To Be A Christian & To Stand Firm...

Ephesians, A Users Guide To Spiritual Warfare Part 3

2011-12-24T10:23:00.001-05:00

Did God really say... (Genesis 3:1

What if He did. How does that impact the world around us?

How does that impact our walk with Him, our service to Him...

How does the perception that God meant what He said change things?

Ephesians 4:17-18 outlines in just a few words the source of every problem, every grief suffered on Earth due to the harmfulness of sin:

17 So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. 18 They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts.

"Futility of thinking, darkened in understanding, separated from the life of God, hardening of hearts"; the whole problem of sin in a nutshell. Then the Words of hope, real, tangible hope, in reach, available to all:

Ephesians 4:22-24

22 You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; 23 to be made new in the attitude of your minds; 24 and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.

So Holiness isn't a style of music. Holiness isn't a posture we adopt by positioning our bodies. Holiness isn't the correct combination of decorating our churches or our homes. Holiness isn't just the right fabric in our garments.

Holiness is an attitude of our minds, our thinking, our actions. Holiness is a search for the mind of God, not in theory, but in practice. Holiness is a search for deception in the way we think and act.

Ephesians 4:25-32

25 Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor, for we are all members of one body. 26 “In your anger do not sin”: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, 27 and do not give the devil a foothold. 28 He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need.
29 Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen. 30 And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. 31 Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. 32 Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.

Speak truthfully. We depend on God to tell us the truth, so how much more must God depend on us to do the same! How can we claim to represent the God of all truth if we are not willing to be honest with others regardless of how we think the truth may make us appear to others!

"In your anger do not sin..." A cautionary warning. The devil instigates others, especially unbelievers and even more especially compromised Christians to provoke us to anger in an effort to compromise God's people to sin, thereby undermining the credibility of God's Church. So anything that provokes our temper should be a warning to be careful of where our thought process is headed when we are irritated or enraged, and to be very careful how we respond.

"He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands"

Some of the most arrogant people I have ever encountered are people who delegate almost all the work to be done at a job to others while they themselves sit proudly on their laurels congratulating themselves on their power. So those who have risen to high places in their personal endeavors and have it in their power to delegate tasks to others should be especially watchful of the temptations they are afflicted with... Authority is a stewardship, not an entitlement.

"Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths"

This is one of the most overlooked commands in Scripture! James gave such a strong warning:

James 3:5

Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark.

The things we are heard saying and not heard saying have a huge impact on the world around us! There are so many ways we can either heal or harm by the things we say! Gossip, for example, can be so exciting! This is a huge warning, because satan loves to provoke our emotions, and that evil provocation can and does feel extremely good! Beware the tingling enticement of such sin!! Many, many people fall for that, then are left to delve even deeper into sin in an effort to cover their guilt when the damage shows in shattered lives!!

Swearing often seems necessary to communicate strong feelings. This is especially tricky, especially because the need to communicate the seriousness of the issue is very real. On the other hand, one thing I have noticed over and over is that when I have been in situations where either there is no obvious opportunity to witness for Christ, or when I have been witnessing for Christ and unbelievers are deciding for themselves if my faith is credible, if I can refrain from swearing at all, they really notice that. This surprised me at first, but the fact that people do notice has happened often enough now, that I take it very seriously. A little thing like choice of language can strongly bolster our testimony to a watching world...

Ephesians 5:1-2

1 Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children 2 and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

It seems to me that being imitators of God and living a life of love in an unlovely and unloving world is a very real sacrifice to the Lord. The impact love makes will surely last longer than just about anything else we could possibly do, since it is through love, honesty and kindness we witness to the lost...

Then there is the opposite of love...

Ephesians 5:3-7

3 But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people. 4 Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving. 5 For of this you can be sure: No immoral, impure or greedy person—such a man is an idolater—has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. 6 Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of such things God’s wrath comes on those who are disobedient. 7 Therefore do not be partners with them.

It has always interested me that Paul grouped greed in with sexual immorality and course joking. It is also hard not to notice that a Church which takes such a strong stance against abortion also takes such a weak stance against sex out of wedlock and adultery... Less than 50 years ago, should a Pastor get a divorce, his career in the church environment was over. Now divorces among pastors are a common feature of the church scene... In fact, among certain types immoral women, interfering with someone else's marriage is an accepted means of finding a "good" or "better" husband! And among high school college age youth, sex is considered a rite of passage of some sort... "Did God really say..." Well, yes, in fact He did.

"Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of such things God’s wrath comes on those who are disobedient. Therefore do not be partners with them."

Does this mean that if someone has already made the mistakes there is no hope? Of course not, but it is also very true that because things have already gotten so far out of hand, God's wrath is indeed coming down on this world with terrifying speed! Someone I love calls this "Snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory"... Indeed, this is exactly what has happened as sin has wormed its ugly deceptive way into the church at large.

I once heard a man speaking on a Focus On The Family program (sorry, I don't remember his name, I heard this show several years ago), about working hard to reconcile differences in his marriage related to handling money. He spoke of his doubts in this way: "Could the God of all perfection have made one little mistake in choosing my wife for me?" That dear man asked himself that question over and over, but deep down he knew that even if God could make a mistake, that wouldn't be it. So the certainty that he had married his wife in the center of God's will became the foundation of his decision to keep trying to break through to a place of respect and understanding that kept him in his marriage until he and his wife understood each other and reconciled their differences.

So being sure enough that God really DID say, that God really DID MEAN what He said is the critical foundation to all victory in Spiritual warfare, and by extension, the only means to unite with Jesus Christ in genuine and absolute victory in all things. It matters that much. Therefore, if we are to hope to put on the armor of God and use the Sword Of The Spirit which is the Word Of God, (Ephesians 6:17), we must insist that His Word is true no matter what else seems real.

Ephesians 6:16-18

16 In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. 18 And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints.

Lord Jesus, I thank You for the privilege of writing this series. I thank You for all You have taught me and for all You have given me. I thank You for your inestimably precious Holy Spirit which has so consistently backed You in all You said and all You do. I pray for this series and especially for Your Holy Word, to reach the hearts of many and to spark a deep and widespread revival in and beyond Your Church as we anticipate the stunning miracle of Your Triumphant Return.

On this Christmas Eve, I pray for Peace on Earth and goodwill towards all men, in You, through You and To You alone Jesus Christ. Amen and Amen

Ephesians, A Users Guide To Spiritual Warfare Part 2

2011-11-11T10:32:00.000-05:00

I have been putting a lot of thought and a lot of prayer into this study. Returning to this issue has brought back some memories that had begun -- at long last -- to fade...

Robert has said he has never heard anyone speak of the Lord and the sort of experiences I have had with Him quite the way I do... That, and an objective return to a series I wrote for another forum back in 2009 has brought back some memories from those days. I didn't set out to be particularly holy or anything; I just had a very serious need to know who God really is, how He thinks and why. When I first became a Christian, one thing I was completely clear on was that whoever or whatever I might have thought God really is was so badly mistaken that I would have to dump every preconception I had ever had about spirituality and start from scratch. So I did. I read my Bible with keen interest, frankly very surprised at what is actually says, particularly the New Testament. When I began learning to pray, I found myself asking the Lord all sorts of questions about how He was asking me to cope and how to actually do the things He was asking me to do which will soon be discussed as we enter chapter 5 of Ephesians... I was overwhelmed with afflictions from without and from within during those years, and more recently as well. Some days it was all I could do to face the fact that i had woken up to face yet another day... At one point I begged the Lord to just let me die, I was so miserable that I couldn't conceive hell to be any worse, so I told Jesus Christ He didn't owe me (He didn't and doesn't), and that He need not let me into His Heaven. His reply was a gentle but firm no...

In 2008 and 2009, two things became clear to me. First, the structure of local churches seemed institutional to me. Until I read the article Matt shared with me yesterday, I had thought that was just the way churches were supposed to be, and that the problem was my own perception, tainted by experiences of my rebellious youth. In fact, the typical American church is institutional, because one of the strongest reasons people go to church is to attempt to protect their kids and marriages from the poison of pop culture. I have never been able to bring myself to fault anyone for that... They do have a right to seek shelter in the Lord. The problem is they get so institutionally introverted that they shut out the unbelievers who make the outside world so threatening in the first place, thus defeating their own larger purpose...

The second thing I learned is that most Christians don't understand the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, don't think themselves or anyone else really has the Gifts, or much worse yet, do think they have the Gifts of the Holy Spirit and don't seem to understand what they are or why. Let me break that down a little. Around here, the outward expression of the Holy Spirit is largely smothered on purpose because it is just plain safer and saner if nobody tries to operate beyond the normal 5 senses. One or two churches tried to go into the higher functions of Christian Spirituality, and got into trouble. One of the pastors who got fooled by Toronto Vineyard type deceptions (they were claiming the "gold teeth blessing" among other things) is still leading a fairly large church, but more carefully and quietly. Most churches, though, just quietly operate, doing typical Baptist works of mundane service like providing school supplies and food for the poor and doing short term missions. Thus they perceive their gifting to be things like leadership, teaching and encouragement. They're not terribly mistaken either, I don't think. But there is more to the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, and I wonder if its possible for us to be more effective than we are. On no uncertain terms, there is a growing need these days as the majority of the people around us are falling fast into deeper and deeper evil as they hurl headlong towards Hell. This is serious, and for many, there are young family members in extreme danger of being caught in the dragnet...

I have thought long and deep about how I came into the experiences with Jesus Christ that I did. It wasn't exactly deliberate, but it wasn't accidental either. If you look at Ephesians chapter 5 and Colossians chapter 3, it becomes clear that the Biblical ideal is way out of step with the way just about everybody lives in the "real world". Right there is where the trouble starts, because many people decide right away that God's ways are not only impossible, but enough to put us at a severe disadvantage if we actually try to live that way. So most people don't try. What they don't understand is that when we do try, the Holy Spirit ignites into real power and starts backing us. I have lived this and I can and do testify it is true. There are a lot of former drug addicts and other people who were in deep sin when they came to repentance who are saying the same thing, and being conviently ignored...

I have this much to say, its all I know. From the beginning of my Christian walk, I made it an important part of my life to read my Bible daily. I read every single Book at one time or another, although some Books I read over and over, others rarely (most the NT, Isaiah and Jeremiah, least some of the minor prophets). And i spend time in quiet prayer daily, just in case the Lord wants me to do something for Him, and to pray over my own life and for people I know. Because I am ready at all times, sometimes the Lord does want me to do something for Him, and I am able to serve Him in some way. When I am serving Him, and also when I have turned to Him for answers only He can give, I have directly experienced several of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, as the Lord chooses to employ them. Sometimes its there, but, other times these gifts are clearly not there. Thats OK, when it does happen, I am keenly reminded that Jesus Christ is real, is alive, and, most importantly, He has His own thoughts, His own needs, His own agenda. I find that very reassuring. I need my God to be a living Individual, not something I made up on a creative afternoon...

I went through some terrible times with trying to fit into church and not succeeding. I dealt with those emotions through candid prayer and careful guarding of my heart. The question that saved my sanity was could their sins be somehow worse than my own? I was making mistakes of my own, different mistakes to be sure, but still...

Ephesians 4:11-13 discusses the ways the Lord uses His people to get things done His way:

11 It was He who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, 12 to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up 13 until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.
This really matters, because of what Paul says next:

14 Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming. 15 Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ.
Note that Paul isn't warning against demons here, he's warning against the way people twist things! What Paul is warning against is worldliness, or in more recognizable terms, what we would call "popular culture"...

17 So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. 18 They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. 19 Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more.

Ephesians 4:21-24

21 Surely you heard of him and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. 22 You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; 23 to be made new in the attitude of your minds; 24 and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.

We have two dynamics working together in Ephesians chapter 4; first, Paul states as strongly as it is possible to state something that we must depart from the futility of the sinful mindset. In other words, the way in which sin has warped our whole approach to living with ourselves and each other, that we need an absolute departure from a sinful context of thought and life and we must reconsider everything in the Holy Light of God's thinking. If we don't, we are going to keep getting into trouble. A very good working definition of futility is trying the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. If memory serves, that is also used as a definition of insanity, but honestly, I think futility is a better term here. The problem is that groups of people depend too much on "little lies", deceptions and attempts to control one another, because people tend to not trust one another's motives in most group settings. People get more motivated by their own perceived hope for a reward than they do for the greater good. In the case of Christianity, the only real winner has got to be Jesus Christ, He alone has GOT to be the one we work to see win, because ONLY JESUS CHRIST CAN BE TRUSTED WITH THE VICTORY!!!

I repeat:

Only Jesus Christ can be trusted with the victory.

If anyone or anything less is given the power, the authority, the right to rule, we are all in BIG trouble, because ONLY Jesus Christ's motives are pure.

Every time a sinner repents, Jesus Christ wins a victory. Every time His values are expressed in the way we live, we advance the Lord's agenda. If we have the guts to live the Scriptures we quote, people notice. They may repent, they may not, but one thing they do is notice. When Christians live out the Word in our actions as well as our words, we prove in practice the rightness of God's ways. To me, that is a victory for the Lord. Every time we deny satan, the flesh, whatever, we are advancing Christ's Kingdom agenda. I have great reason to believe those small victories count. These small victories back Jesus in His commands, proving that what He said to do is right to do. When we fight for that, He fights for us. I have lived this in practice, and I am very sure its right.

It is when people come to depend more on worldly thinking than they do on Scripture, that they open themselves to deception. 2 Thessalonians 2:10-12 explains the dangerous problem. Please note the phrases I bolded, it is so important to understand:
10 and with all the deception of wickedness for those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truthso as to be saved. 11 For this reason God will send upon them a deluding influence so that they will believe what is false, 12 in order that they all may be judged who did not believe the truth, but took pleasure in wickedness.
There are 2 interlocking points here that cannot be emphasized enough; first, there is the fact that those who are perishing lack a desire to receive a love of truth. This is because they take pleasure in wickedness. Wickedness is an enticing deception that takes many forms. The pleasures of wickedness are tied to the lusts of the flesh, and the whole poisonous process is largely underestimated by the church at large. Warnings exist for a reason, and this is one of the most serious warnings of all:Matthew 7:13-23
13 “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. 14 “For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.15 “Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. 16 “You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? 17 “So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 “A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. 19“Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 “So then, you will know them by their fruits.21 “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. 22 “Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ 23 “And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; Depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.’
Its not safe to assume that these verses only apply to false teachers, not when verse 19 says EVERY TREE. Particularly when we are so clearly in the times prophesied that there will be:Matthew 24:24
"For false Christs and false prophets will arise and will show great signs and wonders, so as to mislead, if possible, even the elect.
Therefore, it is a dangerous game to cling to falsehoods of any kind, or to to neglect the Word in favor of anything that seems to "work better". Ephesians 4:17-18
17 So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. 18They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts.
Which leads us, then, to the foundation of our goal:Ephesians 4:22-24
22 You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; 23 to be made new in the attitude of your minds; 24 and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.
True righteousness and holiness... I do believe that is where the trouble starts. There is a nearly bottomless well of opinions about what "true" means when it comes to righteousness and holiness... We do have a finite set of instructions in the Bible concerning righteousness and holiness, the trouble starts when everybody has their palpable little portion of what they think is enough for them, and its the combinations of little bits of Scripture different people put together to satisfy their opinions of what "good enough" might be that leads to all the divisions in the Body Of Christ.Judges 21:25
In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes

Ephesians 4:17-27

17 So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. 18 They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. 19 Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed.20 That, however, is not the way of life you learned 21 when you heard about Christ and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. 22 You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; 23 to be made new in the attitude of your minds; 24 and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.25 Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body. 26 “In your anger do not sin”: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, 27 and do not give the devil a foothold.

Ephesians 4:30-32

30 And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. 31 Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. 32 Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.

Ephesians, A Users Guide To Spiritual Warfare

2011-11-11T10:27:00.000-05:00

Ephesians 6:10

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power.

The word "finally" can only mean that something must be done before you can "finally" proceed. What we are proceeding to do according to the instructions in Ephesians 6 is

Ephesians 6:11

11 Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.

