God’s Voltage Will Find a Path Around Man’s Resistance

All sorts of stuff is going on.

For like two years, I’ve been trying to get friends and my sister to pray in tongues. Back in the Eighties, I started to feel sure that this was the key to spiritual growth, and my experience since then has confirmed it. I believe the Holy Spirit is the nervous system (the “Force”) of the Body of Christ, and without it, we will always be ineffectual and self-defeating, so I try to get people to build the Holy Spirit’s influence inside them by praying in tongues.

People I know are starting to listen. They get timers, and they make sure they pray in tongues every day. They come back to me changed. I feel like I have help now. I don’t have to be the lonely voice of tongues. If I drop dead, they’ll keep going and multiplying and growing.

It’s like The Matrix, in reverse. We’re the agents, and we’re the good guys. That little surveillance kit an agent wears, with the plug in the ear? That represents the Holy Spirit, connecting us to our guiding power. We submit. We listen. We are in agreement. We act as one. Neo? That’s the guy who thinks he’s special. He thinks he can do it without God. He believes he knows better. Basically, he’s the Antichrist.

Remember how Agent Smith touched people and turned them into clones of himself? That’s what Jesus bought us on the cross. On Pentecost, he came down and sent the Holy Spirit through the Upper Room, turning 120 people into his younger brothers and sisters and enabling them to grow to be like him. Now we can lay hands on people, quite literally the same way Agent Smith did, and we can give them this gift. This is what being “born again” really means.

People love their pride. They love to feel like they have special abilities no one else has. They love their narcissism. That’s why the image of Neo is so appealing. You put on a cool black coat and nifty black shades, and you load up with all sorts of sexy weapons, and you wade through the sheep who oppose you in ignorance. You slaughter them without remorse, because they’re part of the problem. If they were as hip as you, you wouldn’t have to shoot them, but they’re just not cool, so down they go.

That’s pretty much how Satan works. He didn’t like God’s plan. He figured he could do better. He was beautiful and smart and strong. He was persuasive. He was aggressive and self-confident. Today we would call him “empowered” and “centered.” He didn’t care about the little foolish people who weren’t very bright or very strong and who therefore had to depend on God. He was all about the special ones. The elite. He was Morpheus.

God is not like that. He isn’t a modern model of self-aggrandizing cockiness. He is humble. The Bible says, “Though the Lord be high, yet hath he respect unto the lowly, but the proud he knoweth afar off.” God doesn’t look for cool people who have it together, so he can let them do him the favor of applying their amazing gifts in his service. He looks for the weak and the grateful, so he can build them up to fight with HIS gifts. He uses foolish things to confound the wise. His strength is made perfect–“perfect” means “complete”–in our weakness.

So now my prayer group is spreading the infection. And I know there are other carriers all over the place, doing the same thing, even if they don’t talk much about it in church.

Pastors and teachers tend to underestimate the importance of tongues. Most flat-out deny the power of tongues. Many slander the Holy Spirit, saying tongues are demonic. That’s fine. The Holy Spirit doesn’t have to speak from the pulpit. He can speak in the parking lot or the men’s room. That’s what he does in my church. He’s like electricity. He finds a path of low resistance, and he takes it.

Why didn’t God make this happen 2000 years ago? The simple answer: he did. But the church listened to Satan, as it always does. Satan told our leaders hard work was what mattered. It was WRONG to expect God to change people simply because they prayed words they did not understand. It was SELFISH. You should EARN your favor with God!

Never mind the obvious hypocrisy. You can obtain salvation, which includes eternal life in health, joy, and wealth, by uttering a few words. But if you expect God to change you just because you pray in tongues every day for years, well…that’s just too easy! Does that make sense to you? I hope not. You would have to be stupid.

God does not force the world to work properly. He gives us the tools, and then he steps back. And we fail him, over and over. Adam failed him. The entire world failed him before the flood. The Jews failed him in Egypt and in the wilderness. Christians failed him, even after he gave them easy salvation and the gift of tongues. God let these things happen. He did that because making the world work is our responsibility, not his. His kingdom is not of this world. This world is supposed to be our kingdom.

Every once in a while, God returns and gives us what amounts to a bath. He cleans us up and puts us back on the path. He gives us knowledge our ancestors should have held onto and passed on to us (“A good [man] leaveth an inheritance to his children’s children). Then he steps back again. Over the last century or so, he has been pouring the Holy Spirit into us like a French farmer force-feeding a pate goose. The Holy Spirit is back. We have another chance. And we’ll eventually blow it. Meanwhile, we can do a lot of damage to Satan’s kingdom.

This weekend, our pastor taught about the prayer of victory. I was afraid he was going to pass on something Steve Munsey came up with. I was afraid we would hear that we were supposed to give a huge monetary offering in exchange for a super Pentecost dose of the Holy Spirit. That didn’t happen. Instead, at the altar call, he said he wanted people to receive the baptism with the Holy Spirit…en masse! It was wonderful. It was beautiful. This is exactly what my little group prays for! This is what changes lives. God armed a bunch of new recruits. We don’t have to feel so outnumbered now. I hope we see more and more of this. I don’t want to see my pastor do things that aren’t going to bring him a fit reward for a lifetime of service.

