He must increase and I must decrease

I just got the email I've posted below from Zac Poonen's ministry which at least obliquely speaks to some concerns I've had on my mind recently. I probably won't get it all said in this post but I'll put his email up as food for thought at least.

I certainly understand the point that when a preacher wants to convict his hearers of sin it only comes off as accusation that doesn't really convict if it is done in the wrong spirit. I've experienced this countless times. Such preaching may create a sense of guilt that prompts increased efforts in the flesh to amend one's ways, but not the sort of spiritual conviction that leads to genuine deep repentance and cleansing.

Over and over I use my mind to try to persuade people of this or that -- in this case not personal sin but some proposition or other about the current cultural atmosphere, about how sin in general brings judgment on a nation, or about evolution and that sort of thing -- and over and over I have the thought in the back of my head that this is the wrong way to go about it, that I need the Holy Spirit if I'm to succeed at getting anything across. Only the Holy Spirit can get across what I'm trying to get across. It has to be His work, not mine. I know this and yet I keep doing it in the flesh -- through the mind alone. Partly this is reinforced by the frequent assertion from other Christians that if you believe in Christ you therefore HAVE the Holy Spirit, your mind IS the mind of Christ and so on. Well, yes but no. Over and over I complain that I'm too self-centered (I know I am and I can't get out of it) and over and over the response will come back "oh but we all are" without any apparent recognition that we can't be self-centered and do the work God wants of us. It's a distressing frame of mind to be in. This needs a lot of spelling out.

But for right now I'm just going to post Zac Poonen's exhortation. The connection with my thoughts is a little rough I realize but although he uses different terms it says a great deal that instructs in what I've been trying to learn. I will say that speaking from the Holy Spirit is speaking from one's nothingness and I'm very aware of my pride lately and lack of a sense of my own nothingness despite my intellectual appreciation of how much it's exactly what I need. Pride, self. Self is always there, seems there's no way to get around it. Yet its presence is always interfering and it

must

be done away somehow. Constant reminders that in Christ we are saved and forgiven do not speak to this. Self has to die, the flesh has to die, the self has to die that the Spirit may live through us. REALLY die, be found no more. But even the churches rationalize it so that it never really gets killed.

"Kill me, Lord."

God Wants Us to Recognise Our Nothingness

Zac Poonen

In Job, Chapters 38-41, notice the completely different way in which God spoke to Job compared to the way the four preachers, (who claimed to represent Him) spoke. God did not once accuse Job of having sinned in secret or tell him that he was being punished for his sins, etc., etc., and Job was convicted immediately and repented!! What a lesson we can all learn from that, on how to speak to people and how to preach! God’s ways are not our ways. Many preachers try to convict people by telling them about sins that they imagine those others have committed. Nothing results from such an approach, except that the preachers themselves increase their guilt before God for speaking with the spirit of the Accuser. God, in His great mercy and compassion however, speaks to man in quite another way - and the man is so thoroughly convicted of his sins that he says, “O God, I am corrupt, I am nothing. I repent. Please forgive me.” God leads people to repentance by His kindness (Rom. 2:4).

Three basic questions that God was asking Job (in these chapters) were:

1. “If you can’t understand these wonders in creation, how can you understand spiritual realities?”

2. “If I control all My creation, do you think that I couldn’t control the lightning that struck your sheep, or the Sabeans and Chaldeans who killed your servants, or the storm that struck your children’s houses?”

3. “If you can’t stand in front of a crocodile that I created, how can you stand before Me?” (41:9-11).

God showed Job His sovereign power and control over all of creation. That was all that needed to be said. And Job was humbled. Hours of direct attack by the four preachers accomplished nothing. The indirect approach by God accomplished everything in a few minutes. Faith in the sovereign control of God over all of His creation is what will bring rest to our hearts too, when we face problems, afflictions and enemies.

The Lord asked Job, “Do you still want to argue with the Almighty?” (Job.40:2). Job, who had a quick reply for every argument thus far is now silenced. He now says, “Lord, I am nothing and I have nothing to say. I will not speak any more.”

This first book of inspired Scripture teaches us that God wants us to recognize our nothingness so that he can be everything in our lives. Then our lives will fulfil His purpose and be a blessing to multitudes. Before God can use someone, He has to reduce him to nothing.

Paul said, “What is Paul and what is Apollos? I planted, Apollos watered, but God was causing the growth. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything.” (1Cor.3:5,6).In other words, the one who does evangelism is nothing and the one who does Bible teaching is also nothing. God alone is everything and so He alone deserves all the glory. That was the secret of Paul’s life - he was a zero even at the end of his life.

