Let's talk about adultery

If I continue to live the way I’m living right now, I would say that the chances of me ever committing adultery are 0%. If I changed my way of life, started to neglect the word of God and prayer, stopped going to church, and just let myself backslide, then I suppose anything is possible. Remember, sin is a form of moral insanity that wants to dominate every area of your life. “Let the man who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.” But if I stay in the game and keep seeking the Lord, I can’t imagine that I would ever fall prey to this sin.

Yet many, many people do commit this sin. I’m thinking that people who commit this sin are only thinking about the cookie and not thinking at all about the big picture and the long term consequences.

The cookie, of course, is an attractive woman giving you come hither signals. If you just think about the cookie, I can’t imagine how you could fail to commit adultery from time to time. “She looks good and I think she wants me.” So you start day dreaming about her and desire builds. You tell yourself that you can get away with it and the next thing you know you’ve committed the sin.

But what about the big picture and the long term consequences?

Let’s start with my wife, Nancy. Let’s think about Nancy heartbroken and weeping. Talk about pouring a bucket of ice water on the fire of evil desire. If there were no other big picture, long term considerations, and I only had one chance in ten million of “getting caught,” I still couldn’t do it. I couldn’t take one chance in ten million of breaking her heart. It’s unthinkable. (Remember, as we grow in Christ likeness, the irresistible is supposed to become the unthinkable.)

But let’s not stop there. Let’s think about the kids. Here is an interesting medical fact. If I cut my wife, my children bleed. To be honest with you, I can’t even begin to form in my mind the looks on their faces if they ever found out that dad had betrayed mom. This isn’t because I don’t have a vivid imagination, it’s because it would be too painful to imagine.

It’s never inappropriate to think about the enemy in these situations. The fallen angels are the moral opposites of God. There is at least one spirit being out there who would be laughing as my wife and children cried. Why would I want to bring a twisted form of joy to a being who is totally committed to my destruction?

My kids are grown, but when they were small it would have been inconceivable for me to live in a different house from them and only get to see them every other weekend. Also, I’ve never made much money. I can’t imagine how I would have gotten by on what a judge would have left me to live on.

If you commit adultery with someone, they own your marriage. All it takes is one phone call to your spouse. The person you are committing adultery with doesn’t even have to make the phone call. They can have a friend do it anonymously. “Were you aware of the fact that your husband and Ms. Loose Morals checked into the no-tell motel last Tuesday afternoon?” What? You don’t think they would do something like that to you? You do realize that this person you are trusting is just as much of a lying weasel as you are, don’t you? They are helping your trash your wedding vows. The essence of sin is moral insanity. How sane is it, really, to trust this person?

Of course there is always a chance the birth control won’t work. Instead of trying to figure out how you are going to live on what the judge takes away from you to support the children you already have, let’s think about how much more he will take away to support the new baby. But not to worry. In a couple of decades the child will be grown and then you can go back to keeping 100% of your income. 18 – 10 years. No big deal.

An now a brief commercial about STD’s. I remember where I was when I heard that president Kennedy had been shot. I also remembered where I was when I first realized the potential death toll from the HIV virus. Do you remember when you first heard about it? We didn’t know right away that it wouldn’t transfer from person to person in the non-drug using heterosexual population just as easily as something like herpes does. Can you imagine the death toll if the virus spread from person to person the way the more common STD’s do?

Here’s another thought that I shared with a youth group awhile back. HIV was a “new” disease. Who knows what’s coming next? What will it do to us? How many will die? How many young people will be rendered sterile before they ever have a chance to start a family? Sexual intimacy is a super highway for the transmission of disease. It’s best not to connect your road to the interstate system. Better to have a private road connecting just two people.

Does this sound unchristian? Not spiritual enough? Thinking about consequences? Doesn’t sound very romantic. Shouldn’t you love your wife enough not to cheat on her? I do, but not all marriages are sweetness and light all the time. There is probably only one perfect woman in the world and I am already married to her. Other men may need more motivations that I do. But as to how “spiritual” all this is, we’ll let Solomon be the judge of that. Consider the following verses from Proverbs 5 (NASB).

For the lips of an adulteress drip honey
And smoother than oil is her speech;
But in the end she is bitter as wormwood,
Sharp as a two-edged sword. (3,4)

That sounds like he is focusing on the long range consequences. “This looks good right now, but you will be so very sorry if you give in to it.”

Keep your way far from her
And do not go near the door of her house,
Or you will give your vigor to others
And your years to the cruel one;
And strangers will be filled with your strength
And your hard-earned goods will go to the house of an alien. (8-10)

Is it just me, or does that sound like a guy who is upset because he has to pay so much child support? How does that feel when your house becomes her house after the divorce? And then it becomes their house when she remarries? But guess who is still making the payments?

And you groan at your final end,
When your flesh and your body are consumed. (11)

Have you ever seen pictures of people who are in the final stages of dying from AID’s?

There are evil spirits out there and they have learned how to train the human race. “Look at the cookie. Pay attention only to the cookie. Think about how good the cookie will taste. Yum! Yum!”

One of the most important keys to victory is to stop and actually think about what is happening from a godly perspective. A godly perspective includes thinking about the big picture and long range outcomes. The whole book of Proverbs, the “wisdom” book of the Bible, is an appeal to learn to think in this way. And thinking in this way is like pouring ice water on the fire of evil desire.

Outcomes

The key to transformation in the Christian life is being “transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Rom. 12:2) As this process continues the truth sets you free. In the last post I gave you three paragraphs to meditate on and to read over and over again until they become a natural response to sinful desires. The truths in those paragraphs deal with big picture, long term consequences. The fallen angels who plague our lives do not want us to think about big picture, long term consequences; they just want us to think about the cookie.

