From the Tomb I Arise

People sue me all the time. I haven’t written about it, but I’ve been sued 5 times over the last few years. Most of it has to do with real estate. All of the lawsuits were ridiculous. None went anywhere. I believe two are still active, but they’re hopeless. I have relied on God to deliver me, and he came through every time.

I have refrained from countersuing and from reporting anyone to the authorities; I believe that if you want God to deliver you, it’s important to avoid getting in there in your own strength and mud-wrestling like a moron. You can’t glorify God by delivering yourself.

I was praying about one of the cases in my truck, maybe in 2009, and I felt a wave of faith rush through me. It was so powerful, I grabbed the center console and held on. I felt as if I were being washed away in a flood. From then on, I knew that suit was over, regardless of how it looked. I mention it now so God can receive his glory. I think it’s extremely important to credit God in front of other people when he helps you out.

I had a dream which I believe was about one of my enemies. In real life, my involvement with this person really got into gear in an event that took place next to the kitchen sink. Seriously. One night years later, I dreamed a big female roach was on a canister by that sink. It was about six inches long. It had two arrays of eggs under its forelegs, like the missiles on a helicopter. It also had a big brown belly which reminded me a great deal of my enemy: a plaintiff with a round pot belly and skin the same color as the roach’s.

I hate roaches, especially when they come toward me the way this one did. I live in Miami, where you will see roaches occasionally no matter what, so I keep a spray bottle full of alcohol handy to blast them. It usually knocks them out so they can be dealt with at leisure. The alcohol didn’t work. The roach was enraged, so it took off (Florida roaches fly) and flew over my head, across the kitchen. I kept blasting it, trying to get it to go away. It refused to let up. It turned and started descending, facing me, and as it did, it dropped slowly toward the back of a fan.

You can imagine what happened. That big belly got sucked into the fan, and the guts went all over me. The roach destroyed itself because it could not leave me alone. I was covered with disgusting roach guts, but I was unharmed.

After that, I found myself wandering through an old apartment belonging to my parents. They’ve never had an apartment during my lifetime; the apartment in the dream doesn’t exist. It was full of dust, and I was salvaging old things that had been set aside and forgotten. Dust poured off of them as I picked them up.

The reason I mention this is that I feel like I have new insight on the dream’s meaning.

I recently ended all involvement with this enemy, at considerable expense. I didn’t have to. I was in no danger. I felt that the Holy Spirit wanted me to. I needed to close the door on a malignant relationship and get rid of any handles that could be used to get me involved again. Part of the reason, I felt, was that God wanted to clear the playing field for a new relationship. And today I found myself rummaging through dusty items from my past, because of new opportunities God is bringing my way.

I started building guitar amps a while back. A friend wants me to build one he can use professionally. I just repaired one of my church’s Vox AC30CC2s. The other day a guy in Texas asked me to build him a Bassman clone. I don’t know where this is going, but it’s starting to look like it means something.

I keep many of my old math and physics books in the garage, on a suspended platform. I got a degree in physics and then went to grad school, but I got burned out and quit, and for a long time, I felt it had all been wasted. Lately I’ve been looking for ways to get up to speed on electronicis, and I’ve been ordering books. Today I had to go out in the garage and make sure I wasn’t duplicating anything I already had. While I was dealing with the dust on the boxes, I remembered my dream.

I used to think the last part of the dream suggested I was never going to recover the potential that was taken from me earlier in life. I was never going to get another shot at the missed opportunities. Now I think I may have been wrong. What’s a little dust? There was dust on King Tut’s tomb, and look at the riches they pulled out of it.

I just ordered an REA Problems Solvers book on electrical circuits, plus a Schaum outline. I got expedited shipping. I can’t wait to dig in.

I know there are very few people who will find this blog post interesting, but I felt I should put it up and let God have his glory. If you don’t document these things, no one will listen to you later on when they turn out to be from God. Never predict the past. God gets no honor from that.

The symbolism of the roach eggs is not lost on me. I could have been in real, lasting trouble, but for God’s protection.

If you have ears to hear, take something away from this. If not, sorry I wasted your time.

God Does Not Need Your Mud Pies

I haven’t blogged in forever. I guess the bug left me.

Life continues to improve. All sorts of stuff is happening.

As regular readers know, I belong to a prayer group at church. Most of us are not too pleased with the lack of Holy Spirit moves in the main services, and our church has hosted some preachers who left us disappointed and annoyed. Our answer has been to increase prayer in tongues and listen to the Holy Spirit.

Things keep ramping up. More people are joining the fight. More people are coming to the group and telling us how prayer in tongues has changed them. They’re getting revelation from God. They understand the Bible better. Good things are happening to them. Their lives seem guided. It’s exactly what I knew would happen, if they would listen.

We’re even seeing it in services. Our pastor has been allowing the congregation to spend times praying in tongues, as a body. That’s phenomenal. It proves God is listening, and that the things he has us doing in private are not a waste of time.

A week or so back, someone came in and tried to convince us tongues were not for everyone. He cited 1 Corinthians 12:

4 There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. 5 There are differences of ministries, but the same Lord. 6 And there are diversities of activities, but it is the same God who works all in all. 7 But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to each one for the profit of all: 8 for to one is given the word of wisdom through the Spirit, to another the word of knowledge through the same Spirit, 9 to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healings by the same[b] Spirit, 10 to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another discerning of spirits, to another different kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. 11 But one and the same Spirit works all these things, distributing to each one individually as He wills.

That’s the Bible, all right. But he went beyond the plain meaning of the words. It says God manifests himself through each one as he wills, but it does not say prayer in tongues is not for everyone. The Bible says the gifts belong to the Spirit, not to us, so the Spirit decides when to use which gift, and through whom. That doesn’t mean you can’t exercise all of the gifts, at various points in your life. In all likelihood, Paul was simply reminding us not to be disappointed or impatient because we don’t display all of the gifts equally all the time.

In the New Testament, there is a pattern. Over and over, people receive the baptism with the Holy Spirit. Robert Morris has pointed out that every time–no exceptions–they began to speak in tongues that were unknown to them. And the scriptures (both testaments) are loaded with references to tongues. Many of the references are symbolic. Example: instead of saying, “You will pray in an unknown language,” Jesus said he would give us “living water.” Concerning singing in tongues, the Psalms say the kings of the earth (his sons and daughters) will sing in the way God shows (Psalm 138), and that God will put a new song in our mouths, “even praise unto the Lord” (Psalm 138).

The name “Beersheba” is a prophetic reference to tongues. The “sheba” part comes from the Hebrew word for “oath” or “seven.” We know from the Revelation and from the shape of the lamp in the Holy of Holies that seven is the number of the Holy Spirit. The “beer” part means “well.” At Beersheba, Abraham found water provided by God, in the middle of the desert, because he trusted God. The earth is a desert, and tongues are the living water, provided freely by our creator. Beersheba was a place where God spoke to people repeatedly, in revelations, as the Holy Spirit reveals himself through his gifts.

That’s just one example.

In the New Testament, we are repeatedly encouraged to pray “in the Spirit,” which means “in tongues.” If you read the passage in Ephesians about the “armor of God,” you should not ignore the last part, which makes it clear that prayer in tongues is the way to go about putting on the armor: “praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, being watchful to this end with all perseverance and supplication for all the saints (Eph. 6:18). And what about the passage in Romans which says things work out for our good? Look at the whole thing. It’s about people who have been baptized with the Spirit, and who pray in tongues.

Rom 8:22-30
22 We know that until now, the whole creation has been groaning as with the pains of childbirth; 23 and not only it, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we continue waiting eagerly to be made sons — that is, to have our whole bodies redeemed and set free. 24 It was in this hope that we were saved. But if we see what we hope for, it isn’t hope — after all, who hopes for what he already sees? 25 But if we continue hoping for something we don’t see, then we still wait eagerly for it, with perseverance.

26 Similarly, the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we don’t know how to pray the way we should. But the Spirit himself pleads on our behalf with groanings too deep for words; 27 and the one who searches hearts knows exactly what the Spirit is thinking, because his pleadings for God’s people accord with God’s will. 28 Furthermore, we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called in accordance with his purpose; 29 because those whom he knew in advance, he also determined in advance would be conformed to the pattern of his Son, so that he might be the firstborn among many brothers; 30 and those whom he thus determined in advance, he also called; and those whom he called, he also caused to be considered righteous; and those whom he caused to be considered righteous he also glorified! “(CJB).

I can testify about this, personally, and I can tell you my friends will agree with me, because they’ve been there, too: when you pray in tongues a lot, God guides you like GPS. He may not take you where you think you should go, but he will put you where you should be, and things will work out in ways that amaze you, over and over. One tongues proponent–Glenn Arekion–puts it this way: when you pray in tongues, the Spirit prophesies about your life. He tells what will happen. He arranges your future. Call it prophecy or intercession or what you will; it happens.

I believe that when John spoke of Spirits denying or admitting that Jesus came “in the flesh,” he was referring not to the initial incarnation of Jesus, but to his reincarnation in us, through the baptism with the Holy Spirit. Nearly everyone, atheists and Satanists included, admits Jesus lived as a man, so surely this can’t be the admission Job was talking about. If a Satanist says Jesus lived as a man, does that mean the Spirit of God is in him? Come on.