There are preachers who are eager to grab the credit for souls saved somewhere. There are pastors who complain saying, “That pastor stole my sheep from my church”. etc., etc. Why do these Christian workers speak like this? Because they haven’t become zeros as yet. When they say, “my church”, which church are they talking about? We know of the church of Jesus Christ. But which is their church? Everybody must certainly be taken away from “their church” and planted in the church of Jesus Christ!! And “their church” must be destroyed.

What a long time it took Job to come to the place where he could acknowledge that he was insignificant and decide never to justify himself any more. Thereafter, for the rest of his life, Job must have been a man who was “quick to hear and slow to speak” (Jas.1:19). The long speech that he gave in six chapters (Chapters 26 to 31) is the longest self-justification found in the entire Bible. It stinks of self-righteousness
all the way through. But Job could not smell his pride himself.

Now at last this self-righteous man had become zero. As a result of whose preaching? Was it through the man who spoke of visions and dreams? Was it through the man who held the traditions of the fathers as sacred? Was it through the self-appointed “prophet”? Or was it through the man who was so correct in what he said? None of these four preachers could help him. It was God Who helped Job to come to this place. He was the Fifth Preacher. And He is the One Whom we should imitate. “Be imitators of God” (Eph.5:1). What a wonderful thing God’s brief message did to Job, which the other preachers could not do with all their long and repeated sermons. What was the reason for this? The answer is: God loved Job. The four preachers did not. When we love people from our heart, God will give us the right words to give them. When we don’t love them, we will only criticise them and accuse them and we won’t be able to bless them. Let us learn then to love the people we serve, and God will always give us the words to speak to them.

A prophet of God must have God’s word in his heart and God’s people on his heart. Then God will give him prophetic messages for them.

While the other four preachers tried to convict Job of his sin, God sought to make Job a worshipper. And God succeeded. This is what we need to show an unbelieving generation - that our God is the Almighty and Sovereign Ruler of this universe. We are not to be intimidated by the threats of our opponents – for not a hair of our heads can be touched by anyone without our Sovereign, Heavenly Father’s permission.

Let us learn to act with compassion, instead of always being ready to criticise. Let us never pass judgment when we do not know the true facts. Even when we think we know the facts, let us acknowledge that there may be other facts that we still don’t know. So let us always humble ourselves and say, “Lord, I am nothing. I’ll put my hand over my mouth and keep quiet.”

Job also said, “Lord, I had heard about You before, but now I have seen You” (Job.42:5). There is a vast difference between hearing about God and knowing Him personally. When John saw Jesus on the isle of Patmos, he fell down and worshipped Him. Job fell down and worshipped God too. Job also repented radically of his accusing God and took back every word he had spoken (42:6), and God forgave him immediately as we see very soon thereafter.

Even learning that we are to be nothing and believing it can be done through the flesh, that's the problem I keep running into in myself. I can preach it fine, but living it is something else.

And I can't just DECIDE to do it in the Spirit, God has to do a work so that I REALLY know I'm nothing, I have to SEE it, it must be REVEALED and THEN I'll really know it and live it.

It does help to pray that He will bring it about though. And even doing whatever we can do in the flesh to shut ourselves up and make ourselves small, make ourselves nothing, of no account, can't hurt unless we're deceiving ourselves that that's all there is to it.

Even truth can be preached in the flesh so you have to die even to truth in that case.

Real revival real repentance real spiritual life

Interview with pastor Bill McLeod describing the genuine revival in his church in Saskatoon, Canada in 1971, making clear that consistent and persistent and lengthy prayer over a long time, years if necessary, is the price we have to pay if we want God to come and genuinely revive us spiritually.

One thing that was impressed on me by this message was the Lord's principle that he who has will be given more and he who has not, even what he has will be taken away.

This helps inspire me to be persistent in praying for revival. The more I pray the more I can expect to be able to pray, and even perhaps to be given the true gift of the spirit of prayer eventually.

This wasn't a stated part of pastor McLeod's message but it is implicit in what he described happening to himself and to his church. It happened with himself as he started out praying for revival for two hours in the morning and then the Lord increased the burden and he spent more and more time in prayer. It also happened with members of his church as the pastor came up with assignments for them to do to get them praying and after some time of doing that some of them started to find that they were praying spontaneously for longer and longer periods. It took five years of this before revival came.

And it came with melted hearts toward one another in love, brokenness, mended relationships, a sense of the immediate presence of the Lord convicting of sin, all of that bringing in more and more people as the Spirit Himself was doing the work and not human flesh. Genuine revival. Spirit-wrought revival. Far from being trumped up by the flesh, the flesh was killed that the Spirit might live and reign.

