I’ve watched about five different reality shows where people were competing for huge sums of money and one of the things they had to do was eat disgusting things. We’re talking spiders, crickets, grasshoppers, roaches, dead rats, and even buffalo testicles! I watched one guy on “Fear Factor” eat three-week-old moldy, maggot-filled cheese. I do believe it was the sickest and funniest thing I’ve ever witnessed. When people are desperate, they’ll eat almost anything.

I personally hate the dark meat in chicken. It makes me want to throw up. But put me on an island for a month with nothing but rats and bats and I promise you I’d not only eat dark meat chicken, but I’d love it! I don’t care for okra in the least. It tastes like Vaseline-pellets to me. Offer me fifty thousand dollars to eat it and I promise you that I’d develop a taste for it real quick.

I’ve been a Christian for about twenty years now, and in that time I’ve experienced the four corners of denominational thinking. I’ve been to Catholic churches, Methodist, Episcopalian, Baptist, Nazarene, Assembly of God, Four Square, Calvary, Victory Outreach, Church of Christ, and about fifty other denominations that range from cold to hot. You name it, I’ve been there. I’ve seen formal gatherings, informal gatherings, contemporary, traditional, charismatic, and just plain dead gatherings.

The one common denominator that I’ve noticed in this vast religious landscape of Christian beliefs is that they are all full of hurting and hungry people. Not just hungry people – starving people! Over the years I’ve watched different Christian “Fads” come and go. I’ve seen twitching, barking, laughing, shaking, falling, hopping and dancing. I have found that you can always gauge the level of spiritual starvation in people by what they’ll ultimately accept as food. What will they put in their spiritual mouths, chew up, swallow, and call food? I do not believe that there has been a time in my entire life quite like the one we are living in now. There has been a famine in the Church for so long that people are showing signs of extreme spiritual malnutrition. Christians today remind me of the little starving Ethiopian children we see on the “Feed the Hungry” commercials. Their spiritual bellies are swollen from a lack of nutrition, their bones are showing through their skin, and there are flies buzzing around their faces.

At this point I believe that most Christians, out of sheer desperation, will eat just about anything that’s given to them. Gone are the days of meat and potatoes. Anything will do for today, as long as it fills the stomach. I watch sincere-hearted people running from dumpster to dumpster eager to find just a scrap of whatever to ease their spiritual hunger pains. People will literally travel hundreds of miles to attend a conference where supposedly the fire of God is being poured out. They’ll wait in line for four hours and give away money that they don’t even have, only to leave blaming themselves for not having received the fire they had heard so much about.

I recently watched a series of videos of a popular preacher in Florida whom everyone is raving about. After watching about an hour of clips I was mortified by what I was seeing. Iseriously thought it was a clip of some wacky character that “Saturday Night Live” had come up with to make fun of Christians. What astonished me was how easily all the people in the audience were led astray by something so obviously screwy. The things this guy said, the claims he made, the ridiculous things he taught, and his silly slap-stick antics were so unbelievably whacked out, it was astonishing to see how blindly people followed him.

This guy is a convicted sex offender. He’s covered in tattoos (of terrible things). He has piercings all over his body and he claims that God tells him to punch people in the stomach and kick little old ladies in the face. He also talks about these insane visions he claims to have had that go against ALL of scripture. The supposed visions are so positively wacky and off the wall, that they remind me of something my three-year-old daughter would make up when she is in an extra goofy mood during story time. It would be hilarious if it weren’t for the audience full of spiritually emaciated people believing every word of it.

This is just one of many examples that I’ve found in recent days where evidence of starvation is running rampant in our religion. I understand these people because I used to be one of them. I remember my non-Christian friends trying to lovingly talk sense into me when I was following another popular “healing evangelist” of the day (the other guy). Even they knew that this guy was a crazy charlatan. My friends asked for verified proof that people were really getting healed, and I remember secretly not wanting to investigate that because I wanted so badly to believe it was really happening the way he claimed it was. I felt that asking for proof would be a lack of faith on my part, and I feared losing a blessing from God if I went down that road. It was honestly more fun to just believe it was true. It was fulfilling. I suppose I knew in my heart that things were grossly exaggerated, but I didn’t want to lose that excitement I was feeling in my spirit.

I remember that giddy feeling that would come over me when I would hear the crazy stories about visions and encounters with God that my evangelist guy claimed he had. Though it did sound a bit “off” to me, I was just happy that something was happening somewhere to someone; even if it wasn’t happening to me. I think that’s where the giddiness came from. There had been drought and famine for so long that my heart would leap at the mere suggestion of rain. Also, in a twisted way, it both gave me hope and took my hope away at the same time. It gave me hope because I thought, “Who knows, if this is happening to him, it could happen to me.” It took my hope away because when I came back down to reality, I knew that it wasn’t ever going to happen to me. It was just too big and, quite frankly, too crazy.

I remember driving for three hours and waiting in line for another six hours just to get a nose-bleed seat at one of his crusades. I didn’t want anything else other than to know that God was real and He noticed me. I remember driving home after the service feeling like I missed it. I totally understand spiritual starvation to the point where I can recognize that hollow look in someone’s eyes from a mile away. It’s an unfulfilled hungry look that is clouded with desperation and self blame. This is the look I see in most modern day Christians.

The institution of Church, in my opinion is a watering-well business. They dug the hole, they attached the bucket to the rope, and they set up the pulley and crank system so people could get water, and they distribute it to all who come. It’s a great business because everyone needs water. The problem is that when people actually encounter Jesus, he causes them to overflow with living water from within and they never thirst again. That’s not good for business!

I think institutional Christianity ultimately survives on keeping people in a constant state of starvation and dehydration. “Living Water” cannot be distributed to your customers when you’re in the business of selling water. That’s suicide. Arrowhead wouldn’t last a day if people got wind of this Jesus guy who could make them not thirst anymore.

I remember pondering that “Living Water” verse in the Bible years ago and secretly wondering why I was still thirsting. That passage alone was evidence that I was missing something, and I think it’s evidence that most of American Christianity is missing something. People don’t travel three hours to hear a popular preacher speak if they’re not thirsty. They don’t pool their money together and send their pastor to Florida in hopes that he’ll bring home the fire unless they’re starving to death. People also aren’t ready and willing to believe any crazy thing when they are well fed and satisfied. These things are the result of severe hunger.

When people don’t know how God feels about them, or they suspect that He has less than favorable feelings towards them, they begin to hunger and thirst. When people don’t know where they stand with God at any given moment, or they attempt to calculate exactly where they stand based on their performance or lack thereof, their spiritual stomachs begin to growl and their lips become dry and chapped. When people think that Christianity is about NOT SINNING, their spiritual bellies begin to swell from lack of nutrition. When they believe that they were put on this earth to complete a job that God created for them to do, they ultimately find themselves crouched down waiting for the food truck while flies buzz around their lips. .

The moment I realized that He loved me just the way I was, EVERYTHING left me in an instant. My hunger and thirst were gone immediately and I never again attended another conference or “how to” workshop that the watering-well system of Church had to offer. I never even searched the book store for a Christian book to read. Every single behavior that I had lived with up until that point, ended the day I realized He and I were fine. I can honestly say that I thirst no more. Jesus was right.

The whole world of witnessing was such a turn off to me that I could barely stand to have it brought up. After sitting through hundreds of sermons where the pastor would shame the hell out of me for not telling the world about Christ, the guilt and condemnation finally took its toll. I pretty much decided to throw the whole witnessing thing out the window altogether. So when my friend opened up to me about how she felt about witnessing, I understood her heart completely.

So what’s with that anyway? Why would we feel insecure about telling someone we meet on the street about Jesus? Why does it feel so weird to give the whole Gospel script to people? Are we holding back? Is it really because we don’t care for people as much as we should? What is it about us that is so hesitant to witness? Are we embarrassed of Him, or are we just not believing enough in Him? Why is it that this subject seems to condemn most Christians?

In the last forty years I’ve heard no less then a hundred different pastors stand up and reprimand their congregations for not witnessing enough about Jesus. I’ve been to conferences, work shops, Sunday school classes, and weekend retreats designed to encourage and equip Christians to get out and be a witness for Christ. It’s the age-old problem that pastors have bitched and nagged about for as long as I can remember. It seems that no matter how many sermons are preached on the subject, people don’t get any better at it. The best anyone’s ever been able to do is to encourage their congregation to invite others to church so the pastor can do the witnessing. In fact, this is what witnessing has become in today’s church.

I recently had a pastor friend of mine ask me my opinion as to why Christians never witness. My answer is simple.

For the most part I think Christians don’t witness because they haven’t witnessed anything.

I believe that we have lost sight of exactly what a “witness” is. Church people use that word wrongly. It amazes me how often we mistranslate that word in today’s Christian world. I honestly believe that most honest Christians think the word “witness” means something totally different for us than it does for the rest of the world.

We are taught that witnessing is a commandment. That’s impossible. Witnessing is not up to you. I can’t command you to be a witness for the OJ Simpson case. No matter how much of a law I make it, being a witness is not up to YOU. You were either there and saw something or you weren’t there and you didn’t see anything.

When the OJ Simpson case was finished, did you feel guilty for not being a witness for that case? Probably not, because you didn’t witness anything. You would have absolutely no reason to be there. Being a witness is not something you can decide to do. You can’t walk into a random court case going on in your city and ask the judge if you can take the stand because you were commanded to be a good witness. Amazingly, that is EXACTLY what most Christians do every time they “witness” because they’ve been taught that a witness is telling people everything you’ve learned about something.

If you read the papers and watch CNN religiously in an attempt to gather as much information as you can about an upcoming high profile murder trial, you still are not qualified to be a witness. No amount of knowledge or memorized information about a case is the equivalent of witnessing what actually took place. Ironically, Christians today think that because they read about something in the Bible and listened to a sermon on it, they’ve witnessed it. That doesn’t even make sense.

Pile on top of that, the fact that we are constantly pressured to take the witness stand and do a good job. It’s no wonder Christians come across to the world as being insincere and hypocritical. We are insincere because we are calling ourselves a witness to something we’ve never personally witnessed. The best we can do to improve our witness is to study theater. I honestly believe it is not by accident that drama teams have popped up in churches all across America. The more realistic we can make out time on the witness stand, the more convinced the jury will be.