The three paragraphs are an attempt to think beyond the act of sin (the cookie) to the larger issues of the nature of sin (moral insanity) and the manipulations of the fallen angels (who are trying to dominate and destroy your life).

How Biblical is the business of thinking in terms of the big picture and long term consequences? Let’s explore this by looking at a single chapter of the book of Proverbs. All quotations are from the NASB.

A wise son makes a father glad, but a foolish son is a grief to his mother. (10:1)

This is big picture thinking dealing with the whole course of your life and the consequences that your actions have on others. Imagine that you are a teenager who has just gotten together with some friends. For the first time in your life you are offered an illegal drug. All Satan wants you to think about is the here and now. Do you want to “chicken out” on your friends? What will they say if you refuse? If that’s all you think about, the battle is already half way lost. But if you start thinking about how heartbroken your parents would be if they found out about it, you are well on your way to victory.

Ill-gotten gains do not profit, but righteousness delivers from death. (10:2)

Every once in awhile we have a local news story about someone who caved into temptation and embezzled funds from their place of employment. One of the reasons that these stories interest me is that I can identify with the criminal. I don’t identify at all with someone who would take a gun and rob a liquor store, but I can get inside the head of someone like me, who basically lives a law abiding life, and who succumbs to the temptation to “borrow” some money from work. I’ve never done it, but I can identify with middle class, middle of the road people who might give in to temptation.

The person who begins by “borrowing” some money usually ends up getting in so deep that they can never pay back everything they owe to the company. They do this because their thinking is limited to two ideas and two ideas only. They are thinking about what they want the money for (to pay a bill or buy a luxury) and how good it will feel when the overdue bill is paid or the big screen TV is purchased. If that’s all you’re thinking about, you’re going to loose that struggle. Solomon encourages us to look at the big picture.

Il-gotten gains do not profit. Sure, you might be able to enjoy that big screen TV for a few months, but sooner or later you are going to get caught and go to prison. While you’re in prison, you’ll be surrounded by violent psychopaths, some of whom may injure or even kill you. You can stay out of jail by living a righteous life. This will deliver you from death (and psychopaths). When you are tempted by the big screen TV, if you form vivid pictures of yourself in jail, you are probably not going to commit that sin.

Poor is he who works with a negligent hand, but the hand of the diligent makes rich. (10:4)

I used to pastor in a small town where I got a taste of farm culture. I’ll never forget something one of the farmers said. “You can tell when a guy isn’t going to make it when he starts spending too much time in town.” It’s Tuesday afternoon. You have work to do. But you really want to go into town, drink coffee, and catch up on the latest gossip. The decision that you will make on that Tuesday afternoon will have little or no impact on your long term finances. As a matter of fact, as a self employed person you can play “hooky” from time to time and get away with it. It’s one of the benefits of being self employed.

But Solomon doesn’t want you to limit your thinking to this Tuesday afternoon. The long terms consequence of negligence is poverty. If you think about the big picture and the long term consequences, while you may take an occasional Tuesday afternoon off, you will spend enough time working to stay profitable.

In the first four verse of this chapter we have three exhortations to look at the big picture and the long term consequences. In a sense, this is the theme of the whole book of Proverbs. The devil knows what he’s going to do. He’s going to try to make you think about “borrowing” money from work so that you can get that big screen TV. He’s going to make you think about how good those football games will look in high def. He’s going to want you to think about how nice it would be to be in an air conditioned theater on a Tuesday afternoon as opposed to working under the hot summer sun on your farm. He’s going to direct your attention to how your “friends” will tease you if you don’t try that drug while never, ever directing your mind to the possibility of breaking your parents’ hearts.

They’ve had thousands of years to master their craft. The fallen angels know what they want you to think about and feel. Do you know how to counter that? Think about the big picture and long term consequences. Study the book of Proverbs to learn how to do that.

The Tactics of Truth

You are being manipulated by evil spirits who have had thousands of years to master their craft. The devil knows what he is going to do; do you know what you are going to do?

This is what you need to do. You need to be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Here is how you do that. You put down what you need to know and you meditate on it until it becomes just as strong a thought habit (pattern) as the habit of sin used to be. You do the exact same thing to yourself that the enemy has done to you, only you do it in the cause of righteousness.

Copy this post. Paste it into a word processing program. Leave a saved copy of it on your desktop. Email yourself a copy for use at work. Print it out and put it in a notebook. Then read it at least once a day (preferably more) over and over again until it is completely internalized.

One of the best times to read it is when you are actually struggling with an evil desire. You will find that this throws a bucket of ice water on the fire of evil desire. Here is the material for you to meditate on.

The evil desire that I am experiencing is not an opportunity for me to use my free will in the sense of designing the kind of life I want. It is only an opportunity to surrender a little more of myself to a higher power. This is an attempt by Satan to either strengthen the grip he has on my life or to reach out and conquer new territory within me. The evil spirit behind this temptation is not my friend. There is not the slightest bit of kindness, mercy, or compassion within him. The more pain I am in, the happier he gets. I am not going to surrender any part of my life to morally crippled, fiendishly twisted fallen angels who hate me with a hatred that is just as pure as the love with which my heavenly Father loves me. I will not be a slave to sin. I am a servant of the Lord.

