HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, January 18, 2015 – Standing your ground as a Christian doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t flee persecution. Fleeing persecution is a time-honored tradition of true believers. Joseph fled to Egypt with Mary and Jesus. When they came back from Egypt, they moved to a part of the country where Herod’s successor wouldn’t have authority over them. Jesus himself, throughout his ministry, moved from town to town and avoided certain areas where he knew the Jews were out to kill him. We are to follow Jesus’ example in everything we do, so stand your spiritual ground as a Christian – and run!

NOWHERE IN SCRIPTURE DOES IT ADVISE BELIEVERS TO REMAIN WHERE THEY ARE BEING PERSECUTED.

When Jesus knew his time had come, he willingly went to Jerusalem. When Paul knew his time had come, he willingly went to Rome. Otherwise, Jesus and Paul fled from or avoided areas where they knew their lives were in danger. In stark contrast, when they knew their time had come, Jesus and Paul boldly went to their persecutors rather than have their persecutors hunt them down.

Followers of Jesus will always suffer persecution. Our job is to pray for those who persecute us, and then get the heck out of Dodge. Jesus is nothing if not pragmatic in his approach to survival. Don’t fight your persecutors – flee from them, and pray for them.

Some notable flights from persecution:

•  The Exodus (Hebrews fleeing Egypt)
•  David (before he was king) fleeing from Saul
•  Early Christians fleeing everyone
•  True Christians (born-agains) in the Middle Ages fleeing the Roman Catholic Inquisition

In response to current widespread persecution of “non-believers” (that is, non-Muslims) in perpetually war-torn countries such as Iraq and Syria, some men who call themselves Christians have organized “Christian militias” and vow to fight and kill to retain their ancestral land. This is not what Jesus would have done; Jesus said: Those who live by the sword, die by the sword. Jesus told us to abide by the Ten Commandments, including “Thou shallt not kill.” There is no such thing as a “Christian militia”, if fighting and killing is involved.

Christians who are being persecuted need to flee. Standing and fighting (i.e., killing people) is going against God’s will. It’s your spiritual ground you need to stand, not the ground under your feet.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/12/21/syria-christian-islamic-state/18915275/

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, January 18, 2015 – God loves us all the same. Yes, we know that, but do we really know that?

God loves born-agains. God loves atheists.

God loves me the same now as a born-again as when I was an atheist.

God loves me the same as he loves Jesus.

God loves Jesus the same as he loves Satan.

Imagine that.

God loves us all the same.

The difference is in our choosing to love God back. When you love God, you give your will for him to work through you, so he does. When you don’t love God, you don’t permit him to work through you, so he doesn’t.

God respects our free will. He doesn’t always agree with our choices, but he respects our right to choose. He gave us that right, and he honors it. Choosing wisely means following God’s advice. He’ll never force you, but he will vigorously advise you. He doesn’t leave you guessing as to which choice is the right one. He always makes sure that the right choice is clear to you. God will NEVER trick you into making the wrong choice.

God loves us all the same. Remember that, and pray for those who hate you. My grandmother and countless strangers prayed for me.

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, January 17, 2015 – Consider Jesus: He lived his whole life on Earth misunderstood. His family mocked him; the leaders of the Jewish nation he had come to save reviled him and ultimately plotted his murder; and his own followers betrayed and deserted him. He alone persisted, to his final tortured breath, in the certain belief that he was God’s “suffering servant”, the Christ, the one sent to redeem fallen mankind.

This is faith; Jesus’ entire life was a test of his faith. While everyone around him operated on assumptions derived from the witness of their senses, thinking as man thinks, Jesus relied on faith. His faith was unshakable because it was rooted in his trust in God, not in anything or anyone else. It was a deeply personal one-on-one relationship which alone endured to the end. Had Jesus hearkened to his family or his religious leaders or his followers or to outward appearances or even to John the Baptist when he expressed his doubts about Jesus being the Messiah, he would not have made it. Who would have thought that God would send such a humble man of questionable birth and little material means as his Messiah? And his disciples – such a rag-tag motley group of “sinners”! From the outside looking in, no-one, unless granted by God, could possibly grasp that Jesus was who he said he was, yet from the inside looking out, through the eyes of faith, Jesus was the perfect fit.

Then, as now, there is so much misrepresentation of who and what Jesus was and is, so much nonsense masquerading as knowledge and teachings. Jesus is the one and only Messiah, the one who was to come, God’s Christ. While on Earth, he was fully human, though increasingly suffused with God’s spirit. His faith was greater than any human’s either before or after him, which is why he was the chosen one of God. Being all-powerful, God can work in whatever way he wants, but he chooses faith as his means. Faith engenders an ever-growing desire to submit one’s will entirely to God, to do only the Father’s will, as Jesus did. The greater the faith grows, the greater the desire to submit to God; the greater the submission, the greater the faith, and so on.