We are taught to, be a “good witness” and no one ever stops to think what in the world that means. It doesn’t even make sense. In fact, the very wording of that statement is evidence that the whole thing is a concocted lie put together to deceive the court. There is no such thing as a “good” or “bad” witness. It’s impossible to improve what you’ve witnessed without exaggerating or outright lying while on the stand.

A witness is asked to do one thing and one thing ONLY; tell the court what you witnessed. Don’t tell the court what you think or what your theory is as to what happened. Don’t even give your opinion as to whether or not the guy on trial is innocent or guilty. What did you actually see?

If you saw the defendant drive by your house in a red convertible at around 2:15 am, THAT IS ALL YOU CAN SAY. The court is not interested in where you think he went or where you think he was coming from. All they want to know is what you saw! If you were up at 2:00 am reading the Bible, or if you were up looking at pornography matters NOT. If you had showered or if you stank to high heavens when you saw this, matters NOT. Tell the court what you saw. THAT and only that is what makes a “good” witness. A good witness is also someone who doesn’t exaggerate or embellish what they saw in an effort to make the story more exciting. Truthfulness about what was actually witnessed is what makes a “good witness.”

I think Christians feel nervous about witnessing because they’ve been taught that they have to include a bunch of information that they read about or learned, but didn’t actually see. We feel like we’re reading someone else’s script. It feels unnatural because it is unnatural. It’s unnatural because it’s not our true testimony.

You’re not commanded to be a witness for Christ. You’re commanded to tell what you’ve witnessed, AND NOTHING MORE! For most Christians, I am finding that if they told “the truth and nothing but the truth,” their time on the witness stand would last little more than a few minutes. I honestly don’t say that to shame anyone. In fact, I don’t think it’s their fault. Unfortunately, because so many of us have been taught to sell the story to the courts as though it came from us, we find ourselves getting so twisted and spun around that we can’t distinguish the difference between what we memorized and what we actually witnessed. Our actual experience gets buried beneath a mountain of scripts and screenplays we’ve spent a lifetime studying and rehearsing.

I’ll never forget watching the OJ case on television many years ago. I quit my job a few weeks before the court case began, so I was glued to my television every day from the beginning to the end. I think I learned more about being a witness and giving a testimony by watching that court case then I did after more than twenty years of being a Christian.

What amazed me most, was how the D.A. was able to string together a bunch of seemingly insignificant testimonies and form an accurate timeline and picture of what happened. Each witness who testified, told only what they witnessed. One guy looked out his window late at night and saw a white Ford Bronco speed past his house and disappear into the night. That was all he witnessed. That was all he told. He didn’t explain the whole story of the murders and try to convince the jury that OJ was guilty or innocent. He just told what he witnessed. Another guy saw a dark figure run across OJ Simpson’s lawn and enter through the back of OJ’s house. The second witness told only what he saw and nothing more.

There was a couple who found Nicole Simpson’s dog wandering aimlessly through the neighborhood. They said he was nervous and agitated. Their testimony was only about the dog and what they witnessed. They offered no opinion on what might have happened that night. They weren’t qualified to. They were good witnesses because they told the court exactly what they witnessed. They told the truth, and nothing but the truth.

One by one, the different witnesses approached the stand and testified. Slowly, but surely, the entire picture of what happened came together. Amazingly, there were some people who’s testimony didn’t seem to have anything to do with the murders whatsoever. Some people testified about the handling of blood after it was collected. Others testified about police procedures in collecting and protecting evidence. Another person testified about whether or not actors in movies get to keep the clothes they wore in the film. There were multiple witnesses that came from hundreds of unique perspectives. No two stories looked or sounded alike, yet together – they all pointed to the truth.

It is not a witness’s job to convince the jury of anything at all. It’s a witness’s job to tell only what they witnessed. If Christians could get this concept, I believe an explosion of freedom that they’ve never known would rock their spiritual worlds. Contrary to popular belief, I have found that Christians don’t have a problem witnessing at all. When something happens in their life between them and God, they immediately run around like giddy school-girls telling everyone who will listen. People don’t have a problem testifying about what they’ve actually experienced. It’s human nature to tell everyone around you when something exciting happens in your life. Even Jesus couldn’t get people to keep their mouths shut after they encountered Him. He told them over and over not to tell anyone what had happened to them, and every single time they ran around and blabbed it to the world. When people actually experience something, they can’t help themselves. They have to tell everyone they know!

Christians have a problem with reading a script that someone else wrote and trying to make it look like it’s their testimony.

If people could just get this concept I truly believe they wouldn’t be so hard on themselves for not performing up to standards. Some people’s testimony is nothing more than, “He showed me that He loves me today,” or “He’s showing me how my mother felt when I said what I said to her,” or “Today, God finally explained something to me that I’ve been asking about for months.” Our testimonies will be random snippets of intimate encounters that we’ve experienced with God. There may never be two incidents that look alike, or that compare with other people’s snippets. Remember, it’s not our job to form anything out of what we witness. It’s not our job to convince anyone of anything based on what we’ve witnessed. It’s only our job to be truthful about it and trust in the D.A. (God) to put the pieces together and reveal the true picture.

Many Christians feel that being a “good witness” means that they have to embellish their personal moments with the Father when relating the story with others. We exaggerate about what happened in an attempt to make it sound more spiritual and exciting. Rather than tell it like it is, I find that many people are afraid to admit how unspiritual some of their moments with God really are. They give their testimonies a full body make-over, and after awhile, even they can’t remember which version of the story is true.

If we understood this concept, we wouldn’t even be tempted to compare what we’ve witnessed with what someone else has witnessed. The two have nothing to do with one another. How much sense would it make if OJ Simpson’s limo driver started competing with the couple who found the dog wandering the neighborhood, because he liked their testimony better than his? Ridiculous isn’t even the word for it. It would be outright stupid.

“You mean to tell me that I can do drugs, kill people, rob banks and burn down an orphanage and I’ll still go to heaven?”

It amazes me how folks come to that conclusion after hearing that we are forgiven for everything, and He will never leave us or forsake us. You have to wonder what’s in the heart of Americans today when betrayal and debauchery are the first thing that comes to their mind when offered security in a relationship.

Could you imagine going to a wedding and listening to the bride and groom recite theirvows: “I will never leave you – through sickness and health – for richer or poorer – for better or for worse – till death do us part,” and some guy on the front row raises his hand and says, “Woe dude, that means you can cheat on her, do drugs, beat her up and burn her parents’ house down.” It’s interesting that this is the mentality that people worry that others will take when offered a forever covenant with God. The separating factor between those who “get it” and those who don’t, is love. People who do not have love in their hearts almost always interpret a forever covenant as an opportunity to sin.

An open hearted human reaction to eternal security is almost never this. Security in a relationship causes the heart to open wide and become transparent and vulnerable. The forever covenant is assurance that every part of a person will be accepted and loved, no matter how ugly or dark. It encourages a person to no longer hide within themselves or live in secret. When they know they are safe forever, they are a thousand times more likely to give all of themselves and hold nothing back. This is the heart behind the marriage covenant of “Till death do us part.”

For any relationship to be authentic, it must start with a forever covenant of eternal security. Unfortunately, today, most relationships don’t have this one foundational element and they are plagued with secrecy, uncertainty, and shallowness. I think that more than anything, today’s relationships are saturated with control. I have found that control is humanity’s antidote to insecurity. This is where the heart of today’s Christian thinking exists.

Most Christian teachings today strip us of our security in our relationship with God. They create uncertainty in the hearts of people as to where they stand with Him at any given time. Once uncertainty has been swallowed, control sets in. It sets in because it is needed immediately. There is a vacuum created with unsureness that needs to be filled with something more powerful than itself. Control is not only needed, but it’s desired as well.

Teachings about accountability partners, spiritual leaders, submitting to authority and church covering are widely accepted with little or no resistance. When a loving God is made to look unpredictable and not so loving, people submit to someone who they think might know better than them. They lose confidence in themselves and their ability to please an unpleaseable God, so they put themselves under the care and control of others in an effort to find security again.

Without security, the Christian life becomes about “NOT sinning.” Every single aspect of a person’s relationship with God is determined by whether or not they have sinned recently. I have found that just about every Christian term is somehow linked to this pattern of belief. Anytime a Christian today is talking about his spiritual struggles, he is most certainly talking about a personal battle with some sin in his life. If a person is struggling to get closer to God, they are usually struggling to conquer a sin or a pattern of sin. When someone feels especially spiritual and close to God, it’s usually because they haven’t committed any of their big sins in the last few weeks. Because they feel as though theygot the victory of that particular sin, they feel freed up and confident to approach God.

“Growing in the Lord” is defined by how much less a person sins than they did before they met God. Today, we even consider our “witness for Christ” to be our public abstinence from sin. If a person sins in front of unbelievers, they are told that they “blew their witness.” Almost all Christian “testimonies” are about how a person was caught in a life of sin before they met Jesus. The bigger the sins a person was committing before they got saved, the more they are asked to give their testimony in front of others.

It doesn’t surprise me that when the grace message is preached today, the first thing that comes to mind with the average Christian is sin. The grace message is spoken of as a “license to sin” and the mere thought of that scares people to death. It goes againsteverything they think the Christian life is about. Finding out that God loves you whether you sin or not, is a bit scary because people aren’t sure what they’ll do.

One person actually told me that it’s safer to deny the grace message because that way they’d know for sure that they would sin less. “Freedom in Christ” sounds too much like “freedom to sin.” It’s just not worth chancing it.

I have listened to grace preachers all over the world respond to the world famous “license to sin” accusation. We all have our own way of trying to get people to not look at it that way, but to see the heart of relationship and what Christianity is really about. My approach to this has become vastly different from most. In fact, I believe it would down right scare the hell out of most pastors.

Do I think the grace message gives people a license to sin?

YES, I absolutely do.

Part of giving someone freedom, is giving them their choice back. Christianity today has stripped us of our choice to sin. When we are told that sin separates us from God and we will be punished, our choice in the matter is taken away. We have an entire generation of people who quit sinning because of the outer voice of their religion rather than the inner personal voice of their heart. In other words, their quitting didn’t come from their heart; it came from their head. The grace message gives people back their right to sin, and it provides an atmosphere in which they can grow spiritually right and find truth in the center of themselves rather than in a system. A license to sin is not an encouragement to sin, but it’s the right to sin. Take away that right, and you take away relationship altogether.

