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THE PARABLE
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, August 9, 2025 – There were two prototype churches during Jesus’ ministry – the inner circle made up of Jesus and his close followers, and the outer circle made up of casual followers who came and went. After Pentecost, these prototypes became, respectively, the Kingdom Church, peopled by Holy Spirit-filled born-again believers, and the worldly church, peopled by everyone else who calls him- or herself a Christian. The two churches remain to this day.
As a born-again believer who came to faith instantaneously and miraculously, I am mystified by people who choose to remain in the worldly church (because it is a choice to remain there, a personal choice). I can’t fathom the mindset where someone would say “I’ll commit this much of myself to God, but no more”. I can only assume the lack of commitment comes from not knowing the first Commandment or, knowing it, choosing not to follow it.
Before I was a believer, I knew many people in the worldly church. There wasn’t much to distinguish them from me, other than that some of them attended a church service on occasion or wore a cross under their shirt. They drank with me, cursed with me, did all manner of whatever with me, but then checked the “Catholic” or “Protestant” box on official forms. I even ridiculed their beliefs to their faces, and they just laughed. Their casual approach to God is one of the main reasons why I never at that time seriously considered looking to God for answers to my many problems, though even if I had considered looking to God, I wouldn’t gotten anywhere until he actually called me.
When God calls you, it’s a one-and-done deal. He doesn’t call you, is rejected by you, and then comes back later to try again. You get one shot. If you accept his call, he’ll test you to gauge your sincerity. If he finds you sincere, he’ll convert you and you’ll be born again, but the tests won’t stop there. They’ll keep on going until you draw your last earthly breath.
Most people in the worldly church have been called and are now being tested for their sincerity. They’re drawn to what God’s offering, but they’re also partly drawn to what Satan is offering. God is patient and so is giving them an allotted time to sort things out. During this time (the duration of which is known only to God), their commitment typically waxes and wanes, though as long as it remains above a certain measure, they’re still in the worldly church, which means there’s still hope for them. But, again, no-one knows the time God allots to each soul. When time’s up and that soul is still dithering, it’s lost forever. This spiritual fact should scare the you-know-what out of everyone in the worldly church.
I was born-again from atheism and so didn’t go through the worldly church phase. When God called me, I immediately threw my full lot in with him, holding nothing back. God knew this (knowing my heart) and so converted me (healed me) on the spot, giving me a portion of his Holy Spirit. The tests, though – the tests have been non-stop for me as a born-again believer, and I’ve struggled with many of them. The higher you climb the mountain, the more rugged the terrain and the tougher the conditions.
Jesus had to teach his casual followers in parables because they weren’t able to receive God’s Truth straight up. His close followers could receive it, but his casual followers needed it veiled. If any of you reading this are still in the worldly church, here’s a parable for you:
There once was a donkey. He was a nice enough donkey, as donkeys go. With few exceptions, he nearly always did what his master asked of him. And because the donkey was more obedient than stubborn, his master kept him and was kind to him and continued to feed and shelter him for many years.
But as time passed, the donkey grew less and less obedient and more and more stubborn. His master noticed this and tried to correct the donkey’s behavior. At first, he tried correcting him with a gentle hand, but the donkey ignored him. So then he tried correcting him with a heavier hand that slightly hurt the donkey (though just enough to get his attention and show him that his master meant business). Still, the donkey persisted in his bad behavior, growing more and more stubborn with each passing day.
The master was at a loss for what to do. He was fond of the donkey, but because of his stubbornness, the donkey was of no use to him. And so, one day, the master made the difficult decision to let the donkey go.
The man who came and took the donkey away didn’t care that he was stubborn.
He was a salami maker.
ON PRAYER PRIDE
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, August 7, 2025 – When I was an atheist, one of the things that bothered me the most about Christians was their insistence that they pray for me. They’d tell me that they wanted to pray for me, sometimes asking me if that was OK, but most of the time not. If they did ask, I would turn them down with a sneer. No means no, even when it comes to God’s blessings.
