of no value unless God is behind them. You can build a big company, raise successful kids, help the poor, support the church, and still fail to please God or accumulate wealth in heaven, because the things you did were not part of his plan.

The things God builds stay built. Even if the things you do for him don’t last in this world, the reward will be eternal. And he is the only force that can permanently set you free from your problems. Jenny Craig and Betty Ford can set you free for a time, but only God can make you “free, indeed.” To accomplish anything of eternal value, you have to find out what God wants you do to.

That first sentence would be great on a T-shirt.

I decided to look that up today, in my King James Bible. The only King James I have belonged to my mother; my main Bible is the New King James, and I also like The Complete Jewish Bible. I opened her Bible to the 127th psalm, and in the margin next to Psalm 128, I saw my mother’s handwriting. It said “Steve, Dec. 12, 1987.” And she had bracketed the following verses:

For thou shalt eat the labour of thine hands: happy shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee. Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house: thy children like olive plants round about thy table.

In this life, I will never know why she put brackets around that language. She died in 1997.

Now that I think about it, this happened at about the same time I received a miraculous healing. Late in 1987, I decided to find a church, and I got sick immediately. I developed something resembling a severe cold, but it refused to leave me. It hung on for weeks. I prayed and exerted my faith, never relenting. One day I saw a dark shape fly away from me and out through a closed door, and I was instantly healed, and my mother witnessed it.

Strange things were happening to me back then. Maybe when I left the church, I put off receiving the blessings that caught my mother’s eye.

Olive plants would be children who are full of the Holy Spirit. That’s what olives symbolize in the Bible. A vine produces fruit; maybe that’s the significance of the reference to a wife, who bears children.

If you do what God intends for you to do, you will be blessed. That’s what Psalm 127 says, by telling us what happens when don’t seek his will. And one of the blessings is named in the second verse of Psalm 128. You will eat the labor of your hands. The things you do won’t be futile. You will profit from them, in a lasting way.

It was encouraging to read that. I’m old, but I still have enough potential in me to get a few things done before I die.

I’ve written about my trip to Israel. I traveled there in 1984 and lived on a kibbutz for four months. I have written a lot about the way God guided me on that trip. Things were put in my path. Doors were opened. I never had to worry about what would happen the next day, or where I would go. This, I thought, was “walking by faith” in a very pure form.

Now I find that my current experiences exceed my experiences in Israel. It’s getting downright strange.

My prayers are being answered, right and left. And I don’t just mean stuffy prayers about God increasing my holiness or whatever. I mean even mundane prayers. I pray for the neighbors’ dogs to shut up while I’m praying, and it happens, every time. If you don’t think a thing like that will freak you out the tenth consecutive time it works, wait until it happens to you.

I was instantly healed of a kidney stone in my church’s parking lot. I have been permanently delivered from overeating; I can work on pizza recipes all day and not gain weight. My church had to fire its cook, and suddenly, I make the best Sicilian pizza I’ve ever eaten. I went to church to make it, and people unexpectedly appeared and started moving equipment around, and in a few minutes, I had the perfect pizza prep station.

There’s more to it than that. I physically feel things taking place during prayer. And it doesn’t always happen during the most intense moments. Sometimes I’ll pause, and I’ll literally feel something happening inside my head. I’ll feel something touching me; lifting tension off of me and easing my mind. I think this may be the “peace of God, which passeth all understanding,” because I definitely don’t understand it. A couple of nights back, I prayed about my gallbladder, which seems to resent my weight loss, and I felt my gallbladder open up. Once you’ve had pain in your gallbladder, you know exactly where it is, and you can feel what happens to it. From time to time, with increasing frequency, I feel something dropping over me, and I believe it’s the Holy Spirit.

I think I can physically feel faith going up from me to God. Seriously. I think it’s a substance. I believe it rises up to him, and I believe this may explain why the Bible describes our prayers as incense and so on. The 141st psalm says, “Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense, and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.” That’s just one of many examples.

I just remembered: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Perhaps “substance” has a literal meaning.

I’m starting to wonder exactly how much power God will allow a human being to have. And whether I should have it.

If I’m right about these things, this is a wonderful way to live. Maybe I won’t have a yacht and a mansion and a fleet of limousines and a herd of eager-to-please consorts, but I’ll have the ultimate power on my side. I will be able to lose battles from time to time, but it will be impossible for me to lose a war. Can it be that this is what we’re intended to have?

I’ll tell you my secret. It’s not complicated. You don’t have to buy a DVD or get a ticket to a seminar. I pray in tongues a lot. At least an hour a day. As far as I know, this is the fundamental thing that changed my life. Everything else flowed from it. And it’s consistent with what Paul said. He told us this would build us up. Few of us, even among charismatics, pay any attention. But the Bible does not contain idle words, so it must be true. I think it’s like working out or watering a plant. And Perry Stone says it will bring you revelation. Robert Morris, I believe, compared it to going to the gym.

Believe me or don’t. I am not a scholar; I don’t study the ancient church fathers, I don’t speak Hebrew or Greek, and I don’t pretend I can decipher the entire Bible and provide perfect doctrine. I’m just telling you what worked for me. I’ve believed this since about 1990, and now other people are confirming it.

It’s not from hell. I’m not getting the base desires of my flesh satisfied. I’m becoming more disciplined and mature, without turning into an ascetic heretic. I’m not spreading hate or telling people God wants them to give me money so they can drive Bentleys. I think this is the real thing.

If you really want to give me money, however, don’t let me discourage you. Think of it as a seed gift, which I will plant in order to harvest a nice spray-on liner for my truck bed. Or some more expensive tools I will rarely use. Godly stuff, I assure you. God probably won’t give you a hundredfold return or anything, but my truck will look swell. “How beautiful is my truck with Vogues and a hood scoop.” That will be my slogan.

I’ll give myself a plug, here. If you give money to a TV minister, he’ll just blow it on stupid things like orange Rolls Royces or bad hair transplants. I’ll get cool stuff, like a two-deck pizza oven. Think it over. I don’t want to be a pest. But you’ll feel really good about it. I’m sure of it.

I promise not to send you a miracle prayer cloth or dirt from the Holy Land. I will refrain from praying over your offering, and I assure you, I will blow every last penny on myself. That’s integrity, right there.

I better put up a Paypal link.