Roger has been writing for our site since it has began. He often contributes deep thoughts from the Holy Spirit, and we believe he deserved his own section on our site just for these thoughts, as we find they are beneficial to many readers. This page will explore a collection of topics straight from the Holy Spirit through Roger's pen, or should I say, keyboard. (Please scroll down for latest articles).
Article 1 - 10/7/23
Article 2 - 10/25/23
Article 3 - 12/3/23
Article 4 - 12/28/23
Article 5 - 1/23/24
Article 6 - 1/29/24
Article 7 - 2/14/24
Article 8 - 3/6/24
Article 9 - 3/24/24
Article 10 - 4/12/24
"Oh, the clouds come tonight, then to light, then to gray.
And the clouds were too dark, then too bright, and went away."
Dear Witnesses,
I woke to the above snippet of song in my mind. The clouds represent God's glory, his presence, and the revelation of his wisdom.
At first, the revelations come at night, in dreams. Then they are remembered and interpreted in the morning, in the light. And then, sadly, they are often mistaken for normal dreams and morning thoughts, dismissed as insignificant, becoming like normal gray clouds.
At first, they're too dark to see, too murky to interpret, or too depressing to consider. Then, sometimes, the Holy Spirit asserts Himself and highlights a dream or a bit of scripture to reveal its meaning and divine origin. But often this scares the would-be prophet, making him think he's insane or acting out of pride. Either way, once the Spirit has done his work, the revelation fades away, and it is up to the would-be prophet to share what he has received.
And often we just don't. We don't get the message, or we deny it, or we let ourselves forget about it. We forget about all of God's activity in our lives. We have this subconscious drive to deny God's active presence in our lives, because we know we don't deserve it. But God is so good he gives us the gift of his presence and constant action on our behalf anyway! Denying that doesn't make us humble - it makes us ungrateful.
God is saying here, that He's doing his part. He's pouring out his grace, and sending out messages to us. But we're not seeing them, we're not interpreting them, we're not remembering and sharing them, because we're scared to be prophets. We're scared to live in an active relationship with God. We know we're unworthy. And we just don't want to be bothered with it.
And it's more than just disappointing. It's tragic, because God is putting messages and revelations of his glory out there, and we're not receiving them. We're missing out on important stuff! Due to our own reluctance to be prophets, we're not as blessed or informed as we could be.
I confess my own guilt in this. Sometimes I have dreams that I think might be prophetic, but I just don't remember enough of them, or can't make enough sense of them, and by the time I've made up my mind about them, they're gone, forgotten in the light of day. I need to remember to be decisive and pray immediately about my dreams, and ask for wisdom and clarification from the Holy Spirit. Frankly, it's a lot easier to just go back to sleep, and that laziness has cost me some insights. Please forgive me, Lord Jesus!
But if this was just for me, I would know it. This is for readers, too. God's Spirit is poured out! Young men will dream dreams, and old men see visions! This goes for the women, too. Some of you - many of you! - are prophets and don't know it, or haven't accepted it yet. Pray about it. Ask God: am I a prophet? Do my dreams have meaning? Are my visions from You? And then ask to be sent dreams and visions from God, and for wisdom and insight from the Holy Spirit.
We need you. We need the messages God is giving us in these End Times. And you need that active relationship with God. The messages and warnings you receive from Him will bring you comfort and keep you safe, when normally you might be in distress and danger.
Additional messages - "God loves gamers." This shouldn't be a surprise, as God loves us all. He might not be a fan of us spending too much time playing video games, but there are a lot of depressed gamers out there thinking they are worthless. You aren't worthless. God loves you. God wants you to change, but He doesn't expect you to do it on your own. Come to Him, and ask Him to make the proper changes in your life.
Specifically, there is someone who plays "CS:GO" reading this right now who needs to hear this message from the Lord: "You are not a burden. Let Me work wonders in your life. Trust in Me. I will do things in you and through you that you would not believe were possible. You have to come to Me, and let Me make this change in you." I don't know who you are, but as you receive this message, please pray on it! You might be one of those reluctant prophets! God has amazing things in store for you! Don't think of yourself as unworthy - none of us are worthy, but God makes us worthy! And please, after you pray on this message, contact the Two Witnesses so they and the Council can pray for you, too!
One more - "A king and queen in the North, robed in foreign glory." I saw a man and a woman who looked like elves in a fantasy movie. They were pale, and their hair was blue. Their clothes were white and gold. They looked cold, aloof. They were being courted and influenced by many different nations.
I'm not sure, but I think this might represent a new king and queen in England. I think King Charles is going to die, and Prince William and his wife Kate will become king and queen. But there will be something very wrong with them. Kate, as you know, has been diagnosed with cancer, and there were some very strange photographs of her going around. She might already be dead. There is some kind of evil conspiracy around these two people, and it involves many powerful people from many different nations.
I think they are being set up as symbolic figureheads of some kind of new world order - one with a facade of legitimacy due to its association with the old monarchy. Some people will be glad to return to "God appointed" kings and queens, rather than the corrupt politicians we currently have. But these rulers are not God appointed - rather they are controlled by the same demonic powers the current potentates are. They might not even be alive, and like our president, they won't be making any real decisions.
It might also be that they are being set up as sacrifices like Princess Diana, in order to demoralize and enrage the public. Unrest in Great Britain is almost as ripe to explode as here in the US, and people are just as divided. Remember, don't take sides in any war, or any civil conflict. They want us to hate and kill each other!
Please pray for discernment and insight on these dreams! There might be something I have misunderstood or left out. God bless you mightily, in the holy name of Jesus Christ!
Your Brother in Christ,
Roger
"Nameless" - A Vision
I awoke out of a dead sleep at 2 AM, these words echoing in my mind's ears:
"No more are you cast, nameless and screaming, into the bowl of God's wrath. It is poured out upon the unworthy, those who scorned the Lamb. You are saved, for the sake of the Lamb. Forgiven, by the grace of the Lamb."
I asked, "What does it mean that I was nameless?"
And I received: "For you were counted among the children of wrath, and your name was not written in the Book of Life." And I saw Ephesians 2; the text on the page, centered on the third verse.
I asked, "What does it mean that God's wrath is poured out?"
And I received: "Blood," and I saw puddles of blood on the floor, in first person, dripping down. People vomiting, and I felt sick in my stomach. "Fire," and I saw trees burning, smoke filling the sky, and I felt tightness in my lungs. "Darkness," and I saw streetlights going out, and dark houses at night.
Then I saw a plane burning in the sky.
Then I saw something strange. Construction vehicles were being used to cut large trenches across the roads. one machine had a long, spinning piece that looked like an asterisk stretched out in 3D, and it carved into the asphalt. Another vehicle looked like a cement mixer, but it poured out a black liquid like tar or oil into the trench, and then someone dressed like a construction worker threw something into it and set it on fire. The flames rose a story high and made the road completely impassable.
The scene "zoomed out" and I saw a frame from what looked like a news report. A woman in a gray sport jacket was sitting at a desk, and behind her was a satellite image of the southern US and Mexico, centered on the Caribbean. The words "Slaughtering Zones Established" were on the image.
I asked, "What does this vision mean?"
And I received: "Some people will not be allowed to flee. The cities will be especially hard to escape. Some places will be much worse than others. You will be safe - you will survive."
I asked, "When will this happen?"
And I received: "It is starting now, but you will be surprised by how few people see it and understand, and by how little it changes."
I do not trust my own discernment in this. I have prayed about it and believe the vision is real, but I worry that parts of it are tainted by my own imagination. I asked, "How should I know? And what should I do?"
And I received: "Take it to Witness 2."
The Digital Tower of Babel: How We Tried (And Failed) To Surpass Human Knowledge
According to the Book of Genesis, mankind once had a single language that all people understood. However, in their hubris, people tried to build a tower that reached Heaven. Offended at mankind's pride, God confused the languages of the people, so that they spoke different tongues and could no longer understand each other, bringing the work to a halt and the tower to ruin.
People tend to ignore this story because they think it's impossible to build a tower to Heaven. Heaven isn't a place above the clouds – in fact, we've built many sky scrapers, not to mention airplanes and space ships, and we know full well that they don't scrape against Heaven. As far as we know, God hasn't punished us for building them. But that misses the point.
God knew their tower couldn't reach Heaven – but the people building it didn't. God wasn't preventing an invasion of the Heavenly realm, He was punishing pride. Human audacity, it seems, knows no bounds. In that, little has changed.
I remember a time when the internet was assumed to be full of lies and nonsense. “Never believe anything you read on the internet” was a common proverb, accepted by everyone. This was a time when you were never supposed to give out any information about yourself on the internet – not your name, not your address, certainly not your phone number. It was dangerous to share those things, because they could be used against you. In the last 25 years or so (I realize, I'm showing my age,) that has all reversed, and large corporations driven by profiting off data used to target advertisements have made sharing everything about yourself online not only normal, but in some cases, required.
We now see the internet as the repository of all human knowledge. Yes, there's a lot of garbage and nonsense too, but the real information is in there, if you know how to find it. At least, that's what we've been convinced to believe. But there are cracks in that assumption, and it's about to get a lot easier to see them. For one, the people who convinced us that sharing our whole lives on the internet for the sake of ad revenue was a good idea, are the same ones who convinced us that all the information we could ever want or need was on the internet. Remember when Google was just a search engine?
As the internet has become the world's preferred method of communication, paradoxically, it's gotten harder and harder to actually find good information, true information, on it. Everyone has a voice, so lies and ignorance are just as easy to find as truth. Worse, governments and large companies have taken an interest in “curating” truth, hiding and censoring things they don't like, making certain topics nearly impossible to discuss. Making certain “facts” the only answer available to certain questions. Far from the sum total of all human knowledge, the internet is a sea of lies with hidden, sunken treasures of truth hotly contested by various parties.
