When did Miami get so Beautiful?

I went to Tennessee over the weekend to bury my dad’s older sister. I’m not sure she was actually buried, though. The funeral home screwed up and failed to have her cremated on time, and I don’t know whether they got the situation fixed. It’s amazing that they would do that, but there you are.

She was 84; two years older than my dad. I didn’t know her terribly well. I saw her a few times during my life, but there were no Christmas gifts or birthday cards, and until this weekend, I couldn’t name all of her kids.

When I was a child, my mother told me that during the early years of her marriage, she had been shocked at how distant my dad’s people were. She claimed my dad’s mother–I don’t think of her as my grandmother–told her that relations with my dad were so unpleasant, they didn’t want to stay very close.

This weekend I reunited with a cousin I last saw–I am fairly sure–in about 1968. I know I saw one other one not long after 1970, because I remember him mentioning the movie M*A*S*H as a recent thing, and it came out in that year.

I also saw my dad’s other sister this weekend. I believe I last saw her in around 1990.

Sad.

Sadder still, my dad and I were the odd ones out. His sisters stayed in touch, and their kids knew each other well. They have a lot of shared memories. Trips. Gatherings. We don’t know much about it. They talked about holidays and vacations past, when they did this and said that. My dad was able to keep up with them about the distant past, as in 1931-1956, but that was about it.

She died from a stroke, if I understand things correctly. She started having them some time back. She became forgetful. She said things over and over. She became demented. In February, she had to go to a home, and then she started speaking gibberish.

Like my dad, she was very overweight. I think that probably caused the strokes and dementia, but I’m no doctor.

My aunt was married to a Mormon, and when they married he had several kids of his own. I only connected with one member of the flock, back during the Vietnam War. She was a little older than I was, and we were not related by blood. My aunt could be a challenging person to get along with, and she and her husband were very hard on the kids, making them work constantly and maintaining harsh discipline. My cousin was quiet and gentle. I think we got along well because we were easygoing people with parents who were could be unpleasant.

I did not want to go to Tennessee this weekend. I was not needed. When my mother died, only two of these people showed up, and that was more than I had expected. I would not have made this trip but for my dad, who is not really up to the task of planning and executing a long trip alone. I truly dreaded going. I was worried about my house being robbed, and I had to move mountains to get the burglar alarm fixed. Then a garage side door turned out to be rusted out, and I had to take a grinder to the hinges. I had to have locks changed. Lots of aggravation and no reward.

My dad wanted to go from Tennessee to Kentucky, to see the town where he grew up. I have no connection to this place at all, except that it reminds me of the appalling and unnecessary deficiencies of my childhood. To make him happy, I agreed to go with him. We would be at the service in Tennessee on Saturday and then drive to Kentucky on Sunday. On Monday, back to Atlanta to catch our flight. If you add up the road hours, you will see why I was not pleased.

My aunt’s funeral was in Oak Ridge, and we got into town after 9 p.m. I had driven us up from Atlanta. I was beyond exhausted. The trip was tiring, and God had awakened me to pray in the morning, which cost me two hours of sleep. After some argument, I agreed to go to my uncle’s house and see the family. I would not get to bed until 12:30, and I knew everyone would be agitating to get started early the next day.

My dad was startled to see how his other sister and her husband looked. She was using a walker, and her hands shook. Her husband just looked old, and at his age, he had a right to.

I was as cheerful as humanly possible, and I waited for them to start giving us hints to leave. My cousin came over and talked to me, and she gave me information about my aunt.

When her issues started, they were just like the problems my dad has now. Asking the same question several times. Forgetting recent events. Confusion. And she would not go to a doctor. She and my uncle were in denial. Maybe a doctor would have put her on a diet or done bariatric surgery. We will never know. But when I talked to my cousin, I realized I was getting close to the beginning of a rocky road.

To keep from going crazy, I went outside and called the Holiday Inn and got a separate room, and I went to sleep in peace. God awoke me again, and I did what I was supposed to do and did not complain. I prayed. I blessed. I cursed. I decreed. Then peace returned, and I slept. I moved the alarm clock back an hour and a half. If they had to wait a little longer for me, they would get over it.

Breakfast was revolting. They had those weird scrambled eggs that have no variation in color, plus turkey sausage. I got a piece, thinking it couldn’t be that bad. I was wrong. It was that bad and then some. I can’t believe people eat that garbage.

While I was choking it down, my dad announced that he didn’t want to go to Kentucky any more. I got on the cell phone and moved our flight. God be praised. I felt like a runaway slave. I can’t remember ever being that happy.

At the funeral, my dad spoke, and then people related funny stories about my aunt. I had one or two, but they would not have flattered certain people.

Looking at the plastic beer-coolerish container which may or may not have contained her ashes, I thought about my aunt’s final destination. I have no illusions about it. She went to a Mormon church, but she didn’t buy into it, and even if she did, Mormons don’t receive salvation because they believe it comes by works. She and my uncle told the preacher or priest or whatever that they didn’t believe, and he suggested the keep going, just for the social life.

While we were at my uncle’s house, somehow the subject of American Indians came up, and my cousins started making sly references to their “real” origins. The Mormons believe they sailed to America from Israel. Of course, that’s a load of hogwash, and the Indians have no genetic relationship with the Jews, beyond what every human being has. When I heard them talking, I realized they were very serious about their heretical religion, their parents’ unbelief notwithstanding. Disturbing. I was looking at a poisoned field.

I don’t know why I had to go on the trip. Maybe it was God’s way of showing my dad his future. Maybe he wanted someone to pray for my cousins. All I know is, for the first time in my life, I was overjoyed to be headed for Miami.

At my uncle’s house, while I was talking to the clerk at the Holiday Inn, I heard myself say, “I’m never going to see these people again.”

My mother’s people are my family. When my dad talks about my mother’s father, he slips and calls him “your father.” My dad’s relatives seem nice, but I couldn’t pick most of them out of a lineup. His mother never called when I was a kid. We didn’t hear from his older sister much unless she wanted something. When his mother died, the other relatives cleaned out her house and gave us two items they selected, and my dad got the funeral bill. I didn’t attend. Nobody expected me to.

A while back, my dad tried to get me to go to a family reunion, and I refused. I reminded him of my age. I said, “It’s too late,” and, “I don’t know those people.” My remaining aunt and uncles will be dead in five years. I barely know their kids. My other relatives on that side are even more distant. There aren’t enough crumbs in the bottom of the bag to make shaking it worth the effort. I felt that I was being asked to go and put on a show of false love for strangers. To pretend that we hadn’t screwed up, back in the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties.

We screwed up. Some people would lie to themselves about it, but I won’t. We flushed whatever chance we had to be part of that family, and that was fine by them.

I’m glad the trip is behind me. I don’t expect to see anyone in my dad’s family again, except possibly when he dies. He isn’t leaving them anything, so they won’t be involved in his estate. I’m glad I know them, but there isn’t much there to build on.

My life is so different from the ones it intersected with this weekend. God is showing me joy and power. He is teaching me things, and other people are learning them from me, and they are starting to put these things to use and come back with startling testimonies. I don’t consider the earthly obstacles in my path the way I used to. These days, they fall. But my relatives keep grinding away, pushing the same rock up the same hill every day and expecting very little for the effort.

I understand what Jesus meant when he said that believers were his family. People who can’t see the light are tuned to a different channel.

I am going to look for a strategy to deal with my dad’s upcoming challenges, and I am going to work to get myself out of this city. I can’t save everyone, but I can help a few people, and I can look after myself. I hope I never fly into Miami again. I have seen as much of it as I need. This has been a pivotal month. For me, it’s a sharp upward turn. For others, it’s the crystallization of a course that leads nowhere.

Put God’s Weight Behind Your Punches

Time to tell you about something new that has been working in my life.

The “dead” (non-charismatic) churches teach that God doesn’t do much of anything for us, except on special occasions and when we die. That’s a lie. The charismatic churches teach us that God’s job is to be a butler who does our bidding and also brings us money; his purpose is to make us rich and solve all our problems. That’s also a lie.

God does solve our problems. He heals diseases. He brings us prosperity and peace. He helps us succeed. But that’s not why he exists. He rules the universe. Our purpose is to do things for him. When we understand that we are here to establish his kingdom on the earth (to the extent that it is possible in this age), he will direct more of his resources to help us.

That just makes sense. If you had two kids, and one was running around with loose women and taking drugs, you wouldn’t want to encourage him in his foolishness. You would wait for him to burn out and come home. If your other child was working in the family business, you would reward that child. When he needed help, you would spend money, give advice, and so on. His interests would be your interests. It wouldn’t make sense to deprive him.

If you want a new injection of faith and help–which will serve your own interest–paradoxically, you have to put God’s interests first. Jesus pointed this out in Matthew 6:33: “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”

I always felt like I was doing God’s will when I prayed, blessed, and cursed on behalf of myself and other people. I suppose I was right, to a limited extent. God wants us to fix problems. But I could have done better. I should have gotten up every morning and started out by working on God’s problems.

The Bible says we are to “bless” God continuously. We interpret this in strange ways. We say it just means to thank him. When it comes to food, we somehow got the idea that it means to bless the food itself, which, being a blessing, doesn’t really need any help. What if “bless God” really means “bless God”?

A long time ago, I learned that it didn’t make any sense to bless food, but I wasn’t really sure what I was supposed to do. I would thank God and so on, and I would ask him to use meals for his purpose. But a few weeks back, I got a revelation. What if I actually spoke a blessing to God?

I gave it a shot. I would think of something that seemed to be a problem for God; something his children were not able to defeat. Then I would curse it and speak defeat to it. For example, I would curse the homosexuality movement in America and Israel. Or I would speak something positive, such as faith and discernment to the body of Christ.

When you have a certain amount of supernatural awareness, you can tell when things work. This worked. I felt it. It was right. I felt more faith flowing into me. This was something God had been waiting for.

I applied it to my daily prayer time. Now I get up and I curse things that displease God, and I speak victory to his children (not to the world at large). I speak defeat to Obamacare and statism. I speak defeat to the abortion industry. I speak defeat to the federal government, before the body of Christ, which it is beginning to persecute openly.

I do this before I think about myself and the people I know.

The power is just crazy. It flows and puts me in a state where I can barely move, I’m so caught up in it.

I know it works. Time and time again, I’ve seen obstructive people pushed aside by this method. One day a person will be obnoxious and overbearing. The next day, after I speak defeat to him, he’ll be meek as a lamb. You can even speak defeat to problems, like a car problem you can’t seem to fix. It works, and it works quickly. Not necessarily instantaneously, but quickly. And it’s scriptural. Look at Mark 11:23:

For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.

