Wolves in sheep’s clothing

A dear friend of mine mentioned something that is a good point. I do not believe Satan is omnipresent, while I know that Satan cannot be attacking everyone at the same time, he does have demons that can. Often I think that we separate demons from their master. Whether it is Satan directly attacking you or a demon attacking you they are ultimately after the same thing…drawing you away from God.

 

I think too often we don’t pay close enough attention to what we are taught or what we hear, especially if we have grown comfortable with the preacher, program, book, or whatever it may be. This is something I can definitely relate to and understand. The danger in this is that the path to hell is a gradual one. Often when we walk down a gradual road we don’t even notice that we have changed direction and headed in the opposite direction. I think the puritan era is a great example of this, while their original idea may have been to become a more “godly” group of people, they ultimately were slowly killing themselves through the legalism that was running rampant. Instead of turning and walking out a life of godliness or whatever you want to call it, they became white washed tombs. Now I realize that is general and I am not speaking about every single individual, but the majority of what you hear about Christianity in that era can be seen from the negative side (the white washed tombs.) Nathanael Hawthorne’s book “The Scarlet Letter” shows a glimpse of this.

 

The saying goes something like this, “If we don’t learn from our mistakes we will repeat them.” I think that is what is happening in Christianity today. When we become so focused on living a “godly” life we turn to the best way we know to steer in this direction, it may start out as something good but if we aren’t careful the road will lead to legalism. This is definitely not from God. Satan is alive and well, and working his way into the bride of Christ. One way we are seeing this is through teachings of distorted scripture. He is walking slowly pulling us gradual from the path and if we aren’t careful we will become lost. He is working his way through the congregation by teachings that start out with some biblical basis or grounding and slowly that is taken out.It is replaced with a false interpretation that is self-serving to certain men. If we are not careful we may one day find ourselves following the teachings of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

 

The other day I was reading a transcript of a sermon and was reminded how easily I can become blind. If you wish here is the link to the transcript http://www.sgmsurvivors.com/?p=1134. Years ago I would have sat through a message like this believing everything as a “gospel truth,” but sitting back and looking at it now, I am struck by the flawed thinking and logic behind the message. I found this quote most interesting, “God wants happy pastors.  That’s what He wants.  Wants happy pastors. Because unhappy pastors misrepresent Him.  Happy pastors accurately represent Him.  Unhappy pastors misrepresent God.  Misrepresent the gospel.  Misrepresent the Savior, misrepresent the gospel of grace.” (I took this quote from the second half of the message here is the link http://www.sgmsurvivors.com/?p=1149)

I am not sure where exactly in the Bible God tells us that what He really wants is happy pastors and without them His truth cannot be spread. The gospel message and the love of our Savior is misrepresented all the time. We are humans and not perfect, but the thing is we serve a perfect God. He uses our mistakes and can turn them into good and the most wonderful thing is that we don’t have to be perfect to share what God has done! No, He includes us anyway. The message we need to be concerned about and the life we need to be concerned about is our own and how we are living. Not whether we are living to please our pastors or being a joy to them, no that is ultimately self-serving (to pastors), and is putting them on a pedestal which they do not belong. This mentality causes fear of man and us to worship something else besides God. When we are focused on keeping a pastor “happy” we are forgetting who we are living for, we are here to live for Christ. It is not the pastor who can only accurately represent Christ, we have a job to do and that is share the love of Jesus! It is not only a pastor that represents God, we represent God because we are part of His family! It is not a pastor that only represents the gospel, our daily life represents the gospel! It is not only our pastor who can represent our Savior or the gospel of grace, we represent our Savior and the gospel of grace! The church is the body of Christ, the pastor is no more important the the church member who comes every Sunday. God doesn’t want us (each member of the body of Christ) to be passive, brown nosing, hoping we are making the pastor happy because he represents Christ. Not at all! God wants us to be active! He wants us to get our hands dirty. He wants us to go to the poor and help them, He wants us to walk along side the upcoming generation listening to their struggles and getting down and dirty pulling them up when they need. He wants us to be out there loving those who others don’t see as worthy. He wants us to be moving, living a life that is directed and solely focused on Him! Not on what the pastor feels or how happy the pastor is at that current moment.