Satan is not my friend. He does not love me. His only pleasure is in my pain. He will do everything he can to destroy my life and drag me down into the lake of fire if he can. Something inside me wants to do something I know is wrong. Anything that urges me to get something I want seems to be my friend. It seems to be on my side. I must understand that this is a trap. Sin does not want me to get what I want. That is the lie. Sin wants to completely dominate every part of my life and bring ruin and destruction to my soul. I will not compromise with evil because I understand evil does not believe in compromise; it believes only in domination. It is the same old lie: “you can do what you want and you will be free.” I am designed to submit to and flow in perfect harmony with a higher power. My only real freedom is to choose the power that I will submit to. I renounce the power of darkness that is trying to destroy me and submit myself to the Lord of light.

I must firmly fix in my mind the main principles of sin. Sin intends to take ever increasing control over me. Sin intends to bring ever greater measures of pain and sadness into my life. The very essence of sin is moral insanity. Any accommodation with evil is insane. It’s like agreeing to rent your spare room to a mass murderer. I was born with a moral disease that made it possible for the unthinkable to be irresistible. By the grace of God, and with the help of the Holy Spirit, I am coming to see sin for what it is and to repent – to totally and radically change the direction of my thinking. I am growing to hate the insane power of darkness that is seeking to dominate and destroy my life. By the grace of God, what was once irresistible is now becoming unthinkable.

I just read the whole thing out loud. It took two minutes. Just two minutes. Reading this once and then moving on to the next post will not change you. The power of darkness has built strongholds within you using a step-by-step process. The fallen angels have had thousands of years to master their craft, but the truth can and will set you free. The devil has a plan. He knows what he’s going to do. Do you have a plan? Do you know what you are going to do? If not, then use my plan. Read these words over and over again until you find them coming into your mind at the very moment that you are feeling the evil desire.

Right now, when you feel the evil desire all you think about is the cookie – the pleasure of sin. And so you succumb. Over and over again. The evil spirits think this is hysterical. They are laughing at you while they plan ways to take control of new areas of your life.

It took two whole minutes to read those paragraphs out loud. Two whole minutes. Can you find two minutes when you get up in the morning? Another two minutes during your daily break. Another two minutes before you go to bed at night. It’s up to you. You can roll over and go back to sleep. You can keep responding to the cookies. Or you can stand up and begin to fulfill your destiny as a child of the living God. It’s up to you.

This would be a very good time to go back to the beginning of this thread and read the whole thing over again to firmly fix it in your mind. The next posting will deal with the Biblical principles behind this process. This is not psychology or positive thinking. This is the power of repentance and the grace of God that can and will set us free.

How bad is bad?

Let’s sum up everything we have learned to this point.

• Sin is a form a madness that has infected our natures.

• The demons control us by training us to think about what they want us to think about in relationship to desires we have.

• God designed us to flow in perfect harmony with a higher power.

• Satan is not trying to set us free so that we can use our wills in any way we want, he is attempting to be the higher power that dominates us

• Every act of sin either strengthens the grip Satan already has on me or else enables him to take new territory inside me.

Now lets go back to the original rebellion of Lucifer. He was the only being in the universe who could set up an independent kingdom to compete with the kingdom of God. Every other angel and human who rebelled against God, even if they thought they were setting up their own little kingdom, ended up subject to the power of Satan.

We don’t know what part free will paid in how Lucifer decided to values and standards of his new kingdom. Did he decide to become the way he is or did he become the way he is as an inevitable result of his rebellion? There is no Biblical data to answer that question. What we do know is this: Lucifer became the exact moral opposite of God. The implications of this are absolutely chilling.

The clearer our picture of God is, the more alarming we find the fact that Satan has choose to become the exact moral opposite of God. The contemplation of God’s kindness, love, and mercy should melt us to tears. God isn’t just kind, He is the source of kindness. God is the most gracious, the warmest, and the most considerate of beings. God is everything that is sweet and tender and giving. Satan is the opposite of that. And he is trying to dominate your life.

It’s not that Satan loves less; Satan doesn’t love at all. There is not one trace of love within him. He is utterly without pity or mercy of any kind. His evil is pure and undiluted by any goodness whatsoever.

Consider the following stories. An evangelist tells the story of praying for a young woman who had been battling cancer for two years. The disease had finally spread to both lungs and there was nothing the doctor could do. As the evangelist prayed for the woman he was suddenly able to see into the spiritual realm. He could actually see a demon attached to this woman’s side. He rebuked the demon and commanded it to leave. And the woman was instantly healed.

I spent some time with people dying from cancer in my days in the pastorate. It isn’t pretty. In the end it’s usually a grueling, torturous way to die. Now think about this being attached to this woman. This was probably a fallen angel. He had apparently devoted two years of his existence to killing this woman inch by inch. He knew she had two small children at home. He felt her fear and her pain. This was a being who at one time had probably stood in the presence of God. And he was reduced to the point where he could spend two years doing this!

Imagine yourself in the role of that fallen angel. Imagine listening to the woman when she finally told her small children that she was going to die. Imagine the children distraught and crying. At some point, if there was the slightest glimmer of kindness or mercy in this being, you would expect it to let go. “I’ve tortured the woman enough. She has two small children. I’ll go somewhere else.” But he didn’t do that. His inner being is engulfed in total darkness. There is no trace of goodness there any longer.

In case you’re wondering, I don’t believe that all disease is caused by demons that have attached themselves to a human body; but I do believe this particular story. And we know that there is a connection between disease and the kingdom of darkness. “Ye know … how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil.” (Acts 10:37, 38 KJV)

Those who were sick were “oppressed by the devil.” This is what I think. I can’t prove it, but I’m virtually certain of it. Some of Satan’s minions were running around manipulating people into joining the sexual revolution at the exact same time that other fallen angels were manipulating a virus in Africa that would become the HIV infection. I’ve never been around someone dying of AID’s, but I understand that it is a very slow, hard death.

