Make Sure You’re Serving the One You Think You Serve

This morning while I was praying, I got a new revelation. Here is what it adds up to: today’s megachurches are really concentration camps where Satan puts Christians in order to keep them in slavery. I have written about this general idea before, but the notion of churches AS camps set up by Satan is new.

The only disclaimer I will make here is that I’m not suggesting the things that happen in churches are as horrible as the things that happened during the Holocaust. It’s not a literal analogy, so don’t stretch it farther than it should go.

A few years back, I visited the Holocaust Memorial in Washington. I’ve written about this. One of the exhibits was a large model of the death camp at Auschwitz. Looking at the camp, I realized it was Satan’s parody of the Temple.

At the Temple, clean animals (which are symbolic of the Jews) were killed in a way sanctioned by God, releasing their blood. They were burned, and much of them was consumed. And it pleased God.

In the death camps, Jews (and others, of course) were killed by asphyxiation. Their blood remained in them. They were then burned, like sacrificial animals. In Judaism, cremation is not permitted, presumably because God knew deniers would claim the Jews had never existed, had their bones not been preserved. They already do this with regard to the millions who followed Moses.

The Nazis mocked the Temple by burning Jews. They mocked the Torah by tattooing them. They mocked the Levites’ portion by taking body parts from Jews and using them for various purposes. Like animals, the Jews were consumed.

I went through all that in earlier blog posts. But I’m not sure I mentioned this. The Nazis liked to decorate their camps with signs reading “Arbeit Macht Frei,” which means, “Work Makes You Free.” This also has significance.

We are saved by grace. When we receive miracles, we receive them by grace. No one earns anything from God. To say God owes you a thing you’ve earned is to equate yourself with God and to declare the crucifixion unnecessary. Work does not make you free. In fact, work is a curse, as we know from reading Genesis 3:17:

To Adam he said, “Because you listened to what your wife said and ate from the tree about which I gave you the order, ‘You are not to eat from it,’ the ground is cursed on your account; you will work hard to eat from it as long as you live.

If you don’t think work is a curse, look at how Adam lived before he fell. God planted trees from which we were allowed to take fruit “freely,” and he gave us every plant for food. It is true that Adam was created to “cultivate” or “serve in” the garden, but the entire operation was built and prepared by God, and there is no evidence that life there was hard.

Satan loves to put us to work. He put Adam, Eve, and their descendants to work. He put the Hebrews to work in Egypt. He took soulish Jacob and made him a slave to Laban, who was a heathen. He put Samson to work at a grain mill. He made the Jews work for the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans.

Now he makes Christians work for things God wants to give us for nothing. “Work makes you free,” he tells us, while he holds back the things God wants to give us. He is like a Nazi guard, holding back Red Cross packages that belong to prisoners.

He has a wonderful strategy for making us go along with this plan. He tells us a few things that are true: we’re not worthy, we owe God, and we need to serve God. Then he adds some lies: God helps those who help themselves, God will not pay any attention to us if we don’t work really hard for him, and God wants us to have the satisfaction of overcoming through effort and sacrifice.

A lot of that stuff sounds so reasonable! We do terrible things, and then we come to God and ask for forgiveness and help. It seems only natural that he would want us to prove ourselves and purify ourselves through work. That’s what we would expect, if we were God. If we expect him to give us things for nothing, and to do big things for us, we’re spoiled! We’re abusing his grace! We’re selfish!

None of that is true, however.

Think about it. The Jews sinned, and God allowed them to enter paradise through a simple system of repentance and sacrifice. That may be harder than what Christians do, but it’s still very easy, compared to saving oneself. We sin, and we believe that simply by repenting and asking for forgiveness, we receive eternal life–ETERNAL, which means unlimited generosity–in paradise! That’s as easy as easy gets. Talk about spoiled. That is the epitome.

If we believe these things so easily, how can we be crazy enough to think God won’t do comparatively tiny things for us? If God will give you eternal life in heaven for doing virtually nothing, won’t he help you change here on earth? Won’t he fight your enemies? Won’t he heal you? Compared to eternity in paradise, making a leg grow back is, in mathematical terms, nothing. Eternal life is an infinite blessing. Shrinking a cancer is a tiny, tiny, finite blessing. Destroying an addiction? Same thing. Yet we think God wants us to earn things.

In the charismatic churches, we somehow manage to be spoiled AND deny grace. That’s a remarkable achievement of which Satan must be proud. We are spoiled because we clamor for money, money, money, and we don’t think about granting God’s wishes, as we want him to grant ours. We deny grace because we believe we have to shovel huge cash offerings into ministries in order to get God’s help. If we buy God’s goods, are we blessed children, or are we just customers?

We also deny grace by teaching self-help and positive thinking. Those things are for people who don’t have God’s assistance. You will never see a Bible passage about Moses sitting in front of a mirror reciting the Stuart Smalley affirmations.

When a fool preaches nonsense about money, Satan will help him grow a congregation. This is just like what the Nazis did when they built camps. They wanted to concentrate people in a place where they could do them harm. Satan will grow a big church for a Benny Hinn or a Kenneth Copeland, and then he’ll hold people captive with Ponzi-like promises of future riches. The pastors will become addicted to money, and once that happens, they’ll slap down anyone who brings healthy doctrine in.

This is what happened to me at Trinity Church. The pastors loved money and fame, and they thought these things were always just around the corner, if they kept up their program of twisting doctrine. The people gave and gave and gave, and once they had money invested in worthless get-rich promises, they felt that in order to get the “harvest,” they had to keep going, so anyone who contradicted the Steve Munsey gospel was seen as an enemy of prosperity. You need faith to collect the prize, so anyone who says the prize isn’t coming is effectively robbing you of your future.

The circle of rationalizations gets tighter and tighter until the church becomes a money cult.

This has happened all over the US. Satan has helped bad churches grow large, and once the people are there, he robs them of their money and teaches them they always need to give more and serve more.

Satan has to do this, because he is not omnipresent. God doesn’t need even one church. If he wants to, he can unite and teach all of his people through the Holy Spirit. He can speak to a billion people at once, whether they’re together or not. Satan has no all-powerful spirit to tie people together, so he has to rely on conventional means, and that means he likes huge congregations.

The big-church model is inherently carnal. If God is God, he can give the same messages and the same help to an infinite number of small churches. He’s actually doing that, right now. The idea that he “needs” big churches to get the message out is a denial of his power, and it is also the height of human pride.

It reminds me of a story James Thurber told. A man had a large tree moved to his yard, and someone said, “Shows what God could do if he had money.”

Right now, all over this country, there are huge churches full of neutralized Christians whose pastors serve primarily–PRIMARILY–to prevent them from getting to know the Holy Spirit. Some of the pastors are outright crooks, but others are just afraid that if they quit talking about money for ten seconds, the loot will quit pouring in. They feel they have to spend every available minute talking about carnal tools.

Guess what happened to Steve Munsey, who harps on offerings night and day? You already know if you read this blog. His church has been in foreclosure for quite some time. The court will not permit him and his cronies to run it! How’s that for failure? And now we have numbers.

Munsey’s church took in about ten million dollars per year. Munsey took $900,000 per year for travel and meals. I don’t know if he was traveling by space shuttle or what, and I guarantee you, he took offerings wherever he went, and he was probably given food and lodging, so you would think he could get by without travel money, but still, that’s the figure. He also took $500,000 per year for private plane expenses. Isn’t that “travel”? He and his wife also took AT LEAST $700,000 in yearly compensation. These figures fluctuated over the years, but they are true. He also had his own zoo. Look it up. I’m begging you. Don’t believe me.

His mortgage was about $100,000 per month, so that’s roughly $1 million per year. He found over $2.1 million for ghetto-rich idiocy, but he couldn’t manage to write a comparatively small check once a month.

This is the man who inspired the leaders of Trinity Church. Businessmen have gone to jail for doing things like this, and TBN was letting him appear and beg for cash as recently as four months ago. I guarantee you, if he walked into Trinity today, they would assign people to follow him around and kowtow and cater. There is no way they would take him in the back, like lucid people, and say, “What on EARTH have you been up to?”

If you’re in a big church where they talk about self-help, and you’re not hearing about the Holy Spirit and prayer in tongues, you are a slave. Your church is a cult. It’s a spiritual concentration camp. Satan is just waiting for you to die, powerless, so he can scratch you off his threat list. He’s probably not happy that you’re in church, because any church can be turned against him with God’s help, but as long as churches have to exist, he is going to take them over and use them to keep people weak.

If you’re determined to work, work in prayer. This is the most important thing you do. Prayer parted the Red Sea. Prayer prevented the extermination of the entire Jewish people in Exodus. It sets people free, and it makes them more powerful and more virtuous.

Don’t be afraid to go to a small church. The size of a church has no relationship to its power. My little church has started four other churches. My old church is huge, and it has accomplished virtually nothing. For God, I mean.

Work does not make you free. Work will never make you free. God’s work created the world. The work of Jesus freed you from sin and enabled you to receive the Holy Spirit. The work of the Holy Spirit, through you, will please God and solve your problems. Anything beyond that is garbage which will rot and be blown away in a generation.

Change is Here

I went to a carnal church that was under the influence of greedy megachurch preachers. I left because they were hostile to scripture-based correction offered in humility, and because they treated people like slaves and milked them like cattle.