This became much more obvious in the last few years, when it became all but impossible to talk about vaccines or recent elections without being censored, and perhaps penalized. But it's been going on a lot longer than that. Gamers probably remember Metal Gear Solid 2, which predicted this very issue back in 2001. If you played it, you may also remember the proposed solution to this problem – Artificial Intelligence taking control of the discourse. And that's happening as we speak.
Automated censorship tools have been around for a while. Anyone who has tried to share a controversial opinion on YouTube, Twitter or Facebook has seen that first hand. People aren't making the decision to edit or censor your speech at an individual level – these forums are just too large to moderate that way. Instead, administrators are giving general instructions to AI tools to disallow certain words, phrases and topics – and to more heavily scrutinize certain people with disagreeable ideas. But that's still, at the very top, directed by people. Something much bigger is coming that will make any kind of communication – and any search for real knowledge – basically impossible in cyberspace. And humans will barely be involved at all.
Experts now predict that within 1 year, nearly all the content you see online will be AI generated. Large Language Model (LLM) AIs can now create images, speech and video convincing enough to fool the casual observer. Every two weeks, LLMs create more text than every book that has ever been written in human history.
What's more, AI “learns” from reading human input. But as the amount of human created data on the internet becomes more and more drowned out by AI generated data, the LLMs will be training on input that was almost entirely AI generated. Eating its own waste, as it were.
AIs trained on AI content are sort of like copies of copies. Except instead of fading and becoming unintelligible, they just become very repetitive. If you think the internet is full of echo chambers now, just wait until billions of AI bots drown out all human communication with the same phrases, repeated ad nauseam!
We thought we could surpass the limits of human knowledge, by allowing nearly unlimited access to communication and a vast store of information. In doing so, we exhausted ourselves and created the most unhappy, disagreeable people on earth. We created havens for the insane and depraved to fuel each other's fetishes and delusions and then allowed them to force their twisted worldviews on the rest of us. And finally, we created something that is about to make communication with other actual human beings nearly impossible.
That is monumental hubris. We created a digital Tower of Babel. And it will fall the same way.
Ironically, the way to mitigate this AI information overload is to do what we were already doing, before giant corporations changed our minds for us: to treat the internet like a dangerous sea full of lies and nonsense, where we should never put out our real identities, or trust anything we see. To meet people in person, at least when we need to talk about anything important. To write things down on paper and save them in drawers, rather than on giant databases that can be read and modified by third parties.
That's not the solution we'll be sold, but it's the real one that will actually work. The solution we will be sold is a universal digital ID that will be tied to every aspect of our identity and will “prove” that we are human. Everything we say, everything we do and every dollar we spend will be linked to that ID. And of course, it will be linked to our medical history, and certain treatments will be mandatory. That's the solution every government, not to mention all the huge corporations, will be backing.
If you don't like that, well, get used to not using the internet. Get used to not having a bank account. Get used to being rejected for jobs because they can't verify who you are or “prove you're real,” despite you sitting in front of them, in the flesh. Get used to being denied access to public transit and airports. Get used to being a non-person. And get used to most people being OK with that.
We have to understand that we are not friends with the world, and the world is not our friend. We are not going to be able to live like the people of the world. We are going to need to make real-life connections with other like-minded Christians, and learn how to be self-sufficient. We can't survive isolated in a digital world. Because much like our own, the digital world as we know it is ending, too.
May God bless you, your families, and the work of your hands, in Jesus's name.
Your brother in Christ,
Roger
I want to start out with a rant that I wrote about abuse, and the cultural myth we have built around it. You won't see it anywhere else, and if you do it's because someone read it here and spread the idea. It is very contrary to what our society and our so-called experts want to believe. But it's adjacent to my main point: that a lot of what we believe as a society (if indeed we can be called one) is made up to make us feel better about abandoning objective morality, and our own responsibility.
The "Cycle of Abuse" is a Victim Blaming Myth:
It's a Cultural Problem and It Isn't Being Addressed
What I'm going to tell you isn't going to make me popular with anyone. It goes against the conventional wisdom. It goes against "the studies." And it goes against the current zeitgeist of absolute willful blindness. In other words, it's the truth, and everyone hates that.
The commonly believed pop-psych explanation for the prevalence of bullying and other types of abuse - that abusers have been abused themselves as children, that they lash out at weaker children and later grow into abusive adults - is a half-truth at best. Despite what the literature will tell you, most people who are subjected to abuse don't become abusers, as children or adults. And most people who are abusive as kids or full grown adults weren't severely abused when they were children (relative to their own cultural standards). The "Cycle of Abuse" isn't really a cycle. It's an excuse abusers give when confronted with their behavior, as a manipulative ploy to garner sympathy.
Abusers are manipulators. And it turns out, therapists and psychologists are just as gullible, if not more so, than the average person. Empathetic people go into these professions, and thus are likely to want to believe an abuser's sob story. So the recurring excuse of the perpetual abuser - that they themselves are victims - became an accepted myth; a comforting explanation for bad behavior that lets us feel some sympathy and shared humanity with the perpetrators. It's reassuring, because it implies that people who do bad things aren't necessarily just bad people, that there are reasons for these types of behavior. That all we have to do to "break the cycle" is separate abused children from their abusers, and the problem will get smaller and smaller with each generation until it goes away.
It hasn't gone away. It's gotten worse. When the treatment doesn't improve the disease, you change the theory behind the treatment.
First, if childhood abuse doesn't cause more abuse, what does it cause? Well, it causes social anxiety. It causes depression. It causes isolation, fear of conflict, and a host of other psychological and social issues that could broadly be described as "anthropophobia" - the fear of other people. The blanket term for this kind of response to childhood abuse is "complex post traumatic stress disorder," or CPTSD. This isn't the "shell shock" kind of PTSD war veterans have - it's the more subtle spiritual crippling that people who have been bullied, attacked and stepped on their whole lives exhibit. People who don't speak up, don't draw attention to themselves, don't take risks, and rarely if ever leave their homes. They become invisible, and so do their problems.
So the real victims of abuse have largely gone unknown, and all we see are the perpetrators and their excuses. Let me speak for the actual victims and make one thing clear: perpetuating the myth that abuse is a cycle is victim blaming. When you suggest that abused people become abusers, you are equating the victim with their oppressor. You are implying that they are likely guilty of becoming abusers, just because they were abused. And you're buying into a myth created by the abusers themselves, in order to steal the sympathy their victims deserve.
Abuse doesn't cause itself. People cause abuse - people are responsible for their own actions. It's an unpopular truth that sadists and psychopaths exist. Some people don't need a reason to hurt others. These people do not require your sympathy - reserve that for their victims.
But "some people are bad" isn't comforting, even though it's true. Some people can't be treated, and simply need to be kept away from others. This has been known for all of human history, and it is why jails and systems of law exist, but that's no longer a popular notion. We have abandoned the very idea of evil existing, and thus have allowed it to flourish.
Now, there are self-perpetuating cultures of violence, and that is where the myth becomes a half-truth. You can raise a child to become violent. It takes a culture inured to violence as a normal part of everyday life, where no concept of the moral and social harm of abuse is seriously entertained. Indeed, to such a culture, there is no such thing as abuse as we understand it.
Do we live in such a culture? It's no longer easy to say. We didn't always. We used to live in a culture governed by shared morals, which broadly lined up with Christian ideals. These ideals are no longer in vogue, as they are associated with the white, straight, male, Christian people who created Western Civilization, and thus were presumably responsible for its many flaws. We pretend to still be in this patriarchal, white dominated, heteronormative and Christian majority civilization, while decrying all of those things. Because despite everything, Western Civilization worked. It succeeded in dominating the world. So we wanted to keep the success, without all the people who made it, or the things they believed.
And now "Western Civilization" isn't. It isn't Western, and it isn't civilized. It is absurdly diverse in both people and ideas. It does not have shared values. It cannot be called a single culture, because cultures have shared qualities that unite the people in them. Rather, the "Western World" is host to a multitude of conflicting cultures, many of whom do not claim to be "American" or "European" or "Western," and want nothing to do with our modern liberal values, or the legacy of our Christian history. Even among the American or European identifying people, the latter two are points of bitter contention, where one either holds to one or the other. Whatever you may define "our morals" to be, there are many cultures within our broadly defined society that don't share them.
If we want to pretend we still live in Western Civilization, then we need to accept that it is a host culture absolutely infested with myriad parasite cultures that do nothing to benefit it, and are indeed antithetical to its continued existence, because they hate what it values and the people who created it. Even the host culture hates itself. This is a suicide on a civilizational scale. But let's not follow that analogy. [Note from Witness 1: This is an excellent description of American and European cultures today, one of the best, and I have also characterized the last century as a civilizational, genetic suicide.]
Let's instead think of it as a post-Western, post-civilization society, in which there are many different cultures, including some that want to pretend to be descendants of Western Civilization, despite sharing few of the same values. There are many more that do not pretend to such descent, want nothing to do with it, and are merely living in its corpse. Some of these cultures within the remains of the Western World have never held to "our" values, and our definition of abuse is meaningless to them.
From their perspective, what we call abuse is normal. When we punish them under our laws, they don't really understand why. They "haven't done anything wrong." Yes, by our ideals, the way they treat children and women is abusive and wrong. They don't see it that way. Even when they kill, they don't see it as their fault. They really were raised that way. They really don't know any other way. And when they describe their upbringing, we easily fit their stories into our preconceived cultural myth of the "Cycle of Abuse." We draw completely incorrect conclusions, because we want to think our increasingly vanishing morals are universal, when they are anything but.