I think they've won the culture wars: it's dead.

EvC forum never disappoints when it comes to being on the forefront of the culture wars. There are a number of threads there started by a new guy called "Den" who writes satires about how evolutionist thinking implies a lack of moral standards, and I keep being amazed that they continue to treat him as slandering them. That's amazing enough, but then along comes this thread saying outright what we've all known for decades now: marriage has lost all meaning in modern culture.

Does the idea of gay marriage threaten marriage? Ha ha, of course it does. This thread is proof, or if not exactly proof it's exactly what has always been meant by the destruction of marriage -- destruction of the MEANING of marriage, which this thread amply demonstrates is well underway. Do they make the connection? Naa. They continue to characterize that complaint as about individuals' personal marriages rather than about marriage itself. They write far more stupid satires based on that misunderstanding than Den has written. Gay marriage trashes the whole meaning of marriage. But of course marriage has been pretty much trashed for decades now or we wouldn't have arrived at this point. Gay marriage is just the last nail in the coffin. At least there's still enough life in the culture to fight over that last nail.

Does evolution undermine morality? Of course it does. Den does misread his opponents. He doesn't realize just HOW far the culture has gone thanks to influences which include evolutionism and its fundamental atheism. They don't even get that there is a connection with atheism. They can't tell the difference between individual beliefs and moral standards and philosophical imperatives. The theory of evolution of its own nature renders morality irrelevant.

Yes people still go on with a sense of morality, even in many cases a pretty old fashioned sense of morality, though that is eroding in favor of a brand new and highly strident moral indignation against anyone who disagrees with them about anything. The fact that a sense of morality remains, however misguided or twisted, in spite of all the philosophical and cultural influences that undermine it these days is testimony to the fact that human beings were made in the image of God. THAT certainly wouldn't occur to them. (Reminds me how the atheists carry on in their tones of moral indignation against the claims of believers in God and particularly against the character of the true God. Christopher Hitchens brings his outraged moral sensibilities to a fever pitch at times. Pastor Douglas Wilson, who became the other half of their roadshow debating atheism pointed out that Hitchens would have made a good Puritan. C.S. Lewis called this attitude toward Christianity, growing already even in his day, "God in the Dock").

Even without specific religious underpinnings, ALL human cultures have ALWAYS required and recognized marriage. There's something SO fundamental about it that its being questioned these days is another sad sign that we've just about lost all the props that held human society together in the past.

And the fact that the morality is increasingly twisted against the standards God gave us is testimony to our fallen nature as well as to these cultural influences that have made it impossible for the younger generation to understand why we ever had such an institution as marriage.

Evolution destroys any foundation for morality. Nietzsche knew that. Evolution was the main salvo in the Death of God. He'd sneer at those who try to reconcile their own garbled moral sense with their belief in evolution. They haven't a leg to stand on but they don't know it.

Read the thread and weep, all you who still can. The others I guess will just be puzzled over my assessment. Sad.

Some inspiring Christian resources

I'm going to recommend a couple of video teachings I've learned about recently, both of them great boosts to Christian understanding and worship. My brother lent me both of these, and I'm very thankful.

I've only seen the first half of The Truth Project, but I have to say I can tell where it's going because where it's been is already good enough to recommend the whole thing. This is a twelve-part series of classroom style lectures that aims to lay out a systematic and comprehensive Christian Worldview. It succeeds.

C. S. Lewis said: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” The Truth Project is an attempt to outline the Everything-Else that the sun of Christianity reveals. I think that Christians who have been struggling along with a half-worldly view of life without realizing it will be invigorated and inspired by this series of teachings.

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The other recommended teaching is The Bethlehem Star which is an engaging introduction to astronomical signs related to the birth and death of Christ, the star over Bethlehem announcing His birth of course being the main focus, but other heavenly phenomena as well.

The blurb:

The Star demonstration is a multimedia presentation by lawyer and law professor Rick Larson. In a presentation seen by many tens of thousands live on stage and many tens of millions on television, Larson leads you sleuthing through Biblical and many other historical clues. He then pilots a computer model of the universe across the skies of 2000 years ago as you watch. At these presentations, you will see the striking celestial events the ancients saw.

It reminded me of a book I have but never really read, The Witness of the Stars by E. W. Bullinger, written in 1893, that is a very thorough treatise on how the stars and planets, the constellations and even the signs of the zodiac, were originally meant to show the gospel story. That book has become much more meaningful to me after seeing The Bethlehem Star.