So before we go reaching for armor and try taking stands, there is some training and preparation in order. If there were no need for training, there would be no need for the inclusion of the qualifier "finally", so therefore, the whole Book of Ephesians works together to prepare us to take up the Armor of God and take our stand against satan.

This isn't just casual assumption based on guesswork. I had more trouble with the devil and his harassment between 2004 and 2008 or 2009 than I care to remember. I tried all sorts of things, including quoting Scripture, expecting the demons to be impressed (that usually didn't work), declaring the battle won based on my assumptions of what Revelation 12 should mean (that failed utterly), anointing oil (might actually have helped a little, but I suspect God was feeling sorry for me by then) and begging every church i could think of (that got me nowhere, so I called churches in 5 states, which garnered me one sympathetic ear and a bottle of anointing oil at an affordable price). I tried Bob Larson ministries which garnered me a few phone calls with a rather odd amateur sort of Larson trainee who lived a couple of hours away and I never did meet in person. And I did a LOT of praying, learning a dependence on the Lord that only comes when you've tried everything and have no other choice. Some Day in Heaven, He and I will tell the whole story too...

So I did finally learn some things. I learned a lot about the devil and how he does and does not operate. I learned a bit about being careful to not attribute more direct action to the devil than is unexplainable any other way. Most of the problem with sins that are hard to shake have to do with damage already done to a person by something the devil did during our individual life, leaving us to firmly believe things that aren't true. And I learned the devil is not powerful, what he is is influential. So he can't make your car float in thin air, but he does tell lies that can seem true and he does come up with really bad ideas that sound good until you see where its all leading.

This is why the Word of God is so important. Talking too much about the Bible and trying to live strictly by the Bible sounds religious until you actually try it in practice. When you live by the Word, our Great Shepherd will lead us through His Word to a way of life that is victorious, healthy and life giving. So let us then proceed to examine why the whole Book of Ephesians tells what we need to do to win at Spiritual Warfare and why.

In his opening remarks as he wrote this important letter to the Church in Ephesus, Paul first establishes the nature of our relationship with the Lord. Paul speaks of the depth and richness of God's love for us, expressed through Jesus Christ. This is important, because it establishes what it means to Jesus Christ to be involved in our lives and our circumstances in spite of the fact that we have willfully sinned against Him. This was extremely important to me, because I was frankly amazed at how much trouble Jesus Christ was putting Himself through to fight for me. It had been very clear from early on that He was indeed fighting for me, and I was really awed by that. So Paul is careful to establish faith rooted in the fact that however small we might be in our own eyes, God values us deeply and takes us seriously.

Just in case that might go to our heads, though, Paul follows this magnificent encouragement with Chapter 2 which says things like:

Ephesians 2:1-3

1 As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, 2 in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. 3 All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath.

Now that Paul has brought us down a notch or two, he goes on to establish the difference between religion, using the Jewish Old Testament law for his well understood example, and spirituality rooted in Jesus Christ, establishing His position on the struggle:

Ephesians 2:13-18

13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.
14 For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, 15 by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, 16 and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. 17 He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. 18 For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.

This important groundwork sets the stage for dependence on Christ alone as well as a confidence that it is really God we are going to be approaching here, not some powerless myth or something.

In the third section of his letter, Paul explains what this is all about. The fact that Jesus Christ was opening the gates of God's sheepfold to the Gentiles was a great offense to the religiously correct Jews. Paul, then, made it a point that being religiously correct was not going to be effective in reaching the truth about God:

Ephesians 3:4-6
4 In reading this, then, you will be able to understand my insight into the mystery of Christ, 5 which was not made known to people in other generations as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to God’s holy apostles and prophets. 6 This mystery is that through the gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus.
Thats really important, because when confronted with spiritual trouble, the first impulse is to get religious as possible. Another question would be to wonder why a clear victory can seem elusive at best and impossible at worst. Paul had undoubtedly had to ask these kind of questions in his career, and he shared the answers God gave him:

Ephesians 3:10-13
10 His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, 11 according to his eternal purpose that he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord. 12 In him and through faith in him we may approach God with freedom and confidence. 13 I ask you, therefore, not to be discouraged because of my sufferings for you, which are your glory.
Paul knew all about how some folks lose heart and faith when things get really bad. Paul was an expert in hanging tight onto faith when things get really bad, so he knew exactly how to encourage the rest of us. He set a splendid example in this letter and other letters he wrote over the course of his ministry.

THAT

Ephesians 3:14-19

14 For this reason I kneel before the Father, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. 16 I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, 18 may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19 and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

What is Spiritual Warfare, how does it work and why? The basic definition of Christian Spiritual Warfare is to take a stand against the devil and his schemes (Ephesians 6:11). The devil’s schemes are all based on some sort of deception that causes us to misunderstand God’s intent and therefore make His ministry ineffective in some way. This may mean messing up God’s plan for our own life or it may mean messing up God’s plan for the lives of people around us, either way, the devil is out to cause fear, doubt, instability and distrust. When the devil’s plans are working in his favor, people are found to be working against each other, against ourselves and ultimately against the Lord Himself Who is a God of peace and stability. This, then is why how we act, what we do or don’t do matters so much. How we act and what we do springs from how we think, which is why satan attacks our thought life with negativity, lies and temptations (enticement). He accuses us against ourselves, against each other and against God, and believe me, he can be very persistent. Because satan is very persistent, and because as an outside observer, he is able to spot weaknesses in how we think that we ourselves are unaware of, his lies can and often do, come off as extremely credible, and very difficult to overcome as well. For this reason, it can and does take some deliberate effort to refuse to believe the lies. The key, then is found in believing Scripture as it is written.

One of the most important percepts of Scripture is forgiveness. Because forgiveness is so important to God, forgiveness is often the most difficult part of our walk with the Lord to master. I have no doubt that is a deliberate move on satan’s part, the one thing he works the hardest to destroy in our relationships, with first ourselves, second with our families and third with other people around us. It is very much in the devil’s best interest to destroy our faith in God as well, but I think one of the primary ways he gets at our faith is to mess with us directly and with how we all see and therefore treat each other.

Jesus Christ, working through the Holy Spirit combats these things through speaking the truth in love. It is not uncommon for us to have a hard time believing what the Lord says though, directly because His thoughts are not our thoughts, and His ways are not our ways.

Isaiah 55:7-8
7 Let the wicked forsake their ways
and the unrighteous their thoughts.
Let them turn to the LORD, and he will have mercy on them,
and to our God, for he will freely pardon.

8 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the LORD.
This is very important to pray about and understand, because as this precious Book of Ephesians unfolds, it will challenge the very ways we cope with the day-to-day challenges of life, which is the reason chapter 5 in particular is largely underestimated and dismissed…

To the best of my understanding, power is something God (rightly) reserves for Himself, ans any authority we might have is tied directly to our place in His family. So when we call on the name of Jesus Christ, He answers precisely because we are His. For example, and this has happened to me many times and to Robert several times as well. We wake up in the middle of some weird bad dream and call on Jesus Christ, and the dream stops immediately, and doesn't come back. Only God has the power to stop the dream, but we have the authority to trust Him and have that trust affirmed. I think thats accurate, I hope it is. It took me a long time to even begin to understand what authority in Christ even might be. If anyone has a clearer answer, please post it!As to why the church is in so much trouble, we look for easy answers and clear victories. Sometimes what we get is anything but, and people tend to get desperate and try just about anything... Others give up entirely. The least common, yet most effective thing to do is read the Word and keep praying even if it takes years to get the issue straight. In our push-button world, though, many people won't wait for that... This is absolutely tragic, because in some cases thats exactly what we should be doing! Just because there is great power and profound answers in Jesus Christ doesn't mean the process is effortless and instant! A hard lesson, but a very important one...

As I entered the latter parts of Ephesians chapter 4, I got hung up on verses 11- 13:

11 So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, 12 to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up 13 until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

These verses are extremely important, but I have never seen church leadership functioning properly, so I asked Mattfivefour for his advice. The following is quoted from his reply:

Ephesians 4:1-6 is a call to the members of the Church to function as the members of the church, in their daily behavior (their walk) and their functioning together.

In furtherance of this point, Paul, writing under the anointing of the Holy Spirit, makes it clear through Ephesians 4:7-16 that God not only has a purpose for the Church, but a structure.

This structure is critically important, but is largely smothered by the habit in the Western church of a few select individuals claiming the spotlight while assuming and/or insisting that others are somehow qualified only to watch the superstars in dumb admiration. This is a brutal mistake, driven by egos of a few at the expense of the Holy Spirit and by extension, Jesus Christ Himself. The Lord, however is not totally thwarted by the rebellion of the church, He can and does step neatly around such people and accomplish His sovereign Will in spite of these problems... That is the good news. The bad news is that many people will be red-faced rather than congratulated when the time comes to answer to the Lord for how we have stewarded His Gifts...

Ephesians 4:1-7

1 As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. 2 Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. 3 Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. 4 There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; 5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism; 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
7 But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it.

Ephesians 4:1-7

1 As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. 2 Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. 3 Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. 4 There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; 5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism; 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.7 But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it.

12 to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up 13 until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

to repair a thing for its full destination or use

However

I am still very much praying over, studying and developing this discussion, again, it is so important. There is no point in worrying about what others are doing wrong if we have nothing correct to replace it.

If we don't like what we see other Christians doing, someone MUST offer them a more effective approach. Anything less is just noise!!!

Thoughts On Weird Church Manifestations

2011-04-26T22:31:00.000-04:00

The following is quoted from a post by Rapture Forums Member, Sounding The Alarm:

We've all heard stories "of experience" that cause you to pause and ? whether something just might be of God that you never would have accepted because the story was so compelling
BUT, in the midst of that struggle, experience must ALWAYS line up with Scripture and can't be subjective only to experience/testimony or you become in danger of falling for what so many have before, being led by man's Word instead of God's
and that can easily lead to following after a "feelings/experiential" Christianity
as My College Professor said of Charismania/Pentecostalism (AG/Professor) said:
"I'm convinced if that had the "burning bush" happened in our time, there would be "burning bush" conferences all across the globe
was apart of the "slain in the spirit movement" and heard many testimony's and many were very compelling but when put to the test of scripture, the experience faltered
I do know many who will tell you that while I was "down" I heard from God but I am convinced that it wasn't that they were "slain" it was during the time they were waiting to "get up" they were "listening"
once visited The Holy Spirit research Center in Tulsa,OK (ORU Campus) and they had Professor's that worked the Institute who were there to answer theological ?'s
watching old video's of Oral Robert's and Kathryn Kuhlman I asked Dr Ziegler (No relation to Zig) of the phenomenon of slain in the Spirit and asked for His reference in scripture...all accounts of men or women or priest falling were always upon their knee's and or face except the account of the arrest of Jesus and the soldier's falling back ..of which was "no ministry time"
being emboldened to ask ...then why has it grown so prominent in our time and his only explanation was "the evidence of historical testimony" meaning, prominent revivals/movements had been followed with this manifestation
to me it's very dangerous ground in that it can perpetrate further waste of time chasing an experience that is totally subjective, when in scripture we are taught to seek God and not an experience, by faith ..believing His Word and Promise
one of the tail tail signs I have seen is where ever that manifestation begins to take place, that manifestation takes pre imminence over every other thing
Benny Hinn is the perfect example
The highlight reel of his crusade's are during the "fall down time"
I find it Ironic, that He calls out major healing's, "there's a man being healed of blindness" and so during that moment the power of God is upon him to heal his sight and yet He is not "slain" until he stands next to Benny
Same with the current "Bay Revival"
we don't need manifestation's we need revelation of who Jesus is and what He has already done
and one more thing, so much of this "glorifies the Holy Spirit" of He whom came not to Glorify Himself but JESUS!!!
but this is just me sharing from how I see the whole thing

On Generational Curses Part 2

2010-12-02T11:28:00.002-05:00

The following was written by Mattfivefour of Rapture Forums (Reprinted with permission)
http://www.raptureforums.com/forum/forum.php

There is no such thing as a generational curse. The idea that there is comes from an incorrect reading, an imaproper exegesis, of Exodus 34:7. A proper exegesis will consider the context of what is said, a proper identification of those to whom the warning was issued, along with all of the other bible verses on the topic. A proper exegesis will include reference to the teaching of Deuteronomy 5:9-10; Deuteronomy 28:1-14 which proclaim blessing to the obedient and Deuteronomy 28:15-68which proclaims curses only upon the disobedient; Deuteronomy 30:19-20; Ezekiel 18:6-20; I could go on and on, especially into the New Testament. Instead I will keep this short by quoting Pastor Dan Rodrigues:

"In Christ, my past has been blotted out. The curse has been broken and I am free in Him! (Colossians 2:11-15, 1:12-14, Galatians 5:1, 13) God took my sin, death and curse and put it on Jesus so that I would walk free from them and inherit the blessing. (Galatians 3:13, 14) The blood had made me righteous and I am no longer under the curse as a punishment for sin! (Romans 3:21-26) Now, even if I sin, I can confess my sin and receive cleansing from all unrighteousness through the same blood that redeemed me. (1John 1:7-11, 2:1-2) This means that I can stay free with the liberty that Jesus purchased for me. Satan has no more rights to your or my life. He is a defeated foe and has no right to enforce the curse in our lives. (Hebrews 2:14, 15, 1John 3:8, Colossians 1:13)"

Every single Christian has, through Christ, complete power over Satan and his demons. (Mark 16:17; Luke 10:19; James 4:7; 1 Peter 5:8; etc) There is no bondage in which he can hold us based on somebody else's actions. If we are in bondage to Satan and our flesh it is because of our own actions, not an ancestors.

This erroneous teaching of generational curses has done much harm in the Body. I am sure Satan enjoys and promotes the silliness that ensues, for it takes people's eyes off their real problems and lessens the all-sufficient work of Christ. Those who promote it are usually well-meaning, but unfortunately their belief is unscriptural ... as a full and proper investigation of scripture reveals.

On Generational Curses Part 1

2010-12-02T11:24:00.001-05:00

The following insights on the "generational curse" issue came through in this morning's prayer. When we bring a matter to prayer, and the Lord "speaks to us", as so many growing Christians have heard of and openly wondered about, when the Lord speaks to our hearts, it comes through as thoughts so profound and sophisticated that we know it wasn't our own ability or intelligence that came up with that level of insight. Adrian (Mattfivefour) has described this exact same process in conversations he's shared with me. The following theological refutation of "generational curses" is an example of this sort of thing in my own prayer life. For the record, this has been happening to me on and off for several years, but it was at least 3 years of this sort of instruction, and 5 years overall, before the Lord thought me well enough trained to speak of these sort of insights in a public arena...

Ephesians 2:6-9

6 And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 7 in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. 8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast.

The "generational curse" concept is just plain wrong on all kinds of levels. First, it short-circuits the need for repentance and denies the need to seek the Lord. Secondly, it claims that the dead have power over the living, a classic occult deception. Third, it introduces the possibility of a mysterious influence which requires guesswork and the drawing of unsupported conclusions based on flimsy evidence at best, as the deeds of the deceased can be invented at will, since they can neither prove nor disprove what cannot be supported by facts.

John 8:32

Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."

The TRUTH will set you free, not the assumption, not the guesswork.

On The Importance Of Forgiveness

2010-12-02T11:21:00.002-05:00

Forgiveness is one of the most difficult concepts with which the Christian is confronted. In out human minds forgiveness very often seems to diminish the significance of the harm done. Often when we try to begin the forgiveness process, the first words we reach for are "thats OK". What if its not OK? What if it never can be OK? That leaves us feeling utterly helpless in the face of a genuine disaster, and unable to find a way to forgive. When its that bad, we feel frightened, confused, trapped between the impossible and the immovable. Who could possibly help us find our way out of this wrenching dilemma???

Jesus Christ.

Forgiveness removes the power of sin from our hearts.