The pride that some Christians take in praying for others still bothers me as a born-again believer. Prayer is the most powerful force in the universe, and it should never be used lightly or against the wishes of the recipient. It should also never be done from a position of pride. Or better said, it can’t be done from a position of pride, any more than it can be done lightly or against people’s wishes. Christians may think they’re praying in these cases, but all they’re doing is the spiritual equivalent of spinning their wheels. They’re accomplishing nothing good and going nowhere.
After I was born-again, God let me in on a secret that he’d held from me for decades as an unbeliever. He revealed to me that my grandmother had secretly prayed for me all those years. She’d prayed for me without telling me (and yes, without asking me) because God had guided her to do so, and she prayed from a place of grandmotherly love, not from pride. She did it in secret, and she did it out of obedience to God.
When I was born-again, my grandmother was the first person I told, because in my mind she was the only person I knew who’d understand what had happened to me. What I didn’t know at the time was that God had me rush to tell her because the news of my conversion was part of his payment to her for her labors. She wasn’t just the only person I knew who’d understand what had happened to me, she was the one person who needed to hear it, and God made sure she did. Scripture says there’s more joy in Heaven over one sinner who repents, and that same joy is felt in genuine believers like my grandmother. We believers get paid first and foremost in joy, the kind that only comes from God through his Holy Spirit. Sure, we get other blessings, too (God is very generous to his children), but the main payment is joy.
We need to pray only for those God guides us to pray for, in obedience to him, not to “Christian prayer tradition”. Jesus wasn’t a fan of public prayer and used it only in rare cases where circumstances demanded it be used and where God guided him to use it. Otherwise, he followed his own advice of retreating to his prayer closet (or to anyplace private) and praying in secret for those God guided him to pray for. Jesus is our model for how to pray, not YouTube prophets or televangelists or street preachers. We’re to pray in secret and only with God’s go-ahead, and to pray from a place of love, not pride.
Prayer is the most powerful force in the universe; we need to respect it as such.
THE COST OF DISCIPLESHIP
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, August 2, 2025 – A love of the truth, the desire for truth, the need for truth – these all exist at a gut level in those who love God. Where there is no love for the truth, there can be no love for God. Without a love for the truth, there can be a seeming love for God, a casual affection for God, but no genuine love. Only those who have a love for the truth can genuinely love God.
There’s a reason why the first Commandment is to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. God made it the first Commandment, because if we love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, the other Commandments will be easy for us to keep. By “easy to keep”, I mean self-evident. It’s self-evident that if we love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, we’ll keep his Commandments. It would be self-contradictory for us not to keep them.
I’ve been talking about love for the truth in the past few articles because love for the truth is central to our reality as born-again believers, and I don’t think it gets enough press. Love, of course, gets lots of press, but love for the truth often gets pushed to the side, being the plain-speaking and so less desirable sister. We’re taught by the worldly church to love everyone without distinction, but rarely are we encouraged to speak God’s truth at all costs. This is a great failing on the part of the worldly church, not to emphasize the primacy of love for the truth.
God is Truth and the sole source of it, and so to have a love for the truth is to love God (even if you don’t believe he exists). When Jesus started his ministry, the first thing he did was to leave everything and everyone behind. And why did he do that? Because worldly values and love for the truth cannot peacefully co-exist. If you have a genuine love for the truth, you cannot compromise, and the world requires constant compromise.
Jesus’ first disciples likewise had to choose between the world and love for the truth. Thank God they chose truth! As soon as Jesus called them, they left everything and everyone behind, understanding that there could be no compromise in Kingdom work.
I am deeply saddened when I hear words like “diplomacy” and “tolerance” being used to describe Christians’ interactions with the world. These words have never been used to describe Jesus’ interactions and so should never be used to describe the interactions of those who claim to be Jesus’ followers. We cannot be diplomatic and tolerant and have a love for the truth at the same time. Diplomacy and tolerance are worldly values, not Kingdom values.