The indwelling of Jesus through the Holy Spirit (Jesus coming in our flesh) is what the Spirit of Antichrist fears, and it’s what he fights the hardest. It makes us powerful, as Jesus himself said it would. It replicates Jesus here on the earth, producing little copies of him to afflict Satan’s kingdom. It’s like Agent Smith in Matrix Revolutions.

Satan doesn’t like it when we receive salvation but remain powerless. But he really hates it when we get salvation in the next life AND power in this life. So the Spirit of Antichrist rises up in people who are not baptized with the Spirit, and it leads them to criticize prayer in tongues. This is probably what Jesus was referring to when he said you could not be pardoned for “speaking against” the Holy Spirit (Matthew 12).

The guy who tried to tell us tongues were not for everyone made it clear he thought we were exalting ourselves because we had the gift. He said it didn’t make us “better Christians” than him. I think that reveals the motivation that led him. He projected pride onto us. This is probably what Cain did to Abel.

He could not have been more wrong. When you pray in tongues and listen to the Holy Spirit, you’re not exalting yourself. You’re humbling yourself. You’re telling God you’re a welfare case. You’re saying you can’t do what he wants without his help at every step. You’re admitting you have virtually no power and no righteousness of your own.

We never knew he didn’t pray in tongues until he told us. He had given us the impression that he had the gift. I don’t know how we could be accused of thinking we were better than he was, when we thought he was just like us.

I do not believe God gives tongues to special righteous people. I believe he gives them to people who have faith and who will submit. After all, from God’s point of view, we are all on the same level. Jeffrey Dahmer and Billy Graham…both so far from God’s righteousness, they might as well be the same person. It’s like the Tower of Babel. It looked like a big deal from earth, but from heaven, it looked like a pimple. No more impressive than an outhouse or a bordello. So the idea that God only gives tongues to super-good people is crazy. One of the purposes of tongues is to help us become good, through God’s charity. Why give it to people who are already good? If you’re so great you can keep the law on your own, go for it, but you have to do it perfectly. The rest of us need to have the law written on our hearts.

I think some people who take a long time to receive tongues may be suffering from an insidious type of pride. They feel bad about what they are (as we all do), they feel they have to work and suffer to make it up to God, and they don’t feel entitled to his help. So they can’t let go and let him speak through them. “Never mind, God. I don’t deserve you. Let me do this for you.” The problem is that no one ever climbed up to heaven. You have to be carried. If you think you can do things for yourself, you may think you’re penitent or unselfish, but in reality, you’re proud. You believe you can do things only God can do, and you think you can do it your own way. That’s my best guess. You have to be willing to let go, take a chance on making a fool of yourself, and let your lips start moving.

I ask God for things constantly. “Help me open the refrigerator door. Help me turn on the TV. Help me shave. Help me breathe.” God WANTS us to be dependent, because a dependent person can’t have pride. God is not busy. He is not offended when you ask him for things. The thing that offends him is the illusion of self-sufficiency. Read the Bible; see how Saul got cursed. Look what happened to the Levites who brought strange fire to the altar. What was the Tower of Babel about? Man doing it for himself.

God doesn’t want your help, believe me. He will not owe you. You are to owe him.

I knew this kind of attack would come; it always does. It succeeded in removing the power of the Holy Spirit from the church about 1800 years ago. It will fail this time, but it’s still going to be with us. Satan is going to use sincere Christians who think they are doing God’s will, to stop the spread of the power of the Holy Spirit. But when he cuts off one of Jesus’s fingers, three more will grow in its place. It doesn’t depend on us; it depends on the God who empowers us. We are disposable. We are like seeds. Plant us, and more of us grow.

Here’s something really weird. Surely you know religious Jews don’t buy ANY of this. They are extremely hostile to Jesus, at least in private, so it would be crazy to expect them to believe in the gifts of the Spirit. But Perry Stone met one who had a surprising attitude. His name was Yehuda Getz, and he was an Orthodox rabbi who lived in Jerusalem. Did he have a good reputation among religious Jews? I have no idea. For all I know, he was a nut case. But one day Perry Stone mentioned tongues to him, and he said, “Ah, yes. The language of God.”

Stone asked him to explain, and he said that on Yom Kippur, when the high priest entered the Holy of Holies, the priest would speak directly to God in an unknown language. I had never heard of this before. I still don’t know what to make of it. I have never seen anything in the Old Testament which refers to tongues literally. Metaphorically, sure. But not literally.

My cup runs over. I don’t have time to talk of all the things I’ve seen lately. If you want to live this life, you can’t experience it through me. Get ahold of it for yourself. You don’t need me.

The Guess What

The Herzog clone is moving right along.

I shouldn’t call it a clone. It’s based on the Herzog schematics that are available on the web, but those schematics are pretty pathetic. I’ve had to fill in gaps, and there are things I want to do differently.

Here are the schematics, in case anyone out there wants to build a Herzog. Good luck.

HERZOG SCHEMATIC AT BUILDTHEMUSIC.COM

As you can see, there are two different projects. Here is what I’m told. The one on top is the first Herzog, and the one below is an improved version. The top one has a manual switch, and the bottom one is rigged for a footswitch.

There are many holes in these schematics, and there are things I just don’t like. I want to be able to use this machine as an amp, so I want a tube rectifier. That blows out all the diode nonsense in the bottom part of the screen. I want a footswitch, but I also want a manual bypass so I don’t need the footswitch when I’m using the Herzog as an amp.

Here’s how it looks at the moment. The board is in, the tubes are in, and the pots and jacks are ready. The components are not soldered yet, and there is no wiring. The tubes may be oriented incorrectly. I stuck them in there for mockup purposes, so it doesn’t matter if the pins are where they should be.

I have to run to Radio Shack to see if they have 5V relays, and then I have to go out in the garage and start tinkering again.

One nice thing about using bad schematics is that you have to learn about the circuits you’re building. If everything were going smoothly, it would be monkey-see, monkey-do. Now it’s more like monkey-figure-it-out.

I have some nice aviation wire on order. Hoping it will be here tomorrow. That would allow me to finish the amp without worrying about replacing wires later on. I want good wire in the heaters and any areas that are sensitive to noise. I have some RG174, but it’s small for heater wire (26 gauge).

I have to come up with a base for this thing. I may put perforated metal inserts in the ends (matte black) and mount it on some nice walnut or mahogany.

And finally:

The X-1 Needs to Cool Down

I’m making great progress on the Fender Champ/Garnet Herzog cloney thing.

Today I made the screw holes for the power transformer (I already had a hole made for it to sit in), and I installed the rectifier socket and output transformer. I also made a circuit board from scratch.

Sadly, I made a little boo boo while making the socket hole. I have a new unibit that goes up to 1 3/8″, and I was all excited about using it. I fired it up and drilled a pretty nice hole, and then I remembered…the correct size is 1 3/16″.

The hole was bigger than the socket.

I had to spend an hour an a half remembering how to use the lathe. Then I made the little tube platform you see in this photo.

Most people don’t know anything about tube amps. They’ll think there’s a scientifical reason for that platform. AND I INTEND TO LET THEM BELIEVE IT.

It looks very cool, so I’m not complaining.

This thing should be running by tomorrow night, if I can figure out what kind of relay to use for the footswitch. I may have to bypass the footswitch stuff until someone clues me in.

Anyway, it’s beautiful.

More

I figured out what the platform does. It repels microfleems that aren’t subradiante.

Nothing of Interest Lies Behind Me

If I had to name the strangest thing the Holy Spirit has done for me, I think it might be this: he has made me into a morning person.

I have never liked mornings. For most of my life, I didn’t really wake up until noon, and I felt most energetic late in the evening. I hated getting out of bed.

These days I don’t leave the bedroom until I’ve spent a long time in prayer, much of it in tongues, and I feel God’s presence come into me, and I sense that he has prepared a victorious day for me. I feel invigorated and eager to get up and see what’s ahead. That is just crazy.

The Holy Spirit is doing great things at my church. This is a welcome change. We’re supposed to be charismatics, but I don’t recall seeing the gifts of the Spirit in action in our services. It’s my understanding that some things have been prohibited, because of the danger of scaring off new people. First limitations were placed on exhibitions of the Spirit’s power. Then they disappeared entirely.

I guess I’m overstating what has happened. Sometimes someone who is teaching says something that clearly came from God. And I have seen some “prophecies” which I think came from adrenaline, not God. But the general rule is that the services are scripted down to the minute, and we try to make each weekend service exactly like the others.

The problem with this is that God has to be unpredictable. It’s great to try to have order in your life, but God has to have room to do things we don’t expect. One of his great strengths is his knowledge of the future. His enemies don’t have that. So it’s a tool he uses to frustrate them, and the only way he can do that is to do things that can’t be predicted.

The crucifixion is an example. The disciples were crushed when they learned it was going to happen. But look how it turned out. It restored us to our positions as governors of the earth, and it saved us from hell. Some of us, anyway. God did the unexpected, and he even tricked Satan into helping.

