Hillary's Conversation
There is a book titled “The Choice” written by Watergate reporter Bob Woodward in 1996. The book claims that the then-president’s wife, Hillary, found encouragement by talking to Jean Houston, co-director of the Foundation for Mind Research, which studies psychic experience and altered and expanded consciousness.
The book said Houston got Mrs. Clinton to hold an imaginary conversation with Eleanor Roosevelt who died in 1962.
Hillary wrote in her weekly syndicated column that she occasionally has “imaginary conversations with Mrs. Roosevelt to try to figure out what she would do in my shoes. She usually responds by telling me to buck up or at least to grow skin as thick as a rhinoceros.”
The Bible constantly speaks of a dimension beyond material externals and appearances. Jesus called it “The Kingdom of God”.
But then the Bible also says that there are wrong forms of attempted communication with this other dimension.
When we live in this material dimension, we daily measure things by our limiting, natural senses – human intellect, emotional feelings and external appearance can act as our bases for judgment and decisions.
But we were created to live IN THE HIGHER DIMENSION ALSO – the timeless world of limitless unity with the Spirit of God. We are each, by a rebirth at conversion, to know the Spirit reality of a personal union with the Trinity of God – Christ living in us, through us, to others.
This does not deny our humanity, or the temporal reality of the material dimension, but brings us to a level of awareness which enables us to transcend our humanity.
My slowness in coming to see who I really was as a Christian probably stemmed from my religious training, as well as from my personality and interests. Because I had been warned in my youth by my religious teachers to stay away from anything “mystical” in trying to communicate with the spirit dimension lest I be sidetracked into religious error, I purposely avoided any Ouija boards or séance kind of spirit communication. Knowing that I might be deceived by the evil part of the spirit world, I stayed carefully away from “spiritism” or “mysticism”.
Oh, sure, I prayed. I attempted to communicate with God in the spirit world. I told Him my troubles and what I needed from Him. But what I didn’t do was LISTEN for any answers or guidance. I didn’t really trust whether I would recognize the message as from God or from some evil source.
But when I came to understand my new birth and Christ dwelling in me, I then realized that I had thrown out the baby with the bath water. Just because certain, far out groups, who seem to deny the atonement of Christ, emphasize mysticism does not mean that the subject us taboo and should be ignored.
The truth is that all people are mystics, whether they realize it or not. Mysticism is simply man’s inner knowing of Divinity – man’s intuitive realization of the need for union with God. Because the True Light enlightens every man (John 1:9), all people have in their hearts a spark of this inner knowing of what their destiny is meant to be. Believers in Christ have responded positively to this inner illumination, and have come to know and honor Christ as Savior and Lord. Unbelievers either reject that spark of Divinity outright (Romans 1:21) or find ways to attempt to get around it to satisfy their worldly perceptions.
Any Christian who acknowledges the Virgin Birth, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Atonement, the Holy Spirit, and then says he rejects mysticism as a source of knowledge – as I did for years – is in for a hard time in Christian living.
Most of us have learned from bitter experience that when we live only in the material dimension, we are powerless to perfect ourselves. Providentially, God has arranged a workable solution. As born-again new creatures in Christ, we are meant to live and operate in the consciousness of a higher dimension of spirit realm. We humanly do not have to be perfected. We humanly do not have to overcome or become anything. We only need to acknowledge our awareness of who we really are in the spirit dimension – one in union with Jesus Christ.
The key to a walk of faith that is not constantly derailed by day-to-day events is a fixed settlement into the truth of our union with Christ. Then this settled awareness turns into a quiet fellowship with Christ within whereby we come to recognize, AND KNOW THAT WE RECOGNIZE, messages of guidance from Him.
We no longer need to fear, as I did, that we will be deceived by evil spirits. We WILL recognize the difference between godly and ungodly guidance. We will instantly know the voice of Jesus as quickly as we know the voice of any family member.
This is not to say that we will always FOLLOW the guidance of Christ that we hear. We can still slip up by temporarily ignoring Christ and sinning. But we will also KNOW afterward that we did not follow Christ’s guidance when we sinned. This will tend to correct us and draw us back to Christ, probably even closer than before we sinned.
So, back to Hillary. If I could talk to Hillary, this is what I would tell her:
1. Don’t bother communicating with Eleanor Roosevelt! – or any dead person for that matter! They can’t help you with messages and, in fact, you are really asking for evil trouble.
2. You don’t need Jean Houston as some kind of a spiritual guide. If you are a Christian, you have the Holy Spirit working as a Teacher guide behind the scenes directing you to Christ.
