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Yearly Archives: 2025
WHEN LOVE ISN’T LOVE
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, January 2, 2025 – One of the most startling scenes in the Bible is when Jesus turns on Peter and thunders: Get thee behind me, Satan! You value the things of man, not the things of God. We can only imagine Peter’s confusion when Jesus came out with that. And what had Peter done to earn the rebuke? He’d offered to defend and protect Jesus to the death. But instead of gratefully acknowledging Peter’s (seemingly) generous offer, Jesus attacked it and revealed it for what it was – inspired by Satan.
I like this scene because it unflinchingly exposes the misapplication of love. Far too many Christians falsely believe that “love is love” and as such takes precedence over all other human interactions. They are taught by their pastors to love selflessly, illogically, persistently, and yes, even aggressively, including where their love is not welcome. They are taught to love in all cases and under every circumstance, but is that really what Jesus taught his followers to do?
I would argue “no”. Jesus taught us to be obedient to God in all cases and under every circumstance and showed by his example what obedience looks like. In the scene referenced above, Peter responded with misapplied love rather than responding with obedience to God. Jesus was in the process of revealing the prophesied and God-ordained trial he had to undergo, but all Peter heard was that Jesus would suffer, and he wanted to protect Jesus.
How many times have we done that in the course of “being Christian”? We think we’re doing the right thing by wanting to protect people from their trials, but in trying to protect them, are we valuing the things of God or the things of man? Are we in fact acting as emissaries of Satan rather than of Jesus?
As born-again believers, we’re called to love our enemies. It is the highest calling of any human. But loving your enemies means praying for them and blessing them; it doesn’t mean forcing your unwelcome affections on them. You don’t tell your enemies you’re praying for them and blessing them; you just pray for them and bless them where they can’t see or hear you doing it. You do it in secret, like Jesus advised. That is genuine spiritual warfare.
Christians can be the most insufferable and creepy people on the planet when they go around parading their “love” and forcing it on people who don’t want it. What good is it to tell people that God loves them if those people hate God or don’t believe he exists? The number one reason why I despised Christians when I was an atheist is because they tried to push their beliefs on me. I didn’t push mine on them, but they insisted on pushing their beliefs on me. Their pushiness didn’t make me a believer. They thought they were doing something good by “sharing” and preaching, but all they were doing was making me despise them and their message even more.
Jesus emphasized that the first Commandment is to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. We are to treat others as we would want to be treated and to pray for and bless even our enemies, but all our love goes to God. All our obedience goes to God. That is the first and greatest Commandment.
Jesus didn’t go around forcing his love on people; he healed those who came to him for healing and taught those who came to him to learn. There is not one verse in the Gospels where Jesus is seen shouting “God loves you!” to random strangers. If Jesus didn’t do it, neither should we.
If you don’t want to be rebuked like Peter, you need to value the things of God, not the things of man. Love God and be fully obedient to him. If God has ordained someone for a trial, let them go through that trial. If God has ordained you to help someone, help them.
Only by giving all your love and obedience to God will you know when to openly love and when to step back.
NEVER ALONE
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, January 1, 2025 – This is a difficult discussion to have, mainly because not everyone agrees with these sentiments, and some are violent in their disagreement. Worldly Christians in particular bristle at the teaching and accuse me of misapplying scripture. But it’s not a misapplication of scripture to say that our relationships in this world should be the same kind of relationships that Jesus had. It’s not a misapplication of scripture to say that we should live as Jesus lived. It’s a teaching, not a misapplication of scripture. It’s a teaching.
If we read the lines and between the lines of scripture, we can clearly see the kind of relationships Jesus maintained and sought during his ministry years. First and foremost, it didn’t include the kind of relationships that worldly Christians consider their core emotional touchstones. Jesus did not have a good relationship with his immediate family. They didn’t believe that he was the Messiah and even tried to stop his ministry when he lived in Capernaum. In response to their disbelief, Jesus kept them as arms’ length. He didn’t despise them. He didn’t reject them. He didn’t curse them. He saw them as a trouble point and so treated them accordingly.
