Home » Born-again Christian (Page 41)
Category Archives: Born-again Christian
THE UNSHAKEABLE FAITH OF JESUS
NIAGARA FALLS, Ontario, October 18, 2022 – There are few things that make me angrier than people lying about Jesus, and one of the biggest lies is that Jesus lost his faith while on the cross.
I have argued here and here and elsewhere that Jesus, in all his time on Earth, was never closer to his Father than in the hours leading up to and during his crucifixion. He did not lose his faith. He did not feel forsaken. He played his Messianic role flawlessly, and in so doing, became the perfect sacrifice that paid the sin debt and paved the way for the establishment of God’s Kingdom on Earth. I have zero doubt about that.
Had Jesus not played his Messianic role flawlessly, he could not have served as the blemish-free offering that was required as the sin debt.
Jesus did not at any time lose his faith in God or in his role as Messiah. How could he lose faith in God? He knew him intimately, one-on-one, as his Dad. To Jesus, God wasn’t out there somewhere, maybe or maybe not hearing prayers, maybe or maybe not answering them, but inside him as an abiding presence, informing his every thought and word. There was no separation between God and Jesus, as Jesus himself said just a few hours before his crucifixion: “The Father and I are one”. Where Jesus was, there was God, through God’s Holy Spirit.
We have the same intimate relationship with God, if we’re genuinely born again.
Those of you who think that Jesus temporarily lost his faith on the cross, could you kindly point out in scripture where precisely he lost it? Because I see no evidence of lost or diminished faith. On the contrary, I see Jesus more focused than ever on what he knew he had to endure, and willing to endure it, knowing that the end was his glorification.
Why is Jesus’ unshakeable faith important to us as his followers? Because Jesus didn’t want to be crucified. He fought against it at the eleventh hour, begging God to find another way for him to accomplish the deed. But when God was adamant that there was no other way, Jesus accepted it and forged ahead, strengthened by God and by the angels God sent to minister to him.
We do not see a weakened Jesus exiting the Garden of Gethsemane. Oh, no – we see a spiritually and physically superhuman Jesus, embracing his betrayer and admonishing his followers for wounding the soldiers who’d come to arrest him. We see a Jesus fully in command of the situation and of himself. This same superhuman Jesus continued as such to his last breath, with no loss of faith. On the contrary, he must have astounded all those present when he continued to minister to those present – to the women who lined his path, to John and his mother, and to the thieves – despite the horrors he was enduring. When the Roman soldier stood at the foot of the cross in awe of Jesus, saying “Truly he was the son of God”, it wasn’t because he’d just witnessed a man losing his faith, but because he’d witnessed a man who against all odds remained true to himself to the end.
This continuance of Jesus’ faith in the face of extreme torture and humiliation is important for us to know, because we will face similar situations as his followers. That is a guarantee. And like Jesus, we may not want to do what God has planned for us and we may try to negotiate a way around it or to find a better (that is, less painful) way to carry out our mission. Chances are, again like Jesus, we’ll have to go through what we have to go through as planned. But knowing that Jesus was able to do it by submitting fully to God should serve as our guide.
I have come across many people in my travels who are angry and bitter at God because they blame him for letting a loved one die or for “not being there” when they were suffering an illness or a bankruptcy or any of the other thousands of crises we humans can go through during our time on Earth. They blame God for their trouble and pain, and in blaming him, close themselves off to him so that he can’t work through them anymore. That is a sad situation, and imagine if Jesus had done it. Imagine if Jesus had closed himself off to God because God wouldn’t find another way for him to accomplish what he had to accomplish. Imagine if Jesus had been bitter at God instead of submitting fully to him. Had Jesus been bitter, he would not have been able to do what he did during his crucifixion, he would not have gained victory over death, as God would not have been able to work through his bitterness.
Without unshakeable faith, Jesus would not have been able to pay the sin price required of him as the Messiah. He didn’t blame God for what he was going through. He didn’t get angry. He didn’t get bitter. He didn’t shut God out. He just put his shoulder to the wheel and let God work through him.
He let God be God.
We must never shut God out, no matter what we’re going through. Some of what we’re facing may be a test, and some of it may be punishment we’ve brought on ourselves. Either way, we must never close ourselves off to God. He must remain our centre and our focus and the source of our strength, as he was for Jesus. No matter how bad things get or how miserable a circumstance you find yourself in, I’m guessing it still won’t rival the pain and suffering Jesus endured at his crucifixion. If he could remain faithful through that trial by submitting fully to God and strengthening as a result, then so can you.
So can we all.
Untested faith is mere boasting. Faith that strengthens under trial is the true measure of faith. In that, as in everything else, let Jesus be your guide.
WHAT RIGHT DO YOU HAVE?
NIAGARA FALLS, Ontario, October 17, 2022 – Most people in the Western world love to babble on about their rights. In the Eastern world, people are more cautious about what they consider is owed them merely by virtue of existing, yet even they are still inclined to believe in that hazy little thing called “human rights”.
But we in God’s Kingdom know that humans have no rights beyond the one guaranteed to us by God – the right to choose, which is based on our God-given free will. Every other right comes from some level of governing authority and so is worldly (that is, administered by the devil and his representatives) and can be cancelled at any time.
What most people call or consider “inalienable rights” are actually privileges granted them under certain circumstances. For instance, the American Constitution would be worth next to nothing if there were a Chinese or Russian take-over of the United States. That’s because the American Constitution is only valid while Americans are under the authority of their own government. If that government is taken over by a foreign entity, the Constitution becomes obsolete, regardless of the “inalienability” of the rights contained within it.
It should spin your head around like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist knowing that what we call “rights” are actually privileges granted us by the devil. In Canada, it’s not so much a head-scratcher that our state-sanctioned rights are sourced in evil, considering they involve, for instance, the right to abortion, the right to euthanasia, a man’s right to be called a woman and a woman’s right to be called a man, freedom FROM religion, etc. God’s fingerprints are definitely not on those so-called rights. Even the rights to freedom of speech and a free press, if you dig a little deeper, are clearly not sourced in God, as they give a Satanist the same right to a pulpit as a born-again believer.