“Everything is permissible for me”—but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible for me”—but I will not be mastered by anything.” –Paul–

Without a license to sin, I don’t believe people will ever know their own heart, much less the Heart of God. The problem is that in the process of molding themselves to fit religion’s requirements, a person learns to deny any and all inner emotions of the heart that might cause them to sin. Things like anger, passion, lust and greed are shut down and the result is that they lose contact with self and eventually forget who they are altogether. Sadly, Christians today stand adamantly against sin, but they have no idea why. They don’t feel a thing in their hearts about sin, other than the memorized knowledge that “it’s wrong.” They believe it’s wrong, not because their heart sings that truth, but because that’s what they’ve been taught. When you shut down some aspects of the heart, you end up shutting down ALL aspects of the heart.

Some people who believe that Christianity is about “not sinning” will inevitably say, “What difference does it make? As long as a person isn’t sinning, who cares what’s behind it?” This is an anti-intimacy mentality. Would you rather have your spouse not cheat on you because adultery is a sin or because they love you? Givingsomeone a license to sin is the only way to get to the “because I love you” answer. Most fear that answer will never come, so they opt for the “adultery is a sin” card. It’s more controlling and has a better guarantee. They’ll say something like, “If you ever cheat on me, I’ll divorce you” in a feeble effort to guarantee the other person’s faithfulness. Real relationship says, “If you ever cheated on me, I wouldn’t leave you.” It leaves faithfulness completely up to the heart of their spouse. The thought of that is terrifying.

When my six-year-old daughter informed us that she wanted to run away, we packed a suitcase for her and opened the door. Needless to say, she changed her mind and told us she wants to stay with us. I’m not interested in making prisoners out of my children. The only way to accomplish that is to give them a license to run away. The same is true with the grace message. God wants relationship that is based on a heart’s desire for intimacy with Him. He’s not interested in keeping prisoners. The only way to have this intimacy with people is to give them a license to sin.

True freedom comes only when the hand of control is removed and a person is given choice to sin or not to sin. If you have a hundred birds in a cage and fifty of those birds belong to you, but the other fifty do not; how many will fly away if you open the cage?

ALL OF THEM.

However, fifty will eventually fly back. Then and only then, is relationship possible.

The wrath of God is one of those subjects that most of us are secretly disturbed by. Even people of the grace persuasion tend to graze over this topic, not sure what to do with it. It’s especially frustrating when we see it mentioned in the New Testament. It’s not as though there is no such thing as God’s wrath because of Jesus. It’s still talked about in several places after the resurrection took place. Most of us can’t pinpoint where those places are because we’ve trained ourselves to emotionally graze over them when reading our Bibles. We’ve become experts in putting it out of our minds and promising ourselves to deal with it or think about it another day.

Even more interesting, are the people who actually feed on the wrath-verses. Their entire Christian existence is based on their fear of ever being at the receiving end of God’s terrible wrath. It’s the topic of grace that terrifies and frustrates these people. They rely on wrath to keep themselves in line. They love it. The moment anyone suggests a God of love and grace to these people they get angry, vindictive, and even fearful. They need their perspective of wrath because it’s the power force they live their lives by. Grace seems pitiful and weak. Wrath has power and force. They honestly don’t believe there is any power in grace whatsoever. I have found that people like this are actually attracted to wrath because it kills others. It gives people what they deserve. They like it because they hate people.

One gentleman interrupted me when I was speaking on the subject of love, so he could dispute what I was teaching on the heart of God. He was visibly angry because he wasn’t hearing the gospel the way he liked it. It didn’t come seasoned with fire and brimstone. The thing he had grown to rely on to motivate him to follow the rules was mysteriously absent from my words. This man attributed his recent life change to his fear of God’s wrath and eternal hell. He even boastfully informed us that we were fooling ourselves if we thought love was going to overcome the evil in the world. It was sad. For this man, wrath was a threat from God. He feared God’s wrath so much, that he straightened up and quit sinning.

What is the Wrath of Love?

Firstly, I want to re-term “The Wrath of God.” I think that term has been abused and twisted so much that it brings up bad feelings for anyone hearing it. The Bible says that God is love and so the proper term that would hit the bulls-eye of our understanding would be “The Wrath of Love.”

Already, when you hear it put that way, you can feel a different meaning peaking through the muck of past religion. It does not discount or diminish the wrath of God, but it defines it more clearly. It defines who that wrath is aimed towards and who it’s NEVER aimed towards. That makes all the difference!

I have found that the wrath of love is as violent and awful as love is great and beautiful. Where there is love, there is wrath. As much as you love, you will have wrath on that same level. The two cannot be separated. They live in harmony with one another. They are essentially the same. Wrath is love and love is wrath.

I remember one summer, long ago, my father picked us up and took us to the mountains in my aunt’s 1070’s style camper. We went up to go camping together for the weekend. I didn’t get to see my dad more than about one week a year, since he left us for another woman, so it was a special treat. Any time at all spent with him meant the world to me.

We were only there for one night. He called it “two days” because we drove up the first day and came back the second. I remember feeling like I’d been ripped off in the deal. I still recall sitting up late at night with him and giving him several scenarios in which to respond to. We’d ask him, “What if a bear came out of the mountains and tried to eat us?” He would assure us that wouldn’t happen, and then tell us to go to sleep. “What if a man came up to us and tried to hurt us? What would you do?”

His answer was more important than he knew at that time. We didn’t need to be pacified with a stupid, “that will never happen” answer, and sent to sleep; we needed something much bigger. To an eight-year-old boy, this question held within it the very picture of my value. What did I mean to him? How much did he love me? Where did I stand on his priority list?

I remember waiting for the answer and secretly hoping it would be as gory and viscous as possible. In a tired voice, my dad said, “If that were to happen, Daddy would beat that man up so bad that he could never walk again. I’d probably kill him.” He said, “Daddy won’t let anyone ever hurt you like that.”

Without a moment passing I darted back, “Then what about a bear? Would you kill the bear too?” His former answer wasn’t OK with me, and he was beginning to see that. “Yes I would” he replied. “I would kick him in the teeth, smash his head, and beat him to a pulp.”

Those were the words that both excited me, and comforted me. Thirty minutes later, I was safe and sound asleep.

The need for wrath

There is something in each and every one of us that NEEDS wrath on our behalf. From my earliest memories as a boy among boys, on the playground at school, we held imaginary competitions between our dads. The “my dad can beat up your dad” conversation was asnatural to us boys as climbing trees, playing mud-war, and dragging G.I. Joes behind our bikes. Every kid did it and every kid believed his dad was the strongest and the best. It must be that way. Each of us needed to know our dad could kick anyone’s ass on the block. Even fictional characters like Superman or Spiderman couldn’t stand against our dad. We needed to believe that. Something inside of us had to know we were safe with our fathers.

The wrath of God is NEVER pointed towards His children! It is ON BEHALF of His children.

A true understanding of the wrath of God should cause you to run to God, not from Him. He disciplines those He loves and He has wrath for those who attempt to destroy those He loves.

The wrath of God is your daddy being able to beat up every other daddy in the universe. You NEED to know that.

If a man broke into my home and tried to harm my wife and children, I can guarantee you this: he would experience the wrath of Darin in ways he’d never imagined in his worst nightmares. I promise you that he would die a very painful and slow death at my hands. This may sound unloving to you, but I assure you that it’s the product of the strongest dose of love I’ve known in over forty years. My family is everything to me. The same drive within me that loves them, protects them.

It reminds me of Jesus warning anyone who would cause a child to sin. He says it would be better for that person if they were tied to a millstone and thrown into the sea. In other words, he was stroking the love that existed within each and every parent standing there listening to him. He was speaking love’s language. The language that parents throughout the world know all too well.

The next time you hear someone threaten you with the wrath of God, don’t for one moment be fearful or apprehensive. It should never intimidate you. It should excite you.

Ten minutes later, they rushed her straight to the Intensive Care Unit. I followed close behind them, asking them over and over, “Can’t we just suck the fluid out of her lungs?Isn’t there something we can do for her?” They proceeded to put her under a heat lamp and do nothing. I was able to look through a window to the I.C.U. and check up on her whenever I wanted. I came and left about a hundred times in the first three hours. I was slowly getting more and more frustrated with the doctors because every time I came and looked through the window, Eva was lying there gasping for breath, and the doctor was sitting at a desk doing nothing.

One time I stood there for almost thirty minutes, and in that time period the doctor looked up from her desk a total of three times to check on my daughter. Once four hours of this nonsense had gone by, I was furious. What’s the point in letting this child gasp for air, and not doing anything to help her?

At about four and a half hours, Eva was sweating and moaning. She was getting tired of gasping and working to breathe. It looked like she was slowly dying. I became irate and I called the head doctor on that floor and demanded that something be done. She came and met me in the hall and I brought her over to my struggling daughter and told her the story of what I had witnessed the last five hours. “Why aren’t you guys doing anything?” I said. “Isn’t there anything we can do?”

I will never forget the doctor’s reply to me. She looked at me squarely in the eyes and said, “There’s a lot we can do for your daughter, but we’re choosing to do nothing for the first six hours.” She said, “We have to give her time to declare herself.” She went on to explain to me that, “Eva must fight to survive.” If they helped her from the beginning, they would actually be hurting her in the long run. She said, “We have to see how badly Eva wants to live. This is good for her.” She promised me that if Eva should quit breathing altogether, they would step in and save her, but until they see signs of that happening, they just wait and watch.

Once I understood what was happening, I let myself in to the I.C.U. and I stood by Eva’s crib – bent down and put my lips to her little ear. I said, “Breathe, baby, breathe. Breathe, baby, breathe.” Her eyes cracked open, and then shut again as she continued her battle for life. Two hours later, she was lovingly swaddled in a sweet smelling blanket and safely returned to her mother’s arms. Turns out, the doctor was absolutely right. She has been “declaring herself” every damn day for the last five years! Out of our five children, she is the strongest willed by far. I often wonder if it’s because of those first six hours of her life.