It’s much better than wasting your time and giving yourself gray hair fighting things in the natural. And if it works for my personal problems, how much more will it work when I apply it to things that are more important to God?

We have to be proactive in this life, but that doesn’t mean we work hard with our hands and minds. It means we work hard in prayer, blessing, and cursing, not to mention worship.

Life is like “The Karate Kid.” God will coach us and back us up, but he expects us to go into the arena for him and win the fight. We have been missing this for centuries. People ask why God lets bad things happen. He doesn’t. We do.

He created a system that works a certain way, and he wil not bend. He will not come down and wipe our noses just because we’re suffering. He will not do things our way. If one generation throws away its knowledge of his ways, he will allow succeeding generations to live in defeat and humiliation instead of returning the knowledge to them. God does not owe us anything; he will permit us to ruin our lives.

Every so often, when we’re out of his will, God will do something restorative for his own purposes. The Jews didn’t deserve Jesus, but God sent him anyway. This generation didn’t deserve a restoration of knowledge, but we’re getting it anyway, even though God let us live in failure for almost two millennia. Yes, sometimes God will give you a break when you’re off the reservation, but you can’t expect it as a way of life. Generally, you have to follow his plan.

We forgot about the power of the tongue. We forgot about blessing and cursing. So our ancestors–even the Christians–were Satan’s abused slaves. If you go back to the Holy Spirit and speak in tongues, God will restore knowledge and power to you, not to mention virtue.

Part of God’s plan is devotion to his goals. If you don’t have that, you will always be a cripple.

Take a crack at it. Speak in tongues daily to build faith and revelation. When you’re strong, start blessing God and cursing the things he hates. Put his needs first. Then see what happens.

I’m not telling you life will be perfect, but you can have peace. You can have confidence in the future. You can watch your most persistent problems dissolve.

You have nothing to lose. If I’m wrong, nothing bad will happen to you. But if I’m right, you are in for a great experience.

This Junk Actually Works

I guess people who come here solely to read about God will be sore, but I am here today to talk about machining. I am making progress on the parts for my CNC mini-lathe. You can find and buy the plans at Ron Steele’s site.

In an earlier post, I discussed a mount I was making from aluminum on the mill. If you look at the photo, you can pretty well tell I was milling it from flat aluminum plate. I had a few problems. First I misread the plans and tried to make it from 1/2″ plate. Then I saw that it was supposed to be 3/4″ thick. I started over.

The plans called for a 0.510″ bore down the center of the part, to accommodate the screw that moves the lathe cross-slide. The bore had a shallow 0.625″ counterbore, because the screw has a shoulder on it, and the shoulder fits the counterbore. On either side of the bore, centered 0.411″ away, there was a #18 hole drilled through, and there was also a 0.297″ counterbore in the #18 hole locations, to a depth of 1.1″.

This means there was a big bore through the material, and to either side, there was a 1.1″-deep bore centered 0.411″ away.

If you add up the numbers, you find that when it’s all done, there is roughly 0.010″ of material remaining between the main bore and each counterbore. For all intents and purposes, that’s no metal at all. And when I shoved a homemade counterboring tool in there to make the counterbores, the thin aluminum sagged and distorted. I could have bored it out and not worried about it, but it wasn’t workmanlike, even by my standards. I decided to make a third part.

I measured the lathe for myself. The plans are generic, for lathes sold by Harbor Freight, Grizzly, and so on. My lathe is a Big Dog, made by a Chinese company called Real Bull. It’s slightly different. I don’t know how closely the plans fit the other lathes, but they were way off for mine.

I needed a bore about 0.400″ wide down the middle, and the counterbore on it only had to be 0.510″, so that meant I could have about 0.060″ of metal on either side of the bore, not 0.010″. Great news.

I also realized that the 1.1″ counterbores were not needed. The whole point of the wide counterbores was to admit fat M4 screw heads. The idea was to slide the short screws down into the bores and then through the #18 holes and into the lathe. This would have allowed me to keep the OEM 10 mm screws. Obviously (now), longer screws would permit shorter counterbores. So that knocked about 0.090″ off the depth I would have to bore. Great.

Looking at the part, I realized it was symmetrical about the main bore’s axis. That meant a mill was not the ideal tool. It was made for a lathe. So I bought a 2.75″ round rod and used it instead of plate.

I cut it to 2.25″ in diameter. I trimmed one side down to about 1.350″ in diameter. That gave me a part shaped like a hat. Then I had to put a 1.500″-wide bore in the big end, to a depth of 1.400″. My ability to bore a blind, flat-bottomed hole on the lathe let me down, so I did it on the mill’s rotary table and got gorgeous results. Now I had to put flats on it in order to turn it into a flat part.

The original part was 0.750″ thick. Measuring my lathe, I realized I could make it thicker on one side. That would allow me to rest more metal against the lathe apron, providing more resistance to flexing.

I guess this is dull enough already, so I’ll just put up a photo of the part being cut to size.

There is nothing under the part in that picture. People suggested parallels, but I just clamped it in the vise and indicated it horizontal to within a thousandth. DONE! Then I flipped it and rested the new flat on parallels. The result was perfect.

For reasons I no longer recall, I saved the top counterbore for the mill. Not a great idea, but it worked. I used a CDCO co-ax indicator on the main bore, and I got it to within on 0.0005″ tick. That’s crazy, because it was a drilled hole, and drilled holes are not supposed to be that round, but it did work. I opened up the counterbore using a heavy boring head and a cheap brazed carbide boring bar. Then I put the #18 holes in, using a center drill and my new set of cheap Harbor Freight HSS drill bits.

A word about these bits. You need them. It’s a 115-piece set for about $35. People have complained about the points being off-center, and maybe that’s true. The two bits I’ve used cut true, though, and you should be able to fix the bad ones in your set. But there’s more to it than that.

There will be many times when you’ll want to alter a drill bit. I needed a 0.297″ counterboring tool, and I didn’t have one. An expert told me I didn’t want one, because counterboring tools have little pilot doodads that hang off of them, and they snap easily. He said I needed to grind a 19/64″ drill flat on the end. My main drill set is US-made carbide, and I am not going to grind those bits up, because the discount price is over $200. If you have Harbor Freight bits, who cares? Grind away.

Also, cobalt is not ideal for aluminum. I found this out this week. I was drilling slower than I should have, and the bit grabbed and shattered. I think there were five pieces. HSS is less likely to do that in aluminum.

The part is really beautiful now. Much nicer than the one in the plans. In retrospect, I see that I could have done the whole thing from one piece of metal, but I would have had to put it on the rotary table, and with a 3-jaw chuck or a clamping set, that would have been awkward. Which is why I am planning to get rid of that chuck and get a 4-jaw.

My measuring capabilities are getting better, so I am now making parts with very tight tolerances. I realized I had no accurate way of measuring depths, so I decided to get a depth micrometer. The Chinese set from Shars runs over a hundred bucks, but some Ebay guy is selling NOS Scherr-Tumicos for about $62, delivered, and now I have one. It’s beautiful. Unfortunately, to measure different depths, you will have to use internal rods of differing lenghts, and every time you switch, you have to put the mike on a reference surface and calibrate it. If you don’t have a granite surface or something else that has been ground flat, you will have a problem.

Now I have to worry about a coolant system. An Israeli company called Noga makes inexpensive flood systems, but I don’t want one. I think it’s unnecessary. I think I can come up with something that just drips. I have never needed to flood work on the lathe, and in order to do it, I would have to cut up the lathe pan, add a drain, add a pump, add a reservoir, and deal with a gallon or so of dirty coolant. I think I can run a tube under the chip guard and mount something on the cross slide, to follow the part. It can drip WD40 or oil directly on the point of contact. People with mills use a ton of coolant, but I don’t think it’s needed here.

Here is the Alibre drawing I did for the part. For some reason, the screw holes in the bottom of the feet are not visible. Not sure what’s up with that. Some people say you have to create an imaginary plane and drill through it.

Anyway, it’s going well. And I think I’m going to have to have a CNC mill and router in order to feel whole. Not sure about a printer. I think they’re only good for 3D prototypes. I don’t know if that’s worth the money, when you can simply make a part or draw it well. I don’t think the flimsy plastic parts these printers make are very useful yet. Maybe I’m wrong. Sooner or later they’ll print things in metal or something durable, though.

If you have a CNC router, mill, and lathe, you can do a ton of stuff that’s actually useful. In fact, you would probably have to hide it from your neighbors in order to avoid running a free fix-it shop.

I guess I’ll spare everyone the story of how I left a wrench on my drawbar and snapped the shear pins when I turned the mill on, but I will tell you this much: if you have a Bridgeport-type mill, and you obstruct the nut somehow while the motor is running, and it quits working, don’t despair. They’re made to take this. Here are the symptoms that will have you wetting your pants:

1. Cutter continues turning under power.
2. Spindle brake doesn’t work.
3. Drawbar nut turns easily, but drawbar doesn’t tighten or loosen when turned.

Here is what happens. The bar has an upper part, which is hollow, and a lower part, which is just a rod with threads at the bottom. The parts are connected by two perpendicular shear pins which are very soft. When you obstruct the rotation of the nut, these pins may snap. Your mill is not damaged. Just pull the nut part up out of the mill, put a rod down into the top and use it to bonk the top of the bottom half of the drawbar to loosen the collet, and draw the bar out through the spindle opening. Then insert a magnet into the top opening and retrieve the round bushing that came with the drawbar. It will be sitting loose on top of the spindle. You’re done. Now if you want you can hammer new pins into the bar, or you can order one online for about $20, delivered.

Right now my drawbar is held together with a single pin I made from mystery metal. I drilled and punched the remains of the old pins, and I lined the drawbar holes up to hammer new pins in, but after the first one went in, the holes, incredibly, were misaligned, so I gave up on the second pin. I ground off the excess, and I was ready to go. I think things worked out fine, because I don’t know how strong that mystery metal is, and I do NOT want pins that are too strong. Next week the new bar arrives, and I’ll keep this one as a spare.

The accident left a couple of tiny dings in the part, but I’ll get over it.

Sorry I don’t have more photos, but I am not really working hard to document this mess.

I can’t wait to get this thing running, but with all my errors, it could be a while.

Sit Down, Relax, and Win

Sometimes Biblical stories don’t mean what we think they mean, and sometimes we think more of Biblical figures than we should. They made mistakes, although the Bible doesn’t always clearly condemn their wrong actions.

Case in point: Elijah and Jezebel.

Elijah challenged the prophets of Baal. Two bulls were prepared to be burnt as offerings. The idolaters tried to get Baal to burn their bull, and Elijah called on God to burn the other one. Baal did not succeed.

When the idolaters were worn out, Elijah took his turn. He had his bull soaked in water, and he had a ditch dug around it, and he had that filled with water, too. He called on God, and God burned the bull and took the water, too.