Like the early Church, we born-again believers can have a certain degree of community with each other, but only if it’s predicated on a love for the truth. I’ve made it my mission on this blog not to compromise, not to be diplomatic, and not to be tolerant of untruths, which has not made me many friends. But I’m not looking to make friends here, at least not at the cost of compromising my love for the truth. I have friends enough in the heavenly realm. It’s more important that I speak God’s truth, and God’s truth cannot be compromised to spare someone’s feelings.
Jesus never once minced his words, even if it meant he trampled on people’s sensibilities. In this, as in everything else, we’re to follow Jesus’ lead. I don’t mean we should be purposely cruel for the sake of cruelty. No. I mean that we should speak God’s truth uncompromisingly, as all God’s prophets have done throughout the ages, and that we should speak God’s truth regardless of the cost. It’s the high price of discipleship that lost Jesus most of his early followers and it’s still losing him followers today. Who wants to live poor, outcast, mocked, despised, and out of synch with the world?
I do, if that’s what it takes to stay loyal to God.
I’m happy for them to say at my passing: “I never liked her. I’m glad she’s gone”, if before their own passing they say: “She was right.”
ON PROVOCATIONS
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, July 30, 2025 – We’re not to respond to provocations like the world responds, we’re to respond like Jesus.
Again – we’re not to respond to provocations like the world responds, we’re to respond like Jesus.
Provocations are tests. When someone offends us, we’re being tested on our response. We shouldn’t respond with anger or with threats of retribution, because “vengeance is mine, saith the Lord; I will repay.” If we respond with anger or with threats of retribution, we’ll fail the test. If we fail the test, we’ll have to keep taking it until we get it right.
Our job is not to do God’s job. God has a job to do when people offend his children, and that job is vengeance, God-style. God is very good at his job (in fact, he’s perfect at it), so we don’t need to do his job for him. If we try to help, we’ll just get in the way and make things worse for ourselves.
Vengeance is not our job as children of God. What is our job is what Jesus taught us to do when people offend us – we’re to pray for them (as God gives us guidance) and bless them (as God gives us guidance). Nowhere does Jesus say that we’re to give an eye for an eye or sue the offenders in a court of law. That’s the world’s way, not our way.
How we respond to offences distinguishes us from the world. We can’t respond to offences like the world responds and then call ourselves followers of Jesus. If we respond to offences like the world responds, nothing distinguishes us from unbelievers, not in the spiritual realm, anyway, which is the only realm that matters. We can preach the Gospel until the cows come home, sing sweet sweet melodies to Jesus, and give everything we have to the poor, but if we respond to provocations like the world responds, we fail our test and drop in spiritual rank.
This is not what we want as followers of Jesus.
Provocations are not few and far between; they’re not once-in-a-lifetime or rare events: They’re daily occurrences, sometimes even hourly or minute by minute. At times, one provocation is barely finished before the next comes hard on its heels, giving you no time to regroup or catch your spiritual breath. The closer you grow to God—the closer you follow Jesus—the more and harder the tests, and the faster they come.
We will continue to be tested for the rest of our time here on Earth. We’re to respond to provocations like Jesus showed us, not like the world shows us. That means no lawsuits, no tit-for-tat, no bearing our grievance like a trophy, and no vows of revenge. Given that our every word, thought, and deed is being meticulously recorded in the spiritual realm, we must respond like Jesus responded, like he taught us to respond. For us, with our sights on Heaven, there can be no other way.
JUST A TOOL: ON AI, TRUTH, AND THE MARK
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, July 28, 2025 – I recently had the strange experience of being grilled by an older person about my Artificial Intelligence (AI) usage. Specifically, I wasn’t grilled on how I was using AI; I was blasted for not using it, for not wholeheartedly embracing the tool.
Because that’s what AI is essentially, just a tool. Just another tool. I don’t know if you’ve experienced it as well, but I’ve found that many people across the age spectrum are starting to view AI with near worship-like awe at its capabilities, even though it’s just a tool and can only ever be just a tool. And whether we choose to use that tool or not is still up to us. We still have free will. Most of us. For now, anyway.
