Revival Hope

Again I'm hoping maybe it really isn't too late to save America, to have revival that resuscitates an entire nation and pulls it back from the brink of death.

Here's where Leonard Ravenhill would have us start:

...[I]f I could, I would like to call together thousands of preachers in different countries of the world to spend a week in prayer for renewal. I would like to see them given instruction in prayer; not seminars on prayer, mind you, but exhortation to pray. We would spend the whole week praying, with periodic breaks. I believe this could be a detergent in the life of the Church. It would be a cleansing process. We could go back to our churches and perhaps stave off judgment, and God would usher in the revival that must* come. [p. 95, America Is Too Young To Die. Christian Life Books paperback]

This ought to be a prayer in itself, but I've found that I can't pray that big. I can barely pray for thousands of preachers in America myself, let alone the whole world. Which I guess means I don't have the faith for a movement that large. But wouldn't it be great if thousands of us all over the nation prayed for this to happen?

It seems right that it should start with the preachers, the pastors of churches, and the elders and deacons. That's where the revival in the Hebrides under Duncan Campbell started, with the church leaders saddened by the falling away of the young people in the community and desiring to revive them, so getting together two or three nights a week to pray, while a couple of the elder women in the congregation prayed together at home at the same time.

We need a HUGE revival in America, a nation-wide revival, and of course a world-wide revival would be even better, but Ravenhill's book is about America under God's judgment and what it would take to save the nation, and the theme of my recent posts has been the same. America is going to go under completely if the churches don't rise to the occasion and pray out their hearts for revival. The same is true of all the nations of Europe and all I can do is hope the fire would spread there too.

And please, not the kind of revival they had in Brownsville with people passing out and jerking and flailing around as if that's the whole point of revival while the word of God hardly got heard, but a revival that majors in conviction of sin and repentance first of all, at all levels of the Church from the pastors on down. That's where REAL revival always starts and that's what the nation needs, after all, if judgment is to be averted.

There always seems to be less preaching during revivals from what I've read, God Himself doing the major work of it, but there must be some preaching of the truth if there isn't going to be a flood of false doctrine taking over. People can get saved but have some very strange ideas about Christian theology and someone has to teach them.

The very best book I've found on revival is Brian H. Edwards' Revival!

[Back later to say more about this book]

How do you tell a true revival from a counterfeit?

Reading in Leonard Ravenhill this evening, a book he wrote in 1979, America Is Too Young To Die, his usual powerful exhortations to a failing church, exhortations to repentance, to holiness, to prayer, to revival. It's rich with quotations I'd like to copy out and hope I will soon. It's so sad that it's been over thirty years and America still hasn't seen revival considering that Leonard Ravenhill prayed for years for revival and preached and wrote exhortations that moved many.

But some would disagree that we've had no revivals since then. In the back of the book there are ads for other books put out by the same publishing company, all revival-oriented, some of them about genuine revivals I'm aware of that go back a hundred years or more, but some on highly questionable revivals. There is a series of books, for instance, about the "Azusa Street Revival" of 1904 which I came to believe years ago was a false revival, but now I'm going to have to repeat my research on it to convince myself again, because I find it so hard to reconcile an ad for that event with the solid Biblical position of Ravenhill -- can't the publishers tell the difference?

There's also an ad for a book on the supposed "Brownsville Revival" of the 90s in Pensacola, Florida, which I've also been convinced was counterfeit. Again I'm going to have to do more research, but I did start by finding some video of that "revival" on You Tube and it's really quite fascinating. It's the first time I've actually seen some of the phenomena I'd only read and heard about otherwise, people falling down, jumping up and down "in the spirit" and having the "jerks" and generally acting "drunk in the spirit."

Well, to be accurate, I'd seen something like it in charismatic contexts, people falling down when the leader -- usually a visiting "evangelist" -- touched them and prayed over them, but I was never convinced that was for real. None of it appeared to be involuntary -- though some of it may have been, I don't know, there was no way to tell.