After the idolaters lost, Elijah had them beheaded. When Jezebel heard, she said she would kill Elijah. She came after him in a chariot, and he had to run through the wilderness and hide. God’s servant had to hide from a silly woman who served the devil. Why?

When the Baal worshipers were pleading with Baal, Elijah mocked them. He said they needed to yell louder. Maybe Baal couldn’t hear them. He said, in the idiom of his day, that perhaps Baal was busy defecating.

That’s where Elijah dropped the ball.

Elijah had not been instructed to taunt the priests of Baal. Doing so was a little childish. It did not glorify God. If anything, it glorified Elijah. And it made other idolaters less likely to repent. It made them angry and inflated their pride against God. So God let Elijah feel a little heat.

When we wander off into carnal behavior, we lose the anointing–our authority–and we become more vulnerable to the enemy.

Moses listened to Satan at the spring of Meribah. God told him to speak to the rock in order to make water come out, but Moses whacked it with a stick, which took glory away from God. A person witnessing it could say, “That was no miracle. Moses broke the rock.” As a result, Moses was not permitted to enter the Promised Land.

What Elijah did was no different. He “helped” God by ridiculing his enemies. Jezebel could never have put him to flight had he restrained himself. Elijah knew what he had done. Like believers before him, he had gotten ahead of God and relied on his own power. In the wilderness, he said so: “It is enough! Now, Lord, take my life, for I am no better than my fathers!”

I’m thinking about this today because I saw a story about Nancy Pelosi. She has warned a Catholic archbishop to stay away from a pro-marriage rally in San Francisco.

The Catholic church, like almost every denomination, is a powerless mess. They teach man’s foolishness. The church abandoned the Holy Spirit something like 1800 years ago, and prophecy and revelation dried up, and the Catholics and the Orthodox started making things up. They gave us ridiculous ideas such as sainthood, Mary worship, the glorification of the cursed state of poverty, conversion by torture, genocide of unbelievers, burning at the stake, celibacy, indulgences, and the worship of physical objects. Then the baptism with the Spirit returned, and charismatic churches popped up, and they proceeded to trade the Holy Spirit for lies about money, self-help, and positive thinking.

Satan took over the world in Adam’s time. He took over the temple during the time of the kings. He took over Christianity in the early centuries AD. He now has a strong grip on the TBN crowd and the tongue-speaking churches.

Christians love to gloat over Adam and the Jews, while congregating in churches that belong to the devil. We did the same things our predecessors did, but we can’t see it. No wonder. Prayer in tongues is THE specific tool that opens eyes, and we keep discarding it in order to please men.

The Catholics run from the abortion lobby and the gay lobby. They won’t excommunicate anyone. They won’t take a real stand. They clothe their failure in a skin of love and patience, but that’s a pretext. They just can’t cope with the secular world. I don’t know what the archbishop will say to Nancy Pelosi, but I have a feeling it will be pretty weak. And she is still receiving communion, which, according to the Bible, is only for those who have repented.

The spirit of Jezebel lives in Nancy Pelosi. Jehu killed Jezebel, but the spirit survived. It made it all the way to the chair of the Speaker of the House, and it stayed there quite a while. And now religious figures have to take this benighted, grasping woman seriously, because they use man’s weapons instead of God’s.

The Catholics–and all other churches that expect nothing from God in this life–have no power. As long as they refuse to live by faith, they will rely on carnal tools, and since Satan is the false god of carnal tools, they will not win. They are playing on his home field. This is why we see real estate agents listing churches.

I try to keep a lid on the childishness these days. I used to think Elijah’s story proved that ridicule was okay. That was a mistake. It may be that the Holy Spirit will lead you to needle someone, but unless you get a clear order, it’s carnal. It works to drive people away from God. It may make other Christians hoot and applaud, but what’s the good in that? They’re already on God’s side.

I am trying not to sink into verbal mud-wrestling. Paul said our weapons were not carnal, and that they were able to pull down strongholds. I believe him. I speak defeat to people like Pelosi, and I go my way. I don’t paint signs and carry them in front of TV cameras. I don’t do pilgrimages on my knees. I don’t volunteer to work for political campaigns. I speak destruction to evil and go my way. It works in every area of my personal life, and I am confident that it will work on a national scale, much better than sending money to the RNC and the friends of Grover Norquist.

Let the dead use the weapons of the dead.

If you build yourself up through prayer in tongues and take this approach, you will get better results than you get now, and you won’t have to dedicate your life to serving carnal people who oppose your enemies. God didn’t send you hear to spend 18 hours a day canvassing for a Mormon. Trust me on that.

Give it a try. Give it a month. If it doesn’t work, you can quit.

But it will work.

“Help! Save me From This Crazy Woman!”

This is too much. I can’t put this on social media for bizarre reasons, but I can post it here. This is a recent photo of my godchild Noah. This has to be the best baby picture ever.

Wasn’t This Supposed to be OUR World?

Just a short one today.

Over the last couple of days, I watched a really bad Thor movie. It was about an elf who wanted to destroy the universe.

Last night I had a revelation about similar films. I’ve seen dozens of movies and shows about various villains who threatened to take away man’s liberty and blessings and plunge him into slavery. Movies like “Oblivion,” “The Matrix,” and “The Terminator.” We enjoy the entertainment, but we fail to realize…one villain already succeeded. Satan ruined the world and made us all slaves. Every one of us. We lost! We are defeated slaves on our own world!

We’re used to our situation, so we don’t appreciate it. We think early death is normal. We accept divorce, poverty, mental illness, and war as inevitable. We take disease in stride. We have come to see this cursed world as a pretty good place.

That’s insane! We were never supposed to live like this. Our world was supposed to be an extension of heaven. Instead, it’s hell’s waiting room. Virtually all people live in defeat and servitude. Most people go to hell. It’s amazing that we don’t see the world for what it is: a colossal disaster.

Don’t accept Satan’s “normal.” There is nothing normal or acceptable about it. Pray in tongues. Learn who you are in Christ. Bless and curse. Affect the course of history instead of letting it roll over you and your family.

A Lot More Power is Available

I used to be a noted political blogger. I was somewhere between 100 and 200 in the Truthlaidbear Ecosystem, if you know what that is. And I started Huffington’s Toast, which was a big deal back in ’05, and I wrote something like a third of the content.

I was one of the Internet’s “gotcha” players. When the left screwed up, people like me were there to ridicule, and we did it with great pleasure. We saw a discredited, dangerous political philosophy gaining ground in America, and we felt it was right to do whatever we could to open the public’s eyes and turn the tide in favor of common sense.

As I drew closer to God, I tried to get away from political blogging. I felt that it was less important than talking about God, and I thought the venomous nature of the game was not really compatible with God’s plan for me. But I didn’t make a clean break. I kept going back to the mud-wrestling pit, if only to dip a toe in the mud. I still venture in on occasion, but I keep getting better at resisting.

I don’t even read blogs now. I kept up with Sondra K’s site for a long time, but I finally quit, not out of determination, but because I didn’t enjoy it as much as I had in the past. Once in a while I still wander over, but everyone seems so angry, I don’t feel inclined to hang out.

I have learned that the way to get victory is not to scream and ridicule. We won’t win through fundraising, organizing, or boycotting. The way to win is to turn back to God, and having done so, to speak defeat to the supernatural forces which are at war with God.

The Republican/Democrat divide, at its most fundamental level, was never about right versus left. It was about God versus Satan. We had one party which was overwhelmingly Christian, and which made an effort to fight Satanic policies, and we had another party which fought God, supporting homosexuality, fornication, covetousness, drug abuse, the persecution of the church, the division of Israel, and the murder of the unborn. The GOP wasn’t pure, because it was a secular organization. But it was driven by religion.

Why is America in decline? Why are we suffering from suicidal economic policies, de facto legal illegal immigration, gay persecution of the church, a catastrophic loss of liberty through surveillance, and defeat at the hands of our global enemies? It’s not because we tax and spend. It’s because we don’t care about God, who is the only reason we used to be blessed.

We glorify pride and lust as though they were good things. We worship self, which is also worship of Satan. We think we can do anything, without God’s help. As a result, God’s help is being withdrawn, and we are learning that our natural efforts can’t solve our problems.

Things will not get better while we war with God. That’s the simple truth. Unless a certain number of us turn to him and start exercising authority over ourselves and others, things are going to get worse.

There is a way to beat the enemy, and it doesn’t involve filling blogs with vicious memes about Obama. We have to develop faith through prayer in tongues, and we have to speak defeat to the forces of evil. Without faith, it won’t amount to much, so prayer is an essential part of it.

This year I learned that I can get victory over spirits and people simply by speaking in faith. If someone is wronging me, I don’t go to them and scream at them. I speak defeat to them. I speak victory to myself. And things improve.

This is what we should be doing with our god-hating leaders.

We should speak defeat to them. We should speak revelation, contrition, and faith to them. We should speak victory and protection to the people who run against them. And we shouldn’t do it for our own sake. We should do it out of a sincere desire to see God’s kingdom advance on earth.

The world is going to fail. Prophecy proves that. Most people are going to hell. This age will end, and billions will die in misery. But that doesn’t mean every part of the world will be destroyed. There is no reason why one or two nations can’t turn to God and be preserved and blessed. We should do what we can to see to it that America becomes such a nation. At the very least, we will minimize our enemies’ power, and that is a goal well worth working for.

When you get up in the morning and pray, think about God’s desires first. What does he want? What angers him? What pleases him? Ask for his guidance.

He may lead you to speak defeat to Planned Parenthood or GLAAD. He may lead you to speak defeat to Israel’s enemies. Do what he tells you, and tell others to do it. Speak revelation to them.

We keep picking leaves off the tree when we could be pouring poison on the roots. That’s our problem. If you’re sick of Barack Obama, Harry Reid, John Boehner, the threat of Sharia law, and Grover Norquist, speak defeat to the root that supports them.

The Bible tells us that God will give us good things AFTER we seek his kingdom and righteousness, but we don’t listen. Even Spirit-filled Christians are obsessed with their own advancement. Watch TBN some time and see. They talk all day about healing, money, and success. They should be talking about destroying our iniquities and being filled with the fruit and the gifts of the Spirit, and they should be talking about decreeing–not just praying for–an end to Satan’s works in our nation. They should be talking about love for God and our neighbors. They should be talking about charity. Instead they’re wandering off on useless tangents.

If you own a business, you will pay employees, and you may give them health care. What if an employee from the business next door comes over and asks for money or medical treatment? You’d send him home. Why do we expect God to work for us when we don’t work for him? Our work is prayer, blessing, and cursing, with his desires at the center. If we’re not doing those things, we shouldn’t expect much.