Jesus was a human being; he wasn’t God. Fully human, he was also the fullest  expression of the manifestation of God’s spirit in a human being, and so God’s spirit worked through him more powerfully than through anyone else either before or after him.

But Jesus wasn’t God.

Jesus often spoke as God in the first person, as did many if not all “sons of man” – that is, prophets – before him. So although Jesus was not God, he could still speak with the authority of God, as it was indeed God speaking through him. Jesus was sinless not because God prevented him from sinning but because he chose not to sin. His did this of his own free will. Any one of us could also have become the Messiah, had we also always chosen to do the will of the Father, but only Jesus consistently chose God’s way. That’s what made him worthy to be the Christ. He wasn’t born the Christ, he became the Christ through his own free will.

This distinction – that Jesus was not God and that he became the Christ of his own free will – is incredibly important in shaping our relationships with God and Jesus. We are not to worship Jesus, but to follow him. We are to worship God as our Father, as Jesus did and also advised us to do. We are to strive to have the same relationship with God as Jesus had, where God’s spirit united them as “one” through an aligning of their wills. Jesus prayed for his followers to have this same relationship with God as he had, and Jesus always got what he prayed for.

Jesus was sinless because he always chose to do God’s will. In other words, he always chose life. He made mistakes, but he didn’t sin. There’s a huge difference between making mistakes and sinning. Jesus relied as much as humanly possible on faith, not on himself or other people or institutions or ideologies. Relying on faith means putting yourself as much as humanly possible into God’s hands and letting God’s spirit work through you. The more you put yourself into God’s hands by living by faith, the greater your faith grows and the more God’s spirit can work through you. That Jesus managed to make it all the way through his life, to his last breath, without sinning once, is by far the greatest human achievement of all time.

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, January 17, 2015 – None of us know for sure who’s going to make it to Heaven. We can do our part, following Jesus’ example in everything we do and say and think, but ultimately it’s God’s decision about who makes it to heaven and who goes to hell.

For those who do make it to heaven, there’s no more pain, no more fear, no more death, no more ugliness, inside or out, and no more bad memories or regrets.

So what about those who don’t make it to heaven? If we make it to heaven, won’t it make us sad when we remember those who didn’t make it?

I asked God about this, because it bothered me. How could I be happy in heaven knowing someone I loved was in hell? If there are no tears in heaven (except maybe happy ones), how do people there deal with remembering their loved ones who ended up in hell?

The simple answer is: They don’t have to deal with it because they don’t remember anyone who didn’t make it to heaven. The memory of those people is completely erased from their minds, as if they’d never lived at all. Those in heaven only remember good things. Do you mourn or miss someone you never knew or never heard of? Of course not. Then neither, if you make it to heaven, will you mourn or miss those who go to hell.

In contrast, those who end up in hell never stop remembering all the horrible things they did, all the people they hurt, and all they forfeited by choosing the devil’s way rather than God’s. Over and over again, they relive the pain they caused other people.

In hell, pain never ends.

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, January 17, 2015 – Most people who don’t know God (and even some who do) claim that we can’t know anything about heaven because no-one has ever come back to tell us about it. That may well be, in a general sense, but we can certainly know about heaven through those who’ve had visions of it (meaning, they’ve been shown glimpses of life in heaven) and by what scripture tells us about it.

If you’re born again, chances are pretty good that God’s shown you glimpses of heaven. My understanding, from what I’ve been shown and told, is that heaven is very much like Earth, only absolutely perfected. By “perfected”, I mean that there is no decay, no physical or emotional pain, and no ‘ugliness’ in any sense of the term. There are no ‘bad hair’ days in heaven. Souls that make it to heaven leave their imperfect mortal bodies behind (on Earth) and enter into perfect immortal bodies that are entirely free of flaws. Everyone and everything is beautiful in heaven.

That means – perfect skin, perfect teeth, perfect hair, perfect bodies. If we make it to heaven, we will have perfect athleticism that comes with perfect hand-eye co-ordination and perfect balance of body mass distribution. (Imagine what that will do to your golf score!) We will also sing ‘like the angels’, whose voices are renowned even among non-believers.

We will live in homes that suit our personalities and preferences to a “T”. We will eat all of our favourite foods with perfectly attuned appetites, never gaining an ounce of superfluous flesh. Our weight will be perfect and remain so forever. We will be surrounded by our favourite flowers and trees and animals. Each night, our sleep will be the best we’ve ever had, and we’ll wake up the next morning feeling the best we’ve ever felt.

There is no sickness in heaven, neither of the body nor of the soul. Everyone in heaven loves God and follows Jesus. We all share the same values, but our personalities are our own. Our will is perfectly attuned to God’s, but our personalities are our own.