I also saw some people fall down under helpless laughter at a charismatic retreat, but not the whole group, just a few. The "Laughing Revival" in Toronto was going strong during that period and it was clear the people in the group where I was were really having some kind of laughing fit they couldn't stop. I've experienced out-of-control laughter that takes your breath away and makes your sides hurt and that's what this looked like, but it went on an entire night in one case at least and maybe more and it was all attributed to the Holy Spirit.

Brownsville wasn't into laughter, but it certainly was into passing out, jerking and flailing and the like. And now I know it is very very real, whatever it is. You can see it particularly in a four-part You Tube video, the first part of which I've embedded below -- you click on a message at the end of each which will take you to the next part -- where one of the leaders/pastors is interviewing various people about their experiences in the "revival." Most of them experienced these phenomena even in the process of being interviewed -- watch the young black man as he is waiting for his turn in the second part -- and the interviewer himself almost succumbed a few times later on, his head jerking uncontrollably at times, almost completely falling down at least once. The phenomenon seems to start with small jerks of the upper body and may or may not progress to full body flailing movements and/or falling down, though some just seem to get weak in the knees and fall down without any of the other manifestations.

It appeared some were making a mighty effort to control the effects. Whatever these things are they are clearly real in the sense that the people are not intentionally doing them but it's all just happening to them. I think this is completely obvious on the film.

They call it "the power of the Spirit" and refer it all to God and Jesus. But is that what it really is?

It seems that all they talk about is the physical manifestations themselves. This is what interests them, what they come for, what suffices for "revival." They "give the glory to God" but IS God the author of all this? They seem drunk, and they love being drunk, it's obviously a lot of fun. The crowd applauds when someone falls down or shows other evidence of being "under the power" and they laugh and jump up and down in the normal voluntary emotional way to see that clearly INvoluntary stuff going on. It all reminds me of the giggles people get on various illegal drugs recognizing that everybody else is also high. Very much like that. Drunk. Stoned.

What IS this phenomenon?

The interviewees say God "really did a work" in them or something along those lines, when they were out cold on the floor, or God "healed me" and so on. But the actual content of the experience is oddly vague and scrambled or not voiced at all while the jerking and falling and whatever the feeling is that goes along with those manifestations are celebrated as what it is really about. "Give me more," more more more, says the first woman. More WHAT? Apparently just whatever the feeling is that makes her stagger and eventually fall down and not wake up until 3:30 in the morning.

Is God REALLY the author of these things? Is God glorified in such phenomena?



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogSrTm598XE&feature=related

Since the people in the Brownsville "revival" clearly believe it is the work of the Holy Spirit and give thanks to God, talk about cleaning up their lives and plead the blood of Christ and the like, I don't want to come to any premature conclusions on the basis of some negative impressions but want to study it more. The test is always the fruit, as the Lord says, so what has been the fruit of Brownsville? True revivals change the surrounding community in some way and the participants in the revival go on to do meaningful Christian work. Has that been happening?

There have been many credible witnesses of former revivals that were undoubtedly true revivals who reported that such phenomena also occurred to some participants --sometimes understood in earlier times to evidence a bad conscience under conviction of sin, or a weak constitution -- but in those cases the manifestations were not made the center of the revival as they obviously were in Brownsville. So there is room, it seems, to recognize that such things may happen to some people in a true revival, but when they dominate and become the focus as if they are the whole point of the revival itself they've got to be considered at least a distraction from God's true work. I'm not completely happy with this way of sorting it out but it would be risky to assume more than this.

At the very least I have to say that this is not the revival I'm praying for, and I specifically pray that such phenomena not be welcomed and applauded if God sends us revival, though I'm not going to say it shouldn't be expected or tolerated. If the focus isn't clearly on conviction and repentance from sin and changed lives it's just too vague WHAT it's about.