I turned back to God because of my own problems, but eventually I realized the way to win with God is to make his problems my problems, and that only happens through the Holy Spirit.

You shouldn’t worry. You can trust God. If you put your life in his hands and give up your own plans, he will not let you down. The God that let fools drive nails into him for you will not do that. But you have to do things his way. You can’t say, “I gave $20,000 to an orphanage, so I’m all set,” or, “I recorded this CD of Christian rap for you, so now you have to make it sell.” You have to pray in tongues, receive revelation, and act on it. You don’t get to decide what your mission is. But whatever it is, it will be very good.

I am working to act on this advice, myself. I veer off the path. It’s new to me. But I know God will steer me if I maintain my prayer life. According to Isaiah 35, he has prepared a highway in the desert for me, and even if I’m stupid, I will not wander off of it. Not for long.

Don’t be afraid to speak defeat to ungodly people and organizations. They’re not that strong. They have no guide and no real help. They just look big because our failings have fed them. If enough of us go to work, we can make a difference in this nation, and even if we fail, we will make a difference in ourselves and in many other individuals. That’s okay, because that’s God’s real mission. It is success, even if the nation as a whole is ruined.

Recognize Your Abusers

I got a great revelation during prayer this morning.

I have a few people in my life who are…jerks. I have never been able to come up with a nicer word for “jerk,” so that’s the word I use. They don’t listen. They are pushy. They constantly insult people, whether expressly or by implication. They are selfish to the extreme. They don’t care how bad they have to make you feel in order to get their way, and they go through life dominating other people by injecting their own problems into them instead of confronting those problems.

God gave me a way to fix them good. I speak defeat to them, in the name of Jesus. I speak victory to myself. I speak defeat to the spirits that drive them. Of course, I also speak revelation, faith, and contrition to these people. That should go without saying. The point isn’t to destroy them.

This works. It works so well that the jerks I know personally are actually feeling bad. They seem downcast and depressed. They seem angry. If you don’t believe it, try it yourself. A jerk can be all over you in the morning, but if you speak defeat to him before lunch, later in the day, he will be cowed. If you do it day after day, he will sort of shrivel up.

I felt bad about this. Mostly, I felt relieved. I won’t lie. But I felt some guilt. But today God showed me something: the things these people feel now would be in ME had I not acted! This is what they go through life shoving into people. They’re just getting what they created. They wanted me to feel that way. And that would be wrong. I would be punished for nothing, and they would be enabled. They would have no reason to repent.

Satan loves to put his seed in people. I honestly believe this is why rape is so common in prison, which is a foretaste of hell. When one man rapes another, he gets pleasure from the other man’s suffering. The more the victim struggles, the better it is for the aggressor. And when it’s done, the victim is full of things that should be in the aggressor: defeat, shame, despair, and powerlessness.

Outside of prison, people do the same thing to us in more acceptable ways. They touch us when we don’t want to be touched. They don’t respect our property. They interrupt us when we speak, as though we’re not there. They give us orders they have no authority to give. They laugh at us in a malicious way. They criticize. They micromanage.

Micromanagement is a form of abuse. Like all abuse, it negates the victim’s status as a person. Backseat driving is a perfect example. It’s fine to give someone a couple of tips about which turns to take, but if you’re on a half-mile drive to the drugstore, and the driver has to follow your orders the whole way, you’re a jerk. You’re an abuser. Obviously, if the driver has a license, and he’s in the driver’s seat, he has the authority to make decisions and drive. If you can’t leave him alone, it’s as if you’re denying his right to exist. He ceases to be a person. He becomes an extension of you. And that’s what you wanted all along.

A jerk thinks he is the most important person on earth. He may be completely unable to understand the misery he causes other people, or he may be aware of it and take pleasure from it. He serves his flesh, like a baby. And to serve the flesh is to serve Satan. Spirits tell the flesh what to do. The flesh tells the jerk what to do. The jerk tells you what to do. When you comply, you’re serving Satan, too.

All my life, I have been too nice to jerks and bullies. I have gone along with their antics in order to have peace, and of course, that makes them worse. That’s called “appeasement.” It didn’t work in Nazy Germany. It doesn’t work when Israel deals with Muslim nuts. It never works. Enabling is not a good strategy, unless you want to become a manipulator and lose your integrity.

The jerks in my life created suffering. It was intended to go into me, like a seed, and bear fruit of despair, defeat, shame, guilt, self-blame, and failure. Now it stays in the people who created it. Good! They’re SUPPOSED to suffer. There are only two options: it goes into them, or it goes into me. For most of my life, I’ve taken it inside me to shut them up. That was stupid. From now on, it goes back into them, and if they die from it, so be it. I am not a vessel for Satan’s seed.

The most effective jerks are the ones who can inflict guilt on you. A bedridden grandparent can be a jerk. Your mother may be a jerk; that’s extremely common. People who do a lot for you (and always remember it and recite it back to you) can be jerks. Many people who seem to be on your side and even THINK they’re on your side are jerks. Don’t be deceived.

Do you feel weak after dealing with someone? Do you walk on eggs around them? Have you ever had a guilty moment in which you imagined how free you would be if they died? Are there dreams they keep shut up inside you?

That’s a jerk. Even if it seems like they’re being nice to you…that’s a jerk. It’s Satan’s suicide bomber, knocking on your front door.

The law told us to honor our fathers and mothers. If you don’t hear from the Holy Spirit, that’s the best course. But Jesus, who expected us to obey the Holy Spirit (who wrote the law) said, “Let the dead bury the dead.” A young man wanted to stay with his father until he died, and then he planned to serve Jesus. Honoring his father would have meant staying. Jesus told him to let the dead bury the dead, which meant, “LEAVE HIM.”

Jesus said he came to bring division. He said he came to pit relatives against each other. That was a major departure from the law. He was referring to separation from people who serve the flesh, and he didn’t care if they were related to us by blood. When we are led by the Spirit, our real relatives are not the people who carry similar genes. They’re other Spirit-led believers. They are the people Jesus was talking about when he said that if we gave people up for him, we would receive new ones, not just in paradise, but here on earth.

If you’re Spirit-led, you definitely have bullies and jerks assigned to you by Satan. You need to throw them off and serve God instead. You’re going to need faith in order to do it. Otherwise, when you speak defeat to them, nothing will happen. Faith comes from daily prayer in tongues. So you better get started.

You don’t have to know the bully you speak defeat to. You can speak defeat to Barack Obama if you feel led. You can speak defeat to a group or a movement. Don’t put a limit on it.

I hope this is helpful. I am applying it, and I have seen results.

Real Men Have Aluminum Dandruff

I’m having a lot of fun making parts for my CNC mini-lathe.

Earlier in the week, I made part of a motor mount. It will hold a stepper motor which turns the cross-slide feed. Well, it WOULD have held it. But I made a little booboo. The plans called for a part 3/4″ thick, 2.75″ long, and 2.5″ wide, and somehow, I got the idea that I was supposed to make it from 1/2″ aluminum plate. The part is now a paperweight. The way I’m holding it in the vise is wrong, but it worked.

I was very careful when I made this thing. I got it within a thousandth of nominal size, or whatever it’s called. I stepped up my measuring game in order to get there. It’s a PRECISION paperweight.

When I started machining, I watched a lot of videos. I didn’t have machinist buddies who could teach me, and the videos are very informative. In particular, I like the ones from Lex Liberato of Swarf Rat. But they have their flaws. For one thing, most of the guys I watched tended to rely on dial calipers, which are not very accurate.

A dial caliper is an improved (arguably) version of the old vernier calipers we used to use in lab classes. Instead of making your eyes hurt from trying to read tiny vernier scales, they have dials attached to them, and they read in thousandths of an inch (imperial calipers only).

It’s easy to get the idea that this means you can measure something to within a thousandth of an inch of its actual size. That’s wrong.

Back when I taught physics labs at the University of Texas, we were told to tell students to try to estimate down to one-half of the length of the smallest unit an instrument measured. For example, if you had a ruler marked in millimeters, you would try to make a good guess and come up with a measurement accurate to half a millimeter. That won’t work with dial calipers, because their accuracy is actually lower than the smallest unit measured.

Calipers flex a lot, and you can screw up the measurement by applying the wrong amount of pressure. They have little knobs that tighten the jaws against the work, but no one with any skill actually uses the knobs, because they kill accuracy. In reality, you’re supposed to put your finger and thumb on the jaws and push them together. There are a lot of problems with calipers, and a very skilled machinist told me never to use them unless I was satisfied with up to 0.005″ of error.

What you really want are micrometers. Calipers are faster and easier to use, so they’re great for interim measurements when you’re working fast, but when you get close to final dimensions, you want something better. Micrometers will get you within half a thousandth when used badly. If you use them well, you can get down into the low tenths.

Cheap mikes are much better than they used to be. I just got some from Shars, and I paid around $20 each. I checked them using shop-grade Enco gage blocks, and the figures I got (with bad technique) were 0.0003″ off nominal size. Micrometers come with ground carbide doodads that you are supposed to use to measure accuracy, but they can’t be trusted, so don’t use them. Even lame gage blocks will be within a tenth of nominal size. It sounds crazy to say cheap gage blocks are better than carbide standards, but it’s true. Don’t ask me why.

I took out my new Chinese mikes and put them to work on the part I was making, and I came within half a thousandth. I think. Actually, I guess it could be a little more, since I was getting 0.0003″ of error on the gage blocks. Anyway, the parts were very close to specified size. Much closer than they needed to be. Had I been off by fifteen thousandths, it would not have mattered.

I made this Y-shaped mount thing, and I felt pretty smug. Then I saw that I was supposed to drill a 1/2″-wide hole down the center of it. This is the subtle clue that alerted me to the fact that the part was too thin. So today I had to make a new piece of aluminum so I could redo the part.

I used my table saw to cut a 1″ slice out of a square aluminum rod 3.5″ on a side. Does that sound crazy? It works. I would not cut steel with it, but aluminum cuts beautifully on a table saw, if you go very slowly and use lots of WD40. In five minutes, you can cut something that would take 15 on a little band saw, and you can get accuracy within 5 thousandths.

I never trust the sides of new stock to be square, so after shortening the block to 2.75″, I put it on the mill with a 1/4″ carbide 2-flute cutter and cut a flat side on the top. I put that against the fixed jaw and put a round piece of aluminum between the other jaw and the other side. This allows the flat side to rest firmly on the fixed jaw, to serve as a reference. I made another flat side and ended up doing all four sides.

Now I had a problem. I had four square, flat sides. But I also had two really large sides, perpendicular to the rest, that were neither flat nor parallel. They had saw marks on them. How do you fix a thing like that? You can’t rest it on parallels and mill the upper side, because it won’t rest flat on the parallels. If you put two flat sides against the vise jaws, it will be level in one direction, but it can slope from one side of the vise to the other.