Sin, whether committed by you or against you causes a root of bitterness that is well enough described by Paul as a thorn. Probably most people haven't had something like a hay thorn or a raspberry thorn stuck in their finger long enough to know what that can do, so think of unforgiveness as a pulled muscle or a sprained ankle. A chronic pain and stiffness that makes it hard to move freely. That is what unforgiveness causes in our thoughts and emotions. Bitterness hinders our relationships with ourselves and each other, and it can hinder our prayers and interfere with our ability to sense the Holy Spirit in our hearts. Bitterness is a hard spot in our spirits that bothers us constantly, sometimes more painful than other times, but always there making us uncomfortable at a deep level...

God isn't asking us to forgive so He can prove He's got domineering power over our better judgement. He has no need to "prove" He's right. Rather, He is trying to bring us to a place where we can move freely within ourselves and among one another. God loves you, and He loves the person next to you with quite equal faithfulness. He's just as impressed with the smallest of us, who are struggling to master the basics of His ways as He is with the greatest of us who are leading the way. Remember that even the greatest of the Apostles started somewhere. No one was born knowing how to tie our own shoes let alone discover the great and profound truths about God. So someone hasn't mastered much Scripture --yet. That is no indicator of what they may accomplish, given time and encouragement...

God wants us all to be at peace. This makes sense because it is always the bitter, angry person who causes the group to split. How many of us have been devastated by a church split or a family divorce? Forgiveness is the preservative cure for these troubles, thats why it matters.

Finally, Jesus Christ will never ever ask us to do something difficult, and not help us as only He can. To ask something difficult and refuse to help is cruel, and the God of all Righteousness is never cruel.

Know Your Enemy Redux

2010-11-08T20:00:00.000-05:00

Among Christians there are some people who believe in the devil and demons and some people who don’t. This is for the people who do believe in those things. Before anyone goes getting upset, just because they’re real doesn’t mean they’re impressive. They’re not. They only have one bag of tricks, and once you’ve seen the whole spectrum of what they do and how they do it, really its not that impressive, since its nothing but illusion. The problems come when the illusion becomes convincing. This is why I maintain that satan isn’t powerful, he’s not, he’s influential. The difference is in how much damage he CAN’T do, as opposed to how much damage he can do. He can only get as far as people let him, and we can only let him as far as we believe him.

People give satan a lot of credit for mysterious “power” over things like illness, job loss, even the weather. But the thing is, if satan was all that, Satanists, the serious kind, would be running the world. Trust me, if they could they would, they’re that kind of people. Practitioners of the occult, the serious kind, were every bit as offended by Sept. 11 as anybody else. And believe me, if the voodoo practitioners in Louisiana could have stopped hurricane Katrina from decimating the coastline, they would have. Would they ever have, they have houses down there so do their families and friends. If they had access to anything like THAT kind of power, Katrina would have fizzled in the Gulf. For that matter, they couldn’t stop the BP oil leak either. Witch doctors like seafood too you know… So satan just couldn’t possibly be all that, now can he?

So what is he then? A cheap punk with a big mouth. It is a well known fact among Christians that satan messes with our thought life. I think some Christians get this idea that satan only messes with Christian’s thoughts, but of course that’s not true. Look at the kind of oddball ideas unbelievers come up with… So the big difference between how Christians are affected and how unbelievers are affected is we at least try to fight back. But the going gets rough when we are under the impression that we’re fighting ourselves! That’s because the name satan actually means “accuser” and that name is actually keenly descriptive. The devil accuses everybody, including God Himself, and he accuses us from the inside. He also accuses other people against each other, which is why truth is so vital to Christians. In order to sort out the false accusation from what’s really going on, we absolutely MUST have an unshakable definition of truth, and that is why Scripture is so important. Scripture has GOT to be more true than what seems so real, because satan is such a determined liar.

Now its also really important to understand that one way the devil operates is to blow the deception way out of proportion. In other words, whatever lie he’s pushing, he magnifies, he makes the lie seem waaay bigger and more important than it actually is. Two really good current examples are homosexuality and islam. People afflicted by homosexual attraction are so thoroughly blinded by the lie that they become convinced that this is a genetic variation over which they have no choice. They really believe they were born that way and they can’t not be that. That is simply not true. Then there’s islam. No matter how many times the muslims tell the truth about themselves, that they are murderers and liars, and these are facts admitted openly by muslim imams themselves, many people have come to believe there is something very legitimate about islam. Why they fall for that is frankly a real mystery to me.

So satan gets into our heads and into the heads of people around us and starts this process of false accusation. He’s not above using a grain of truth to back his game, which has a very effective way of making the deception convincing. This is why Scripture says such things as be sober minded and alert, to capture every thought and to believe God no matter what. Its not easily done in the face of convincing deception. I think that’s why it was so important for Jesus Christ to send the indwelling Holy Spirit, and why He paid such a high price to gain the right to do so.

I hope this helps strengthen and encourage those who are struggling. The struggle is very real, don’t I know it, but the indwelling Holy Spirit and the importance of the Word Of God are the sources of the real power in this life. So be of strong heart and bold faith people, if we can only find the courage and perseverance to stand firm, if we can remain in prayer and in the Word, we will all make it past this sometimes very difficult lifetime and dwell in Eternity free from all this forever, In Christ…

2010-10-26T09:53:00.001-04:00

Sounding The Alarm, A Call To Prayer

2010-09-12T07:33:00.001-04:00

This was posted at Rapture Forums late last night by SoundingTheAlarm, a dear brother in Christ.

Battle Stations Alarm----PLEASE PRAY

My Calling is to Cry Loud and Spare NOT, in shouting from the rooftops to beg you to PRAY

12 Then Jesus went into the temple of God and drove out all those who bought and sold in the temple, and overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. 13 And He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a ‘den of thieves.’”

David's Prayer in Psalms 9

15 The nations have sunk down in the pit which they made;
In the net which they hid, their own foot is caught.
16 The LORD is known by the judgment He executes;
The wicked is snared in the work of his own hands.

17 The wicked shall be turned into hell,
And all the nations that forget God.
18 For the needy shall not always be forgotten;
The expectation of the poor shall not perish forever.

19 Arise, O LORD,
Do not let man prevail;
Let the nations be judged in Your sight.
20 Put them in fear, O LORD,
That the nations may know themselves to be but men

Proverbs 1:7 tells us The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge,

All across the world "christians" are crying for God's Judgement to come..."surely its near, I mean Sodom and Gomorrah couldn't have been worse?"

And though the Cry is justified...

1 Peter 4 tells us

17 For the time has come for judgment to begin at the house of God; and if it begins with us first, what will be the end of those who do not obey the gospel of God? 18 Now

“ If the righteous one is scarcely saved,
Where will the ungodly and the sinner appear?”[f]

19 Therefore let those who suffer according to the will of God commit their souls to Him in doing good, as to a faithful Creator.

What does God's Judgement Look like? What would He do?

Well first let us realize "what is His House?"

In Genesis 27 and 28 we are told the story of Jacob and Essau

Jacob had stolen his brother's birthright and blessing ...and he was running for his life and was hiding

and in Chapter 28...

So he (Jacob) came to a certain place and stayed there all night, because the sun had set. And he took one of the stones of that place and put it at his head, and he lay down in that place to sleep. 12 Then he dreamed, and behold, a ladder was set up on the earth, and its top reached to heaven; and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.

16 Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it.” 17 And he was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven!”

Jacob then made an altar and named that special place Bethel, which Mean House of God

So what we see is God coming to Jacob in a dream and what was Jacob's reaction....He was first afraid (The Fear of God is the beginning of Knowledge)....then he declared this revelation

SURELY THE LORD IS IN THIS PLACE and I didn't even know it!!

He then responded by making an altar

David Cried in Psalms 9

Put the Nations in Fear oh Lord, It was the Heart of God crying through Him....

It's God Desire that all men would come to saving KNOWLEDGE of Him....that None Should Perish

and He wants to reveal Himself through His Church

But His Church is asleep....we are hiding in our four walls ...we are hiding and "playing church"....we are merchandising the gospel, it's a multi-million dollar industry for some

we have "christian" tv channels covering the globe and "around the world" broadcasting messages 24/7

but Here's the deal......Their's a Famine In the Land....And God's Heart is breaking

In Jeremiah 23 we see a picture of Our Lord's Heart at a time very similar to these evil days

9 My heart within me is broken
Because of the prophets;
All my bones shake.
I am like a drunken man,
And like a man whom wine has overcome,
Because of the LORD,
And because of His holy words.
10 For the land is full of adulterers;
For because of a curse the land mourns.
The pleasant places of the wilderness are dried up.
Their course of life is evil,
And their might is not right.
11 “ For both prophet and priest are profane;
Yes, in My house I have found their wickedness,” says the LORD.
12 “ Therefore their way shall be to them
Like slippery ways;
In the darkness they shall be driven on
And fall in them;
For I will bring disaster on them,
The year of their punishment,” says the LORD.
13 “ And I have seen folly in the prophets of Samaria:
They prophesied by Baal
And caused My people Israel to err.
14 Also I have seen a horrible thing in the prophets of Jerusalem:
They commit adultery and walk in lies;
They also strengthen the hands of evildoers,
So that no one turns back from his wickedness.
All of them are like Sodom to Me,
And her inhabitants like Gomorrah.

16 Thus says the LORD of hosts:

“ Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you.
They make you worthless;
They speak a vision of their own heart,
Not from the mouth of the LORD.
17 They continually say to those who despise Me,
‘ The LORD has said, “You shall have peace”’;
And to everyone who walks according to the dictates of his own heart, they say,

‘ No evil shall come upon you.’”
18 For who has stood in the counsel of the LORD,
And has perceived and heard His word?
Who has marked His word and heard it?
19 Behold, a whirlwind of the LORD has gone forth in fury—
A violent whirlwind!
It will fall violently on the head of the wicked.
20 The anger of the LORD will not turn back
Until He has executed and performed the thoughts of His heart.
In the latter days you will understand it perfectly.
21 “ I have not sent these prophets, yet they ran.
I have not spoken to them, yet they prophesied.
22 But if they had stood in My counsel,
And had caused My people to hear My words,
Then they would have turned them from their evil way
And from the evil of their doings.
23 “ Am I a God near at hand,” says the LORD,

“ And not a God afar off?
24 Can anyone hide himself in secret places,
So I shall not see him?” says the LORD;

“ Do I not fill heaven and earth?” says the LORD.

25 “I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in My name, saying, ‘I have dreamed, I have dreamed!’ 26 How long will this be in the heart of the prophets who prophesy lies? Indeed they are prophets of the deceit of their own heart, 27 who try to make My people forget My name by their dreams which everyone tells his neighbor, as their fathers forgot My name for Baal.
28 “ The prophet who has a dream, let him tell a dream;
And he who has My word, let him speak My word faithfully.
What is the chaff to the wheat?” says the LORD.
29 “ Is not My word like a fire?” says the LORD,

“ And like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?

JUDGEMENT BEGINS IN THE HOUSE OF GOD

Our Lord walked into the Temple, He began to overturn the things that brought Him anger and frustration....He turned things Upside Down...It was His Version of An Extreme Home Makeover

In His Judgement He spoke "MY House Shall be called a House of Prayer" He exposed sin...."You have made it into a den of thieves"

I want You to take special note that Jesus went to HIS HOUSE ...He Cleaned House and He brought testimony against His House

and Now I ask you this question

What is Jesus House?

Paul asked us this question too

"Know Ye NOT that You are Temple of God?"

Jesus is coming to you ...through this message...He's exposing things in your Life (His House) that need to be turned upside down

You know what they are......what would be His Testimony of His House? What would He say You Have made His House??

This is not to be condemning but Praying it's a wake up call!!!

May we like Jacob awake from Our sleep and say "surely the Presence of the Lord is in this place (Inside of Me) and I hadn't realize it"

Let's rend our hearts and not our garments

let's rebuild altars in our homes, at work, AT CHURCH

Prayer is not a religious exercise...it's the heart beat of God..who Jealously knocks on the doors of our Lives....

He's wanting to make Himself known in You and Through You

An Extreme Home Make Over will re-establish FIRST LOVE, It will priortize TIME....It will bring Holiness, it will turn your life upside down....

Your Prayer Closet will become a garden instead of a desert....

Jacob went to sleep in a dry and weary land, but woke up with a revelation He was in God's Presence

If I could shout through writing, If you could hear the cry that's in my heart

This is the prayerless generation...We MUST rebuild altars, we must wake up to the fact that in this day and time we preach thousands of message and see such a small harvest

YET Peter, after spending time waiting on God, Preached ONE message and 3,000 souls were saved

What is the difference??

I heard a story of a missionary who came to America....while he was here...he was taken from church to church and service to service

as his time in America was coming to an end...a curious brother asked the minister his thoughts on the church

"American's love to build buildings and have great services...the best music, fellowship and dinners..but they won't pray!!!!"

"Lord, Have mercy on us....wake us up"

Pastor's, I challenge you, no.... I dare you.....sunday morning, instead of preaching another message...call your people to pray....

turn the people to His Presence....dedicate the whole time...TO PRAYER

If your reading this ...hear the heart of this message...PLEASE HEAR

He's calling You and I...It's urgent..."the effectual fervent prayer of the righteous availeth much"

does the opposite of that ring true?

the lack of prayer by the righteous avails little?....

God in His Sovereignty has given us charge ...to Love Him with All of our Hearts, will all souls and with all our strength and through that Love it will produce love for our neighbors, co-workers and friends to be willing to lay down our lives in an effort to reach them for God's Glory

but it won't happen when His House had been made something other than what He said it was suppose to be!!!!

The Frustrating Search For Answers

2010-09-11T10:56:00.000-04:00

John 7:24

"Stop judging by mere appearances, and make a right judgment."

The Apostle John quotes Jesus Christ with those largely overlooked words. In fact, no single complication has caused me more trouble, grief, and desperate need for answers from the Lord alone than the casual assumptions made by the people I have found who are willing, however indirectly and briefly, to discuss the issues of genuine spiritual warfare with. I am sorry to have to say this, but I will say this anyway, my efforts to find the fullness of freedom from demonic harassment, and to understand and define what I have been dealing with since the fall of 2002 have been consistently hindered and outright derailed by the assumptions made by others which took the place of the actual facts. Unfortunately there are only two explanations for this response from Christian leaders; the first reason would be that they assume I am lying. This could fairly be defined as denial. The second would be to assume they already know so much about human motive that they assume there is no need to request factual detail. This would most likely be avoidance of the issue. The common denominator is denial out of fear, and we are most afraid of what we do not know. I am no exception. I learned something new about the afflictions of demonic harassment on Thursday, and the new discovery caused a deep fear of what else I might not know. I also reached a new level of faith when I realized the futility of turning to uninformed people, some of whom, but certainly not all of whom, may well have been prayer thread voyeurs. Push anyone hard enough, and the truth comes out. This is why God allows such severe testing, such intense suffering. We find out what we're made of under pressure; I found out what I'm made of yesterday, when I discovered that a frequent visitor to online prayer threads evidently thought my pleas for insight on spirituality were based in a fiction I invented for entertainment purposes. Well yes, I had to do some praying in the last couple of days. I found it extremely difficult to accept that this whole struggle with the occult I am embroiled in wasn't a temporary complication of naively underestimating the dangers of the occult, which is what I had thought "should be" the case. Trial and error being the most certain means to discover how anything really works, what has actually been asked of me is to work through the trial and error process to discover the truth about the Christian side of the spiritual war, how this really works and why.

The enormous body of flat misinformation loose in the public discourse is absolutely shocking. Anyone who has ever worked in online BBS forums will notice that when people lack facts, and are discussing a topic with opinions based on guesswork or disagreement, the discussions go on and on and on. But if someone enters the discussion with indisputable facts, suddenly the discussion slams to a halt because facts are few while assumptions can go on endlessly. Such is the case with Christians and spiritual warfare. I have seen vast volumes naming so-called demons with detailed descriptions of their attributes written by self appointed Christian "experts". Curious, and very illuminating that the Bible has no such detailed information on these matters though. That should have been our first clue... If our faith in God and in His Word is as complete as many claim it is, and as many hope it is, then we all should recognize that if its not in the Bible, we don't need it. There is not one single list of demons with names and attributes in Scripture, only a brief, succinct description of satan and how he operates. In all these years, that is a detail I kept noticing as I searched the Scriptures for the answers to this elusive victory. The critical key turned out to be in Ephesians 4:27 "and do not give the devil a foothold." This foothold the devil finds all too easily can be very hard for the Christian to discover. The casual assumption is that the afflicted believer is at fault in thought or in action, but in fact it can be an unintended omission which is extremely difficult to discover. Prayer that the Holy Spirit illuminate what the believer cannot see is critical. This has been the case in my experience twice now. Assuming the believer is in sinful error is also a grievous mistake. In my case, I underestimated the seriousness of a curse spell used against me that was so weird that I had deliberately forgotten it. Satan, however had not, and he was exploiting a breach in my spiritual defenses that I had no idea was even there.