==========
Later, I'm convinced this all does come from God now, my impression after watching the video a number of times, but I'm also puzzled at the different kinds of revivals that apparently all come from God. [June 13 2012: I don't remember what made me think this was of God back then, probably nothing more than believing one or two of the participants. But as I review it now I have to go with all the misgivings I had at the time as well. This can't be from God.] Just what's on these videos makes it appear that repentance from sin was NOT part of this revival. There's more of a spirit of accusation from the pastor's wife, for instance, a complaint she had against the church, a statement about being "hurt," no sense of her own being at fault, so rather than being forgiven by God she thinks in terms of being "healed" by God, or released from a "curse" she's been under, or from a kind of imprisonment. The young black man said something about having done some bad things but he also denied that he was a bad guy and there was no spirit of repentance in him either.

This kind of thing is what I've witnessed in charismatic contexts myself -- much emphasis on healing and release, no sense of repentance. (I do have to note that the Wikipedia article on the Brownsville revival says that preaching on sin and experiences of conviction and repentance definitely WERE part of this revival, though that wasn't evident on the video above.)

But it's the great revivals in which God breaks people under conviction of sin and self-accusation that I've only read about that seem to carry God's power out to the community and affect the participants for the rest of their lives. This is the sort of revival I hope would come to America. The revival in Saskatchewan in the 70s started with repentance among the church members and I think their pastor Bill McLeod ought to be a model for all pastors today because he spent hours praying for his church every day until the revival came. This charismatic kind of thing in Florida just seems weak by comparison. The TONE of it bothers me, the giddiness or giggliness. What WAS the fruit of Brownsville?

What do the churches need to repent of?

Thinking about how Christians need to fast and pray and repent for the sake of America I was trying to determine what the main sins of the churches are -- where we should start. There are plenty of problems with America at large of course, but how much of it should be laid at the door of the churches? In a sense all of them, I believe, simply because a strong Bible-based and Spirit-led church utterly dependent on God would have prevented them from happening. I'm assuming the failure started with the church back somewhere but I don't know how to locate that point. The Deism of our Founders perhaps? The Higher Criticism that infected so many in the middle of the 19th century? Well, the churches that succumbed to that are now utterly apostate, denying the full inspiration and authority of the Bible, allowing women pastors, treating homosexuality as a normal expression rather than a sin, even having homosexual pastors. And that's just the start of it. Whole church denominations are given over to some false doctrine or another and if this isn't the Great Apostasy predicted in scripture it's hard to imagine what that would look like. There is also an amazing trend of supposedly Protestant churches treating Romanism as a true church.

But I'd like to think more about the specific sins of the churches that are still good churches, that still adhere to Biblical inerrancy for instance, that teach the true gospel of salvation by faith alone through grace alone.

Even in those churches you may hear teaching that is very soft on divorce and remarriage for instance. Studies have determined that Christians are divorced in the same proportions as the rest of the society, even possibly greater proportions. We hear these statistics and they make us sad but does anybody stop to think that this has to be because the churches themselves aren't upholding Biblical teaching on divorce and remarriage? I've thought this for some time but hardly ever hear this preached against. I found one good discussion of the problem BY A ROMAN CATHOLIC (can't find the link right now, hope I can track it down). I had to agree with him. Too bad. The Catholics do get some things right biblically which is a terrible indictment of the Protestant and nonCatholic churches.

I know of churches that are more or less Bible believing and true to the gospel that nevertheless have divorced/remarried pastors and elders and deacons, which seems to me to be clearly in violation of scripture, specifically Jesus' own teaching on the subject. Seems to me if God should bless such a church with revival He'd have to begin by convicting them of this violation and the only way it could be properly dealt with would be pretty inconvenient to put it mildly. The Israelites who had married foreign women in the time of Ezra, and even had children by them, were put through the wrenching experience of separating from them because their marriages were a violation of God's word in that case too. Sometimes repentance and restitution are messy.

But if churches want to be in God's favor, if we want revival, something like this is going to have to happen. I'm going to have to find that link and get into the specifics of this, but it does seem to me that if Christians would simply pray and honestly seek God's will instead of "leaning to our own understanding" it would be revealed to them directly, they would be personally convicted of sin in these matters and wouldn't need to hear a lot of sermons on it. Of course if they've been hearing permissive sermons that support them in their sin then they are trained in resisting the Holy Spirit for starters, and may not even listen to a contrary view of the scripture anyway.