This really bugged me. Finally, I put two flat sides against the vise, snugged it up a little, and bopped it into line with a wooden brush handle. I put a test indicator on the mill spindle with an Indicol holder, and I moved the knee up and down, measuring how far a flat side veered off vertical. I figured that if a side were perfectly vertical, the block had to be positioned correctly. I got it to where it barely moved.

I put a 1/2″ cutter in the mill and took about 0.020″ off the top of the block. I flipped it over, put it on parallels, and did the other side. Then I checked the thickness, which was uniform. I was too lazy to get out the Indicol holder again or use some other method to check squareness, so I put a machinist’s square up against every corner I could find, and I could not see daylight. Good enough.

The big lessons I learned over the last month were:

1. Calipers are useless for accuracy below 0.005″, in spite of what people claim about their results.

2. Cheap micrometers are good to under a thousandth. Good ones will get you down close to a tenth, if you have good technique.

3. When buying micrometers, you have to check them using gage blocks, because carbide standards are junk.

4. If you test a micrometer, you have to test it at several settings, because a micrometer which is accurate down near 1″ may be less accurate near 2″.

5. Expensive calipers are a complete waste of money, because they’re still not accurate.

6. Don’t use micrometer ratchets, because they’re not reliable. Learn to tighten them directly, going by feel. This takes practice. Which I haven’t done yet.

I also learned some stuff about lathes. Mainly this: don’t use lube when cutting aluminum with carbide. At least not until you do a finish cut. In my experience, it seems to help the finish a little, but that could be my imagination. I’ve used a lot of WD40. It made a big mess. It was completely unnecessary. Thank God it evaporates, or the garage would be full of it.

Milling lessons I learned: don’t use lube when milling steel with carbide. It stinks and doesn’t really do anything.

None of this stuff applies to steel cutters, and you absolutely must use lube when milling aluminum with carbide, because it will weld itself to the cutter. If you screw up and fill your flutes with aluminum, you can knock it out with a center punch. The punch will catch in the aluminum, and this will keep it from going sideways into the sharpened edge of the mill when you hit it with a hammer. You can also soak it in lye to dissolve the aluminum, but some people think this leaves tiny cracks in the carbide which will make it more likely to break.

While I’m sharing lifesaving information, let me tell you about knurling.

I had to make these knobs for the CNC lathe. They’re 2″ wide, and the narrow part is 1/2″ long and 1″ wide. They’re harder to make than you think.

When you knurl, it’s hard to turn the part. The knurls put a lot of pressure on it, so you need to be able to grip it well. How do you do that with a part like the ones I made? If you make the short part and wide part first, and then you knurl the wide part, you have to hold it by a half-inch-long stub. That’s no good. It may spin in the chuck. If you make the whole thing 2″ wide and knurl one end, planning to cut the stub later, how do you hold the part while you cut the stub into it? You can’t, because you’ll have to put the knurled portion into the chuck. That will damage it, although in practice, you can do it with a level of marring which is nearly imperceptible.

Here’s the answer: soft jaws. These are sacrificial non-hardened steel jaws that replace the hardened jaws of your chuck. To hold a part, you run a boring bar into the jaws and make a bore exactly the size of the part. Then when you tighten the jaws on the part, a lot of metal is in contact with it, so you don’t get pressure points that mar the work. You can make soft jaws yourself, but you have to be stupid to do that, because Shars sells them for about twenty bucks.

I don’t have soft jaws. I made the knobs with a knurled portion about an inch long. Then I put the stubs in the vise and turned the knobs carefully, cutting them down to 1/2″ in width. It’s slow and not all that professional, but it works.

You will notice a shimmery sort of line that runs around the knurls. I’ll tell you the reason for that.

I have a scissor knurling tool. The advantage of this is that it squeezes the part from the top and bottom, applying no net sideways force to it. A scissors tool won’t push the part out of the chuck. It’s great. Buy one.

There is a problem with a scissors tool. You can’t gradually increase the pressure, the way you can with a tool that pushes from the side. You have to adjust it in steps, using a nut on top of the tool. The problem with this is that it’s easy to end up with too much pressure. That’s what happened to me.

When you use too much pressure, as you move the tool down the work, it may turn slightly in the toolpost. When that happens, you get that little shimmery band. It’s a very minimal defect. But you don’t want it, so don’t be afraid to make several light passes.

Here’s another great thing to know: you do NOT have to measure the diameter of the work before applying diamond knurls. I had been taught that this was necessary, but that’s wrong. You have to do it with straight knurls, or they won’t mesh on successive turns. But diamond knurls will work on any diameter. Try it and see.

Also, it’s nearly impossible to get a knurled part with a precise specified diameter, because knurling makes the diameter bigger.

I plan to redo these knobs, but with all the false starts and scrapped parts, I considered these adequate for a 1.0 version.

In the past, I tended to do a lot of machining that required little precision. I called it “woodworking with machine tools.” But eventually, you have to get it together. The last couple of weeks have improved my skills a great deal. I hope the things I’ve told you in this blog entry will help you. Believe it or not, it took a lot of practice, reading, and forum begging to get this information.

Og from Neanderpundit may come over and obliterate all of it, but it has worked for me, and I got it from people who are much better at machining than I am. It may not be the best advice available, but it’s pretty good.

Take it and Run

Sometimes a helpful word is more helpful if it’s short. I want to tell you something very important and very useful.

What we perceive as discouragement is actually hunger for prayer in tongues.

The Other Things Will Come on Their Own

Last night one of my pastors taught about peace as a fruit of the Spirit, and in some way that I no longer recall, I found myself thinking about inherited wisdom.

When the world runs properly, it runs on inheritance, not repetitious work. By using the word “repetitious,” I am acknowledging the fact that inheriting prevents us from having to re-do work our forebears did.

If you are born in the dirt, and you school yourself and find a way to get income, and you learn how to take care of it and invest it, when you have kids, they won’t have to repeat your efforts. Or at least they shouldn’t have to. From day one, you can tell them what you learned, and you can require them to apply it. You can send them to good schools. You can show them how to save and invest. You can leave wealth to them so they won’t have to work 12-hour days and become slaves to lenders.

You started at one level. Your kids will start at another. The word for that is “progress.” If you don’t do these things, your kids may end up poor and beaten.

People think they shouldn’t give their kids things. There are billionaires who refuse to leave their kids fortunes, because they think it will ruin them.

What could be more stupid?

The money isn’t the problem. The problem is inside the heirs. Many, many people who inherited money went on to increase it and best their own parents. It’s silly to make the assumption that your kids can’t succeed unless they suffer.

These truths apply to money, but that’s not what we should focus on. They apply to wisdom and good habits. If you can impart your wisdom and good habits to a kid, you can leave him absolutely no money, and he’ll still be all right.

In a family, wisdom and good habits can only be sustained through communion with God.

Without God’s help, people don’t behave rationally. You can tell people the truth over and over, and what you tell them may be obvious, yet supernatural forces can lead them to believe things which are patently wrong.

I’ve learned to look for a supernatural explanation whenever people behave in a way that makes no sense. Even a stupid person will have common sense if he isn’t led astray. In order to get people to approve of things like abortion, body modification, homosexuality, debt, and so on, people have to be deceived, and that implies the existence of deceivers.

If your family isn’t godly and attuned to the Holy Spirit, you will hear and believe stupid things, and wisdom will seem ridiculous to you.

Last night while I listened to my pastor, I started to realize how little wisdom my parents had passed on to me.

I’ve seen people speak wisdom to their kids. I’ve seen it in real life, and I’ve seen it in movies and TV shows. A parent puts a kid on his knee, and he says, “Always remember…”, and out come words that kid can apply when he’s eighty.

That didn’t happen to me! Not much, anyway. Everyone’s parents teach them a few good things, but I am sorry to say that my parents were not wise people, and they didn’t have much to teach me. They were smart. They were not wise.

My dad didn’t really make an effort. He felt that as long as he brought money home, his job was done, and we were supposed to leave him alone so he could watch TV. My mother realized she had an obligation, but she had no support, and she was too busy with the tail-chasing busy-ness of putting out fires of dysfunctionality in the house.

I was not a rebellious kid, but I was functioning with half a parent, and I was lazy and stubborn. I just wanted to be left alone. Wonder where I learned that.

Do I write this to condemn my parents? Of course not. My problems are my own fault now, and the obligation to fix them is mine. But if we had known God, I would never have had to deal with most of the failures I’ve experienced. My parents were educated, but they were very ignorant. They didn’t know what a family needs to make it grow. As a result, neither did I.

We think poverty is a natural state. We think it means having little natural wealth. That’s completely wrong. Real poverty is invisible. Part of us exists in the supernatural realm, and if that part is poor, the rest of us is like a plant with rotten roots. It doesn’t matter how big the fruit are as of this moment. Our harvests will eventually dry up.

I know many Christian families now. Most are not affluent. Yet they have things that look like unattainable treasures to me. The siblings LIKE each other. The parents show each other affection. They pray for each other. I can’t even imagine what that’s like. My mother died at sixty-one, and I can recall ONE stunted display of affection between her and my father; he kissed her on the scalp as he was leaving us (and I don’t mean leaving for work). My sister has been unbearable to be around for the majority of my life. When I go to Facebook and I see people posting photos of families having fun, it seems foreign. We never had fun together. That’s so strange.

All these problems could have been avoided, and to a great extent, they can still be fixed, but God is the only way. He gives us knowledge. He shows us tools, and he gives us faith, which is the power that makes the tools work. When we pick up the tools and use them, he transforms us and our surroundings. He brings life out of ground that used to be dry. He drives away the pests and cures the blights.

If you don’t have faith, you are poor and blind. It’s that simple. Faith is the fundamental gift. If you have faith, you can get knowledge, wisdom, and discernment. But if you’re not praying in tongues, you’re not using the Bible-specified tool that causes your faith to grow. So you should expect continued failure. You should never go to God and ask, “Why me?” Like tech support people love to say: READ THE MANUAL.

It’s upsetting to realize how bad off I used to be. But it can help me save other people from the same pit, so if Satan managed to steal from me and enslave me for a while, he will pay manyfold through the people God pulls out of his hand through me.

If you’re giving your kids money and not helping them commune with God, you might as well throw them out of the house to beg. You are a failure as a parent. Turn it around while you can. The one thing kids should not inherit is regret.

Confirmation

I had a remarkable experience today. My pastor preached about the upcoming persecution Christians will face. He says it will be coming from gays.

I have been saying this for what? Two years? And I don’t tell my pastor what to preach. It just happened. God told me, and then he told my pastor. We didn’t conspire.