 

This my friends [if I have any left ;)] is where our eyes are being misled. This is one of the ways the devil gets his fingers wrapped around our minds, slowly squeezing out what we know to be right replacing it with our desire of human approval. We are slowly being fed a twisted scripture and distorted scripture. We are losing our focus on God and what He has placed us (each individual) here on this earth for and replacing it with a man-centered focus.

 

Maybe you are tired of hearing this but we are in for a battle of our very life! There is a war waging all around us and we need to move and pick a side. A passive lifestyle is not a side to be on. If you could see death and could see it coming at you, wouldn’t you want to run? This battle that is going on, this spiritual warfare is worse than a mere simple death, it is a battle that determines our eternal resting place.

 

I may not have it all together, and goodness I may have flawed thinking in many areas, but that is where the Holy Spirit will be at work in me…but if I know one thing it is this, that at the end of my life (whether it be soon or years away) I don’t want to know that I sat by passively watching those around me. Not at all! I want to know that I fought long and hard, whether it be through prayer, action or both I don’t want to be at the end wishing I could have done more with my life. God is calling all of us to a mission. He has placed all of us here with a wonderful purpose that He has created us for! Let us not waste away sitting and listening to the eloquent words of fools, but instead listen to the words of our Father who is calling us to move, calling us to step out in faith, forsaking what need be to follow Him. Because in the end, it won’t matter what we lost here in this life, in the end it won’t matter whether we were thought of as mad or slanderous. What will matter is where we spend eternity and who we spend it with. The wolves (why does it have to be a wolf I do love them so :-P) are here, and they are bating us to come.

John 3:17

I was reminded today by a friend of a very simple yet profound truth. When I was growing up the popular verse was John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” This was the “hot” verse to know but often overlooked is the verse following it, “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

 

John 3:17 reminds me of what I escaped, a life that sought to drown me under condemnation of who I was before Christ. A life where the love of Christ was void and where I was directed to focus solely on my short comings and sin. A life where the cross didn’t mean redemption, but a reminder of how unworthy I am. That was what I escaped and what I am trying to come back from, a thinking that may have started from good roots, but somewhere along the line a disease infected it causing the fruit to become rotten.

 

Too many Christians are letting their mind stay at the cross. They are dwelling there considering it to be the most important spot. The cross is important without it our story would be different, but that should not be the main focal point of our walk. Christ’s resurrection is where we need to be looking. He has ascended and calls us to move forward. We are to be living in the joy of knowing our Lord is risen, we are to be living in the love He has shown and the fact that we are now in His family. Condemnation no longer has a hold on us, and by dwelling in the past at the cross we are not being served. We are letting the very enemy of our soul, Satan, draw us deeper into a ditch that may take years for some of us to come out of…now I will put a warning that you may not like what I am about to say so here is your chance to stop reading.

 

I honestly believe that in some instances this new Christianity that is emerging all around us is brainwashing many. Pretty strong words huh? Well heck yeah and here is why I am saying this. I believe God can bring about good in any situation, no matter how horrible it is. I believe God was working during World War II as the Germans were showing a side of evil that many could not imagine. I believe that God can work good through the current fall we are seeing in Christian churches. He is a mighty God and that is displayed through how He can make good come from evil. That being said, I believe that the bride of Christ has a disease that is rapidly spreading through her, and that she doesn’t even know that something is wrong. Maybe this disease started out as a good cell but somewhere along the lines mutated into something horrible like cancer. I have watched as a dear friend of mine has started changing and that has only been within the last year. Through writings it is evident of where the focus has turned. What could cause such a drastic difference in a year? Times are changing, the way Christianity is heading is changing, and it is not a good path. There are churches out there that I think are heading in a better direction, but does that mean we leave part of the bride of Christ behind? The story of the good shepherd was that he left the flock of 99 behind to find that one lost sheep. Why? Because God loves us so much that he cares about each individual person. He doesn’t want to leave one behind!