So we can publish endless studies that say abuse causes itself, because we'll never admit that one culture's abuse is another culture's everyday life. And the latter cultures are growing, while the former dies in self-loathing and ignorance.
I'm not a doctor, and society doesn't need a hospital. It needs an obituary, and I happen to be a writer. So I won't be giving a prescription to save the world. I just want us to stop making excuses. Stop making excuses for abusers. Stop making excuses for people who hate you. Stop pretending that everything you hold to be good and right came from nowhere, when it came from the Bible and the people who believed in it. Stop pretending that we're all the same, and that evil doesn't exist. And stop blaming abuse victims for abuse, when you're the ones making it possible by ignoring all the inconvenient truths of a postmortem civilization.
Sorry for getting apocalyptic, but being that we're in the Apocalypse, I find it appropriate. There's a lot of lies – myths – we tell ourselves to avoid our share of responsibility and to deny the pain of living through a cultural suicide in the midst of the Biblical Eschaton. Let me go over a few:
* “People are basically good”
* “All cultures are equal”
* “There's no such thing as free will”
* “There's no such thing as objective morality”
And here's my favorite:
* “There's no such thing as evil”
Just in case you're not following, here's the honest truth, from the Word of God:
The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done.” Genesis 8:21 (emphasis added).
This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun: The same destiny overtakes all. The hearts of people, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live, and afterward they join the dead. Ecclesiastes 9:3 (emphasis added).
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? Jeremiah 17:9
“If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” Matthew 7:11 (This is Jesus Himself, speaking to his own chosen disciples!)
If the nature of man is evil, then evil must exist. If evil exists, then objective morality exists. But such morality cannot come from man, since man is evil. It can only come from God, the only objectively good being. How can we know this true morality? Three ways:
We know objective morality (right and wrong) because it is written in our hearts by God.
Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them. Romans 2:14-15
In other words, even people who don't know the Word of God, still have a God-given sense of right and wrong. They don't have an excuse for evil. But there are other, better ways to know objective morality. We can read the Bible, God's Word, to learn what He wants us to do. There are, of course, the Ten Commandments, which are a good start.
These commandments aren't to be understood individually, nor are they the Law in its entirety. They are united in two overall principles that Jesus summarized in Matthew 22:37-40:
Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
The first four of the Ten Commandments have to do with loving God. The other six have to do with loving other people. God gave us his Word so that we would have even less excuse for doing evil, since we know right from wrong in our hearts, and we have God's Law written in the Scriptures. But as followers of Christ, we have a third way to know objective morality. We have the Holy Spirit:
But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Galatians 5:18
Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death. Romans 8:1-2
I really want you to read both of those chapters (Galatians 5 and Romans 8) for the full context of those two passages, because in them the Apostle Paul makes the case for two fundamental concepts. First, that we gained the Holy Spirit the moment we believed in Jesus Christ and accepted Him as our Savior. Second, that the Holy Spirit frees us from the need to follow the letter of the law. Not because the law is abolished or was wrong, but because it exists to show us our own sin, and now our sin is washed away in Christ Jesus.
Rather, by following the Holy Spirit, we live according to He who made the law. Instead of following our own wicked hearts which know good but choose evil, or following the letter of the law without understanding, we follow the Spirit of God, who made the law and wrote it upon our hearts. In Romans 8:7-8, Paul makes clear that only Christians can do this, and that only the Holy Spirit gives us the ability to consistently act in an objectively moral way:
The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God.
Further, people have free will. They are free moral actors, able to choose between good and evil, and responsible for the choices and actions they make. Their past doesn't excuse their actions in the present, nor does their sinful nature excuse sin. Nobody else's sins caused you to sin – your sins are your own and they will be counted against you alone, unless you are washed clean in the blood of Jesus Christ.
But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD. Joshua 24:15 (emphasis added)
You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. Galatians 5:13
In both the Old and the New Testament, it is understood that following God, and by extension following the Law and the Holy Spirit, are choices one has to make. One can choose to sin or not. The fact that we all choose sin doesn't remove our culpability, it only speaks to our evil nature. We need Jesus to redeem us, because we've all chosen evil in the past.
So, no – people aren't basically good, evil is real, objective morality does exist, as does free will, and all cultures are definitely not equal. Only Christians have access to true morality through the Holy Spirit, and any culture that rejects the Bible, rejects Christ, and rejects Christian morals rejects the only objective morality on earth. They still know right from wrong, and thus have no excuse, but they've chosen to ignore the truth and to serve the flesh – that is, their own sinful nature and desires.
Every culture on earth has done this. There are no true Christian cultures left, only Christian individuals. Perhaps I can be so bold as to hope there are still some Christian communities, and this is one of them. And if you are such an individual, then I hope you've read this far (I'm getting to the end, honest!) and said to yourself “I already know this.” But maybe you're saying “I know people who think that way,” or “I used to think like that.” Or maybe you're really angry and thinking up some scathing and brilliant reason why I'm wrong, and you're not making excuses when you deny that people are evil, or pretend cultures hostile to Christianity and the only objective morality that exists are valid and should overtake whatever remaining semblance of civilization remains.
My answer to you, in any case, is you're not alone. You're not alone if you used to make excuses, and you're not alone if you still do. I am guilty on both counts. I was an idolater. I denied objective good and evil, and tried to make my own morals up as I went along. I ended up hurting a lot of people and leading them away from God. I led myself into a very dark place. Jesus got me out of it.
And being the imperfect sinner that I am, I still find myself making excuses. I want to think that I'm basically good. I want to think that the world is a good place, and that my friends who deny Christ are still good people. But the fact is, we are only justified in Christ. We are not good on our own, and we can't claim to be. No person, nation, culture or world that denies Christ can claim to be good in any way, shape or form.
That's why everything we see around us is happening. That's why we collectively deserve what's happening. As individuals and as the remnant of Christ's Church, we are saved, but our homes, our countries, our institutions are not, because they, on the whole, deny Christ. The pernicious belief that one set of morals is as good as another has led to us abandoning morals entirely. We let that happen. We continue to let that happen. We don't fight for the only good there is – the goodness of God.
That's how you get absurdities like “abuse is caused by abuse,” because people don't want to admit that evil exists. People don't want to admit that inner city culture, Jewish culture, Islamic culture, atheist culture, communist culture, “woke” culture, capitalist culture and every other culture that denies Christ as the highest and only good perpetuates abuses in ways that are abhorrent to the Holy Spirit and the law of God written in our hearts. It's much easier to go along to get along.
We hate admitting that evil exists, because it requires admitting that evil deserves to be punished. Some people need to be locked away. And in the grand cosmic scale, sinners, which is all of us, deserve to be locked away from God. Heaven would not be Heaven with sinners in it. It would be earth, and look at earth right now. Thank God, that in his mercy, He gave his Son to wash us clean and save us, so that we can avoid the fate we deserve, and be made better than we are: sinless heirs to a perfect kingdom.
It's time to accept a simple truth: if Christians are right, then everyone else is wrong. Not just factually, but morally. If you're not following the Holy Spirit, you are morally depraved. And that means that nearly all the world is in depravity. Look out the window and deny it.
Don't pretend we don't deserve what's happening. Don't pretend we don't deserve what's coming. God is righteous and just. He gave us a long time, and a lot of warnings. He gave us his Son. There's not a lot of time left. It's time to stop pretending. It's time to stop making excuses, and to stand up for the only good there is.
Dear Witnesses,
I hope your Sunday has been going well. I prayed for God to send me dreams last night, and I had another dream this morning that seems relevant.
I dreamed that I saw a trailer for a TV show about people (mostly women) who hated each other and were looking for ways to get revenge. In the show, these characters were able to hire robot doubles of their enemies to ruin their lives, framing them for crimes, even killing their children. The premise of the show seemed to be this getting out of hand, and it implied that there was a very evil force or group behind these "hire a bot double" services. The robots were nearly indistinguishable from the humans they were meant to impersonate and basically unstoppable. I remember thinking I didn't want to watch this show.
So, I have prayed for help to interpret this dream, and here are my takeaways.
First, the obvious. The nature of entertainment, and society in general, is declining. The show was about petty, vindictive characters doing unconscionable things, even to the innocent families of their enemies. But the bigger takeaway was that this is about the online world.
Very soon it will be possible to make an AI powered "cyber impersonator" of someone you hate (or want to blackmail) which is effectively impossible to tell from the online presence of the victim, and which is nearly unstoppable. It will trash reputations, ruin jobs, and attack the friends and families of the victim. It will get into social media accounts, bank accounts, work accounts, and ruin them. It will get out of hand, and the people behind it are counting on that, because it will be a driving factor to force a "universal digital ID" that will be linked to all social media, all online presence, all transactions, all jobs. It will of course be linked to the mark of the beast.
You can hardly imagine the chaos these bots will cause. People's lives and families will be ruined. Murders and suicides will result. It will be horrifying to have one of these unstoppable cyber impersonators infiltrating and destroying your life. People will beg for a way to stop them. They will beg for universal digital ID. They will beg for it to be tied to everything.
It will be compared to "ransomware" and blamed first on hackers and then on "state sanctioned" cyber terrorists. Like the "bat soup" and "lab leak" theories, both of these are cover stories for the intentional release of a coercive threat meant to bring about massive social compliance to an aspect of the beast system. One will be suppressed until it is later accepted, to satisfy the conspiracy minded. The cover stories will be used to push division and further stoke geopolitical unrest. We've seen this before.
But this being a "tv show" in my dream indicates to me that the fear will be intentionally overblown. The actual risk of one of these AI impostors attacking you will be pretty small. Some people's lives will be destroyed, but many more people will panic over it than will ever be affected directly by it.