It seems like the sermons are getting less powerful over time. We hear the same kind of stuff apostate churches teach. “Try hard.” “Be good.” “Pray a lot.” But behind the scenes, among a few people here and there, the Holy Spirit is working a counter-revolution.

I’ve persuaded a bunch of people to start praying in tongues more, especially in my prayer group. Wild things are happening. I used to come in and try to tell people what I had learned about the Holy Spirit. Now they’re telling ME. I learn wonderful things from them. I feel built up when they testify about what God is doing for them and their families. And our numbers are growing.

We have a guy who has only shown up twice. Once a long time ago, and again this past Saturday. His wife is Jewish. To her, a cross and a swastika are pretty much interchangeable. I believe she’s an atheist, so her objections are not based in Judaism.

He says he has been hiding his Bible from her. He put it in a box covered with foil, so she won’t know what it is. He reads it when she’s not around. He’s an outcast in his own house.

She made him go into psychotherapy. She chose the doctor. He’s a Jewish atheist. He tells my friend the Bible is full of lies. Surely that’s unethical. He ought to be turned in to the Department of Business and Professional Regulation.

His wife believes Christianity is a mental illness, and it sounds like his doctor is in the same camp. Mind you, my friend is not bothering her. He’s not telling her what to believe. He’s not trying to force her to go to church or become a Christian. He’s just praying and reading his Bible, and she is treating him like a lunatic. She even told him to choose between her and the Lord. Fortunately, he said he would choose the Lord.

Here’s the great thing about his story. God baptized him with the Holy Spirit, even though he wasn’t free to go to church or associate with Christians. He started praying in tongues one day. No one laid hands on him or prayed for him. It’s like what happened to me a long time ago. God has a purpose for this man, and he is not going to let the man’s wife get in the way.

We started reminding him that he is the priest of his home. The man is the head of the woman. He is supposed to lead, not follow. We told him he had to quit hiding. If he reads the Bible in the living room, his wife’s head isn’t going to explode. It’s not going to hurt her. Let her be unhappy, if she so chooses; it’s not her place to tell him what to do.

I don’t know what my friends in the group would have told him a year ago. Probably useless things. “Tough it out.” “Christians are supposed to suffer.” “Stop complaining.” Instead, because they’ve been building themselves up in the Spirit, they told him the right things. Take charge, obey God, pray in tongues, associate with other believers, and let God work it out. Don’t let the tail wag the dog. And I told him he needed to go see my Messianic friends. He’s not Jewish, but he knows what it’s like to be shunned by a Jewish wife. They would have unique insights to help him succeed.

Maybe she’ll leave. She has free will. But if that happens, her husband should be able to say he provided a clear example for her.

I wish I had time to talk about the way God is unifying my friends and me. I’ll give an example. Yesterday an illegal alien showed up with a newborn baby and started begging in front of the church, holding a sign. I had to deal with her, in my capacity as a security volunteer. I needed someone who spoke Spanish. There are few Cubans in my church. Nearly all Cubans speak Spanish. We have some Puerto Ricans, but they generally speak Spanish poorly. We have a pastor who speaks Spanish, but he didn’t want to do it. Guess who God found for me? A young man who sees me as a source of Biblical knowledge. Someone who takes my Facebook stuff, without telling me, and reposts it on Twitter.

We went and talked to her and took her to the church’s cafe. I felt like God wanted me to do something for her, so I ordered her some food, and I agreed to do other things the Spirit seemed to suggest. While I was at the cash register, my friend Alonzo came out behind me with his credit card out and told the cashier he was paying for whatever I was having. I said, “It’s for someone else.” He said, “It doesn’t matter. I got it.” Later he told me the Holy Spirit told him to go up and pay for what I was ordering.

We heard a sermon about the power of words. The pastor mentioned two things. He said the Bible says we conquer through the blood and the word of our testimony. He also discussed the story of Moses at Meribah, where he struck a rock with a stick to open up a spring, instead of speaking to it, as God had commaned.

While I was working in the sanctuary, Alonzo came up, and I started telling him what I believed the true significance of these things was.

I said I thought the Meribah story was about the baptism with the Holy Spirit and prayer in tongues. Water, wells, and springs usually symbolize the Holy Spirit inside us. “Beersheba,” for example, means “well of seven,” and seven is the number of the Holy Spirit, as symbolized by the seven lamps in the Holy of Holies.

We are supposed to get the living water flowing, pray in tongues, and take on God’s nature and his power. We do this instead of struggling to please him with our own puny tools. Apostate churches, however, claim tongues are from the devil, and they tell us we have to earn our righteousness and our favor from God. Jesus bought it all with his blood, but we have to earn it!

When Moses struck the rock, he was using human effort. He tried to “help” God. Instead, he deprived God of his glory. His punishment was that he was kept out of the Promised Land, which symbolizes the kingdom of God. Spirit-filled believers have God’s kingdom inside them; a believer who rejects tongues and will not listen to the Holy Spirit will not enter the kingdom.

I told Alonzo this was my take, and he started telling me he had told his wife the same thing. And we had a remarkable conversation about it, in which we confirmed each other’s conclusions.

I said I believed the passage about the blood and the word of our testimony referred to salvation (the blood) and tongues, in which the Holy Spirit testifies using our mouths. This is the word of God. It’s the sword of the Spirit. Scripture is the word of God, but so is anything God says today. And of course, Alonzo was right there with me. He said he believed the same thing.

The unfortunate thing is that the sermon didn’t connect the Holy Spirit and tongues to the power of words. What we received was a shallower interpretation. “Be careful what you say, and make sure you speak positive things in God’s name.” That’s great, but it’s the tip of the iceberg. We should have received the whole thing. People came for a meal, and all they got was a roll and some parsley.

I have had concerns that I haven’t been listening to the Holy Spirit lately; not as much as I should have. So I’m trying to do a better job.

A week or two back, in our prayer group, I felt that the Holy Spirit was telling me to make a big sacrifice in order to put a complete end to a terrible relationship. I was involved with the wrong woman, and the relationship failed, but I got stuck with a worldly connection to her. I feel that the Holy Spirit has told me to get rid of it. Why would God provide me with someone new, while there are still strings tying me to someone else? If I were a woman, and I married a man, I wouldn’t want to see him writing alimony checks or doing anything else to indicate he had a relationship–even a dead one he regretted and thoroughly repudiated–with someone else. So I plan to listen to the Holy Spirit. He will wash this person out of my life for good and clear the way for someone else.

When I do what I’m planning to do, I will be wronged to a certain extent, but it’s better to be wronged than to wrong. God repays. He repays you, and if they don’t change, he repays the people who wrong you. We are not supposed to jump in the mire with the pigs and mud wrestle. We fight principalities and powers, not people.

“Meribah” means “bitterness” or “quarreling.” I don’t want to get bitter because I got stuck fighting someone with earthly tools. Bitterness may rest in those who wrong me, but it will be rinsed out of me by God’s cleansing waters. When I think about the things that have been done to me, I have my crabby moments, and sometimes I give in a little, but I know that the future is sweet, and this garbage will soon be too far behind me to see.

Monster Wattage is the Answer

Life just gets better and better.

I received the parts for my new 5-watt Herzog/Fender Champ clone, and today I started working on it. I had such great results with the heavy aluminum channel on the 5f6a clone, I decided to use 4″ aluminum square tubing for the new project. And I’m using a tube rectifier, just in case it makes a sonic difference when I use the rig as an amp. I’m told it won’t, but it will still look cool, and that’s important.

The next photo shows the chassis after I trimmed it with a table saw. I just made a rectangular hole for the power transformer, using the milling machine, but I’m too lazy to take a photo. Now I’m waiting for my giant unibit to arrive so I can drill the tube holes instead of using a hole saw.

My buddy from church settled on an amp: the Trainwreck Express. This is one of those legendary small-shop amps, like the Dumble Overdrive Special. A little outfit in the Northeast made them, and then the maker died. Now people go over them with microscopes and try to copy them.

It’s supposed to be a high-gain amp with a temperamental circuit. They say the overdrive goes nuts with a small twist of a guitar pot. It’s said to be better for rock than blues, but my friend says it’s what he wants.

Next week we’ll order parts.

I’ve learned a ton since I made the 5f6a, so this new amp will have new intelligent features in it, like heater wires that are arranged correctly to minimize hum. I’m referring to the Champzog. The Express is another story. People are telling me to do exactly what everyone else has done, if I don’t want trouble.

Here’s something amusing and possibly useful. The Express is a head (like all Trainwrecks), and it’s traditionally made of lacquered hardwood. Someone found that you can go to Woodcraft.com and order a nice dovetailed cherry drawer for $56, in the exact dimensions of an Express cabinet. Good info to have.

I love it when new amp parts arrive. I want to pour them out on my bed and roll in them. But I’m not that mental yet.

I’ll bet anything I end up making more amps for the guys at church.

Time to unwind with a Coke. This has been a phenomenal day.