 

A revival is what he bride needs, but whether it will come slowly through one person at a time being called out by God to forsake what they currently know for something else or whether He comes and does a massive heart change is something we will have to wait and see. Until then the voice of the saints collectively praying is what this war is hinging on. May we never forget that at the root of Christianity is the focus of an unfathomable and boundless love. May our lives have a transformation like Jan Jovic (“When Heaven Weeps” by Ted Dekker.)

Fall

Fall is probably my favorite season. The leaves start to change, it gets colder, I go on a mini trip with my mother, and I don’t know why but for some reason I always feel inspired during this season. I wish I could say that was what I was feeling now.

 

The last couple of days I have been really restless and I am not sure why. I woke up the other morning and couldn’t take it anymore. I want to be able to wake up in the morning and know that I have a purpose that is greater than what I am currently doing. I am becoming tired of the monotony of each day which then turns into weeks and months. Before when I would be restless at least I felt/knew God was calling me somewhere, so I could handle it, because I knew things didn’t seem like they were in vain but now…

 

Where am I supposed to go now or how am I supposed to put this into something constructive? I would still love to do what I felt God calling me to years ago but at this point I don’t have enough faith that things will start picking up in that department again. I know that all you need is faith the size of a mustard seed but at this point I am not even sure I have that.

 

Though I will say on a brighter side I headed up to Mt. Zion today with my fam and heard a really good sermon on praying. It wasn’t like anything I am used to which I love! The pastor was talking about how even when we don’t know how to pray that the Spirit is praying for us.

 

So I guess we will see what happens…

“Love is marching to His heartbeat”

Ha, so as you probably guessed this is a quote from one of the new BarlowGirl songs. Ok, sorry to bombard you but as I sit and listen to this cd I am continually touched by the lyrics. This one particularly caught my attention. It is from the song Love is Marching.

 

The last year I spent getting to know the teen girls at the church I went to, was one of the best, not what I was currently experiencing. It was in that year that the burden God had given me for teens was increasing, and I was grateful for the opportunity to get to know these girls. I spent time praying for, hanging with, and just trying to listen to what was going on in their lives. I was paying attention to the teachings they were under and it was becoming obvious to me that something was missing. These girls were not being met where they were and most importantly they were not being encouraged. I spent time praying and setting up a couple meetings to talk to some of the leaders sharing what I saw. I carefully came up with examples to give in case I needed them. Unfortunately all of this was a major failure, nothing really came from my little voice because it was drowned out by an agenda.

 

It was blaringly obvious that we were missing something, the love of Christ. We were missing the very thing that has changed all our lives. I love this quote “Love is marching to His heartbeat.” How true this is!! We can stifle the teens and this next generation all we want, but in the end love is not marching to our agenda but to His heartbeat and His heartbeat is to shower this next generation with His deep love.

I often think of my girls, hoping that they are doing well. Like many of my leaders my time with them was short (try like one meeting) but I hope that they too will be able to find what I did at their age, a God who has big plans for them, a God who won’t give up on them and that they will be overwhelmed by His unconditional love.

 

“Love is marching to His heartbeat”

Love and War

Thursday I received the new BarlowGirl cd that I had preordered. All I can say is wow!!!! I absolutely love this group and the last few years they have truly be an encouragement as I have tried to walk through things. The title of their new cd is Love and War and is a challenge reminding us that we are facing a choice in this war going on.  I haven’t had a chance to listen to the whole cd yet but have already fallen in love with the song “Running out of time.” I have found the new theme song for this leg of my journey 🙂

Running out of time by BarlowGirl

We are not blind, we know the truth

Still we don’t stand, still we don’t choose

We’d rather stay so comfortable

Stuck in our worlds under control

We may not pull the trigger but we

Stand by and watch and pretend not to see

Silence is worse than evil done, what in the world have we become?