The Bible tells of a “mark of the beast.” This is some kind of sign that will identify people as followers of the beast, a Satanic leader (believed to be a human being) who will rule the world before Jesus returns. If you have the mark of the beast on your right hand or on your forehead, you’ll be able to buy and sell. Otherwise, you’re out. So you’ll starve to death, or at least you’ll become marginalized and impoverished. Exactly like the Jews under Hitler.

It’s starting to look like the mark may be a rainbow tattoo.

In Colorado, baker Jack Phillips refused to bake wedding cakes for homosexuals. He is a Christian. Obviously, baking a wedding cake for two men is a tacit endorsement of homosexual marriage, and a Christian cannot, in good conscience, create such a cake. It is extremely cruel to force a Christian to participate in a rite celebrating sexual perversion. But Colorado has an unconstitutional law prohibiting businesses from refusing to serve people based on their sexual orientation, and a local judge has ruled that it trumps a Christian’s religious freedom.

The solution? Mr. Phillips no longer bakes wedding cakes. Fortunately for him, he will not need to, because now he has hordes of Christians (and probably even some gays) buying other things from him strictly to protest the ruling. But what if all of his business revolved around weddings? What if he were a wedding planner or singer? He’d be out of a job.

As it is, he will be forced to attend sensitivity classes which are virtually certain to amount to religious persecution, in that they will require him to endorse homosexuality (directly or indirectly) in order to pass.

This is amazing. It’s like sending a Muslim to a class where they force him to eat pork. And it’s happening in America! In 2000, no one would have believed this kind of anti-Christian government action was possible.

Back then, Barack Obama was against gay marriage. How quickly his worldview reversed. It’s a wonderful convenience, being able to change your mind that fast. It worked so well for the French under the Vichy regime.

My pastor mentioned this case today. He said he didn’t know why he was saying it, but he predicted that in the future, people will simply be put out of business if they don’t support the sin of homosexual relations. I think he’s right. It may be possible for American Christians to stop it through prayer and cursing, but it will surely happen in countries where Christians are rarer or weaker.

We asked for this when we started involving government in the business of remedying discrimination. It’s like the old story about a woman who got a cat to chase a mouse. Then she needed a dog to get rid of the cat. After a few more steps, she found herself buying an elephant. Anti-discrimination laws were the cat. Now the gay elephant is threatening to turn us into untouchables.

Am I saying I’m against Title VII and similar laws? Maybe. I’m not sure. I do know that we often turn to government to solve problems that would have solved themselves in less harmful ways.

Does anyone seriously think that we needed laws to end discrimination? Without Uncle Sam’s “help,” would we still have whites-only public schools in 2014? Surely not. The laws reflected change in public opinion, and that change would eventually have swept the nation. It might have added five or ten years to the process, and that would have resulted in a great deal of suffering, but things would have changed without the government’s clumsy, inept actions, and the government, which is heartless and stupid, would now have less control over our lives. It might have been a good trade.

Now we have a pile of laws banning racial and religious discrimination, and almost nobody minds that, but gays have managed to turn these laws into hammers for crushing Christians. They say being gay is just like being black. Run that canard by some black people, if you’re brave enough. Black is a skin color. Homosexual relations are acts. It’s not the same. No mainstream religion ever said being black was a sin. The Mormons came pretty close, but even they had no issues with doing business with black people.

My pastor told us we needed to discern the winds that were coming against us. Overall, Christians live in victory when they do things right, but sometimes very bad things happen to us because we belong to Jesus. Peter was crucified upside-down, after watching the Romans crucify his wife. The Romans burned Christians alive. There is no point in listing more atrocities. They are well known, and they continue today, especially in Muslim countries.

He’s right. God does wonderful things for Christians, and he gives us the power to prevail in every situation, up to a point. Sometimes he permits us to be killed, jailed, and so on. But according to the Bible, we are supposed to see those things coming. The Bible says God does nothing without telling the prophets first. Most Christian churches deny modern prophets, so they have no idea what’s going on. But some of us still acknowledge prophets and listen to them.

Fred Stone, the father of minister Perry Stone, made some predictions before he died, and one of them was that a time of great spiritual confusion was coming. He said the only people who would know which way to go would be Christians who pray in tongues. My pastor doesn’t know a lot about Fred Stone, but he said the same thing, in so many words. People will be weak, and like Peter on the night before the crucifixion, they will fall away. Some will decide homosexuality is fine, in acts of desperate rationalization. Others will just lie in order to live. The only way to stay true to God in the face of persecution and murder will be through the transforming power of the Holy Spirit, and that means praying in tongues daily.

I look around the web, and I see a lot of comments about the current wave of persecution. Many Americans are amazed! Apparently they thought gays wanted peace. That’s like saying the Palestinians will be satisfied with one more acre of Israel. The goal of many gays–the goal of the great spirit that pulls their strings–is to get rid of Christianity. They want to remove the Body of Christ from the earth. This is the very definition of “antichrist.”

People thought they could give up one Biblical prohibition (found in both Testaments) and have no problems. Now many are starting to see that they gave a great deal of control over their lives to a very loud 3% of the population. Will they rise up and push back? They haven’t so far.

The prosperity preachers are going to have a disastrous harvest if the persecution increases. They haven’t taught people anything, except how to give them their life savings. Their flocks will either turn on them or go pro-gay. I’m sure many of the pastors will go pro-gay. Some will just plain go gay. The ministry has a strange way of drawing homosexuals, and a gay man who is not Spirit-led (there is no other kind) can serve his whole life and not realize how wrong he is. We’ve already seen charismatic pastors come out of the closet after sex scandals. Surely more will follow.

One nice thing about getting really close to God is that you can get a surprising amount of protection. You may be martyred some day, but until then, you should be able to do very well. And it will certainly be better than serving Satan, who abuses his people in a capricious and unpredictable manner.

We have no record of Jesus having any problems or defeats whatsoever until he was arrested. John lived to be very old, and ancient accounts tell us that when the Romans boiled him in oil, he was not harmed in the least. If you know what your weapons are, and you use them, you should be able to insulate yourself until things really go south. I know the apostles sometime suffered badly, but we should not assume them to be perfect models. Jesus said followers would rise who would outdo his own achievements. We haven’t seen them yet. The apostles didn’t do it, so he had to be referring to people living much later. The greatest Christians have yet to be seen. Don’t assume you won’t be one of them.

On the one hand, we have some Biblical stories about a few beatings, but on the other, we have Jesus, who said he had overcome the world and that it would not hurt us. Given these facts, I am inclined to believe Jesus and assume the apostles could have done better. Perhaps they went to places the Spirit told them not to visit. Or maybe they were warned that they would suffer briefly and ordered to go anyway, and they went.

For the most part, it seems that strong Christians have very good lives, although they may be killed in unpleasant ways. Personally, I would not measure the quality of my life by the suffering I encounter on the day of my death. If things go well until then, I will consider myself blessed and victorious. And think of what comes after a brief period of pain. In paradise, the least of us will be greater than the failed cherub who rules the earth. We will be completely out of his reach. No pain. No aging. He will seem contemptible to us, if he doesn’t already. Think how wonderful that will be.

If the actions of the gay army scare you, get up every day and curse them with failure. Pray for God to destroy their works. Speak revelation to them so they might change. Speak defeat to the spirits that rule them. And be honest when you talk about the issue. Say you stand with God. Don’t let other Christians feel like they’re cut off.

I’ve already said way too much to hope to escape notice. It’s out there, like college girl’s naked spring break pictures. I can’t really turn back. If things heat up, I’ll stick out like a sore thumb. I won’t be afraid. I won’t shut up. The strongest being in the universe is with me. Trying to please man is an exercise in futility in the best of times, and in our persecution-heavy future, it will also be a ticket to destruction.

Instead, Here’s the God Who Watches and Says “There, There.”

Today I read a testimony by a blind woman who got breast cancer. She did not receive miraculous help. Her message: “Don’t think you’re invincible just because you have faith.” I’m paraphrasing.

I subscribe to Kirk Cameron’s Facebook updates, and he was the one who linked to the story from Facebook. The comments on the piece are full of approval.

I just don’t know what to say. Through Moses, God parted the Red Sea and made the water stand up in vertical walls. Through Samson, he exerted hundreds or thousands of tons of force and lifted the gates of a city out of the ground (somehow the stones stayed together). Through Jesus he called a rotten corpse out of a tomb, and it walked to him, resurrected and restored. And today I’m seeing Christians approving a story telling people not to expect too much from God!

“Faith” doesn’t mean accepting suffering as something you can’t change, while still loving God. Faith is a substance, like water or rock (Hebrews 11:1). It exists in the supernatural realm. God provides it to us when we pray in tongues, and then when we need it, it’s there, and we can send it to God to cause powerful works here on earth.

People have said God doesn’t do miracles any more, except possibly on rare occasions, through a Pope, or at Lourdes. That’s the attitude the beggars at the Pool of Bethesda had! They couldn’t make anything happen. They had to sit and wait and hope to be there when the waters moved. Didn’t the crucifixion change things at all? Of course it did. Jesus said we would do GREATER works than his. He said WE would do them, not that GOD would do them.

Christianity would still be wonderful even if God didn’t heal disease and block our enemies. God didn’t need to offer us these things in order to get us to accept salvation. But he did. And he didn’t say it was a temporary offer.

Some people cite 1 Corintians 13:8 as evidence that miracles would cease. It says:

“Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge,it will vanish away.”

It doesn’t mention miracles. And as for tongues, it refers to a time in the future, when Jesus is with us and tongues are no longer needed. When the enemy is beaten and the war is over, you don’t need to talk in code.

Human beings have a natural tendency to try to explain bad things away. The church got away from the Holy Spirit, miracles dried up, and people didn’t know why, so they decided it was God’s plan. They didn’t want to say the Bible wasn’t true, so this seemed like a better option. They made excuses for God, which is about as ridiculous as it gets. They should have been asking themselves what they were doing wrong, but the church had policy of torturing and burning people who questioned the party line.

These days they just tell you you’re a divider and not a positive thinker. They would probably burn us if they could, though.

The world is full of Christians who deny God’s power because they can’t find it. Not because it isn’t available. “If my church doesn’t have it, it must be evil.”

Tongues are still with us. Miracles are still with us, and they happen to millions of people, not just Popes and strange homeless men who wander around in robes.

It’s good to teach people to stick with God even when things go wrong, but to teach them that things will never go right…well, let me put it this way: did Jesus ever teach that? He warned people that they would be persecuted and even killed, but he didn’t say anything about living in a pattern of consistent defeat. He said he had overcome the world for us, and that it would not harm us.

Barring a word of warning from a prophet, I will always look for the best possible outcome in any situation.

Denying the miraculous is carnal. It is the DEFINITION of carnality.