5 Pounds of Sustain

I’ve decided on my next tube amp project. I wanted to make a low-powered Bassman 5f6a clone, but my 40-watt amp sounds so beautiful at low volume, I think a smaller one would be a waste of time. I decided to do something a little more unusual: a Herzog.

This is the effect Randy Bachman used to solo on the Guess Who hit “American Woman.” You get a creamy, compressed, overdriven sound with infinite sustain.

How did he do it? Amp maker Garnet Gillies took a single-ended 5-watt design similar to the Fender Champ, slapped a resistor across the output, and ran it into the input of an ordinary amp.

There are two well-known Herzog schematics out there, and neither one really makes sense, but they are authentic. I pored over them and asked other people for help, and today I ordered parts based on my conclusions. I plan to make a 5-watt amp head which can be turned into a Herzog effect with the flick of a switch.

I know there are other ways to get this effect, but my guess is that they don’t sound the same. The Herzog has two tubes in it. I would be surprised if you can duplicate their sound with solid state electronics. I’ll bet the analagous pedals are not quite as good. And they definitely won’t drive speakers.

The Bassman is beyond amazing. I can play it with the volume at 2 and get beautiful, warm sound. It loves pedals. It sounds great on its own. It’s perfect. Better than I hoped.

I’ve noticed that the dynamics go way past any other amp I own. It’s actually a problem. If you pick lightly, you get a very quiet sound. If you pick hard, you get popping notes that fracture your skull. The trouble with this is that it exposes every mistake. Things I used to get away with are suddenly right out there where everyone can hear them. My other amps evened out the volume, and I didn’t know it.

This is a great quality for an amp to have, because dynamics are a big part of playing well. Nat “King” Cole was an astounding jazz pianist, but he played everything within a very narrow volume range, so he never got the kind of acclaim Oscar Peterson got. Vladimir Horowitz doped the hammers on his Steinway so he could cheat and get a wider dynamic range. Art Tatum could go from a whisper to a roar instantly. Variations in volume keep the listener engaged. They make music less boring.

The amp makes a little noise, but still, you can hear tiny details. If I run my finger up and down a wound string, you can hear every winding.

I can see why so many amps were based on this circuit. My guess is that if you don’t care for metal death distortion, this is as good an amp as you can get.

It’s a little hard to think of new projects after hitting a home run on the first try. But I’ll keep going. After all, there wasn’t a whole lot of original thinking in this amp. The physical design is completely unique; I did all that, apart from using old circuit board layouts. And I chose the components. But the actual circuit is 95% Fender. And Ma Bell’s engineers designed it before Fender got ahold of it.

My blues guitarist friend now says he wants a Trainwreck Express clone. Whatever. Once he figures out what he wants, we’ll build it.

Homebrew Amp Sends Sino-British Combos Packing

I took my new amp to church yesterday? The verdict? Amazing.

One of the guitarists asked if he could use it during services. Mind you, he was going to be putting it up against the lead guitarist’s $1200 Vox AC30. At the end of the day, the guitarists were telling me how great my amp was.

The sound is warmer than the Vox. It breaks up nicely. It sounds way better at low volumes. It has plenty of juice. They didn’t have to turn it past 12 o’clock, even with a single 10″ speaker battling against the Vox’s 2×12.

I put a new part in it: a humdinger circuit suggested in Merlin Blencowe’s book on power supply design. This is a trimmer pot between the heater feeds with the wiper connected to ground. It allows you to balance the voltages in the feeds so they’re identical. This gives excellent hum cancellation. Now the amp is really quiet.

I’m planning to build an amp for one of the guys, and he was leaning toward a Super Reverb, but now he’s thinking two amps, because he likes this one so much. It looks like I can do it for around $400, unless he goes for a Gucci tone-snob transformer set. That will add $300 to the job.

It amazes me that I can use this amp to practice in a small room. And look how God has given new value to the physics education I thought had been wasted.

Two of these would completely solve my church’s guitar amp problems, but I guess they’re stuck with the Voxes. They’ll never sell them and use homemade amps. People don’t like to rub their mistakes in their own faces. When you blow that kind of money on amps, the natural thing is to struggle to make use of them.

Life is sweet. The next project will begin as soon as I can get parts.

Amp Virtually Finished

This is too cool not to blog

Last night I got my Fender Bassman clone running! Here’s a photo. It’s gorgeous. I call it “Thick Al.” I asked for advice on a forum, and I referred to it as a “thick Al chassis,” referring to the aluminum, and someone thought I was giving the amp a nickname. Sounds good to me.

This is a 40-watt amp powered by 6L6 Sovtek Svetlana tubes. It has a 12ay7 preamp tube (V1), and then the signal goes through two 12ax7s (second stage and phase inverter). The rectifier tube is a Chinese GZ34, and it’s backed up by 4 4n1007 diodes.

It’s the exact circuit Leo Fender used, except that I didn’t follow his practice of always using the cheapest components, and I omitted the ground switch, added variable outputs, and used a 125V pilot light. If I had it to do over again, I would omit the standby switch, as a noted authority has convinced me that they are worthless.

The chassis is a 20″ length of 6″ Aluminum Association channel. I machined hollows in the back to make it easier to mount things. I made the circuit boards using a table saw and drill press. I polished the chassis with an orbital sander and 220-grit sandpaper.

It still needs something to cover the bottom.

A day or two, I did the “smoke test,” firing it up to see if it worked. I kept blowing fuses, and that’s when I learned that the cases of electrolytic capacitors are electrically connected to the innards. I had the filter caps mounted so the leads touched the cases, and that caused shorting. Hey, I don’t make capacitors. How would I know?

I got that fixed, and I built a current limiter to conserve my remaining fuses, and I found that the amp was very quiet and distorted. It took two days to find out that I had put 470K resistors where I needed 470 ohms. Two were on the screen grids, and one was on the phase inverter. I also had a 250pF capacitor where I should have had a 250uF, and I had the volume pots wired so they turned backwards.

Last night I got it running, but it was too late to try it out. Today I turned it on, and I had lots of noise.

I learned a lot about grounds. I had to move a whole bunch of them. In the process, I rewired the volume pots and also the presence and EQ pots (which, I now know, were wired correctly at the time). I replaced various bits of cheap stuff with good stuff, I put a tube shield on V1, and I turned the amp on again.

Still noise.

Then I turned on my Fender Blues Jr. Guess what? It was considerably noisier. That told me I had made it. I got some great suggestions for reducing the noise further, but it’s great right now.

I played the amp using my Epiphone Riviera P93 with Lollar pickups, using a Holy Grail reverb and the following distortion pedals: Plimsoul, Blues Driver, and Fat Sandwich.

The amp is amazing. The sound is very sweet, hot, and detailed. It has lots of punch, so you get a big reward for picking louder or softer. It’s less muddy than the Blues Jrs. Apart from the residual noise, it’s the perfect amp. And the volume actually works! A lot of amps go from 0 to 10 in ten degrees of rotation. On this amp, 3 means 3! It sounds good at practice levels! I don’t need my Firefly now!

I play it through a homemade cabinet with a 12″ Weber Signature speaker (super cheap). I can’t turn it up because the speaker is rated at 25 watts, but so far, it sounds beautiful. I just received a 10″ Eminence Ragin’ Cajun, and I plan to make a cabinet for it tomorrow. That will give me 75-watt capability, so I’ll be able to fire the amp up for real (probably with ear plugs).

I never expected to be able to use this amp. I built it in order to learn. But it’s extremely useful. A keeper. The ideal blues amp.

I just wish the selector switch on the Epiphone wasn’t going out. I have to get that fixed.

I love the way the amp looks. I was going to put some kind of roll cage on it, but I don’t really need one at home, unless I plan to get drunk and sit on the amp.

Now I need a new project. The guys at my church complain that their Vox AC30 amps are too loud; they can’t crank them and get good tube sound without blowing up the church. Maybe I should make an 18-watt EL844 based amp and see if they like it.

It’s amazing how God is taking the old threads I dropped and weaving them into something meaningful. This is a blast.

God is the Same Size Everywhere

I get flak for criticizing denominations to which I don’t belong, but these days I think it’s fairly obvious that I spend a lot more time criticizing my own branch of Christianity. In that respect, I’m a lot like Jesus and John the Baptist. Jesus was probably a Pharisee, and John was the son of a priest, but they said horrendous things about the religious establishment. Does that mean we should look for opportunities to insult religious authorities? Clearly not, but it has long been understood that the right to criticize increases with the target’s proximity to the critic. Messianics tell us that as religious Jews, Jesus and John could get away with criticizing their own kind. I think that principle still applies, as long as you don’t venture into pointless or malicious gossip.

An organization with no critic is like a circuit with no negative feedback. If you feed an amplifier a signal, and there is no way to limit the amplification, you can get positive feedback which causes the amp to go way overboard, ruining its performance. Similarly, when a church has no one to stand up and say no, it will tend to wander into theological minefields and commence to dance.