Psalm 19 comes alive in a new way with these studies:

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

On reading around in Bullinger's book I was intrigued to recognize that if Larson is right about the dating of Jesus' birth, then Bullinger had the wrong date and so missed it, of course missing the celestial signs that attended it, and so did Kepler for the same reason. Interesting sleuthing going on here.

Haiti on the way to recovery. Let it be so, Lord.

I hope hope hope this is what it purports to be , a real move of God in Haiti. Three days of fasting and prayer by a million people in Haiti, crying out to God to forgive them and heal their country. How wonderful. This is what is needed. President Preval called for these days of fasting and repentance to replace the Mardi Gras celebration.

I'm sure those who organized it and those reporting it believe it is genuine and I want to also. Scriptures were read, prayers were prayed, songs of worship were sung. Praise God for it if it is genuine. Three thousand conversions are claimed, 101 of them confirmed to have been voodoo priests. Heart-wrenchingly wonderful if genuine.

So why do I have any reservations at all?

Because the name of Jesus Christ was not spoken even once in this video.

Because nothing was said about how people in Haiti think they can be both Christian and voodoo practitioners to assure us this confusion is overcome in this event.

Because "Christianity" is too often equated with Catholicism and ritual instead of genuine relationship with Christ.

Because in such an atmosphere there is some question how complete a conversion is going to be.

I hope hope hope it is genuine. I hope that at least a huge proportion of it is genuine. I wish it hadn't been presented in such a sloppy emotional way so that it's impossible to judge whether it is genuine or not.

But we will know them by their fruit.

Lord, I pray that You will bless Haiti mightily with a new allegiance to You and a complete healing of their unhappy land.

Us too, Lord, us too.

Thy Kingdom come, Lord, to this benighted world

Been watching a documentary on Netflix off and on today, Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion. Despite its many good reviews I had put off watching it because it has the involvement of so many well- known Hollywood leftists. I expected a heavy dose of leftist propaganda.

Instead, because of the nature of the Tibetan situation, their sympathies are against the biggest leftist force on the planet these days, China, and the enormities perpetrated by China against the Tibetans over the last fifty years and more are thoroughly documented and profoundly disturbing.

I had known nothing about the political situation in Tibet until now. I certainly knew of the Dalai Lama who has traveled the world speaking for his Buddhist beliefs, but somehow it had escaped me that his primary concern is the horrendous misery of his Tibetan people at the hands of the Communist Chinese -- possibly because I avoid liberal/leftie demonstrations like the plague and there have been some on behalf of the Dalai Lama -- one of them shown at the end of this film.

The artificial ideology-driven nature of Communism is quite apparent in the statements by various Chinese spokesmen, the false ideas of "oppression" and of "religion" and the like that rationalize their brutalization and murder of the "oppressed" in their program to "liberate" them. How much of this is believed by the people who use it for propaganda I don't know, but I have the feeling at least some of it is.

The version of Buddhism preached by the Dalai Lama is completely nonviolent and quite touching in its insistence on forgiveness and nonhatred toward the Chinese. At one point in the film (around 1 hour, ten minutes into it - you can watch it on your computer from Netflix) a narrator comments how different it would be if Christians had such an immediate relationship with their leader as the Tibetans have with their Dalai Lama, because much motivation comes from such a relationship that we are apparently lacking -- a remark which is still reverberating in my head.

But we DO have such a relationship, I want to protest, and so much MORE of a relationship since it is not with a mere holy man but the God Who made all things. Our leader is NOT someone who died two thousand years ago and whom we do not expect to see again until He returns for our salvation, as the narrator claimed; our leader is MORE immediately with us than the Dalai Lama is to the Tibetans, and we don't have to go anywhere to see Him; we can address Him all day long.

But how sad that this is not apparent to others. Is this our fault or is it the nature of Christianity that it is not apparent?

I have to think it's our fault.

I often wonder to myself how it can be that we Christians are intimately connected with the omnipotent God who made this universe and yet the power that ought to be associated with that connection is so apparently lacking.