There are some places where we use AI without knowing it. We don’t consciously summon it; it’s built into the feature we’re using, like online searches. But even there, when we use the AI tool inadvertently, we can see its limitations, we can see how the promptings are at best best-guesses and the search results leave out more than they include. We can see how the tool’s been digitally carved to deliver results that accord with a certain agenda, and that agenda is not godly. That agenda is skewed away from God.
Which leads me to the whole point of this article, which is that AI, being just a tool, has no love for the truth. Truth doesn’t guide its results in my online searches any more than truth guides its responses to people’s “chats” with the technology. Being just a tool, AI can’t discern between truth and lies because it doesn’t have that capability. It has a lot of capabilities, but not that key one, not the one that distinguishes us from it. Missing the key capability of being able to discern truth from lies renders AI able only ever to be just a tool. It can only ever be just a tool.
Even as a bio-neurological implant, AI is still just a tool, because when AI merges biologically with humans, it overrides their free will. By overriding people’s free will, AI replaces people’s ability to discern truth from lies. I say “replaces”, but what I really mean is “nullifies” – AI nullifies people’s innate God-given discernment so that, like AI, the humans become a preprogrammed tool with all the awe-inspiring capabilities of AI, but still just a tool.
In merging with humans biologically, AI doesn’t become human or even a human hybrid: AI doesn’t become sentient (it can never become sentient). Instead, the humans it merges with become AI hosts, fully controlled by the AI’s programming and no longer able to discern truth from lies, no longer having free will, no longer able to choose the truth solely because it is the truth and therefore desirable, regardless of the consequences of choosing the truth. The human-AI entity devolves to an “it”, to being just a tool.
And there’s the crux of the problem right there. The Bible talks about people who take the mark being permanently shut out of Heaven. People who’ve lost their free will have also lost their ability to discern truth from lies and therefore cannot have a love for the truth. Just as it’s impossible for AI, being without free will, to have a love for the truth, one day it will also likewise be impossible for AI-controlled humans to have a love for the truth. The Bible says that most humans will choose this state—will willingly take the mark—and that it will be their eternal damnation.
I can very well see the older person who grilled me about embracing AI taking the mark without thinking twice. I can also see the people who willingly took the injections and willingly wore the mask taking the mark without thinking twice. These are people who, though still having free will, display no love for God in their free-will choices, no love for the truth. They will willingly exchange their God-given free will for a SmartMind™, or better said hive mind, but we dare not. We dare never make that exchange, not for any promise of near godlike abilities if we do, nor for any threat of punishment if we don’t. We who are melded with God’s Holy Spirit dare never make that exchange.
I’m not against AI as a tool, but I am against AI as a replacement for free will. When the time comes, will you use your free will to choose Truth—to choose God—or become just another tool?
A LOVE FOR THE TRUTH
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, July 26, 2025 – I’ve been a born-again believer for over 26 years. During that time, I’ve met very few genuine believers and have witnessed no genuine conversions. What I have seen is a progressive falling away into progressiveness by unbelievers and also by people who say they’re believers, a falling away into embracing DEI without really understanding what DEI is.
It’s not a coincidence that DEI falls just short of spelling “DEVIL”. We know what is worshiped by those who embrace and promote DEI, and it ain’t God. It ain’t Jesus. In fact, even the mere mention of God and Jesus can throw DEI worshipers into a frenzy, as we’ve seen with the Sean Feucht “LET US WORSHIP” concert cancellations across Canada.
But I’m not here to trash DEI worshipers. They’re doing a good enough job of trashing themselves, so I just let them be and let God deal with them. They’re not my business. My business is helping born-again believers and people who love the truth.
You can tell when people have a love for the truth, even if they’re not believers. There’s something in the set of their words and how they hang back from following the crowd. As an atheist, I believed that truth existed; I just didn’t know where to look for it. I rejected relativism as being short-sighted and, well, relative. To me, DEI is nothing more than relativism repackaged as a social construct, which is why I reject it. In my opinion, relativism is a lie, and therefore so is DEI. Again, my opinion, but still, my opinion.