The prophets were critics. I can’t think of a single Old Testament prophet whom God raised up to tell the Jews they were doing a good job. Yet our modern charismatic churches preach that anyone who says anything “negative” (they don’t use the term “constructive criticism” much) is sowing discord and gossiping and so on. It’s true, some people do gossip in a malicious way. I know someone who calls my pastor “Judas”, and I’ve been told that another local pastor with a radio show calls him a “white plantation owner” because he runs a church which is mostly black. That’s all gossip and slander. But what if you go to John Hagee’s church, and you notice that he teaches that we shouldn’t evangelize the Jews? I know that makes Jews happy, but we’re not Jews! We should be up in arms. And we’re not. Mainly because John Hagee collects tons of money and has a TV show (we believe all rich televangelists are blessed and super-holy), but also because we don’t want “discord.”

Don’t even get me started on the pastors who claim we can command or “release” angels. Even Jesus did not presume to do that. He said he could call out to Jehovah and have a huge number of angels sent to help him; he didn’t say he would command the angels personally. The Bible tells us very clearly that dealing with angels is dangerous. Scripture vilifies those who worship “the host of heaven.” It says some angels fornicated with women and raised up a race of giants. Jesus told us to ask the Father for things; he never told us to ask angels. In fact, an angel offered to serve Jesus and allow him to fix the world’s problems as its ruler. That angel was Satan, and Jesus told him to get lost. The Bible contains no examples of godly people who told angels what to do, yet suddenly some pastors think it’s a good idea.

Essentially, they are telling us to practice voodoo. In voodoo, you try to command the souls of dead people, and you pray to strange “saints.” In reality, these beings are either imaginary or just evil spirits. A spirit who serves God–we call them “angels,” but not all are angels–is not going to listen to an order that comes from outside the chain of command. So if any spirit listens, it has to be a rebel spirit. If you’re a Christian, and you try to tell angels what to do, you are no different from a santero or voodoo priest. This is obvious to anyone who has read the Bible and who has a basic familiarity with spirit worship, yet now this garbage is pouring out of our pulpits.

Charismatic churches have endemic faults, and one such fault is a tendency to create personality cults. We claim to worship God, but in reality, we exalt teachers and pastors and musicians, as though they were somehow more holy than the rest of us. We even pamper them at the expense of our families and the poor. When they do revolting things, we say, “Judge not!”, as though Jesus had issued a blanket prohibition on speaking about other people’s sins. Paul told us to correct people, and he said that if they refused to change, we should denounce them before our entire churches. Was he wrong? If so, who has the authority to take a blue pencil and delete his errors from the New Testament? If such a person exists, I haven’t met him yet.

Every pastor has sins and iniquities, and it’s wrong to shun a man of God merely because he does something wrong. But what if his iniquities endanger his flock, and he has no remorse and no intention to change? If I found out my pastor spent some nights looking at porn or drinking himself silly, I would be concerned about him, but if I knew he didn’t defend his behavior, and that he was working to overcome it, I would still be on his side. But what if he said what he did was okay? What if he fired another pastor who was in exactly the same boat? What if he invested in a strip club? What if he twisted doctrine and claimed he had proof that the things he was doing were not sinful? A guy like that needs to be exposed and removed. End of discussion.

Self-righteous criticism is a sin. Malicious or vengeful criticism is a sin. But exposing a bullheaded person who is leading others into a pit is not sin. It is something we are obligated to do, according to scripture. When a religious leader’s errors get sufficiently grave, and I have to balance loyalty to man against loyalty to God, God is going to have to come first.

I don’t look to cause trouble, but I am never going to let a friend walk into a trap without saying something. If that means I get asked to leave a church, it means absolutely nothing to me. I pay to go to church; they don’t pay me. I serve the church. It doesn’t serve me. I’ll take my power to bless somewhere else, and I’ll still be blessed. Like Jesus said: “Shake off the dust under your feet for a testimony against them.” He never said, “Hang around and be abused and mocked and taught false doctrine until you die.”

I know a few famous preachers I truly admire and listen to without hesitation. On the other hand, preachers disappoint me all the time. The main things that offend me are ingratitude and arrogance. I don’t like a preacher who feels entitled; as though he’s a rock star. People like this are “stiff necked” in Biblical terms. They are like clay bottles which are already fired and can’t be altered by the potter’s hands.

I know about a preacher who was invited to preach at a major event. Somehow, he got separated from a piece of clothing he wanted to wear on stage. It turned out he always wore this type of clothing. What would you do? I’d wear something else. Seriously, are we superheroes now? Do we have to have costumes?

Volunteers at the event had to find and buy a replacement garment. That shocked me when I heard about it. It’s like something that would happen at a Jennifer Lopez concert. “Make sure all the bottles of Evian in the green room are turned so the caps face southwest.” It reminds me of Hillary Clinton’s famous rule that no one in the White House was allowed to make eye contact with her.

How can this happen? It’s not like this guy was wrong about a minor point of doctrine. He was very obviously way out of line. And he was allowed to preach and receive money! Man, that’s creepy. I don’t want my offerings going to a person like that. I don’t want to hear what he has to say, because “of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh.”

I’ve seen arrogant preachers. I’ve seen greedy preachers. I’ve seen preachers who were obsessed with naming the utterly ungodly celebrities they knew. I’ve seen many preachers whose messages were defensive propaganda intended to keep people from leaving bad churches and cutting off their tithes. The fact is, many of the people who make it to the stage are not great servants of God. They’re just ambitious and desperate for attention and admiration. We don’t know who the real servants are. At judgment, we’ll find out, and I guarantee you, there will be a lot of big-name clergymen and megachurch pastors who get humiliated, while obscure people who sat in the backs of their churches receive praise. Now that I think about it, maybe we do these clergymen a disservice by failing to speak up when they blow it.

When a church cuts off the right to question and exalts a mere man, it becomes a cult. God is utterly humble; you can say absolutely anything to him if your heart is right. Somehow, we’re supposed to give men more honor and deference than that. Does that make sense to you? The Bible says, “Though the Lord be high, yet hath he respect unto the lowly, but the proud he knoweth afar off.” It says, “Him that hath an high look and a proud heart will I not I suffer.” It says, “God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble.” God actually fights the proud. And remember, “grace” means power, not mercy. If you’re humble, God will give you power. Real power. Not just a sweet gig running a megachurch.

Some people teach that Satan broke the church into denominations. The more I think about it, the more I think Jesus did it. He wanted us to be in unity, but he also wanted us to listen to the Holy Spirit. When a church hardens its heart against the Spirit, it becomes part of the natural world, and Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” Maybe he reluctantly inspires people to leave and form new, healthy churches.

Maybe the story of the Tower of Babel symbolizes the church. In that story, man used his own limited brainpower to create an astrological observatory intended to give us control over our fate. Man didn’t listen to the Holy Spirit or choose to walk by faith; he chose to bypass God’s plan and do it on his own. In response, God divided man with different languages. Churches that cast out the Holy Spirit work the same way. They think they can improve the universe by doing what seems good to them, and they ignore the Holy Spirit. So maybe God responds by dividing them into new denominations where reform can persist for a while.

We are now being reunified by a common language: the language of tongues. The Tower of Babel story is proceeding in reverse in some charismatic churches. The Holy Spirit, not some central church body run by homosexuals and bureaucrats, is knitting the dry bones back together.

I utterly reject the policy of speaking mindless positivity at all times. I think serious, concentrated prayer is always the first step when a man of God screws up, but after a while, you may have to open your mouth, and you may have to leave. That’s not you being a bad Christian. That’s you getting free of a sick environment and absolving yourself of your share of the collective guilt.

If I ever get in trouble for speaking the truth, so be it. Any church I go to will get more from me than it will give me, so I don’t think I will ever leave a church in bad odor with God, and it’s not like I’ll lose any earthly blessings. I’m not like a person who depends on the church to provide me with a job that far exceeds what my competence merits. Worst case scenario: I get to spend more time doing things for myself and my family. I can serve God and bask in his presence in a cave in the desert. It’s good to go to church, and you should try to put yourself among believers, but my real church is any space I occupy. If ever end up without a church, it will be temporary, and God will go right on taking care of me.

I hope the charismatic churches get it together. Otherwise, we will be the obsolete churches of the 21st century, making rude gestures from the platform while the train pulls out without us.

Man’s Castles are God’s Anthills

Today I got a great Retweet from John Bevere. His son Addison is entering the ministry. Addison said this: “Sophistry is born when the wisdom of man attempts to define the wonder of God. True religion is marked by faith!”

Amen. If brains were what mattered, we would all be taking our cues from Jews. Christian religious scholarship is not very good, although it’s certainly better than the childish stuff we hear from Muslims. Jewish scholarship is on a much higher level. Nonetheless, we believe our way is correct. The reason is that our faith, power, and virtue are imparted to us supernaturally, not through effort or study. A Christian who isn’t bright at all can be a powerful teacher as long as he allows the Holy Spirit to speak through him, but many of our ancient, revered authorities, though learned, were completely wrong about major issues. That’s a nice way of saying they made things up.

Sometimes people tell me I need to read this or that moldy old book, in order to understand God. Meanwhile, God manifests himself to me every day and does wonders in my life. It’s like being in Paris and getting a phone call from a travel agent in Des Moines, offering to send me a pamphlet.