I ended up at a church where the Holy Spirit was welcomed. The pastor and his wife were enlightened through the gifts of the Spirit. At the old church, when I brought up revelations I had received, or good teachings I had heard, I got this: “That’s great, Steve.” And then I got blown off. At the new church, usually, the pastors already knew about the things I brought to them, and when they didn’t, they listened and thanked me sincerely, and with the Spirit’s help, they added to them.

I’m not a big wheel at the new church. I’m not in charge of the volunteers. I don’t run a ministry. I have never been asked to teach, except for a couple of minutes. I’m not pleased because I finally found a place that exalted me and kissed my rear end. That hasn’t happened. I’m pleased because God led me to a place where I was not treated the way a white corpuscle treats bacteria. My old church was under the control of Satan, and his servants kept me and other sincere Christians sealed off from acceptance and authority.

A while back, my pastor started teaching the same things I tried to teach at my old church. Prayer in tongues, mostly. It’s a secret language, through which you speak directly to God. You prophesy your future. You build yourself up in the fruit and gifts of the Spirit. You fire weapons at Satan, and because he can’t understand you, he can’t defend. You pray God’s perfect will, with faith provided by the Holy Spirit, in Jesus’s name. As we know, those prayers are always answered. Jesus promised it.

Because I’m middle-aged and not totally stupid, I predicted that a few people would take this seriously, and that it would be enough to bring change to the church. That is now happening.

On Sunday, the pastor called up a friend of mine. Unbeknownst to me, she had listened to the sermons. She stood up and said she was praying in tongues at least an hour a day. She said she was doing it at work, and she was trying to keep it quiet, because she worked in a library. She began teaching and prophesying. It was amazing. I’m sorry I don’t recall all the things she said. I was too busy thanking God to pay close attention.

A year or two back, at the old church, I attended a Friday prayer service. They have since cancelled these; apparently, prayer services aren’t “dope” or “slammin’.” At the service, I found myself saying, “Unleash the flood. Unleash the flood.” I had no idea what it meant. Soon I realized I was talking about the Holy Spirit flood.

Water, floods, rain, mist…these things represent speech. Prayer in tongues is a flood that comes from the Holy Spirit. More accurately, it’s like the mist that used to come up from the ground every day, before rain existed. It comes up inside us; it doesn’t just fall on us from outside.

Genesis 1 says God created heaven and earth, but the next verse says, “The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” Many believe something happened between the verses. Creation was performed, but something screwed it up, and then the earth was without form and empty, and it was covered with waters.

Satan works through voices. He’s a tiny man who talks loud. He’s like the moon, which looks big when it comes between us and the sun, which is 444 times as wide. He and his fallen spirits speak and yammer constantly. They slander God. They curse his work. They curse and corrupt human beings and turn them against him. I believe this is the water that covered the earth. Through salvation and the baptism with the Holy Spirit, we receive faith and knowledge that lift us above the flood, into the space where God works miracles.

In Matthew 14, we see this illustrated symbolically. The Disciples see Jesus walking on water; Jesus is above the words of the enemy and his people and spirits. Jesus asked Peter to come to him, and Peter walked on the flood, which would have drowned him but for God’s help. When Peter focused on the storm, he sank.

We are so immersed in Satan’s lies, we can’t get to the place where God works. We are conditioned to think he doesn’t care, or that he doesn’t exist, or that he can’t help. As a result, we don’t get help from God, and he doesn’t improve us, as he wants to. If you pray in tongues every day, you will eventually be lifted up for air. Your faith in the deadly waters will be overcome and destroyed by your faith in God, through the living water.

I believe that’s what the Holy Spirit was trying to tell me through those words. God is unleashing a flood of living water on the earth. A generation of people are rising up, and through God, they will have tremendous power. In the hearts of many, Satan’s lies will be wiped out and proven wrong, and through us, God will finally do the “greater works” he promised.

My church is focusing more on prayer and worship. We’re also doing some things which are probably pointless, involving social media and so on. But we’re doing what matters. The prayer and worship we go through before and during services are ramping up tremendously, and God is manifesting himself. This Friday, we’re having a special night just for prayer and worship.

My own prayer life gets better and better. Sometimes it seems as if there is no room for improvement, but you know God (I hope). He doesn’t fill the cup. He makes it overflow. There is no end to his help and his goodness. I can’t even guess how much better things will get, with his help.

Carnal people will doubt this. That’s how it has always worked. This stuff is only understood and accepted with the help of the Holy Spirit. Your mind alone will never get you anywhere. Hell is full of brilliant people, and heaven is full of the simple. It’s frustrating to know that it’s pointless to say these things to most people, but I’m glad there are people who will hear, understand, and take advantage.

If you haven’t received the gift of tongues, keep trying. Find people to lay hands on you. Ask people to pray for you. Fast, if you have to. Look up the promises of the baptism with the Holy Spirit, and stand on them in prayer. I can’t tell you why it takes some people longer than others, but I know God loves you, and he will give you what he wants you to have. He hit me with it while I was alone in a room with a television set.

The faith of the Holy Spirit is the rock Jesus referred to at Caesarea Philippi. People think he referred to Peter, but that was a play on words. Peter had a revelation through the Holy Spirit. This is what Jesus referred to. Through the Holy Spirit, we understand and believe, and once that happens, we stand on the Spirit as we would stand on a rock in a turbulent sea. God says he has lifted us up out of the miry clay and set us on a rock and established our goings. He didn’t mean Peter was going to hold us up.

God will also transform the floods of your enemies into rock you can stand on. He will turn your enemies’ lies and curses into blessings, so you will walk on the flood. Your enemies will be your footstool. In this way, he will make your enemies your slaves, as he brought honey out of the lion he killed for Samson.

Why did Samson kill the lion and touch its dead body? He shouldn’t have been handling torn, rotten flesh. He was a Nazirite. He did it because it showed that when the Holy Spirit was with him, he was above the written and spoken law.

God IS the law. What he tells you in real time is what you should do. The Bible is great, but because it doesn’t change, Satan can use it to trap you. He can cause you to go against God by obeying the LETTER of the law. Look what happened to Jephthah. When you hear from God minute by minute, you obey the SPIRIT, who has the liberty to tailor his orders to the situation. This is why Jesus let the disciples pick grain on the sabbath. It’s why Jesus made a habit of healing on the sabbath. The book is good, but it’s inferior to the one who wrote it.

What’s happening in my church is exciting, but I’ve already seen the danger. When the Holy Spirit falls on a gathering, kooks show up. People who love attention come, and the first thing you know, they’re howling like monkeys and hitting people and rolling on the floor. They’ll come to the microphone and say stupid things. It happened in Pensacola. I warned my pastor about it. I think God gave me that insight. Satan hates the power of the Holy Spirit, so he will send idiots to make it look like heresy and ignorance. Don’t be fooled by the chaff. This is real. Satan may put on a sideshow to distract you, but a hundred fools don’t disprove the righteousness of one true witness.

I get quibbles from people who sit around reading things like St. Augustine and Tertullian. I hear nonsense about how the books of the Bible were chosen arbitrarily, or how they’ve been altered. People love to pump themselves up with intellectual pride, as if a little being with a 3-pound brain and a 70-year lifespan could dissect the Almighty.

You can read about God, or you can cut out the middleman and get to know him personally. That’s where real authority comes from. God and those who believe him will be here long after the conceited have been sent to a place where bloviation brings them no recognition and no relief. Don’t let your pride ruin your future.

America’s New Slogan

Last night I had a remarkable experience. I watched the James Bond movie, Skyfall.

It’s remarkable that I sat through it. Skyfall is a truly terrible movie. They have the best James Bond ever, and they’ve already destroyed and abandoned the character. It also looks like they’re hiring people’s girlfriends to write the scripts. But apart from that, I was amazed by what it showed me about the world.

Part of the movie took place in Shanghai. According to Wikipedia, Shanghai is twice the size of Los Angeles. The population is around 23,000,000.

They showed some night scenes, shot from the air. You could shove New York inside this place and never notice it. It’s gigantic. And the buildings are gorgeous. They’re new. They’re clean. They’re immense. They’re lit up with all sorts of electric displays. Lights. Moving advertisements. It looks like a carnival for giants.

The streets are filled, not with bicycles or pedestrian traffic, but with cars, trucks, and buses. The roads are modern.

It buries anything America has to offer. It’s not even a contest. Our cities look puny and dirty by comparison. They look poor.

Shanghai has three buildings over 400 meters in height, and it will have a fourth in 2014. The entire US has two, and they would rank third and fourth in present-day Shanghai. Take a look at this page to see what has happened in Shanghai: Shanghai: 1990 vs. 2010.

We have lost. That’s what the movie showed me. Our economy is still bigger than theirs, but they’re on the way up, and we’re on the way down, and unlike us, they still believe in “bigger, better, faster.” Their human rights record is dismal, and they have a lot of pollution, but they are still leaving us in the dust, and even if they cleaned up and treated their citizens better, that would not change. Critics love to point to the pollution and oppression, as if these things somehow generated China’s prosperity, but they’re wrong. It came from hard work, and from our disobedience to God. These people are our enemies, and God has stopped restraining them, just as he has stopped restraining the anti-progress leftist nuts who used to lose elections here in the US.