“I don’t know, Mark, this seems a little speculative to me.” Okay, I understand that. So let’s take a look at two examples right out of the Bible. Do you remember the incident in Mark 9 where the disciples were unable to cast the demon out of the boy? “But when the evil spirit saw Jesus, it threw the child into a violent convulsion, and he fell to the ground, writhing and foaming at the mouth. ‘How long has this been happening?’ Jesus asked the boy’s father. He replied, ‘Since he was a little boy. ²² The spirit often throws him into the fire or into water, trying to kill him.’” (Mark 9:20-22 NLT)

Again, it is important to think about this from the point of view of the fallen angel causing this havoc. Imagine the anguish of the parents each time the boy went into convulsions. Imagine the little boy in tears asking his daddy why this kept happening to him. There was an intelligent being causing this and witnessing every moment of pain and suffering this family had to endure. And he would not relent. He would not say, “enough.” There was no mercy or pity inside of him to interfere with his enjoyment of their suffering.

We know that the demons know that they are going to hell if they loose this war. The demons confronted by Jesus in his earthly ministry were terrified that He would cast them into the pit before the end time.

How bad do you have to be to knowingly manipulate another being into a condition of everlasting torment? I don’t honestly know if the demons hold out any real hope of winning in the end, but how bad do you have to be to be trying to take as many human souls with you as you can when you loose?

God hates sin. He loathes it. He detests it. And He wants us to come to feel the same way. God never looks at a sin as an isolated act. God sees acts of sin as footsteps on a path that leads to total domination by absolute evil. God looks at sins as compromises with evil beings that laugh as human souls are carried screaming off to hell.

But let’s not think about such things. Let’s keep our focus where its always been. Let’s thing about the cookie. Such a delicious cookie. Let’s not pay attention to the demon standing nearby with a rolled up newspaper in one hand and a cookie in the other. Just look at the cookie. Don’t pay any attention to the hand that’s holding it out to you. We’ve been trained to think about sin the way the demons want us to think about it. It’s up to us to begin to bring the truth of God into the equation at the very moment that we feel the desire to sin.

Instead of thinking about the cookie, think about the fact that the sin you are tempted to commit will either strengthen the power that one of these twisted, evil beings has over you, or it will enable this horrible creature to take new territory in your life.

The beings that are manipulating us have had thousands of years of practice. That doesn’t mean that they can’t be defeated; it just means that they know what they are going to do next. They’re probably a little bored by the whole process. How would you like to do the same job for thousands of years?

Satan knows what he’s going to do. Do you know what you’re going to do? If you’ve been looking at the cookie, and that’s all you’ve been thinking about, then you’ve been loosing. It’s time for you to make some plans, and one of the best plans you can come up with is to consciously link the act of sin with the powers that are behind the whole thing in the first place. In the next post I’ll give you some specific advice on how to do that.

Absolute freedom is an illusion

When Lucifer rebelled, he got to do something that no other created being is able to do. He has since spent vast amounts of time and energy trying to convince every other created being that we can do what he did, but he is lying and he knows it. It is very, very important that we come to understand this lie.

In order to understand this lie I need to refer back to Saturday’s posting. Human beings were created to flow in perfect harmony with a higher power. When we think of this in relationship with God it is one of the most beautiful and heartwarming thoughts that the mind can dwell on. God actually wants to incorporate me into the everlasting ecstasy that is the shared life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is my destiny. By His grace it can begin in this present life and be perfected in the life to come. There is fullness of joy in the presence of God. This joy is the heart’s response to the full expression of the almighty, unconditional love of God.

I need to conform to a higher power. I was designed to live in perfect harmony with a higher power. It is our destiny and every human being will fulfill this destiny either in perpetual light of heaven or in the dark depths of hell. But don’t expect Satan to explain any of this to you. He’s too busy lying. He’s trying to convince us that we can do what he did.

The first lie was told to Eve in Genesis 3:5. “You will be like God.” So the man and the woman ate of the forbidden fruit. And what was the result? Proud, independent, free human beings, each one the captain of his own ship and the master of his own fate? Not hardly.

The Bible makes it clear that everyone not in the kingdom of God is in the kingdom of Satan. (Acts 26:18 John 12:31) This is what I meant when I said that Lucifer got to do something no other created being could do. It isn’t really possible for me to set up my own kingdom. I have to choose the power I will serve, either God or Satan. But Satan does not want us to know this. He wants to keep us believing the lie that we really can do what we want the way we want when we want.

Unsaved people buy into this hook, line, and sinker. They have no idea they are under the dominion of a higher power. Jesus told the unbelieving Jews that the truth would set them free. They responded by denying that they had ever been slaves to anyone or anything. Jesus responded by telling them that “everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin.” (John 8:34) He then went on to say that their very natures were in conformity to the nature of Satan. “You are of your father the devil and you want to do the desires of your father.” (John 8:44)

But it isn’t only the unsaved people who get confused about this. A saved person who commits sin is also under the power of the devil. “The Lord's bond-servant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged, with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition, if perhaps God may grant them repentance leading to the knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, having been held captive by him to do his will.” (2 Timothy 2:24-26)

Now let’s take this down to where the rubber meets the road. When was the last time, when you were struggling with an evil desire, that you took time to think about whether or not you wanted to give Satan greater power and authority in your life? Every sin either strengthens the hold the devil already has on you or allows him to take over some new territory in your life. I suspect that there are many Christians who understand this, but once again, how many times have you stopped to think about it when you were battling against sin?