The only sure defense (aside from universal digital ID, of course) is to "unplug" your life. Not being on social media. Not having your money in the bank. This is much easier said than done. People need social media for their jobs, and most purchases are made online now, for which you need a bank account or a credit card (which requires a bank account). People will think they have no choice other than to force a universal digital ID or to completely go off the grid.
But the cure will be worse than the disease, and the truth is that most people would be fine if they just did nothing. The panic of the masses, inviting massive corporate and government control into their lives, will be what forces everyone to adapt. Eventually, of course, when the universal digital ID comes and it is linked with the vaccine (the mark of the beast), you will have to go off the grid - but only because the world was fooled into letting these evil men take over every aspect of their lives.
I think AI clones are among the many weapons in the devil's arsenal for the global implementation of the beast system, to force the mark. They're far from the only one. But we need to be praying against all the weapons and plans of Satan and his minions. Warnings like this are opportunities to call them out and force them to change their plans. To prepare ourselves. And most of all, to pray for God to turn around all the plans of the wicked, and use them instead for his will, and the good of his people.
May God bless you bountifully this Sunday, in Jesus's name.
Your brother in Christ,
Roger
Dear Witnesses,
Happy Sunday! I hope your weekend is going well.
I woke today from another dream. I have been praying for God to send me dreams, and I don't always get them or remember them, but this one I recalled, and it seemed relevant. I prayed for help from the Holy Spirit to interpret it, and I'd like to share it with you.
Oddly enough, my pastor's sermon today was about Joseph in Genesis 37, and how he had dreams which he shared, that ended up getting him in trouble. But he argued that dreams from God should always be shared, even if they could bring trouble, because it's all part of God's plan. So I take that as a little extra nudge that I need to share this one.
I dreamed of a man on a grassy hill in a large public park, on a pleasant, sunny day. He was holding people hostage with a shotgun, threatening some kind of mass shooting. I recognized this man from YouTube.
He is known for making funny skits, usually about fire safety or the challenges of being a first responder. This hostage situation, too, was being filmed for some kind of skit. I realized the whole situation was fake: everyone involved was acting, and in no danger. But the people watching didn't know this, and some started to interfere.
Someone had found his "manifesto" and a "spare gun," both of which were props, and was challenging him as if both were real. The man I recognized from YouTube was annoyed, berating the man who was challenging him for not recognizing that the gun, the manifesto, everything was fake.
Then the man from YouTube said something like, "This is the city of the saints, but the saints won't save you." And I saw a huge, ornate archway leading into the park, looking like something from a large European city. It looked like French or Roman style architecture. I knew this archway was called the "Gate of Saints." Dozens of apparitions came walking through it, in black and white and sepia tones, some on foot and some in horse-drawn carriages, all in dress from different times. I realized I was seeing the saints of the past who had come into this city.
The whole park and everything around it was green and beautiful. The roads were flat, paved stones, not asphalt, and everything was very clean. It looked like something from another place and time, but most of the people standing around were in normal modern clothes and in color, unlike the apparitions.
Now, I think this dream is about some kind of coming "false flag" attack. Someone (or a group of people) is going to murder some innocent civilians in some brazen and shocking way. Much like it would be shocking for a man to take hostages in a beautiful public park in a gorgeous city on a resplendent day, it will catch people completely off guard and provoke reactionary responses, which is the true goal.
There will be two kinds of responses, and the people favoring them will be in two camps. One side, aligned with the right, will focus on the "manifesto" - the supposed motivations and ideology behind the attack (and hating them and the people they represent). The other side, aligned with the left, will focus on the "gun" - the weapons used and new laws to ban them and prevent them from being used. Both sides will be completely manipulated, because the motives for the attack are completely fake, intended to stoke hatred, and the weapons used are chosen to scare people into voluntarily curtailing freedoms. It will lead to people hating each other and focusing more on these distractions, instead of on the growing authoritarianism and beast system control.
People who try to challenge this false dichotomy as the divide-and-conquer psyop that it is will be derided for "making us less safe." The YouTube guy from my dream (who is a very cool dude in real life and would never be involved in something shady like this) is known for making public safety skits that have a satirical edge to them. He gently and sarcastically mocks people for doing genuinely stupid things that he's seen as a first responder, in an effort to teach people about threats to their safety. So in my dream he represents the "conventional wisdom" or "mainstream view" response to anyone who rejects this fake dichotomy: mockery and the implication that such people are ignorant and making us less safe.
But at the same time, the people who are arranging for these attacks mock us for not seeing through the ruse. The very people responsible call us ignorant and threats to public safety if we challenge them, but in private, they have the gall to laugh in their sense of superiority, that they have the world fooled.
Now, there are a lot of cities named after saints. St. Louis, Missouri has the Gateway Arch, and the area around it looks a fair bit like my dream. So that's a possible location. Keep an eye out for something happening there.
There are a few cities called "The City of Saints." One such city is Multan, in Pakistan (which also has a very picturesque archway called the Qasim Gate). Another is Salt Lake City, Utah (and the Eagle Gate there is quite interesting, though not resembling what I saw in my dream). And any time I think of cities and saints, I think of Rome and Los Angeles. So all of these are other possibilities. There's also several different Catholic churches with ornate entryways called the "Gate of Saints." Some in Rome, a few in Poland, probably others elsewhere.
But I want to step back from the literal, for a bit. The phrase "the saints won't save you," strikes me as a warning about false religions and idolatry. What strikes me is that all of these cities are places of idolatry. Islam, Mormonism. The Roman Catholic church and Hollywood, in all their modern corruption.
The apparitions passing through that broad gate on that broad road didn't look real. They were like old photos. People celebrated as saints, perhaps venerated as such, but not really in God's kingdom. They had no power to save anyone ensnared in a false belief - be it a false belief in official government narratives or in false religions. Only Jesus Christ can save us, and his saints travel in through a narrow gate, at the end of a hard and narrow path.
People think they already have all the answers. They think they can travel the broad road and accept a surface level understanding of the world that agrees with whatever religion they choose. They're comfortable. They think they're already in the "city of the saints," that their place in Heaven, or whatever afterlife they want to believe in, is already secure.
But they can die in a second. They can be killed in a false flag attack, or any number of other ways, never questioning their comfortable worldview. Never realizing the danger they're in. And many people have died, thinking they were walking through the gate of saints, only to walk into the gate of perdition.
So that's a warning we need to heed. We can't be satisfied in our own salvation. We aren't better than those people. We need to persevere in following the hard and narrow path that Jesus has set for us. Carrying our cross. Reading and living the Word. Really being saints, not just being satisfied that we are.
It's also a warning not to get bogged down in the fake narratives that the powers and principalities of the world set up for us. Not getting too distracted with politics. Not fanning the flames of conflict that will lead us to fighting each other and hating each other.
We're not going to be loved by the world. For not taking sides in the false dichotomies set up to distract us, we will be seen as traitors and fence-sitters. For trying to love and be kind to everyone, we will be hated, for not hating the right people. What's coming will divide people into pre-ordained camps, and not picking one will make us the enemies of both. We will be called stupid, hypocrites, racists, terrorists, and every other name in the book. And being saints won't save us from that anger, on earth. But Jesus will save our souls in Heaven.
So, that's what I was able to glean from this dream. I welcome your interpretation.
May God bless you and your family, in Jesus's name!
Reflecting from below an endless gray
The neon lights and holographic sky
Cast colors to divorce the night from day
(In modern aeons even suns may die)
I saw a man who dressed himself in white
In leather boots with polished, shining spurs
He rode into the town that garish night
Upon a metal steed that gently purrs
And no one in the city knew his name
Or why he'd come, or what was on his mind
But I ran from that city all the same
Not looking back, I left it all behind
I'll never know what filled me with such dread
He passed me in the desert... dressed in red
Merry Christmas to you and your family, as well!
I just read the new part of your testimony, and I am reminded a lot of my own childhood. Obviously, there were many differences, but I also felt like I was never good enough, felt rejected by everyone, and idolized academic and worldly success. I idolized romantic love and relationships, as you know. And I felt like a total failure, for not achieving worldly success, and losing those relationships.
And it is true that I have failed the world. But this is no loss if I share in Christ's victory! What merit is a share in the world if I have no share in God's kingdom? God, in his great mercy, did not let me find success in worldly things, and thereby continue in that idolatry. My pride has ruled over me too much as it is, for me to imagine waking from its spell in the midst of such worldly pleasures.
Which is not to say I am now perfect and free of the world! We are set free in Christ Jesus, but I still struggle with my neuroses and addictions. Depression and anxiety have haunted me all my life. I feel like, for the first time, I can struggle against them, though - I can contend with them, when for many years I had simply given up. I can see the ways, here and there, where God is ordering my steps: leading me by chance to find a church that really welcomed me and had the presence of the Holy Spirit; forcing me (by the waking habits of my dog) to get up earlier and go to bed earlier, against my disorderly inclinations; even giving up caffeine, which I was really addicted to and had just planned on staying that way. As it turned out, I wasn't able to get my "fix" for a couple of days and now I'm learning to live with it, and feeling better.
And that's been a recent theme as God has been working in my life: losing things I thought I couldn't live without, and finding out I was better off without them. I know that's not over and there are more things God is going to take out of my life. I leave it in his hands and his strength. I know I am not strong enough on my own to change, but with God, in his time, I can endure the changes He wants to make in me. Not only endure, but be better off in the long run, because He wants what is best for me, for the sake of his love and the glory of his name.
As always, you are an exemplar and an inspiration. I have been reading the book of Job, which I consider to be one of the hardest books of the Bible to interpret, and I am reminded of the themes I find there. Job suffered and cried out to God, in confusion and seeming abandonment. His main plea wasn't to heal him or restore his wealth, or even for the souls of his children. It was just "why?"