A long time ago, I realized that a man’s sins can breed and feed an giant enemy who sits beneath the horizon. You may think nothing you brings consequences, but somewhere, an angry behemoth may be dining on your wickedness, and one day, he may step over the horizon in the blink of an eye and destroy you. It happened to the ancient Jews more than once, and it can happen to us.

Shanghai is just one city, in one country. What about Mumbai? What about Moscow? Xingdao, Beijing, Hong Kong…go to Ebay and look for tools, and see the place names that come up.

When China goes after Taiwan, we will back down. They’re going to be ready, armed with weapons we paid for, and we’re going to be mumbling “Believe in America” and “You didn’t build that.” The socialists and America-worshipers will have to drop to their knees and say, “Enjoy your new province.”

America isn’t going to be restored unless we repent and pray. It may already be too late for our nation, but you can still save your family.

God Proves he is With me by Rendering me Obsolete

I feel like I gave birth today.

For the past few weeks, my pastor has been teaching about the power of prayer in tongues, and he has been explaining the benefits. He has been encouraging us to spend a long time each day, praying in tongues.

Today the leaders met for the usual 9:30 prayer, and the young man who runs the worship ministry spoke. He started talking about the power of tongues, and he talked about the way God wants to do things for us. We work too hard. We do the wrong things, because we don’t listen. We wander in circles in the desert because we won’t follow God into the Promised Land. I was nodding my head the whole time. I was amazed. He was saying the same things I tried to tell the people at my old church for three years.

He asked if anyone had a testimony. I didn’t say anything, because I don’t want to monopolize this thing every week, but he called on me anyway. I told him he was absolutely right. I told him about Psalm 23. It says God will LEAD us to LIE DOWN in GREEN PASTURES. To a sheep, this is like saying, “I will turn you loose in a bank vault.” To a sheep, a green field is inexhaustible wealth. And it doesn’t say you’ll PLOW AND SOW AND WATER. It says you will LIE DOWN. God does most of the work.

Before we prayed in our understanding, he had us join hands and pray in tongues for a good long time.

When we broke up, the usual praise and prayer started. A young lady took the stage and started teaching about prayer in tongues. She was teaching things I was saying years ago, in the back room at Trinity Church, where the leaders had no interest in the Holy Spirit.

I was amazed. I had to sit down. I realized I wasn’t necessary any more. They didn’t need me. If they continue praying in tongues, God will tell them everything I tried to tell them and more. It all comes from him, not me.

This is what I wanted for Trinity Church. I prayed for it and pushed for it. They wouldn’t listen. They didn’t really believe in God. They talked about him in order to make money, but they really believed in hard work, self-promotion, cut-throat competition, and positive thinking. The pastor’s family kept competitors down, while using them to get ahead. They relied on plans and schemes and connections. They ran four services a weekend (more services, more offerings), and they scheduled the Holy Spirit out of the program.

Jesus told us that if a house would not receive our peace (our blessings and success), we should leave and take our peace with us. That’s what I did. I went to New Dawn Ministries, and they received my peace. In fact, they took it from me! If I died right now, they’d do as well as if I stayed. This is the best result possible. I have been fruitful and multiplied.

When I thought about this, I felt as though God was telling me I had accomplished the thing I had been restrained in Miami to do. I can’t stand this carnal, nasty city, but I’ve been stuck here. I accomplished virtually nothing at Trinity, but when God called me out, and I listened, I found a church where I could make a dent. Just as Jesus showed the disciples where to cast their nets, God showed me where the ground was fertile.

I think now God is going to make a way for me to get out of this aggravating place. He has told me about a couple of things he’s going to do for me. They’ll make it possible for me to go, without a lot of hardship.

Trinity is going nowhere. I keep praying for God to get rid of the ministers who are holding it back. If he boots them out and replaces them with people who know the Holy Spirit, things will start to work. I’ll continue praying, but what’s behind me is behind me. When God takes you out of Sodom, you don’t run back to turn off the iron.

Should I write openly about Trinity, by name? Yes. I’ve asked God about it. The answer is yes. I have nothing to be ashamed of. I did what I was supposed to do, and now I’m blessed and my church is blessed, and Trinity is still a mess. It needs to be acknowledged. There is no correction without awareness that something is wrong. I don’t care if I offend them. They’re already offended, and the world is still turning. God has told us repeatedly not to be man-pleasers. I have been proven right, and their approach continues to be proven wrong. If I say so, I am just giving God his glory.

The Bible says, “My soul shall make her boast in the Lord; the humble shall hear thereof and be glad.” I am right to talk about what God does and wants to do, and the only people who won’t listen are the arrogant. And as God has said, he is against them.

If you’re buying into the kind of garbage carnal churches teach–the money-crazy false doctrine you’ll hear on TBN–you need help, too. Trinity isn’t the only church that leads people in circles. God is not going to give you money for sending donations to Benny Hinn. He does not want special Jewish-holiday gifts from you. He does not expect you to pretend to be Jewish and give up shrimp and wear a prayer shawl. He wants you to pray in tongues, repent, and get to know him.

This is a big day. I’m wondering what’s going to happen this year. I think it’s going to be very, very good. It has been so far.

Always Nice to Get Constructive Feedback

I’m getting trolled again.

I guess I should be honored. After all, “Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man’s sake.”

Someone who is so concerned about discovery he or she (I will use “she,” arbitrarily, since “he or she” is tiresome) won’t even use an Internet handle is coming to my blog and posting comments ridiculing the Holy Spirit and, of course, me.

I don’t understand the anonymity. I don’t go after people. I’m not going to get in the truck and go shoot someone. I don’t even engage them on the Internet. There is little to fear from me personally. I can understand using a handle, but if you won’t even go that far, you’re overdoing it.

I think she may be an anti-Semite. She made approving reference to a name which appears on a weird, obscure, anti-Semitic blog.

I’ve received 2 trolling comments. It may be that they came from different people, but I don’t think so.

Summary:

1. Prayer in tongues is stupid and crazy.

2. My music is really bad and will never amount to anything.

3. I am conceited because I think my music is better than the worst music I’ve heard on TV.

4. I claimed I was going to be a famous humorist, and that didn’t happen.

5. It’s good that I didn’t have kids.

6. I am insane.

I think that’s most of it.

I don’t think I claimed I was going to be a famous humorist, although I did have hopes. If that had happened, I would have been lost. I’d want nothing to do with God. I’d be spending money and living for myself. I’d be praying for three minutes on a good day. Thank God it didn’t work out.

When I saw the last comment, the obvious Bible verse came into my head: “Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man’s sake.”

Criticizing someone for praying in tongues is reproach for the Son of man’s sake. Jesus died partly so we could be saved, but also in order to give us the gifts and fruit of the Holy Spirit. His primary mission on earth was to make it possible for the Holy Spirit to live in us and make us like Jesus. This is a horrifying thing to Satan. It’s the reason he killed and tortured early Christians. Once the Holy Spirit was driven out, persecution dropped off, and the church went mainstream, with much less opposition. When people insult you because you’re obeying God, you know you’ve hit a nerve. Satan doesn’t activate his puppets for nothing.

I used to have endless trolls. I was something of a troll myself. By that I mean I engaged in pointless carnal disputes, and I went out of my way to provoke foolish people. I try to avoid blogging about politics these days, and I think it has reduced the troll population, but not all trolls are political. Some hate God. And they hate God’s people, for no reason.

I don’t plan to approve troll comments. That may seem unfair to people who think everyone has a God-given right to have their point of view published, but as I’ve said for many years, my blog is not a forum. If you want to insult me, do it with your own money, somewhere else.

I also block troll IPs. A stubborn troll can always find a way to get here, but I might be able to discourage the weak ones.

It’s kind of remarkable that a person would show up to hit me with discouraging lies, when the things I’m writing are so non-confrontational. I understood it back when I was making fun of Al Gore and the BDS people. When someone attacks you or someone you idolize, you may get angry. But this nameless person is angry because I pray in tongues and because I like the music I write. That’s strange.

The music is going really well. With God’s help, I have figured out how to come up with original melodies, so it looks like I’m going to have a copious supply of material. More than I know what to do with. When God says our cups run over, he is not kidding. I’m not going to be able to finish all the tunes I come up with. I’ll have to start doing triage. If things keep going the way they are, I’ll end up with a tremendous library of original music. My hope is that some of it will be accepted and used, but it will be nice to have, even if I’m the only one who enjoys it.

My new Internet friend may not like what I’m doing, but my teacher–an actual musician with outstanding credentials–does. Here’s something crazy. He composed a new tune and put it on Youtube. At my last lesson, he said I had inspired him. If it weren’t for me, he probably would not have done it. That’s amazing! God used me to wake someone up. And the worship leader at my church is also excited. He composes, but he has been putting it off. Now that I’m doing what he’s supposed to do, he says he has new motivation!

As for prayer in tongues, the things that are happening at my church are astonishing. My pastor has been teaching about the Holy Spirit. Suddenly, he’s telling us things I tried to tell the people at Trinity Church for several years. The things that got me ostracized are now being proclaimed from the pulpit, by an authority figure. The leadership at Trinity Church had no respect for me or the Holy Spirit. The whole operation was a mechanism intended to promote the pastor and his family, and they did not want to spook people. Now I’m at a church where the Holy Spirit is taking over.