The evil spirits have trained us the exact same way that we train our dogs. Look at the cookie. Do you want the cookie? Do what I say and you will get a cookie. Don’t think about anything that I don’t want you to think about. Just look at the cookie. Think about how tasty it is. Think about how much you’re going to enjoy it. Look at the cookie, and only at the cookie.

Freedom begins when we “come to our senses” because God has given us “a knowledge of the truth.” Freedom begins when we begin to understand that we are trapped by pre-conditioned thought patterns and when we decide that we are going to begin to think long and hard about some things that Satan doesn’t want us to think about.

The next time you find yourself tempted by the cookie, start thinking about whether or not you want to give Satan increased power and authority in your life. Let’s go back to our mother Eve in the garden. “Eat the fruit and you will be like God.” That’s tempting. But this was the truth. “Eat the fruit and you will become my slave and become like me.” Somehow I think that Eve could have found the strength to resist that, but Satan didn’t tell her the truth. He won’t tell you the truth either. You’ll have to tell yourself the truth. In the next week I will be giving you some very specific instructions on how to do this.

Why God made us

The evil spirits who are trying to enslave us have many advantages over us. One of the sources of their strength lies in their longevity and in their clear understanding of human nature. You must always keep this in mind: the forces of darkness have had thousands of years in which to perfect the art of manipulating human beings.

If we are going to resist them then we must have a better understanding of ourselves. If the enemy knows who we are and what we are here for, and if we do not understand these things, it gives him tremendous leverage to use against us.

In today’s post we will consider the whole question of what it means to be human. Next Tuesday we will apply all of this to our war against the powers of darkness.

This is the truth about what it means to be a human. We were designed for a specific purpose: to become junior partners with God in a shared life. I believe that God designed us this way because of His own triune nature.

Let me tell you what it’s like to be a Person in the three-in-one Godhead. As I explain this please keep in mind that I am very much like a two year old who’s daddy just happens to be an astrophysicist. The two year old has only the slightest idea of what his father really does. Our understanding of God is much like that, but that doesn’t mean that the things we know aren’t true. It simply means that we only know a tiny fraction of all there is to know about God.

God is three persons sharing one life. Another way to say it is that God is three individuals sharing one life. Here are three basic facts about the Trinity and how these facts relate to the human condition.

Each person in the Trinity is never alone. They are everlastingly conscious of one another. Needless to say, this is not the way that human beings relate to one another.

Sometimes I am with my wife and sometimes I am not. When I am with her I can share my thoughts with her and she with me. When we are apart we have no idea what the other person is doing or thinking. When we come back together we can share the things that happened and what we were thinking about when we were apart. Our experience of each other is an off and on thing. Sometimes we’re together and sometimes we’re apart.

Most of us conceive of a relationship with God in the same way we think about and experience human relationships. Sometimes I’m with God (when I’m praying or worshipping) and sometimes I’m not. When I get to heaven I’ll have my own house (mansion). Sometimes I’ll be in my house, and other times I’ll be with other people, and other times I’ll go down to the temple and be in the presence of God.

That’s not the way it’s going to be. You don’t go to heaven so that you can live in God’s neighborhood. God is heaven. Being in heaven is the same thing as being constantly in the presence of God. Because of this we can mature in our Christian faith until we reach the point were we are dwelling in heaven on earth as we constantly experience His presence. Bother Lawrence is probably the best known example of this. He was a monk who lived in the middle ages. He found that he could experience just as much of God’s presence when he was working in the garden or doing dishes as he could when he was actively engaged in worship. He had learned to experience God in much the same way that the persons of the Trinity experience each other. They are never alone.

So that’s the first thing we need to learn: each person of the Godhead is everlastingly aware of the presence of the other members of the Godhead and God has specifically designed us so that we can enter into that everlasting, intimate relationship. This is what we were created for. This is the reason we exist.

The second thing we need to learn about the persons in the three-in-one God is that they flow in perfect harmony together. They are able to do this because they are the perfect mind. Oh how I wish I could convey to you in some small measure the absolute beauty and perfection of the mind of God! Because they know everything perfectly and understand everything perfectly they always agree in whatever decisions have to be made. If you could somehow separate each of the three and give them scenarios to work on each and every one of them would always come up with the exact same solution every time. And their solutions would be the best possible solutions. Every time.

We were designed to flow in perfect harmony with the will of God. We were created to become incorporated into a higher power who will be making almost all of the decisions, great and small, on the basis of His perfect wisdom and knowledge. Notice that I said “almost all of the decisions.” We can and do have some say in what happens. That is part of the mystery of prayer. For the most part we will joyfully concur with each and every decision that God makes as we marvel at the perfection of the workings of His mind. The will of God will become our will except on those occasions where our will becomes His will. From time to time our desires will change His intentions. It is love that makes this so.

When my son joined the National Guard, he had to go away and do the same basic training that regular Air Force personal go through. This training was in Texas. We live in Illinois.

I had no idea that there was a formal graduation and that families were invited to attend. So I wasn’t planning on it. We hadn’t set aside vacation time or saved up money to make the trip. So when we found out about the graduation, my will was that we ought not go. I would have liked to, but we don’t have the kind of financial resources that can easily absorb the cost of gas, motels, and meals for a trip like that without prior warning. So I decided we wouldn’t go. That was my will.

Until I found out that my wife really needed to go. Not that she wanted to go. She needed to go. And then that immediately became my will. Love made it so. Once I fully understood that there was something in her mother’s heart that made it imperative for her to go, I not only changed my mind, I become positively enthusiastic about the whole idea. (For those of you who don’t believe in miracles, I invite you to ponder the mystery of how a woman who weighs just over 100 pounds can stroll through life with a man who weighs well over 200 pounds wrapped around her little finger without even having to lean slightly in the direction of the hand that includes the finger around which the 200 plus pound man is wrapped.)