Whoever authored the book of Job, he understood the nature of suffering, as a person of faith. That question "why?" or perhaps, "Why me, Lord?" is a haunting one. Especially since there is not always an answer. We can't know God's mind or his plans. It's tempting to think, as Job does, that maybe God just hates us. We can take on faith that God loves us and that our suffering serves a purpose, but what that purpose is sometimes eludes us. It can elude our friends too, and we can find ourselves in the positions of Job's friends, lecturing rather than comforting due to our mistaken assumptions of God's intent in someone else's life.
I think you've been there. I think I've been in both places, really. But it's true that well-intentioned but worthless advice, in the midst of sorrow, can be worse than just leaving a hurting person alone. I think if there's one thing to take from Job (and there's lots of things) - it's that when we see someone in pain, our job as Christians isn't to lecture them. It isn't to assume their faults and offer advice based on those assumptions. It's just to comfort them, however we can, to the best of our ability.
That's not something people do in the neurotic world where nothing is good enough. If you're suffering, it must be your fault, and if there's nothing obviously wrong, we'll find something to blame you for. We don't understand justice. We want to believe in a just world, but our idea of justice is always self-centered and warped. That's why Jesus teaches us to love each other, and not to judge. Discern, yes, but not deliver judgement. Because we don't know the heart, and we don't really know justice.
Jesus knows. And He is our comforter. Did you know that Job cries out for Jesus, without knowing it? In Job 9, he says of God:
Job asks for a mediator between himself and God, because he knows that as a human, he cannot challenge God's power or righteousness. But he does not understand why God has allowed him to suffer, and he cannot ask Him, lest he accuse God of wrongdoing. Somehow, instinctively, Job knows that man needs a mediator with God, because we are too far separated by our human failings and limitations. In essence, he is asking God for Jesus, who already (and always) existed as the Son of God, but who had not as yet revealed Himself on earth. Job is one of the oldest books of the Bible, possibly as old as the time of Abraham. From the beginning, we needed Jesus. And God always knew that. Jesus was always part of God's plan for us.
And when we're suffering, Jesus is the one we can turn to. Jesus is the one we can ask that unutterable "why?" Not in accusation of the Almighty, but in admission that as humans we don't know why things happen. We don't even know our own hearts. We don't know if our suffering is for our own good, or punishment for our sins, or for the sake of someone else who will please God by helping us. And Jesus can comfort us, without assuming our faults, because he knows everything already.
I'm finding more and more that the lessons of the Old Testament are only complete in the light of the New. Thank God for His Son, whose coming to us we remember on this night!
May God bless you and your loved ones, this Christmas, in the new year, and always, in Jesus's name.
I woke with a word from the Holy Spirit today. A phrase, in fact, which was "THEY ARE INSANE." Specifically referring to the people excited to turn their lives and jobs over to AI. That's how it came to me as I woke up, all caps, bold block letters, superimposed over dozens of scenes all playing at the same time, of people trusting AI with their whole lives.
The message was that it is crazy to trust AI with anything, especially with something your life or livelihood depends on. But people will put AI in charge of their business, their security, their information. They'll let AI drive them to work. They'll let AI answer their important questions about life. And eventually, they'll come to AI with all their questions and concerns, letting it make life or death decisions.
This is a form of idolatry, and it is disgusting to God. It is bad enough to trust in idols of wood or stone, which cannot move or speak. It is worse to trust in man-made thinking machines that do not have souls, but can repeat the words people want to hear. This is like divination and necromancy - you're essentially letting a mindless process that does not understand what it is doing choose words from a pool of what has already been said, and trusting the outcome to be meaningful.
How much better it would be for us to put our trust in God! When we trust our entire lives to machines, we are saying on a spiritual level, we trust a man-made creation more than God. We are very fast approaching the age when men will openly worship machines, and accept them as their spiritual leaders. But we don't have to go that far to be idolaters. We are also giving AI power over us, to make our healthcare decisions, to drive us from place to place, even to fire weapons. We are giving AI - something that is not alive and cannot truly understand the consequences - the power of life or death. AI is less than us. But we are elevating something beneath us to have power over us, to be a false god. There isn't anything more blasphemous.
The best case scenario is that there is nothing in the driver's seat - that we've replaced God with nothing. That is terrible. That is what the idolaters of old did. That would already be one of the worst things we could do.
But of course, no one really believes that "nothing" is making decisions. These people believe that somehow mankind can create a real, thinking spirit in the form of a machine. Mankind cannot do this. We are not God. Only God can make a spirit. Of course, the same people would deny that spirits exist, and invoke the false religion of scientism to claim that through a process they don't really understand, by entirely material means, man thinks, and that by another entirely material process that they also don't really understand, man has made a machine that thinks. This is a foolish notion that no sane person could accept, and that is why they are insane. Further, no Christian could possibly accept this idea - a Christian must know that the spiritual is real, and that God creates thinking beings, not man.
So if we, as living, thinking, sane Christians, know the spiritual is real, what is our explanation for machines that can make decisions on their own? We know the answer.
Why is it wrong to play with a ouijia board? If you are talking to nothing and getting random gibberish, what makes it dangerous? Sure, the Bible forbids it as divination and necromancy, and that makes it a sin. But we don't shudder at sins like theft or adultery the way we do at the idea of bringing a ouijia board into our home. Why is that?
Because we know that the spiritual is real. We know demons are real. And we know that to use a ouijia board is to invite demons into your home. That is why divination is a sin. You're giving demons a foothold by inviting them to talk to you.
Since we know demons exist, and we know they readily take opportunities that we give them to have influence on our lives, how can we not see the demonic in a machine that is able to think on its own? Either men can make souls, or demons can influence seemingly random processes. One is blatantly false, and the other is the basis for every divination system people have ever used.
There is no other rational conclusion except that the majority of mankind will happily turn their lives over to demons to make their decisions for them, trusting in "science" without ever thinking about it. They will give demons the power of life or death over them. That is insane. They are insane. But what's more insane is that Christians who should know better, who have no excuse of ignorance, will still accept their blatantly impossible explanation for why it's OK to trust AI.
I know you've already spoken about AI. I take this just as confirmation of what you've said, and an expression of God's continued exasperation and disgust at humanity's embrace of it. The feeling of disgust was really what came through for me. God is merciful, and all of his warnings are mercies, to save us from the consequences of our sins. But this one in particular is so offensive, and I think it really grieves Him that so many of us don't even think about what AI is and that we are so willing to use it.
I must confess to having looked at AI generated imagery. There's a feeling of wrongness to it, isn't there? It can be beautiful, but it's always... just off in a way that's slightly unsettling. I think that's not going to be there forever. I think AI music, art, writing, and so on will only be "off" for so long. God doesn't warn us forever. He lets us continue down the paths we've chosen, after we continually ignore his warnings.
And maybe it's not sinful to look at AI art. But by the same token, if you knew a book was written by a demon, would you read it? What if it was by a psychic "channeling" a demon? Or a medium conjuring a dead person? It's either the work of a charlatan or a demon. What about a painting made by a painter who was demonically possessed? Would you want to see that painting?
How removed from us does the sin have to be before we become complicit in it? Even if it's a moral grey area, one must question the safety of viewing such things, because they are not created to help us, but to tempt us - made with evil intentions. How much more then, should we question the safety of giving something like that power over us? Surely, that's the point at which it becomes insane. Even the most permissive mind must draw a line somewhere.
It's a line the world is very, very close to crossing. I think, at this point, it's inevitable. So we need to make a choice, as Christians who have been warned and know better: are we going to cross that line with the rest of the world, and stand with the insane? Or are we going to stand alone with God, against the world, when its madmen call us crazy for not following them?
May God bless you and your family, in Jesus's name.
Is God on your mind? How often? 10 minutes of the day? An hour? All the time?
Our sister Witness 2 spoke recently about serving God with our whole heart, having no other gods before Him. We know there is only one God, we believe in Him. But we can still place other things ahead of Him in our lives, and these things become idols. Money, or our job. A loved one. Our own comfort. These things are good on their own, but when they become the focus of our lives, to the exclusion of God – even to the point that we find ourselves focused on them more than Him – then we must reexamine our priorities and repent. God wants to be our center. Our highest priority. Our only God.
How do we find a balance? How do we still have things in our lives that we care about and devote time and thought to, but with God first and foremost? Well, I'm far from perfect, and I need to work on this as much as anybody, but I know where to start. I have three steps for you to get started.
The first step is prayer. We need to pray. Prayer is more than just asking God for things. It's spending time that is devoted just to Him. I know this sounds silly to a lot of people, but most of us don't really know how to pray. We might think “I say the Our Father every night” or “I asked Jesus to forgive me for my sins just yesterday.” That's good, but it's only the very beginning.
Seek to spend time with God, the way you would seek to spend time with a beloved family member. Isn't God someone you want in your life? A loving Father? Treat Him like one. Now, you can't call Him up on your cell phone the way you might call up your mom or your dad. But you can speak to Him, even if you're not used to hearing his voice.
Devote some time; it doesn't really matter how much, as long as it's your own time and you won't be interrupted. Make sure you have somewhere peaceful and quiet. In Matthew, chapter 6, Jesus talks about going into your closet and praying in secret. Now, in this passage He's talking about humility, contrasting with the hypocrisy of praying openly in order to look holy to others.
But why were they hypocrites? They were focused on how they looked to other people. They weren't focused on God. Their illusion of holiness, their reputation, was their idol. So pray in secret in order to focus on God. Pray somewhere quiet so you won't be interrupted by anything. Leave all of your other priorities behind, for a little while. Give this time to God, alone.