Rid Yourself of Illegal Immigrants

The positive comments I’ve been getting are surprising to me. My readership has gone down by about 98% (although I can’t account for accumulation sites that steal my work and redistribute it without impacting my Sitemeter), and apart from that, this is the Internet, where everyone claws and hacks at each other. When you write something here, you don’t expect waves of love in response. On the contrary, you are more likely to worry that nuts will find your house and vandalize it.

I’m glad I’m not getting a lot of criticism for discussing God without a divinity degree. There are denominations that have nearly zero interest in hearing from people who haven’t immersed themselves in church history and in misguided publications written by ancient figures who read a lot of books but never encounted the Holy Spirit.

For the most part, what I relate here is testimony. That means it’s things I experienced, or it comes from personal revelations. That’s as good as it will ever get. I am not going to spend ten years getting a Ph.D. in theology before saying what I know to be true. That can’t be helped. It’s an unreasonable expectation.

You can’t require God to work through the people you choose. He picked Amos the vinedresser and Rahab the prostitute. He chooses whomever he wants, and he seems to delight in picking people whose nature offends church bigwigs. It happened over and over in the Bible. Jeremiah the kid, Jepthah the son of a prostitute, Moses the stuttering murderer with low self-esteem…it’s not just a freak occurrence when it happens. It’s actually a pattern.

We love anything that seems “official.” We look for a stamp of human approval. This is why so many people idolize (word chosen carefully) greedy louts they see on TV. God doesn’t work that way. He is not about centralized authority. He came here and died so authority could be distributed among millions or billions of his children. He did not come to create levels of closeness to him, with a few really impressive saints who are his children and lots of little people who are stepchildren, grandchildren, or subcontractors. Every one of us is supposed to be right up there next to him. There is God, and beneath him there is one (and only one) generation of children, and we are brothers and sisters.

You may call a person your “father in the faith,” and that’s okay, and it has a valid meaning in its own way, but he’s still just a brother. If he tells you one thing, and God tells you another, you should listen to God.

There are people out there who will get very angry if you disagree with Benny Hinn, based not on the quality of his teaching, but on his personal wealth and the size of his audience. Nonetheless, Benny Hinn is a pretty unproductive role model, and he is wrong about many important things. The Pope is wrong, too. People you know may be better sources of information. It’s a mistake to refuse to listen to a Spirit-filled Christian just because you know him, and because he isn’t famous. If you don’t think a supermarket bag boy can be a prophet, you need to open your eyes.

People could come here and tell me I’m useless because I didn’t go to a seminary and turn Christianity into calculus. They’re not doing that, and it’s a relief.

Testimony from a truthful person connected to the Spirit is much better than dusty books written by people who became famous after the church fell into a state of rot. Books are full of theory, guesses, mistakes, and lies. Testimony is what actually happened. The conclusions you draw from it may be wrong, but the testimony itself is not. It is reliable. That’s a big deal.

Much of the doctrine of old denominations comes from wrong guesses and deliberate lies. This was also true of Judaism in Jesus’s time. He said the Jews of his day venerated man’s traditions and, in so doing, made the scriptures ineffectual. He used ignorant men from Galilee to spread his knowledge. The scholars were useless to him because they had no respect for his education, so he used people who listened, and by doing that, he proved that the whole notion of religious scholarship is misguided. Heaven isn’t full of geniuses.

The other day I realized that in practical terms, a genius can be less intelligent than a person who has a low IQ yet is willing to listen. I know people who are very smart, who do very stupid things over and over for decades. I also know people who aren’t smart, who listen to good advice and do smart things. These people have better lives than stubborn smart people. They live wisely. So regardless of their mental limitations, effectively, they are more intelligent than smart people.

I have spent a lot of time living stupidly, and people my age who are not as bright, who listened to God from their youth, have led lives that have been much more prosperous and peaceful. I suppose I, better than anyone, have the authority to say that brains can get in your way, and so can knowledge.

God gives me a lot of revelation now. I’ve read the Bible, but I haven’t memorized it, so I don’t know everything that’s in it. Very often, I’ll tell people something about God, and then weeks or months later, I’ll see it in the Bible, in a passage I don’t remember reading. If I get a true revelation from the Holy Spirit, and I pass it on honestly, it’s as reliable as the Bible. People forget that the Bible was written by ordinary human beings. If every copy were burned tomorrow, and it were impossible to rewrite it, its teachings would still live. God would continue revealing them to people who pray in tongues. Eventually we would have a new and different Bible, if we needed it, and it would be accurate.

If you don’t respect me, it doesn’t matter. Don’t read my blog. Just pray in tongues, be honest with God, and keep moving. Eventually you’ll know everything you need to know. But if I can be useful to you, keep reading. I am not making stuff up, and it really does work.

I keep learning about spirits. It seems like a lot of charismatic preachers are taking pains to discourage people from “blaming the devil” for everything, and that’s dangerous, because every one of us has demons and fallen angels to fight. It’s not just epileptics and people who cut themselves.

The Bible calls us “houses.” A house is a structure in which beings dwell. Your spirit dwells in you. No other spirit should be in there, except for the Holy Spirit. Satan is a spirit. Other fallen angels are spirits The demons–our half-human cousins, who were birthed by women–are spirits. Jesus made it very clear that they can dwell in us. He described a man as a house an evil spirit can leave and then return to, bringing seven worse spirits. He wasn’t just talking because he had a big mouth. He was serious. He was warning us. You can’t be a Christian and not believe in Spirits. To believe Jesus was God was to believe he knew what he was talking about, and he believed in Satan and demons.

I believe people from certain segments of society are more likely to be oppressed by spirits. I’m from Eastern Kentucky, where people live in defeat, and my family has had all sorts of demonic issues. I know a lot of black people, and they have the same problem. One powerful sign of demonic aggression is dysfunction in a family. My family is highly dysfunctional. When I was a kid, we were afraid to see my dad come home. My sister could not do right to save her life. I had nightmares every night until I was eight or nine years old. I never saw my parents show affection for each other. My sister and I could not stand each other. My parents didn’t know God, so they opened the door to every spirit you can name, and in they came.

My sister’s current state of defeat, misery, anger, and bitterness is impossible to describe adequately with words. I had all sorts of failures and problems in life, in spite of my intelligence, talents, and advantages as a white American from an upper middle-class family. My dad has no grandchildren. My sister and I are single. My mother died from self-inflicted lung cancer. My dad is tense, angry, and hopeless, and he resists God in spite of every sign God gives him.

We didn’t get here on our own. We had lots of help from Satan. Even when we tried to turn things around, forces we could not resist slapped us down. We were not children of God, so we had not inherited authority. When you have no authority, it’s normal for bad things to happen to you.

I spent most of my life making myself a boarding house for demons. I indulged sexual lust. I indulged anger and bitterness. I cultivated pride, thinking self-esteem was the secret to success. I thought I was a good person because I told the truth and didn’t try to hurt anyone (physically). I left the front and back doors open all day, every day. To think I would not end up with demons, because “that was only in Bible times,” would be truly fatuous.

I have been delivered from a number of things in services at my church. Some people are embarrassed or not honest enough to ask for deliverance in front of other people. Not me. I don’t care if it’s on national TV. I want these things OUT. So when God tells me to, I will gladly go up and get help.

I was delivered from acedia and a spirit of murder before the whole church. Maybe some people thought I was nuts. I don’t care. I felt these things leave me. They were real. I felt their fear when my pastor said people needed to be delivered. My body turned cold. My hands were like ice. And after they left, I was changed. Deliverance is not phony, and it is not something only a few people need.

This morning I received a deliverance here at home. For as long as I could remember, I had had a problem with a crazy voice that said awful things in the back of my mind. I am extremely creative, so I am used to having ideas fly around in my head, and I had always assumed this was the source of the voice. It would say or think terrible, disrespectful things about God. It would put obscene images in my head. This morning God told me what it was, and I was amazed. It was a spirit of antichrist.

I didn’t realize a committed, sincere Christian could have this problem. I am a hundred percent serious about my walk with God. I have no interest in going back. I am Spirit-led. But there was still a snotty voice that said strange things about God. I paid no attention to it, and I thought it was ineffective, but it wasn’t something I liked.

Today I spoke to it, and I told it to be cast into the sea. I felt the powerful faith that comes from prayer in tongues, and I felt the fear of NOT believing, which helped me even more. I felt the spirit’s defeat.

When it was over, my mind was still. This happens when you receive deliverance. An unwelcome voice that yaps and yaps is gone, so it seems quiet. It’s a great relief. Like having a splinter removed.

Here’s an interesting thing: one spirit may do more than one thing to you, and it may have buddies. If you have a spirit that makes you angry, it might do something else that seems unrelated. Maybe it will make you gluttonous or lazy. Who knows? But if you receive deliverance from a spirit you know to be involved in one area of your life, you may get relief in areas that seem unrelated.

This thing didn’t like God. In particular, it did not like Jesus. It envied him. But I think it also hated people, because the people who treat me badly don’t annoy me as much now.

Spirits can come back. You may have to keep throwing them out. But they can’t win. They don’t have the authority to overcome you when you persist.

I put this out there because it’s important. Many Christians hush this stuff up, and that hurts people who need to know it. I don’t feel like hushing it up. I am too old to whimper about the negative opinions of people who don’t know anything.

This morning I got a word from God, and I kept repeating it back to him: “Thank you for cleansing my house.”

If there are parts of you that you don’t like–if you get sick of yourself sometimes–it may be that you have spirits to deal with. If you feel compulsions and attitudes that don’t appeal to you and seem foreign to you, it may be because they ARE foreign. You can be rid of them. You’ll need faith, so pray in tongues every day. But you can be free.

Lift Your Snout up to Heaven

Another weird week has gone by.

A day or two ago, someone told me Kanye West had gotten married, and that a pastor from my old church officiated. Once again, that place affirms the worst things I’ve thought about it.

Eventually people from the church expressed their approval online. That was to be expected. When you’re blind, and you lead the blind into deeper blindness, they will be impressed whenever you wander into a new ditch.

I saw an online defense of this grotesque affair. The usual excuses were made. We aren’t supposed to judge. Anything that increases the size of the church is justified, because it means more people go to heaven.

Of course, that stuff is wrong.

First of all, we are REQUIRED to judge. Matthew 7 is not a ban on judging. It is a warning that before we judge others–which is one of our duties–we have to judge ourselves. Otherwise we lose perspective, and we start demanding more of others than we demand of ourselves. And we start to think of ourselves as righteous, which is a big mistake. We are supposed to judge ourselves, and having done that, we are expected to judge others. We are not expected to scream and yell and tell them they’re going to hell, but we are supposed to point out their errors so they can correct their courses.

