Believers captivated by the devil

(new article tomorrow)

I was talking to a friend from church about how some true Believers, while certainly not satanically possessed, are satanically oppressed. She said, “I wonder what that entails exactly.”

Paul writes to Timothy in II Timothy 2:26, “And that they may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil, who are taken captive by him at his will.”

“A snare is a trap used to hold somebody so they can’t get away; it doesn’t kill you, it just holds you,” explains Richard Jordan in a Bible study, confirming that a Believer today can be “demon or devil-influenced, and even demon or devil-captured.”

“There’s the old joke from years ago about the two raccoons who got caught in a trap; it snapped and clenched their rights paws. They realized that if they were still in their predicament come morning when the trapper arrived, they’d be dead meat.

“The female raccoon says, ‘Well, the only option we have is just to gnaw our leg off and live with three legs and not be killed.’ The male raccoon agrees, ‘Okay, I can see that.’

“So, she gnawed her leg off and went on about her business and came back a half-hour later to find the male still in the trap.

“She says, ‘Well, I thought we agreed we’d gnaw our leg off and be free?!’ He answered, ‘Well, I’ve gnawed three of them off and I’m still in the trap!’

*****

“Satan can’t kill you as a Believer, but he sure can snare you. He can cause you to be entrapped by error. Notice he takes you captive by ‘his will.’ Satan has a will for Believers.

“His opposing will for the Body of Christ is to neutralize you so you can’t effectively function as a member of the Body; you can’t function in the identity God’s given you. You get your mind off who you are in Christ, vacillate and move away.

“When Paul talks about ‘instructing those that oppose themselves,’ that’s the condition of a Believer under satanic influence. What does it mean when he says ‘oppose yourself’?

“It means you are one way—you’re a saint of the most high God—but you’re living another way as if you’re not. You live in opposition to who you really are. You’re saved but you’re living like you’re really lost. You’re living in the Spirit but walking in the flesh.”

*****

Satan is the great tempter and two times in Paul’s epistles he warns against falling for “enticing words.”

He writes in I Corinthians 2:4, “And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.”

In Colossians 2:4, he stresses, “And this I say, lest any man should beguile you with enticing words.”

“That idea of enticing words—it’s words that are really enticements, where you’re trying to entice somebody into doing something for some other reason than what the real issue is," explains Jordan.

“If you were in the commerce world, they’d call it ‘bait and switch.’ Entice them to come in and then switch them to the thing you really wanted all along to do with them.

*****

Paul writes in I Corinthians 1:17, “For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel: not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect.”

Jordan explains, “That ‘wisdom of words’; that’s talking about making your own way, giving your own explanation. It’s human viewpoint; man’s plan to do things. And what it does is make the gospel ‘of none effect.’ Galatians 6 is another explanation of that. When Paul talks about ‘fleshly wisdom,’ he’s talking about religious show.

“Galatians 6:12 says, ‘As many as desire to make a fair shew in the flesh, they constrain you to be circumcised; only lest they should suffer persecution for the cross of Christ.’

“They just really want to make a ‘fair show of your flesh.’ They got a system they’re promoting. And it gets to be this big fleshly operation. Paul talks about the Corinthians ‘being corrupted from the simplicity that’s in Christ.’

“He starts out II Corinthians 11 by saying, ‘For our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our conscience, that in simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom, but by the grace of God, we have had our conversation in the world, and more abundantly to you-ward.’

 “That word conversation--look at I Peter 3. Sometimes you hear that word conversation, and oftentimes it’s chaffed at because it’s an Old English word that has more meanings to it than what we generally talk about.

“We usually mean our speech. You know, sit around and have a conversation, discussing things with people. But a conversation is more than just a conversational chat; it’s an entering into an inner play.

“Your conversation is not simply something that you hear with your ear; it’s something you can see with the eye. It’s more than just words. It’s something literally that you can see in someone. It’s the way they converse with life; it’s the way they interplay with life. It has to do with who you are and the whole circuit; the whole of what your life is about.

*****

Paul writes in II Corinthians 4:1-2, “But have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God.’

“I’ve learned for years that the truth will commend itself to a man’s conscience that wants the truth, and when it doesn’t commend itself to someone, you know why it isn’t? Because what they’re looking for is something different."

*****

In his 2005 book, The Apostasy of the Christian Church, Bible scholar R. Dawson Barlow writes, “But just to make sure we are not deceived by the niceties of some people and human ‘sweetness,’ it is at this point we must be very clear about the nature of apostasy. Apostasy does not usually deny the existence of God. It does not behave itself unseemly and cry out that it hates God.

“In fact, apostates are pretty nice people whose life philosophy is to get along with everybody, offend no one and attempt to make the world a better place.

“Apostasy pursues to serve a ‘god of his/her own imagination’ and serve ‘he, she, or even it’ through a form of religion whose foundation of authority is the subjective feelings they have on a certain matter.

“It matters not what the revelation of God says; the final, ultimate authority is, ‘How I feel about any issue in my heart!’ It rejects the objective authority of the Word of God as the final court of appeal, and, in the process of this rejection, embraces the deceitful, subjective message of the human heart and misinterprets it as God’s authoritative message.