It reminds me of a line in the movie Patton. The general had just captured Palermo, and a Lieutenant Colonel named Codman told him General Alexander had ordered him not to take the city. Patton said, “Send him a message, Cod. Ask him if he wants me to give it back.”

Before tomes and treatises existed, what did people do? They dealt directly with God. I doubt he shut them out because they didn’t have degrees. Where did Adam go to college? What about Moses? Actually, I suppose Moses would have learned a lot of useless garbage from Egyptian tutors. But we know God spoke directly to him, as did the angels. Many modern Christians would have told him he was doing it wrong. “Tell those angels to get lost; we have to go study God.”

One of the great things about Christianity is that you don’t have to be smart to do it well. Jesus used fishermen to spread his word. You don’t have to be a scholar. Isaiah predicted this in what would later be known as his 35th chapter:

1The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.

2 It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing: the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon, they shall see the glory of the Lord, and the excellency of our God.

3 Strengthen ye the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees.

4 Say to them that are of a fearful heart, Be strong, fear not: behold, your God will come with vengeance, even God with a recompence; he will come and save you.

5 Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped.

6 Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert.

7 And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water: in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes.

8 And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be for those: the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein.

9 No lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast shall go up thereon, it shall not be found there; but the redeemed shall walk there:

10 And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

Whatever the literal meaning of this passage may be (people obsessed with reason will get lost there), it also refers to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, who guides and strengthens and changes us. This world is a desert, and the Holy Spirit is like GPS (or a pillar of fire), leading us through it. It’s as though there is a highway before us, and he keeps us on it, even if we are fools. That’s what the Hebrew says, even if some translations change it to say fools will not walk on it.

The Bible is a strong authority. Things that came after it? Not so much. Jesus himself condemned them. In the book of Mark, he said, “Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men, as the washing of pots and cups: and many other such like things ye do.”

We have a lot of nutty ideas working their way into the charismatic churches now. A famous TV preacher has people convinced they can command the angels. Which is true. If they practice voodoo. Otherwise, no. Jesus himself said he would ask the Father to send angels, showing he recognized heaven’s command structure. The Bible calls Jehovah “the God of armies,” referring to the spirit beings he commands. When men start talking to mere spirits, they get in trouble, as Adam could tell you.

If you’re a Christian, you have to compare everything to the highest authority you have, and scripture outranks the rantings of publicity-hungry preachers who are eager to come up with the next big supernatural craze. It also outranks the Talmud and the early church scholars.

The book of 1 John says. “But the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in him.” Either John was right, or he was a liar, and his whole book should be banned. I think he was right. I think the Holy Spirit teaches me, better than any man could, and I think it’s a good idea to discard crusty doctrines that don’t jibe with scripture. If that’s controversial, so is the Bible.

But then the veracity of the Bible is always controversial, especially in the church. “Oh, it doesn’t really MEAN that…”

I’ve also noticed that people from the older churches have a real problem tolerating other denominations. You can go into a room full of Baptists and criticize Billy Graham and escape with no damage beyond a few dirty looks, but if you even hint that Catholic doctrine is wrong, you can encounter some serious hostility, and if you do it in a bar, you may get a beating. I’ve had close Catholic friends who instantly turned hostile at the mention of the possibility that other denominations might be right. It’s like the Mormons; there are some things you can’t discuss with them.

I agree with what Addison Bevere says. Wonderful bit of wisdom.

Amp Nears Completion

I keep plugging away at my new guitar amp. Because I chose to do an original chassis design, I ended up running into a lot of surprises, and they slowed me down. The next time I make one, it will be a breeze.

Here’s what it looks like without the tubes, power light, and switches.

I couldn’t figure out how to give it a nice finish. A thing like this is not easy to fly-cut. Today I decided to try a woodworking scraper and an orbital sander. WOW, did that work. The scraper leveled all the places that lifted up when I drilled it, and it reduced the scratching. The sander gave the aluminum a crazy finish that looks like Damascus steel. It has all sorts of wiggly parallel lines on it. And it only takes a few minutes to clean up the whole amp.

I have one ding that won’t come out, and there are a couple of fairly deep scratches I am too lazy to remove, but it looks great. Someone suggested an engine-turned finish, but that takes a long time to do, and it will show scratches badly. This is quick and unique, and if it gets scratched I can fix it in ten minutes.

The input jacks I ended up using are about a millimeter too big for the cavity I made for them. I did the measurement with smaller jacks. I guess I’ll have to fix that. The other jacks will work fine as outputs.

These knobs were labeled “bronze” when I bought them, but they look like copper to me. Whatever. They still look neat.

I might conceivably be able to play through this amp tomorrow. I have to get the circuit board installed and solder the connections to the pots, transformers, tube sockets, and whatever else.

The only cabinet I have is a 25-watt 12×1. I hope I don’t blow it to smithereens.

It’s going to work. Can’t wait to hear it.

I’ve been getting advice on Internet amp forums, and I can tell I’m irritating some of the people. Some think it’s cool to do a design this weird. Others seem almost offended.

I have never understood people who hate creativity, but they’re everywhere. If you’re a truly creative person, you will be persecuted your entire life, no matter how hard you try to get along with people. I’m surprised I haven’t been burned for a witch.

VIPs up Front, Holy Spirit in the Coat Closet

All sorts of fascinating stuff is going on.

I started bugging friends to pray in tongues, using timers. Some of them started doing it. Lives are changing. Unity is growing. Now some of them are going on without me.

I didn’t go to my weekly prayer group this weekend, because I thought they were going to talk about worldly things. It didn’t work out that way. One of my friends ended up running the group, and they did what I do. They worshiped and let the Holy Spirit work, and they had a great meeting. They didn’t need me. Thank God. This is what I was hoping for. I’m not the Holy Spirit. If I have to be there in order for things to work, the situation is hopeless. If I get mashed by a bus, the movement should go one as if nothing happened. I’m just one part in the machine.

I’m learning things about the church and what needs to be done inside it. The old churches, especially the Catholics, teach idolatry and apostasy. The new churches, like my own denomination (the Assemblies of God) are absolutely CONSUMED with greed and lust for power. They use the Holy Spirit as an excuse to glut their flesh and take advantage of God’s people. On the whole, the newer churches are better off, because the Holy Spirit still has a seat at the table. People still pray in tongues and admit God does miracles. They don’t pray to a mere woman or to so-called “saints.” So I think it’s possible to take people within the new denominations and break them loose.

I’m coming to some conclusions that I think are sound.

1. The idea that you have to give huge amounts of money to the church is just stupid.

According to Aaron, the Jews used to teach that 20% was a good maximum. I’m sure there are many times when the Holy Spirit calls on people to give more, but the most my church can count on from me from now on is 10%. If they were doing something remarkable with the money, it would be a different story, but they’re not.

We have been taught that God will make people prosperous if they give enormous, burdensome offerings. I can tell you for a fact: it’s not true. I believe God expects us to tithe, and that he rewards us for it. I am positive God rewards people here on earth for giving to the poor, because he promises it. But if your pastor comes begging you for $50,000 because he put your church in debt without counting the cost, he’s just wrong, and God is not going to give the money back to you, and there ain’t going to be no “hundredfold return.” If you hang around Christians long enough, you will meet lots of people who give to ministries but don’t do well, and that proves our doctrine is off. I can name names, and if money-crazy ministers challenged people like me, a flood of witnesses would come forward and bury them, bringing receipts.

No one ever teaches us to pay our debts to man before we offer money to God, but it should be obvious that this is required. Yet we are often encouraged to give money we don’t have, without asking ourselves what we owe. Why would God reward you for giving him stolen property? We teach people to max out their credit cards in order to buy ministers jets. That’s sinful, plan and simple. God hates debt. Jesus told us to avoid oaths (including the one you make when you agree to borrow money). How can any teacher tell us we should borrow in order to give? Seems to me that if you stiff Mastercard in order to give to Benny Hinn, if anyone should get the blessing, it’s Mastercard. They’re the ones who took the hit, right?

Rarely do we hear that God won’t give us money if we are greedy or irresponsible or covetous. If you have a lust problem, do you think God is going to make you the coach of a girls’ swimming team? If you have a gluttony problem, do you think God is going to give you an ice cream factory? Why would your father, who loves you, curse you with something that would destroy you? If he’s trying to bring you shalom, including prosperity and contentment, he’s not going to hand you a needle and tell you to shoot up.

Rarely do we hear that God likes it when we give to the poor. Over and over, we hear that God wants us to bless MINISTRIES. Coincidentally, ministries buy big houses and cars for ministers. The guys who tell us God wants us to bless ministries. No conflict of interest there. Perish the thought.

How often do we hear a minister quote God’s promises to help those who help the poor? Like once a month? Many ministers don’t want us helping the poor, because they see the poor as competition. Terrible thing to say, but true. Give Pastor X a hundred bucks, and he’ll take fifty for himself. Then his employees get thirty. Then the ministry gets fifteen. After that, the poor lick the dirty dishes.

Here’s what I believe. You give generously to your church, IF they use the money wisely. Otherwise, you give judiciously. You give generously to the poor, and you make very sure the charities you choose aren’t pocketing most of the cash. You take care of your family before the poor. Especially older relatives.