Common Christian Treasure Hunts

I can’t tell you how many sincere Christians have told me about their constant battle to reclaim the relationship they had with God in the beginning of their walk. So many people reminisce about how wonderful it was in the early years, and they constantly kick themselves for letting it get cold and die away. If they could just get back to that glorious place where everything was so spiritually powerful and delightfully simple, they would finally be where they’ve always wanted to be with God. Happiness, peace, and joy are surely waiting for them there. Until that happens, most Christians I know spend the majority of their time trying to recapture that intensity and passion they once had for God, and I will tell you flat out that I’ve NEVER EVER seen anyone actually find it.

This seems to be an extremely common phenomenon among Christians. I have personally spent most of my life doing exactly what I’ve described. Looking, searching, praying, and wishing I could find what I used to have with God when I first met Him. It was so easy in those days. It seemed like everything was handed to me on a spiritual silver platter. Then religion with it’s rules and doctrines and traditions had to go and mess it all up. I have been on this search for most of my life until the day Eva was born. Something in me changed with that experience. I understood the Heart of God a little more than I did before.

When a child is conceived and begins to grow in his mother’s womb, his life is a total cake walk. There’s a cord connected to his tummy that provides everything he needs to develop and grow. All he has to do is kick back and enjoy. When we took the first ultra sound pictures of our daughter, Landin, we were in for an amazing surprise. She was literally dancing in her mother’s womb. She was jumping, doing flips and dancing all around. We couldn’t believe our eyes. It was amazingly beautiful. I told my wife, “Must be nice.” Not a care in the world.

When the baby is born, that cord is still attached. For ten months, the mother literally poured everything of herself into that child through that cord. Everything from blood, fluid, oxygen, food, and even DNA from both daddy and momma. There is a point however, where it’s time to “Cut the Cord.” It’s a point when all of mother is in the child and it’s time to be born. If the baby stays in longer than the duedate, eventually the mother’s womb can no longer provide life and nutrition for the baby. After a certain amount of time, it actually begins to hurt the child. This is why being born is so necessary.

I’m always amazed when I meet someone who said a “sinner’s prayer” an hour ago, and they refer to themselves as “born again.” It’s perplexing to me that we believe that accepting Jesus Christ is the same as being “born again.” Where in this world, does any creature conceive and give birth in an instant? Why do we think it’s this way in spirit?

Asking Christ to come into your heart is NOT what makes you born again. It is simply conception. Many people out there experience conception, but end up being miscarried because the conception was synthetic. Kind of like how birth control pills tell a woman’s body that she’s pregnant when she’s really not. I think there are many people who experiment with spiritual conception, but aren’t interested in the least in being born again. Institutional Christianity has become experts in “knocking up the Holy Spirit” with an unwanted pregnancy. In other words, we’ve figured out how to do artificial insemination by stimulating a person emotionally and carnally. They latch on to the Holy Spirit and conception takes place, but the pregnancy ultimately ends in miscarriage because the person wasn’t the least bit interested in being born again.

In my experience, a person usually becomes “born again” about a year or so after conception. It’s just a moment in someone’s life where everything just seems to open up and come together. Most Christians I know can even pinpoint the time when they were fully grown and the Spirit gave birth to them. It doesn’t happen in a day.

It has been my opinion that during the time we are developing in the womb of the Spirit (before being born again) we are connected to an umbilical cord and getting fed all of the Spirit for that short time. That’s that time in your life that you remember where everything was so wonderful and simple between you and God. There is a point however when the Spirit has given us all He can. A point when we’ve fully developed and are ready for birth. Once we are born again an amazing thing happens that I believe modern day Christianity has overlooked completely.

When my daughter Landin was born, she came out full of her mother. She was still connected to her mother. The first thing that had to happen before anything else could take place was up to me. I reached in with a pair of scissors and cut the cord. It’s the father’s way of saying, “You have sat back and developed and grown in your mother’s womb in a beautiful relationship. Now it’s time to cut the cord of that relationship and give you choice. Though the cord is cut, know that you are all of your mother and all of me. Relationship, from this day forward, is your choice.” It must be that way!

I’ve discovered that the time we Christians long to go back to, was actually our spiritual womb time. You can’t go back to it. You’ll never get to experience it again. It was there for a specific time and for a specific purpose, but the Father has cut the cord and you have been born again. You are now full of Him, and relationship is choice. He no more expects you to recapture your “womb time” than I expect one of my children to crawl back into Angie’s womb and relive it. In other words, STOP FEELING GUILTY. Stop searching for a “corded” relationship with God like you used to have. You’re not getting it. He won’t let you go back to that. It wasn’t YOU who screwed it up. It was your Father who cut the cord.

When you think the Father is calling you back to the way it used to be, you are mistaken. It is not His will that you be carried and fed as a helpless child for the rest of your life. God is the one who purposefully ended that glorious time when you were in the womb of His Spirit. Don’t waste your energy trying to reattach the umbilical cord. If you feel like you’re suffocating in this world It’s time for you to stand up and “declare yourself.” God isn’t saying, “Come back to me” or “If you could only recapture what we used to have together, everything would be fine.” He cut the cord of that relationship and today He leans in closely and whispers,

“Breathe baby breathe. Breathe baby breathe.”

Then she actually licked her finger, put it in my drink, and stirred the ice around. With a seductive look, she pulled her finger out and reached it towards my mouth for me to taste. Not wanting to make her feel embarrassed and because she was pretty and I was thirsty, I opened my mouth. The margarita had made her finger cold and salty, but it was nice because the sun was out and it was a hot day. As I was savoring the salty flavor in my mouth, I heard what sounded like a seagull choking on a piece of fish. “Daah daah daah.” I looked around the beach to see what kind of an animal would make such a sound. I heard it again; “Daah, daah, daah,” but couldn’t decide where it was coming from.

Just then, something clenched onto my right cheek and began jerking and pulling as if it were trying to remove a chunk. It was painful. That was when I opened my eyes and realized that I had been dreaming. That margarita salt I tasted in my mouth was still very much alive. It was alive because my one-year-old son, Jude, was lying on my chest facing me, with his snotty nose directly in my mouth. He had a chunk of my cheek in his little fist, digging his uncut fingernails into my skin, trying to wake me up, chanting, “Daaa daaa daaa,” waiting for me to open my eyes.

Fifteen years ago, I had a life full of dreams and goals. I had financial plans that would make me a millionaire by the age of 30. I drove a BMW and a brand-new motorcycle. I owned expensive things and had exquisite taste. It was nothing for me to drop a hundred dollars a night in a pricy restaurant. Everything was good. My sights were aimed high and my “to-do list” included climbing Mount Everest, making movies, and being on the cover of Forbes Magazine. My health was at its best and I was physically stronger than anyone I knew. The sky was the limit for me 15 years ago.

One night, almost ten years ago, I sat in the hospital with my young wife, having no idea that I was just hours away from an event so catastrophic that my entire life as I knew itwould come to an abrupt end. It was the birth-day of my first child, Landin. For me, it felt as though I was waiting for something in the mail. I had no idea what was about to happen. It didn’t even register with me that my dreams and goals were about to dissolve into nothing. I honestly thought I would go on as before, living my life and chasing my dreams. For me, having a new baby was about as significant as buying a dog or a cat. It may take a little extra time and money, but life would go on as it did before. I wasn’t prepared for what was about to take place in my heart.

About five hours after Landin was born, her mother was asleep in the hospital bed, it was the middle of the night and I was holding a miracle. This was our first time alone and in a span of about three minutes, an infant destroyed everything that meant anything in my life. My goals and dreams that weighed so heavy on my list of priorities, suddenly became shallow and uninteresting. The possessions that defined my very existence and validated my manhood, became nothing more than a pile of rocks.

The wife who used to look upon me as the hope of her future, no longer thought and dreamed only of me. In fact, I was put at the bottom of the list. I suddenly went from number one, to number two, in the space of an hour. I went from being footloose and fancy-free to being a prisoner in my own home. No longer could I dine at fancy restaurants and stay out till the wee morning hours. I couldn’t even meet a friend at Starbucks for a cup of coffee. My sleep time that was formerly sacred, had been pillaged and red uced to a few hours a night (if I was lucky).

In the following weeks and months, my healthy body began to accept viruses that it had not known since childhood. I was sick more in six months than I was in the previous 30 years. The sleep deprivation began to take a toll and the only thing that kept me going was the hope that things would soon change. Little did I know at that time; I wouldn’t catch up on my sleep for another 15 years.

In a very real way, the day Landin was born, I never made it out of the hospital alive. I left all that I thought to be me, in room 201, and I have never been the same. My heart went from being securely and safely protected beneath a sternum and ribcage, to being haphazardly pinned to the shirt of a wobbling one-year-old girl who ran into things and fell on her face 60 times a day. Up until that time, the most terrible thing I could imagine happening in my life was death itself. The image of my death became nothing in comparison to the pain and suffering I would endure if I lost this little child.

In all my years, I can honestly say that when I was given my first child I was given something a thousand times more terrible than anything I had ever imagined. I was given LOVE. The strength and power of that love was so potent that it literally dissolved the flesh from my heart. Every selfish mind-set and mentality that I had picked up in my life came floating to the top and was thrown away. All that was left, was the true me, and a baby named Landin.

When I use the word “terrible,” I mean it in a literal sense. It is so huge, so extreme, so audacious, that the only word that accurately describes love is the word terrible. It’s not for the faint-at-heart or squeamish. It can overtake an entire life in a matter of minutes.

I know several men who were married with children and one day they announced that they were leaving the wife and kids for another woman. I find that when this happens, I am rarely surprised. It doesn’t surprise me because I observed a lack of terribleness in their love for their family long before they made the decision to leave. These men didn’t miss a beat when their children were born. Nothing changed for them. They still had their night out with the guys, they still did all the things they wanted to do. Having a child was nothing more than owning a new toy. I could see their mild love manifest in every word and action.

When love is not terrible; terrible things happen. People get injured in terrible ways and sometimes never fully recover. I’ve come to believe that the most dangerous thing in the world is a non-terrible love.

I admire Oprah Winfrey for her efforts in bringing child molesters to justice. She has exposed a world of darkness in our country that has become an epidemic. It almost seems hopeless when we hear of the dreadful statistics of how many children are molested in our generation. I think we should track down every child molester in America and prosecute them to the fullest extent. I’ll even tell you that I personally believe that such an offense is deserving of the death penalty. I secretly long for the day in which that will be the consequences for harming a child in our country.