“The buzz word of this growing number of people is, ‘Well, you have to do whatever is right for you.’ The conclusion is that nothing is really right or wrong, but what is right and wrong for me! This is nothing but a denial of any absolute truths.”

*****

In Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck reasons, “It don’t make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person’s conscience ain’t got no sense, and just goes for him anyway.”

The conscience either “accuses or excuses,” and people who continuously violate their system of norms and standards learn to excuse sin. The thinking becomes, “Well, everybody else is doing it, so what difference does it make?”

Paul writes in Titus 1:15-16, “Unto the pure all things are pure: but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure; but even their mind and conscience is defiled.
[16] They profess that they know God; but in works they deny him, being abominable, and disobedient, and unto every good work reprobate.”

Southern California preacher John Verstegen explains, “Because individuals are unsaved and operate in the ‘vanity of their mind’ on the basis of false doctrine—the satanic doctrine of this world—what happens over time is they then change that system in their inner man and their conscience goes along with it.

“Sometimes you ask the question how a person could do such a heinous sin and so forth. It’s because, over time, they have been taught that those things are acceptable and they justify it. That’s what Paul says in Romans 2.

“Why would someone do such a thing as murder someone? Well, because they’ve been taught that in certain circumstances it’s okay to murder and that they’re doing it for their god who approves of that type of thing, etc. 

“So they adjust and change that system of norms and standards they were born with and replace it with a wrong system. Even though their conscience initially questioned, ‘Well, is this right?’ it’s now said to be defiled.

*****

Because a newly saved person’s conscience is said to be “weak,” needing to be fortified through a steady diet of biblical truth, as Paul tells us in I Corinthians 8, it can be in a mixed state of confusion.

“On the one hand, it’s recognizing, ‘Hey, this is right and that’s wrong,’ but like this guy (in I Corinthians 8), he still thinks an idol is something real,” explains Verstegen. “So because his conscience previously bore witness to that thing and sacrificed to idols, now that he’s a Believer—and has a little bit of sound doctrine in his inner man—his conscience is kind of thinking, ‘Wait a minute, I belong to Christ now so this idol is nothing.’

“Now, what’s interesting is that a weak conscience can become defiled again. It can go back to what it was before the guy got saved. That’s the real issue here."

*****

The other thing that is true for an errant Believer is that his conscience can become “seared with a hot iron,” as Paul writes in I Timothy 2:4.

Verstegen explains, “You ever burnt yourself? When you sear something it’s lost its sensitivity to pain because you’ve actually burned the nerve endings and that’s why you can’t feel it anymore. You actually fried it. It’s a conscience that has been so affected it doesn’t bear proper witness anymore because it’s totally lost its sensitivity to bear proper witness to what’s right and wrong.

“In the context in I Timothy, this actually is talking about a Believer; somebody who was in the truth but then departed from the faith and their conscience has become seared.”

*****

Paul reminds the Corinthians in I Corinthians 12:2, “Ye know that ye were Gentiles, carried away unto these dumb idols, even as ye were led.”

Jordan explains, “You know it’s very important that you understand that idolatry is more than just a man taking something and bowing down to it. There is a spirit in this world that leads men to worship idols. My friend, there is a satanic, demonic spirit that works in unsaved people and operates in them and it leads them around and it led these Corinthians to worship idols.

“Of that satanic spirit, Paul says in Ephesians 2:2, ‘Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.’

“That’s the prince of the invisible realm. It has to do with Satan and his combined host of subordinate demonic cohorts and their activities in the world. And you listen to me; the very creative genius of unsaved people is satanically inspired.

“People are led by this spirit and Satan’s object is to blind men’s minds to the truth and divert their worship from God Almighty unto himself and his cohorts. It’s religious kind of stuff a lot of times, but a lot of time its other stuff, too. It’s anything that diverts a man’s attention—his worship and his honor and what he concentrates on—away from Almighty God unto the god of this world.

“In the case of the Ephesians, they were religious. They went to church all the time and they prayed and they had a personal relationship with their god and they did all the rest.”

Satan's 'secret' enticements

The word “occult’” means something you can’t know unless you’re initiated. You know what Eve was invited to become a part of? The occult. A secret society of knowledge that you can’t get unless you’re an initiated person, explains Richard Jordan.

Most of this traffics in the religious, spiritual background and it’s hidden in their symbols and their allegories and their hidden meanings behind things. They come along and try to draw you in. They invite you to follow the secretness of it. All the cults are cults of secrecy. I don’t just mean nobody knows it; I’m talking about you have to be “ illuminated” to get in.

God already revealed His will; God already gave Eve clear instructions about it. Satan says, “I know something He doesn’t want you to know,” and you know what that does? It entices you.

*****

In the quote Satan gives to Eve, “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil,” there are 46 words and the word “eyes” represents the 33^rd word in the quote.

He’s saying, “God’s got a secret knowledge out here, Eve, and He’s not telling you about it, but if you’re one of the initiated you’ll know it.” Thirty-three in the Bible is a number associated with illumination, knowing things.