2. It’s not a numbers game.

Some ministers will do anything to get people to accept salvation. They will say homosexuality and fornication are fine. They will use worldly music that leads kids into sin. They will chicken out when it comes to politics, refusing to warn their flocks about the evils of voting the wrong way on abortion, Israel, the church, and sexual sin. They will welcome worldly teaching into their churches. They’ll do absolutely anything to appear cool and hip. They end up with churches full of people who think they’re in nightclubs. Their flocks stay ignorant about idolatry and other sins. In short, they turn their churches into extensions of the godless world, and they excuse it by saying souls are all that matter.

Souls are NOT all that matter. We are supposed to put people in touch with the Holy Spirit and teach them about sin. Jesus didn’t die to save the whole world. Some people are going to hell. We should be raising up real Christians. When you don’t do that, your church gets more and more worldly over time, and a generation or two down the road, it’s completely ruled by Satan. It’s better to have a good church with 200 members than a nightclub church with 50,000 members.

3. You should spend your time the way you spend your money.

If your church is doing foolish things, don’t volunteer. Stay home and pray. Sometimes you’ll want to be there so you can be a good influence, but you shouldn’t let them turn you into a doormat. People, especially kids, will think you approve of what’s going on. You can always find something good to do with your time; don’t let misguided people waste it and make you feel used.

4. A church that doesn’t promote from within is out of God’s will.

If your church seems to do a whole lot for the pastor and his family and friends, while ignoring gifted or helpful people who are not in the inner circle, something is wrong, and you need to pray for change. God doesn’t send talented people to churches so they can be milked like cattle, while connected but clueless people get endless support. That’s how the godless world operates. People cheat the gifted and keep them down. They take their achievements. They take their creations and the money they generate. A church that works that way is an extension of the world. It’s the church of Satan. If your church doesn’t reward you and work with you after a reasonable amount of time, cut it off. God prunes unfruitful branches, and you’re not expected to be nicer than he is.

5. A church should have open books.

If you pay the bills, you have the right to look at the books. A pastor who won’t publish an annual report, with details, is slapping the face of the people who feed him. There should be no such thing as blessing without accountability. Did your pastor fly to China and take his family with him? Maybe you paid for it. You have a right to know.

6. A church that takes “wisdom” from the ungodly world is serving Satan.

Remember how it worked in the Bible? The Holy Spirit filled people, and they did miracles. They took away people’s pain. They gave people peace. Naturally, people wanted to learn from them, so their lives would be improved.

Now we don’t do that. We look to see what wordly people are doing, and we say pathetic things like, “God doesn’t want the WORLD to get all the benefit of this stuff.” So we find ourselves doing yoga and using visualization techniques. We steal positive thinking doctrine from Dale Carnegie and the Scientologists.

WHO WANTS THAT CRAP? It won’t heal cancer! It won’t give you a personal relationship with God! What does it have to do with Christianity? NOTHING. If anything, it puts distance between you and God. He wants you to be blessed through faith, not gimmicks and idolatry.

The history of the church is a story of revolution. God comes and puts things right, and man corrupts it. God comes and throws out the men who usurped his power, and he puts things right again, and he puts better people in charge. Man corrupts it. The cycle repeats, over and over. Right now, the Spirit-filled churches are swimming in their own filth. We love wealth. We love seeming hip. We love cameras and stadiums. Meanwhile, the Holy Spirit might as well be hogtied. And believers are being swindled. Eventually, they will rise up and demand accountability. What will our money-stuffed evangelists say? They can’t preserve capital; they destroy it. They can’t repay, because they waste what we give them. They don’t build anything profitable with it.

A capitalist who takes your money may build factories that take raw goods and add value to them by turning them into manufactured items. A ministry doesn’t build factories or other wealth-generating apparatus. They take from givers, spend, and then take more. They sink money. They can’t repay what they take, because they don’t create anything.

7. A church that takes from the poor and gives to the rich is sick.

If your church feeds donated money to wealthy singers and speakers, paying them handsomely for showing up and drawing crowds, there is a problem. In fact, I take a dim view of any event you have to pay to attend. Perry Stone doesn’t charge people to go to his conferences. If you show up, you’re allowed in. Why would I charge to introduce people to the Holy Spirit? God didn’t charge me. Why would I bar the door with a toll, when God held it open for me?

Also, if your church asks volunteers to inconvenience themselves and spend money in order to help rich friends of the ministry who aren’t involved in events at your church, look out. If you volunteer to help your church, it doesn’t mean they can ask you to trim the pastor’s hedges or deliver his pals’ luggage from the airport. Volunteers should only be asked to do things that benefit the church. Anything else is corruption. How would you feel if you found out Barack Obama was sending the Secret Service to wash Barbra Streisand’s car?

8. A church that doesn’t welcome criticism is in Satan’s control.

If you read the Bible, you will see that generally, God’s servants were critical. They didn’t show up to tell people they were doing great. They told them to repent. But these days, some churches tell their flocks that anyone who points out an obvious and shameful problem is a Judas. Clearly, you can’t run a church when everyone criticizes without letup. But a church that bans criticism is doing the same thing the Nazis, Communists, and Islamists have done. Satan likes to protect his lies, so when he gets control of an organization, the first thing he does is ban free speech. If you can’t speak up in your church, it’s not because God wants unity. It’s because Satan doesn’t want to be exposed. Cockroaches instinctively fear light.

9. A church that kisses up to the rich is in error.

If a rich person shows up at your church, and the pastor automatically puts him in the front row, look out. He’s blessing someone Satan has already blessed. He’s saying wealth is proof of God’s approval, and that people who are not rich are inferior. The perversity of this mindset should be obvious to a small child, yet pastors don’t see it. If your pastor brags because a celebrity showed up in church, it’s not a good sign.

I think there is going to be a tongues movement. God doesn’t wait around forever while man runs the church and fills his pockets. God is going to reach down and create a church within a church and a nation within a nation. We will be persecuted by the church the same way early Christians were persecuted by Jews. We’ll communicate through whispers and glances. And slowly, we’ll cut out a big portion of the people and churches that are currently held captive. I see it happening around me. It’s not going to stop. God ordained it, so man can’t oppose it.

Like Samson, Spirit-filled people will shake themselves and use the strength of the Holy Spirit to snap the cords that bind them. Believers who refuse to listen will be like Samson after Delilah shaved him. They’ll be defeated by the world, blinded spiritually, and put to work grinding the world’s grain. God’s strength will not be in them. That’s what I believe or at least expect.

I feel like I know where I stand now, with regard to the church. I am at peace. I am not going to strive with my earthly tools and fight incompetent and corrupted people. God will clear a path for me, if I listen to him, and he will clear paths for my friends. His sleeper cells will be preceded by powerful spirits that serve God.

It’s a wonderful thing to witness. I’m so glad I didn’t have to spend my whole life being defeated by people who claim to serve God yet oppress his servants.

He Does Such Swell Stuff for People

Remember the chapter in Luke where Jesus sat the disciples down and had them do yoga? He said, “I know it comes from a Satanic religion, but it really makes you flexible, and it’s okay, as long as you don’t pray to demons.”

Wait…he didn’t do that? Are you sure?

I had a Facebook discussion this week about yoga. A friend asked if it was okay for a Christian to do it, and of course, I said it was not. And I pointed out that it was very strange, seeing Christians argue over HOW MUCH of a Satanic religion it was okay to adopt.

Yoga is a religious practice. It’s part of Hinduism. Look it up. The postures were created as offerings to demon “gods” worshiped by Hindus. And if you get beyond the stretching and sitting, they’ll teach you Satanic mysticism, including things like meditation.

Christians will try to tell you that Hindu meditation is okay, because the Bible tells us to meditate. Unfortunately, they have not looked up “meditate” in a concordance. Two Old Testament terms translated as “meditate” mean to murmur or to concentrate, presumably on God’s word.

Here; take a look at a yoga expert’s explanation of meditation:

In the yogic context, meditation, or dhyana, is defined more specifically as a state of pure consciousness. It is the seventh stage, or limb, of the yogic path and follows dharana, the art of concentration. Dhyana in turn precedes samadhi, the state of final liberation or enlightenment, the last step in Patanjali’s eight-limbed system. These three limbs—dharana (concentration), dhyana (meditation), and samadhi (ecstasy)—are inextricably linked and collectively referred to as samyama, the inner practice, or subtle discipline, of the yogic path.

Right, right. Totally harmless. Nothing there to alarm a Christian. We all recall Jesus telling us how we needed to stretch our way to final liberation and achieve the last step in Patanjali’s eight-limbed system.

Are we dense, or what? HELLO? This is idolatry and mysticism. How could it be any more clear? What will it take? Do they have to give you an “I Heart Satan” T-shirt when you sign up, in order to get the message through your skull?

I am really fed up with wordly and/or Satanic (same thing) practices worming their way into the church. I am sick of “life coaches,” large group awareness training (i.e. cults), positive thinking, yoga, motivational speakers, positive visualization, and self-help gurus.

None of this stuff has anything to do with Jesus.