People who assume they already know everything they need to know don't pray well, because they don't ask the Lord for insight, and they address their assumptions rather than address the facts. Inaccurate prayer is hindered prayer. Hindered prayer may be partially effective, but like sloppy medical procedures, hindered prayer leaves unresolved issues festering in deep places. When it comes to spiritual warfare, this isn't fair. Better to admit you don't know than to assume you don't need to know.

The worst kind of Christian death blossom of all is the person in deliverance ministry who doesn't know what he or she is doing, but assumes and boasts that he or she does. People like that tend to charge into the fray full of uninformed enthusiasm, only to slink back out of deliverance ministry when they discover for themselves the consequences of inaccuracy. Unfortunately, it is the afflicted believers who can't so easily flee who do the real suffering, and believe me, that suffering is all too real.

In Christ, Meg

On A Hill...

2010-09-10T20:33:00.000-04:00

A Warrior on a hill

Gazes at Eternity

And says I will

Scripture For Today

2010-09-10T12:30:00.008-04:00

Again, this one means a lot right about now...

Isaiah 46:4

⁴ Even to your old age and gray hairs
       I am he, I am he who will sustain you.
       I have made you and I will carry you;
       I will sustain you and I will rescue you.

A Titanic Mistake

2010-09-10T12:27:00.000-04:00

Originally written by SoundingTheAlarm at Rapture Forums, 9/10/10

The Quran Burning Pastor ....I must confess reflects a carnal side of me

I have Loved My Country, I've loved being an American

...small town born an raised.....right in the heart of America

Grew up going to church ....sunday morning (sunday school and service), sunday night, wednesday night an choir practice night cause my mom was the church pianoist

Grew up when you actually "hauled hay" ...The American flag wasn't something you burned but Held in highest esteem

Sitting in a lawn chair, eating homemade Ice cream and listening to God Bless America during the 4th of July is a vivid childhood memory

playing pool at the local dairy queen with a man who had two hooks for hands lost in WWII and hearing his heart of passion for this country

You'd go the friday night football game and everyone, EVERYONE Placed their hand over their heart....because we were PROUD to Be An American

"God's Country" ...is a phrase I've heard mentioned many times in my 42 years

But as an American, I've watched things tear at the very heart and soul of this place I've called home

Abortion on demand, Same Sex Marriage, Porn becoming a leader in industry, People use to leave the doors unlocked, ADT signs are now everywhere, we've shot our own schools up, we've entertained ourselves til nothing shocks or moves, we let kids play video games that they habitually pracitce killing others...girls wear less clothes on beaches than what use to be called "porn" and all of that has come from within

and because of that.....we've sinned our way to a state where Like in the Days of Jeremiah, Enemies of our very existence ...have come to and inside our borders, some have bought us, and enslaved us with debt

BUT, what infuriates me and causes my flesh to rise is what I have witnessed through the last two decades...is WE have been forced to accept in the name of tolerance, the liberties given to the very enemy of this nation...they are allowed to come here and preach their Indignation AGAINST US and cry out for our destruction ...and yet we are scolded no to speak against it or we are accused of "hate speech"

On 9-11-2001, I sat in horror and watched it unfold right before my eyes.....I cried and prayed and was hoping beyond hope that God would take that awful day and turn it into a time of a great awakening

Churches were filled all across the nation.....as memorial's and vigils were held.....but those given charge over the masses, had NOT a Word from God but rather ...self help, humanistic, self centered sooth-saying messages

Instead of calling men and women everywhere to repent, they chose to extend the outreach of "tolerance" even further

Now a decade later, we have a sympathizer as commander and chief, wolves are truly guarding the chickens.....and enemies who flew planes into our hearts are now building a momument of victory right there at ground zero???? SERIOUSLY??? "Woe unto that Generation" rings in my spirit

These People that desire the death of Jews, Christians and Infidels of all kinds ....demand freedom to worship the god of this world, who has come to steal, to kill and destroy...and we are not only allowing it, we are cozying right upside, appeasing their every wish

Yet at the same time.....those very same people will not allow Anyone outside their Islamic Family to enter into a mosque, they won't allow you near their Mecca ...they will kill you for carrying a bible, they will cut your head off and you tube the scene....

so YES I can relate to that Pastor In Florida when I allow mySELF to think on such things

BUT That could be a TITANIC MISTAKE, if I allow that to blind me from God's greater truth, This is NOT MY HOME

I'm looking for a city who's Maker and Builder is the Lord

and all those who have come to kill, to steal and destroy in allah's name are not my enemy, for I wrestle not against flesh n blood (I say that in faith with my teeth gritting "ok Lord")

I'm to love those who spitefully use me, to bless those who persecute me and none of that is possible unless we a the remnant Church arise in this hour by bowing on our knees in prayer and repentance

The Reason our nation's home were once unlocked, Was Because we Loved and Served a God who sent His Angels Charge over us

The Reason, school violence consisted of a fight here or there and guns were on gunracks in pick up trucks was because WE PRAYED IN SCHOOL and one better than that ...WE Prayed in CHURCH

The Reason neighbors helped neighbor's "put up hay" or help fix their car, was because they prayed beside their neighbor in a pew on Sunday

but

The Bible makes it clear, this world isn't going to be getting any better....Love will wax cold, wars and rumors of war, lovers of selves more than lover's of God

it's clear we are living in such a time

But we've been given a charge to "REDEEM the Times for the days are evil"

I liken that charge as one surely given during the sinking of The Titanic

I'm sure at some point the people were having a great time, so in love with the comfort and surroundings of The Titanic....

but once that great and mighty ship had struck the iceberg, and the reality of the destruction that was and had taken place

they didn't have time to mourn the loss of the Titanic....they had to find "a life boat"

I'm sure there were some at work trying to save The Titanic, but I'm sure there came a point where it was "just time to save Lives"

This coming election I will vote, I will also be crying and praying for God to revive this nation SHOULD HE TARRY

However, I believe their's a GREATER URGENCY....our enemy would love us to fight for the here and now and forget what's MOST IMPORTANT

Sometimes Good can be the enemy of God!!

in the midst of soapboxing over the next couple of months leading up to November....ask yourself this question

Am I as passionate in my speech for Christ as I am for this Country?....Am I longing more for this place than a City who's builder and maker is the Lord? (remember Lot's Wife)

again I'm not saying I'm not going to Vote and be passionately rooting for a conservative victory

but I'm talking about Our Perspective

During the sinking of The Titanic, there was a story told of a very rich woman who had brought great amounts of money and jewelry with her on her journey

this same woman, upon realizing the ship was going down.....headed for one of the life boats, but in haste forgot something that was NOW extremely valuable and turned and ran back to her room, she bypassed the safe which held her precious jewelry and money.....she reached for ORANGES that sat in a bowl in her room, something that might now save her life

Her Perspective had greatly changed from just hours before ...as did all those on board that "unsinkable ship"

During this election season...Should the Lord Not come back tonight......(don't assume He's NOT!!!) but if He Should Tarry even a little while longer.....remember ....as everyone is busy running to and fro trying to fight for the life of This Ship......be pointing them to a more sure salvation!!!! JESUS, Our Lord and KING!!!

Instead of Burning Quran's, may we Burn with Passion and renewed URGENCY to See JESUS LIFTED HIGH

Maranatha!!!!

The Critical Error Of "Interfaith Common Ground"

2010-09-09T13:32:00.002-04:00

I have been very troubled by the discovery that the emergent church has adopted pagan practices, and in fact the people who have done this defend their error, refusing to consider the possibility that they have made a mistake. I have reason to believe that at least some, if not many of these people are actually very sincere Christians. It is that very sincerity which actually sets up the true sheep for the jaws of the all too genuine wolf.

You see, pagans are masters of deception. They are also masters of self-justification. They only show others what they want them to see, and they NEVER, EVER use the word evil in reference to what they do in secret, and I can assure you, some of them do do practice some very serious evil in secret.

Take the pentagram, for example, a piece of jewelry popular in some crowds. Should some innocent onlooker ask isn't that evil, they reply, oh no, its a symbol of the connection of man to Earth or some such soothing excuse. Asked if wiccan is evil, they reply oh no, its just dark. Ask them what "dark" is, and they become even more vague (I never did get a straight answer when I asked years ago, but I suspect someone has come up with something by now...).

So the emergent or simply well-meaning Christian has family or friends who are experimenting with pagan practices. The practitioners are certainly nice people, certainly seemingly normal, holding jobs, raising kids, living in the suburbs just like everyone else. Their kids seem nice enough, their homes seem nice enough, their conduct at the office is polite and professional, they give the very credible appearance of normal. They also insist on common ground with Christians. In fact, in my pre-repent days, after a certain Christian managed to get sorely on my nerves by flirting with me (he was half my age, and I never trusted his intentions), I had some pagan friends stop speaking to me, because they had nice Christian friends. Even then, I really questioned why people who had rejected Christianity would want Christian friends... In fact, a lot of the pagans were very motivated to be accepted by Christians. That always made me wonder, because the homosexuals and their sympathizers I used to know in the 1980's and 1990's didn't have any such interest in finding common ground with Christians.

So Christians think we're supposed to make friends with these people and build bridges linking our world with theirs, but what the innocent don't know is what the guilty really do in secret. THAT was the huge mistake I made when I got entangled in the mess with the occult that was so dangerous to me. I didn't know the true extent of the evil in some people's hearts, and I thought the common interest in the ancient world was going to lead to some very cool new friends... I was badly mistaken. It wasn't something in my heart or in my intent that got me in so much trouble, it was what was in their hearts... THAT was the hidden danger...

2 Timothy 1:13-14

2010-09-04T09:18:00.001-04:00

2 Timothy 1:13-14

13 What you heard from me, keep as the pattern of sound teaching, with faith and love in Christ Jesus. 14 Guard the good deposit that was entrusted to you—guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us.

This was the BibleGateway Scripture for today from their RSS feed. It speaks so strongly to my heart this morning as all the things that Jesus Christ has been doing in me come together and become permanent. I have found that everything that works against my victory in the Lord wars against me with great determination and invasiveness, so I must be constantly on guard, checking and rechecking what is trying to influence me and how this works.

As dismal as that sounds, the majestic triumph of progressive Sanctification (thank you for that insight, Mattfivefour, that was an important key), has unfolded in my life in direct defiance of every imaginable (or rather unimaginable circumstance...), and that the Holy Spirit has been doing exactly what He set out to do in spite of the opposition. That is what really shines this morning. Even though it usually looked like everything, or very nearly everything that could go wrong did, there is no doubt, I am no longer defined by my past. I am no longer defined by my damage. I am no longer defined by my sins. Therefore, this Sanctification, this freedom in Christ, this privilege of Christianity has become a very precious treasure to be defended, because the devil would very much like to steal or destroy what he very much cannot and will not kill.

In The Grand Weaver, Ravi Zacharias states that truth defines spirituality. This point is critically important, as most people think that spirituality defines truth. Most of us think or thought that discovering the spiritual means we have discovered a hidden truth, and therefore we had it backwards. Without truth to define the spiritual, the spiritual becomes chaotic, unstructured and therefore destructive. We really need absolute truth to define our spirituality, and the only absolute truth is the Word Of God, which is the Alpha and the Omega which will stand the test of Eternity.

Truth defines spirituality...

14 Guard the good deposit that was entrusted to you—guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us.

In Christ...

Scripture For Today

2010-08-30T08:28:00.000-04:00

This comes as a great comfort right about now.

Ephesians 2:19

Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household,

Denial, The Luxury The Church Couldn't Afford

2010-08-30T07:41:00.000-04:00

I am still processing my recent discovery that many Christian churches and individuals have adopted two overtly pagan practices, contemplative prayer and labyrinth walking. My mind is just reeling and my heart is appalled. If it were possible to say that the poor innocent Christians couldn't have known, that would be one thing, but the fact is that they were warned. These warnings came from three sources, the testimonies of missionaries, people going to the pastorate for help with spiritual afflictions, and people who had successfully repented from paganism, trying to tell the church what is, and for a long time has been, going on with those who practice witchcraft and the occult. The church chose denial. Denial that satan is real, denial that evil has any kind of power, denial that working closely with Jesus Christ, remaining in Him through obedience to His commands through Scripture and through humble prayer could bring a triumphant victory in which Jesus Christ, not His servants, get the glory.

This has been my experience with seeking help for serious and severe spiritual afflictions, and there, so far, have been no exceptions. Church leaders, first in person, then online, hear what I have been through. Every single pastor I have turned to help listens patiently, acting as though they have never ever heard of such things, say the obligatory prayer, then never speak to me again. Online, people suspect me of lying, have no insight or demand my silence. Without exception, Christians tremble in fear at the very suggestion that satan has any tangible power to do anything, while blaming him for every failure that makes their lives inconvenient or difficult.

Witches have no such illusions. They take the first step of unknowing,

http://www.lighthousetrailsresearch.com/blog/?p=4858

http://www.lighthousetrailsresearch.com/cp.htm

which exactly resembles the practices Lighthouse Trails has exposed as poisoning the Christian church, only when the pagans do it, they make no effort to Christianize the spirits they find when they do these things.

I first heard about these practices when I joined an online neo Druid group in 2002. They described "contemplative prayer" in this way: clear your mind of all thoughts, then go down, down into your inner darkness. These people repeatedly described "going into the otherworld", where they encountered spirits which some people described as "deities" others called them mere "entities". I had personally never heard of anything quite like this before, because people who I had met in person were very secretive about these things, only discussing such practices among those who were interested in trying it themselves. I had been approached by a group in Colorado Springs once in 1988, but I honestly thought the man who suggested "focusing your 'energy' through quartz crystals" was delusional or making it up. I thought it was very funny at the time. Eighteen years later, the Holy Spirit revealed to me the fact that the 2 quartz crystals I bought from that same man at a party were invested with demons. I have no need to invent that story, it happened, and when the Holy Spirit made me aware of this reality for the first time, it terrified me. You get used to these things after a while, though, and you learn to lose your fear and deal with it calmly.

The church at large, however, chose a devastating denial, on one hand claiming satan had no access to a Christian who is filled with the Holy Spirit, on the other hand, indulging curiosity about how pagan spirituality really works, arrogantly denying that Scripture gives clear and unambivalent warnings to avoid such foolishness at all cost. When they failed to find license for their blasphemous curiosity in the Word of God, they turned to Catholic mystics for justification, even though the evangelical protestant church claims to believe that Catholicism is so far off the genuine doctrine of the Holy Bible that it is considered a cult. Actually, although my whole family is Catholic, I must agree, to my deepest despair.

This is called moral relativism, and it is unbelief. The unbelief factor comes from being so intimidated by satan as to deny that he can cause any sort of harm, to deny that he can and does empower human beings in any way, and further to deny that he can cause spiritual harm to a Christian. He can do and does do all these things. However, the vast majority of this "power" satan has claim to is either mere influence through thought and emotion, or outright illusion of one sort or another. I know this for an absolute fact. I know from sympathetic discussion with practicing witches before i repented into Jesus Christ, and through direct confrontation with practicing witches that there is very little that they can do in any kind of tangible form. I further know for an absolute fact that remaining in Jesus Christ, by obeying His commands, through Scripture, proving our repentance through how we live, how we pray and why, brings us a Covenant protection sealed at the Cross and guaranteed by His Resurrection and His Ascension into Heaven where He lives now.