Have you ever read in the occult, or heard in religion about “the third eye”? You have two eyes and then they say you have a third eye. You ever seen people go around with a little red dot on top of their forehead; a little jewel up there? In some religions that’s called “the third eye” and it’s an eye of perception that you get in the middle of your forehead.

This is the ability to see into something and have knowledge that you couldn’t have any other way. It’s secret knowledge that you can only have IF you are in the initiated. Where you got to go to get that?

 Satan’s offering Eve the initiation: “I know something God doesn’t want you to know, and that you can’t know unless you become one with me. You know this and you’ll really know what’s going on.”

*****

Ultimately, when the Antichrist is manifested and the system that brings him to the fore and puts him into power is manifested, it’s that mystery.

There is a secret purpose, this idea of secret wisdom, understanding and the GAIN that you can get if you get it that’s associated with Satan all the way through the Bible. It’s associated with his LIE program.

What do you say about a lie? It can be 98% truth but it’s the 2% that isn’t that kills you. You see, it’s hidden among . . . the “tares are hidden with the wheat” kind of thing and the lie program is all this good, good, good, but there’s that secret thing in it.

Isaiah 33 is a passage dealing prophetically with the nation Israel in the last days. Isaiah 33: 6 is a verse of scripture I used to keep posted on my wall. It says, [6] And wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of thy times, and strength of salvation: the fear of the LORD is his treasure.

Eve didn’t have the basic knowledge even straight in her thinking, so that when Satan came along and offered her this secret knowledge, she couldn’t say, “NO, I know what the truth is!” She’s over here dreaming up stuff, leaving stuff out, adding stuff.

Where did she ever get that, “I can’t touch it”? She just thought, “Well, if I can’t eat it, it must mean I can’t touch it either.” She made that up in her imagination. She didn’t have the knowledge. That’s where stability is, in knowing.

*****

God, talking to Moses in Deuteronomy 29:29, says, “The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.”

Notice, everything you need to know to do everything God has for them to do, He revealed to them. If there’s something they don’t know . . . wasn’t that what Eve was told? “There’s something you don’t know, Eve, that God knows, and if you knew it, you wouldn’t let him get away with this.” And then her imagination starts going.

Moses says to Israel, “If there’s a secret that God hasn’t told you, that’s His business; you don’t have to worry about it. You just worry about what he told you. Don’t worry about the secret stuff; worry about what He revealed to you, because what He revealed to you is what He wants you to know.”

You understand God knows things you don’t know? If God took everything He knows and put it into your little noodle, your brain would be on the wall.

*****

People say science has advanced us so far. So how come you can read about an evolutionist 700 years before the time of Christ?

In a passage directed at the unbeliever, Jeremiah 2:27 says, “Saying to a stock, Thou art my father; and to a stone, Thou hast brought me forth: for they have turned their back unto me, and not their face: but in the time of their trouble they will say, Arise, and save us.”

Here are people who think their father is a piece of nature that the earth produced; they think they evolved out of plant life and stone life.

You see, evolution is really a religion that is an ancient religion trying to tell you that where you came from is nature and not God, and they’ve worked themselves into this religious frenzy of attributing their source and origin to nature.

So evolution in our day is simply the application of “science falsely so-called” to the philosophy of pagans that Jeremiah warned Israel about and has existed since Genesis 11.

The saying, “There’s nothing really new under the sun,” is really a truth and if you ever talked to someone who is an evolutionist, or someone who says science disproves the Bible, you’re dealing with those people back there.

You’re dealing exactly with what they dealt with. It’s a spiritual problem, and I look at the world around us and I say, “Look at the mess we’re in!” and when you see it, you say, “Where did it come from?” And folks, that’s where it comes from. It comes from a spiritual issue.

*****

Psalm 2 says, '[1] Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?
[2] The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying,
[3] Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.'

There’s a conspiracy, there’s a force in the world, a secret, behind-the-scenes spiritual movement that’s against the God of the Bible, against the Lord Jesus Christ, against the Word of God, against the Holy Spirit and against you.

Its purpose is to destroy your life, your family, this church, WHATEVER that stands for what God’s doing. And they take counsel together. And there’s an evil, wicked force out there doing it.

*****

There’s a conspiracy for wickedness and it has a name. As Revelation 17:5 says, 5] And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.

Revelation 17 says, [1] And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters:
[2] With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. [3] So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.

Notice she’s been around for a long time. She’s destroyed many kingdoms in the earth. She goes all the way back to Genesis 11, so this is not a new character in the earth.

She’s in the wilderness and that’s where you’re going to find this woman. She’s going to be obsessed with pulling people in with drunkenness and fornication. That’s not a physical wine; that’s getting them intoxicated with a spiritual enticement that produces a spiritual adultery.

She’s out there in the wilderness; to find her you’ve got to go way far away from the springs of living water. You have to go way far away, be alone, with no bread. That’s what happens in the wilderness. You see, she’s going to be every place that Book isn’t.

*****

You go find a church today where that Book isn’t preached and taught, and especially taught rightly divided, you’re going to find her. And when you get where you learn how to spot her, it’s going to scare you to death to see her everywhere you go. But knowledge of what’s going on allows you to have wisdom about how to handle it.

By the way, if you look at Verse 6, it says, “And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration.”