Most countries list, in the form of a Constitution, the rights they extend to their citizens. Yet God has limited his list to just 10, and nearly all of them are warnings not to do something rather than license just to do it. Isn’t it interesting that there is no list of human rights coming from God, who loves us more than anyone else can possibly love us and who wants only the best for us? Isn’t it interesting that God considered it more important and more to our benefit to curtail our license rather than to expand it? Isn’t it interesting that God deemed we would be better off with a list stating what NOT to do rather than a list of what to do?
The social contract took a beating over the past few years. Loosely stated, the contract is an informal agreement whereby we, as individuals living within a society, agree to abide by certain laws and social constraints in return for protection from and access to that society. I’ve written here and here and here and here (and elsewhere) about how that contract was all but nullified not only by mandates, but by the vicious zealousness of individuals who took it on themselves to police them. For me, as someone who could not wear a mask and would not get injected, everyday life became a dystopia of socially imposed “thou shalt nots” barring me even from public transit and grocery stores. Unable to get around or to shop in person for my daily needs, and suffering increasingly violent and bizarre attacks for the social sin of baring my face in public, I withdrew to the country and lived in isolation for a year, relying on deliveries until the mandates were dropped.
I read yesterday that the mandates may be coming back to Ontario, where I’m currently holed up, so I’m already making plans to move on. Even the threat of having to relive the social conditions of the past few years is enough to make me want to flee to Egypt under cover of night with just the clothes on my back.
Beyond our right to choose, we have no God-given rights. We have rights granted to us by various levels of government and supra-government organizations like the United Nations, but our God-given right is limited to our inviolable right to exercise our free will, which no-one on Earth can take away from us. If God thought that giving us free will was sufficient as our one and only inviolable right, we also should consider it sufficient.
As for laws and mandates that infringe on our freedom of movement, freedom of expression, etc., there are always ways around those. Sometimes they can be sidestepped and generally ignored, while other times the only way around them is to leave the jurisdiction where they are imposed. But you never have to give into them and you should never fight them, no matter how egregious they may be. If they have been imposed, God has has given them the nod, so if you fight against them, you’re fighting against God. Don’t do that.
At the same time, you never have to do something that you don’t agree with and that you believe violates your right to choose in accordance with your conscience. Yes, there may be worldly consequences for choosing against the prevailing laws and norms, but I’d rather accept those consequences and let God help me deal with them (which he will gladly do) than to violate my conscience before God or break his Commandments.
There is never an excuse for doing something you know is wrong and every reason to do what you know is right. Your free will – your one and only God-given right – is inviolable. You absolutely (in the truest sense of the word) can do what you like. But in so doing, choose wisely, as you’re answerable to God, not to the devil and his representatives on Earth, not to your family and friends, not to your enemies, and not to anyone else.
You are answerable only to God.
WHOLE LOTTA SHAKIN’
NIAGARA FALLS, Ontario, October 15, 2022 – When the children of Israel started to go down the wrong path God-wise, the pagans they lived among started to gain more power over them. The more they disobeyed God’s Commandments and the laws Moses gave them, the worse their lives became and the more pagan-like they grew, learning to value lying, cheating, stealing, adultery, covetousness, honor killings, etc., as acceptable cultural norms.
At some point, God gave them up for lost and let the pagans rule over them until the majority of the children of Israel were indistinguishable from unbelievers. The few faithful who still followed the Commandments God spared, protected, and set aside. The rest he let go.
Former Christendom is undergoing the same mutation process today. It is a spiritual devolvement to move from Christianity to anything else, just as it was a spiritual devolvement thousands of years ago to move from Judaism to anything else. The rewards are the same today as they were thousands of years ago for those who make that shift to paganism, keeping in mind that “paganism” is a euphemism for demonism, and that the deities worshiped by pagans are actually demons and fallen angels in disguise.
Paganism is any form of worship that is not worship of God in Jesus’ name.
In my travels over the past few months, I have found that most of Canada is now owned and run by pagans. They have not been imposed on the country; they were earned as Canada’s just reward for turning away from God and his Commandments. Even their pagan festivals are now being given the same treatment as former Christian festivals and holy days, and in some cases have become more prominent and celebrated.
Scripture shows that the only way for a nation to regain God’s blessings and avoid his judgement is for all people in that nation to sincerely repent and turn back to God. I can’t see this happening in a place like Canada that is now majority pagan. It may happen in small pockets of believers or on a person-by-person basis, but Canada will never return to its earlier spiritual prosperity, as the majority of Canadians no longer believe in God or keep his Commandments.
As a born-again believer, I feel more and more isolated and foreign in my own place of birth. I feel more and more unwelcome and more and more like an oddity. I was forcibly removed from a chapel a few weeks ago while I was reading the Bible and praying. A female security guard who spoke with a very strong Indian accent had reported me for “loitering” in the chapel at Toronto’s Pearson airport. (As if such a thing were possible – to loiter in a chapel!) Two armed police officers showed up and threatened me with arrest unless I left immediately, as otherwise I’d be charged with trespassing (again, as if it were possible for me, as my Father’s daughter, to be trespassing in a place designated as my Father’s house of prayer). Not wanting to be arrested (it’s not yet my time, as Jesus would say), I left the chapel and the airport, but I was profoundly shaken by how dark things have become in Canada when a Christian woman can be threatened with arrest for allegedly loitering and trespassing in a place set aside for Christian prayer and worship. I can’t imagine the same thing happening to a Muslim woman (or man) in a place set aside for Muslim prayer and worship.
I have made it a policy, as a born-again believer, not to go where I’m not welcome. I take my cue from Jesus’ instruction to his disciples to shake the dust from their feet as a sign to places that reject the Gospel. There are many places I’ve discovered that I can’t go anymore, so there’s been a whole lotta foot-shakin’ going on over the past few months. And like Jesus and Paul, I will avoid going places where I’m threatened with arrest until God gives me the cue that it’s my time.