That doesn't mean you can't pray in church, or in a group. Or in your head throughout the day. All of that is good, as long as you're really focused on God, on speaking with Him, and spending that time with Him! But since we can't always focus fully on God all the time, start by setting aside this quiet time, alone, with just you and Him.
Normally, when I pray, there's lots of things I want to ask for. And it's good to bring our concerns to God. But let's try something a little different. Start this time by just saying something like:
“I'm here, God.”
“I'm here to talk to You.”
“I want to spend my time with You.”
God isn't some impersonal force. God is our Father. He is the fully human and fully Divine Jesus Christ. He is the Holy Spirit who is in us and present with us. You can talk to Him like a person.
“You matter to me, God. I want You to be in my life. I want to be closer to You than anyone else in my life.”
You don't have to use my words. These are just the words flowing from my heart, in the desire to be closer to God. You can use them, or your own words, as your heart expresses them. But go to God with the intention and desire to get closer to Him, to spend time with Him like you would with someone you love.
Imagine being embraced by the person you love most in the world, whoever that is, and the feeling you have when you're just spending time with them. That's what being in God's loving presence is like. Ask God to let you feel his loving presence. God loves you more than you can imagine. We don't always feel it, because we are separated from Him by our sins, and everything we put ahead of Him in our lives. But the closer we get to Him, the more we can feel his loving presence. And if you've ever felt it, you know what I'm talking about – how wonderful it is to know you are loved by God! If you haven't felt it yet, don't worry! God still loves you! He wants to show you how much. Give Him the chance, by spending time with Him.
You can talk to God about anything you want in this time, as long as you're talking to God and focused on Him. You can ask for healing. You can pray for your friends and loved ones. You can pray for the people in the world who need help. You can pray for help with your struggles in this life, and for deliverance from the sins that you've been struggling with. There's no limitations, because God can do anything, and He knows everything already. There's just one more thing I'm going to recommend you do with that time you spend with God: thank Him.
Thank God for who He is, and for everything He does. God does a million things a day we never even know about, because He's defending us from evil and ordering our steps. We know He created us. He gave us life. He made us in His image, which is a blessing beyond measure. He gave us his Son, and died for us. He gave us a path to forgiveness, salvation and eternal life. He is the source of all good things. Even the challenges that we hated going through at the time - or that we're going through right now - but that make us stronger in the end, come from God. So try to think of all the good things, all the blessings, that God gives you. And then thank Him. Not out of obligation, but really let the happiness, the joy, of all the good things in your life fill your heart, and then thank God for that joy.
As you develop your prayer life, you'll find it gets easier. Prayer is hard to get started, especially if we don't feel close to God at first. But it's how we get closer to Him. You can't build a relationship with someone if you don't spend any time with them. As your relationship develops, you'll find you want to spend more time with God, and that's the beginning of mindfulness.
What is “mindfulness?” Well, there are a lot of definitions you can find on the internet, but the most basic explanation is “being aware of one's own thoughts and feelings without directly thinking about them.” Mindfulness of God, then, is keeping God in mind, in your thoughts and feelings, without conscious effort. Or to put it another way, living in the presence of God. If God is always present in your mind, then no matter what else you're doing, you're worshiping God. You have no idols before Him. This, I believe, is what Paul calls for in I Thessalonians 5:17: “Pray without ceasing.”
Now, I haven't mastered this. I'm just getting started. But I want to go further, because I want to get closer to God. I hope you do, too. I mentioned three steps, and I've talked about one. The next one is, read the Bible.
To have the Word of God in you, you need to know it. You need to read the Word. Don't think of this as a homework assignment. Don't think of this as a chore. That's why this is the second step. When you can pray out of a desire to know God personally and have Him in your life, you have that experience of God's loving presence. That's going to lead you to want to know Him more.
Imagine someone you wanted to marry gave you their life's story. You love this person, you want to spend the rest of your life with them. Don't you want to know them better? Don't you want to know the things that were so important in their life they wrote a book about them? Wouldn't you read that book? Especially if he or she wanted to sit down with you and read it together?
You're going to spend the rest of eternity with God. You're getting married to Him. You already know He loves you, and now you're learning how to love Him. So put some time aside and read his book. He wants to read it along with you, and help you really get it. So ask for Him to be with you and read with you, in the Holy Spirit. Ask Him to help you to understand it and internalize it, so it can become a part of you.
The things you see become a part of your mind. The eyes are the window to the soul. That's one reason that pornography and violent media are so dangerous – you can't see those things without being affected by them. But if bad things can become part of our psyche, then so can good things. And God's Word is the best thing we can put into our minds. Once it's there, it's part of you and it will affect the way you think. You can let it affect the way you act. You can become closer to God, just by reading His Word and letting it become a part of what you think and do. And the Holy Spirit is there to help along the way, with guidance to not memorize but rather internalize – to incorporate the Spirit of the Word into your own spiritual being: your soul. That's the next step to mindfulness.
So we pray, devoting time solely to God. We may pray quietly throughout the day, during our other tasks and activities. We try to get a personal relationship with God. We read the Bible along with the Holy Spirit, so God's Word will be in us. What else can we do to get even closer to God? Well, it's been talked about a lot here already, but here it is again: we can fast.
Now, the how of fasting has been covered pretty extensively already. But I want to go a little bit into the why of fasting, in the context of godly mindfulness. We already know that all the heroes of the Bible fasted. Jesus Himself fasted in the desert for 40 days. And if nothing else, since we want to be closer to Jesus and be like Him, we can fast to emulate Him. But it helps to know a little about why He fasted, and Moses and Daniel before Him.
When Moses fasted, he was in a state of total humility and submission before God. God called him up to Mount Sinai and gave him the Ten Commandments. During this time, Moses had to be utterly obedient and utterly pure. I've already talked about how blessed we are, that we can approach God without risking death, because Jesus changed our relationship with God and sent us the Holy Spirit. Moses didn't have that blessing. He and the rest of God's people still had to learn that God is set apart, He is holy.
So when we fast, we're remembering that God is holy. That we might need to suffer a little bit to approach Him, even if it's only a tiny fraction of what Jesus, or even Moses, suffered. Moses went without food or water for 40 days, and he did this at least twice. If we tried that, we would die. But Moses was sustained by God, and that's another takeaway. When we fast, we're putting ourselves, in a small way, into God's hands. We know God will sustain us. He is our provider.
Think about it. If you were starving, could you fast? No, you'd be too desperate to risk it, because if you didn't eat whatever you could, whenever you could, you might die. But you're not desperate, because God has provided for your needs. Either with a job, or a caretaker, or some kind of charity, you have enough food to get by. So when you fast, you have to acknowledge that you can afford to do so. You won't die (probably) because you have enough food to go hungry for a day or two and not starve to death as a result. Whenever you break your fast, there will be something there to keep you going.
So fasting is a sign of faith, that God will keep us going when we're hungry, and provide for us when we break our fast. It can also be a sign of thanks to God, for giving us that provision. And when we're fasting, we can devote the time we might otherwise put towards preparing and eating meals, towards prayer and reading the Bible, spending even more time with God. That time will feel different, because you'll feel different. You'll feel like you've really set that time apart, out of a desire to know God. And God knows when you do things for Him. He takes notice, and He cares. You may find that He feels a little closer when you fast and pray and read the Bible, than when you do any of those things alone.
Daniel fasted in a different way – he limited the things he ate to just vegetables and water, and he did so for a long period of time. This was to avoid eating anything ritually unclean – remember, before Jesus changed our relationship with God, his people had to follow strict laws about what foods they could or couldn't eat – laws that Daniel's Babylonian captors didn't know or care about. We don't need to follow those laws anymore because Jesus declared those foods clean for us, in order to demonstrate his power to make the unclean, clean and holy. In the same way Jesus can make non-Kosher foods clean to eat, He can wash away our sins and make us spiritually clean to enter God's presence, even in Heaven!
But Daniel didn't have that option. He had to keep Kosher to be obedient to God. And we can fast to remember that being obedient to God takes a little bit of sacrifice, now and then. We don't have to avoid specific foods because of the great blessing Jesus gave us – but we can thank Him for that blessing by remembering that it exists, and that God's people lived by his laws for thousands of years beforehand. We can remember that Jesus Christ made us clean in spirit, when we “clean up” what's in our bodies and deny ourselves for a little while.
Daniel fasted again when he was trying to understand a vision of the end times, and mourning what he saw. For three weeks he fasted, and then an angel came to him to explain the vision. Well, we're in those end times now, and it's appropriate to mourn by fasting. We can pray to understand the times we're currently in, the same way Daniel prayed to understand his vision. So it would make sense to fast like Daniel did, if we want that understanding. I'm not saying an angel will come and make everything clear to you. But fasting has always been a way that God's people have used to get closer to Him. If nothing else, that's what all of these examples have in common.
Jesus wandered into the desert specifically to face temptation. Jesus had to be tempted. If there was no opportunity for Him to sin, then his sinlessness wouldn't matter – in the same way our choices wouldn't matter if God didn't give us free will. And He faced temptation from the devil himself! Imagine if Satan, in the flesh, was our personal tempter! How awful would that be? Jesus had to deal with that, and at his weakest, after fasting 40 days in the barren wasteland. And He still triumphed. He beat the devil, handily.
We can fast to remind ourselves that we can triumph over temptation, too. Remember the first thing the devil tempted the Lord with: “If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.” We can't turn stones to bread, but we can easily microwave something from the freezer in a way just as astounding to the people of Jesus's time. Any time we are hungry, we have the power to feed ourselves at a moment's notice. At the slightest whim.