Therefore, the church would do well to grow up, sober up, and admit what these things are. Denial is a false refuge that is surely bringing on destruction of every hope there should be and is in Jesus Christ. We owe it to Him and to ourselves to drop the rose colored glasses and tell the mistaken advocates of contemplative prayer techniques the whole truth, so that they may have a chance to make an informed choice. If after being fully informed, they refuse to accept the truth, we have done all we can, and their sin is theirs to answer for.

In Christ, Amen

Contemplative Prayer, The Cloud Of Unknowing Part 2

2010-08-28T10:26:00.004-04:00

The following quote is from Lighthouse Trails Forum, and was written by Ray Yungen
http://www.lighthousetrailsresearch.com/LTForum/index.php/topic,189.msg812.html#msg812

Contemplative advocates propose that there has been something vital and important missing from the church for centuries. The insinuation is that Christians have been lacking something necessary for their spiritual vitality; but that would mean the Holy Spirit has not been fully effective for hundreds of years and only now the secret key has been found that unlocks God’s full power to know Him. These proponents believe that Christianity has been seriously crippled without this extra ingredient.

Mr Yungen is discussing a new attitude that is growing in popularity in the modern church. The foundational mistake behind this attitude is the dual assumption that Christians are somehow immune from influence by unclean (evil) spirits, and the related assumption that any spirit a Christian can sense can only be the Holy Spirit. Unfortunately, this assumption is incorrect. This is why the Charismatic church in particular is famous for bizarre expressions of spiritual influences among congregations, false deliverance or failed attempts at deliverance etc. Concepts such as "discernment" and "anointing" are tossed about the Christian scene like some sort of verbal nerf football, with little understanding of how and why spiritual awareness works. The human carnage from this combination of arrogance, lack of compassion for the afflicted, and general guesswork, which depends more on emotion and the cult of personality than it does on sober investigation, Scripture and prayer, is absolutely devastating. The following You Tube video is a classic example of the appalling harm done when well-meaning Christians assume they know more than they do, and proceed to act on these assumptions

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9P5k-regP6o

So what should they have done differently? The young man being abused in the video went to the church seeking help for homosexual temptation. The first mistake the pastors made was to assume the young man was "demon possessed", and required an exorcism. The second mistaken assumption was that they were already anointed, so they had no need of consultation with Jesus Christ. This would be rather like assuming that because your car can and will move under its own power when you start the engine and put it in gear, that your car doesn't need a driver. So this is one example of the arrogant assumptions people make when they overestimate their anointing.

Another tragic assumption about Christian spirituality is that the only type of spirit that we can feel penetrating our consciousness is the Holy Spirit. I have been known to say that if the assumption of spiritual immunity were indeed correct, we wouldn't need the Armor Of God (Ephesians 6:10-18). Furthermore, Christians love to claim the words "Put on the full armor of God" in verse 11, easily dismissing the first word in verse 10, which just happens to be "Finally". Finally means that there was something important to do before you take the next steps. The only safe conclusion then, is that before you get impressed with the potential of wearing armor and waving swords, you had better be trained and prepared, or something may well go horribly wrong... But too many Christians have convinced themselves that this is unnecessary. Ever wonder where they got that impression? I think the mistake came from two directions, one being the errors of assumption of spiritual immunity, and the other being from having contact with spiritually aware non-Christians.

Just because someone is not a Christian doesn't mean they aren't spiritual. And just because they aren't the Holy Spirit doesn't mean they aren't real, and Scripture does in fact make it clear that unclean (evil) spirits can and do manifest themselves through human beings in perfectly visible expressions. So where do we look for clues?

Motive.

A spirit of any kind will always have an agenda of some kind.

Evil gains influence through mental confusion and emotional provocation, so the first defense is to be

...clear minded and self-controlled so that you can pray.

(1 Peter 4:7)

That is extremely serious when dealing with spirits, any spirits. If the spirit trying to gain influence over a Christian is provoking inappropriate feelings or emotions, is causing a feeling of helplessness, panic, extreme excitement out of context of the circumstances, anything, anything at all that is opposed to a calm grasp of the circumstance with a goal towards stability serving the Biblically defined best interests of the Lord, slow down and pray. Furthermore, if you are uncomfortable with the expression of the spirit in any way, it is not only OK, it is extremely important to ask for Jesus Christ to remove the source of discomfort and show you the truth. Then it is also critical to wait until you are very sure of what is right in His opinion before you proceed any further with the hoped for next move before doing anything else. Finally, there is absolutely no Holy Spirit application for anything, be it ritual, type of prayer, or object that is effective in an occult, pagan or new age application. Never. Ever.

Contemplative Prayer, The Cloud Of Unknowing Part 1

2010-08-28T07:52:00.000-04:00

In a quest for a spiritual reality, some Christians have made a terrible mistake. I cannot help but wonder if this terrible error occurred because too many Christians have been denying that satan has any real power for too long. They have set an uninformed double standard of what they have decided among themselves must be true, claiming on one hand that satan is the cause of every little inconvenience, but at the same time convincing themselves that he has no real power. Up to a point, this error is understandable, because the Bible has so little in the way of direct discussion of satan, per se. What most people don't realize, however, is that while Scripture may not have much to say about the demons themselves, there is quite a bit of description of what it looks like when people are under the influence of evil. In fact, the vast majority of the Old Testament is a running commentary on what goes wrong when people who have been called and chosen to serve the Lord God Who sent His Messiah, Jesus Christ, make the wrong decisions against clear warning, and permit themselves to be influenced by demonic spirits. It is only when the Christian is able to understand this and accept it, that we understand that the Bible actually does say quite a bit about satan and about evil and about the consequences of permitting oneself to be influenced by satan. God did not leave us informed, nor did He leave us unassisted. What went wrong was people assumed they knew more than they do, they assumed the old Testament has no significant application to our lives since the Advent of the Holy Spirit, then they decided for themselves that God was careless in His provision for the spiritual confrontations we can and do face in our daily lives.

Casual assumption based on uninformed observation combined with convenient denial has placed the church at large at a spiritual disadvantage of truly stunning proportions, and satan is destroying both the innocent and the guilty with blasphemous impunity. Real witches are operating freely, while innocent victims in countries such as Africa are being tormented, tortured and even murdered because church leaders are depending on uninformed presumptions being passed from person to person like an airborne virus. Meanwhile, those of us who really do know the genuine difference between flesh and spirit, how it works and why, are dismissed as liars, of feared as being insincere because people are easily intimidated by things they don't understand, or are afraid to accept.

I have enough experience at this point in an ongoing war with a practitioner of demonic witchcraft to be sure that it is true that satan cannot read our minds, so thankfully, that much is true. On the other hand, satan very much can and does know exactly how to gain influence over our thoughts and feelings, and he is extremely motivated and extremely determined to do exactly that. This is why it is so critical that we submit our lives, our decisions, our thoughts, our motives to Scripture alone. This is also why it is so important to read the Bible every day, as a reality check to prevent us from being enticed through temptations or pressures, to stray from the safety of the only way of Life we dare trust.

The Mechanics Of Deception

2010-08-20T08:25:00.003-04:00

The only way you find out what is real is when you stand against what is not, and that will always cost you.

John 7:24
Stop judging by mere appearances, and make a right judgment.

In a recent forum conversation, I stated that the only way to be able to recognize a genuine Christian is to be one. Does that statement sound confrontational? Or does it sound mistaken because there are so many, too many expressions of “genuine” Christianity? There are certainly a lot of different people saying they consider themselves to be Christians. They can even be quite adamant, justifying their claims by at least frequent church attendance and regular giving of money. Is an hour or two or even three or four hours a week at church a Scriptural justification for Salvation or a human justification for Salvation? Be careful how you answer that, because the answer might be more subtle than it seems. Scripture states we are justified in Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ says we remain in Him by obeying His commands out of love. Humanity says we are defined by what we are seen doing. I repeat, humanity states we are justified by what we are seen doing; however, humanity also says if we are not seen doing something, if there is not enough evidence to prove to human understanding that we did do something, that we are excused from our hidden deeds. This is a very dangerous assumption, because Scripture clearly states that nothing is hidden from the Lord. In fact, that is very true. Ted Haggard, for one, is living proof…

So one key to deception is self deception. The person dependant on hidden sin convinces himself or herself that if the deed cannot be exposed, the person cannot be held accountable. Furthermore, the deceiver says that if you tell a lie often enough, refusing to change the untrue story, raising the volume of the lie as necessary, the lie gains a false “power” of “truth”. The lie posing as truth has an offshoot called assumption as well. All too often, people assume they know what should be true, so the assumption becomes another form of false truth, which is much more dangerous, because the mistaken or false assumption becomes a hook in the jaws or a ring in the nose, with an unbreakable chain attached that leads the person who depends on these things straight into deception. People become trapped in this deception because it can be painful, even very painful to face a level of truth that is in apparent or genuine conflict of interest with self interest, or perceived well being. A deception can and sometimes does become a refuge in which wounded or simply dissatisfied people take shelter. For this reason, satan’s attacks are either genuinely harmful or subtly enticing, because harm and dissatisfaction destabilize the individual thus disrupting the ability to think critically and rationally. The attacks also disrupt the emotions, thereby destabilizing the whole response mechanism, causing a chaotic and unstable response pattern.

This is why the Lord tells us to Stand Firm, and backs His advice with an inner strengthening that comes through the Holy Spirit, which is the hallmark evidence of a genuine Christian when we are enduring affliction. When this ability to stand in the storm is found is when we are able to overcome the luxury of assumptions about what can/should, or cannot/should not “be happening”, and get the facts. This is why I say on no uncertain terms that to claim you are a Christian, and that you are representing a testimony of what this is really like, should you choose to lie or misrepresent the facts, you have committed very serious blasphemy. I make such a confrontational statement, because if you misrepresent Jesus Christ either through reaching beyond the context of what you know for a fact is true, or through deliberate deception, you are steering the people you have influenced in the direction of hell itself. It is that serious. Therefore, deliberately lying about the Holy Spirit, claiming that He did something, such as healing, knowing that they are lying, and there are documented cases, they may well have committed the fearsome sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Now this statement applies only to those who knowingly and deliberately deceive people, claiming all the while to be anointed in the Holy Spirit, and this crime is documented among some ministries.

People don’t get lost in the comfortable, well-marked places, people get lost in the wastelands, in the unmarked wilderness. Faith is unlikely to come undone in the cushion of answered prayers and comfort zones, faith comes undone when the answers we are confronted with are either delayed or denied outright. When our desires or needs are overridden by the lord’s desires or needs, we are confronted with a conflict of interest which will be the defining test of who or what we genuinely believe and who or what we honestly serve. This is the furnace, the genuine test of our faith which Peter stated is more precious than gold.

The Lord Is My Strength

2010-08-17T10:13:00.003-04:00

Ravi Zacharias said something in this series that explained something I had never fully understood before. He said that for the Christian, joy comes from within, while the sorrows of circumstances are on the outside. For the unbeliever, the bitterness and sorrow are in the center, and joy is on the outside. That made perfect sense to me, and Mr Zacharias explanation finally made sense of the paradox of suffering in the Christian experience. Here's the link to the whole series; the statement I referenced is in pert 2 or 3, I'm not entirely sure which off the top of my head.

http://vimeo.com/2298668

Scripture states in many ways that the Lord strengthens us. Here are two examples:

Isaiah 40:31

but those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.

Philippians 4:13

I can do everything through him who gives me strength.

We all know that Scripture is true, at least we do on our better days; its on our worst days that the doubts creep in, and maybe we're not so sure... It is on those bad days, those impossibly worst days that we must reach very deep for the promised strength, this is exactly what Stand Firm means. And when we do that, when we insist on searching for our guidance and strength in Scripture, in prayer and in Jesus Christ, we will indeed find how true all this is. When I need Him most, I find Jesus Christ standing in one place, not waiting, just standing, and because He stands in that one place, I am able to find Him. When I do find Him, thats when He strengthens me. If I were the only one who ever said something like that, I guess there would be room for doubt, but in Scripture, Paul says exactly the same thing:

2 Corinthians 4:8-9

8 We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; 9 persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.

It is because our strength and our joy comes from within, through the indwelling Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ that we have the strength that is not our own to stand in the storm. This is not "natural" because it is not of the flesh which perishes, rather our strength and our faith are of the spirit which shall be Eternal in Christ. For this reason, our joy and our strength, and the Peace which passes all understanding are unnatural and unfamiliar, but in spite of all that, this Peace in Christ is very real, and we can and should embrace it with full confidence in our Lord. That, dear sisters and brothers, is how faith is forged in the furnace of affliction, and why this is the way it is unfolded.

May each of you rest in Jesus Christ alone... From the inside.

I listened to the Ravi Zacharias videos for the second time last night. Among other things, Mr Zacharias said that for the Christian, the central questions of life are answered, even if the peripheral ones are not. That is the key to how we find our strength in Jesus Christ no matter what else is happening, and that is why affliction is a necessary part of our growth in the Lord.

First of all, I need to explain why this makes sense to me. I spent most of my adult life sure that there is a god, but having no idea who or what the genuine God really is. Most of my closest friends were the same way, we were sure that at times we had been blessed by a god of some sort, but none of us could define Him, so when the going got difficult and confusing, we had no center, no central Truth to help us find our way, so many of us were very unstable, groping blindly for solutions anywhere we could get them. This led to serious drug abuse, temporary relationships with people we might have thought we loved but couldn't seem to stay with, insanity and suicide. Yes, it was that bad. It also led to false spirituality which failed the credibility test for me personally, because the identity of God was totally up-for-grabs. It worked like this; I think I'll try the Celtic gods for a while. Oops, that didn't work, how about the Norse... Hey, my friend over there is into the Sumerian, thats kinda cool. Those folks are into Yoga and Buddhism... It was a "flavor of the week" type thing that could, and did, lead anywhere and everywhere, and because anything was possible, anything could be justified. But at the center of it all was this fact, your woundedness and your bitterness was the definition of your identity. Kind of an "I bleed therefore I am" sort of thing. This is why I rejected new age, this is why I took a chance on Jesus Christ, even though I found organized religion and all the theological and doctrinal differences so confusing (for the record, I was raised strict Catholic).

It was only when Jesus Christ, in His profound mercy, was kind enough to give me one more chance to see Him for Who and what He truly is, that everything started to make sense. Finally, and only after I had lost confidence in absolutely everything else there is or can be to depend on, Jesus Christ gave me a chance yet again, and this time, I took Him up on it. From the first time I finally started reading the Bible, I found an absolute Center upon which I could depend. I found the Bible was making more sense than many of the preachers did, because the preachers were talking about money and things money can buy, but the Bible was teaching about working from the inside out towards a relationship with God which was and still is healing me, because as I learn to see God for Who He is, He shows me who He thinks I am and why. It doesn't stop there, though, He constantly reminds me that He is doing the same thing in every sister and every brother who serve Him as well, and that their victory in Him is every bit as important as my own. That matters to me, because I was born out of wedlock, given up for adoption, and spent most of my entire life certain that I was a mistake, and that there was so much wrong with me that I was a good argument for abortion. It took the Lord several years to weed that whole mess out of me, but He thought it was worth doing. He's different that way...

So, in conclusion, the Lord strengthens and corrects us from the inside. He is our beacon, our fortress, our justification, our truth, our identity. We are free in Him, because we are free from the lies and misconceptions that try to claim that we are nothing but the sum of our mistakes and failures. According to Jesus Christ, we were created with something worthwhile to offer the world around us, but understand this:

ONLY Jesus Christ can see us well enough to know what we really are.

ONLY Jesus Christ will tell us the truth about what is right with us.

ONLY the Holy Bible can teach us how to respond to and unite with Jesus Christ.

The ONLY way to the Father, to the real God everybody talks so much these days is

THROUGH HIS SON JESUS CHRIST

Amen

"As A Thief In The Night"

2010-08-17T10:07:00.003-04:00

This poem is the latest work from a woman at Rapture Forums who writes poetry she receives in her heart from the Holy Spirit. This poem is reprinted here with permission from the author, PraisingHimAlways.