Another issue that continues to strike me as a violation in the churches is the abandonment of the requirement for women to cover our heads in the assembly. My study of this completely convinced me that the vast majority of the churches are in violation of scripture on this point, and this is also a matter that I think an honest and protracted seeking of God's will would resolve. Not to cover our heads is to violate God's creation ordinance of man as the image of God and woman as the glory of man. In the churches this means that the glory of man is allowed to compete with the glory of Christ. This is one practice that ought to be simple and straightforward that has been made unnecessarily complicated because people just don't want to have to do this.

It ought to be clear enough from the fact that on the basis of the same scripture that calls for a woman to cover her head in church a man is required to uncover his, and we enforce that part of the directive while ignoring the other. It's not about women having long hair either because there was never a time when women did NOT wear their hair long until very recently, so Paul would have had no reason to exhort them to wear it long.

Those two issues, divorce/remarriage and the head covering, are where it seems to me the churches need to start the process of repentance.

(Not that I think it's going to happen, of course, I'm afraid I'm pretty sure that America is going to be destroyed by God's judgments because the churches will not rally to our calling, but nevertheless I hold out a small hope that I'm wrong.)

A couple of end times messages

Most recent radio talk by Brannon Howse of Worldview Weekend. This is part 2 of some revelations about Newt Gingrich's far-from-conservative politics, and he goes on to talk about how all the current crop of unacceptable Republican candidates are part of God's judgment on the nation.

Most recent email from Jan Markell of Understanding the Times: A pastor's analysis of the deterioration of Christian culture as seen in comparing the recent Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster with the Titanic disaster. The Titanic sank in an era of Christian culture that taught even unbelievers to put the weak before the strong. But on the Costa Concordia we have behavior that even barbarians would have been ashamed of -- "every man for himself" with big strong men shoving aside women and children to save themselves.

"Survival of the fittest" in action. The Man of Indomitable Will, the Antichrist, who disdains all weakness, doth slouch to Bethlehem to be born very very soon.

Just sitting here waiting for God to wipe America off the map

Now I'm disappointed with Jonathan Cahn. On the one hand he presented his prophetic vision as simple fact, as in that speech at a Messianic Jewish conference that I keep posting here, but on the other hand the book he wrote about it is written as a novel. I haven't seen it yet but that's what people say about it. I expected it to provide more detail about the facts he had discovered and maybe it does, but a novel I do not need and treating this kind of information as fiction is a horrendous offense! It turns out that Cahn himself indulges in the hype tone I mention in the previous post though I'd been saying it wasn't his doing.

And yet I still have to regard the mere facts of the matter he presents as just as uncanny and meaningful as I first found them to be. Ground Zero really is where George Washington's inauguration was consecrated by prayer by the first members of the US Government. Whether America is to be regarded as consecrated to God in the sense ancient Israel was is questionable, but Cahn's point that some form of consecration took place seems undeniable, and MUST explain why God treats us the same as He did Israel, which is clearly what is happening with the Isaiah 9:10 connections. Cahn mentions both the plaque at Jamestown and the dedication of Washington's presidency at Ground Zero as two instances in which the nation was consecrated to God. It's hard to dismiss this as a meaningless coincidence.

Isaiah 9:10 certainly does refer to the felling of sycamore trees as God's judgment on Israel, and to the planting of cedar trees or conifers as Israel's defiance of God in response. How can we possibly overlook the uncanny symbolism of a single sycamore tree in the churchyard of that same historic church being destroyed by part of a falling WTC tower and replaced by -- a conifer? And there's also the replacement of the fallen bricks with the hewn stone echoing Isaiah 9:10 as well. That too is uncanny. In doing these things America has certainly had the same attitude as ancient Israel as recorded in Isaiah 9:10 -- we'll redo and rebuild what God destroyed, and we'll do it bigger and better and stronger. The sycamore itself is now memorialized in a bronze replica of its roots, which I find spooky in the extreme, like celebrating death, in this case the death of America, what else? Unwittingly of course. And it's right beside that historic church in which our first government was consecrated.