Here is one of the fundamental truths of Christianity. People try to fix their own lives without God, and they fail. They suffer, so they turn to Jesus. That’s how it works. You don’t turn to Jesus and then fix your life without God’s help.

People need to stop making excuses for God. That’s one of the problems here. People become Christians, and God doesn’t make their lives perfect overnight, and they hear bad teachings which don’t pan out (thousand-dollar seed gift, commanding the angels, etc.), and they try to come up with explanations, in order to preserve what little faith they have. One of the explanations is this, even if it’s never spoken expressly: “You have to work and find solutions to your problems and make things happen, and then you give God credit because he allowed you to succeed.”

People give up on God’s help, so they try yoga, self-esteem building, Dale Carnegie, and other worldly, ineffective nonsense. It works in the short term, so they run around telling people God blessed them. Worst of all, they tell people it proves God helps those who helps themselves, which is a huge lie not found in the Bible. God helps those who admit they can’t help themselves.

Here’s another truth: Christianity isn’t about making life perfect. The poor will always be with us, according to Jesus. Disease will always be with us. We will not get everything we want in life. People will die in accidents. Good people will not do well in business. Babies will be born deformed. The purpose of becoming a Christian isn’t to make your life perfect, although it may get very, very, VERY good.

Why do I point this out? Because many Christians think that any type of success pleases God. If yoga makes you healthier, it must be okay with God. If LGAT (large group awareness training, like EST and the Landmark Forum) cults help people succeed in business, they must please God. If you give money to poor people and help them temporarily, it must please God.

That’s crazy. God’s kingdom is not of this world. Suffering is part of his plan. Very often, “fixing” a problem by worldly means is the worst thing you can do. It’s not okay to practice demonic Hindu methods just because it makes your back feel good. It’s not okay to achieve success through cult training; in all likelihood, you’re just dodging something God wants you to go through. It’s not okay to let self-help gurus train you to be aggressive and conceited; God says to be humble and rely on him.

When you help yourself by means God never wanted for you, God takes his hands off and stops blessing you until you face-plant.

When the king of Israel turned to the Egyptians to fight his enemies, instead of turning to God, he was cursed and rebuked for it. He trusted man instead of God, and he got slapped down. Somehow, we think we’re different. We think we can get exactly what WE choose, through any means we want, instead of waiting to find out what God wants for us. We get earthly success through carnal means, and then we claim we’re blessed. Then God’s fire comes and burns it up, and we’re back at square one.

Why not take the straight path? If you’re a knowledgeable Christian, what excuse do you have for wasting time on this nonsense? Isn’t it better to lack for a while and then get a real blessing than to take what you want by force and then pretend God gave it to you?

I am reminded of the story about the little boy who prayed for a new bike and didn’t receive it. Finally, he stole a bike and prayed for forgiveness.

This is why liberalism is such a problem in the church. We aren’t content with God’s time-consuming ways. It’s not enough to have him work inside us individually and improve us one at a time. We think God’s kingdom is of this world. We have to have peace, love, unity, prosperity, and free puppies and kitties for everyone, NOW! NOW! NOW! So we don’t wait for God’s way. We say homosexuality is wonderful. We say socialism is God’s way, even though it isn’t mentioned once in the Bible. We support gun control, even though the Bible calls Jehovah “the God of armies” and Jesus ordered his disciples to carry swords. We say Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and other Satanic diversions are “other valid paths” to God. We adopt any worldly or occult practice that seems to work, and we call it good, because GOD WOULDN’T WANT TO DEPRIVE HIS PEOPLE OF ANYTHING.

What a load. Shame on us.

When Job’s children died and his wealth disappeared and he was covered with pus-oozing boils, did he join a yoga class? Did he start watching Oprah? Did he join a cult and take part in a humiliating seminar in a hotel ballroom? No. He said, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.” He thought he could defend himself before God, and he was wrong, but he didn’t turn to a swami to solve his problems.

God blesses people here on earth, especially if they give alms (Psalm 41), but that’s not his primary purpose. You may not get everything you want. That doesn’t mean it’s okay to try to get your stuff from the devil or from man. Remember Abraham? He had the opportunity to become rich by accepting goods from the King of Sodom, and he said, “I have lift up mine hand unto the LORD, the most high God, the possessor of heaven and earth, That I will not take from a thread even to a shoelatchet, and that I will not take any thing that is thine, lest thou shouldest say, I have made Abram rich.”

Christians need to learn this: you don’t judge the righteousness of an act by its positive earthly result. You judge it by the Holy Spirit and scripture. That which seems to bless you is not necessarily good, and it may be a great evil.

Satan shoves this filth into the church in order to take away people’s longing for God. He says, “See? You don’t need to wait for supernatural help. Get what you want on your own. This is what God really wants. Surely you didn’t think he was going to give you things for nothing! You don’t deserve it! God wants you to earn things!” Meanwhile, the Bible tells us over and over that God gives us what we don’t deserve, and that he paid virtually the entire price. It tells us that trying to save yourself is proud and rebellious.

When I first resumed going to church, I put up with a lot. I reminded myself that I was under the authority of other people, and that God had put them over me. I told myself I had to be patient, and that when they seemed to screw up, there would be blessings in going along with it. I felt it was rebellious and divisive to speak up.

Now I’ve modified that a little. I believe you give people reasonable slack, and then you stand up for God and open the mouth God gave you. I was not reborn to serve clergymen. I was reborn to serve the one who made them from sand and salt and water.

Some people claim the church is divided because rebellious people split off in order to get their own way. That’s a distortion straight from hell. The church is divided because churches become corrupt, and sometimes good people have to leave in order to serve God. Sure, some people are rebellious and divisive. But that’s not the whole story. How long do you serve a church that mixes paganism with Christianity? How long do you stay in a church which teaches that the Holy Spirit’s manifestations are demonic? How long do you serve a church that has a gay pastor who teaches with his husband in the first row? Do you seriously think God expects us to eat filth forever? Of course not.

You should try not to offend people, but you also have a duty to let people know when they’re in trouble, and that is more important than getting along with others. Through Ezekiel, God told us we would be guilty of the blood of sinners we did not warn.

Every prophet offended the church. A whole slew of them were martyred. If you haven’t made anyone in the church angry, you’re doing something wrong. Jeremiah, Isaiah, John the Baptist, and Stephen were better servants of God than our modern Pastor Feelgoods. I know I’ll annoy people eventually, but when they pit themselves against God, what choice do I have?

I will wait on the Holy Spirit, and I will open my mouth when I have to. If some people don’t like me, so be it. They are not my judges.

Neandernerd and his Cave of Even-Order Harmonics

I had to put the AC plug in my amp chassis today. I knew this might be a problem, since the chassis is 3/8″ thick and a bit floppy for milling. I had selected a three-prong receptacle that required a hole 1.1″ by 1/25″ in size.

I was able to use the mill to waste excess metal, but it was no good for making the contours of the hole. I tried everything I knew. Fein Multi-master. Rotary flex shaft tool. Files. Everything was slow and hard to use.

I decided to get crazy and try the drill press.

You won’t believe this. You can mill aluminum with a step bit on a drill press.

First I used the mill to reduce the thickness to 1/8″ in the applicable area. I was able to orient the chassis so I could do this easily, but orienting it so I could cut the hole was not possible.

Then I stuck a cobalt unibit in the drill press and went to town. I learned two things.

1. If you hang onto an aluminum workpiece and drag it by a unibit, it mills pretty well.

2. You can use a unibit as a very precise and quick nibbler. Seriously. You raise it a step, move the work over to it, and lower the step through the metal. I’m sure this is like #3 on just about any video of workshop no-no’s that will get you fired (right after using a lathe while wearing a grass skirt and dreadlocks), but it really works.

I only wish I had figured this out right off the bat. I could have wasted the metal with the unibit and then nibbled it to fit. I had to file the corners a little, but that was a cinch.

Here’s the obvious question: why didn’t I use a cord that only required a round hole?

Look, shut up.

Okay, I’m stupid. That’s the reason. Everyone uses computer-style receptacles these days, so I although I thought about an old-style cord, I forgot about it when I ordered the parts.

Never again. Trust me on that. An old-fashioned cord with strain relief is just as good. I think it’s better. No one is going to kick it out of your amp when they walk by.

The chassis is basically done. I have to drill a couple of round holes and get wood screws to hold everything down, but that’s it. Now it’s just a matter of soldering, adding knobs, adding a structure to protect the tubes, and turning it on.

I’m dead-set on wood screws. They won’t vibrate off like machine screws with nuts. They hold really well. And if I use short ones, they won’t protrude into the chassis and aggravate me like machine screws. And no nuts to fool with! I hate turning a screw with one hand and holding a slippery nut with the other.

I should have finished the amp today, but Mr. Amp Genius had to have his three-prong receptacle.

My mill is driving me nuts. The power feed failed, so I have to turn the dials by hand, and they’re getting so you really have to apply pressure to make them engage. Tips would be appreciated. There are nuts at the ends of the screws that–I think–may adjust this. I plan to crawl around under the table and see.

That’s the weekend! Yeah, dawg!

I can’t help it.