It is not pleasant living among pagans and watching a former Christian nation fall under pagan authority, with God’s approval. It’s deeply and profoundly sad, like mourning. Some of the places I’ve visited God has told me he’s entirely washed his hands of, that he’s given the inhabitants over to their sins and vices and let them be. It’s a terrible thing to have God wash his hands of you, to have him let you be. That is not something you ever want to have happen to you, but it remains a possibility for everyone, as long as they’re still on Earth in human form.
After I left the chapel in Pearson airport, I boarded a local Toronto bus and headed for the subway. I’d heard that it would be running all night to accommodate the revelers at a city-wide arts festival. I’d never “ridden the rails” after midnight, so I was kind of excited to see what it would be like riding around in empty subway cars at 3 a.m. That’s what I’d envisioned, anyway – that the subway cars would be empty and quiet and clean and orderly and I’d be able to have a good nap from one end of the system to the other.
The reality was that the cars were full to bursting – standing room only – until well after 4 a.m. One of the last cars I rode in was taken over by a very drunk and rowdy group of young people of about university age. One of them sat across from me and slumped over with his head between his legs. At some point he opened his mouth and began to spew vomit on the floor between his feet. He didn’t heave; he just left his mouth open and the vomit poured out in a steady stream. I have never seen so much vomit coming from one human. It quickly grew into a pool that covered half the subway car. It was like a horror movie or better said a parody of one. I jumped off at the next stop and notified the driver what was going on. The last I saw, the train was halted at the station to deal with the mess.
So much for Toronto the Good, as it used to be known. So much for Toronto transit being so clean, you could eat off the floor of the vehicles and the stations. That’s how it used to be, back in the days when you could still say “Merry Christmas” without being shushed or accused of bigotry, back in the days when a Christian woman would never have been removed from a chapel at gunpoint for the alleged crime of “loitering”.
When a nation rejects God, he leaves. He shakes the dust from the bottom of his feet, and he leaves. What is left in his wake is a spew of cultural and spiritual filth that eventually drowns out all that was good and holy. There are now whole cities and regions in Canada that have become to me like Sodom and Gomorrah, whole cities and regions that I will never pass through again. But the pagans and neo-pagans haven’t won, because they face the same end as the wayward and fallen former Christians unless they repent.
No-one wins when a nation rejects God. No-one wins when a nation devolves into paganism. The natural end of such an abomination was foretold by Jeremiah and came to pass when the children of Israel were besieged in Jerusalem and ended up cooking and eating their own children, followed by the destruction of Solomon’s temple. It came to pass again when Jerusalem was besieged by Roman soldiers, followed by the destruction of the second temple. And now it’s coming to pass in former Christendom, with women again murdering their own children, this time in the name of reproductive rights, followed by the wholesale destruction of church buildings the world over.
Scripture tells us that God will not be mocked. If he’s not welcome, he’ll leave. If I’m not welcome, I’ll leave. But God help those places that are left bereft of God and his children: They will quickly become previews of the inescapable hell that awaits the fallen forevermore.
TALKING ABOUT GOD
NIAGARA FALLS, Ontario, October 3, 2022 – As a born-again believer, I occasionally experience a strange phenomenon that began when I returned home to Canada a few months after my rebirth in Australia – friends and family started to talk about me in front me as if I weren’t there. This had never happened to me before, except as a child (parents famously talk about their children in front of them). The first few times I experienced this after my rebirth, I made a joke about it, but the people kept on talking about me, despite my trying to add my voice to the conversation. Their response was to turn up their voice volume and talk over me, ignoring my input.
As I mentioned, talking about people in front of them is something that parents often do about their children. Adults may also do it about people they think are mentally incompetent or on their deathbed. People under arrest or otherwise detained likewise experience being talked about in front of them by authority figures. But when I returned to Canada as a born-again believer, I wasn’t a child, I wasn’t on my deathbed, and I wasn’t under arrest or being detained, so clearly these people assumed I was mentally incompetent simply for being a believer.
Twenty-three years into my rebirth, some people must still think I’m mentally incompetent, because they still talk about me in front of me. Some even accuse me of being a fraud. This is how unbelievers make sense in their own minds of born-again believers. If I do something stupid or immoral, they point to my stupidity/immorality as evidence that I’m just pretending to be a Christian (because Christians are perfect, never falling to temptation or doing anything wrong, right?). But why would anyone pretend to be a Christian when Christians are treated with such disdain and outright hatred by unbelievers?
Even as we experience being talked about in front of our faces (in addition to liberally being talked about behind our backs lol), we ourselves are guilty of doing the same thing to God. We know that through the power of God’s Holy Spirit, God and Jesus are always with us. That’s a promise given to us by Jesus on the night before his crucifixion and a condition of our being in the Kingdom. Yet just like the people who talk about us in front of us as if we can’t hear them, we are also guilty of talking about God and Jesus that way.
Being ever-conscious of God’s presence is something we need to learn. We can accomplish this by always including God and Jesus in our conversations. When we’re by ourselves or with other born-again believers, we can talk openly and directly to God and Jesus, knowing that they hear us and we can hear them; when we’re with unbelievers, we can simply be aware that God and Jesus are with us, listening. In those situations, we can talk to them in our mind, even as our mouths are saying something different to someone else.
I believe that Jesus operated this way during his time on Earth. Scripture shows that he sometimes spoke openly and directly to God when he was with his followers, and that he sometimes appeared to be talking to God privately in his head, asking his advice. One of those latter instances was when the woman caught in adultery was brought before Jesus while he was teaching in the temple. Her accusers belligerently demanded that the adulterous woman be stoned to death in accordance with Mosaic law. But Jesus seemed to ignore the accusers and continued with his lesson, stooping down to write on the ground. I believe that in his seeming obliviousness to the drama at hand, he was asking God’s advice on how to deal with what appeared to be a legalistic slam-dunk. When Jesus finally did address the accusers, his response (“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her”) wielded such spiritual authority that it shut them all up and sent them away with their tails between their legs. Only a Word straight from God has the power to do that.