But most uncanny of all is the attitude of American leaders who exactly echoed the spirit of the leaders of ancient Israel in their denial that this was God's judgment and their refusal to repent but instead to rebuild in their own strength what God had destroyed. There is no way to deny that parallel, there's no way to deny that this follows the same lines as Isaiah 9:10. Of course it wasn't a President who quoted Isaiah 9:10, it was merely the Majority Leader of the Senate, Tom Daschle at the time, but that IS a leader of the nation and it has to mean something. The fact that John Edwards quoted the same verse a few years later in a prayer breakfast on the anniversary of 9/11 isn't quite so telling, because he wasn't in a high position of leadership, but it certainly does at least reflect the attitude of defiance America as a whole was taking at the time, strangely unaware of its actual meaning, thinking to be speaking words of comfort about 9/11 instead. And he made that speech at a typical government prayer breakfast, an official appealing to God for the nation. Again, all this was unwitting, they all think they are comforting the nation with promises to rebuild.

But here is how that passage continues:

11 Therefore the LORD shall set up the adversaries of Rezin against him, and join his enemies together; 12 The Syrians before, and the Philistines behind; and they shall devour Israel with open mouth. For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand [is] stretched out still. Isa 9:13 For the people turneth not unto him that smiteth them, neither do they seek the LORD of hosts. 14 Therefore the LORD will cut off from Israel head and tail, branch and rush, in one day.

Sure sounds to me like God is promising more judgment to come BECAUSE Israel didn't repent but vowed to plant better trees and build better buildings.

Some of us didn't need all these signs and symbols to know that 9/11 was God's judgment on America, or warning judgment. All you need to know is how God dealt with nations in the OT and specifically how He dealt with Israel. He TOLD them -- Deuteronomy 28 for instance -- how he would deal with them if they obeyed and if they disobeyed. Disobedience calls for the triumph of enemies and the destruction of the economy for instance -- surely this is a principle that applies to all nations, not just God's own people, although in lesser degree simply because "to whom much is given much is required." Those principles are all we should need to know to understand 9/11 as God's judgment -- a warning judgement of more to come, I should say, simply because it was such a limited event compared to what it could have been. A warning judgment to wake us up and lead us to repentance. But Americans refused to see that in it, and the biggest shame of all is that the pastors of churches all over the land refused to see it that way. Thousands of churches could have been fasting and praying for repentance in earnest except for that.

So a few years later along comes Jonathan Cahn who discovers these uncanny correspondences between a little-known verse in the Old Testament and the events and attitudes in America surrounding 9/11. This has to be God's mercy, giving us some indisputable signs to prove that He's bringing judgment against America even in the teeth of the nation's determined denial and defiance. NOW, I think to myself, how can anyone avoid the fact that America is under God's judgment? This revelation, I think to myself, ought to speed through the churches and send us all to our knees. But no, it hardly gets off the ground.

And now it turns out to be presented in some questionable forms with a questionable tone itself, and we still have no problem avoiding the truth of the situation. How much this hype has to do with our avoiding it I don't know, I just know the whole thing is incredibly sad, we are under God's judgment and we have plenty of reason to know we are under God's judgment and we are doing nothing about it.

I wish I hadn't ordered the book because I can't afford much these days and I don't need a novel. I'd like to have all the material he offers in support of this prophetic vision but the money is too much for me. And now I'm really angry that he has been treating this material this way, hyping it up as a novel, using all the spooky hokey hypy words that should not be used in reference to Biblical revelation.

Even with all that, as I said, I still believe this message is authentic at its core. The parallels with Isaiah 9:10 can't be denied. This is a strange case of amazing TRUTH being manhandled by the techniques that belong to lies. I don't know how to put all this together.

I've been disappointed in Christians' response to this. And I still am, but this problem with how the main protagonist has been treating the material does give some excuse to the churches for ignoring it. SOME excuse, though, that's all. I still think the facts themselves ought to have overridden such a reaction to the hype, if that is part of the reason it's been ignored.