Chorus

This is war so pick your side

It’s time to move not time to hide

Don’t let lies make up your mind

Cause we’re running out of time

Verse 2

Tomorrow will come, and one day we’ll see

The choices we made, made history

Before it’s too late find where you stand

Let’s use our voice while we still can

Can’t you see that

Chorus

 

Satan

How often do you think of Satan? You may be considering this an odd question, but something to think about none the less. Before now I never really gave him much thought, I mean I knew about him but I was focused on other more pressing issues like my own sin. Now I do believe that working on sin areas is important but bear with me as I explain.

Growing up I never gave much thought to the fact that Satan doesn’t care about non-believers. If you sit down and think about it why would he? I mean they are already in the palm of his hands and making them fall into temptation isn’t anything that exciting. In the movies they make the nemesis think he/she is superior and they are always there to challenge the hero and make things difficult, I would imagine that Satan is looking for something more challenging than the throng of non-believers he has under his control. What would be the most challenging thing for him to do? Well possibly coming behind enemy lines and making them believe they are following the right path while he is leading them astray could be a viable option.

Ok, so that was just my personal opinion but if you think about it, something like that would make sense. We are his greatest enemies because we have chosen someone else to keep our attention, affection, and devotion. Getting a believer to fall away from God or misleading a believer would probably be the most rewarding thing for Satan because he has taken away something God values.

Growing up I was told that I was my own worst enemy. This was a mentality that was pretty much widely accepted and at the time it made sense, but there is a major flaw in this type of thinking. When we as Christians focus on the fact that we are the worst sinner it is causing us to be self-centered and self-absorbed. Like an idol being self-centered can either come from a sort of good thing like degrading ourselves by constantly saying how horrible we are our from a bad thing where we continue to puff up our ego. God saved us from His wrath and gave us eternal life, we are no longer a slave to sin. When we lived a life without God we were then our own enemy, continuing to dig deeper into a ditch but once we were saved that all changed. We are now living the life of the redeemed and we have a worse enemy now who is great and very deceptive, Satan. He prides himself in making us stumble and getting our eyes off our Savior and onto ourselves. The mentality that we are our own worst enemy is dead wrong and it is when we get this mindset we turn our back on the very enemy we need to be fighting above all else, Satan.

This is one of the ways Satan is spiritually attacking God’s church. The onslaught is being given under the guise as biblical and the eyes of God’s people are being led elsewhere. This is part of the fight we must be vigilant in guarding what we think and what we accept as biblical truths. Satan isn’t going to attack God’s people with something that sounds outlandish because we will be less likely to follow that if it is too far off base. Instead he will whisper sweet words into our ears that sound like it leads towards godliness and he will back it up with some biblical bases but gradually what we hear will start to go off course. Gradually he will twist the way we think and what we hear so that we won’t even notice that our thinking has gone off track. This is our own worst enemy and this is who we should be weary of and focused on fighting. This battle we have before us is more important than anything else it is a battle that seeks to draw us away from our eternal home.

Spiritual Battle

I have never been one to put stock into dreams, nor do I trust feelings easily, as I know often times they are not from God. That being said, months ago when I experienced a dream I knew it was not normal. Never before had I felt so much fear or anxiety that did not leave once I was awake.