For those, like me, who love the truth, I say thank God for God! If you love the truth enough, you’ll eventually end up being a believer, because God is Truth and the only source of it. If you have a love for the truth, God draws you to him little by little, little by little, little by little, until—WHOMP!—like a magnet come full into range, you slam into God heart-first and cling to him for dear life, never wanting to let go.
That’s where I am now, clinging to God for dear life. I’ve been clinging for over 26 years. When Jesus said: “When the son of man returns, will he find faith on Earth?”, he meant that he didn’t expect to find many believers upon his return. He didn’t mean that he expected to find millions if not billions of believers ready and waiting to be raptured, as the televangelists and YouTube prophets would have you believe. No, Jesus meant that he expected to find only a few believers, and those few would be scattered to the four winds. This is my experience, as a born-again believer and therefore by definition as someone with a love for the truth – this is my experience, that we’re already few in number and scattered to the four winds, “one to a city, and two to a family”.
As disheartening as it is for me as a believer and as a Canadian to see how hated God and Jesus are now in Canada and how the infrastructure of the state has weaponized DEI to target Christians even in their places of worship, it’s not going to change my love for the truth. On the contrary, the state-sanctioned rejection of everything I hold dear just makes me cling to God all the tighter. I’m on enemy turf here, and the only thing that’s protecting me is the power of God’s Holy Spirit to keep the devils in line. They don’t dare touch me as long as I do God’s will. They don’t dare touch me, but it’s a war zone here. To see it as anything less is not to have a love for the truth.
SANCTUARY: PRELUDE
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, July 25, 2025 – I know that you come here and that you take great pains to hide that you come here. I know you’ve told no-one that you come here because there’s really no-one to tell, is there? Not in your world, where every deed is weighed and measured and every word examined for inklings of betrayal. That’s how starts, the betrayal – by inklings, by niggling doubts that everything might not be quite as rosy as you were assured it would be.
And that’s why you’re here. Your nigglings and inklings brought you here, and you’re right to be here. You’re right to have doubts. A sane mind reflexively responds to lies with doubt. Whatever they told you when you signed on all those years ago – whatever they told you about what happens afterwards – was a lie. You’re not exempt. The ‘chosen’ are not exempt. You can’t barter good deeds for the privileges you’re afforded. You can’t nullify the consequences of what they ordered you to do. When all is said and done, we’re all held to the same measure, which is the reason why I’m talking to you here today.
We’re all held to the same measure – no exemptions – and sooner or later that measure is taken. With you, it might be taken later, but it will be taken. That’s a guarantee. And everything you did, assured that you’d mitigated the consequences through the rituals and the offerings and the works of charity – everything you did will come crashing down on you like the proverbial cornerstone. You cannot escape consequences.
As you know only too well, they monitor everything, listening for a stray word here and there, for a sign that things might not be with you as they should. And if they find a sign, they’ll test your loyalty, adding burden to burden. Only your thoughts are safe from them. Only your thoughts remain your own, and your thoughts are the only place you can openly doubt them. God gave you this sanctuary of your thoughts so that you’d have somewhere to go to make sense of it all. He knew that they’d come for you all those years ago, and why they’d come, and what they’d offer, and he also knew why you’d agree to their terms, just as he knew that one day you’d start to have doubts about your agreement.
Imagine if you didn’t have the safe space of your thoughts! Imagine if you had no place to hear yourself think! But God loves you so much that he gave you this sanctuary, this place where you’re free to think whatever you want, where you’re free to be you. They cannot follow you into your sanctuary. They cannot hear your thoughts.
We can meet there, if you like, in your thoughts. When you mull over these words, that’s how we meet.
Your thoughts are safe with me.
THIS SIDE SODOM
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, July 24, 2025 – I could have told them, if they’d asked me.
I could have told them that Halifax is just this side of Sodom now, and that to host a Christian worship concert here, especially during “Pride Week”, would bring out the worst in the locals, and they did not disappoint.
You don’t have to wonder what it was like for the disciples who went out two by two, under Jesus’ instruction, to preach the Good News. You don’t have to wonder what it was like for them to enter a town that was so opposed to their message that it ran them out. You don’t have to wonder what it was like, because it happened only yesterday in Halifax. You can read about it here. The site location permit for the concert was revoked less than a day before the event was supposed to take place. And just like that, the concert permits in neighboring cities were also revoked, all for the same reason: “safety and security considerations” due to planned protests against the concert and its attendees.