Having said all of that, I would like to also say that I DON’T believe that the epidemic of child molestation can be stopped by the death penalty or any other means of punishment to the pedophile. In fact, I don’t believe that focusing our attention on the pedophile is the correct beginning point. Though we need to attack them with a vengeance, I believe the problem is far deeper than them. I honestly believe that with the vast majority of cases where a child is molested in our country, the blame belongs to the child’s parents. Truthfully, I am surprised that no one has ever stated what seems to me to be the obvious precursor to child molestation. I’ve never seen it addressed once in the media.

When I was a Pastor, I was able to predict with stunning accuracy which children would some day be molested and which children would most likely never be molested. I told three sets of parents in one month alone that it was either presently happening to their child or it was about to happen and in every case, I was right. I could accurately predict this by gauging the amount of terribleness there was in the love of the parents for their children. I observed two kinds of parents: Those whose lives were about them, and those whose lives were about their children.

When love is not terrible, single moms date men on the internet and leave their children with a sitter they barely know. When love is not terrible, parents allow their children tospend the night with someone at school whose parents they’ve never met, they let their kids run the neighborhood unsupervised all day. A terrible love surrounds itself around the object of its affection and life becomes about protecting and covering that person.

Every single time I see a set of parents on television who are being interviewed about their child being molested, I find myself shaking my head within the first five minutes of the interview saying, “Figures.” In the first 30 seconds of the interview, it is almost always more than obvious that they do not possess a terrible love for anyone but themselves. You can see it in their decision-making and thought processes. I find that parents who do possess a terrible love are usually watching the show and screaming at their television sets, “You did what????” “You left your child with whom???” “What the hell were you thinking???”

Let me say here that I know that there are exceptions to this. There are indeed incidents where a molester can get to a child even when his or her parents have a terrible love. Sometimes it just happens, but I have found that it rarely happens! Ninety percent of the time, I find that the parents of a molested child share the same characteristics. Their life is about them; not their children. I know this is bound to offend many people, but if you just observe what I’m talking about, I’m sure you’ll recognize it.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve met a set of parents and came away sincerely worried about their child’s well-being. I personally believe that the epidemic of child molestation in America needs to be stopped. I don’t believe that pointing the finger at the molester only, is the answer. It’s important, but it’s not the only answer. I honestly feel that the parents of the child are the ones at fault most of the time. This is a non-terrible generation. Our love isn’t terrible any more, and our children suffer because of it.

I don’t even think that life begins until we give ourselves over to terrible love. Our constant resistance to it is the cause of most of the pain and disfunction in the world. Love must be allowed to dominate our hearts and swallow us completely. It’s the nature of Love to expand and overtake us. If we fight against that; everyone around us well feel the affects. Choking love is a dangerous action. I think it’s the reason for the increase in mental illness in America. Almost every horrible thing that happens on our country can be traced back to a non-terrible love.

After dressing all the kids up in matching pajamas, we set out on the two- and-a-half hour drive from Phoenix to Flagstaff. They fought and screamed and cried and hit each other and slept and laughed and cried some more and hit each other and fought and cried all the way up there. I think parents who have over three children should be given special permission to drink and drive. About 30 minutes before we arrived, the fighting and crying suddenly stopped.

Believe it or not, it started snowing! In fact, it was a blizzard just like in the movie. My kids had never seen this and we certainly didn’t expect it to happen on this day. Within a few minutes, the landscape turned into a winter wonderland. When we pulled into the train station, the kids were wide-eyed with excitement. As snow fell from the sky, the magnificent Polar Express slowly pulled up to where we were standing. I glanced over at my five favorites to find the very look that I have learned is the meaning of life itself. The look that had on their faces made the whole trip worth it: “Sparkling Eyes of Wonder.”

Think about the Christian life as we understand it to be. Think about the things we say. We talk openly about how God is in constant repair mode with each and every one of us. We tell each other that for the rest of our lives here on earth, God will be sanding out the blemishes, ironing out the wrinkles and bleaching out the stains in our life. Every single Christian I know is in the midst of some personal project where God is walking them through something and healing them from past wounds. I once heard someone say, “We may not all be where we want to be, but praise God, we’re not where we used to be.” Another person said, “At every point where you finish with something in your life, God will immediately begin repairing a new thing. This process will be continuous until the day you die.”

This is the Christian’s life that we’ve presented to the world for hundreds of years. We tell people how Jesus can change their life, and how God wants to heal them. Our testimonies are either about how Jesus did this to us or how He’s in the process of doing it to us. The moment someone opens their heart to God, the lifelong refurbishing process begins.

I can remember in the early years of my Christianity doing nothing but looking up at the ceiling of my bedroom and saying, “Change me, God, change me.” I must have prayed that prayer ten thousand times. That was before I joined a local Church, which called themselves, “A hospital for sinners.” Once I became a member; I had a buffet of choices where I could go and be ministered to. They had a ministry for every hurt and need imaginable. “Now this is what Christianity SHOULD be,” I thought to myself. “And this is what Church should be – a rehabilitation center for hurting people.”

Most of our Christian thought life is centered around getting better. Most sermons we hear today have to do with how God fixes us and what we need to do to be fixed by Him. Spiritual growth is measured by how much fixing has gone on in our lives and how open to being changed we allow ourselves to be. We encourage each other to have fellowship in our lives so we can be accountable to someone and grow together. We constantly talk about how to live a victorious life and how to conquer addictions and old habits. We try to change everyone around us as well, because we think that fixing the world is the job of Christians. It seems that everything in the Christian walk is about the process of changing, growing and healing.

I would like to be the first person to say that I believe that this entire mentality is RUBBISH!

When I was a Pastor, I saw this “lifelong-rehab” mentality just about everywhere I went. In fact, because I was, “with the organization,” the people associated me with their perceptions of what Christianity was all about. The moment anyone would walk into my office or see me in a grocery store; they would begin vomiting up every wrong thing in their life. I began to long for a normal relationship where we just shot the breeze or had a drink together. No one ever included me in their outings where they laughed and told jokes and dined. I represented Christianity and Christianity represented change. When I was in the room, everyone focused on being a Christian and changing their life. It sucked!

Where in the New Testament was the Christian life presented as a sign-up for endless rehabilitation? Sadly, this is the entire essence of our religion today. We have lost sight of why God created us in the first place. Most of us don’t even know why we’re here. We think it’s so God can renovate our lives, and prepare us for heaven. Because we believe this way; we have redefined the very essence of Christianity and we’ve become blinded to the original heart and purpose of this life. I feel that Christians today have lost sight what it’s all about. We’ve missed it!!!

I believe that our entire religion has missed the point altogether. Jesus never said that He came so that He could put us in a fifty-year recovery program and change our lives. He said that He came that we might have life, and life to the fullest. When we base an entire relationship on a mind-set that it’s about being repaired and changed, we will only go so far in our levels of intimacy with Him. We will react to Him in the same way everyone did to me when they saw me at the grocery store. He won’t be invited along for the fun outings. When we are with Him, we’ll be ready to get down to business and start changing.

The results of this evolution away from truth is that we now spend precious hours every day focusing on things that are not our business to focus upon. We have become obsessive about controlling subjects that we have no control over, such as growth and inner healing, because we’ve put them at the top of our priority list. Most Christians spend their time analyzing where they are at in their growth process and how they can grow faster. We counsel one another and meditate constantly on better ways to change, all the while not realizing that it’s not about that. Imagine how silly we must look as we try our best to grow spiritually. It reminds me of my four-year-old daughter squinting her face and gritting her teeth in an effort to grow a beard like her daddy. Christians today have become overwhelmed with topics that if left alone, would simply take care of themselves.

Have you ever watched a group of Church-going Christians try to have fun? It looks so manipulated and fake. It comes across as sappy and acted-out. It just doesn’t seem real. I think Christians today spend more time convincing themselves that they have fun than they do actually having fun. Christianity isn’t fun by today’s standards. It’s not about fun. It’s about change. It’s about getting fixed. This is precisely why Christians are almost never fun. If we realize that He came so we would have life to the fullest, I believe that we would be a thousand times more likely to leave the “sort-through-the-past journal,” and our bratty “inner-child” behind, get out of the house and climb a mountain, taste a new food or go waterskiing, and enjoy life.

I have found that for the most part it is a bad idea for married couples to either go to a marriage conference or get marriage counseling. The moment a marriage shifts into “fix-it-mode” the relationship becomes drained of all it’s joy and contentment. Couples who are constantly “working on their marriage” almost never have an ounce of fun in their lives. Sparkling eyes of wonder turn into condescending eyes that search for wrong or keep track of who is doing what. The joy of marriage is in letting go and living life together. All relationship requires this mentality for it to succeed.

For Free Believers, this is a common trap that is extra-easy to fall into when it comes to our relationship with the Father. Coming out of the institutional religious world where many of us have lived under constant control and abuse, there is a lot of healing and restoration that we must go through before many of us can even function normally. God is faithful to do just that in all of our lives. If we’re not careful, however, it’s easy to start to believe that the purpose of the Christian walk is for inner recovery and healing. When we give ourselves over to that mentality, we miss life itself. When we see our “journey” with God as a business transaction where we go from one point of recovery to another; we are falling into this terrible mind-set.

Could it be that in the course of truly enjoying life, things like growth and healing happen on their own?

There is a lot to be said for “sparkling eyes of wonder.” It’s a remedy for most of life’s pains and hardships. In fact, I believe that it’s the very essence of life. I’ve found that things like healing and growth are at the mercy of “sparkling eyes of wonder.” When we make Christianity about “getting better” and we put off life until that happens, we are stealing the inner joy that our Father receives when He sees us experiencing life for the first time. As a father, I know how heart-breaking it is to wait for that look in my children’s eyes when I take them on a new adventure, and then not get it. This is exactly what I see modern-day Christianity doing to Him every day of the week. We’ve forgotten about the life part of Christianity and we’ve focused all our attention on being rehabilitated.

The sad thing is that if we really understood the essence of Christianity, we would not go into “Change me” mode, but we’d go into “Sparkling eyes of wonder” mode. Christianity was supposed to be Disneyland, NOT a war zone hospital or a rehab facility for the emotionally jacked-up. Believe it or not, we don’t have to talk through everything in our past. We don’t have to hash through every mistake and meditate on all our pain. Sometimes it’s okay to just pack the kids up and take the “Polar Express” to the North Pole. You’d be surprised at how much the experience causes you to grow and how much healing takes place through the joy of it all. We were created to live life and experience it. We were created to have “Sparkling Eyes of Wonder” at every turn.