As born-again believers, we need to learn (yes, it is a learning process) not only to be aware that God and Jesus are always with us (hearing our every word and thought and seeing our every action), but to include them in our conversations, whether spoken aloud or in our mind. A large part of the process is simply being reminded of their constant presence. In technological terms, the microphone and speakers are always set to “ON”. How you choose to remind yourself is up to you, but a string tied around the finger or wrist is a tried-and-trued classic option that works. Or you can carry a Bible with you wherever you go. It’s nearly impossible to carry a Bible and not be aware that God and Jesus are right there with you.
I thank God that he and Jesus are always with me, and that they can hear my every word and thought and see my every action. When I was a young and oftentimes foolish born-again believer, I wasn’t always aware of God and Jesus’ presence, and so I did some things I shouldn’t have done and suffered the earned rewards for them. We can avoid those situations (and the suffering they bring) by always being aware of the presence of God and Jesus. If you talk about them, do so knowing they hear you and make them part of the conversation. Don’t just talk to them during designated prayer time or when you’re alone; talk to them all the time.
MORE LIKE JESUS
NIAGARA FALLS, Ontario, September 27, 2022 – When you tell God you want to be more like Jesus, watch out! That’s one prayer God loves to answer in spades. Before you know it, you’ll be roaming the country a homeless, penniless outcast, just like Jesus was during his ministry years.
But you’ll have God’s Spirit powerfully with you. No amount of wealth can rival having God’s Spirit powerfully with you.
It’s better to be a penniless follower of Jesus than someone with excessive funds who doesn’t know God. I say this from personal experience but also from observation. The most spiritually miserable and misdirected people I’ve ever met are not poverty-stricken but those with more money than they need. Money is not a blessing when it exceeds your needs. Money beyond your needs becomes a burden, a temptation, and a curse, driving a wedge between you and God.
Becoming more like Jesus (that is, learning to make the choices he made and following his lead in everything we do) should be our lifetime goal as his followers. We’re not to model ourselves after movie stars or sports heroes or superheroes or anyone else, including our favourite relative, friend, or pastor. We follow the lead of no-one but Jesus; that’s what it means to be his follower.
You grow into the role of being a follower of Jesus. You’re not reborn and automatically become like Jesus. It’s a process that unfolds over time. It’s first and foremost a spiritual education, bearing in mind that Jesus was as much a teacher as he was the Messiah, and that the whole purpose of his ministry work was to teach people about the Kingdom and how to live in it. God, through his Holy Spirit, taught Jesus so that Jesus could teach his disciples, who in turn taught his other followers, who in turn then taught yet other followers, and so on and so on, all the way down to blogs like this one today.
As followers of Jesus, we keep on learning to be more like Jesus right up to our last breath as humans. Even Jesus himself was learning up until his crucifixion (remember the Garden of Gethsemane). I don’t think we ever reach the point where we can say: “Well, I’m exactly like Jesus now, so I can stop learning”. Every day, we learn from God through his Spirit, but also from scripture (especially the Gospels), and from making mistakes.
Maybe because I make so many of them as a former atheist who wasn’t “raised in the faith”, mistakes tend to be my dominant learning mode. We learn best by mistakes, as the adage goes, and they also keep us humble, as my grandmother used to say, so mistakes do have a positive aspect if used correctly. But mistakes can also hurt you and leave you troubled and confused for a time. And they can ultimately turn you against God.
So it’s critically important when we fail our tests or fall to temptation that we run to God as soon and as quickly as possible. Our instinct will be to run the other way to avoid God and lick our wounds in private, but we need to run to God, not try to hide from him. Scripture says that God will wipe away all our tears; it doesn’t say that we won’t cry or not give ourselves reason to cry; it says God will wipe away all our tears, and that includes tears that result from self-inflicted wounds from failed tests and temptations or downright stupidity.
I have done both – cried and run away from God and cried and run to God, and beyond a shadow of a doubt it was far, far better to run to God for healing than to try to avoid him and fix things in some other way. God’s healing is miraculous and therefore instantaneous and perfect, whereas anything I did to try to rectify my mistakes only made things worse. I laugh as I write this, because with the passage of time, I tend only to remember my stupidity rather than the pain my stupidity caused me. That shows the perfection of God’s healing, that the pain is gone even in remembrance. There’s no rankling or regrets or self-loathing. I only think: “Well, that was stupid of me. Won’t do that again”, and I move on.
We need to move on after we’ve made mistakes, especially ones that involve failed tests and temptations. The temptation will be to wallow in self-pity or self-hatred, to beat our breasts publicly, or even to think we’ll never regain our spiritual footing so we might as well just give up. Those are all temptations in themselves and they come straight from the devil. Don’t fall for them. God wants you standing firmly on your feet and looking up to him, not wallowing in self-pity and looking down.
Becoming more like Jesus is a lifetime pursuit. We shouldn’t get angry or impatient with ourselves if we occasionally (or more frequently) make choices that Jesus didn’t make and suffer the consequences for it. We should instead learn from our mistakes and use them as cautionary tales to teach others. We should never wallow in our mistakes or in self-pity; we should always run to God and God only for healing.
****
Even as we continue to learn about the Kingdom ourselves, we can still teach others. Our knowledge will never be perfect while we’re here on Earth, and it doesn’t need to be. God doesn’t expect us to be perfect and in fact hasn’t enabled us to be perfect until we get Home. What he does expect of us is to remain actively willing to become more like Jesus. That means not only praying to be more like Jesus, but accepting the reality of actually being more like Jesus, which of necessity is going to involve being itinerant, penniless, and at odds with mainstream society, including mainstream Christianity.
When this happens, embrace the changes in your circumstances, don’t fight them. If God entrusts you with poverty, he has given you a very great gift and blessing. Don’t reject it. The more Jesus came into his power in the Kingdom, the poorer and more outcast he became in the world. The same will happen to his followers. Having poverty thrust on you is a sign that you’re becoming more and more like Jesus. It is reason to celebrate, not to mourn; it is a reason to double down on your commitment to God and the Kingdom, not cause to neglect the Kingdom to pursue money-making ventures in the world.