You know how they martyred the saints in the Book of the Revelation? Go to chapter 6 and you see they were “beheaded under that fifth seal.”

You watch in our day bloodthirsty people out beheading. Where does the wickedness that would cause you to take children and teach them to cut people’s heads off? They are “without natural affection,” where you cut children in two and teach children to cut other people’s heads off.

Listen, there is a genetically designed implanted understanding in every person that it’s wrong to kill. God put it there. Romans 2 tells you that. Every culture knows that.

But there’s a spirit of evil and wickedness. By the way, that crowd over there in the Middle East that calls themselves Isis, did you know that’s the name of an Egyptian fertility goddess who was married to Osiris, the Sun God, and she was the Moon God. Her symbol was a crescent moon.

Art's inner beauty

(new article this evening)

What most people don’t know about me is that I was influenced from a young age by the artistic skills of my mother, a multi-faceted artist who obtained a degree in fine arts in the '50s from the University of Akron.

While she never pursued a career in art, instead marrying my dad a year after graduation and then immediately starting a family with him, her works of art, from big oil portraits to water-colors and wood carvings and even a cement-sculpted rhinoceros that sits on my bookshelf today, could be found all around the house.

*****

A key thing I was taught by a favorite art history teacher at Ohio State (where I earned a minor in art history along with a double-degree in journalism and political science in 1987) is that inner beauty is what’s really behind true creativity and it only exists when the artist feels real love for people and the God-created things of the earth—love that develops in the person sensitivity, consideration, patience, the ability to notice and watch details of life that escape others, etc.

An artist can exhibit perfect technique as a painter, musician, singer, poet, writer, etc., but without this inner beauty their talent has considerably less significance, even as much as it might obtain “success.”

The pay off in developing inner beauty is a highly coveted simplicity and abandonment of resistance and fear and the desire to impress others and have their approval.

*****

While others go for colors, design, structure, etc., my thing has always been for inspirational people. My long-loved framed work is a print from the Detroit Institute of Arts of an 1887 Vincent van Gogh “Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat,” in which he gives an intense, sad, anxious-looking stare.

I guess for sentimental reasons, I always list Irving Stone’s translation of van Gogh’s private letters to his brother, Theo, as my favorite non-Bible related book.

This paperback of mine from the ’70s, which I first read in my mid-20s after just moving to Chicago and finding myself incredibly lonely, is so worn out from use, the pages are loose and the cover hangs on only by triple scotch tape along the spine.

In one passage--and it’s one I just flipped to and give no particular emphasis to--Vincent writes: 

“What shall we say as to the fact that there are times when one feels there is certain fatality that makes the good turn out wrong, and the bad turn out well?

“I think one may consider such thoughts as partly a consequence of overwrought nerves, and if one has them, one must not think it one’s duty to believe that things are really as gloomy as one supposes; if one did so, it would make one mad.

“On the contrary, it is better to strengthen one’s physique, and afterwards to set to work like a man, and consider that melancholy as a fatal thing. One must always continue to use these two means. In the long run one will then feel one’s energy increasing and will bear up against troubles.

“Mysteries remain, sorrow or melancholy remain, but that everlasting negative is balanced by the positive work which is thus after all achieved. If life were as simple and things as little complicated as Goody Goody’s story, or the hackneyed sermon of the average clergyman, it would not be so very difficult to make one’s way. But it’s not so, and things are infinitely more complicated, and right and wrong do not stand separately, any more than black and white do in nature.”

*****

One of my favorite photography works of art is a black-and-white portrait of my great aunt Audrey Stone (my grandmother’s sister on my mom’s side) when she was 90 years old and sitting in her rocking chair on the front porch of the Kanawha River cottage house she shared with her sister, Nel, in the small West Virginia mountain town of Sutton, pop. 1,100.

Audrey, a long-time beauty salon owner in Philadelphia who was married to a prominent doctor, was a voluminous poet in her retirement years and her work was frequently published in the local paper, The Braxton Democrat-Central. (The other thing to note about her, I think, is she was a good Christian woman who didn't smoke or drink, etc., and suffered from depression and once had a full-blown nervous breakdown in her 30s where she threw an antique, very expensive Cello out the second-floor window of her Philadelphia brownstone, shattering it in pieces.)

Accompanying this particular photo from 1991--in which Audrey’s wearing a summery polka-dot skirt and a wide white French beret with a star pin anchoring it to her thick and wavy Irish-Scottish white hair--is her poem “The Vagabond Lover,” said to be dedicated “in memory of P.M., a war veteran of Dublin, Ireland.”

The love poem reads, in part, “When my street is draped in snow, I know where to go to find the lover, The Vagabond Lover, a man of the road. A man of the highway life. Old Rocky Bywatt, just a man of the road.

“He will keep you warm come a blizzard or storm. He will kiss away the tears and smooch away the years—that’s the lover, the man of the highway.

“You can love all your doctors, merchants or chiefs, but I will take the man of the road. His words might be compared to the prettiest bird. His voice echoes sweetest sounds ever heard. His kisses divine were sweeter than wine. His warm, soft and tender smile would thaw the frost of age and add new extinguishable fuel to a cold woman’s heart . . . ”

*****

As a writer, I always find it heartening the tremendous emphasis God, a writer Himself, places on the craft of writing and getting His message out in written form.