He also, as far as we know, didn’t maintain any friendships with childhood friends in Nazareth or with anyone from Nazareth. The siblings Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, along with a few of the better-known female followers, appear to be Jesus’ only friends outside of his disciples, and his disciples he met only after he started his ministry work. John the Baptist he knew because he was his cousin, but how close they were is debatable. Jesus, of course, knew everything he needed to know about John, but John was somewhat on the fence about the messiahship of Jesus. At times he seemed to believe, while at other times he seemed to doubt. This waffling kept John and Jesus at a distance from one another.
Jesus had no close relationship at all with anyone in established religion. In fact, the religious powers-that-be were Jesus’ worst enemies, just as today they are ours. Anyone who receives a salary for preaching is not your friend. There are zero exceptions to this rule.
The humans we choose to be close to during our time on Earth should reflect the kind of choices Jesus made. Jesus’ choices should guide ours. Being friendly with someone is not the same as being friends, any more than sharing a meal with someone is indicative of closeness. We should never reject people because they’re not born-again. Jesus didn’t reject his family, even when they refused to accept him as the Messiah. He didn’t reject them, no, but he also didn’t spend much time with them, and he didn’t reveal much of himself to them.
Like Jesus, we can only have close relationships with people who are fully committed believers and have accepted Jesus as the Messiah. We can be friendly and spend time with people who are not believers, but we have to be careful what we say to them. They may come across as supportive and sympathetic, but consciously or not – intentionally or not – they will one day betray us. One way or another, they will betray us. Scripture is very clear about that.
It’s better in the end to be alone than to have false friends, just as it’s better not to marry and not to have children. These teachings are directly from scripture. I thank God every day that I don’t have a spouse or a child. I thank God every day for the vast Heaven of believers who are my family and friends in the spiritual realm. Being alone as a born-again believer doesn’t mean one is actually alone. I’m never alone.
If you’re born-again, you know what I mean.
GORGE ON GOD
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, January 1, 2025 – It’s a hazard of the prophet trade always to see things in a negative light. The positives are there, too, but only as an afterthought, as something in the hazy distant future. To most real prophets, we are never in the positive in the here and now. We are in the negative and trending deeper into the negative.
That’s one of the ways you can discern a false prophet from a real one. A false prophet will almost always paint a rosy picture of the near future. The messiah is coming! The rapture is coming! Our deliverance is coming! A real prophet will tell you things are bad and about to get far, far worse.
Sure, they’ll get better some day, but only for a very few.
And not here on Earth.
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Isaiah 22:12-13 is one of those passages that haunt me this time of year. People gorge themselves as if they’re starving and goad you to do the same. I have known what it is to go without food and the strangest part of it was that even when I was given food, it was never enough. I was still hungry. I could eat to the point of vomiting and still be hungry. That’s how it is when you perceive at a sub-conscious level that you don’t have enough to live on. Your mind tricks you to keep on eating to prepare for the dearth. It’s a survival mechanism.
I think that’s why the poor these days are almost always fat. The rich are skinny and the poor are fat. It’s a rare poor person who’s skinny, unless they’re also a drug addict or living in Africa. It used to be that the rich were fat and the poor were skinny. That’s how you could tell who had wealth and who didn’t. Now the rich are skinny mainly because they take appetite suppressants or overexercise or stick their fingers down their throats to vomit up what they couldn’t stop themselves from eating. Because even the rich feel like they’re starving. Underneath their smug self-imposed exercise regimes, they’re constantly hungry, only they don’t know for what.
We feast on food when we should be feasting on God. Isaiah 55:1-2 explains what we should be doing. We should let our soul delight itself in fatness. We should be gorging and feasting on God and his Word, not on food and this world. Jesus invited us to feast on him not in a physical or metaphorical or even metaphysical sense, but in a spiritual sense. Jesus invited us to live Isaiah 55:1-2 while also living Isaiah 22:12, with no contradiction.
The point of this article is to get you to live these verses deeper. You can never have too much God. Gorge yourself on God and you’ll move farther and farther from the feasts of this world and from the need to participate in the feasts of this world. You won’t have to consciously remove yourself; it will happen as a natural (or better said, supernatural) consequence.
Gorge on God. Weep and mourn for the passing of this world, but gorge on God.
A BORN-AGAIN BELIEVER 