All prophets throughout the ages have had poverty thrust on them, and yet God still provided for them: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and everything you need will be given to you”. In becoming more like Jesus, there’s no need to fear poverty and rejection by mainstream society: these things should instead be celebrated as a milestone achieved. Paul says that the values of the Kingdom are foolishness to the world. If God saw fit for Jesus to be penniless, itinerant and outcast during his ministry years, we should expect to be the same.
It is a very great privilege to be given the grace to be more like Jesus. Wherever that leads you, embrace it.
ONE TRUE CHURCH
NIAGARA FALLS, Ontario, September 27, 2022 – There is only one church under God, with only one high priest – Jesus.
The only way to enter God’s church is through the door of spiritual rebirth, which is determined by God, not by people. You are not born into God’s church; you are reborn into it.
There are no denominations within God’s church. There is just the one church and the one church only. Jesus, through his ministry work, showed us the Way, the Truth and the Life. No-one comes to the Father except through Jesus, and only at a time and place of God’s choosing. Only those who have come to the Father and live in his grace are in his church.
Christianity, as it manifests today, is nearly a complete fraud. All denominational churches are fraudulent, as are people who call themselves Christians who are not reborn. The worst thing to happen to the early church was not that it was persecuted, but that it became a state religion under Constantine. In becoming a state religion, Christianity was then forced on people as a mass cultural movement rather than a genuine spiritual submission to God. Much was changed in order to make Jesus’ teachings palatable to the superstitious pagan masses (i.e., demon worshipers). Much was also changed in order to make Christianity a means to control the masses.
When I was an atheist, mass Christianity used to make my skin crawl. It still does. Jesus I love; God I love; scripture I love; but mass Christianity leaves me cold. I feel the same way when I enter a building that calls itself a “church”, with people sitting in rows before the altar like they’re expecting a performance. When did gathering to worship God become a performance? Jesus wasn’t performing when he taught in synagogues; he was teaching. People weren’t there to watch him perform; they were learning. God’s church is a spiritual realm intended for worship and prayer and teaching and learning. No performance is required.
God’s church is wherever and whenever God’s people are. You don’t have to enter into a building or even gather with others to be in church, because those who are genuinely in God’s church are always in it. There is never a time when they’re not in church
The only reason to enter into a church building these days is to use it as a personal resource or to call genuine believers out of it.
*****
For the first three and a half years of my rebirth, I attended Catholic churches religiously (in every sense of the term). I was front row center at mass at least twice a day. The last church I attended I was there so often, the priest gave me a key so I could come and go as I pleased. It was there, in that building, that God showed me the truth of what was being worshiped.
Catholicism is defined by Catholics as the one true church, with the popes tracing their successional lineage as heads of the church all the way back to Peter. They may well trace their lineage to Peter, but the Catholic church is anything but the true one. The day I turned 40, three and a half years after my conversion from atheism, I got down on my face in tears and asked God to take out of my life everything that was keeping me from doing his holy will. I was steeped in Catholic superstition at the time and had lost my former joy. I felt more and more “off”, and rather than growing in my faith, I was stuck spinning my spiritual wheels.
At the same time, I was a model Catholic – always at mass, always clutching a rosary, always reciting whatever set phrases (“prayers”) the priest or pope instructed me to recite. Whatever place I lived in looked like a shrine, with the walls plastered with crucifixes, prayer cards, and pictures of the pope. My candles were blessed by a priest, as was my oil, my salt, and even my cat. I thought I was doing everything I possibly could to serve the church (including considering becoming a nun), and yet I felt a growing hollowness and coldness inside me that I knew was wrong. It was that odd coldness in particular that drove me to my knees and then down on my face in tears, begging God to help me regain the love I’d had in the days and months following my rebirth. In hindsight, I believe this is the first time I’d genuinely prayed to God since I was reborn.
God answers all heartfelt prayers, but he does so in his timing, not ours. Nine days later, after early Sunday mass, God answered my birthday prayer. I was sitting alone in the church, as was my habit after mass. I loved the stillness and the quiet and the smell of the just-extinguished candles, which reminded me of birthday cake. It was then, as I sat alone in silent reverie in what I thought of as “God’s house”, that God showed me precisely what kind of a building I was in.
It was either as if something fell away from my eyes or was added to my vision, but I suddenly saw the building as a pagan temple. The statues of saints were pagan idols, the worst of which was the massive statue of a dead Jesus hanging over the altar. I could not remain in that place another second. I had to get out.
And so I left and never went back. That was nearly 20 years ago. At the “shrine” where I was living at the time, I tore all the Catholic paraphernalia off the walls and tables and threw them into boxes, which I then shoved into a cubby hole and later placed at the curb for garbage collection. All I had left after the purge was a pristine white-covered King James Bible that I hadn’t even cracked the spine on. I’d bought it a few months after my rebirth, but I hadn’t read it. The day I left Catholicism was the day I started to read the Old Testament for the first time. The New Testament I’d read cover to cover in the days following my rebirth, but the Old Testament I hadn’t touched. In finally reading the Old Testament word for word (rather than as cherry-picked verses, as Catholicism does), I found in it clear and indisputable evidence that Catholicism was a redo of everything gone wrong with Judaism.
*****
Catholicism is not alone in thinking it’s the one true church. Every denomination labours under the same delusion. Every denomination espouses a creed or a list of beliefs that adherents must sign off on in joining the congregation. Tellingly, being genuinely born-again is not one of those must-have beliefs.
After leaving Catholicism, I sporadically attended a broad range of Protestant churches, finding in each of them the same superficiality I’d found in Catholicism. These were not genuine believers sitting before the altar. These were not my spiritual brothers and sisters. Most of them were either “raised in the faith” and so were there out of obligation or were attending the services as a social event.