One of my favorite Bible verses, in fact, is John 21:25: “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.”

A great old hymn I’m often reminded of, entitled The Love of God, and written by Frederick Lehman, starts out, “The love of God is greater far than tongue or pen can ever tell.”

The last of its three verses goes, “Could we with ink the ocean fill, And were the skies of parchment made, Were ev-’ry stalk on earth a quill, And ev-’ry man a scribe by trade; To write the love of God above Would drain the ocean dry; Nor could the scroll contain the whole, Tho’ stretched from sky to sky.”

When you truly internalize the fact God is the author of the Bible, and intended for every single word to be just what it is and where it is, it’s unfathomable to think He would be behind a bunch of varying versions of His Book that have differing words, contexts and meanings. I mean, can you see William Strunk or E.B. White being that way with their Elements of Style?!

*****

A book I came to appreciate after hearing my preacher, Richard Jordan, once refer to it as one of “the great books written outside of the Bible,”

is Alexander Hyslop’s 1858 classic The Two Babylons. It is truly unreal how jam-packed it is with amazing facts, revelations, insights, analogies, etc., regarding history’s pagan-satanic underpinnings and origins from Nimrod on. It’s such a complex read I feel I will never complete its 323 pages!

Here’s just a taste of Hyslop’s extraordinary ability evident from his first introductory paragraphs:

“There is this great difference between the works of men and the works of God, that the same minute and searching investigation, which displays the defects and imperfections of the one, brings out also the beauty of the others.

“If the most finely polished needle on which the art of man has been expended be subjected to a microscope, many inequalities, much roughness and clumsiness, will be seen.

“But if the microscope be brought to bear on the flowers of the field, no such result appears. Instead of their beauty diminishing, new beauties and still more delicate, that have escaped the naked eye, are forthwith discovered; beauties that make us appreciate, in a way which otherwise we could have had little conception of, the full force of the Lord’s saying, ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these.’

“The same law appears also in comparing the Word of God and the most finished productions of men. There are spots and blemishes in the most admired productions of human genius. But the more the Scriptures are searched, the more minutely they are studied, the more their perfection appears; new beauties are brought into light every day; and the discoveries of science, the researches of the learned, and the labours of infidels, all alike to conspire to illustrate the wonderful harmony of all the parts, and the Divine beauty that clothes the whole.”

America's most dangerous battle? Religion

“Saved or lost, religion is the most dangerous battle you’ll ever face. This is where the real big game is. People like to argue about politics and all the rest of the stuff, but this is the BIG stuff,” says Richard Jordan.

“You can worry about the politics and what they’re doing in Washington and the economy and all these other things, but the real battle today in the Dispensation of Grace is in the area of spiritual issues. 

“Religion is simply a way for man to put confidence in himself, in his own flesh.

“Paul says in Philippians 3 he counted his religious self-righteousness as dung. He’s saying, ‘I thoroughly understand what it is to have confidence in your flesh—I had religious flesh.’ And he said, ‘What I found is it’s worthless!’

*****

“Notice Paul calls Satan ‘the god of this world.’ He didn’t say the king of the world, the political leader of the world, the economic force of the world.

“Satan has a religion and he seeks to propagate it. And the great battle today is not fighting the social battles and the cultural wars; it’s fighting the religious front. Until you understand that, you’re not going to be in the real battle.

“I’m not saying the other battles aren’t important; I’m saying the real battle, when you want to get down to what the core source of the real issues are, it’s the issue about a person’s relationship with his Creator or lack thereof. Religion is designed to substitute confidence in your flesh for trust in Christ.

“When Paul says ‘have no confidence in the flesh,’ your flesh is a way the Bible, especially with the Apostle Paul, describes you, yourself and your self-life independent of God.

“Romans 7:18 says, ‘For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing.’

“Our resources are not God’s resources; our identity is not the identity and purpose He gives us. Paul’s talking about trusting and valuing and treasuring who he is in himself and his ability to perform; he’s talking about pride and self-satisfaction in yourself. 

“Proverbs says, ‘Every man does that which is right in his own eyes.’ Can you relate to that? We do what WE think is right. It says, ‘There’s a way that seemeth right to a man; the end thereof is death.’

“Man says, ‘Makes no difference, I’m doin’ what’s right in my mind…’ and there’s a pride in that! There’s a self-satisfaction in that and that’s what religion is all about!

*****

“Paul says in Philippians 3:7, ‘But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ.’ All these things in verses 4-6 he says were valuable to him.

“Gain is the idea of wealth, treasure. Notice he says, ‘I wasted it and profited in the Jews’ religion above many mine equals in my own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of traditions of my fathers.’

“You see he profited? Paul’s saying, ‘Those things that brought profit to me in my thinking. Those things I treasured and adored and thought were the most wonderful, solid, enriching things in my life.’

“What were they? There are a number of things but they divide into two categories. He’s going to list some ethnic and racial things—some pride of race and pride of place kinds of things. And then he’s going to list some religious things. Distinctions. Some performance things.

