When I received the Lord into my life I was about twenty-one year’s old and living in Hollywood, California. It happened alone in my apartment. I remember being so excited that I called everyone I knew and told them what happened to me. That following day, I practically ran to the book store and bought my first Bible. It was a Living Bible. Within 2 months I had read the entire thing cover to cover, and I was still hungry for more. Over the next few years I went out and purchased study guides, commentaries, concordances, lexicons, dictionaries and Bible handbooks. I inundated myself with every form of Christian teaching I could find.

My prayer life was blazing. I would excuse myself from parties so I could sneak into another room, fall on my face, and pray. I was literally head over heels in love. Sometimes I would spend hours just talking to Him and praising Him. I remember getting on my motorcycle and driving across the Valley while singing at the top of my lungs to Him (my helmet had great acoustics!). It was a time that was so raw and real, and simply unforgettable.

During that time I had run into some teachings about being a “Soul Winner”. Because I wanted to serve the Lord, I took soul winning very seriously. It became the only thing on my mind. I became an expert “closer”; I found myself winning ten to fifteen people to the Lord a week. Many of my friends from work became Christians as well; I even started a weekly Bible study that they were all invited to. Because I had been the one to lead them to the Lord, I felt a responsibility to teach them.

Almost from the start, I found myself disillusioned and frustrated at their lack of interest in things like the Bible and prayer. They literally had no desire to read or talk to Him; I couldn’t believe it. It didn’t make a lick of sense to me and I was totally perplexed. It didn’t matter what I did or how much I encouraged them; they would show up each week with an almost dead look in their eyes. These were baby Christians without an appetite for the Scripture or intimacy with God.

I’ll be honest with you; I tried everything from blatantly piling guilt and condemnation on them to scaring the hell out of them. Nothing worked.

Their attitude of indifference was completely foreign to me since my personal experience was the exact opposite. I soon decided that this was normal behavior and I was the one who was behaving abnormal.

For years since that initial experience and letdown, I’ve pondered this all too common phenomenon and have secretly wondered why it was this way.

It wasn’t until about fifteen years later, while pastoring at a church that prided itself in it’s “soul winning” abilities, that I began to get an inkling as to why Christians today are so lethargic and almost predictably apathetic. Today, there is no doubt in my mind as to what the problem is; I can’t believe I didn’t come to this conclusion sooner.

The majority of Christians today (particularly in Pentecostal circles) have been bornprematurely.

During this time, the Lord began to show me my personal experiences I had with Him in the beginning; He took me back even further than my initial salvation experience I had in my apartment that day. He took me back to almost a year before that day, and He showed me the exact time when the Holy Spirit “conceived” and “became pregnant” with me – it was almost ten months before I actually asked Jesus into my heart. It took nearly a year for my spirit to develop inside the womb of God, and when I was fully ready, I was born right there in my living room in my Hollywood apartment.

Nothing in this world conceives and gives birth the same day. Every Christian I know will tell you that when they’ve looked back on their lives before receiving Christ, they could always see the hand of God working in them, even long before they actually made the decision to become a Christian. The Bible says that Spirit gives birth to spirit. Salvation is a process that for some, may take years.

The problem with many Christians today is that they were pushed into reciting a sinner’s prayer before they were fully developed in the “womb” of the Spirit. A zealous person with a strong desire to “win souls” may have closed the deal and effectively induced labor months before the due date, thus causing a premature birth to take place. This happens because somewhere in the scope of things, Christians thought it was their job to not only witness about Christ, but to muscle people into a decision, saving their souls from hell.

A close friend of mine recently told me that she was relieved when the Lord said to her, “Did you really think that I would leave the salvation of a human soul in your hands?”. It sounds funny when you hear it that way. It almost uncovers the outright arrogant mentality we buy into when we overstep our bounds and feebly attempt to take over the job of the Holy Spirit in an effort to further the Kingdom. I personally believe that we cause terrible damage to people when we try to “get them saved”.

I was once asked to be a witness for a court case. I’ll admit that when I got up there, everything within me wanted to not only witness but completely close the deal and force a decision by the judge. There was something within me that wanted to overstep theboundaries of law and hijack the entire case, forcing the judge to submit to my personal jurisdiction. Every witness in the world has a personal opinion; however in a court case, the lawyer will put a gag in their mouth and force them to speak ONLY what they saw and nothing more. The job of a witness is to only tell what was actually witnessed.

The salvation of a human being is a group effort. It’s both physical and spiritual. There are physical beings that play a part and there are spiritual beings that play a part. The problems come when the physical beings quit believing in the spiritual beings and they take the role of the Spirit upon themselves. Once that happens, we have premature babies born all over the world who basically need to be in intensive care for themajority of their lives. When I worked as a pastor in a church years ago, I found that ninety percent of my work consisted of caring for the preemies in the intensive care unit. Almost all of my time was spent just trying to keep these underdeveloped Christians alive another day.