On Tuesday, the pastor had us pray in tongues as a group. I would guess we went about 15 minutes. I didn’t know what to say. I was watching a dream come true. The shoots are coming out of the ground. The final fire is lit, and this time, Satan will not be able to put it out, because this time, God is not going to rely on man to keep it going. It’s like the restoration of Israel. In the past, Israel’s situation depended on how the Jews treated God. Now it’s different. In order for prophecy to come true, God has to get in there and make things happen, regardless of how badly his people behave. It’s grace this time, more than before.

My own prayer life gets better and better. Sometimes I get so far into the Spirit, I feel as though my attachment to the physical world is almost broken, and I tell God I’m ready to leave if he wants to take me. I get new breakthroughs in faith and revelation all the time. Every time one comes, I think it can’t get any better than that, and then the next one comes, and it’s better.

Things keep improving. God has made it clear that certain things are going to happen for me. I wish everyone could get what I’m getting. It’s so easy, but people reject it. Or they never find out about it.

One of the things that comes out in my music is the sorrow over the people who aren’t going to make it. In nature, many are born, and few survive. Even in the moment of conception, millions of sperm cells die, and only one survives. In the kingdom of God, it doesn’t have to be like that. Provision has been made for all of us. But most of us will not know God, and most of us will go to hell. There isn’t much we can do about it. If the situation could be fixed, God would have taken care of it. Many of the people I see around me now are going to disappear permanently. I won’t know them much longer.

I am starting to see unsaved people as unreal. In a way, this is correct. Is anything real, if it doesn’t last? The unsaved show up for a while, make a little noise, and then vanish for good. A person’s life shouldn’t be like condensed breath on a windowpane, that appears for a minute and then dissipates. But this is how most lives go. The unsaved matter. But their presence is temporary, and the things they do will be erased, as though they had never happened. Ten thousand years from now, who will even think about them?

I don’t plan the music I write. The tunes come to me, and I write them down. I don’t think they express some true “voice” within me. They’re not what I expected to write. Maybe God is expressing something through me. I hope that as my skills improve, his music will come through me more clearly and in better quality. I can’t wait to see what’s ahead.

Pray for the trolls. In God’s kingdom, like the fairy tale, a troll can live under a bridge, but she won’t cross it.

Now With Added TULIPS

I finished a new piece of music, applied for a copyright registration, and stuck it on Youtube.

Here it is. I hope you like it.

I got the photos from a public domain photo site.

It’s funny how this works now. Sometimes I wonder if I’m going to get anything written. Then I pray, and I get to work. I usually put in about 90 minutes, and then I feel God’s peace descend on me, and I realize it’s time to quit.

I got myself a new digital piano. The toy keyboard I was using was driving me nuts.

Some of the computerized instruments can be shrill. Hopefully real musicians with actual instruments will play it some day.

Psalm 37:4.

“May God Bless and Keep the Tsar…Far Away From Us”

What a fun morning.

I keep getting subpoena’d in a misdemeanor case involving a relative. Someone made a clerical error, and they put me down as a witness. I was not present when the crime took place, so I can’t be a witness. The first time the case came up, I showed up. The second time, I called the prosecutor, and she told me to stay home. This time, I could not get the courtesy of a reply, so I dragged my behind to the Gerstein Building.

In a Facebook status, I called this building dark, grimy, and Dickensian. I think that captures it. It’s as gloomy as a crypt. The last time I went to see one of my relative’s trials (felony, not misdemeanor), the room was so dark it made me wonder if the judge had some kind of problem. It was like the judge’s office in the movie The Natural. This time it was a little brighter, but still not a place where any sane person wants to be.

I dress like a lawyer when I think I’m going to have to speak, but when I’m forced to show up due to a clerical error, it’s work pants and a comfy T-shirt. I took a tablet with me so I could pass the lost time reading John Le Carre. I don’t usually read fiction, but I bought one of his books on a whim.

I was dressed in a way that would have gotten a lawyer cited for contempt in years past, but on this occasion it didn’t matter, and I looked a whole lot better than a lot of the characters in the gallery. One guy was wearing red, black, and white boxers, and we all got a nice eyeful when he stood to leave.

Some kid’s cell phone went off, playing the opening measures of “Staying Alive” by the Bee Gees. It must have gone on for fifteen or twenty seconds. He was already on his feet and on his way to the door before he shut it off. The judge didn’t even look up. If it had been me, they would have brought the electric chair out of mothballs just to teach me a lesson, but everyone’s luck with judges is different.

The case was pleaded out. Twelve hours of traffic school, court costs, and a withhold of adjudication. What a waste of my time. I stayed long enough to be sure I wasn’t going to be needed.

The judge issued a pile of bench warrants, and she nolle prossed a whole bunch of cases because the cops didn’t show up to testify. My relative had a whole slew of cops waiting to sing. She allegedly hit one while he was trying to ticket her and then fled the scene. THAT will get them up in the morning to testify. And who can blame them?

I nearly wrecked on the way home. I turned left at an intersection, and some guy came barreling through without slowing down. This is the kind of accident that will get you charged, even though you’re not the idiot. You’re supposed to yield to oncoming traffic, but if someone is absolutely flying, and the visibility is limited, you can do everything you’re supposed to and still get charged. God looked out for me, and I managed to keep from smacking the other vehicle.

I’m finally done with this particular case. I don’t have to show up for all of the other ones unless I feel like it, and guess what? I don’t feel like it. I really hate the courthouse. I didn’t mind it much when I was practicing, but back then, I was jerking the chain. Now I’m always one of the people on the other end of it. A courthouse is where you end up when you get outside God’s protection and land in the hands of the secular government, which is a very stupid and merciless organization. I want no part of it.

So glad to be away from that place. May God help the people who are still stuck there. That building is like the market scene from Soylent Green, except they pass out jail time and devastating verdicts instead of orange dinner rolls.

Sow a Seed at the Library of Congress

Yesterday at church a couple of friends showed me a banner that had been created for a campaign called “I Love my Church.” They wanted to protect the design, and they were talking about the money involved. They were talking about thousands of dollars. It has been maybe eleven years since I practiced IP law, and I’ve forgotten most of what I knew, but I knew enough to tell them the figure was a little high. My first boss loved money more than air, and he only charged $120 for a copyright application.

I thought about the music I’ve been composing. It’s all on Youtube. People have suggested I protect it. I turned on my PC and researched it. It turns out getting a copyright registration is easier than ever.

You don’t have to do ANYTHING in order to get a copyright. Everything you create is automatically copyrighted. But you may have to prove priority in court, and back when I was practicing, the federal courts wouldn’t even entertain a suit until you showed them a copyright certificate. Getting an official registration is smart. It’s also cheap.

I’ll tell you what I learned. The Library of Congress (the folks who are in charge of copyrights) has a new (to me) website. The location is http://www.copyright.gov. If you have a musical recording (or anything else) you want to copyright, this is where you go. Depending on the nature of the work, you may be able to upload a copy electronically, so you don’t even have to buy a stamp.

You have to create an account, and any information you supply will be in the public record. You’ll have to give them a mailing address. It might be smart to get a P.O. box.

The fee is $35 per work, but you can cheat. If you write 300 songs, you can put them in one body and call them one work. I had one tune that was finished in 2012 and three that were finished in 2013, so I grouped them separately and applied for two registrations.

The ins and outs of the process are extremely confusing. You’ll have to figure out which category to put your work in, and you may find yourself pulling your hair out before you’re done. I’m a lawyer, and it drove me nuts for about an hour.

If you create a musical composition, turn it into a recording, and master the recording yourself (as I did), you can cover all three things (melody, recording, and production) in one registration. You don’t have to send them sheet music.

I’m not charging for this info, and you’re not my clients, so it may be totally wrong. Don’t rely on it. But it may be helpful to people who have stuff to protect.

It’s very exciting, having those certificates on the way. I’ve never registered anything before. Not on my own behalf. Now if I turn on the TV and hear one of my tunes playing, it will be easy to turn the perpetrator into my employee, taking the royalties and doing no work, apart from what I’ve already done.

I don’t think this will happen, but you never know. A lot of the crap you hear on TV is not as good as my work. A sleazy jingle writer could find worse things to steal.

I’m going to have to leave my tunes on Youtube as long as possible, because they will also be evidence of priority. The copyright certificates will provide the years in which things were written, but they won’t provide dates. What if some goof copyrighted one of them right after I uploaded it? I’d need something to wave in the judge’s face.

I suppose it sounds a little arrogant, suggesting someone might want to come after my obscure, simple tunes. Think of the bad music you’ve heard on the radio. If that garbage can be stolen by infringers, so can my work.

If people end up paying for my work, it means that right now, God is giving me wealth. I have to make sure I don’t leave it out on the curb for people to steal.

God has helped me understand that copyright is the best form of IP protection. To get a patent, you have to do a gigantic amount of work and spend thousands of dollars, and you get a limited period of protection. Trademarks aren’t useful for most people, and they’re a lot of aggravation to get. To get a copyright, you spend five minutes filling out a form and uploading a file, and the copyright will outlive you. And creating a work of writing or music is WAY easier than inventing something. To a person who understands the mathematical nature of the world, it should be obvious that there is huge potential in copyright, and a bigger return for the effort.

In other news, I’ve had a big faith breakthrough. I’ve learned a few things.