So here we are, looking at a major warning of God's judgment in the events of 9/11, given to us in unmistakable signs, being ignored by God's people instead of taken to heart as it should be, as we are the only hope for the nation to escape future escalation of God's judgment, which is inevitable if we do nothing, and we ARE doing nothing. Going-on-eleven years after the event we are doing nothing despite this revelation that ought to have set a fire under us long ago.

Our state of paralysis is itself a form of judgment.

Will the next hit, whatever it is, wake us up? Probably not. We've had a few hits since 9/11 in fact, not just the Wall Street hits but some pretty heavy weather hits across the nation as well. That's certainly what Katrina was. Anybody moved to repentance? Naa, just the usual complaints against anyone who suggests it was God's judgment.

The hype around the Cahn message plus its general lack of circulation among Christians is the real mystery

I don't get it. The Jonathan Cahn study of 9/11 is convincing in and of itself, so two things are a puzzle: 1) why isn't it getting the attention and seriousness it deserves, and 2) why does there have to be all the hype around it?

On the hype question, All the stuff about "secret" knowledge for instance -- what's secret about God's word? "An ancient mystery" blah blah de blah. The Bible is full of mystery but not the kind of mystery that calls for that spooky tone of voice. It's there to be discovered by an obedient and persistent believer. And I thought that's what Cahn did in this case -- God led him to the many signs that connect 9/11 with Isaiah 9:10 -- they are there for anyone to appreciate, there's no need for the tone of breathy excitement and hoked-up drama that some treat it with.

The link above is to a publication by a Sid Roth who has a program with that tone titled It's Supernatural, on which he interviewed Cahn, and I could have put that up here too but the tone put me off so I didn't. But he's not the only one who treats this revelation that way. Even the cover to Cahn's book has that tone to it. Even the single word "Harbinger" as its title carries some of that feeling. I've simply tried to ignore that because the evidence in itself is good enough, but I have to admit that the tone of the cover detracts from the message.

That tone usually goes with something that's fake or at least exaggerated beyind its intrinsic value, but that hasn't seemed to be the case with this Bible-based information about 9/11. It's straightforward Biblical truth unless I'm missing it completely.

As for the lack of attention: Apparently this prophecy is better known among SOME Christians than I knew. At the same time it's nowhere near as well known as it should be. Googling it now I find many more references to it than I knew existed when I started posting on it, but since it strikes me as so amazingly authentic it's hard to believe it isn't well known by ALL Christians by now. How come it's only getting circulated in limited segments of the Church? I find now that Charisma magazine had it on their cover a few years ago. Is it because it's associated with that branch of the church that it's being ignored by the more mainstream churches? Does the hype tone have something to do with its being so generally ignored?

That is really unfortunate if so. It SHOULD be known to all of us and in fact be taken seriously as THE concern of the day until we have a great movement of repentance and revival based on it, which is the only right response the churches could have.

I have not found even one discussion of this prophecy that questions its authenticity so that is not the reason it is being ignored. It MUST be because it's associated with the charismatic and messianic movements then, and perhaps also the tone of hype that is unfortunately laid on it?

If this isn't the reason, if there are objections to this message that I'm failing to appreciate, SOMEBODY PLEASE LET ME KNOW.

Meanwhile I'm still convinced of the authenticity and importance of this message and I'm going to put up Cahn's conference talk on it again:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXei0Zb3dxM&feature=related

We don't need the hype and it detracts from the message. God's prophets didn't carry on in that tone about their revelations. It should be a straightforward reverent study of God's word. If I weren't already convinced by the evidence itself I wouldn't pursue something with that atmosphere surrounding it. At least Cahn himself doesn't treat it that way in this talk I keep linking to, although he can get pulled into it by those interviewing him to some extent.

Here's another one with that hype tone and this one tells us that America is going to end on September 30, 2015 because of something contained in this prophecy. If people believe such things why don't they have a tone of mourning and seriousness and concern to see if anything can be done to prevent such an outcome? So they think we'll just sit here with breathless excitement passing the popcorn waiting for America to go up in smoke so we can say "Wow that was amazing!" and walk out of the theater or what?