Sometimes love will make our will God’s will. If you don’t believe me, understand that when God said he was going to destroy the Israelites in the wilderness and replace them with the descendants of Moses, that was precisely what He intended to do. God never says anything that He doesn’t mean. But Moses interceded and asked God to spare them, and in a miracle of love, the will of Moses became the will of God and the Israelites were saved. I think that God allows our wills to prevail in circumstances where His perfect mind can find ways to incorporate our desires with His larger, perfect plans. But the same love that transformed the will of Moses into the will of God, and that transformed the will of Nancy into the will of Mark, will transform your will and mine into harmony with the will of the awesome, perfect, beautiful God we adore.

So these are the first to things we must know. We are designed to be everlastingly in the presence of God and in perfect harmony with the will of God. Here is the third truth about the Trinity and how His triune nature relates to human nature. It is a gleaming jewel of a truth.

God exists in a state of everlasting ecstasy. Love is what makes this so. The three Persons of the triune God-head share an everlasting drug that is stronger than the most powerful liquor man has ever distilled. And please, don’t be offended by the comparison between the love of God and drunkenness. God Himself makes that comparison/contrast when he exhorts us to “be not drunk with wine, but be filled with the Spirit.” As someone who was raised in the sixties I can’t find a better way to say it: God is everlastingly high on love. And He wants to share that emotional state with us everlastingly.

We Can Train Them

Text from a symposium delivered to the “Conference on Dealing With the Seed of the Woman”

I am here to report on my study of the offspring of the human cattle on the planet earth. As most of you know, there was a mass evacuation from the planet when the woman began the process of giving birth. (I am happy to say that this is an extremely painful experience for the female.)

The Oppressor had promised that the “seed of the woman” would “bruise the head” of our master, Lord Lucifer. There were concerns that the birth of the first human child would be an occasion of great danger for our kingdom, and thus the evacuation of the planet. Various attempts were made by special teams to go down to the planet and kill the children, but the lackey’s of the Oppressor are tasked with protecting them from us and we were unsuccessful in this attempt. But I believe that I have found a way to kill them! I’ll be sharing this information with you in a moment.

I was, as most of you know, “volunteered” to stay behind and observe. I have been observing for five revolutions of the planet around it’s star. The human cattle are calling these revolutions “years.” The cattle designated as “Adam” seems to have a knack for naming things. It’s quite annoying.

The birth of the human baby was very much like the births of the other mammals we have observed, with one important, and wholly unexpected difference. Almost all of the other mammals give birth to offspring that can quickly become at least semi-independent. For instance, most of them can ambulate almost immediately after birth. We were expecting something like this when the human cattle reproduced, but I was astonished to see that the human offspring is quite helpless, physically. They are only able to eat, sleep, cry, and urinate and defecate on themselves for a long while after their birth.

An even greater surprise is the condition of their minds at birth. As most of you know, we have to recognize that the human cattle are capable of forms of higher reasoning, even if we don’t consider them to be our equals in any real sense of the word. So the birth of the first human was the birth of the first creature actually able to think. We were expecting a smaller version of what happened when the Oppressor first made angels and humans. We came into existence with fully formed intellects and the power of speech. One of the reasons we feared the birth of the first human was that we expected a fully functional mind inside of a miniature human body that would then grow to it’s full size.

You may find this very hard to grasp, but the mind of the newly born human is unformed. And in that I believe we have our great opportunity. Let me explain. The first born human, the cattle designated as “Cain,” has now learned to feed himself and to control both his bladder and bowels. He now knows how to do these things, but he is not using his conscious mind when he does them.

We’ll use eating as an example. In order to help the child eat, the human cattle “Adam” formed a piece of wood into what he calls a “spoon” (another example of that annoying naming). The spoon is held in the hand and used to convey food into the mouth. Those of you who have been too terrified to visit the planet would quickly loose your fear if you had witnessed the human Cain trying to learn to use the spoon. It was usually (but not always) able to hold the spoon level enough to keep food on the spoon as it lifted the food toward its mouth; but the early attempts to actually get the food into the mouth were quite amusing. Sometimes the child would bring the spoon up to his forehead. Sometimes he would drop the food over his shoulder.

This will give you a good idea just how unformed their minds are. The first humans and all of the angels were created with the full knowledge of how to get along in the universe implanted on our conscious minds. The human children have to learn almost everything from scratch. With enough practice the human child became quite adept at moving the spoon from his plate (another invention, another name) to his mouth. But as soon as he acquired the skill, he stopped thinking about it! This is very important to grasp. When he was first learning the skill, he had to concentrate the full powers of his conscious mind on each attempt; but once he had learned the skill, he began using it without the need to actually think about it.

The man has named this ability. He calls it a habit. And I think it may be the key to controlling these creatures. To help us better understand this, I want to describe an interesting interaction between the man and the mammal he calls “dog.”

The human has found that the dog mammals seem to be unusually friendly; they actually seek out human companionship. But the human also discovered that the dog would urinate and defecate inside the wooden box that Adam had constructed for his family to live in. (He calls the box a “house.”)

The human cattle don’t like the smell of urine and feces, and they don’t like to step in feces in their bare feet, so this created quite a problem for the man. He wanted to keep the dog as a companion, while the female wanted him to drive it away. But then the man learned that he could train the dog. The way he trained the dog is quite ingenious.