But every now and then I’d stumble across someone who, like me, was looking for their brothers and sisters among the pretenders. That was a happy day for us, to find each other, like finding a gold nugget in the river sludge.
I cannot imagine pretending to love God and pretending to follow Jesus, and being content with that state of being. I cannot imagine just going through the motions of ritual observance year after year, thinking that’s all there is to worshiping God and being a Christian. The worst thing ever to happen to Christianity was for it to be declared a state religion. When the persecution ended, the fraud began.
To sum up:
- There is only One True Church: God’s church.
- You become a member of God’s church through genuine spiritual rebirth.
- This is how it was at the beginning, and this is how it is still.
- All denominational churches are fraudulent. At best, they’re social clubs; at worst, they’re money-making schemes, preying on the gullible.
I do not recommend joining denominational churches, but you can use them as a resource tool. Jesus used synagogues, and in so doing modeled for us that we can do the same. Don’t hesitate to use denominational churches for your needs. It’s one of the few reasons why God permits them to still exist – as a resource for his children in his One True Church.
ADDICTED TO GOD
NIAGARA FALLS, Ontario, September 22, 2022 – Everything good in your life comes from God.
It might come THROUGH people or nature or something else, but it originates in God.
God and God alone is the source of all goodness.
I mention this, because people (including born-again believers) sometimes have a tendency to take credit for good things when they happen, or to attribute good things to other people or to anything other than God. We must be careful not to do that. We must be careful always to thank God for blessings, understanding that he’s behind all of them.
God doesn’t get offended when we misdirect our thank-you’s, but we miss out on the blessings that come with thanking him. When you leave God out of the thank-you equation, you lose. Go ahead and thank people, by all means (lest they get hurt or offended), but don’t forget to thank God.
*****
Bad habits that keep you from being on target with God’s will are not something that you can break on your own or in isolation (that is, one at a time). For instance, wanting to quit smoking without understanding why you smoke in the first place will only lead to your failure. I have spoken with dozens of people (including Christians) over the past few years who are desperate to quit smoking but find they simply cannot do it. Their desire to inhale nicotine-laced smoke is stronger than their desire to quit.
Addictions are sensory- and memory-based. Even the thought of smoking gives addicted smokers the same sensation as actual inhalation of nicotine smoke. In fact, for some addicts, thinking about the addicted behavior is more satisfying than actually doing it. That’s because the thought of the desired addicted behavior releases the same chemical in the addict’s brain (dopamine) as is released during the the execution of the addicted behavior. Which is also why it’s so difficult to quit addictions like smoking, as you’re fighting not only the physical desire for nicotine, but also the strong memory of how it satisfies you, which is accompanied by a dopamine rush. Such a powerful force cannot be overcome just by wanting it to be overcome.
The day I was born-again, I went from drinking 6 to 8 drinks a day to drinking none. I had no desire to drink alcohol in the months following my rebirth. I did start to drink again later, but only sparingly and socially (one drink a few times a week). And then I stopped altogether.
I mention this because I’d been an alcoholic since I was a teenager. I’d been drinking heavily almost daily for 20 years before I was reborn. I never thought about quitting and would likely still be drinking heavily had I not turned to God. I’m not against alcohol per se (Jesus drank socially, and his first public miracle was turning water into wine), I’m just against alcohol for me.
But I know I could never have quit on my own or through any kind of a program or buddy/mentor system. Alcohol was my “medicine” that I legitimately thought I had the right to take. It was my default when things got stressful or hectic, or when I was feeling down or in the mood for a party. I used any excuse to drink, so that over the years nearly every activity I did was memory-stamped with alcohol and the initial euphoria it induced in me.
Such a pervasive addiction would have been almost impossible for me to escape on my own. I’m strong-willed, but not that strong-willed. I thank God that he sprang me from alcohol addiction not because I asked him to, but because whatever alcohol gave me, God then gave me instead. The reliance on alcohol was turned into a reliance on God, so that whenever I felt stressed or depressed, I turned to God. If I was unhappy with something, I turned to God. God rather than alcohol became my default, but this change I could not have arranged on my own. It came through submission to God and only through submission to God and was ultimately effected by God, not by me. First came my submission to God, then came my healing from addiction.
There is no other way to be fully healed from addiction than through divine intervention (in other words, a miracle). But it first requires full submission to God. Prayer – however fervent – without full submission to God will not stop the addiction.
*****
Do you have an addiction that you’re trying to quit? Stop thinking about your efforts to overcome it and focus instead on submitting yourself, body and soul, to God. The more you submit to God, the less power your addiction has over you. The more you submit to God, the more dependent you become on him and the more you will turn to him for all your needs rather than to drugs or to people. Fully submitting yourself to God will not only solve all your problems, it will give you the best ongoing high you’ve ever had, without any hangover or other nasty withdrawal symptoms.
If you have only one addiction during the rest of your time on Earth, let it be to God. We’re made to be addicted to him. Let your dopamine rush come from thinking about God and spending time with God. Let it come from just thinking about spending time with God. Let your focus be on him and him only, and he will get rid of everything that doesn’t belong in your life. You won’t have to do a thing. That’s a scriptural guarantee:
“Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness,
and everything you need will be given to you.”
*****
All good things come from God. He is the originator and source of all goodness. Goodness can come through people and things, yes, but it originates in God. He sets it in motion. He sends it to you.
May your addiction be only and always to God.
FOLLOWERS OF JUDAS: TELEVANGELISTS AND YOUTUBE PROPHETS
NIAGARA FALLS, Ontario, September 21, 2022 – Judas Iscariot was one heck of a preacher. He was excellent at his missionary job, which is why none of the other disciples suspected him of betraying Jesus. At the very end, he was, of course, outright in his betrayal, but earlier on he was as swept up in the Jesus wave as the other followers. He thought he believed in Jesus, he thought he felt the same about the mission as all the other disciples. It was only toward the end of the three years working with Jesus that his beliefs and feelings changed, and he, the arch-deceiver, began to see Jesus as the deceiver. But Judas carefully hid his doubts, as deceivers do, and doubled down on his enthusiasm in case anyone should suspect his plans.