First of all, prayer in tongues keeps paying off. It’s the single most powerful, most important thing I do. If I ever got to the point where my life was so crazy I had to make hard choices, prayer in tongues would be the last thing I gave up. Everything I’ve believed about it has proven to be true. Everything. The more you do it, the better off you’ll be, in every way. It will fuel your life and put a foundation under it.

Second thing: last week, God showed me that when I’m struggling to believe, I shouldn’t necessarily think about the big prayers he has answered. I’ve found that it’s more helpful to think about the little prayers he answers consistently. Does God help you find your car keys every time you pray? Think about that when you pray for him to heal you of cancer. God spoke the galaxies into existence. He can put a new leg on you just as easily as he can tell you where your sunglasses are.

This is much more powerful than it sounds. Try it.

Third thing: when you pray in tongues, keep this in mind: the words are God’s, not yours. God is speaking. He is using your voice, but it’s still him, and his words have power proportional to the faith you supply as you speak. If you think about this while you pray, your faith will be supernaturally increased. Somehow, the Holy Spirit responds to it. He will rise up inside you and support your faith. Your mind will be “stayed” (propped up) on God, as Isaiah said: “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee (Isaiah 26:3).”

This is not a feel-good tip or a motivational tool. It is not carnal, like the garbage the self-help preachers teach. It is a key to supernatural power.

God has set his seal on some things he is doing for me and some people around me. He has told me this in faith. When your faith reaches a certain point, God will stamp a prayer as “done.” I’m not going to list the things that are coming my way, but I know they’re done. He has sealed things for me before, and he has come through. I think the funniest example was the Coral Gables pickup truck ban. He told me he was going to defeat the people who were trying to bring it back, and even though they voted to restore it, they failed. I have to admit, I laughed. These people were so sure their carnal efforts mattered, and they got so wound up. But it was all a waste of their time. They might as well have stayed home.

Don’t expect it to happen if you neglect the gift of tongues. God has gone to great trouble and pain to put a weapon in your hand. If you won’t use it, don’t whine when you fail. God is not a puppeteer; he will not pick up your limp body and move the limbs and the tongue to cause you to do and say what you should in order to be blessed. He has done so much already; he has taken a thousand steps toward you. If you won’t take one step toward him, you are not worth saving. If you won’t take the easy path he has provided, he may not help you. He may literally allow your enemies to murder you. You would not be the first.

Listen and Dream of Lunch

I published a new piece of music. As I have said elsewhere, it’s not really the kind of thing I wanted to write, but it was too good to throw out.

I’m surprised how well the composing is going. My teacher told me not to underestimate myself, and he’s right. Yesterday I listened to a piano piece written by Rachmaninoff, adapted by Kreisler, and played by Ashkenazi. It was horrible. I could not understand why Rachmaninoff wrote it in the first place, although I did recall something he once said. Someone asked him what inspired him to write a certain piece, and he said something like, “Two hundred dollars.” I am too lazy to Google the exact quotation.

Much of the classical music critics, conductors, and musicians have chosen to preserve and play is really bad. I may never write anything that will become famous, but I’m positive I can produce work which is better than the worst things great composers wrote.

Anyway, here it is.

Worms are Low-Carb!

I had an interesting experience yesterday. My church hosted Apostle Caleb Jean.

I don’t know this man. He has made a very good impression on my pastor, who is careful about the people he sets before us. My old church would let any old crook in. What a difference.

The service ran from 10:30 a.m. until after 4:00. Usually, when our services run long, I start praying for God to help the team wrap up, so we don’t drive people away by making them miserable, and I admit, we started to reach that point a couple of times yesterday, but overall, people wanted to stay. When people believe God is manifesting himself, they’ll come to your church, they won’t want to leave, and they’ll be happy to support you financially. I tried to tell that to the pastor of my old church, but…water off a duck’s back.

As I said, I don’t know Caleb Jean, and I can’t swear he’s the real thing, but he was very impressive. He called people up and spoke in tongues and prophesied over them. He talked about their mistakes and the things about them that pleased God. He gave them advice. And here’s the weirdest thing: he gave things away and did not take an offering for his own ministry. He took a second offering for our pastor’s ministry, but that’s not the same thing.

If this man appeared on TBN and did things like that, they would have the prop guys build a cross, and they would crucify him on camera. TBN is a business, and they love greedy preachers who support their greed-based message. You don’t go on TBN to give. You go on TBN to take, and to help the owners take.

Apostle Jean called a couple of my closest friends up. They have five kids. The sixth–my first godchild–is about to pop out. I’ve talked to the husband a lot about the financial burdens he is facing, and the feeling we both have is that children come from God, and it’s best not to interfere. Look at Psalm 137:

Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.

The Jews say that when you kill a man, you kill a nation. Seems to me that the same thing applies when you abort a man.

Apostle Jean doesn’t know these people, but he gave them the same advice I did, more or less. He talked about the misfortune of people who put off having kids and then find they can’t reproduce any more.

I know a woman who had at least one abortion. Now she’s old, and her looks are completely gone. There is absolutely no way she could have a baby without the help of science, and if she manages to marry, it will be extraordinary, because her appearance, personality, age, and debts will repel men. I’ve heard her say God told her she would have a child of her own body. Some people will say absolutely anything and attribute it to God. I can’t tell you what God did or did not say to her, but it is my strong opinion that she wouldn’t know the voice of God if she heard it.

I know a man who complains bitterly that he has no grandchildren. He has even wished his daughter would have an illegitimate child, purely to satisfy his desires. He supports convenience abortion. I happen to know that one of his grandchildren was aborted. How can you be in favor of barrenness and expect your family to be fruitful? He would have been distraught, had he known about the abortion in advance.

It seemed remarkable to me that Apostle Jean gave the same advice I did. I believe God tells different servants the same things, and one of the marks of a person who knows God is that generally, he does not contradict other people who know God.

He spoke over several couples. I noticed something funny. He spent most of the time correcting the women. I believe he was right to do so. Our sick feminized culture has taught women not to submit. It has taught them to fight with men and to be narcissistic and unsupportive. Even Christian women are infected. They don’t listen to their men, because weak, cowardly pastors keep teaching that men and women are equal partners in marriage. Preachers don’t have the guts to point to the Bible, which honors Sarah for calling Abraham “Lord.” The fact is, there is a command structure in marriage, and women are not at the top. A desire to rule over a husband comes from the curse God pronounced over Adam and Eve; you can look it up. It’s not something to nurture. It’s a sickness that has to be stamped out.

He told one woman not to blow a lot of money on a fancy marriage, and she didn’t look pleased. He was right. It amazes me that people will spend twenty thousand dollars on a party, when they can’t afford it. We do everything we can to start marriages off badly. We go into debt. We drive our friends into debt, demanding ridiculous gifts and forcing them to spend money on costumes they can only wear once. We send our young men to prostitutes before the ceremonies (strippers are prostitutes). We require men to blow huge sums on silly rings which usually have to be financed. Then the babies come, and the fights over money start. And the women are already resentful because they know what happened at the bachelor parties. The men are resentful because of the money they’ve had to spend already. Apostle Jean told these kids to put the money toward a house. Good advice.

He advised another young lady not to wait to have kids. He said it was a mistake to worry about her figure. I think he was right. The figure is going to be ruined anyway. Time will have its way. Might as well get something in return for it.

He told one wife to get control of her emotions, and to stop raining her misery and worry on her husband. Wow, was he right. I know these people. The husband is trying to ground the family and provide stability, but the wife gets very emotional, very quickly. Then the husband has to restrain her emotions as well as his own. That’s a big burden. Our sick culture has taught her that she doesn’t have to honor or obey him, so it’s taking time for her to change, and during that time, he has to take the punishment.

Women want powerful husbands, but a husband can’t be powerful if his wife won’t permit it.

Watching the service, I was reminded of something Jesus said:

But Jesus, said unto them, A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house. And he could there do no mighty work, save that he laid his hands upon a few sick folk, and healed them.

Jesus is our “husband.” How can he do great works in us, if we won’t honor him and submit to him?

It’s unfortunate that these women had to hear from an apostle, in front of the church, before taking these things to heart. I’m sure their husbands and parents have told them the same thing. You shouldn’t have to wait for a letter from the Pope before you accept good advice. People are inclined to listen to those who are arrogant or who are respected by others. They treat the humble like children, no matter how wise they are.

Apostle Jean gave a new baby car seat to a couple from my church. He didn’t have it with him. It wasn’t like a door prize. He saw their need, and he said he would have one delivered. And he told them he was going to send them to a nice hotel for a weekend getaway. I was stunned. Have you ever seen a preacher give anyone ANYTHING? I know they pass stuff out to the poor sometimes, but what preacher goes into his own pocket and gives things to strangers? Apostle Jean did that, and then he took up a second offering…for OUR church.

I think that if Benny Hinn had seen that, his combover would have burst into flames.

Meanwhile, my former church is teaching more nonsense. They work from fear, greed, narcissism, and desperation; they don’t care whether a message comes from God, as long as it serves their carnal aims. A bunch of preachers have started saying “tithing is the training wheels of giving,” and the message is that if you only give YOUR CHURCH ten percent, you’re not going to get blessed. It’s the same crap Steve Munsey teaches, from a new angle. It’s been going around for at least a few years. My old church got ahold of it, so now they’re teaching it. Meanwhile, they can’t pay their own bills. You would think a person who can’t prosper wouldn’t feel entitled to teach others how to prosper.