Preemie Problems

I visited a medical website last night to study the common problems that premature babies face. I was floored by what I found! One of the problems (among many that they face) concerned the babies’ respiratory system – the involuntary muscles that sustain human life are basically not ready to “volunteer” on their own yet. Almost always, the baby has to be put on oxygen and monitored closely over the next few months of growth. Preemies also have an unusually high case of Jaundice. They have to be put under “light” in order to balance their system. Do I even have to expound on that one?

Another common problem with premature children is one that literally brought me to my knees when I first read it. Preemies almost always have to be fed intravenously because they’re not capable of eating on their own. Their body hasn’t developed to the point where they can physically take in the food necessary for survival. This fact answered a thousand questions I had been grappling with for years. Preemie Christians have to be force fed for the first part of their lives. Though they may be starving to death; their mouths are not strong enough to suck in the milk to keep them alive. It’s not that they aren’t hungry; they just don’t know how to eat.

The other concerns that doctors have with premature children is in regards to their eye sight and hearing. These two things remain closely examined for years after their birth. Some preemies are born completely deaf and blind. I can attest to the fact that this is exactly what thousands of Christians suffer from all over the world. We have raised a generation of “spiritual Hellen Kellers”.

With that understanding, it’s not surprising to me that according to the latest statistics, we have a generation of young Christians who absolutely need CLOSENESS in order to function in their Christian walk. Hellen Keller had to literally be touching a person with both hands if she wanted to understand what they were saying. Her dialect was one of touching and feeling vibrations from others around her. That is exactly what this generation requires today and I personally believe that this is why the institutional Church (that heartlessly induced their “premature birth”) has now been rendered useless when it comes to sustaining the life and growth of preemie Christians.

The first and perhaps the biggest concern that doctors have with preemies is regarding infection. Their little underdeveloped bodies are susceptible to almost any virus or sickness in the air. They basically have no immune system whatsoever. In the Spiritual world I have found that it is very much the same. Premature Christians are at risk of catching just about anything that comes their way. In many cases, they have to be rushed to an incubator, completely closed off from the rest of the world in order to survive. I do not believe that this was the way God had intended Christians to live. Today however, it is extremely common to see churches create an incubator environment, tucked away from the rest of the world, chalk full of all the amenities, restaurants, book stores, movie theaters, bowling allies, exercising rooms and just about everything else you could think of. The sad fact is that most of their people simply cannot survive outside the walls of their “church”. Today’s Christians are sadly reminiscent of an entire generation of “boys in bubbles”.

I believe we have gotten to this point because – from the beginning of our spiritual lives – we have been trained to do whatever it takes to get people saved. We don’t think with our hearts and observe with our spirits. When we meet someone in our neighborhood, all we can think about is manipulating the conversation towards salvation or an invitation to church. Instead of having the discernment to know where a person might or might not be in their spiritual development, we jump the gun and force an early delivery in the name of Jesus.

The biggest way we induce an early labor is by using FEAR. It works every time. Fear is truly the “Patosin” of our generation. Put a little of that in anyone’s system and you’re sure to have a baby Christian born in the next few hours. The long term affects of a baby being born under fear are extremely devastating. Without a constant dose of fear to keep that child alive, the Christian will eventually lose all motivation and passion. This is why in my book “The God’s Honest Truth” I said that people, who come to the Lord out of fear, end up becoming “Sons of Hell”. They find no motivation in Love whatsoever. Only fear can inspire them to live the Christian life.

Love does not think this way. A truly loving person has the ability to analyze exactly where a person is in their heart. Believe it or not, Christianity is not about saving people from Hell. Not everyone is ready to be born again right now. If we would just keep our hands off the process that God has started in a person’s life and have the discernment to know exactly when someone is ready to be born and when all they need is a little nutrition, I think we’ll see a difference in future generations.

There is something to be said for people who are more committed to the process than they are to the delivery. I have five children and I can tell you that doctors are much more concerned with how a mother eats and exercises during her pregnancy than they are with how the delivery goes. The delivery happens on its own. All the doctor does when that time comes is hold out his hands and catch the baby. That’s it!

I do not believe that we are called to be “soul winners”. I think overall we do more harm than good when we put that role upon ourselves. Be attentive to the heart needs of everyone around you. Don’t abandon heart thinking for institutional teachings. You should never have to force a decision for Christ with anyone you talk to. Let the Holy Spirit give birth to their spirit in His own time. Don’t ever underestimate the power of your prayers and your love. Let that be the only tool you use when ministering to those who haven’t become Christians yet.