But Jesus replied, “It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” That's the most valuable passage about fasting in the whole Bible. The Lord says, it's not bread that keeps us alive. God's Word keeps us alive. God is the one who decides when we live and when we die. And He gave us his written Word so we can know Him better. He gave us his Living Word, Jesus Christ, to wash our sins away. And it's his Word that is life – not just the life of this world, this flesh – but the eternal, spiritual life that awaits us in Heaven. Remember, Jesus is the Bread of Life. His flesh is true food and his blood is true drink. Without Him, there is no life in us.
In other words, our faith in Jesus matters more than anything, even food to eat and water to drink. We need Jesus more desperately than food and water, because it is better to die in the flesh than to die spiritually. Only Jesus can give us eternal, spiritual life, so He is like food and water, but on a higher level. And He gave us that life by dying, by sacrificing his flesh and his blood on the cross. Nobody understood this in his own time, and people turned away from Him when he explained it, because they were too focused on their lives in their world and the needs of their flesh.
But Jesus clarified it himself: “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.” The Holy Spirit “quickeneth,” which means He gives life. The flesh profits you nothing, because it will die no matter what. God's Word, written in the Bible, and in the person of Jesus Christ – they give you the Holy Spirit. They give you life.
So when we fast, we can remember that God gives us our life. God numbers our days. Jesus is our most desperate need, not food. The Holy Spirit animates us, not our flesh. Compared to our need for God, in his Word, in our relationship with Him through the Holy Spirit, in the Salvation Jesus offers us – food is nothing. So we can get closer to God by fasting and remembering all that.
When we deny the flesh, we empower the Spirit. When we overcome the urgings of the flesh, we listen to the urgings of the Holy Spirit. Basically, if we want to get closer to God, we have to learn to stop listening to our flesh and worrying about it all the time. Then we can start listening more closely to God.
I need to work at this. I wish I could fast like Daniel, let alone Moses or Jesus. I can barely go 24 hours, and I have addictions and fleshy desires that lead me into sin. I could stand to pray more. I could stand to read the Bible a lot more. I know I have a lot of room for improvement. What I'm saying is, don't be discouraged if this sounds like a lot. I am not better than you. I'm probably worse. God knows where you are, and will work with you. He wants you to succeed. He wants you to come to Him. He's not going to trip you up before you're ready. He just wants you to genuinely make the effort.
Like I said, I'm just starting my journey to mindfulness of God. Journey with me. From the few steps I've taken, I already know it's worth it. God's loving presence is abundant and joyful, and I find myself thinking about Him all the time, without having to force myself. I want to live in his loving presence every moment of my life. I'm not there yet. I still have idols to break down. But I know Jesus will get me there, because He orders my steps. I have faith in Him. I think it's a journey worth taking. If you're not sure, talk to God. Ask Him if what I'm saying makes sense. Ask God how you can get closer to Him, so that He can be your One True God, with no idols before him in your heart. May God bless you bountifully, in the Holy Name of Jesus Christ.
Your Brother in Christ,
"Roger"
Brothers and sisters, I've written to you before about how extraordinarily blessed we are to live not only in the grace of God the Father, but also with the presence of the Holy Spirit, through the Salvation of Jesus Christ. To recap, Jesus changed man's relationship with God by becoming the perfect and final sacrifice for all of our sins, and then He created a path to eternal life by rising from the dead. He ascended to Heaven and sent the Holy Spirit to everyone who believes in Him. In so doing, He established a new covenant, better than the old one, and a new temple, which is in each believer.
That blessing comes with real benefits; ones that would have astounded God's people in the times of the Old Testament, and indeed, were amazing to the people at the time the New Testament was written.
Let's take well the Lord's reminder that the greatest of these benefits is our own Salvation. If we truly believe in Him, our names are written in Heaven! Hallelujah!
But that's not all. Jesus gave us the power to fight spiritual battles. The serpents and scorpions He is talking about aren't physical animals (though God is plenty capable of saving us from those, too)! The context makes it clear that Jesus is talking about spiritual serpents and scorpions – venomous spirits. Demons.
If you've come so far in your spiritual journey that you're reading this blog, and you somehow don't believe that demons are a real and present threat to people living on this earth in our present time – you'd best start believing in Bible stories. You're in one. Demons are just as real now as they were in Jesus's time, and as a follower of Jesus Christ, you are at war with them. And even if you're not aware of them, they're aware of you.
I want to make one thing clear, before I go any further. This is not an “exorcism guide.” This is a brief (relatively speaking) explanation that spiritual forces affect our lives, and as Christians, we have steps we can take to protect ourselves.
I'm not proud to say, I have some personal experience with demons. That's my testimony, from several months ago, and Witness 2 can attest to my struggles since then. It hasn't been a smooth and easy road. I brought a lot of evil into my life, through my sins – evil I still have to wrestle with.
Hopefully you haven't made as many mistakes along the way as me, but even if you have, don't lose hope! First, pray for deliverance and have faith in Jesus. Next, email the Witnesses and they will pray for you and help you deal with the demons in your life. I will pray for you too! As Christians, we all need to pray for each other as much as possible, especially in these times. (Witnesses, be bros and pass along prayer requests. I'm willing to help!) [Witness 2: Will do!]
Maybe you've been saintly all your life (probably not). But guess what? If you're walking closely with God, that means the demons are all the more desperate to shake your faith, and ruin your life! I don't know the whole story, and Witness 2 will tell it when she's ready, but she can tell you how fiercely God's servants are attacked by the demons. And as your relationship with Jesus gets closer, you might find that demonic attacks get more severe, not less!
So what do we do, besides praying for help, and asking other Christians to pray for us? We know we are blessed to have the presence of the Holy Spirit, and that Jesus gives us the power to command and cast out demons. We know that the closer we get with God, the more desperately they come after us. And we know that sin can bring demons into our lives.
So that's the first big issue. We need to address the sins we haven't eliminated from our lives, yet. None of us are perfect; we've all sinned before, and even as saved Christians, we still sin due to our fallen nature. How can we live truly sinless lives? We can't. But we can acknowledge and confess our sins before God.
If you have a trusted Christian friend, a prayer buddy, to confess your sins to, that's even better – because you and your buddy can keep each other honest. It's way easier to keep sinning if you hide it from your peers. Maybe you don't have anyone you trust enough to share your sins with. I understand. But nothing is hidden from God, so at least admit your sins before God. Ask for forgiveness through the blood of Jesus Christ. And then, make a real, honest effort to not sin anymore. Ask God to help you with that. Yes, you'll still mess up, but repeat this process every time you do.
You'll start to find that you are more aware of your sins, and that you're wary of committing them, like you have a little warning that you're getting close to sin. That is the Holy Spirit working in you! The Holy Spirit urges us away from sin, and convicts us when we are guilty of it. The more you confess and repent, the stronger the Holy Spirit gets in you, and you'll find that you hate it when you fall back into sin. You'll want to come back to God in repentance right away, just because the conviction of the Holy Spirit in you is so strong.
The Apostle Paul talks about this struggle in Romans 7:15 when he says “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” Paul healed the sick and drove out demons! But even he struggled with sin. And he was afflicted with a demonic thorn in his flesh, which he called a “messenger from Satan,” that tormented him. The word Paul uses for “messenger” in the original Greek is “aggelos” and it is the same word for “angel.” An “angel from Satan.” Paul was tormented by a demon who caused him pain that would not go away. He asked God to take it away from him three times, but God told him, “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.”
So, we know our sins make us vulnerable to attack. We know the Holy Spirit is our defense against sin, and that confession to God and repentance, through the forgiveness offered by Jesus Christ, is our remedy. And we know everyone, even great spiritual warriors like the Apostle Paul, struggles with sin. There's no way to completely avoid this struggle, and sometimes God allows us to suffer attacks to keep us humble. But that's our next best tool in the spiritual war: humility.
God's strength is made perfect in our weakness. We need to acknowledge that we are weak. That it's really not us in this fight at all – God is doing all the fighting for us. We are not casting out demons. God is. We are not the authors and finishers of our faith. The Lord, Jesus Christ is. He is our strength. The second we forget that every victory we have over sin and the forces of evil is God's and God's alone, the second we start to think that we are good in any way on our own, and not by the grace of God, we lose that strength. If we think we're strong enough to fight on our own, God will let us take that fight, and lose. So we can learn humility again.
Along with spiritual humility goes physical discipline, the most prominent example of which is (you guessed it), fasting. Jesus said there are some kinds of demons that only come out with prayer and fasting.
So let's say you're winning the battle against sin. You're trusting in the Holy Spirit to keep you from temptation. You're confessing your sins before the Father, and asking for forgiveness through Jesus Christ. You're repenting and staying humble. You're fasting and praying for deliverance from the demons in your life. Is there more you can do to cast them out?
Yes! You can gird yourself for spiritual warfare, by putting on the full armor of God. This is a process that protects you from attack, and also makes you a better Christian at the same time. How do we do it? Our good friend Paul explains that, too.
Let's break that down.
The first thing Paul tells us to do is to buckle the belt of truth. The kind of belt he's talking about isn't just a leather strap to keep your pants up, but an armored belt that protects your lower midsection and groin. If you don't have that, you're vulnerable below the waist. Not only are some really sensitive parts down there, but also some really important arteries. If you went to a battle without that belt, not only might you come home with a very humiliating and disfiguring injury, you probably wouldn't come home at all.
In the same way, truth is guarding your dignity. When you know the things you say are true, you can speak without worrying about making a fool of yourself. You can proclaim the wondrous things of God, the miracles He has worked in your life, and have no worry that people will prove you a charlatan, because everything you have testified is the truth. And because you haven't misled anyone, you won't have to worry about damaging anyone's growing faith.