One of the things that soured me on that church was the way they ripped off other preachers. In 2010, they announced they had a “2020 vision” for the church. The idea was that God was going to give them 100,000 souls by 2020. I got on Google and entered “church” and “2020 vision,” and my screen was filled with earlier versions of the same thing. Imagine one of the prophets telling the ancient Jews he had heard from God, and then repeating what another prophet had said. He would have been stoned to death. It turns out churches rip each other off all the time. They don’t hear from God, because they disobey him and serve their bellies, so they call around and ask each other for material, or they simply steal it. They call these awful pitches “microwave sermons.” They’re like leftovers you heat up in the microwave.

When God blessed the Jews in the wilderness, he gave them fresh manna every day, and when they tried to hold onto the old manna, it spawned worms. That hasn’t changed. A real man of God will hear from the Lord on the fly. He won’t have to open Bartlett’s Quotations or steal from Reader’s Digest.

Apostle Jean told people things they did not want to hear, and he gave instead of taking. That impressed me. I hope he’s the real thing. We need more leaders like that.

“I’m Right HERE!”

The other day a kid I know went on Facebook and complained that five pastors had pushed him down in order to make it look like he had been “slain in the Spirit.”

If you’re not a charismatic, you may not know what I’m talking about. Sometimes when people get into the presence of the Holy Spirit, it makes them a little dizzy. Some claim the Spirit makes them unable to stand. They collapse and lie on the floor for a while. I don’t know whether this is real or not. The dizziness part, I can attest to. But I’ve never fallen down. I had a highly dubious preacher give me a dose of this, and all I felt was a sweaty palm.

If you go on Youtube, I’m sure you can find videos of people essentially whacking people in the forehead. Generally, two helpers will stand behind the person, and he or she will be caught and lowered to the floor. Sometimes the preachers push very hard.

Maybe some people lose the ability to stand when God touches them. But there is no doubt that there are bogus “slayings.” Christians let their guard down, trying to let God in, and sometimes other things that aren’t as clean come through the door.

Here’s an appropriate video.

The young man who made the Facebook post is a friend of mine. He used to help me make pizza every Sunday at church. He’s a good kid. He’s sincere. His mom died a while back, and he has been very unhappy. And he’s stuck in a church that takes advantage of people and offers them nothing. I pray about him from time to time. I wish he’d come by my church. It’s not perfect, but it’s very good. It would undo a lot of the damage the prosperity pimps have done.

I told him this: when preachers lose touch with God, they start faking miracles.

Perry Stone often talks about a Tennessee preacher who got caught doing this. He had a man in a golf cart driving around the parking lot in a venue where he preached. The man had a computer, and he used resources available to repossession firms. He was able to take car license plates and get the owners’ names and the last four digits of their Social Security numbers. Then he communicated the information to the preacher via radio, and the preacher announced it from the stage, pretending it came from God.

Now it looks like my friend’s church is doing the same thing, in a somewhat less egregious way.

It’s not a surprise. That church is a mess. God has not blessed it. The mortgage is huge, and the offerings are not. Strong Christians keep fleeing the place. They’ll teach just about anything in order to get people to give money. They do their best to enrich themselves using carnal tools, so why should God step in and help?

My friend is totally disgusted. Good for him! He has decided to look for the truth in the Bible and in his own experiences, instead of listening to carnival barkers behind pulpits.

I got very angry when I read about his experience. That church has nothing to do with the kingdom of heaven. It’s a family business. A place where a family of owner-operators go to make money and to be promoted. I wrote a few things that were highly critical of prosperity preachers. I had doubts about posting them, but I asked God what I should do, and I felt a powerful response, telling me to go ahead. I thought I was going too far, but it seemed that the Holy Spirit was telling me I wasn’t doing nearly enough.

A young lady who is a very serious Christian expressed concern. She worried that I might be becoming bitter, or that I was out of line. People come to me with these concerns, as though I had never thought about them. Of course, I do think about them. I don’t want God chastising me because I’ve been too hard on other people. I pray before I say critical things, and if the Holy Spirit tells me to hold back, I do it. If he tells me to go ahead, I do that. I have learned to recognize his voice. I’m not out there on a limb, doing what my flesh tells me to do.

This brings me to my subject. Christians still don’t understand what it means to be out from under the law. Jesus set us free, yet we have turned his own words into law. The irony is horrific.

Before Jesus, people were under laws. What are laws? They’re writings. Like books. What is their fundamental purpose? To replace living, thinking beings.

Imagine someone is looking to you for guidance. If you can’t be with him, and you can’t communicate with him in real time, what do you do? You record information for him to rely on. Some of that information will be in the form of rules. For example, if someone works for you as a house sitter, you might write things like, “Don’t leave the porch light on.”

What happens when the rules aren’t appropriate to a situation? They cause more problems than they solve. What if you tell the house sitter to leave a key under the mat, but then you learn that your sister the psychopath kleptomaniac is coming to town, and she knows about the mat? Suddenly, the rule is your enemy. If you let it trap you, you’re in trouble.

What if you’re in the house with the house sitter? Things are much better. When he has a problem, he can come to you and ask your advice. You can tailor your words to suit the situation.

THAT is the difference between the law and the Holy Spirit. When you learn to hear the Holy Spirit, God is with you. The things he tells you in real time supersede the law. The Holy Spirit told David to serve the temple showbread to his men, which was against the law. The Holy Spirit told Jesus to heal people on the sabbath. It told him his disciples were allowed to harvest grain on the sabbath. When the rulemaker is present, you don’t need the rules.

Jesus told us “Judge not.” Is that a law? How can it be, if it came from the man who set us free from the law? Remember, the Bible says this: “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, Lest you also be like him. Answer a fool according to his folly, Lest he be wise in his own eyes.” Is that a contradiction? No! It’s God, telling us the written law doesn’t work. He’s telling us we need to know him personally, so he can be our law.

This is why the Bible tells us, “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.” In the Bible, “son” doesn’t always mean what it means in the secular world. It means one who emulates and obeys another as though he were a father. If you emulate the devil, it doesn’t mean he had intercourse with your mother. It means you behave as though you were his devoted son. If you’re a son of God, you are like God in your heart, and you are guided by him.

Satan loves the law. It’s so useful to him. He can use it to tie us up and render us helpless.

Imagine you go to a church where the pastor is a low-down, worthless crook. Let’s say he sleeps with several women in the church, teaches that there is no such thing as sin, and steals as much money as he can. What do you do? Other Christians will tell you that you have to submit. “Judge not!” In this way, Satan uses them to hold you down while he rapes the church. He uses good rules to achieve bad ends, and he makes you his accomplice.

What if you’re above the law? What if the Holy Spirit communicates with you, clearly and quickly? Then you may be allowed or even required to speak up. If someone tells you not to judge, they’re out of line, because you have complete authority. You’re breaking written rules and traditions, but you’re obeying the living God. No one can touch you.

This is why we have to be baptized with the Holy Spirit. We have to pray in tongues and get to know God as part of us. This is what “born again” means. The Holy Spirit is like semen, if you will pardon the expresson. Like the DNA a man contributes during sex, the Holy Spirit shapes a new being so it becomes like its father. People think “born again” means you raised your hand and accepted salvation, or that you repented of sin. Those things are just part of the process.

God is not breeding pets he can enjoy. He is reproducing. Jesus came into the earth to make us sons and daughters of God. He calls us “heirs.” An heir does not exist until someone dies (look it up), and heirs are almost always descendants. I’m not saying each of us will get a universe and sit on a throne as God, but we will be like our father. The Holy Spirit will shape us and build us.

Satan can’t misuse the Holy Spirit the way he misuses the law. He can mask him. He can get people to do stupid things and claim the Holy Spirit is in them. But he can’t get a Spirit-led person to defeat himself by obeying the Spirit. If the Spirit truly tells you to do it, he is right, and what you do is approved. If you’re not baptized with the Spirit, and you’re not praying in the Spirit daily, you won’t be able to tell his voice from Satan’s. But if you’re on your game, you’ll be on a path that will always be straight. You’ll be on the highway in the desert, mentioned in Isaiah 35. Even if you’re a fool, as we all are in our own right, you will not err.

I’ve judged people’s actions at God’s request. People tell me this is wrong, and they cite the word of Jesus as though it were law. They miss the point. When I do what God tells me, I have authority. He will not always tell us to do the same thing, in similar situations. Today I may be required to be quiet. Tomorrow, I may be required to stand up and point out error. If you’re not in touch with the Spirit, you can’t judge my actions.

The ancient Jews didn’t understand this. When Jesus told them things that conflicted with tradition, or with their understanding of the law, they asked him where he got his authority. He refused to tell them, because they would not have understood. His authority came from the Holy Spirit, with whom he had been baptized by John. Modern Christians still don’t get it. They say we’re not under the law, but in reality, they think we’re under new laws. That’s not true. People who know the Spirit are children of God, and they are not under the law. People who accept salvation but not the Spirit? Still under the law, in their daily affairs.

If you understand these things, the book of Galatians makes sense.

Now I say, That the heir, as long as he is a child, differeth nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all; But is under tutors and governors until the time appointed of the father. Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world: But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.

Howbeit then, when ye knew not God, ye did service unto them which by nature are no gods. But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage? Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years. I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain.