"As A Thief In The Night"

Jesus, Rock upon which we stand
Our Savior, Redeemer, Foundation
King of Glory, we are in His Hands
Holy One, Author of Our Salvation
Peoples, nations rise against Him
None cannot nor will ever prevail
Fools deceived by their own sin
Oblivious to impending travail
Insanity is the order of the day
Evil on the earth waxes worse
But God hears His saints pray
Against darkness and its curse
We are living in the last days
We must be His salt and light
Quickly He will snatch His Bride
Sudden as a thief in the night

Heart Knowledge vs Head Knowledge

2010-08-15T08:28:00.002-04:00

This entire post is quoted directly from Mattfivefour, Moderator at Rapture Forums, reprinted with permission.

I must tell you that am not a big believer in a philosophical approach to Scripture ...after all, in the Greek from which we get the word, "philosophy" (φιλοσοφία = philosophia) literally means "the love of wisdom", not the possession of it). To me, philosophy something which is antithetical to the idea that Scripture implies. The former implies a seeking, the latter a revelation.

It is the revealed knowledge in Scripture—that which the Holy Spirit enlivens to our heart—that has productive power in our lives, not the sought knowledge that comes from the letter of the Word. Paul makes this clear when he tells us that "the "letter" kills, but the "Spirit" gives life. (2 Corinthians 3:6; Romans 7:6) I can read the bible over and over and increase in knowledge of its contents without increeasing in the knowledge of God. Unsaved people who study the Bible do this all the time. They are reading dead words. And thus, despite all of their reading and study, they emerge the same as when they began ... other than,. perhaps, a great deal of head knowledge. The word is only alive when the Holy Spirit makes it so, taking it into a person's heart. Theologians have come up with words to describe the two forms of Scripture: logos andrhema. These two words come from scripture itself. Logos means "the expression of thought," not the mere name of an object, (a) as embodying a conception or idea, or (b) a saying or statement (to use the explanation given in (to use the description given in Vine's Expository dictionary of New Testament Words.) In other words it means the Word in general. Rhemameans a specific word from the Word which the Holy Spirit makes alive in your heart. In other words, it is an "aha!" moment. Vine, again, puts it this way: "The significance of rhema (as distinct from logos) is exemplified in the injunction to take 'the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God,' (Ephesians 6:17); here the reference is not to the whole Bible as such, but to the individual scripture which the Spirit brings to our remembrance for use in time of need, a prerequisite being the regular storing of the mind with Scripture."

The Holy Spirit spoke to me in the middle of the night a few years ago, as I lay on my bed contemplating the vast store of Scripture knowledge I had amassed over the decades, and said, "Knowledge stored up in the mind is vanity; applied to the heart it is wisdom." Whatever we learn we need to ask the Holy Spirit to make real in our heart; otherwise we can never preach it to others with the true anointing of the Holy Spirit. We can use clever words to sway our readers; we can use great oratorical skill to sway our listeners; but none of it will have any lasting effect unless it is anointed by the Holy Spirit. And that sort of anointing comes only as a result of the direct revelation of a truth to—and its application first to the heart of—the one who then will share it with others.

I know of many men with post-doctoral credentials in theology who know far less about God and what He requires than Chris, or Buzz, or Robert, or I, or , for that matter, a whole host of simple, humble, un-book-learned men who are serving in their churches.

Having said all that, clearly the philosophical analysis of what you are reading is a way in which you are thinking through the process and the wisdom of God's commands. Since it is helping you and may help others organize their thoughts, it is a valid exercise.

But remember this one thing: deciding to obey God is an act of the will. Deciding to obey His command to turn to Him, His command to be baptised, His command to be baptised in the Holy Spirit, His command to commemorate His death until He comes again, are all acts of our will. Each is an act that we must make a decision to do and have within us the power to do it. But beyond that, none of what God commands lies in our power to obey ... in our strength. What He is looking for when He lays out His requirements for living is our desire to obey Him. When it is there in us, He Himself, the Holy Spirit, is the one that does the work. In fact He not only does the work but provides the will in us as well. (Philippians 2:13) Indeed. we cannot overcome anything in the flesh by our own will or acts: it is by the Spirit alone that these things are put to death in us. (Romans 8:13b) Our role is to want to obey and to then apply ourselves to daily surrendering our will to His. But it is His role alone to make it happen. And He always will.

In the Old Testament, God revealed His Eternal Law and laid out the commandments that man must keep in order not to violate that Law. Man had to try to obey every whit of those laws by his own efforts. Clearly he could not do that, thus the daily sacrifices and rituals, thus the constant looking for Messiah to come and deliver him. In the New Testament, God does not dispense with His Eternal Law. But rather than writing on tablets of stone, He now writes them on the fleshy tablets of our heart. (2 Corinthians 3:3) And rather than obeying them externally by acts of our will power, we obey them internally by acts of our will and the power only HE can supply.

ALL of this—the power to obey His law—is by revelation to each individual, step by step, and accomplished by the power of the Holy Spirit alone. anything else is us in our own flesh trying to conquer our flesh. That is what the people in the church in Galatia were attempting to do. and Paul told them quite plainly: "You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified? This is the only thing I want to find out from you: did you receive the Spirit by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? Did you suffer so many things in vain—if indeed it was in vain? So then, does He who provides you with the Spirit and works miracles among you, do it by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith?(Galatians 4:1-5) If it is by the Spirit working in us to effect salvation by our faith in Christ that we begin, then, says Paul (or, rather, the Holy Spirit speaking through Paul) it is only by the Spirit that sanctification is effected in us.

...But never forget that it is not by acts of our willpower that we can ever secure the Christ-life within or demonstrate it without. That is His work, alone.

Hope this Helps

Ravi Zacharias On Christian Spiritual Maturity

2010-08-14T16:33:00.003-04:00

The title of this series is Has Christianity Failed You? The content is profound, particularly the following quote, which came from Part 3

I want to point out to you something marvelous here. I want you to understand this. Jesus is not going to conquer in spite of the darkness and the evil. Jesus is going to conquer through it.

Here is a link to the whole series, starting with Part 1. Each segment runs about 10 minutes, and the whole body of video is well worth sitting through.

http://vimeo.com/2298668

The Responsibilities Of Christian Spiritual Soldiers

2010-08-06T09:54:00.004-04:00

Death Blossom : The tendency of Iraqi security forces, in response to receiving a little fire from the enemy, to either run away or do the "death blossom" spraying fire indiscriminately in all directions.

One of the most popularly quoted passages in the Bible is Ephesians 6:10-17, the famous armor of God passages. In the typical slice and dice style of modern feel-good Christianity, everyone wants the armor, but few are willing to consider what happens when a soldier puts on armor and picks up a weapon without the training and discipline necessary to handle the required equipment. I am going to illustrate my point with a real example drawn from the recent war in Iraq. The US sent trained and disciplined American soldiers over to Iraq, this was during the height of the war, during the Bush administration. The large idea was to train and equip the Iraqis to handle their own country themselves, and very large amounts of resources were expended in an honest effort to do exactly that. American soldiers did their best to train Iraqi soldiers before they went into real small scale combat situations with heavy weapons. The effort to train and equip the Iraqis was in no way lacking; the Americans who did the training were held accountable by their superior officers. The Iraqi soldiers had to prove they knew how to handle their weapons and how to properly adjust their armor before the Americans would ask them to face live fire. The Americans themselves were prepared the same way as well. I will give the Iraqis credit for being as brave as anyone else manages to be when being shot at, since they were willing to take the risk, so the only remaining explanation for the “death blossom” phenomenon is a lack of self discipline.

So there are three things necessary to be in place before anyone goes anywhere with armor and weapons. There is basic training in the pieces of armor, how they fit, where they fit and how they function properly. If a belt is too loose, a helmet is on backwards, or shoes are not laced and tied properly, the armor is going to fail you under pressure. Then there is the sword. Swords look simple enough when compared to much more complex modern weapons, but real swords are used in a certain way, and the way any sword is balanced is critical to how it is used. In order to use any sword properly, it is necessary to understand how it is balanced so one can understand how it should be used. It is also necessary to understand what sort of sword your enemy is using, how that is balanced, and how your enemy uses his sword, or you are in danger of becoming a death blossom of another sort entirely, a danger to yourself and others near you.

The armor of God does not come into play until the very end of the Epistle Paul wrote to the Ephesians, so it is only fair to assume that the whole Epistle is a training manual for how to train and prepare for Spiritual Warfare. As with all his Epistles, Paul begins his Epistle to the Ephesians with a blessing. Then he goes on to describe our Leader. Next, he describes who we are not working closely with, so we can discern who we are working with and how to tell the difference. In this way, Paul is gathering a team under Jesus Christ, assembling an army, as-it-were. Then Paul prays for the unity of us all together and for our guidance in Christ, and he goes on to teach us how to work together under pressure (chapter 4).

Then we enter Boot Camp for real, starting with Ephesians 4:17-32 and throughout the remainder of chapter 5, and into chapter 6, leading up to the armor of God and finally our weapon, Scripture itself, the Sword Of The Spirit which is the Word Of God. All too often, our churches are more like Iraqi death blossoms than the Life Giving servants of Jesus Christ we should rightly be. The Pastors are working hard to train everyone. The Word has been translated in every possible combination of the English language. Most professing Christians know at least a little Scripture. The only possible thing left to do is take it seriously. Paul isn't kind of suggesting it might be a good idea, he is as serious as he's ever been.

Ephesians 4:17-32

¹⁷So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. ¹⁸They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. ¹⁹Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more.
²⁰You, however, did not come to know Christ that way. ²¹Surely you heard of him and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. ²²You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; ²³to be made new in the attitude of your minds; ²⁴and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.
²⁵Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor, for we are all members of one body. ²⁶"In your anger do not sin": Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, ²⁷and do not give the devil a foothold. ²⁸He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need.
²⁹Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen. ³⁰And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. ³¹Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. ³²Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.

Don't be a Christian death blossom. Ephesians 5:3-7

³But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God's holy people. ⁴Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving. ⁵For of this you can be sure: No immoral, impure or greedy person—such a man is an idolater—has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. ⁶Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of such things God's wrath comes on those who are disobedient. ⁷Therefore do not be partners with them.

This doesn't mean don't speak to them, when God is finished trying to get His point across, the Rapture will come, but don't be partners with such people. Don't party with them, don't imitate them, and please, don't permit yourself to admire them. They're dead, and dead things stink!

Ephesians 5:15-17

¹⁵Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, ¹⁶making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. ¹⁷Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord's will is.

Every opportunity to do what then? How does the church define "opportunity"? How does the individual define "opportunity"? It seems now more than ever, too much culture, not enough Scripture.

Ephesians 4:15 (edited to make my point)

¹⁴for it is light that makes everything visible. This is why it is said:
"Wake up, O sleeper,
rise from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you."

In Christ. Amen

Lovely Insight On Creation

2010-08-03T09:15:00.001-04:00

S. M. Lockridge is quoted as saying the following

“The reason God came from nowhere, was there was nowhere for Him to come from. And coming from nowhere, He stood on nothing for there was nowhere for Him to stand. And standing on nothing, He reached out where there was nowhere to reach and caught something where there was nothing to catch, and hung something on nothing, and told it to stay there.”

Scripture For Today

2010-08-03T09:04:00.001-04:00

At the rate things are going, this is just very encouraging:

1 Samuel 16:7

⁷ But the LORD said to Samuel, "Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart."

That's My King

2010-08-03T09:02:00.001-04:00

The Bible says
He’s the King of the Jews
He’s the King of Israel
He’s the King of Righteousness
He’s the King of the Ages
He’s the King of Heaven
He’s the King of Glory
He’s the King of Kings
and He is the Lord of Lords

Now that’s my King!
David says
The Heavens declare the glory of God
And the firmament showeth His handiwork
No means of measure can define His limitless love
No far seeing telescope can bring into visibility the coastline of His shoreless supply
No barriers can hinder Him from pouring out His blessing

He’s enduringly strong
He’s entirely sincere
He’s eternally steadfast
He’s immortally graceful
He’s imperially powerful
He’s impartially merciful

That’s my King!
He’s God’s Son
He’s the sinners’ Saviour
He’s the centrepiece of civilisation
He stands alone in Himself
He’s august
He’s unique
He’s unparalleled
He’s unprecedented
He’s supreme
He’s pre-eminent
He’s the loftiest idea in literature
He’s the highest personality in philosophy
He’s the supreme problem in higher criticism
He’s the fundamental doctrine in true theology
He’s the cardinal necessity of spiritual religion

That’s my King!
He’s the miracle of the age
He’s the superlative of everything good that you choose to call Him
He’s the only one able to supply all of our needs simultaneously
He supplies strength for the weak
He’s available for the tempted and the tried
He sympathises and He saves
He guards and He guides
He heals the sick
He cleansed the lepers
He forgives sinners
He discharges debtors
He delivers the captives
He defends the feeble
He blesses the young
He serves the unfortunate
He regards the aged
He rewards the diligent
And He beautifies the meek

Do you know Him?
My King is the key of knowledge
He’s the wellspring of wisdom
He’s the doorway of deliverance
He’s the pathway of peace
He’s the roadway of righteousness
He’s the highway of holiness
He’s the gateway of glory
He’s the master of the mighty
He’s the captain of the conquerors
He’s the head of the heroes
He’s the leader of the legislators
He’s the overseer of the overcomers
He’s the governor of governors
He’s the prince of princes
He’s the King of Kings
And He’s the Lord of Lords

That’s my King
That’s my King!
My King
His office is manifold
His promise is sure
His life is matchless
His goodness is limitless
His mercy is everlasting
His love never changes
His word is enough
His grace is sufficient
His reign is righteous
His yoke is easy
and His burden is light
I wish I could describe Him to you
He’s indescribable
He’s indescribable
He’s incomprehensible
He’s invincible
He’s irresistible
I’m trying to tell you
The heaven of heavens cannot contain Him
Let alone a man explain Him
You can’t get Him out of your mind
You can’t get Him off of your hands
You can’t outlive Him
And you can’t live without Him
The Pharisees couldn’t stand Him
but they found out they couldn’t stop Him
Pilate couldn’t find any fault in Him
The witnesses couldn’t get their testimonies to agree
And Herod couldn’t kill Him
Death couldn’t handle Him
And the grave couldn’t hold Him

That’s my King!
He always has been
And He always will be
I’m talking about
He had no predecessor
and He’ll have no successor
There was nobody before Him
and there’ll be nobody after Him
You can’t impeach Him
and He’s not going to resign

That’s my King!
Praise the Lord
That’s my King
Thine is the Kingdom
And the power
And the glory
The glory is all His
Thine is the Kingdom
And the power
And the glory
For ever
And ever
And ever
And when you get through with all of the forevers
Then
Amen

By S. M. Lockridge

Attacked By The Devil? Now What?

2010-08-02T13:55:00.004-04:00

I hear a lot of things described as "attacks from the devil". This can be financial problems, health problems, family discord, you name it, if a Christian is in trouble, chances are they're blaming the devil, or worse yet, blaming God. So what does it mean to be attacked by the devil, and also, what doesn't this mean? And how might we hope to sort out the difference?

First of all, the power satan once had to perform "signs and wonders" of the sort evinced in the Book Of Exodus was broken at the Cross. I am absolutely certain of this for two reasons. First, Scripture actually does describe Egyptian court magicians as performing signs and wonders such as turning a staff into a snake (see Exodus 7:1-12). Second, beyond what I know from having gotten to know a practitioner of high black magic, anthropologists and missionaries have documented what unfettered shamans can and cannot do, and they cannot do anything remotely like summon a physical being from some other dimension, make anything fly or move, or turn a staff into a snake. They cannot make rain start or stop, they cannot make fire ignite without a source spark, although they might be able to cause an electrical fire on a really successful attempt, and they cannot cause a plague, although it seems they may, under some circumstances, cause a non-Christian to die of a heart attack. Even that extreme, however, is not usually successful. That, then, is simply not my idea of power; more mischief, although harmful mischief, more like. So what exactly is satan capable of?

Influence.