WHY ISN'T ANYBODY RECOGNIZING THAT ISAIAH 9:10 DESCRIBES A WARNING TO WHICH ANCIENT ISRAEL COULD HAVE RESPONDED WITH REPENTANCE, SO THAT IF AMERICA DID WE COULD BE SPARED JUST AS THEY COULD HAVE BEEN?

And here's another discussion of the same prophecy, and this one includes video of both Daschle and Edwards, so that's useful -- but they have to hoke it up by putting dramatic music over their speeches. BLECH.

Again, it's as if the important IMPLICATIONS of this prophecy for America are just going ignored while the uncanniness itself is being treated as something that provokes awe and wonder for their own sake.

If this message is being suppressed for such reasons, those who add the hype and those who fail to appreciate its authenticity in spite of the hype are both seriously at fault. As is anyone who judges it not on its own merits but on its association with the charismatic or messianic contexts. That's called "judging a book by its cover."

The idolatry of human feelings must be repented of, in the heaven stories and in 9/11 if we want God's blessings

Another thing I think I have to say today is that I've been realizing I haven't gone far enough on the "heaven" stories or the attack of 9/11. I've been waffling on the majority reaction of people that puts all the emphasis on the suffering people, on the boys who had the heaven experiences because they almost died so we must first of all soothe the feelings of those involved, think of it as God's mercy that they have been spared and so on, and on the victims of 9/11 RATHER THAN GOD'S CLAIMS ON US.

Yes, I know I'm committing one of the biggest sins in the eyes of the world by saying this, but I'd rather that than commit the worse sin of giving in to mere human fleshly sentimentality while slighting the Lord. If God isn't greatest in all our thoughts, if He isn't the Beloved of our hearts, if we put ANYTHING above Him, we are committing adultery/idolatry against Him.

No, the victims of 9/11 should NOT be our first consideration, though I've allowed myself to say that they should because it's the popular attitude.

God's will should always be our first consideration and in the case of 9/11 what we SHOULD have done, even those who lost loved ones, is GET DOWN ON OUR KNEES AND ASK GOD TO FORGIVE US FOR THE SINS THAT DESERVED THAT JUDGMENT FROM HIM.

And with the heaven stories, there too the feelings of the parents, and the sufferings of their children that led to their having these visions, are put ahead of the fact that the heaven stories are bogus for all kinds of reasons. They are lies and they are deceiving God's people and that is far and away what should matter to us most. It's a great sin to put concern for a family's suffering above the effect of the lies they are promoting, that influence other people against the true God. And that is what we should say to the family as well. The heaven stories are lies from the devil that mislead people about the nature of God and Christ. The devil has no compunctions about exploiting children in the service of his lies, but we shouldn't allow him to play on our feelings when the more important thing is that his lies be exposed and denounced.

Such feelings are an idolatry, and part of the reason God is allowing us to be subjected to such deceptions as the heaven stories.

We can and should commiserate in private with those who suffered in 9/11 but a public event that influences people in the wrong direction is what needs to be the target of public concern. On 9/11 preachers all over the country got up and assured everybody that this was NOT God's judgment, and denounced those few who rightly called it that. They expressed in some cases a great deal of moral indignation in the service of concern for the victims and against the concerns of God Himself who was warning us of judgment on the entire nation of America. Those pastors need to repent before God and the nation. Christians should go to the memorial services for the victims, hurt with the hurting, be a strength for those who suffer, BUT THE MESSAGE OF 9/11 IS NOT ABOUT THE VICTIMS AS SUCH, it is that there will be many many MANY more victims and the loss of a once-great nation that God had blessed mightily for years, if God's judgment warning is ignored!

THE ONLY THING THAT SHOULD BE HAPPENING AT GROUND ZERO IS SOME SORT OF PUBLIC ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF AMERICA'S DESERVING GOD'S JUDGMENT, REPENTANCE FOR OUR SINS AND PLEADING WITH HIM FOR MERCY.

Jesus said we must put nothing and nobody above Him, we must even hate our own family if they take His place in our hearts.

Human sentiment rises up against such a teaching, but human sentiment is the problem and we must not follow it.

Yes, I am repenting here of my own succumbing to the putting of human sentiment above God.