He says, “I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain.” Clearly, Paul had the same concern I do. Jesus bought us a hotline to the throne room, yet we prefer to live under laws we can memorize, while keeping God at a safe distance.

The law is a lot better than nothing, but the Spirit is a lot better than the law.

People need to quit worrying about me. I’m not bitter. I don’t sit around plotting death and destruction for people who have mistreated me. I do get angry, temporarily, when I see people doing rotten things. But that is a fleeting thing, and most of my life is very peaceful. I have absolutely no desire to punish anyone. I do speak up about bad things people do, but that’s not punishment.

Consider what happened to the man in the martial arts video. He faked power. He convinced others that he had it. Then he met a real adversary, and he was beaten and injured, with great ease. He was humiliated. That’s what happens to Christians who fake God’s help. We may be full of it, but our enemies are not. When they come against you, you better have something stronger than a phony anointing.

Remember the Warsaw Ghetto

I think I’m starting to understand the anti-civil-rights hysteria that resulted in Obama’s soon-to-fail gun ban efforts.

All of this stuff has a supernatural root. We don’t pray for godly leaders, and we think we can get by with a little prayer here and there, instead of relying on God. We want to keep our dirty TV channels and dope and extramarital sex. We don’t want to give so much of ourselves to God that it actually has a cost. So God withdraws his protection.

Satan is real. He IS the Antichrist. He’ll have a human puppet some day, in whom he concentrates his power, but Satan is the hand in the glove. He hates America because on the whole, we have been God’s people. We’ve done missionary work. We’ve promoted Christianity and Christian values. We’ve fought sin. We’ve been somewhat helpful to the Jews. The rest of the world is pretty much lost, but in the US, Christians have been able to thrive. Satan wants to put an end to that.

Satan loves killing God’s people and taking away their ability to communicate. In the Old Testament, he tried to exterminate the Jews over and over. He tried to prevent the Messiah from being born. After the crucifixion, he destroyed Israel, scattered the Jews, and arranged for the imprisonment and murder of Christians. In ages past, he corrupted the church itself and used it to kill Jews. During the Holocaust, he built huge parodies of the temple and used them to kill and incinerate Jews and devout Christians.

Satan is raising an army in the US. He calls it Anonymous. He calls it “anti-bullying.” He calls it Islamism and Occupy Wall Street. He is growing a horde of people who rally around separate causes which have the same underlying, hidden goal. He is giving these people power to limit and oppress Christians and Jews, and in the future, he will use them to take what we have and kill us, just as he used their forebears in Rome and Holocaust-era Europe.

We are weak in the Spirit. The church itself blasphemes, calling tongues “gibberish” and “demonic.” We’re told we have to earn what we get, and that God doesn’t do miracles any more. We’re told it’s normal when he doesn’t answer prayer. We’re corrupted and weakened with iniquity; our chronic sins give the enemy the right to afflict us. We are not very good at defending ourselves using God’s preferred tools. But we do have guns. And it would be very helpful to Satan if those guns were taken away before we find our real weapons.

Which physical weapons does the enemy hate the most? High-capacity weapons. Why is that?

Historically, Satan has worked through mobs. He raised a mob of idiots against Moses during the Exodus. He raised a mob to slaughter the Jews under Ahasuerus. He used mobs to commit pogroms and other anti-Jewish crimes. Now, with the aid of technology, his use of mobs is getting more adept. If Anonymous or the jihadis don’t like you, they can come at you with computer attacks. If your neighbors envy what you have, they can coordinate through Facebook, Twitter, or even Craigslist and descend on you like locusts.

Mob crime is going to be the crime of the future. And to fight a mob, until you have a strong relationship with the Holy Spirit, you will need semiautomatic or automatic weapons with large magazines. You’re not going to have much hope if you rely on a seven-shot pistol or a double-barrel shotgun.

A time will come when mobs will gather at the homes of Christians and Jews, and the police will deliberately take their time to respond, or they’ll refuse to come at all, or they’ll participate in the crimes. When that age dawns, we’ll see robbery, murder, beatings, and rape (of men and children, not just women) on a new scale. And if Obama and his minions get our high-capacity weapons, we’ll be as helpless as Lot was in Sodom. He couldn’t defend himself against a gang of homosexual rapists, so the best response he could come up with was to offer his daughters. And the rapists rejected that offer, which is a good demonstration of the effectiveness of appeasement (the approach liberals recommend).

If you have a weapon with a puny magazine, a mob will be able to plan a way to beat you. It will be easy for them to come up with ways to waste your ammunition. If you have a couple of AK-47s with full magazines waiting, it will be another story. In the future, high-capacity guns will save Christian and Jewish homes and lives.

We need to get strong in the Spirit. But until we have that strength, we need to take the advice Jesus gave the pre-Pentecostal disciples. We need to own and carry weapons. If not, history will repeat itself. The slaughter in Egypt. The murders in Bethlehem. Saul’s murders of early Christians. Pogroms. The Holocaust. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising. It will all happen again.

Speak out against the attacks on our civil rights. That’s important. Give to the NRA. Wear an NRA shirt once in a while. But while you’re doing all that, pray. Make sure you pray every day that we will not be disarmed.

Satan is going to raise up more maniacs to shoot up schools and churches. He’ll do his best to make the gullible public think high-capacity weapons cause crime. We know this is coming; he’s already doing it. We need to pray for God to thwart these people, and for him to use civilians with high-capacity weapons to do it. The attack is supernatural. If we don’t respond with supernatural power, we have no chance of winning.

The press will be against us. For a long time, it has been Satan’s voice. It extols abortion, homosexuality, fornication, and just about everything else we know is wrong. It holds liberalism out as the philosophy of the pure. In its way, it portrays Lucifer as an angel of light, and it portrays the followers of Jesus as backward, ignorant, hateful fools who prevent peace and prosperity from breaking out. If we don’t pray, we will be seen the same way the Jews were seen in Holocaust-era Europe. We will be thought of as human vermin. “Responsible for all the world’s problems.” “The cause of all the world’s wars.” They already tell us about the mythical millions who have been killed by Christians, while ignoring the real millions killed by leftists who hate religion.

Pray for victory over the blind. Our God is stronger than theirs, and he has promised us that when a people turns to him, he will heal their land.

NEXT CHALLENGE!

I got my latest musical composition whipped into shape. I want to make it longer, but the basic idea is finished.

It’s a really sad piece. It makes me think of the way believers are going to have to leave others behind. I named it “Out of Sodom.” Maybe I’ll come up with a name I like better.

I put it on Youtube, with a bunch of photos I hope are in the public domain.

I’m starting to feel like I’ll be able to write good music whenever I want. Things are breaking loose.

It’s so great to be able to do the things I’ve always wanted to do. God opens doors, redeems, and restores.

Follow the Pillar of Fire

I want to pass on a little advice. It’s a piece of knowledge that has been useful to me.

As many Christians know, the Bible is like the Constitution (or any other set of laws). It provides many benefits, but you won’t necessarily receive them unless you apply. It’s like the Fifth Amendment. The cops can’t question you after say you want an attorney, but if you don’t assert your right, they’ll question you anyway. There are many things God will do for you whether or not you ask, but on the whole, it’s best to make your needs known and stand on God’s promises.

Here’s a promise which is particularly useful: “The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord: and he delighteth in his way. Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the Lord upholdeth him with his hand.” That’s Psalm 37, verses 23 and 24. It’s clearly a general promise available to all. It doesn’t say “a good Jewish man” or “a good man who sacrifices at the temple” or “a good man with freckles.”

Lately, I’ve been bringing this promise up in prayer, more than once a day. I ask God to honor it until the next time I ask. I believe prayer is like manna in that you shouldn’t rely on yesterday’s ration, so I think it’s important to ask repeatedly and not to expect the prayer to keep you going for the rest of your life. There are some things you only have to ask for once, or which you can stop asking for, once God confirms he will do what you want, but it pays not to take chances.

I remind him of similar promises. The Bible says that when your father and mother forsake you, the Lord will take you up. It says you will hear his voice behind you, telling you which way to turn. It says he will lead you in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

I also ask God to lead my enemies onto the points of their own swords and to hold them there until they repent.

What I’ve found is that when I make this request, things go better. There is less dead time in the day. I get things done. I spend less time goofing off or wandering in confusion. Life is more organized. There is less stress.

This prayer got me over the hump with CAD software. As I wrote earlier, I’m finally able to use it. And it has also led to greater musical productivity. I’m getting all sorts of good melodies written down. I really think I’m going to get to the point where I’ll be selling music. It’s going to be good enough to publish. That’s amazing. Music can be extremely lucrative. You only need one successful work to keep you fed and clothed when you’re retired.

I suggest you try asking God for guidance, daily. See what happens.

I’m very excited about music, because I’ve come to realize that writing music requires the same gift as cooking. It’s really no different. When you write recipes, it comes from inspiration. You’ll be sitting around thinking about other things, and suddenly you’ll imagine a flavor or a texture, and the way to create it, and you’ll write it down and try it. Your imagination tells you what will taste good, and your work only serves to confirm it. When you write music, melodies that “taste good” to the ear come into your mind, and all you have to do is write them in musical notation. If it sounds good, it IS good. That’s the only test.