God didn’t create Adam and Eve so He could fix them or make them better. He put them here for the same reason I took my children on “The Polar Express” adventure. He wants us to drink in every single drop of life. He loves it when we gasp at a beautiful landscape and scream our heads off when we ride a roller coaster. He lives to see us dive into a pile of leaves in the fall or build a snow fort in winter. It thrills Him when we experience cliff jumping for the first time or learn to snorkel. He loves the look on our face when we watch a rodeo or a circus performer fly through the air. He smiles when we sing along to our favorite song and try our best to reenact the drum solo on our desk. He even likes the sudden look of contentment we get on our faces when we put something sweet in our mouths or the wide-eyed look of surprise that biting into a hot pepper brings. He laughs right along with us at the funny faces our children make when tasting a lemon for the first time or smelling a pile of dog poop.

I truly believe that men like Lewis and Clark figured life out. While the rest of us sit behind closed doors working on bettering ourselves and healing our past hurts, people like them go out and experience the fullness of life. I don’t think that Adam and Eve stood up after being created and said, “Change me, God….change me.” I doubt that they started a serious learning process that would take them the rest of their life to get through. Something tells me that they went on a lifelong exploration of the garden. I’ll bet that they had sparkling eyes of wonder at every turn. They tasted every drop of life, savored every emotion, took in the scent of every flower and enjoyed every moment.

Christianity is NOT about changing and getting better. It’s about experiencing life. If you just get on the train of life and enjoy the ride, God will take care of everything else. This literally changes the entire landscape of Christianity as most people know it today. This one truth is so revolutionary that it could conceivably change the face of our religion. I am telling you that life is not about what you’ve been taught it’s about. Life is the Polar Express and your Father waits to see that look of wonder in your eyes as you experience every facet of the experience.

Darin Hufford

Truthfully, I dreaded this moment at the end of all our Sunday evening services, because the spirit of the room was so depressing and sad. I found myself wishing I were a million miles away. Almost always the Pastor would tell us, “People are literally weeping and crying because the conviction of the Holy Spirit is on them tonight,” as if we couldn’t hear it for ourselves from anywhere in the building. It was as though we had set apart a special time in each service for everyone to be riddled with guilt and shame for their inadequacies and personal failures. It seemed that any time the Holy Spirit would show up, He would bring such conviction that everyone present was keenly aware of their every sin and shortcoming. This was always perplexing because I was told, “There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ,” and yet the moment the Holy Spirit entered the room, He heaped condemnation and guilt on everyone there. Either He was working against the work of Christ or we were understanding something drastically wrong.

As a child, I learned to hate it when the Holy Spirit decided to pay our Church a visit. I loathed the feeling in the room. He reminded me of my best friend’s mother. She always followed him around and told him every time he did something wrong. I hated going over to Jesse’s house. We felt his mother’s eyes on us all the time. She was always trying to make us feel guilty. If we didn’t feel guilty, she had a way of making us feel guilty for not feeling guilty. She was exhausting. The Holy Spirit for me was that part of God that we had to be friends with because He came with the God-package. If He wasn’t attached to God however, I knew I wouldn’t even be friends with Him.

I’ve always held to one basic principle when it comes to God. If you wouldn’t be friends with a person like that; you won’t be friends with a God like that.

If you had a friend who followed you around 24 hours a day and pointed out every single sin you committed, you would avoid being around that person like the plague. The Christian mindset today concerning the Holy Spirit is similar. We have convinced ourselves that His job is to “convict” us of all our sins. We think He sits inside us and monitors every move we make and every move we are about to make. If we are considering doing something sinful, we imagine the Holy Spirit inside, saying, “Don’t do it, that’s bad, no no no.” Then we wonder why the average Christian feels a bit uneasy when the Pastor announces, “The Holy Spirit is in this building tonight.”

The Holy Spirit is made to look like a worried, super-sensitive and manipulative mother. He is “grieved” at the drop of a hat. It takes almost nothing for Him to burst out crying, running to the bedroom to lock Himself in because of something we said or did. That gets old after a while. I generally try to avoid people like that because it’s a daunting task to be around them. I must have grieved Him a thousand times a day. I got to the point where every prayer I prayed started with me apologizing to the Holy Spirit for the countless times I’ve hurt His feelings. I felt like an out-of-control abusive husband. After years of this, it was just easier not to pray, because I felt condemned and uncomfortable about the prospects of encountering the Holy Spirit all over again.

It wasn’t until years later that I really began to study what the Scriptures say about the Holy Spirit. I began to take a serious look at everything I had been taught and I started comparing it to what is actually true. I also compared the modern-day Christian perspective on the Holy Spirit with my personal experience of knowing Him. At almost every point, I found that what we were told in Church about Him is not in the least bit true. This is what happens when our knowledge of God’s Spirit is based on teachings and sayings rather than actual personal experience. I found that people would fight to the death for something they had memorized but when push came to shove; they had never personally experienced a single thing that they claim to believe. They only believe it because someone they respect told it to them. Their belief system is only as strong as the person who passed it on to them. This is the case with almost all of the teachings on the Holy Spirit.

Ironically, after reading this, people will comment by quoting Scripture concerning the Holy Spirit in an effort to prove me wrong, but rarely will you have anyone comment based on what they personally know. That’s the problem with modern-day Christianity. It’s not about knowing for yourself. It’s about reading and memorizing.

I have found that the Holy Spirit does NOT convict us of our sins. He also doesn’t whisper “no, no, no” just before we’re about to sin.

That statement alone, if you get it and understand it, can change your entire Christian life forever! The problem is that EVERYTHING we have been taught concerning the Holy Spirit completely contradicts that statement. Sadly, most people will quit reading here and now because they’ll assume they are being led astray by a heretic. What is even more upsetting is that most of us will actually fight for all we are worth to maintain a hideous picture of God’s Spirit within our hearts rather than open ourselves to the possibility that He is something quite different and much more compelling than what we’ve been sold. We do this with the Heart of God, as well. I sit in amazement as I watch an entire generation of people go into an absolute rage over the grace and love message. They’ll fight for all they are worth to prove that God is mean and scary and not loving and gentle. When I suggest to people that God would never, ever leave them, I am flabbergasted at their perverted responses. Rather than take that security and draw closer to His Heart, they’ll purposefully conjure up terrible and wicked scenarios in their minds in an effort to find an exception in which God would ultimately leave them. I believe that this is precisely why Jesus called His generation a “Perverted” one.

The Holy Spirit does not convict Christians of their sins

He does convict the world of sin so they will know they need a Savior. Once we come to the Savior, however, He no longer convicts us of sin. He convicts us of righteousness.

When you are about to do something wrong, or just after you’ve done something wrong, and you hear that little voice from within you telling you how wrong what you just did was, that wasn’t the Holy Spirit. THAT WAS YOU! It was your heart. Remember, God wrote His laws upon our hearts. Your heart knows right from wrong because of that. That voice inside you IS YOU! Think about it for a moment. Why would God write the law on our hearts and then also have the Holy Spirit stand beside us and convict us every time we did something wrong? The truth is, we don’t need the Holy Spirit to convict us because we convict ourselves because we know the truth.

This is HUGELY IMPORTANT! Every time I ask people what their basic feelings are about the Holy Spirit, they almost always tell me that they are uneasy with Him. I’ve stood before audiences of several thousand people and I’ve asked them to close their eyes and raise their hands if they feel intimidation when the subject of the Holy Spirit is brought up, and believe it or not, almost every hand in the building goes up every single time I do this. We feel this way because we have been blaming the Holy Spirit for behavior that is completely contraty to His nature. If you understand that He’s not the one breathing down your back, pointing out your every sin to you, you can actually open your heart to getting to know Him.

He is not interested in pointing out your sin to you. It’s not even how He thinks. He only faces righteous things, so righteousness is all He points you towards. I was watching “Super Nanny” one day and there was this father who was following his child around saying, “No, no no Billy……..don’t do that, Billy……..stop it, Billy……put that down, Billy” over and over. Finally Super Nanny sat him down and explained that when we do this to our children, they have a 30 to 40 percent higher chance of having an inferiority complex when they become adults. She went on to explain a better way to handle Billy when he was about to do something wrong. She taught this man to divert his son’s attention by holding up a toy from across the room so Billy would choose to play with the toy rather than the electrical outlet.

This is exactly what the Holy Spirit does in our lives. He convicts us of righteousness! He inspires us to do good and righteous things. He shows us the better way in life and encourages us to take it. He absolutely does not follow you around nagging and nitpicking your every move. The Holy Spirit is not about getting you to stop sinning. He’s about moving you towards righteousness. When you understand this about His personality, He suddenly becomes likable again. I believe that Christians today suffer from a severe spiritual inferiority complex. This is true because we believe God’s Spirit has followed us around like Billy’s father and pointed out every wrong thing we’ve done in our lives. This is so sad because nothing could be further from the truth.

We come from a generation of Christianity that has taught us that the Holy Spirit always looks at the dark side of everything in our lives. This is defamation of character! It’s the opposite of truth. God’s Spirit always looks at the bright side of your life. In the end, you will ultimately focus your attention on the exact place you believe God is focusing His attention. If you believe it’s sin, then that’s where you’ll always be focused. If you believe it’s righteousness, your focus will be on good things. My children can either learn what NOT to do, or they can be encouraged with what good they can do. I choose the latter and so does the Spirit of God.

How do you have relationship with someone you can neither see nor hear? We’ve all grown up listening to people describe their “relationship” with God as if it were exactly the same as all their earthly relationships. They claim to actually hear His voice, they claim to talk back and forth with Him like they would a neighbor or a best friend and they even claim that He wakes them up in the middle of the night every now and then for a chat. When we hear of this, it’s confusing, because if anyone is really honest, it just doesn’t happen that way. I will tell you on a personal level that when I hear people talk about God as though they are experiencing this kind of relationship, my first inclination is to suggest that they see a psychiatrist and consider going on some sort of medication. I’ve also noticed that every single time I’ve encountered a person who claims to have this human-like relationship with God; their life is almost always in shambles. That “voice” they claim to hear, is constantly offering contradictions. One day it tells them to pack up and move to Colorado, only to change its mind three weeks later and have them move back. One day it tells them to apply for a job at such-and-such place and the next day, they don’t even get called for an interview. I have found that “voice hearers” are crazier and more lost than those of us who have the guts to admit that we don’t hear anything.