There are many followers of Judas Iscariot in the Christian preacher community, especially on YouTube. I know preachers who are alcoholics, preachers who are on antidepressants, preachers who just consider preaching a way to make a living and to be looked after in retirement. These are all modern-day Judases, but I doubt that any of them would see themselves as such. They come across as ultra-sincere and committed to Jesus. Sometimes they’re so good at preaching their sincerity, they start to believe it themselves. It’s only when they step away from the pulpit that their doubts creep in.
By God’s Spirit, you can discern the Judases among us. They love to preach, because while they’re preaching, they feel real. The common impression is that Judas Iscariot was bad or at best mediocre at what he did. But he was good at preaching, one of the best among the disciples. His stellar performance as a preacher and subsequent presumed commitment to the mission is what led to his being entrusted with the group’s finances. Scripture tells us that he stole from the funds the disciples held in common. “But surely someone who preaches like that can’t be dishonest!?!”
Televangelists and their latest incarnation, the YouTube prophets, are all Judases. I do not apologize for making that generalization, as I have yet to come across any televangelist or anyone who self-promotes on YouTube who is not a Judas Iscariot-level false prophet. If you want to work on and practice your skill of discernment, pick any televangelist or self-promoting prophet on YouTube and see if you can find their Judas streak. As I said, they all have one. Sometimes it’s blatant, but other times it takes a few minutes to find.
There are two things they all have in common, these followers of Judas. The first is that they’re glib preachers, smooth with their words. Paul, by his own confession, stumbled over his, which is one of the reasons why he relied so heavily on his letters to get the message out. God would have had a hand in Paul’s lack of spoken eloquence, just as he has a hand in the surfeit of spoken eloquence of Judas’s followers.
The second thing that Judas preachers all have in common is their focus on money. They’ll preach for free, but they’ll solicit donations, or they’ll preach for a salary. Money will always be part and parcel of preaching the Gospel for them, as it was for Judas. They worship mammon, so preaching the Word is just a means to an end (the end being making money). Genuine followers of Jesus never accept a penny for preaching the Word. They’ll graciously and with gratitude accept any donations that are offered free-willingly, but they’ll never solicit them. That is one of the key ways to discern a follower of Jesus from a follower of Judas. God will permit the tares to grow among the wheat until Judgement Day, so it’s up to us to discern who’s a tare and who’s wheat, lest we, too, be deceived.
I know a few Judas preachers personally, and it’s difficult at times for me to keep quiet about them, but God wants me to let them be. He well knows who they are and he tells me that even the Judases have a role to play in bringing believers to the Kingdom. God uses everyone and everything to draw his people ever closer to him. Jesus knew about Judas, but he let him continue to preach to the end. He let him continue because Judas had a role to play in the redemption process, which he played willingly.
We’re not to expose the Judases among us, but rather to discern who they are and let them be. There’s nothing to be gained in exposing them, nothing to be gained in confronting them, and nothing to be gained in trying to stop them from preaching. They are an earned reward for people who prefer to have their ears tickled with smooth words.
God lets those people be, too.
He doesn’t force himself on anyone.
REAL JESUS, REAL YOU
NIAGARA FALLS, Ontario, September 20, 2022 – One of the few things we know for sure about Jesus is that he never sinned during his time on Earth. He came into the world sinless and he left it sinless. Had he not be entirely sinless, he wouldn’t have been able to pay the sin debt owed by Adam. But the debt’s been paid; the kingdom’s come; and Jesus is at the right hand of God, where he belongs.
But Jesus being sinless doesn’t mean that Jesus always wanted to do what God wanted him to do. What most Christians don’t consider (and they should consider it, they really, really should) is that while Jesus was always obedient to God, he didn’t always want to be. Sometimes he dragged his heels, sometimes he jumped the gun, and sometimes he tried to negotiate his way around it.
This is important, that we acknowledge that Jesus didn’t always want to do what God was asking him to do but that he did it anyway. Because if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that we don’t always want to do what God is asking us to do. All of us occasionally try to find a way around God’s will or a justification for not doing it. All of us do this, and if you say you don’t, you’re lying to yourself.
We’re constantly being tested to see whether we want what God is offering or what the world is offering. But God is not going to permit us to be tempted when we’re all fired up after a revival meeting; no, he’s going to test us after we’ve been fasting for 40 days and nights in the wilderness. He wants to see the real us, not the one we claim to be with our Christian friends. He wants to see how we respond not when we’re at the top of our game, but when we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel; when we’re tired and cranky; when we’ve spent the past 3 weeks sleeping on the airport floor: when we’re hungry and thirsty and exhausted and lost and people are being downright nasty to us. That’s when we’ll be tested. That’s when we’ll be pressed to do God’s will against every nerve and bone in our body.
This is where many people fall. They fail the test and then decide not to get back up again. But if we understand that Jesus himself didn’t always want to do what God tasked him to do (that is, that he didn’t always want to choose to forgive, that he didn’t always want to turn the other cheek, that he didn’t always want to love his enemies, etc.), it makes it easier for us to be obedient through gritted teeth. Because you wanna bet that Jesus was gritting his teeth on many an occasion when he chose to do God’s will. He wasn’t always doing it with a smile on his face. No-one on Earth always does God’s will with a smile on their face. It’s not possible to do that.
But it is possible to be obedient to God while gritting your teeth or grumbling under your breath. God’s not asking you to give up who you are or to stop being authentically you; he’s just inviting you to choose his way rather than the world’s way. That’s what it means to be obedient to God, to do God’s will, and it can be done through gritted teeth and while grumbling.
Or you can choose not to do God’s will, and fail the test. When that happens, you need to acknowledge your failure and move on. Don’t grovel in your failure; learn from it. And you’d might as well learn from it, because you’re going to be tested again on that exact same point. You don’t get out of something by failing it, not in God’s economy: You get a re-do when you least expect it.