I find that God is as willing to give me tunes as he is recipes. And here’s one great thing about music: you don’t have to make a mess in order to create it. You don’t have to drive to the store and buy food. You don’t have to wreck the kitchen. And when it’s done, you can preserve it forever, and you can email it and publish it with very little effort.

I don’t know how I would go about finding a market for music, but I’m sure there’s a way. When I have a portfolio built up, I should be able to do something with it.

I consider myself a writer and a creator of music. I think those are the things I should focus on. The other stuff is great, but I believe it deserves less priority. No one will ever pay me to run a lathe, and no one will ever draw closer to God while listening to me make a pizza.

I’ll put up the piece I’m working on now. I was shooting for something resembing a spiritual, but it has more of a classical sound. I love classical music. There’s no reason why I can’t enjoy writing it. I know it’s not fashionable, and composers are expected to come up with inventive new forms of music no one can stand to listen to, but only a moron would say the genre is exhausted. There is a lot of classical music, but only some of it is truly great. There is still a big need to fill. I’m always frustrated because my favorite composers (Chopin, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, and Beethoven) didn’t leave more work, and I’m sure other people feel the same way.

Chopin actually had some of his works burned when he died. Unbelievable.

This piece isn’t done. It’s very short, and there are lots of things I may want to do with it. But it does show that things are going well.

12 31 E Minor Piece

Get connected to the power supply and see what God will do for you. I think he is leading a lot of people out of the spiritual dark ages.

Can Aaron’s Rod Become a Fish?

Back in November, Perry Stone told about a dream a young woman had. This girl was under one of his ministries. She saw a blue fish being swallowed up by a big red fish. Stone had a strong impression that it was a prophetic dream, and he speculated that it might have something to do with the election. Red swallows blue.

We all know how that turned out.

Since then, he has been trying to figure the dream out. He says maybe red symbolizes leftism, as it has for quite some time.

I’ve noticed something about God. When he answers prayer, sometimes he gives you what you expect, but very often, he gives you what you asked for, in a way you don’t recognize at first.

Quite honestly, I think God enjoys popping Satan in the head from unexpected directions. Satan can’t predict the future, and God can, and I believe God likes fooling Satan by doing the unanticipated. The universe is a war zone, and in war, you generally don’t tell your enemy what you’re doing. You make him guess wrong, so he’s never prepared.

Maybe the dream was prophetic. Perry Stone is not perfect, but he knows the Holy Spirit. He is no idiot. If he thinks a dream is prophetic, you should listen, because he is probably–PROBABLY–right.

The dream suggested that conservatives would swallow up leftists in America, and the obvious thing was to conclude that it was about the election. Judging by the polls and by the confident descriptions of the GOP ground game, it looked like Romney was more likely to win than Obama. Romney was genuinely surprised that he lost. It was an unanticipated result.

We didn’t get what we expected. Does that mean the dream was wrong? That may be the case, but it may be yet another example of God keeping his enemies (and followers) guessing.

The current hysteria over gun control may carry the seeds of a reawakening.

There are a lot of centrist and conservative Democrats who vote stupidly, especially in the South and in the plains states. They don’t see the importance of having three branches of government which are aligned in purpose, so they don’t realize it’s suicidal to vote for Democrats who seem to share their values. If there are 60 Democrats in the Senate, and 12 are conservative, the Senate will be under the control of far-left Democrats. The 12 conservatives won’t matter much. And a Democrat President will get a rubber stamp whenever he wants it. And a Democrat President will appoint many, many insane liberal judges to lifetime positions. These judges, not Congress, will determine what the laws say.

People who don’t understand the importance of voting their beliefs do understand this: it’s very bad to be disarmed. Mob violence is increasing. The threat of government oppression is very real. Economic disaster is likely to spawn riots and looting before too long. Many people who vote for Democrats are very determined to hold onto their guns. Now that a gun-control propaganda campaign is sweeping the nation, it is conceivable that sleepwalking conservatives who vote Democrat (or skip voting) might wake up and switch sides.

Gun control is very unpopular. People like background checks, but they do not want registration (which is primarily intended as a means of obtaining lists for future confiscation), nor do they want laws which limit their arms so badly that they are ineffective. Important Christian interests such as the rights of the unborn and the preservation of Israel blow right by many conservatives, but, selfish things that they are, they’ll take notice when you come after their right to defend themselves.

You can’t vote for “free” Obama phones, extended unemployment benefits, and other tax-funded goodies without voting for gun confiscation. There is no line item veto at the polls. If you want the candy, you have to take the laxatives, too.

The Fiscal Cliff fight shows how weak the GOP has become. They gave up a great deal, and in return, they received virtually nothing. They got a promise to negotiate later, which means they didn’t get anything at all. They got the right to hear the Democrats say “no” again.

Now the extremist Feinstein is pushing a horrible bill that would utterly gut our Second Amendment rights. It doesn’t just go after fully automatic rifles or even high-capacity semiautos. It goes after your humble Glock 17. It contains registration and confiscation provisions. It’s very bad news.

What I wonder is this: given that the GOP is so feeble now, can we dismiss Feinstein’s shameful attack on our civil rights as hopeless?

It’s extreme, even for a Democrat, but so was the Fiscal Cliff deal Obama rammed down Boehner’s helpless gullet. So was Obamacare.

Maybe the gun-haters will get some traction in the near future, and it will snap people out of their complacent comas. And maybe other Democrat threats and failures will pile up and stun people awake.

God knows most Americans don’t care about the murder of the unborn. We don’t care about perverted “marriages.” We don’t care about Israel, or about laws forcing religious organizations to pay for abortions. Maybe he’ll use guns–something we care about–to help us understand how stupid we’ve been. And if that happens, the fish dream might turn out to be predictive.

Or maybe the dream means nothing.

One thing is for sure: focusing on the political side of things is a huge mistake. It’s like looking at the hands of a clock. We should be looking at the gears and springs that move the hands. Everything that happens in the natural world has a supernatural cause. We complain about the political policies of our leaders, and carnal conservatives think the answer is to increase our voting base by giving up our Christian morals. Let the gays in. Let the enemies of the unborn in. Drop Israel. That’s incredibly stupid. For one thing, when we open the floodgates in order to overcome the voting advantage of our enemies, we become like our enemies, so the purpose is defeated. For another, our blessings and success come from God, not votes, and if he’s not helping us now, he’s definitely not going to help us when we turn our backs on him.

Every day I pray for God to strike down the ungodly in the US and Israel, and among Jews and Americans everywhere. I ask him to help them turn to him and repent, but I ask him to find those who won’t repent in a reasonable time and take away all that they have. Their power. Their wealth. Their prestige. I ask him to make them ridiculous in the eyes of the public, so people won’t imitate them. And I ask him to pour his Spirit out on a generation of Spirit-filled, praying, God-centered believers who will do his will. I ask him to give them what he takes from the ungodly, and to raise them up before the public so they become role models people want to copy.

This is what will fix America. All the carnal whining and dancing will just make things worse. Remember what the Psalms say: “Fret not thyself in any wise to do evil.” Don’t let nerves make you turn from God and try to fix things with your own hopeless, weak tools. You will only make things worse. That psalm (#37) also says to cease from anger and forsake wrath. This is a hard thing to do when it comes to politics, because the things our adversaries do are so wretched, and it’s so tempting to ridicule and insult them. No one knows that better than I do; my history is full of errors. I still get mad and say things I shouldn’t. But getting angry at our political foes is like getting angry at a sword instead of the person swinging it. It will just draw us further into defeat.

Satan raised the left up against God’s people. That was smart. Even smarter, he is convincing conservatives that they have to abandon God in order to win. This is classic Satan. Cause a problem. Blame God. Reap a harvest of duped souls.

One of the greatest lessons God has taught me is to turn to him whenever anything important happens, good or bad. Satan knows that some people turn away from God when things go badly, and others turn away when things go well. When you have problems, the last thing you should do is give up on God; he’s the only way out. When things go well, you should live in terror of forgetting God, because as soon as you think you don’t need him, you will begin to lose his favor and protection. These days a negative event drives me to concentrated, prolonged prayer, and a big blessing drives me to spend time in thanks and praise. I do NOT want to end up like the ancient Jews who ran to false gods in response to both blessings and problems.

I quit giving money to political causes. I think it’s like putting bandages on wounds that haven’t been cleaned. We can fix this nation, or at least parts of it, but the only way to do it is repentance and concentrated, prolonged, mass prayer. We need a large number of godly individuals to pray for the defeat of the ungodly and the advancement of God’s servants. If we take this path, God will help us stand our ground, if only in “Jesusland,” and we’ll get a good measure of protection and success. If we continue to resort to carnal tactics, we’re going to turn into our enemies, and there will be no reason for God to protect any part of the US. If Lot had joined the orgy, he would have been burned up with the Sodomites.

If we don’t get with it, they’re going to kill us in the streets. It may be twenty years from now, but it will happen. We will have no country to which we can retreat. Israel can’t absorb us, and there are no other nations that serve God. We’ll be like Jews in prewar Germany and Austria. We should be building up our borders with prayer and repentance instead of moaning about the need for a big tent. Working to include ungodly people is like begging for cyanide.

Pray for God to break the teeth of the ungodly among Americans and Jews, and to close their mouths. Pray for him to raise up a generation of powerful leaders and believers. Jesus said his kingdom was not of this world, so we can’t fix the entire globe, but there is no reason we can’t establish a stronghold of considerable size.