After listening to some people describe their “relationship” with God, I found myself turning my ear upward to the sky after prayer and then waiting to hear an audible voice. Who wouldn’t think this way after hearing these people talk? I would go on long walks and talk to Him and then wait for hours trying to hear His response. Nothing! It just about killed me. I felt like an idiot who couldn’t get it. More than anything, I felt rejected by God. Why wasn’t He talking to me this way?

In the Church, because we so desperately want everyone to think that we’ve got it, we will expend all our energy trying to convince everyone around us that we’re getting it, rather than come clean about what we don’t understand. We are having this exact conversation with one of our daughters. We have to constantly remind her that if she doesn’t understand something, she needs to raise her hand and ask for clarification. We tell her that she can’t just sit there silently and act like she’s got it so that no one will know she doesn’t. Sadly, we struggle with the same thing in our own lives when it comes to God.

Let me say quite clearly that I have NEVER heard an audible voice from God. I quit trying for that about ten years ago when I began to feel my sanity slipping away. I also don’t have human conversations with God where I talk and then He talks and we have a complete dialogue that is exactly like what I might have with a good friend. I’ve never come to a fork in the road in my life and then clearly hear God telling me to go one way or another. What I have with Him does not resemble my human relationships in any way.

For me, personally, I understand that God is love. To experience communion with God, we must experience communion with Love. The experience of love is not when you receive it from people, but it’s when you give it to people. That kind of love is alive. It speaks. It gives direction. It has within it all the answers to the universe. If you focus in on that love and look deeply into the heart of it, you will find the living God. I have spent thousands of hours analyzing the love I feel for my children and in doing so, I have developed a relationship of sorts with the heart of love. I have a knowing sense of His existence wherever I go. I know immediately when a thought comes to me through Him (love) and I can set my senses to hear Him all the time.

When I look at a person I’ve never seen or met before, I just take a few moments and allow that love in my heart to attach itself to that new person. I might picture that person sad and lonely, or even crying. The moment I feel compassion for them, the love inside of me begins to join itself directly to that person’s heart. When that happens, I can see things in that person that I could never otherwise see in my normal state. The love that I have for that person begins to speak to me in a knowing sense. It’s not words. It’s just stuff being made known to me like I’ve always known it. It’s matter-of-fact stuff that always has to do with the person’s heart. I’ve learned to rely on love in any and all situations when I need direction or clarity. Love is not an emotion. Love is a person. His name is Yahweh!

When different situations arise in my life, I can look at them and know what my friend, Love, would do. I’ve spent many hours with Him. I know now how He thinks and I know how He responds. I can choose to see these situations through His eyes or through mine. It’s not that He is speaking to me and telling me what to do or how to respond to things. He just rubs off on me.

I am offended when people say stuff like, “God told me this” or “God said that,” especially when it’s something that my friend Love would never, ever say. They are married to “Hate” or “Apathy” and they’re attributing the personality characteristics of those two phonies to God Himself. How sad. Some things are just simply not in Love’s character. However, that doesn’t mean that He will show Himself in the same way to everyone.

One delightful woman once asked me to describe love so that she could have it. I thought for a while and I realized that He takes on a completely different form with each individual person. Though He is always the same, He is entirely unique with each and every person. In other words, the love I have for my daughter, Landin, doesn’t have a single thing to do with the love I have for Emma. Sidney’s (my second daughter) love looks nothing like Eva’s (youngest daughter). There is absolutely no way that I can describe Him to anyone. I can, however, describe Him as He pertains to one particular person, and yet when another person walks up and hears my description, they cannot believe it to be true for them. It’s different for them.

I get tickled when I hear Christians so intent upon proving to the world that God is in three persons. My experience has taught me that He is multi-dimensional. There are billions and trillions of entirely unique personalities within His nature, yet amazingly, they all come together and form one God. When you consider that He is different with each and every person on the face of the earth and you count how many people have walked this earth since its creation and then how many are yet to walk it, He is both beyond our understanding and intimately knowable at the same time.

When I look at a person and they ask me to tell them how God feels about them, I think it’s worthless and dry to respond by giving them the stock religious list of answers. Telling people “God loves you” means nothing any more. That’s a one-size-fits-all answer that is devoid of any individual capabilities. I can tell an individual exactly how God feels specifically for them because I can love them and then describe my feelings to them. The love I have for that specific person IS God’s heart for them and no one else! It is unique to only that person and it could not be said to just anyone. That is a thousand times better than just going through a list of Christian sayings that have been so overused that they are drained of their power.

The thing about Love is that it must have a recipient in order for it to ignite. Without someone to receive love, it’s not love. If I sent you to Mars and told you to be a loving person, you couldn’t because there are no people on Mars. When we understand this principal about love, it’s easy to misunderstand the kind of Love that God has put into our hearts. God’s Love is not a non-ignited love that is dead until it finds a recipient. He put an already-ignited Love within us. He put the Love that the Father has for the Son inside each of us. It’s living and active. It’s the essence of who He is. It is ignited and flowing and speaking and showing from the moment it enters our hearts. Giving Love to others is the only way I know how to experience God.

Love is not something that you can conjure up. The exciting thing about it is that it’s not an it. Love is a Him. If you just love one person and that’s all, you have the power withing you to ignite the entire world on fire with love. It starts with one person and it grows from there. This is not about judging yourself and feeling guilty for not being loving enough. This is about understanding that God is love. There is never a need to feel far away from Him. Just love someone and He is there.

When I say that I know Him and have a “relationship” with Him, I am saying that in a way that would be similar to a person who has endured multiple surgeries due to a severe burn might say that they “know suffering.” They’ve experienced suffering on so many levels that they have developed a relationship with it. One man who struggles with depression once told me that when he got home after a New Year’s Eve party, he was met with his “old friend, depression.” This is how I see a relationship with Love. The more you spend time in Him and with Him, the more familiar you become with Him. I think too many Christians spend their time seeking a human relationship with an invisible spiritual being and too little stepping up and loving others. For me, it’s simple. I don’t look into the spirit realm to find God. I look in my heart and I bring up love and there He is. Spending time with that fire of love in my heart IS spending time with God.

Christianity today does not know or understand this love, so they’ve never experienced its power. It’s just a concept to them. So they are left scrambling to find ways to sell their religion to the world. Their answer is to convince others that our life is being lived in a squeaky-clean manner as though that is what God is all about. Sadly, this is what Christianity has made Him out to be. He is a moralist and when He gets a hold of people, He makes them amazingly supernaturally ethical. They find deliverance from their habits and addictions. Blah, blah, blah. Christianity today analyzes the symptoms of love and then attempts to lovelessly reenact those symptoms out of duty. It becomes about performing the symptoms of love and not about loving.

I can hear it now. People are going to say, “What about Muslims who sincerely love,” or “What about an atheist who loves people. Are you saying they’ll go to heaven?” It’s sad and quite telling that this is the first question that modern day Christians ask me when they hear me talk about love, when if they were lovers of people themselves, their first question would have been, “What about Christians who believe in Jesus, but DON’T love?” We’ve been taught that anyone who loves others aside from Christianity doesn’t really love at all. I’m sorry, but I disagree. I do think, however, that anyone who loves aside from Christianity doesn’t have the privilege of knowing Love’s Name and Love’s history and Love’s promises and plans for the future. Knowing the Name of Love is hugely significant!

When Christ came (Love in the flesh), certain people immediately recognized Him. They knew love long before they knew His name. They recognized His voice before they knew His name. Jesus said “My sheep will recognize my voice.” He wasn’t saying that the people who had become His fans will follow Him and be His little groupies. He was literally saying that these people already knew Him before He even arrived. The only thing they didn’t know was His Name. Knowing Love’s Name is why we spread the Gospel to the world. It’s the final switch that clicks in a person’s heart and opens them to intimacy on levels they never thought possible. His Name is so powerful that those people who don’t even know His heart can simply call upon His Name and still be saved. Knowing His name is everything.

Some of you will hate this

I know many people who sincerely love others with all their heart. It’s just who they are and how they’ve decided to live their life. However, they adamantly reject the “Christian Jesus” they’ve been fed all their lives. They wouldn’t ever dare to call themselves a Christian. When they die and ultimately stand before Jesus, I honestly think they will recognize Him as their best friend whom they knew quite well while on earth. They just didn’t know His name. On the same note, I know many people who are all about Jesus. Their entire life is ‘Jesus-this’ and ‘Jesus-that.’ They are bona fide “Jesus Freaks.” However, when they die and stand before Jesus for the first time, I honestly think they are going to look at Him and say, “Excuse me, Sir, can you point me to where Jesus is.”

I don’t claim to know everything, but I do know this. When a person sincerely opens their heart to the idea of selflessly loving other people, they are opening their heart to Love Himself. I think that decision is a billion times more significant and powerful than rattling off a scripted sinner’s prayer with just the right theological ingredients in it to save your ass from Hell. You tell me which is better.

I also know this. If you don’t love, YOU DON’T KNOW GOD. And if you do love, YOU KNOW GOD AND YOU ARE KNOWN BY HIM. This is not about how a person receives salvation. This is about how a person can know God intimately. I do not spend my time analyzing whether a person’s love is real or not. That’s not my job. I do, however, spend a lot of time analyzing the love that exists in my heart and by doing that, I have found that I KNOW GOD. I personally have not found another way of knowing and experiencing Him personally.

With that in mind, I would like to address something that has bothered me all my life, but have never put into words until now. I believe that this little issue has taken its toll on thousands of genuine and honest God-seekers, and has left them feeling as though they are completely missing God. It’s time to expose one of the church’s greatest and best-kept secrets. Exposing this could set Charismatic Christianity back a thousand years. I’m about to blow a cover off this religion in a way I’ve never seen done before, so buckle your seatbelts.