So I am tired of hearing “Judge not.” It’s the motto of the people who are using homosexuality to destroy Christian lives.

Second, as a pastor pointed out in my church Tuesday, Jesus did not shoot for the biggest church possible. In fact, he shrank the church. On Pentecost, out of the thousands of people who claimed to love him, only 120 were left. That’s just the way the kingdom of God works. Most people don’t get in. Most people will not listen and change.

The gate is small, and the path is constricted. It’s just like the birth canal. We are supposed to be quality believers, not fair-weather Christians. If we are strong and full of knowledge, we will be able to raise up future generations of believers. If not, no matter how many of us there are, we will fail, and the church will either cease to exist or cease to be relevant because it’s so weak.

Jesus doesn’t want people to go hell, but then again, he’s not the one who sends them there. God does force people into hell after they die, but while they live, their own choices determine their paths. Because of free will, God is not able to save everyone. That’s a fact of existence, and it can’t be changed. Nothing we can do will prevent hell from being filled up. We can reduce the population, but that’s about it.

If we whore ourselves out and stop teaching about sin and transformation, we will become part of the world, which is exactly what happened at my old church. It’s not really a church. It’s a whorehouse. It belongs to the secular world. It does tremendous harm. I know because I deal with the refugees.

So numbers do not justify resisting God. What we gain in the present day, we will lose, with interest, in the future.

I’m all for evangelizing Kanye West, but that’s not what’s happening. He’s evangelizing the church for Satan. He is teaching kids they can fornicate and grovel for society’s approval and still be good Christians. That’s wrong. He should not be held up as a role model. He should be held up as a warning. He is ignorant. He is obnoxious. He is arrogant. He makes his living corrupting children. He lives a cursed life, no matter how it looks to the simpleminded. No pastor should be associating with him publicly until he repents. Once again, the world is leading Trinity Church, when Trinity Church should be leading the world.

It’s sad, because the young pastor who performed the rite is headed down a blind alley. He is trying to make himself famous using his natural abilities. The hard truth is that he doesn’t have a lot of natural ability. He’s not particularly smart. His personality can be off-putting. He has no talents to speak of. What he did have, way back when, was the ability to receive revelation and pass it on to others. That was his only real hope of success. But it’s not what he is relying on.

There are talented preachers out there who have hit the big time because they have talents. Benny Hinn has a giant ego, a complete lack of shame, and a fair talent for showmanship. Keith Craft is a talented speaker with a big bag of motivational tricks he took from people like Zig Ziglar. Kenneth Copeland is a gifted manipulator, and he has the ability to intimidate and dominate people. Joel Osteen is shrewd and cunning, and he knows what people like to hear. The pastors at Trinity look up to people like this, and they want to be like them, but they don’t have their gifts. In the natural, they are mediocre. They need God’s help to make it.

For every Led Zeppelin, there are a thousand local bands that play in filthy bars. For every rock musician who becomes a millionaire at 20, there are a thousand who find themselves living in rented trailers at the age of 60. That’s how the natural world works, and pastors who chase the TBN sideshow barkers are at the mercy of that system. They always think they’re on the verge of success, but for the vast majority, it will never come. Satan gives a few people the illusion of success so many others will chase the same mechanical rabbit. It’s like a lotttery. Not everyone can win.Lotteries give, but their purpose is to take.

So I’m not happy about the Kanye West marriage, but I don’t think it matters, because that church was going nowhere anyway.

Things keep going crazy in my own walk. Having escaped the shadow of the curse on the other church, I am growing in the light in the new one.

I have received a lot of revelation lately. The pieces of the puzzle keep coming to me because I pray in tongues. I can only scratch the surface here, because it would take 10,000 words to cover it all, but I’ll give it a shot.

I’m learning more and more about grace, which means everything–things we haven’t earned–that God does for us.

It’s very clear that we are not supposed to try to help God. We should obey, but we shouldn’t do anything he hasn’t told us to do. If you go out and build an orphanage when God hasn’t told you to do it, you have sinned, no matter how many kids you help. Imagine what God’s response would have been had the Hebrews built an orphanage for the children of Jericho.

The Bible calls us “heirs,” and an heir is a person who has already received title to things that belonged to a dead person. If you’re in your dad’s will, and he’s alive, you’re not an heir yet. Legally, it’s incorrect to call you an heir until he dies.

On the other hand, there are little hints as to how God feels about carnal people. He calls us heirs, but he says the “wages” of sin is death. So sinners have to work for wages, and we don’t. That makes sense. Work is a curse, found in the book of Genesis. Jesus died to remove it from us. If you choose to pick it back up, you will have to be satisfied with what you can earn instead of receiving the fortune God built.

These days, a lot of people hate heirs. We admire any fool who calls himself a self-made man. A big percentage of Americans support stealing money from heirs via the estate tax, simply because they don’t like to see other people receive things they themselves can’t have. They learned this attitude from Satan. He’s evil, and so are we, but unlike him, we have a way out. He has to be humiliated and burn forever while we enjoy a beautiful life in the presence of God. We are like spoiled younger children whom older children hate. We are like Joseph, Isaac, and Jacob.

We are not comfortable with the idea that we should go to God and seek things we don’t deserve. Churches love to tell us that we have to earn God’s help, which is just stupid. God came down to us and literally died so we could have a fortune he created, and the church ran in front of it and told us we could not have it. And to this day, it sits largely untouched. Healing. Freedom from internal wickedness. Financial success. Victory. It’s all sitting there, with the shrink wrap still on it.

If you think about it, opposing inheritance is moronic. Look at the way it works on earth. A man is born with nothing, and he ruins his life in order to obtain skills, money, land, and possessions. What happens if he doesn’t leave it to his kids? They have to do the same thing. Over and over, succeeding generations end up serving Mammon and their bellies, building the same heap of dung up, over and over again.

Is that intelligent? Why would anyone think that was a good idea? Yes, sure, you can spoil kids, and you may destroy their work ethic. But in reality, that has nothing to do with inherited money. There are plenty of rich kids who work hard even though they don’t have to, and God knows the poor are lazy. Other factors are at work.

God never rewarded ANYONE in the Bible for hard work. Some people point to Ruth, but she didn’t work. She was a charity case. She took grain someone else grew. She paid nothing.

God rewards faith, not work. Faith is more important than need. God will let you die in misery if you don’t have faith. Faith is the money of his world. And he told us the way to get it: habitual prayer in tongues. That’s in the book of Jude.

The Bible is like a catalog. God has put a lot of offers in it. He has made a lot of promises. If you want something from the catalog, you have to BUY it. Isaiah said we would BUY without money. And when you want something from a catalog, you don’t REQUEST it. You ORDER it. You have a legal right to it. So you can decree things that are consistent with God’s promises, and if you have faith, they will come to pass.

Jesus told us that if we told a mountain to be thrown into the sea, and we believed in our hearts, it would be done. He was speaking of the strongholds in our lives. He didn’t just say we could ask for the mountain to be removed. He said we could ORDER it to move. And faith is the lever that moves it. That faith is not you trying to believe; it’s the Holy Spirit believing inside you, because you pray in the Spirit.

You can speak to the curses in your life and tell them to be thrown into the sea.

We don’t do this much. Instead, we beg. Because we have no money to buy. We have no faith. “God please do this. God please do that. Pity me. Feel sorry for me.” That’s not how a rich kid talks. A rich kid speaks with authority. “Here is my dad’s American Express card. Go get that red Porsche and bring it to me NOW, and I want the air conditioning running when it gets here.”

If you lack faith, you are poor in spirit. Literally.

I take an authority-based approach now. I tell my iniquities to be cast into the sea. I tell my persistent curses to be cast into the sea. It works. I’m not saying everything is perfect as of this second, but I am headed the right way, and there is no power that can stop me. I will arrive.

I got a few interesting revelations this morning, which I will pass on.

Remember when Jesus cast the demons out of the Gadarene, and he let them go into pigs, and the pigs drowned themselves? This is related to the story in which Peter walked on water. People love to say Jesus walked on water, but that’s not the important part of the story. What Peter did was more important.

We are born under curses, and we come into this world with demons (our cousins, because their mothers were human) assigned to us. Every Christian has demons, and they may manifest in things like disease, deformity, or iniquities. When you come to Christ, you are supposed to get rid of them.

In the Bible, waters represent beings, or more specifically, their voices and words. The Sea of Galilee was the Satan-hijacked world, full of human and spirit voices. When Peter stood on the water while looking at Jesus, he was showing that a Christian can rise above the evil voices and live in victory.

Look what Psalm 32 says:

For this cause everyone who is godly shall pray to You
In a time when You may be found;
Surely in a flood of great waters
They shall not come near him.
You are my hiding place;
You shall preserve me from trouble;
You shall surround me with songs of deliverance.

People aren’t afraid of actual water. We don’t sit up nights worrying that we will drown in flash floods.This refers to evil words. All the power in the world comes from words.

We are supposed to stay focused on Jesus and his power and promises. And we should be AFRAID to doubt. Peter could have died because of his doubt. As of today, I understand what “fear of the Lord” means. It means fear of doubting him. We should be afraid to slander him in our hearts by doubting him. The Bible equates faith with righteousness, so unbelief is sin. And it’s a very big sin. It cuts the extension cord that makes God’s power tools run for us.

The Gadarene symbolized a saved person. Jesus cast his demons out, and they ran into pigs, who symbolize wordly people. If you get delivered from demons, there is nothing to prevent them from going into your neighbor the Buddhist, because he has no covenant with God. What did the pigs do? They ran to the water–the voices of evil–and drowned. This is how life actually works. If you’re carnal, you will drown. If you can focus on Jesus, you will walk on the power of the world.

The supernatural is everything. If this world is a river, the supernatural is the rain that fills the source. Carnal people fight with natural tools. They work hard. They sin in order to get around problems. They believe in themselves. And eventually, their efforts fail, whether in their own generation, or those of their descendants. But God’s people are supposed to use spiritual tools like blessing, cursing, and prayer. We strike at the roots, not the leaves. And we get long-lasting results. As the Bible says, whom the son sets free is free INDEED. It’s not an illusion intended to lull you into more error.

Faith is a hack. It hacks reality. Using natural tools is like correcting a Microsoft Word error by putting white out on your screen.

Final thing: you can speak cleansing to your DNA. Science now says that events leave impressions on our DNA, and these recordings can be passed on. So believe it or not, curses can be recorded in DNA. It makes sense, since many generational curses are genetic. God gave me a crazy idea; he told me to speak cleansing to my DNA. And I did it. It works. I have no idea what the results will be, but I can tell you that God moved.

I could go on, but that’s all I feel like saying. Put this stuff to work, and you will see more success in your life. Your definition of success may change, but that’s a blessing, too.