We have a conference coming up, on South Beach. I wasn’t too enthusiastic about it. Sometimes we do things that make me very uncomfortable, in order to attract kids. But we got this big Holy Ghost blast this weekend, and the conference is taking place on Pentecost. Now I’m a little excited. Maybe God is in this after all.

I feel like there is more hope for my church than I realized.

I’ve learned some discouraging things since I’ve been there. We have a pattern of taking qualified people out of positions of power and putting them to work as beasts of burden. I’m a cook, a writer, a lawyer, and a physicist, but I can’t cook, write, or practice law for the church. I wander around doing security jobs. We have one of the best guitar players I’ve ever seen, but his service consists mostly of cooking in the cafe and playing for kids. We have a guy who went to college on a vocal scholarship, and he was removed from the worship team and required to teach small children. I could go on and on. We put less-qualified people in charge, and we waste the talented people God sent us. It’s like the Body of Christ is walking on its hands, eating through its ears, writing with its feet, and so on. It’s so bad, I quit giving things to the church, because I know they’ll be wasted. I give to other organizations that do a better job. But now I have hope that the Holy Spirit will be allowed to put things back in order. This is the power that puts flesh on the “dry bones” and puts them back together in an organized body.

We listen to Australian music in my church. This stuff is really…it’s not good. The musicians are not overjoyed about it. If you gave me all of it in CD form, it would be in the trash in ten minutes, because there is no way I’d ever listen to it. Think of every bad thing the word “white” means when you apply it to music, and that’s Australian worship music. And the lyrics are, well, I’m not going to use the word that came to mind, but they’re…if I wrote lyrics like this, I would seriously wonder if I had any business writing lyrics at all.

Meanwhile, the church is about 80% black. It’s an American church. America has the best popular music in the entire world. We created gospel. We created the blues. We created jazz. We invented soul. Isn’t this obvious? Do I even have to mention Mahalia Jackson, Rosetta Tharpe, Ray Charles, the Stanley Brothers, Kari Jobe…even Hank Williams wrote church music. Importing music from Australia is like importing chefs from England or comedians from Germany. It’s almost an insult to American culture. Would you export watches to Switzerland?

We had a guy come in and sing a couple of bluesy numbers a while back, and people went nuts. It was like they were starving.

We have unbelievable musicians. They’re dying to write and perform real music. But they don’t get the chance. I’m encouraging them to come to my house to work on their own stuff. My church won’t accept the blessing, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t do what they were born to do. I told one of them they should get together and start playing at other churches. Do what God does. If one person rejects a blessing, give it to someone else. You can’t ruin your life by wasting time doing things God did not create you to do. Consider Psalm 37, verse 4. Your natural gifts and desires are not what make you a good Christian, but God does provide them for a reason, and they are not to be ignored.

I quit giving extra money to my church. I found other organizations that made better use of what I had to offer. I quit working in the church kitchen. Now I’m building amplifiers, and I hope to be able to help Christian musicians get good equipment. I was rejected as a writer, which is really beyond belief, considering what I can do and how limited the church’s other writing resources are. We have no other writers of any consequence. Now I either write here, or I do something more productive with my time. If you are bearing God’s fruit in your life, YOU HAVE TO DROP IT SOMEWHERE. You can’t wait around while the people you want to bless give you the straightarm and treat you like a burglar. I just can’t do anything for this church except pray and help with security. So be it. Until they come around, I’ll do for someone else.

Honest to God, I feel like renting a warehouse for these kids. I want to say, “Just go in there and PLAY, and don’t come out until you have ten good songs, and if anyone who even looks Australian shows up, bar the door.”

This has to be how God feels. He has so much good stuff waiting for us, but we choose our own hog wallows. We die in the desert instead of crossing over into the Promised Land. I remember how sad Jesus was when he talked about the things he wanted to do for Jerusalem.

If the revival continues, we should be able to get things in order. If not, I will continue to bless and be blessed, and the good things that come through me will go somewhere else. A current has to find ground. It will not be stopped. I am not going to let human beings thwart God himself. Jesus had to go to the Gentiles in order to bless people; I’m no better than he is.

The amp-building goes well. My only problem is that I’m learning so fast, I can’t finish my latest amp. Every time I think I’m ready to put it together, I learn something that makes me want to change it. But I may be able to get started soldering this afternoon.

I am going to have to go back over some mathematical foundations. Monkey-see, monkey-do is not going to make me an amp expert. I need to know how to calculate impedances and so on. I don’t think any of the math will be challenging at all, but the material will be fairly dry, so it will take effort to swallow it.

Life is beautiful. I hope I can help other people get on the same train. It looks like God is giving me success. In the meantime, I do not intend to let God’s work in my own life go to waste, regardless of who gets in the way. I am too old to put up with nonsense.