The devil doesn't have much, if anything in the way of power, but he does have quite the big mouth, in a manner of speaking. He does have access to our thoughts and, unfortunately to our emotions as well, although I have an idea that the influence over emotions is a lot more effective if satan is working in tandem with a witch. Why that is, I have no idea, I just know from experience that powerful waves of emotional negativity or lust are a hallmark of an attack by witchcraft. Other symptoms of attack by witchcraft are invasive thoughts, inappropriate dreams and unwelcome songs stuck in your head. Dream attacks are recorded by Iranaeus during the

mid second century AD (source, The Encyclopedia Of Heresies And Heretics, by Chas S. Clifton, page 120), and it has been my experience that this form of attack is very much in use today. The emotional negativity is based on personal experience as is unwelcome songs stuck in your head, which has also been described in a pagan forum, which was, at the time, given the handle of "harmonics", being considered a form of telepathy. The telepathy, BTW is entirely real, being described by those who use it as "the collective subconscious". This is also a hallmark practice in some forms of Buddhism and Hinduism. This, then is a brief sketch of the supernatural aspects of satan's influence, but there is a more seemingly mundane aspect as well, temptation.

Temptation exploits the fallen sin nature in all human beings, and this is a much more subtle problem, much more difficult to defeat. Individual temptations are simply too numerous to even try to name here, but it all boils down to one of two things, a bad idea or an outright lie. Both generally play on short term gain so satisfy a self interest, which can be real or imagined. The real destructive power of satan, then is to make a bad idea look like a good one. The obvious bad ideas are things that lead to discord and fornication, lying, laziness etc, but there are other ways he gets at people as well. Business leaders are constantly deceived into causing serious harm by adding seriously poisonous additives to products in the form of ingredients, or as waste from manufacturing as a shortcut to profits. In this way, satan really can cause health problems, but not through some supernatural manipulation of our metabolism, which I honestly do not believe he can do (outside the aspect of genuine demon possession in an unbeliever, which is an exception, not the rule). I do know that a witch can and does inflict lust, having been attacked in this manner, but I also have heard of a spell referred to as a form of rape, leading me to suspect that the physical sensation they inflict, they also feel themselves, which would explain why I have never been attacked with severe physical pain as I have reason to believe that if that could be easily done, it would be. For this reason, I honestly believe it is best to pray for an ill person, definitely, and pray for their doctors as well, and to heed medical advice with all seriousness, rather than expect God to lower your blood pressure, for example, when your doctor told you to exercise and lose weight.

So the first line of defense in genuine spiritual warfare is to be reading your Bible, so you get a good comprehension of how God thinks. The second line of defense is to discipline your own thinking and behavior to model God's own as closely as possible, as this will help you find a way to stop being influenced by the devil's line of thought. The third line of defense is to be sure of what is right and what is wrong, and to insist on living by what is right. I truly believe what we permit to influence us will be what guides our choices, and our choices will become our lifestyle. And how we live and why is what our environment will be, and denial isn't going to change that one bit. And that is the simple truth.

Teaching On Christian Relativism

2010-07-23T11:03:00.002-04:00

This article was originally written by Mattfivefour of Rapture Forums

It is reprinted here with permission of the author.

http://www.raptureforums.com/forum/forum.php

The Rapture Is A Myth

The Rapture is a myth. A lot of people—I daresay the majority—believe that. And their position makes absolute sense when viewed from their perspective. A logical naturalistic, humanist world view dictates that there can be no supernatural events. Since the existing universe operates according to fixed principles of physics, having been refined over trillions of years to the point it now is, nothing can violate those laws. Therefore, supernatural events would be nonsensical in a world where those laws of science which we have so far discovered are immutable. Thus there can be no question that the rapture indeed is a myth.

Now I have said that many people, if not most, believe this about the Rapture. And, as I have also said, they are reasoning from a naturalistic, humanist world view. And thus their presuppositions are logical. But I do not understand is that among this group of disbelievers in the Rapture are Christians … or, at least, those who call themselves Christians. I do not understand them because, unlike the non-Christians, their belief is illogical. How can a Christian believe that the Rapture is a myth?

Now, understand that I am not speaking here about the timing of the Rapture. This has nothing to do with whether the rapture is Pre-Tribulation, or Mid-Tribulation or Post-Tribulation. (For the record, having studied rapture timing over many years, I have been moved by Scripture itself from a mid- to a pre-Trib position. It is the only one that makes sense of ALL scripture on the rapture.) No, here I am speaking of those who claim Christ but say timing is not an issue because there is no Rapture—it’s a myth!

Please allow me to illustrate the illogic of their position.

First of all how do they know there is a God? Well the Bible proves it … and not through circular reasoning that some engage in. You know: “The Bible is God’s Word because He says it is and there is a God because the Bible says there is”. No, the Bible proves there is a God by the very nature of its content. It transcends human wisdom, speaking of things beyond man’s ability to answer; and, indeed, it offers solutions that run counter to human wisdom yet, when examined, those solutions are revealed as truly sublime.

Second, how do they know there was (and is) a Jesus Christ? Well, from the Bible. Yes, there are extra-Biblical references to Him, there are records of some of the beliefs of his first followers extant in writings by contemporary (or nearly contemporary) writers of antiquity. And, I suppose, the fact that outside of the far east just about all of the world divides history into either Before Christ and After Christ, or Before the Christian Era and After the Christian Era, indicates He lived. But that invites the question “Why should His life have made such an impact? And that raises the very next point.

Third, what makes them a “Christian”? What is a Christian? How does one become one? How does one know if one has become one? What does that mean in practical terms in your life? There is only one reliable source for that information. The Bible. I say “reliable” source because there are some who have created their own idea of what a Christian is, based on their own philosophy. They append Christ’s name, but have gleaned their knowledge of Him and what he taught from second, third, or even fourth hand sources. Given that, why should the result be any different than that in the old Telephone Game? Remember that? You sat in a circle with friends and you whispered a message to the first person, who then whispered it to the second person, and on and on around the group till it wound up at the first person again. As likely as not, the message at the end of the circle was barely recognizable as the one that started out. It was a hoot! But there is nothing funny about misunderstanding the message of Jesus Christ.

Thomas Jefferson created his own version of Christianity. He had some very fixed ideas in his mind as to what was true and what was not. Using his powers of reasoning, apart from the Bible, he determined that God existed but that after creation he had little to do with it. In other words, Jefferson was a deist. Therefore, for him, only parts of the Bible were true. The rest was myth. So, using a razor blade, he set out to extract from Scripture the parts he believed from the rest. The result is a thin paste up known as the Jefferson Bible. It omits anything to do with the divinity of Jesus, anything to do with eternal life, anything to do with the supernatural. What remains is a document that accords with the teachings of the ancient philosophers from whom he got his core teachings.

Sadly, many Christians are like that. The result is not a bible, or a biblical belief. It is a man-made religion based on man’s wisdom. They have elevated the product of their rational minds above the Word of Almighty God. Now they are perfectly free to do that. We all are given free will. But to then call themselves “Christian” is to totally misrepresent the meaning of the word. Indeed it strips it of all meaning.

The Bible makes clear that a Christian is a believer in Jesus Christ … that he is God, that He came to earth, that not only did He die to set us free from the sin nature with which we are born, but He died to satisfy the death penalty we all were under as fallen creatures, eternally separated from God. Further a Christian believes also that Christ not only offered Himself up to satisfy eternal justice, to thus set us free from our sin nature, translate us from the kingdom of Satan into the Kingdom of God, and to give us the promise of eternity in Heaven as opposed to hell, and that we are born again by nothing more than faith—believing that all God’s Word says about Him is true—but it also teaches that He was raised again from the dead as evidence that His sacrifice was accepted, He ascended to Heaven where He is reunited with the Father and has sent the Holy Spirit (the third person of the One Godhead) to indwell all believers until He returns to set up His Kingdom on earth. Those are the key beliefs that a Christian must hold. To reject or demur from any is to deny the plain teaching of the Word of God.

Now if you believe all of those teachings, how can you separate out other teachings of the Word of God and say, "These I do NOT believe"? Since you know there is a God, since you know there is a Jesus, since you know what it is that Jesus teaches, since you know enough to become a Christian, and since you got it ALL from the Bible, then how can you decide on any other point of doctrine that the Bible is not to be believed? It makes no sense. It is illogical. To do that is to be a Jefferson … it is to elevate your own thinking and word above God’s.

The Bible says that there will come a Day of God’s Wrath and it will be poured out on the earth (Deuteronomy 31:17; Romans 2:5; Revelation 11:18; 14:19; 15:7; 16:19; 19:15). But it also teaches plainly that those who are “in Christ” are not appointed to wrath. (1 Thessalonians 5:9) It teaches that before Christ comes again there will be a catching away of His church—literally His “called out ones”—living and dead, who will be removed from the earth before the time of the pouring out of His Wrath. (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; 1 Corinthians 15:50-57) How can anybody read those verses and then deny that the Bible teaches there is a Rapture? Timing aside, how can somebody do that?

Now the issue of timing is an interesting one and one I will deal with in another article. But let nobody who claims to be a Christian utter so illogical a statement as “The Rapture is a myth”. For if that is an example of your logic, then everything else you logically believe should be called into question, too.

What Then Are These Gifts Redux

2010-07-17T09:14:00.003-04:00

In April 2009, I wrote a series of essays called What Then Are These Gifts. It was a heart cry of grief over how the Scriptural Gifts Of The Holy Spirit are so poorly understood and so irresponsibly stewarded that God cannot trust the majority of Christians to work with them, or on the other hand, many Christians get so confused when the Gifts do ignite that we cannot work effectively in Giftedness either... I have been wondering over these things ever since I wrote the first series, and as I enter this very demanding new season in my life, it seems good to the Lord to bring forth a redux of the concept of the Gifts Of The Holy Spirit. I almost used the word "remix", but redux was the only word that fit the title, so I looked up redux; here's the definition:

Etymology: Latin, returning, from reducere to lead back

brought back —used postpositively

I testify that it is just incredible to genuinely work in tandem with the Holy Spirit. This is a real-time example of how He redirects an idea, and even if you don't understand the difference between a remix and a redux, God does, and He's still smarter. I like that about Him.

So, what then are these gifts God gives us? What does it mean to be a Christian? How can we handle the things we are given, how should we? Some are given wealth, some are given beauty, some are given creativity, etc, all are given something, not one is missing. Now that we've got it, what do we do with it? It is critically important that we ask ourselves these questions in very deep prayer, because people believe what we are doing much more than they believe what we are saying. Words do harm, but actions harm even more. Words come and words go, but actions tend to have more lasting impact and much more sheer brute force, so actions matter a lot. Furthermore, actions are the fruit of our thoughts, the seed-bearing fruit of our thoughts. Actions are much harder to deny than words ever could be. If we said something we can always deny we meant it, but when we do something, that stands as evidence that can and will be proof of genuine intent.

Matthew 21:33-39

The Parable of the Tenants
³³"Listen to another parable: There was a landowner who planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a winepress in it and built a watchtower. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and went away on a journey. ³⁴When the harvest time approached, he sent his servants to the tenants to collect his fruit.
³⁵"The tenants seized his servants; they beat one, killed another, and stoned a third. ³⁶Then he sent other servants to them, more than the first time, and the tenants treated them the same way. ³⁷Last of all, he sent his son to them. 'They will respect my son,' he said.
³⁸"But when the tenants saw the son, they said to each other, 'This is the heir. Come, let's kill him and take his inheritance.' ³⁹So they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.

What then are these Gifts?

Matthew 25:14-15

The Parable of the Talents
¹⁴"Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his property to them. ¹⁵To one he gave five talents of money, to another two talents, and to another one talent, each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey.

What then are these Gifts?

Even as I type these words, the Holy Spirit is grieving, weeping yet hoping that we will awaken to the meaning and purpose of our stewardship of His Kingdom, to the meaning and purpose of these things He has given us to work with, to the meaning and purpose of the people He has placed in our lives.

What then are these Gifts?

The Vineyard spoken of in Matthew 21 is the people Jesus Christ died for. The Vineyard is the church, the Vineyard is the whole reason we exist in Christ. What are we doing with the Vineyard? What are we doing TO the Vineyard???? What is this apostasy??? What is this rebellion???? How did we become so careless with our stewardship that mocking unbelievers call us "our own worst enemies"???

Divorce.

Fornication.

Secret abortion.

Exploitation.

Backstabbing.

Lying.

False testimony.

False prophecy.

False healing.

Spouse abuse.

Undermining one another.

Accusing one another.

Abuse of tithes.

Disrespecting one another.

Gift envy.

Self exaltation.

The Vineyard looks a lot like an abandoned field.

Desolate.

Poisonous.

Deadly.

Beware.

Run.

Build walls to keep the other out, there is no telling what they might do next. "Do it in the name of heaven, you can justify it in the end"*

Or can you?

What then are these Gifts?

Whom or what are we really serving?

Why?

Wherein lies our greatest hope? Did we think we might stand on some mountain of our own accomplishments congratulating God on the privilege of being seen in our reflected glory? Todd Bentley, Benny Hinn, Brian McLaren, is this what you really believe? Ordinary church goer, hidden sins, blatant riches collected in the Name Of Jesus Christ, did you really think you were winning? By whose standards? Those cheering crowds will not be so impressed when you all find yourselves gathered as thorns to be thrown in the flames.

Matthew 25:41-46

⁴¹"Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. ⁴²For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, ⁴³I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'
⁴⁴"They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'
⁴⁵"He will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'
⁴⁶"Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life."

Now, let us reverse these negatives and search out the positives. What then are these Gifts? Before the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, Peter and John were competitors.

John 21:15-21

¹⁵When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter, "Simon son of John, do you truly love me more than these?"
"Yes, Lord," he said, "you know that I love you."
Jesus said, "Feed my lambs."
¹⁶Again Jesus said, "Simon son of John, do you truly love me?"
He answered, "Yes, Lord, you know that I love you."
Jesus said, "Take care of my sheep."
¹⁷ The third time he said to him, "Simon son of John, do you love me?"
Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time, "Do you love me?" He said, "Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you."
Jesus said, "Feed my sheep. ¹⁸ I tell you the truth, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go." ¹⁹Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, "Follow me!"
²⁰Peter turned and saw that the disciple whom Jesus loved was following them. (This was the one who had leaned back against Jesus at the supper and had said, "Lord, who is going to betray you?") ²¹When Peter saw him, he asked, "Lord, what about him?"

Throughout the Book Of Acts accounts of these two men, though, there is a very different picture

Acts 3:1 is a good example

¹One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the time of prayer—at three in the afternoon.

This is the correct expression of Christian unity, going together to serve, knowing you are both highly Gifted, also knowing that you are both very differently Gifted, and knowing from Whom and for Whom these Gifts exist in the first place. On top of all that, trusting Jesus Christ to honor what it cost you to serve in these Gifts, because anyone, absolutely anyone who has ever worked in the Gifts Of The Holy Spirit will tell you that these things only come at a high price. So let us respect, in this order alone, what it cost Jesus Christ to give these Gifts in the first place, then what it costs each one of us to carry these Gifts, the most important of which is Salvation. Let us honor our Sovereign Lord by honoring everyone else He chose to serve Him, and by honoring the ways and means He chose to work through us, in a dedicated effort to achieve His Holy Kingdom Purpose.

In Christ, Amen and Amen.

Even so... There is so little time left...