This is crucial to understand, that our personalities remain the same. My personality is unique to me, just as yours is unique to you. Whether an unbeliever or born again, whether on Earth or in heaven, my personality remains the same. My values changed profoundly when I was born again, but my personality remained the same. This is how you can tell the difference between someone who is born again and someone who is under the influence of the evil one – a born-again believer will have the same personality but values that are in line with Jesus’ values, whereas someone who is demon-compromised will have a markedly changed personality and values that are opposed to Jesus and God.

My personality is unique to me, and there will be only one like me in heaven, just as there is only one like me on Earth. Along with my personality are my preferences, such as my favourite foods, favourite colors, favourite sports, and so on. In heaven, I will have access to all of my favourites all of the time. So, for instance, I won’t have to eat any food that I don’t like, ever.

I love to figure skate. But here on Earth, I’ve had inner ear issues since the age of 6 (through botched surgeries) that have prevented me from learning figure skating skills such as spins and jumps. I simply can’t do them, no matter how hard I try. In heaven, though, those physical restraints will be removed. I will have athleticism that surpasses even the world’s greatest athletes, because I will have perfectly balanced physical form, perfect hand-eye coordination, and perfect inner ears. I’ll still have to learn how to jump and spin, but I will be able to learn. In fact, I’ll probably be spending most of my free time learning how to jump, spin and do fancy footwork in my own personal backyard skating arena, listening to my favourite skating music.

I say “free time”, because I’ll still have to work if I get to heaven. But work in heaven is nothing like work on Earth. In heaven, work is perfectly attuned to your abilities and preferences, and perfectly supported by God. It always involves “missions” to help both believers and non-believers in the mortal realm still going through the testing years. Think of what angels do here on Earth now, and you’ll have a general idea of your potential job description when you get to heaven.

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, January 16, 2015 – If you had just one more day to live, how would you live it? What would you do?

None of us knows when our time on Earth is up. It could be tonight or tomorrow or even within the next few minutes. Scripture tells us that what’s important isn’t how we start our walk with God but how we end it.  What matters is how good your relationship with God is here and now, not how good it used to be or how good you hope it might be some day. Where your soul is here and now determines where and how you’ll spend eternity.

Let that sink in for a minute.

Read it again: Where your soul is here and now determines where and how you’ll spend eternity.

And again: Where your soul is here and now determines where and how you’ll spend eternity.

Some words bear repeating because otherwise they can be easily overlooked.

Where your soul is here and now determines where and how you’ll spend eternity.

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Every morning, I ask God what I should write about that day. He usually gives me a range of topics, but occasionally he’ll point to just one topic. Today, he pointed to death.

When Jesus gathered his followers for one final meal before his execution, he told them not to cry but to be happy for him because he was going home. Jesus clearly didn’t think of death as something to fear or mourn, but rather something to celebrate and look forward to, and so should we.

But old habits, as they say, die hard. I don’t know about you, but I was raised not to talk about death unless absolutely necessary. And then, if the unmentionable happened to someone we knew, we would use the term “passed away” rather than “died”. It sounded less, well, terminal. We were atheists, and death was a taboo subject; we never spoke of it as something that would happen to us. Any mention of it was with averted eyes, hushed tones, and a sad shake of the head, followed by a quick change of topic.

Today, as a born-again believer, I could talk about death all day. In fact, the thought of dying actually makes me excited because, like Jesus, I think of it as the way to get home to my Dad and to all those who love him and love me. Maybe the older you get, the more amenable death becomes. Or maybe the more I get to know about heaven, the more I want to be there.

We know from Jesus, Paul, David and others that heaven is so amazing, it’s worth any amount of suffering during this lifetime. God has shown me what awaits me in heaven if I, as Jesus puts is, “endure to the end”, and there’s nothing on Earth that comes even remotely close to what I’ve seen. Not that heaven is completely different from Earth – not at all! – it’s the perfection of what we know and love here on Earth that makes it so wonderful.

You shouldn’t talk about death without talking about heaven, because the thought of heaven erases all fear of death and makes the suffering endurable. It also puts death in the correct context – that of being a transition phase from life on Earth to life in heaven rather than a punishment or a failure (which is how the world tends to view it). This is what I was missing for me as an atheist, and what made death so fearsome and unmentionable. There was no vision of heaven to temper the pain and horror that I used to anticipate were the main characteristics of death. As a child, everything I knew about death I’d learned from horror movies.

We need to talk about death every day, openly and cheerfully, like Jesus did. We don’t need to dwell on death, but we do need to remember that it can happen at any time, and when it does, our soul needs to be ready for heaven, not primed for hell. Am I looking forward to the physical suffering that might accompany my transition from this world to the next? No, not at all. I’m not a masochist. I don’t seek out pain for the sake of it, hoping that my contrived suffering will atone for something I or someone else did. God’s justice doesn’t work that way (just ask him; he’ll tell you). Jesus wasn’t a masochist, either. The last thing he wanted to do was to suffer physically, but he accepted that, as the Messiah, suffering was his lot. At the same time, he also had faith that God would get him through it as quickly as possible. And so God did.