*****

“Can I tell you those are the two things most people . . . those are the two things your flesh wants to glory in. It wants to glory in your race, which is another way of saying the place that you have, and then it wants to glory in religion—the performance; the achievements that it can make.

“And flesh has a tendency toward good and evil. By the way, with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, both were bad. Your flesh has a tendency toward the lascivious, the earthy; the lust and the pull to be run by the desires that drag you downward into the earth.

“But you also have a bent toward aestheticism, toward the human good; toward the ability to pride yourself and satisfy yourself in doing what’s right.

“It’s to do good and feel good about doing it. Your flesh is such a deceiver. ‘The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.’

"And the moment you think you’ve done something good, and the moment you sit in relaxation and your satisfaction about what you’ve performed, ‘Let him who thinketh he stand take heed lest he fall.’ ”

Inner man transformation

No one would ever accuse me of being any Type A personality and yet I managed to somehow make my No. 2 dream in life--live in Manhattan--come true. Of course, my No. 1 dream was to get married.

I just woke up from falling asleep, something I'm doing more and more of these days. My desire is to stay the "night person" I've been for many years, but my body is saying no lately.

Suddenly my insomnia, a long-time chronic issue dating back to my 40s, is not such a big thing and, I can't believe I'm saying this, I miss it in some respects! At least I could stay up when I wanted. Having said that, I will have to wait until tomorrow now to post my new article.

*****

Preachers will tell you that if you want to know the will of God in your life, you must carefully scrutinize your circumstances and listen for Him to interpret the events and give you directives through an “inner spiritual voice.”

“If circumstances were the means of divine revelation, then what is the Bible? Chopped liver?!” reasons Richard Jordan. You say, ‘Well, the Bible’s the primary means, but . . .’ No, it’s the only means! Because anything God is communicating and revealing to you outside of the Bible is extra-biblical.”

“The mechanics of the way the Spirit of God operates today is something you can put bullet points by it’s so clearly delineated in Scripture. Plain and simple, the Spirit of God works through the Word. Paul says, ‘The words that I speak unto you they are spirit and they are life.’

“When we communicate and we’re talking, speaking to one another is a spiritual medium; it’s a communication of spiritual truth through a spiritual medium. Paul says in I Corinthians 2:9, ‘But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.’

“In other words, left to yourself you’re never going to find out the things God has prepared for you. But God revealed them to you. It’s revealed truth. You’re not left in the dark. He revealed them to you through His Spirit. How did the Spirit of God reveal these things? Through His Word!”

*****

“I got a real wicked email from a person this past week, and they just went on and on and on, calling me all kinds of terrible invectives, telling me what kind of a heretic I am because I tell people (on our TV program) that the Spirit of God speaks through His Word, and that He DOES NOT speak outside of His Word; He’s NOT communicating to any of us through circumstances, inner impressions, events, physical things, etc.

“Oh, this man was just as mad as could be at me about this. He said, ‘You’re limiting God! God speaks into your heart and He doesn’t just speak with the cold letter of His Word; He talks to you and He leads you.’

“I simply wrote back, ‘This just isn’t how God says He communicates, and every contact you have with Jesus Christ outside of the Word of God is on an inner subjective level inside of you, so how do you know that communication—that feeling, that impression, that thought, that word—you get in your spirit is from the God of the Bible and not from the devil?’

“ ‘Well, I just feel’. . .  Listen, every Mormon who ever lived, the way he got converted was he got the ‘burning in the bosom’ and he feels that way. Every Muslim you know, they went and got the feeling.

“I had plenty of  feelings about God talking to me before I ever got saved. Religion does that. That’s what it’s based on! Religion is designed to satisfy the lusts of your flesh and your flesh lusts for feeling.

*****

“So how do you know that the contact you have is the God who created all things and not some evil spirit? Well, you need some objective standard outside of your own intuition to know that.

“That’s why Paul writes, ‘Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.’ (I Cor. 2:13)

“Where do you find the words that the Holy Ghost teaches? That’s what the Book is! ‘Holy men of old spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.’ ‘All scripture is given by inspiration of God.’ ‘The Holy Ghost spake by the mouth of David.’ ‘The Holy Ghost spoke by the mouth of Isaiah.’ The Bible’s full of that!

“So when the Holy Spirit wants to speak, He speaks through words and those words are recorded on the pages of God’s Word. I Corinthians 2:10 says, ‘But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.’

“He did it in the Book, in His words. When it says ‘for the Spirit searcheth the deep things,’ God the Holy Spirt knows the mind of the Godhead. Verse 11 says, ‘For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.’

“That’s a verse you don’t want to read over too quickly. ‘What man knoweth the things of a man.’ You have a spirit that gives you a capacity to know things beyond simply the physical world around you. You have a spirit of man within you. I’ve got the spirit of man within me.

“And when I speak words, those words come out of my mouth. They tell you what’s inside of me in my spirit. Those words are a spiritual medium of communication that go into your ear and are translated . . . somewhere in the mystery of your makeup it’s translated into words that your spirit hears. And words—the communication we engage in—is really a spiritual thing.