Holy Be The NAME Of The Lord Jesus Christ Amen

*Lyrics from One Tin Soldier by

Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter

1969

Spiritual Warfare, The Inside View Part 2

2010-07-16T14:08:00.004-04:00

For many years, people in this community have prayed for a man to lead a Bible Study in our community clubhouse. When one gave up in despair, another took her place (sorry gentlemen, but its usually the women who pray for these things, the men think they can handle things well enough. The three I know of were women, I was one of them)... On July 6, 2010, a man came in answer to our prayers with his Bible open to Ezekiel 37:1-14

Ezekiel 37:1-14 (New International Version)
Ezekiel 37
The Valley of Dry Bones
¹ The hand of the LORD was upon me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the LORD and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. ² He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. ³ He asked me, "Son of man, can these bones live?"
I said, "O Sovereign LORD, you alone know."
⁴ Then he said to me, "Prophesy to these bones and say to them, 'Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD! ⁵ This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath ^{a]" style="line-height: 0.5em; ">[a]} enter you, and you will come to life. ⁶ I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the LORD.' "
⁷ So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. ⁸ I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them.
⁹ Then he said to me, "Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, 'This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe into these slain, that they may live.' " ¹⁰ So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army.
¹¹ Then he said to me: "Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, 'Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.' ¹² Therefore prophesy and say to them: 'This is what the Sovereign LORD says: O my people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel. ¹³ Then you, my people, will know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. ¹⁴ I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the LORD have spoken, and I have done it, declares the LORD.' "
Footnotes:
Ezekiel 37:5 The Hebrew for this word can also mean wind or spirit

This man is a local, Called by God to make Spiritual inroads in our community. He is a man of this land with deep roots; he knows the history of this county from roots of tradition and recorded fact; he is a beautiful Gift Of God, and it is breathtaking the way in which this testimony is unfolding.

Proverbs 25:13
¹³ Like the coolness of snow at harvest time
is a trustworthy messenger to those who send him...

The Lord saw to it that I was invited to the first Bible Study at the clubhouse. I was dropping off my trash at the Recycling Center, and got talking to the man on duty. He hadn't known I was a Christian, but when I spoke of all the Lord had done for me, he insisted I come. I did, with great joy. Our Pastor announced he would be teaching from Ezekiel 37; I thought he was going to teach End Times prophecy, everybody else seems to be, but he had something else in mind entirely. But before he began to teach from Scripture, he began speaking of the history of our community. He spoke of the people who had controlling interest in developing this place, and said a group had requested a church to be a part of this subdivision. They replied that they came out here to get away from church, and flatly refused to permit a church to be built here. So the Christians who wanted a church restored a very old church built in 1821, which was valued enough to be relocated to its current location about 4 miles up the main road from our community in about 1850.

Our community reaped the whirlwind. One of the first people to build a house out here was my neighbor, who proceeded to set himself up as a ruler of sorts, using a combination of black magic, sheer weirdness, his height (he is tall) and assorted criminal skills he has nurtured over the years to insure that everyone is intimidated by him. Except for me. I refuse to let him scare me. Can't afford to let him scare me, so I scare him instead, and God is clearly backing me on that, because he hasn't attacked me directly yet, although someone shot a gun 7 times outside my back yard one night a few years back...

Reap the whirlwind. Reject God, and that is precisely what you shall do, make no mistake about it. Even today, the latest news is chilling, the upper atmosphere has done something very strange, and scientists are worried...

Getting back on topic, I thought that my buying this house was a horrible mistake that I should have avoided. I also thought my prayers were ineffective, and I had no idea why. I had long since repented in overdrive of everything I could identify, and by this year, I was utterly exhausted, emotionally and spiritually from all I have suffered in the 10 years I have lived here. The only thing harder to find than hope was answers, but a few people have been more than kind (you know who you are...), and when I think I can't go on another day, the kindness and the prayers of God's faithful carry me along the next stretch.

It was this morning, after hours of prayer, both last night and this morning, that the Holy Spirit showed me the whole picture. By refusing to allow God into this community, they left it to satan to run wild out here, and he has. But people prayed and prayed, especially for their wayward children, and God searched until He found the right people, then He refined and trained His servants in terribly crushing trials until he had us where He needed us to be. Then He opened our Bibles to Ezekiel 37:1-14

And He gave us a song as well, Revival by Robin Mark. This song describes our community perfectly, from the people spoken of to the train on the edge of the town, we can hear the train whistle echoing through these woods when he goes through "on the edge of town"...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4HeIXYqaSs

Interlude, Scripture For Today

2010-07-16T14:06:00.000-04:00

Colossians 2:9-10 (New International Version)

⁹For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, ¹⁰and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority.

Spiritual Warfare, The Inside View

2010-07-16T12:55:00.003-04:00

¹⁰Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:
"Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God,
and the authority of his Christ.

In the year 2000, I bought a house and for the first time in my life. This place was a dream come true for me, what I had hoped would be a haven of peace and healing, a place to retire from the madness of my tormented youth and to rest, at long last. That dream rapidly devolved into a nightmare when I discovered what kind of person lives next door... Being a basically nice person, it took a long time to really accept it. For a long time I doubted the repetitive evidence all over my property, that someone who lived very close by was vandalizing my property, entering the garage and the house, and committing acts of theft, not for the sake of gain, but to cause extreme stress, psychological torture. Once I realized the circumstantial evidence unmistakably pointed to one man who lives next door, I blamed myself. Both because I have bad days and used to have a bad temper and because I am a single women, and women aren't supposed to do things like burn yard waste or do home maintenance, I assumed I had offended him. But as time went on, and I had chances to ask other community residents about the man, everyone had stories to tell and adjectives to use, that describe a person who is genuinely evil. The first story came from a dear friend, now deceased, who was never a Christian. He told me my neighbor was into Eastern spirituality in polytheistic combination with Native American. One Christian woman described him as "satanic" (she whispered the word in real fear), another Christian woman stated flatly "He's evil and his wife is just as bad". A non-Christian man described him as "beyond weird", and another man spoke of his daughter as fleeing a seance held by the neighbor's daughter, after she sensed genuine evil. For myself, there can be no further doubt, my neighbor is an initiated witch.

Further reports I heard about this man over the years include a credible source saying he had parked a rotten old house trailor in the middle of a back road out here and left it for the local young men to shoot at and break the remaining windows out of it until the county finally hauled it off. A man bought an undeveloped lot on the other side of my neighbor's place, and found my neighbor had parked 2 house trailers on his property. The neighborhood association officials and the police were called in to force this man to remove the trailers, and they nearly had to go to court before he would comply. The latest news is that the man who bought acreage behind my place is finding large junk on his property.

Everything posted in this Blog is true. In 2002-2003, I suffered a brutal attack by a family member who is an initiated witch as well, although he is smarter, much more skilled and much less motivated to do long-term harm than my neighbor is. The difference between the two men is motivation (more on that here in a bit). In 2003, I responded to a chance at Salvation, accepting Jesus Christ on His own terms, and proceeding to learn much about what exactly that involves. I have never regretted that decision, but what I have sorely regretted is that i didn't do it sooner. All I could think by the Spring of 2006 was that if I had only submitted to Christ years earlier that all this not only could have been avoided, it would have. It is very nearly possible to literally bleed with the grief of regret... It was in the Spring of 2006, having spent the previous two years hounded by evil so devastating, so overwhelming, that I was now thoroughly terrorized. Things seemed wildly out of control, no matter how hard I tried I couldn't find help, and all I could do was scream from the depths of my heart, "WHY ME???" How, O Lord, could I get myself into such an impossible mess??? His answer? "Because you are strong enough." This conversation took place the night before I was to go on a church retreat for the first and so far, only time in my life.

On the third day of the retreat, they were talking about Baptism in the Holy Spirit. I honestly thought I needed to be rebaptized after having been so sorely attacked. I honestly thought I had been way too close to the center of evil and something terrible had contaminated me. One time, in 2004, just after visiting with a Pastor, I felt something in my abdomen that felt like it was trying to claw its way out. I half expected it to succeed. I damaged my car trying to get out of the tightened entrance to the parking lot that afternoon. Another time, in 2005, when I arrived at work, I saw a cloud of evil hovering over the entire property at work. Several people suffered family tragedies while I was at that job, and at times I thought it was because of the evil that was after me. These days, I think I was probably mistaken; I can only hope so...

At the retreat, on that third morning, I went forward for prayer, desperate for a refuge from the terrible things that kept happening to me. Almost immediately, I fell to the floor, in what must have looked like what Charismatics call "slain in the spirit". I had a very strong sense of a terrible war going on above me, and although my eyes were tightly closed, the rest of the people in the room were making a lot of noise. The shouting got so loud (this was the only time all weekend anyone got noisy like that), that I started to get curious, but I was also very aware of the conflict going on, and I didn't want to be disrespectful, but finally I did peek. Virtually every person in that room was on their feet, hands raised as high as they could go, praising God with all their strength! That was a big surprise to me... It was sometime after that, something happened, and my spirit fled. I don't know quite how to describe that, but the Lord confronted the evil that thought it owned me, and when things reached that point, I felt my spirit flinch away, and I didn't see, hear or feel anything until I heard someone shouting my name over and over like I must have been unresponsive or something. I drifted up out of a fog into consciousness, trying to find my throat, and I heard satan scream in fury, "She can't be saved, she was born in sin!" The woman shouting my name was really freaking out, and I had to yell back, "I am a daughter of Eve and of Adam, does that mean I can't be saved?" She replied with a firm "No", so I -- went back to a place of black "nothingness" and told satan I wasn't buying his line. Then I came back to reality with the words "And He separated the Light from the darkness" just gonging in my head, accompanied by an extreme thirst for Scripture. I knew that "He separated the Light from the darkness" was from Genesis, but I couldn't remember the rest of the passage. I repeated the words out loud, asking someone to look it up, but the only reply I got was from another woman standing next to me, Revelation 12:7-8

⁷And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. ⁸But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven.

I later read the whole passage, and came to understand that verses 7-12 applied

Revelation 12:7-12

⁷And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. ⁸But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. ⁹The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.
¹⁰Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:
"Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God,
and the authority of his Christ.
For the accuser of our brothers,
who accuses them before our God day and night,
has been hurled down.
¹¹They overcame him
by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony;
they did not love their lives so much
as to shrink from death.
¹²Therefore rejoice, you heavens
and you who dwell in them!
But woe to the earth and the sea,
because the devil has gone down to you!
He is filled with fury,
because he knows that his time is short."

I wanted badly to just hug a cross standing nearby, but they drove me back to my seat. No one would come near me after that, so I looked up the Genesis passage, it was Genesis 1:3-4 that God had spoken over me

³ And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. ⁴ God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness.

It was when I came home that day that I drove all the way around my community praying the Blood Of Jesus Christ over the whole community before I stopped back at my house. When I came in, I went straight into prayer, and it was that afternoon that God asked me to forgive my Dad for refusing to let me come home ever again after I ran away when I was 16. I have never, to this day been able to go home to live with my family; I am the only one of my siblings living in another state. I did forgive my Dad, all this is recorded on the Revelation chapter 12 pages in my first Bible.

Because of all this, I thought I was winning the war against my evil neighbor, so I prayed Revelation 12:7-12 all that summer with great confidence. I found objects invested with demons all over my property that summer too, learning first hand one way discernment works. I also got a hard lesson in patience and faith, since my neighbor continued to become more and more evil over the next 3 years, even resorting to a blood sacrifice on my front walk in 2007... I knew there was nothing wrong with God, so I decided there was something wrong with me. There are3 many more stories to all this than I have the ambition to recount today, but these are the pertinent facts so far. This is the end of Part 1

Scripture For Today

2010-07-14T08:16:00.000-04:00

One of my favorites.

John 15:10

¹⁰If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father's commands and remain in his love.

Beyond The Anger, Perceptions...

2010-07-14T08:09:00.000-04:00

Organized religious Christianity has got to be one of the most self-defeating well-meaning efforts ever undertaken in the history of mankind. Why? The premise of Biblical thinking is actually very effective. I have seen the OT teaching severely challenged, but in the context of what unfettered people were capable of at the time, the Mosaic Law was actually a very effective set of restrictions on the impulses of the people towards whom it was directed. Case in point, the circumstances described in the Book Of Judges, which includes literary snapshots of exactly what they were capable of in the Middle East when they were not under restraint. The repercussions of spending a night in a village while travelling were chilling. Some people can almost defend the described behavior by saying it is safest to just say yes, but consenting under pressure is not consenting at all, it is submission to a demand for cruel tribute.

Then there is the NT. The teaching technique Jesus Christ used is not reflected in the modern church at all, and I seriously doubt it has been employed since about the third or fourth generation of church leaders following the original Apostles. If we take an uncompromising look at the Gospels, it shows that Jesus only taught a small collection of percepts. This can seem either very incomplete or very restrictive, and for many years it seemed incomplete to me. I really didn't get a clear picture of the church at large until I came online and saw that Christians in many different states in America and also even Westernized countries overseas were all saying about much the same thing. It was only when I was able to see a view outside the Westernized Cultural microcosm that I was able to understand that many are spending more time looking in a mirror of self congratulation than they are examining the real causes and effects of the failures of the organized Christian religious system. The problem starts with denial. People in general are experts at denial, needing a set of simple parameters in which to frame reality as we must cope with it. Jesus Christ was well aware of this fact, so instead of saying something different every week or two, He said the same few things everywhere He went, which is why He ended His ministry asking His Disciples "Are you still so dull?" That question still applies to the average Christian today. The average church Christian is so heavily dependent on churches and church leaders to do their thinking for them that they become absolutely hysterical when they hear something they don't readily understand, yet when their emotional appetites are correctly appeased, they fall smoothly for the likes of GW Bush and Sarah Palin.

Christians are by no means the only people falling for mass deception. Religion is not the problem, failure of critical thinking is. It is no problem to discover fallout from failure of critical thinking in any human environment bar none, so there is no point in my launching any broadsides at groups to which I do not belong, although I could pick on other groups if I so chose, but I do find taking cheap shots to be distasteful.

So the bottom line is this. No matter what you go after, it is well to ask yourself where this is leading and why. Sensible, self-controlled and reasonable people are going to thrive anyway, so it might be a good idea to consider how what you are doing is affecting those around you. Why? Because if you destabilize people around you, the ricocheting shrapnel is probably going to hit not just you, but the family and friends in your life that make the whole flow of life mean something worth waking uo to in the first place.

Scripture For Today

2010-07-13T09:09:00.000-04:00

Philippians 2:9-11
⁹Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
¹⁰that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
¹¹and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

Amen and Amen

In The Furnace...

2010-07-13T09:01:00.002-04:00

It has been made clear to me that I cannot afford the luxury of anger nor bitterness, nor condemning myself nor condemning others of I am to handle the things God has asked me to handle.

Some people have have actually been asked to stand helplessly while someone they love deeply suffers. This is precisely what the Apostles did when Jesus Christ was crucified, Peter in part, and that broke him temporarily, John in full, he alone as well as the underappreciated women, were strong enough. The Apostles considered themselves witnesses, according to their own words as expressed in the Book Of Acts. Christianity was originally referred to as the Way, and in my mind it is safe to assume they meant the Way Of Life, a rather Hellenistic philosophical perception that is reasonable to deduce, as the Hellenistic (Greek) philosophical viewpoint was a cultural influence that is well documented to have had a powerful influence on the Jewish civilization of the time. So in practice, Christianity is not a formalized religion at all, but a way of life. But, please correct me if I am wrong, because I am very sure I am not, but I should hate to be mistaken about something this important. Do this raises some key points:

What does it mean to serve a God Who demands Truth in its purest form?

Matthew 7:14
But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

Luke 21:19
By standing firm you will gain life.

John 1:4
In him was life, and that life was the light of men.

John 6:68
Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.

John 14:6
Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

So what then does it mean to serve a God Who is Love in its purest form?

What then does it mean to serve a God Who demands sacrifice not of someone or something else, but of your self? That, after all, is the example Jesus Christ set at Gethsemane...

What really is the example set? Can you look at these things without flinching?

Maybe it is because of the extreme demands of my Gifting, but I perceive Christianity as very demanding and very rewarding. If that was my experience alone, I would be able to tell that its just me, and I am mistaken in the isolation of my experience, but, I see all around me a great many people asked to sacrifice self interest up to and including their very lives, or worse yet, the life of the person they loved most.

Christianity wasn't bought cheaply, and it very deeply offends me to see it sold cheaply. I simply see no evidence in Scripture nor in testimony to support the claim that Christianity is a free ride for self gratification, quite the opposite, actually. That is the place where I pay such a high price to stand, but then I have no choice.

Since we have these promises, dear friends, let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit, perfecting holiness out of reverence for God.
2 Corinthians 7:1