Case in point: Several weeks ago, I had a run-in with a woman at a bus shelter in Halifax. She was smoking, pointedly ignoring all the “NO SMOKING” signs painted around the shelter’s interior. I politely asked her to stop smoking, but she ignored me. I asked her again, she still ignored me, and that’s when things took a turn for the worse. It’s also when I should have backed off and let God deal with her, but I wasn’t in the mood to do that on that particular day. So I locked horns with the woman.
I won’t bore you with the details, but let’s just say it got nasty. Real nasty. It almost came to physical blows, but God sent us off in different directions before that could happen.
A few weeks later, the night before I left Halifax, I was on a bus, and who should get on but the woman I’d locked horns with. She sat down next to me, but she didn’t recognize me at first. She’d had a problem finding her monthly bus pass when she was boarding the bus, so I asked her if she wanted mine, as I was leaving town the next day and wouldn’t need it anymore. She thanked me and said no, she had a pass already, she just needed to find it at the bottom of her purse. She dug through her bag for a minute and triumphantly flashed her pass at me and the bus driver. Then she thanked me again for my offer and complimented me on my coat.
It was at that point that I noticed a glimmer of recognition in her eyes, but not clear recognition. I could tell that she was trying to place me from somewhere, but she wasn’t sure where. So we chatted for a few minutes about the weather turning cold and about my upcoming trip, and then she gathered her things together to get off the bus. That, I think, is when the penny dropped for her and she remembered where she knew me from. But instead of lighting into me (which she could easily have done), she instead stared me straight in the face and wished me a good night and safe travels. I returned her well wishes, and we nodded and smiled good-bye to each other as if we were old friends.
I think I can say with confidence that I passed the re-do test, as did she. God’s timing is perfect. The funny thing is, during our brief bus trip together, the woman reminded me so much of me. We had similar mannerisms and ways of expressing ourselves, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she were a Christian, though not necessarily a born-again one. I have a feeling I’ll see her again someday, and we’ll have a good laugh over our bus shelter battle. God’s sense of humor, like his timing, is always perfect.
But WE are not perfect, and neither was Jesus during his time on Earth. That means we sometimes have to do God’s will through gritted teeth and while grumbling under our breath. That means we sometimes get mad at God. He’s our Dad, after all. (Surely you’ve been angry with your earthly father!) God would rather that you be real with him than fake it, and anger is a reasonable response to being asked to do something you don’t want to do.
Choosing God’s way was something Jesus always did, though not always with a smile on his face. God doesn’t expect us to do what even Jesus couldn’t do. What he does expect us to do is to grumble and to fail on occasion; and when we do fail, to get back on the horse ASAP. Obedience to God doesn’t require a smiling face, just a grudging “yes” when we’d sometimes rather say “no”.
A simple “yes” will do it.
God will do all the rest.
HOW DEEP IS YOUR LOVE?
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, September 13, 2022 – To praise God means to love him; to love God means to praise him.
There is no praise without love and no love without praise.
The two are the same.
You don’t have stand with your arms outstretched and waving back and forth to praise God. You don’t even have to look to the heavens.
You just do the same things with God as you do with anyone else you love.
You spend time with him. That’s praising him.
You run to him with your problems. That’s praising him.
You run to him with your joys. That’s praising him.
You share your every thought with him and listen quietly to his. That’s praising him.
Even if you don’t initially agree with him, you always let God take the lead. That’s praising him.
Invite him to go for a walk with you. Invite him to sit with you in your favourite hidey-hole. Sing songs with him. My favorite duet with God is the BeeGees’ “How Deep Is Your Love?”
Here are my lines:
“I believe in you, you know the door to my very soul
You’re the light in my deepest darkest hour
You’re my savior when I fall”
Here are God’s lines:
“And you may not think I care for you, when you know down inside that I really do
And it’s me you need to show how deep is your love….”
God, as scripture tells us, is a jealous God. He wants us all to himself. He wants us so much to himself that he made it the first and greatest Commandment that we are to give our everything to him and to him only. But he knows we get distracted. He knows sometimes we forget that he’s right there with us, he can be so quiet. He never butts in (unless we invite him to). He lets us open ourselves to him and invite him in, and then he gladly comes. When we invite him in permanently, he never leaves. He told us “I will never leave you nor forsake you”, I will never desert you; I will never betray you.
God will only leave if we want him to.
May you never want God to leave.
*****
To love God is to praise him. He knows whether or not we love him (he knows everything about us), but he needs us to show it, too. He needs us to show him that we love him. You show God you love him by doing everything he advises you to do, like Jesus did during his time on Earth.
It’s the little things that make a love great, not the grand gestures (though they have their place), the little things, especially and foremost spending quiet time together enjoying each other’s company. You don’t even have to say anything when you’re with God, just let his love wash over you and yours over him. That’s praise and the highest form of worship. It’s what Jesus was talking about when he said God was looking for people to worship him in Spirit and in Truth: for people to love God for no other reason than that they love him. Not out of obligation or a sense of duty, but as a state of being, like being in love.
To love God is to praise him; to praise God is to love him. The two are the same.
Praise without love is an empty thing.
Give God and God only all your love and you’ll get back so much in return, it will bowl you over like a tidal wave. That’s why the Commandment is to love God with everything you’ve got, because God wants to return your investment in him with exponentially compounding interest; for every penny’s worth of love you invest in God, he’ll give you a dollar’s worth, or ten dollars’ worth, or a million dollars’ worth. Who knows where he’ll stop? Look at Abraham and Noah and Moses and David. Look at Jesus. Look at Paul. Look at all these spiritual brothers of ours and see how their love investment in God was returned a million-fold or billion-fold or more. God wants to do that for all of us, if we would just let him, if we would just love him the way he’s enabled us to love him.
There’s no limit to how much we can love God. We put that limit on ourselves; God doesn’t.
To love God is to praise him; to praise him is to love him.
May you love God – may you praise him – with everything you’ve got.
A BORN-AGAIN BELIEVER 