*****

“The reason you and I can talk is we have the spirit of a human, the spirit of man. Your dog has a spirit and a soul, they’re just not human. They’re not able to communicate on the basis that we do.

“When we talk back and forth (as Believers), there’s a spiritual ministry going. Now, when what we’re speaking is the Word of God, there’s more than a spiritual medium being transpired than when we’re just communicating human viewpoint—

we’re really communicating the things of God!

“And as a teacher teaches, if you read verse 12: ‘Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God.’

“As the teaching ministry communicates godly edifying to you, there’s a spiritual ministry that’s developed inside of you, and literally you store up the capacity in your inner man and you’re built up. In Galatians 4:19, Paul talks about Christ being ‘formed in you.’ There’s a form of sound doctrine built up in your inner man.

“That’s what the ministry is designed to accomplish. Our purpose as the preachers is not simply to be here at the church and entertain you, or have a place where you can come and feel good about being there.

“Our purpose is to take some godly edification—some sound doctrine based on our identity as members of the Body of Christ in the dispensation of grace—and impart that information into your inner man so that it builds up that edifice of sound doctrine inside of you, and your frame of reference (your thinking, your conscience, your inner man, all of the processes that go on inside of you) is renewed. The shorthand terminology in Romans 12 is ‘the renewing of your mind’ that you might be ‘transformed by the spirit of God from glory to glory.’

“II Corinthians 3:18 says, ‘But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.’

“There’s this inner-man transformation and it’s the spirit. Paul’s not talking to you about getting saved, he’s talking about the edification process.”

*****

“Paul tells us in Galatians 3:5 that when he ‘ministereth to you the Spirit, and worketh miracles among you,’ it’s by the hearing of faith and not the works of the law.

“Now the reason Paul adds that about him working miracles is because, at the time in which the Book of Galatians was written, this was the first of Paul’s epistles, and miracles were in operation at the time to confirm the message that was being preached.

“In Acts 13 and 14, you’ll see that Paul did work miracles among them. What was the reason? Romans 15:18 tells you. He writes, ‘For I will not dare to speak of any of those things which Christ hath not wrought by me, to make the Gentiles obedient, by word and deed, Through mighty signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God; so that from Jerusalem, and round about unto Illyricum, I have fully preached the gospel of Christ.’

“That covers the territory the Galatians were in, and when he says there that he’s made the Gentiles obedient by word and deed through mighty signs, that’s what he’s talking about in Galatians 3.

“He’ asking, ‘When miracles are done in your midst, is it because of your performance or because of the activity of the Word of God?’ Now, that’s a real strong verse, by the way, for all the folks out there trying to do miracles today, because if you go to a miracle meeting today, what do they tell you? How do you get your miracle? Don’t they always tell you something to do? It’s, ‘Plant this seed faith. Give this offering.’

*****

“There’s that yo-yo down in Texas who gets up on the desk and talks so loud-- Robert Tilton. What a con artist. He had a thing a couple of years ago where he said, ‘God told me that for every $57 you send to my ministry, He’ll save one of your kinfolk. You want to get a relative saved, send us $57.’ It wasn’t long before he dropped it down to $37. You know, get them in on the wholesale plan.

“Well, that’s the idea of, ‘You perform and God will do; God will work a miracle if you do enough,’ but that isn’t how it happens. How’s it happen? The hearing of faith. You hear God’s Word, believe it, and the Word of God works. Now, the reason the miracles were being done (in the early part of Paul’s ministry) was to confirm the Word.”

Alone, learning 'He's all I really need'

We know of God’s omnipotence but what about His wisdom? The reason for the methodology of the revelation of the plan is because it’s all about His wisdom.

Paul writes in Ephesians 3: [7] Whereof I was made a minister, according to the gift of the grace of God given unto me by the effectual working of his power.
[8] Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ;
[9] And to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ:
[10] To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God,
[11] According to the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord:

We have the privilege in our lives, even in the smallest details and the quietest moments, to demonstrate the glory of God. God the Father is glorified when His Son is exalted; when you name Him Lord it’s to the glory of the Father, says Richard Jordan.

So to glorify God is to cherish His Son. It’s to say He’s more important, more valuable than anything going on in the details of my life right now—than any of the pressures of the moment, the heartaches of the moment.

Philippians 3:9: [9] And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith:
[10] That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death;

You see, that’s life without religion because that’s real life. That’s God’s eternal life. Sometimes when you teach grace to people, they have a tendency to say, “Well, you’re just saying God doesn’t care about how I live.” That’s not what grace says. Grace says, “This is real life. All that other stuff is an illusion! That other stuff isn’t real life; it’s really death in disguise.”

Religion is a performance-based program where you try to make spiritual progress in your life, or you try to get God’s blessings based on how you act; what you do. It’s all about you, about your behavior, about what you do and don’t do.

Grace, this thing that the wisdom of God devised, this plan, is a system of living based on what God has already done for us, in which God blesses us because of who we are in Christ. We’re complete in Him. We already have His life and we let that life be our life.

That’s what Paul’s saying when he says, “That I may be found in him, not having my own righteousness, but that which is through the faith of Christ.”