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If God let me know that I had just one more day to live, I would, first and foremost, immediately choose to forgive anyone and everyone I had anything against. I do that every day now, anyway, but I would be especially conscious of doing it if I knew that my time was almost up. Choosing to forgive those who’ve hurt you is the best way to stay closest to God. What I would do after that point would be up to God’s guidance and would be completely dependent on my physical location and abilities. I have no idea what God would advise me to do, but I would certainly do it the best I could, knowing God would be supporting me in my efforts.

Come to think of it, maybe this is how we should live every day – continuously choosing to forgive and continuously asking God’s advice and taking it, knowing that he’ll support us. Maybe this is how we should live every day as if it’s our last. Jesus knew his time was coming, David knew his time was coming, Paul knew his time was coming, and maybe we will, too, but maybe not. Maybe just to be sure, we should adopt the “live every day as if it’s our last” mentality, continuously choosing to forgive and continuously following God’s advice, just as Jesus did. I can’t imagine there’s any other way to successfully “endure to the end”.

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, January 15, 2015 – The pope has spoken out in support of Islamic violence and against freedom of speech, declaring that insulting people’s faith should not be permitted, and that if religion is insulted, violence should be expected as a reasonable response. In this, as in nearly everything else he comments on, the pope is wrong.

God has asked us not to take his name in vain. Jesus has advised us to treat other people as we would like to be treated. But nowhere in the Bible does it say that ridiculing people’s beliefs is off-limits.

In fact, the very opposite is true. Jesus stood first and foremost for speaking the truth, regardless of the personal cost. He would never have glossed over the truth (in other words, lied) in order to spare someone’s feelings.

This is truth: the world’s organized religions are based on “doctrines of man” that are for the most part ridiculous lies. These lies need to be exposed as such, so that those who are confined and shackled by them can be set free to embrace the truth, as revealed by Jesus.

Thank God for freedom of speech. Those who wish to limit free speech wish to control us for their own purposes.

Never let them control you.

Give your free will solely and entirely to God.

Jesus fearlessly spoke out against those who pretended to speak with God’s authority but were in fact (like the pope) mouthpieces of the devil. Like Jesus, we must also speak out against lies.

God gave us the right to speak our minds freely (it falls under the auspice of free will), but the pope wants to one-up God by limiting our free speech. Don’t let him. Speak your mind freely and fearlessly, especially in matters concerning faith.

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, January 14, 2015 – A little bird told me that no religion has a monopoly on stupidity… and then Islam said: “Hold my beer.” The latest manifestation of foolishness masquerading as religious dogma is an Islamic cleric’s fatwa issued against snowmen.

The ‘logic’ behind the fatwa is that making a snowman is like making a graven image, and Muslims are forbidden from making graven images.

Mind you, in the Commandments, Christians and Jews are also forbidden from making graven images, but to the best of my knowledge, no edict, papal or otherwise, has yet been issued advising Christians and Jews that making snowmen is the modern-day equivalent of forging a golden calf.

Considering that God, my Dad, is always the first to consult in issues of religious dogma (and everything else), I asked him what he thought.

“Daddy?”

“Yes, my sweet.”

“Can I make a snowman?”

“You can make as many snowmen as you like.”

“Will you get mad if I make them?”

“No. Why should I get mad?”

“Some guy said it was evil to make snowmen.”

“Sounds like some guy has too much time on his hands. Go make your snowmen. I’ll deal with the guy when the time’s right. In the meantime, pray for him.”

So there you have it. I’m off to make a snowman, with God’s blessings. If anyone’s offended by it, please take your concerns directly to God.

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, January 14, 2015 – There is no marriage in heaven. Needless to add, there is also no sex in heaven, of either type (intercourse or gender). Jesus tells us we will be “like the angels”, who are neither male nor female, don’t marry, and do not reproduce.

This may come as a surprise to those who hope to be ‘reunited’ in heaven with their dearly departed spouse. They may indeed be reunited as adopted children of God (not as spouses), but having ‘marital relations’ will no longer be possible or even desirable. You just won’t want it or even miss it.

As a very close friend of mine once said: “There are no holes in heaven.” This means there is no sexual intercourse but also no defecation or urination, which should come as a vast relief to many.

You can still eat, though – and how you can eat! Your appetite will be perfectly tuned to your body’s needs. The food will always be your favourites, made with the finest and cleanest of ingredients. There are no pesticides or herbicides or fungicides or genetic modifications of any kind in heaven. Everything is clean, natural and perfect. No indigestion or heartburn or tummy-aches of any kind can happen in heaven because, as scripture tells us, there is no pain in heaven.