I've discovered that it takes very little exposure to the plight of peoples in the rest of the world to show up the western version of Christianity for our trivial pursuits and our powerlessness. How can we justify our humdrum preoccupations when we are potentially wielders of the power of God Himself on behalf of the world and yet keep our sights so low, so personal, instead? I receive information from a small church in India (as well as other ministries in India) a very small poor church where the pastor works all day long for his people as well as for other pastors and their people in neighboring areas when needed. His transportation is a bicycle. His people have the bare necessities but no more, simple food and clothing, a roof overhead. Periodically, houses in the area are swamped in monsoon floods. Not too far away other Christians have been suffering violent attacks from the Hindus who beat and kill them and burn their houses, tear the clothes off the women and rape them, and drive the people into the woods. It can leave a person feeling utterly helpless and useless to know just a little about these things. Then I see this film about Tibet and feel the same way. American Christians are very generous, give to causes all over the world, and yet it still leaves one feeling helpless and useless to see the need that can never be met, knowing the main need is for them to come to Christ.

And Tibet's religion of nonviolence is unfortunately a lesson to us I think, or should be. How did we ever get to defending participation in war at all? Yes, I know American wars have been good, or for good causes and all that, I know that violence on behalf of good causes can be justified easily enough ... and yet I can't get out of my mind the fact that Jesus told us not to resist evil, barely allowed a mere couple of swords for His disciples when the crucifixion was looming, preached against even hatred in the heart as murder and told us to be meek, to die to ourselves, to love, bless and forgive our enemies and the like. Aren't we told our strength is in our weakness, that HE is our strength and we only possess it by emptying ourselves of our selves? What we must sacrifice of His power by leaning to our own understanding!

Yet the Tibetan Buddhists practice meekness and nonviolence and forgiveness and we don't? A tribal religion that also practices rote ritual prayers and appeases spirits? The strength we receive in weakness is a supernatural strength; theirs is at best psychological and yet even when they lose faith in it they have more faith in theirs than we in ours.

How can this be?

The self-indulgence and worldliness and consequent spiritual weakness of the western churches is a terrible shame.

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One more thing. I think capitalism is the best economic system for producing wealth and growing the economy, BUT I also think it needs restraints, and about 25 minutes or so before the end of this documentary, it does unfortunately begin to be demonstrated that another sin Christians should be working to overcome is the love of money -- a root of all evil for sure, as is shown in the growth of trade with China that has drowned out protests against their abuses of human rights.

Culture Wars: The Pilgrims and the Indians

The Culture Revisionists are going full steam these days. Just ran across another example.

Started watching a documentary on Netflix, The American Experience about the Indian tribes of America, "We Shall Remain," and right away the Indians are the good guys and the Europeans the bad guys. I suppose there's some poetic justice in this up to a point, since earlier treatments of such subjects were awfully one-sided in the opposite direction.

Now in the politically correct multicultural view (more accurately it should be known as the anti-western-cultural view) the Indians are subtly presented as more civilized than the whites in a way, in little things -- expressions, manner, bearing etc., -- the Indians have dignity and family feeling, the whites appear to be a rather scruffy wild crew. And the narrator describes them in such terms:

In December of 1620, after 66 days at sea, and five uneasy weeks on the northern tip of Cape Cod, a SCRAGGLY CULT from England anchored its sailing vessel, the Mayflower, off the mainland coast and sent a small party of men to scout the wooded shores. RADICAL RELIGIOUS VIEWS HAD MADE THE PILGRIMS UNWELCOME AND UNWANTED IN ENGLAND. They had no home to go back to if they failed to make one in this new world. [my emphases of course]

It's all in the point of view, right? This is an outsider point of view, not the American point of view, certainly not the Christian point of view. There's no hint in this characterization of a people coming across the ocean on a noble enterprise with the noble ideas about government that became the Mayflower Compact and ultimately influenced the greatest nation ever to exist, with a true understanding of the cause of Christ, or anything of the sort.

Soon after they arrive they come across a mostly abandoned and destroyed Indian village --Patuxit -- where the population had been drastically reduced by disease, and "they attributed this devastation to God looking out and clearing the way for His chosen people." Which of course in the context of the miserable sufferings of the people who died there sounds quite ignoble.

And in the whole presentation there's no hint of a genuine Christian faith that rises above fallen human nature.

Then the film does show the efforts at good will between the peoples and their success, while continuing to picture the whites as just a little less than noble and the Indians a little better than.

I had to stop watching.

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Later edit: By the way, I started this film because I had just watched one about the Navajo code talkers who played such a big role in WWII against the Japanese, and was very touched by their patriotism. I hurt for them that they weren't given the recognition they so deserved, especially when it was mentioned this was at least partly because the army was still racist then. I'm far from insensitive to this problem in other words, but it's terribly wrong when the "solution" is an attack on white culture and an elevation of the Indian, whose culture is NOT to be compared to Christian culture whatever its merits. It's sad our history is so rocky, with so much lack of respect for the American Indians, but the solution is NOT "multiculturalism."