That’s me reaching out and taking by faith that identity God gives me in His Son. That’s what it means to “be found in Him.”

Have you ever heard the name John Gibson Paton? I love to read biographies; go find Paton’s.

He was a missionary in the New Hebrides, the islands just north of Australia. If you draw a line between Honolulu and Sydney it will go straight through the capital city of the New Hebrides.

They were discovered in the 1770s by explorer Captain James Cook. He actually gave them the name New Hebrides because they looked like the New Hebrides coastline off of Scotland. In the 1980s they gained their independence from Britain and now it’s called Vanuatu.

In the 1830s, a group of people went there for the first time to take the gospel and then in the 1850s Paton went there. He landed on the islands with his wife and then spent 40 years among the pagans there.

There was no Christianity there at all and he went in among cannibals, people who had already murdered . . . The first contact any missionaries had with the New Hebrides, two guys went in there and the day they landed the natives killed them and ate them.

About four months later another group of missionaries came and they lasted two months before they were driven off the island.

Paton eventually had tremendous success. When he was 90-some years old and leaving to go to Australia to die, he wrote a report in his autobiography and said, “The whole of the island has come to Christ. The chiefs that were cannibals and savages have now come to Christ.”

One chief came to see Paton before he left and said, “I came to tell you goodbye. I’ll no longer see you now, but I’ll see you with Jesus in heaven in the by and by.”

Paton had taken their language and written it down; it was never done before. He translated the Bible into their language and started orphanages in a culture that was filled with infanticide, in which if you were a wife and your husband died, they killed you too so you could be there to serve him in the afterlife. It was a rather interesting concept.

He reformed those issues and trained teachers in the orphanages to raise the young children in Christ. Before he died, they had trained teachers and sent out 130 preachers, trained to carry the gospel not just there but to all of the islands of the New Hebrides.

Because of his ministry there, his story went all across the Christian world and people were challenged because of his story.

Paton had given up a ministry in Glasgow; for 10 years he had a very successful and fruitful ministry there before he went to the mission field and that’s part of the story because when you hear about Paton and all the glory he had accomplished, the wonder of it, you have to remember something.

When he first got there he didn’t go to the island where he had all the success. He landed on another island with his wife, Mary, who was pregnant with their first child. The got there in November and his wife died of a fever in February. Twenty days later his baby, Peter Robert, died, leaving Paton alone with all these savages who were constantly attacking him.

He said in his autobiography that for those first four years he was on that island he didn’t have one day where someone didn’t come and threaten him. Many days a chief would come and bring hostile crowds of warriors with him and surround the home he’d built with Mary.

He spent four years by himself in an environment that was far more hostile than anything I could describe to you in a few minutes. The sickness, the constant threats on his life. He didn’t have a lot of this “kickback time” that preachers like to talk about.

Every day was a day of life-threatening stress. At the end of four years, he was finally physically run off of the island into the ocean. It just happened, by the grace of God, that a ship came by at the same time and picked him up. Otherwise, he would have died at sea.

Four years of loneliness, of loss, of no fruit—not one convert. You say, “What would have made him keep going?” When he left Glasgow for the New Hebrides, one of the deacons in the church said, “Son, you can’t go there. You’ll be eaten by the cannibals.”

Paton had been invited to go back to Scotland to a life of ease and a popular ministry, but he didn’t go back. He went on to have one of the most stellar, exciting stories of triumph in mission history. But it began with those four years of toil, loneliness, loss, deprivation, fear. Four years of the courage of faith.

When you read his autobiography, you can’t help but ask, “John, what was it that kept you going?” The first line he wrote was, “What I tell you here is for the glory of God.”

I think, “Yeah, that’s right, and God gets glory when His Son is exalted, and His Son is exalted when we cherish Him above everything else and that’s the heart of John Paton’s story.”

I want to read you a couple of paragraphs from the autobiography, taken from when he was at the mercy of one of the savage chiefs and hundreds of angry natives hunting him to kill him.

He had a friend who suggested he should hide in the trees, so he recalled, “I climbed into the tree and was left there alone in the bush. The hours spent there live all before me as if it were but of yesterday.”

He wrote this when he was 91 years old; this event took place when he was 35. He wrote, “I heard the frequent discharges of muskets and the yells of savages as I set there among the branches as safe as in the arms of Jesus. Never in all my sorrows did my Lord draw nearer to me and speak more soothing to my soul then when the moonlight flickered among the chestnut leaves and the night air played on my throbbing brow as I told all my heart to Jesus.

“Alone, yet not alone. If it be to glorify my God, I’ll not begrudge to spend many nights alone in such a tree to feel again my Savior’s spiritual presence and to enjoy His consoling fellowship. My friend, if thus thrown back upon your own soul, all alone in the midnight, in the bush, in the very embrace of death itself, have you a Friend that will never fail you? In Christ you do.”

I don’t know where you are today. Maybe you’re in a tree, but you’re not alone. You have Him. You never know that He’s all you really need until He’s all that you really have. When you come in life to find that He’s all you really have, you’ll discover with great joy the fact that He is really all you need.

In the midst of the clutter, busyness, God help you and me to make that realization true and be found in Him alone. That’s real life; that’s life in Christ.