When he found the dog defecating in the “house,” he would yell at it, throw things at it, and even hit it. When he found the dog defecating outside of the house, he would praise it and caress it. Pretty soon the dog began to defecate only when outside the house.

Understand this: the dog can’t really think. He just responds to things in his environment. He began to associate defecating in the house with yelling and defecating outside of the house with praise. This quickly formed a “habit” inside of the dog’s nervous system that keeps the dog from defecating in the house.

Now this next point is absolutely the key to my plan to control these creatures. The same internal mechanism that allows the boy to use the spoon also trains the dog not to defecate in the house! The whole process becomes automatic! It doesn’t require the participation of the conscious mind – which is why it works on the dog, who has no real mind to begin with.

I believe we can train these creatures the same way the man trained the dog. And this is only right. The man is superior to the dog, just as we are superior to the man. The dog doesn’t understand the training process, and if we are careful, I believe that we can train the humans in the same way without them even being aware of it.

The whole key to the process is pleasure vs. discomfort. You associate pleasure with what you want the creature to do and discomfort with what you don’t want it to do. I tried an experiment with the boy designated Cain using this process. It was quite successful.

The woman, Eve, has become quite clever at concocting tasty treats for the humans to eat. The annoying man has decided to call these “deserts.” Eating the deserts gives a sensation of pleasure to the humans. I decided to use “deserts” to see if I could train the human.

It wasn’t an easy thing to approach the little mammal. The slaves of the enemy were nearby, ready to punish me if I tried to do physical harm to the mammal. It was a very scary moment when I drew close to “Cain” and attempted to put a thought in his head. What would happen? Would his protectors attack me? They did not! I can sense that there may be some limits that the Enemy has placed on our ability to influence their minds but we will apparently have some access.

So I approached Cain and got him thinking about the pleasure associated with the desert. I was very patient in doing this. I just kept gently pointing his attention to the pleasure that he got from eating the desert. If you can get a human being to think about something that gives them pleasure, and then keep them focused on this, it creates a state of desire that is actually hard for them to overcome with their wills. It frustrates their nervous systems somehow. When they really want something, it is hard for them to control their desire to obtain it.

So I got Cain to start thinking about the pleasure of the desert. And in a little while, an amazing thing happened. He actually went into the house when the woman wasn’t looking and ate the entire desert!

There were some negative consequences to this. First of all, he ate more than his body really needed. This caused him to have a “stomach ache.” Second, the woman yelled at him. She was quite furious that he had eaten food that was intended to be shared with the man and the younger children.

So you would think that would be the end of the experiment. The little human ate too much and experienced negative consequences. So you wouldn’t expect the human to do that again. But you can train them. I know this actually works because I have trained the human Cain! This is how I did it.

I kept directing his mind toward desert and associating desert with pleasure. I tried to do everything I can to discourage him from actually thinking about what was happening. I certainly didn’t want him to associate too much desert with stomach aches and the woman yelling. You have to keep this very simple. Deserts bring pleasure. Eating deserts feels good. You like deserts.

If you keep doing this long enough the human will begin to find ways to get as much desert as possible. Cain has become quite adept at sneaking into the house and stealing deserts. He often ties to just break off little pieces so that the woman will not notice that he has had more than his fair share. I kept doing this the same way the man trained the dog. You have to be patient, but I finally succeeded.

The boy now has a habit of eating too much desert and the whole thing takes place below the level of his conscious mind! It’s the same mechanism that allows him to bring the spoon to his mouth without thinking about it! I believe that he will have an unhealthy attachment to deserts for the rest of his life until something happens that makes him think about what he is doing and he realizes that he has to retrain himself.

Again, the whole key to this process is keeping the activity below the level of the conscious mind. You do not want them to think about all of the consequences of the activity. You do not want him to associate too much desert with a stomach ache and an angry mother. You just “attach” the thought of desert to the thought of pleasure and do it until it becomes a habit. It’s really that simple!

We were afraid that the first human baby was the promised “seed” that would do us harm. I am beginning to think that that is not so. No one knows how many of these babies will eventually be born or which one of them will be the “seed.” But I can tell you this, you can manipulate them pretty much to your heart’s content when they are this small, and I have a feeling that the early programming won’t wear off automatically just because they grow and develop.

All of which leads me to what I believe may be the most significant breakthrough of all! The angels dedicated to the enemy won’t let us kill these children. Very well. But what if we could train them to kill each other?

I know that sounds absurd, but I believe it to be possible. I have already noticed some tendencies in the boy Cain that I have started to develop. When a new baby is born it requires a great deal of attention from its parents if it is to survive. This leaves less time for paying attention to the older children. I have begun to encourage this in young Cain. I make his think of this little brother and associate that thought with jealousy. Again, you have to keep it simple. You don’t want him thinking about the consequences of actually harming his brother. Brother means jealously. Over and over again until he forms the habit of associating his little brother with jealousy and resentment.

I know that some of you might think I’m crazy, but I believe that I may be able to develop this into something that could someday cause Cain to attempt to physically harm his little brother. My ultimate goal is to manipulate him into killing Able.

That's just crazy!

I want to begin what will be a very long thread on freedom today. I suspect that I’ll be blogging about this for the next couple of months. The kind of freedom I am writing about is freedom from the domination of sin and Satan in your life. I would really appreciate your prayers as I write. I’ve had some very stiff opposition as I’ve begun to put this thing together. I guess that’s a good thing. It means that I’m on the right track. But please pray for me so that I will get this written down the way the Holy Spirit wants it done.