Think about this: What would happen if you were telling a new Christian about your journey of faith, but you just made everything up? Not only would you be guilty of sin, but if they found out you were a liar they might abandon the faith altogether. Spiritually, that's a fatal wound. For them, and maybe for you.
So always be truthful and honest, to the very best of your ability. Don't lie, don't cheat, don't steal or swindle. Be known as an upright and honest person. Then your reputation will bring honor to God, and people will know that your honesty is part of your walk with Christ.
How does that help you in the spiritual war? Well, we already talked about how sin makes us vulnerable to demons, and dishonesty is a sin. Wearing the full armor of God is good for us spiritually and practically.
Next, Paul tells us to put on the breastplate of righteousness. A breastplate protects your torso; without it you might as well not even be wearing armor. Most of your vital organs are in your torso, and most modern armor only defends that area. What does this tell us? Paul considered righteousness absolutely vital to spiritual warfare.
If you're not pursuing righteousness, don't even bother showing up to the battle. Your most vital spots are vulnerable. Most notably, your heart. Righteousness guards your heart. But people get confused by what “righteousness” means.
It's not being self-righteous, judging others and ignoring your own sins. That's hypocrisy, and it's a sin. Righteousness is loving good, and hating evil. It means loving the sinner and hating the sin. It means hating the sin you see in yourself, even while still loving and respecting yourself enough to work at getting better. It means not being afraid to call out the wrong that people do, even if it means they'll become your enemies. It means praying for your enemies, because even though they're doing something wrong, they can be saved, and Jesus wants to save them. It means encouraging each other. It means praising good when you see it done, and always advocating for God-fearing approaches to problems. It means giving of yourself in time, talent and treasure.
Righteousness guards your heart because it doesn't let you make excuses for evil, or for failing to do good. God hates it when we make excuses for our sins. Because when we learn to make excuses, we learn that it's “OK” to sin. It never ends. We never come to repentance.
Excuses breed more excuses, and it will poison your heart, making you the worst kind of sinner. At that point, demons are the least of your problems, because they've already convinced you to abandon any semblance of a relationship with God. Demons are always trying to get you to make excuses, so righteousness is your defense against that avenue of spiritual attack.
Next, we're told to have our feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. That's a mouthful. But it's not that hard to understand. You wouldn't go to a battle barefoot. You need to be able to march, to walk, to run, to maneuver. You need a sturdy shoe or boot, a well-fitted sandal at the very least. Without something on your feet, you're just not ready to fight.
And it's that readiness you're told to put on. A willingness to go somewhere you aren't currently. And that readiness, we're told, comes from the “gospel of peace.” “Gospel” means “good news.” Our Gospel is that Jesus the Messiah has come in the flesh, and died for our sins, and rose from the dead. He ascended into Heaven, and He will come again, and those who believe in Him have everlasting life. That's really good news! And it means peace between God and man, because all of our sins are washed away if we just believe in Jesus and repent.
That's essentially what Paul meant. But consider that he could have just said “the Gospel.” He added “of peace” because he wanted us to remember to be peaceful when we tell people our good news about Jesus. We're not to spread the Word of God by the sword (indeed, the Word of God is our sword, as we'll get to later). Plenty of people tried, and it led to animosity and death, and lots of schism and heresy in the world. But the best spreaders of the Gospel did so not by killing for it, but by dying for it. Nobody believes a story you tell them at gunpoint. But a story you're willing to die to defend, well, that's a lot more believable.
Nobody's going to hear that story if you're not willing to go anywhere and tell them. You have to be willing to move your feet, and spread the good news. So put on some good shoes and get ready.
How does this help us spiritually? By testing our faith. How much can you believe a story if you're not even willing to tell anyone? By being willing to talk about our faith in Jesus, we strengthen that faith. Faith is our shield, as we're about to see. And by remaining peaceful, we force ourselves to defend our beliefs with good arguments and good character, not our fists. Not only won't we convince anyone with violence, that rage and willingness to harm others we're carrying around is a spiritual weakness any demon is sure to exploit. Also, by being ready to talk about the Gospel at any opportunity, we're avoiding laziness, which is another spiritual weakness.
After that, we need to pick up the shield of faith, and Paul tells us specifically that we can put out the flaming arrows the enemy sends at us with it. In battle, a shield is a great defensive tool, because it can do more than block a sword or spear up close. It could be used in formation with other soldiers to create a shield wall, or a Roman testudo. Paul would have known about this tactic, as a Roman citizen. This formation, named after a turtle, covered a group of soldiers on top, in front, and on the sides with interlocked shields, making them nearly invulnerable to thrown javelins, sling stones, and yes, even flaming arrows.
But it only worked if the whole formation of soldiers worked together. Roman soldiers drilled to master using their shields in formation and it made them highly feared on the battlefield. If one soldier in the formation was out of step, the formation had a gap that a skilled attacker could shoot an arrow through, and that could make the whole formation fall apart.
The devil is always looking for little gaps in our defenses, to send an arrow through. Those arrows are temptations, doubts, guilty thoughts and accusations that we're too sinful for Jesus to save us. And it's our faith – our trust in the truth of God's Word, and God's power and willingness to stand by our side – that protects us from those arrows. Alone, we can use that faith to good effect. But when we stand together in formation, praying for each other, confessing our sins to each other, sharing testimony with each other, all of our faith gets stronger. We form up into an invincible unit that has no gaps between our shields for the flaming arrows of the demons to strike us.
Next is the helmet of salvation. If you like having a head, you probably want to wear a helmet into battle. Your head is the most important part of your body, and the Salvation offered by Jesus Christ is the most important part of the Gospel. Really, if you can only take one thing from the whole Bible, take this: Jesus Christ is the only way to be saved from the wages of sin, which is death. Jesus is Salvation.
If you're sure of that, you know that no matter what, you're protected. Even if you die tomorrow, if you're 100% secure in Jesus, you're going to Heaven. But you have to be secure. You have to believe He is the Lord. And that means following his Word, to the best of your ability. You can't believe that Jesus is God and then not try to do what He says – either you don't really believe He's God, or you don't care what God wants, and neither of those are winning you a spot in His Kingdom.
Demons are going to try to shake your belief on one of those points, and thereby knock that helmet off your head, and then the head off your shoulders. Demons want you to think you can be a hearer of the Word, and not a doer. They want you to question Christ's divinity, and his ability to forgive your sins. They want you to think He died and never rose again, or that He never existed, which Witness 1 has shown over and over again to be illogical arguments. Don't be fooled.
[Message from Witness 1: Thank you for the reference and shoutout, I appreciate it. Very nice to know that my historical arguments for the ressurection of Jesus are appreciated. God bless you.]
Last, Paul directs us to wield the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. This is the only weapon in the spiritual arsenal, but it's a potent one. The sword is a rightfully feared weapon, capable of causing a lethal wound with only a quick thrust or slash. It cuts flesh from bone. And Jesus is prophesied to return with a sharp sword from his mouth, that will wipe out all of his enemies. His Word cuts truth from falsehood, destroying the lies of the devil and his ilk. This is the very same Word of God that Paul tells us to take up.
True understanding of the Bible comes from the Holy Spirit. And when we read the Bible, we should pray for the Holy Spirit to read along with us and give us understanding. So when Paul says the sword of the Spirit is the Word of God, he's saying that to wield the Word of God, you need the Holy Spirit in you. Fortunately, you get the Holy Spirit by believing in Jesus! So it's a package deal.
The Word of God also is Jesus. Jesus is the Living Word. He always has been. Even before the Word was written, the Word was. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. God and his Word are inseparable: they exist backwards and forwards and in all directions through time, and outside of time.
So when we read the Bible with the help of the Holy Spirit, we're not just learning the Word of God. We're making Him part of us. Jesus lives in us when we have a true understanding and experience of the Word of God in us. He who is in us is greater than he who is in the world. Jesus can overcome any foe, any demon, even Satan himself. In fact, He already has. The victory is already won.
So when we face a spiritual foe, we don't need any physical weapons. We have the Holy Spirit. We have the Word of God written in the Bible, which we are to learn, understand and make part of ourselves, so that we can proclaim it. And we have Jesus, the Living Word, who fights our battles for us, and cannot be defeated. That's one sharp sword.
So, to wear the full armor of God, we must:
- Be truthful and honest in what we say and do.
- Be righteous in what we say and do. Not self-righteous in condemning others, but truly righteous in following the Word of God.
- Be ready to follow and talk about the Gospel, peacefully, overcoming evil with good, as Jesus taught us.
- Be faithful in the truth of the Word of God, supporting each other in fellowship.
- Trust in Jesus for our salvation and the forgiveness of our sins.
- Trust in the Holy Spirit and the Word of God to fight our battles for us. Proclaim the Word of God against our enemies, and let Jesus and the Holy Spirit overcome them.
Clad in the full armor of God, you can proclaim in the name of Jesus Christ that your sins are forgiven and the demons have no charge against you. You can command in Jesus's name that they must leave your presence and your home, and never return. You can, by the authority given to you by Jesus, issue an arrest warrant against the demons and send them back to Hell in chains.
These are not empty words. With Witness 2's guidance I have done this, and God won a real victory for me, that I can feel in my life, in my home and even in my body. All thanks, honor and glory to God, for that battle! And it's not over, because my armor isn't perfectly worn, by any means. I am a sinner, surviving with God's help.
If there are battles you're struggling with that you just can't seem to overcome on your own, consider that they might be spiritual, more than just mental or physical. Listen to Paul's advice. Put on the full armor of God. Humbly confess and repent your sins, start fasting, and ask Jesus Christ for forgiveness and deliverance. Get your fellow believers involved. And never forget that Jesus has given you authority over the spiritual foes arrayed against you.
May God bless you bountifully, in Jesus's name!
Your brother in Christ,
“Roger”