Jesus directed his disciples not to argue with those who rejected the Good News and not to stay where the message wasn’t welcome. Instead, the disciples were instructed to respond to the rejection by shaking the dust of the place from the bottom of their feet and leaving more or less like Lot left Sodom – hastily, and with no plans to return.
Once a formerly Christian place has gone demonic, as Halifax has—as most places in Canada have—there’s no going back. It’s like a fallen angel or a born-again believer who loses grace. Time’s up for that place; there’ll be no more do-overs, no reclaiming what is irretrievably lost. It’s Satan’s turf now, and he won it fair and square. Paul explains that God permits these people to wallow in their sin, since sin is what they’ve chosen. He respects their free-will right to reject him and his Word, and as difficult as it can be for us at times, we must also respect their free-will right to reject God and Jesus, and let the sinners be.
I’m only here in this almost-God-forsaken place as long as God wants me here. Once he gives me the signal, I’m gone.
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
Here’s an amazing video, sent to me by a reader in Calgary, Alberta.
The video has a surprise ending, so watch to the end!
Enjoy!
ON SHARING AND FAIRING
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, July 21, 2025 – I’ve never been good at random sharing because I don’t always see sharing as being fair. What I have always been good at is “fairing”, which means giving others a fair deal that we’ve all agreed on. I believed in fairing even before I was a believer.
In scripture, a good example of fairing is the employer who hires people to labor in his fields, offering them all the same daily wage. They all agree to the wage, but when it comes time to pay the laborers, some of them become miffed because they’re getting the same daily wage as laborers who only worked a fraction of the time they did. The miffed workers believe that because they worked more hours and under worse conditions, they should be entitled to more pay, even though they agreed to their daily wage before they started working.
According to fairing, everyone who labored got a fair wage because it was precisely the wage they’d agreed upon. It wasn’t imposed on them; they agreed to it.
Another example of fairing is the parable of the ten virgins and their oil lamps. As scripture tells us, five of the virgins were wise and five were foolish. The wise had oil in their lamps and the foolish didn’t, so the foolish foolishly presumed that the wise should share their oil with them. But the wise virgins told the foolish ones that they wouldn’t share their oil (why should they, if it would be to their detriment?), so if the foolish virgins wanted oil, they should go buy it for themselves.
I love these parables because they fly in the face of “worldly wisdom”, which is that everyone is owed whatever they want just for existing, and that those who have more (the so-called privileged) must give to those who have less (the so-called underprivileged) for no other reason than those who have less have less. The idea underlying this perspective is that everyone (meaning the masses) should have more or less the same, regardless of ability, aptitude, effort, or need. To the world, the wise virgins not sharing their oil is an outrage that needs to be rectified, and by force, if necessary. Wage parity, undergirded by mass third-world migration and DEI, is the wise virgins being forced to share their oil at gunpoint.
As I said at the outset, I’m not good at sharing just for the sake of sharing, but I have nothing against sharing if it’s done fairly and wisely and according to God’s guidance. If I have two coats, and God indicates that I should give one of them to someone who has no coat, I share my coats, no questions asked. If I have an extra room in my house, and God indicates that I should offer that room to someone who has nowhere to live, then I offer that room to that person. I don’t run around looking for someone to give a coat to or offer a room to; I share with whomever God indicates I should share with. This is how we share fairly and wisely as followers of Jesus, not followers of the world.
The virgins were wise not only because they had oil in their lamps when they needed it, but because they chose not to share that oil when they were goaded and guilted into doing so. It’s not wise to give what God hasn’t guided you to give, or you’ll end up with less than what you need, which is not God’s intention for you. It’s not Christian to give what God hasn’t guided you to give, or you’ll do more harm than good, not only to the recipient, but to yourself.
Share, but share fairly and wisely, as God guides you.
A BORN-AGAIN BELIEVER 