I do not think it’s inappropriate to begin at the beginning. In this case the beginning we are talking about is the beginning of evil. As Christians we spend all of our lives in a battle against evil but I don’t think we spend enough time thinking about the very nature of the thing we are fighting. What is evil? What is sin?

Apparently the whole thing started with an angel who was in a highly exalted position. His name was Lucifer. There is a great deal of irony in that name, because the name means “morning star” or “light bearer.” He was in the kingdom of God and there was no one or nothing to seduce him into becoming evil. He had never seen evil. In the act of rebelling against God, he literally had to create evil. He had to seduce himself.

I’ve tried to imagine what this must have been like, but I can’t quite pull it off. Where did it all begin? Did he analyze the way all existence was centered on the love and worship of the Creator and begin to imagine himself in that position? And as he imagined it and began to fantasize about it, did the desire begin to get stronger and stronger? We may never know exactly what went through his heart and mind that led him to rebel, but there is one thing we can know for sure.

It was crazy. Have you ever thought about how crazy it was? You and I are born in sin and without very much knowledge of God. Lucifer knew God. Lucifer knew about God. That means that when he first began thinking about rebelling, he knew that God was listening to what was going on in his mind. He also had to know that God was omnipotent. Sin began as a rebellion against an omnipotent being who was hearing the thoughts of the rebels while they were making their plans. And you thought you’d pulled some stupid stuff.

I’ll spend some time on Thursday speculating on why they thought they could pull it off, but the one thought I want to leave you with is that sin is insane. There never has been, and never will be, a sin that was ultimately in the best self interest of the person committing the sin. Sin is crazy. And I was born with sin in my nature. So that must mean …

I can still remember the moment when I first realized that I was depressed. I had been sick for about six weeks. I felt weak and listless. I thought I had come down with something. So I went to the family doctor and he checked me out and he couldn’t find one single thing wrong with me – physically. He didn’t actually come right out and say it, but he led me right up to the point where the realization hit me like a bucket of ice water right in the face. “There is something wrong with my mind.” Independent (sometimes to the point of arrogance), tough minded, above average IQ me? Something wrong with my mind?

For those of you who don’t know, I have seasonal affective disorder. Our bodies react to light and produce what I call “happiness chemicals” up in the brain. Apparently, my body doesn’t work right and I don’t produce as much of those chemicals as you do. So in the winter I have to battle depression. I don’t see pink elephants or come to believe that I am Napoleon Bonaparte (everyone knows I’m really Elvis). I just get sad. Very sad. Sad like someone very close to me just died sad. Like a lot of these mind-body things, they don’t seem to fully manifest until your college years. I’ve been fighting this annual battle since 1972.

I am telling you this story because I want you to come to the same place I had to come to. As far as I knew, the old noodle was working just fine, until I finally confronted the evidence that led me to understand that something was wrong up there.

We are born broken. When my kids were born I looked them over, counted the fingers and toes, and thanked God that they were healthy. But even in the delivery room, contemplative and philosophical soul that I am, I knew that they weren’t fine. They were born poisoned. They were born with sin in their natures. And I knew that my battle with evil was entering a new phase. Instead of just fighting evil in my own nature I was going to have to do everything I could (with God’s help) to help my kids grow up to be as sane (good) as possible. I’m not sure how much help I was, but they have a good mother so they turned out fine.

So how about you? Have you ever come to the place where you have come to realize that something is wrong with your heart and mind? I’m not just talking about the presence of wrong desires. We all know about that. But what does the presence of these wrong desires tell me about myself?

The temptation and the tendency is to think to yourself, “I’m okay, I just need to stop making bad choices.” This simply isn’t true. You are making bad choices because you are not okay. You are making bad choices because there is a power inside of you that is evil and irrational. Every sin is an act of madness.

How in the world could Lucifer have sinned against an omnipotent God who was reading his mind? He did it because he made some choices that literally warped his heart and his mind. In a very real sense he became insane.

Lucifer sinned against an omnipotent and omniscient being. When we sin, we are sinning against perfect love and perfect wisdom. God is the almighty beating heart from which pours all the love that is in the universe. He loves you with a passion and intensity that is beyond any other love that you will ever know. And He is perfectly wise. He has a perfect mind. When He tells you to do something, it is always the very best thing for you to do. Isn’t it just as crazy for you and I to rebel against perfect love and perfect wisdom as it was for Lucifer to rebel against omniscience and omnipotence?

In our fight with evil we tend to focus our actions, on what we do. There is a place for that, but the real struggle has to do not with what we do, but with who we are. I need to be renewed in the spirit of my mind, not because my poor brain almost has it all figured out but just needs a little help, but because my poor brain is linked to a heart that is influenced by madness. True progress in the spiritual life comes as we learn to cooperate with God in bringing ever greater measures of sanity and health to our diseased hearts and minds. In the coming weeks I’m going to be sharing with you some of the things I have learned about cooperating with the Holy Spirit so that He can change me.

Let me leave you with this little thought. Sin hasn’t made us totally insane. We all have things we wouldn’t dream of doing. I don’t know about you, but I don’t struggle with the desire to rob banks or march Jews into gas chambers. We all have a long list of things we simply wouldn’t do. For us, to actually do these things is unthinkable. But what about the sins that we do not find unthinkable? What about the sins we actually do commit? What is God trying to do in our lives? Is He just trying to get us to quit doing things?

What God is trying to do is to transform you so that you begin to see what He sees, feel what He feels, and think the way He thinks. God is trying to transform us so that more and more thoughts, attitudes and actions move from the “things I do but I know I shouldn’t list” to the “things I can’t imagine how I ever did them and will never do them again list.” Real freedom is when God transforms me to the place where the irresistible becomes the unthinkable.