My 8th grade science teacher pinned up one of those psychedelic mind-bending posters that supposedly had a picture within a picture that you could psychologically see inside, if you stared long enough and allowed your eyes to go out of focus. Those things never worked for me. I could stare for hours and I never saw anything but a bunch of squiggly lines and shapes. Supposedly this particular poster had moving dinosaurs in it. At least that’s what the first kid claimed to see as he let out a, “Wooooee, dude, I tooootally see it!” I got up close and looked till my head hurt but I still couldn’t see what he was talking about. Sure enough, one by one, people started to see the moving dinosaurs. Everyone was laughing and talking about it. There was energy and excitement as people coahed friends on how to look in just the right way to “experience” it with them. One by one you could hear people getting a “break-through” as they would finally se what everyone else was seeing. I felt ignorant, because all I saw were stupid, squiggly lines.

I quit trying about half-way through the year. I got to the point where I just ignored the poster when I came to class. Truthfully, I resented the fact that he put it up there in the first place. It was a science class. Why hang a poster with hidden dinosaurs? It didn’t make sense to me, and I found it to be a source of irritation every time another two or three people exclaimed, “I see it, I see it!!!!” I even considered lying to everyone at one point because it was only me and perhaps two other kids who were on the outs, and neither of them had a cool bone in their body.

By the end of the school year, it appeared that the majority of the school had experienced the dinosaurs and I still couldn’t see them. How embarrassing. My embarrassment was short-lived, however, because on the last day of school, the cocky old science teacher stood before the class and revealed to everyone that there were no dinosaurs in the picture. IT WAS A HOAX! He wanted to illustrate how peer pressure can easily sway others. It was amazing to see different people become angry and defensive and swear up and down that they saw moving dinosaurs. I believe those kids could have taken a lie-detector test and passed with flying colors. They fully believed that they saw dinosaurs moving!

Time and again, I have sat with sincere people who feel like they must be missing something in the God department. They tell me that they don’t understand why God hasn’t moved on them the way He has with their friends and Church mates. They are plagued with a nagging sense that they are always a few miles behind the rest of the group and regardless of how hard they try; they can’t seem to catch up. Every time there’s another testimony about God moving in someone’s life, they are reminded that they can’t hear His voice like everyone else and don’t feel the same spiritual ecstasy that their Christian counterparts continually describe and claim to have received.

Over and over, I hear people talking about “Peace that surpasses understanding” and “joy unspeakable,” as though it’s an orgasmic state of mind that truly spiritual people achieve after encountering God in a personal way. I can recall being in Bible college, watching my classmates weep and wail while lying on the floor during the worship service as though the Holy Spirit had completely taken control. They would talk about receiving a touch from God that instantly changed everything. Some couldn’t remain upright during the service because the ‘power of God was all over them.’ All the while, I felt like I did in my 8th grade class when I couldn’t see the moving dinosaurs. What am I missing here? Why doesn’t God do that to me during praise and worship? When am I going to receive a touch like that? How come I can’t hear His voice so easily? Why do I still struggle with depression? What’s wrong with me?

It began to unravel when a popular evangelist came to our Bible college. This guy was known for laying hands on people and having them “fall out” in the spirit. I was excited to receive this and nervous that I wouldn’t. After a short sermon on the power of God, this gentleman instructed us to line up side by side. He would then walk from person to person, laying hands on each one. Sure enough, they were dropping like flies. Everyone he touched turned to Jell-O and hit the floor under the power of God. I was praying a million miles a minute as he drew closer. Finally, I felt his hand on my forehead and I stood there waiting to be launched into the supernatural. I waited and waited but nothing happened. He kept praying for me but I wasn’t going down. Then he started saying things like, “Just receive it, brother,” and “Don’t hold back from God.” At that moment, I felt the eyes of everyone in the class upon me and I knew somehow it was my fault that I wasn’t receiving “the power of God.” Guess what I did. . . . I fell.

When we were in the parking lot and walking to our cars, my classmates were praising God and leaping for joy because of the incredible move of the Holy Spirit that they had just witnessed. People were talking about how awesome God was and how wonderful it was to receive a touch of His power, but I continued walking with my head down, saying, “I will never, ever do that again!” Someone asked me what it was I’d never do again and I said, “I fell on purpose.” To my amazement, every person there admitted that they had purposely fallen, as well.

I say all that to say this: For the better part of my ministry, I have attempted to take things that people say about God that are terrible and wrong and correct them. I have kept myself busy for the past ten years in an attempt to correct all the troubling misconceptions taught by the Church regarding the heart of God. Recently, however, I felt like I came to the conclusion of those bad things. I couldn’t find anything to address because I had pretty much covered it all. Then I felt the Lord strongly impress upon me that He would reveal that even all the good things said about Him are not true.

Our concept of “living in victory” has been embellished and exaggerated from generation to generation, to a point where we wouldn’t recognize the real thing if it jumped up and bit us on the nose. People talk about “freedom” as though it were a state of spiritual nirvana where nothing goes wrong and everything is blissfully perfect. I believe that in the Charismatic movement, there are thousands of people chasing dinosaurs in an effort to appear like they’re getting it when in fact, they have no real idea of what “IT” is.

I’m amazed when I hear testimonies of people in those Churches. It reminds me of “Reality Television.” The problem with “Reality Television” is that there is nothing real about it.

The editor reveals what he chooses by cutting and pasting bits and pieces. He omits certain parts and highlights others in an effort to create exactly what he’s looking for. This is what I see in modern-day Christian testimonies. They remind me of a 30-minute scripted sit-com where everything miraculously comes together in the end. The middle part that is raw and real is always mysteriously omitted so that the listener only sees the rags-to-riches part of what God did in a person’s life. “I once was lost, but now I’m found.” Nothing in the middle. That’s it. Overnight, everything changed and now there are no more struggles and strife in the Christian life, only continual happiness and fulfillment.

I think we do this because deep in our hearts we’re trying to sell Jesus to the public. We attempt to make Him out to be more than He is in an effort to spark interest. We present “life with Jesus” as though it’s a continuous mountain-top experience that comes with batteries included and a life-time guarantee. If this isn’t your personal experience with Him, something is wrong with your spirituality. Sadly, the result of this pattern of exaggeration is that people chase a carrot that is always just out of reach and then become depressed and disillusioned.

Let me be the first to say that the reason you can’t find the peace and joy and freedom that you’ve heard about is because it doesn’t exist. At least not in the way it’s been presented. The Christian life as advertised to you is a lie! The promises and claims that were made to you about Jesus were nothing but a list of sales tactics to close the deal. After all, who would reject eternal happiness and contentment? Who in their right mind would walk away from a Jesus who could make all their problems go away overnight? Who would say no to instantaneous freedom and victory? Especially when it’s as easy as 1, 2, 3. Rattle off a quick sinner’s prayer and you’re on your way to a life of constant adventure and roller-coaster spirituality.

I think there is something to be said for the way Jesus presented Himself 2000 years ago. He rode into the city on the back of an ass. Now that resonates with my life! I get this real and raw picture in my mind, “Life on an Ass,” and it rings true. Maybe it’s not a popular concept with the Christian world, but the fact is, life is humdrum. There are “up” days and there are “down.” There are times of purpose and times of purposelessness. There are extended times when there is clear direction and you know where you’re going and then there are times when you just sit and stare at the walls and go nowhere. Life with Jesus is not filled with a continuous vibration of exhilaration and adventure. Scripture never promised that to us.

I believe that until we are given permission to accept and embrace our humanity, we will be unable to possess values such as peace and contentment. Present-day Christianity seems to be about denying and even detesting our humanity and all in the Name of Jesus. We want nothing to do with out human-ness. It’s as though people present the Christian life as a rejection of the physical realm and an adoption of all that is spiritual. You’d think that some of us are embarrassed to have arms and legs because we think we’re supposed to float from here to there through the power of God. Anything physical or human is considered ugly by today’s Charismatic standards. The phrase, “In the flesh” has been coined in an effort to shame and silence anyone who might dare to be normal and live with both feet on the ground. If God was against living in the flesh, He wouldn’t have created flesh and inserted our spirits into it.

I believe that true authentic spirituality is more physical than spiritual. In other words, it’s NORMAL. Today’s perception of true spirituality is equated with someone no one can relate to. I think it’s something else entirely. If a person is truly in touch with their spiritual side, they will connect and become relatable to everyone. They’ll embrace their flesh and be content with who they are while, at the same time, accepting it in others. Peace and contentment is not a point in life where you no longer experience pain and discomfort. It’s the point when you understand that you will experience pain and discomfort in this life and when you do, you know He is with you and nothing’s wrong. Many perceive any form of depression as evidence that God is not present or we are not receiving what we should from Him. I disagree. Being spiritual, in my opinion, is when an individual embraces every facet of their humanity with no apologies, knowing well that their shortcomings are not evidence of God’s absence but rather, evidence of life. True spirituality comes when we understand that in the midst of living, He will never leave us.

I am convinced that an authentic Christian life looks nothing like what most Charismatic churches promote. The picture they paint is not only unattainable but it’s impossible. I no longer believe the majority of the testimonies I hear. They’ve been edited to fit a story-line that’s proven to be a crowd-pleaser and a bestseller. Rarely does anyone merely provide an accurate account of their life because to do so would be flat-out boring. We don’t want a day-to-day Jesus; we want Super Jesus!

Additionally, I don’t believe all the hype that comes out of Florida. I’m telling you right now that all the people who profess to have experienced “the fire” in Florida are nothing but a bunch of self-conscious teens claiming to have seen the moving dinosaurs on a poster in science class. When asked to produce a shred of verifiable evidence of healings and miracles, the ring-leaders in Florida have come up empty-handed. Everything you are hearing about that “outpouring” is nothing but exaggerated rumors from people who desperately want to appear as if they got it too.

Matthew 24:24
“For false Christs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and miracles to deceive even the elect—if that were possible. See, I have told you ahead of time. “So if anyone tells you, ‘There he is, out in the desert,’ do not go out; or, ‘Here he is, in the inner rooms,’ do not believe it.”

These rumors are spread by those who sincerely want to believe that something’s happening somewhere because when they look at their own “humdrum” life, they are filled with guilt and condemnation for not measuring up to the embellished testimonies and exagerated claimes they’ve grown up hearing in the Church.

Yes, I believe that God heals and yes, I believe the Holy Spirit is alive and well. I believe in the gifts of the Spirit and I believe that God is actively speaking to His people. I consider myself to be Charismatic to the bone, but I don’t believe for one moment that these manifestations occur in the manner that we claim. The sooner we release the modern-day Christian fantasies about true spirituality and embrace normalcy, the better we’ll be.

You might be surprised to find that what you have been seeking; you already have.