In my dream I was standing out at a recreational place in the country. It was a beautiful day, the sky was a clear blue and the weather perfect. There were a slew of people there ranging from middle school to college age. They were all enjoying themselves, mostly in the pool. As I was standing there with a friend, groups started forming, one group for each age/grade, it was then that fear struck me. Out of nowhere came a deafening crashing noise. Fear continued to crash through my veins as with each passing second this noise drew closer. Suddenly this noise was upon us and what made it had arrived. It looked like a huge tree, and each time the crashing noise sounded something was being crushed, by the time I saw it, it had started crushing each age group of teens around me.  Panic had me stuck standing still, I looked around as the noise drew closer continuing to crush the teens, no one in the older group seemed to notice. Standing there I started praying with my friend, she was the only other person as scared as I was as this thing drew nearer to us, right as it was coming towards us I awoke. I couldn’t fall back asleep, my heart was pounding and I knew this was no ordinary dream, there was a spiritual battle going on and it didn’t even seem like prayer was enough to ward off whatever was coming. It was clear that the teens I had grown to care about were slowly being crushed and no one cared about it, I had opened my Bible after that to try and calm my nerves and was surprised at where I landed. I had randomly picked the Psalms to read as I thought that would provide comfort and was brought to Psalms 37. It was there in verse 35 that I was struck, “I have seen a wicked, ruthless man spreading himself like a green laurel tree.”  It struck me odd that I would dream of a tree crushing those around me and I would also come across this verse.

So why am I bringing this up when it was like almost a year ago this happened? Well I have been considering this and a lot of other things lately.  One of the things I have been considering is how Satan will affect Christian’s and how there will be those of us who fall away following false teachers. It kind of reminds me of the Screwtape Letters by C.S Lewis but in a different way.

I believe that as the times change so does the way Satan runs after those who are no longer under his control. In the same way I believe that the way Christian’s fight back also has to change.  That being said I think C.S Lewis’s book is good especially for the time he wrote it but I think if we were to truly consider the fight at hand today things are different. Especially this attack we are currently seeing on the church.

Whether you have figured it out by my writing, I am a fighter. I was born this way and have always been one to stand up and fight hard for what is right (or at least what I thought was right.) I believe we are in a battle, it is not physical but something more important. If this were a physical battle I would be one of the first to grab my gear and sign up but this battle is one of spirits that cannot be won by strength. There is a spiritual oppression facing us today, and I believe this battle is one where Satan at the time being has the upper hand. I believe my dream was a reassurance that what I feared (at that time) was happening, the youth, the next generation of Christianity is being oppressed and crushed. I think we are facing right now a choice, we can chose to be either blind and ignorant to the battle raging on or we can chose to take a stand and fight to make a difference, either way we need to make a move.

This is something I will probably be delving into for the next several posts, as it is something probing my interest right now.

 

The Beginning of the End

This week started the last semester I will spend at the community college. It is kind of bitter sweet cause I have grown to love my campus (even though I am taking online classes.) After this semester I will be graduating with my AA in general studies and hopefully transferring over to Towson for the spring. Though at this point in life I am pretty much open to whatever happens.

I must say this week has started off with a bang. Between being assigned 20+ hours at work, an additional five at another store, starting school, and just trying to go on with daily things I am feeling a little overwhelmed but I guess it is all good. I have survived the first two days so that is a start 🙂

Every fall I set up some goals that I hope to achieve but it seems that no matter what I do I end up failing. I tend to take on more than I should at work and am a perfectionist (even though I don’t get all A’s) at school but like any other year I do have a few goals as I enter into this new semester.

One thing I am hoping to do is continue to write. This summer has given me a good starting point. Unlike my last book (which I would go to publish but I don’t agree with what I wrote) I have a good friend who I am paying to edit this and four people lined up to read it. I am very excited for the friends who are going to look at it because they are all avid readers and I think will be able to offer the best feedback. My ultimate goal with writing this fall will be to finish writing, have it edited and handed out to the people, and finally go over it and write a query.

The second thing I want to try to do this fall is check out the Bible study at my college. I have never made it because it is Monday afternoon but hopefully this fall I can at least try.

So for now that is what I am hoping to do and we will see how this fall turns out.