3. Don’t reject talking to Jesus Christ! He is the One that you should be talking to!
4. But before you accept guidance messages from Him, you must know and accept that He is a part of you if you are a Christian. You must establish a personal relationship with Him so that you will know His voice.
Hillary, your personal life is tough enough right now. Don’t make it any tougher! [Back to Home]
A Survey - An Angry God?
An article by Mart De Haan of RBC Ministries
A 2006 Baylor Religious Survey found that Americans have very different opinions about whether God is inclined to be angry.
According to the Baylor study:
23% believe in a God of goodwill who shows up in our lives and is not inclined to be angry.
31.4% believe in an authoritarian God who is very involved in our lives and apt to be angry when we don’t do what He wants us to do.
24.4% believe in a critical God who, although not so involved with us, will show His displeasure by punishment in the hereafter.
16% believe in a distant God who is neither involved with us nor inclined to be angry.
5.2% say they are atheists.
The results of this survey cause me to wonder how much the people in these categories have been affected by a misunderstanding of the Bible.
The Bible describes a God whose anger is an important part of His story. From Genesis to Revelation, God expresses not only love but also anger. Moses writes about a time When God was so angry with the children of Israel that He threatened to destroy all of them and start over ((Deuteronomy 9:8-20). David, the songwriter king of Israel, later wrote that “God is angry with the wicked every day” (Psalm 7:11), and the last book in the Bible pictures a resurrected Lord bringing the wrath of God against a world in rebellion (Revelation 19:11-16).
The God of both testaments, however, is slow to get angry. He is the opposite of irritable parents whose flash points of anger say more about their own frustration than about their child’s need for correction. The Father in heaven never loses His temper because He has had a bad day or because, in exasperation, He doesn’t know what else to do. Over and over the Bible describes Him as being “ready to pardon, gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abundant in kindness” (Nehemiah 9:17).
The God of the Bible is so patient that He risks being misunderstood. His reluctance to enforce quick justice allows many to conclude that He isn’t watching, or that He doesn’t care (2 Peter 3:3-4). Yet by the time the last pages of the Bible are written, they reveal a God who waits as long as He does to give us time for a change of heart (Romans 2:4).
God takes no pleasure in the death of those who reject Him. Many centuries before Jesus’ birth, a Jewish prophet declared that God takes no pleasure in the death of His enemies. Specifically, the prophet Ezekiel declared, “’As I live,’ says the Lord God, ‘I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn, turn from your evil ways! For why should you die, O house of Israel?’” (33:11). Now, as then, God’s heart grieves over the end of those who refuse His offer of pardon and sanctuary.
When Jesus expressed “woes” on His enemies, He was more sad than angry. The “woes” He expressed to those who hated Him were not expressions of angry self-defense. They were expressions of lament, regret, and distress (Luke 11:42-52).
By “woes” of grief and alarm, Jesus put the Pharisees on notice that they were in danger of being accused and condemned by the very laws in which they took so much pride. So He said to them, “Do not think that I shall accuse you to the Father; there is one who accuses you – Moses, in whom you trust” (John 5:45).
GOD IS TOO LOVING NOT TO BE ANGRY. His anger, slow as it is, remains as evidence that He cares about the harmful things we do to ourselves and to one another.
The opposite of anger is NOT love. The opposite of anger is to be uninvolved and indifferent. It is because God loves so much that He feels such a mixture of grief and anger toward those who refuse to come to Him – at the expense of themselves and others.
This slow-forming, brokenhearted anger is what finally resulted in the terrible flood of Noah’s day (Genesis 6:1-6). Later, God’s judgment fell on Sodom and Gomorrah after the sins of the twin cities created conditions of oppression and hard-hearted violence (Genesis 18:20-21). Still later, God’s reluctant anger fell on Jerusalem, who, according to the prophet Ezekiel, fell into such spiritual disgrace that she made Samaria and Sodom look good by comparison (16:51-52).
Nowhere, however, is the heart behind God’s anger better understood than when:
Jesus turned the wrath of the law against Himself. Because of the love that would not allow Him to be uninvolved or indifferent to us, the Son of God took the punishment we deserved (2 Corinthians 5:21). When Jesus said from His cross, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:46), that was our hour of judgment. In that moment, our guilt was being punished. God’s anger against all that is evil and harmful in the world was falling on Himself instead of us.
Most amazing is that according to the New Testament, the One who will sit in judgment of the world in the last days is none other than the same Jesus who suffered in our place (Matthew 25:31-34; John 5:22-27; Acts 10:42-43; 2 Timothy 4:1).
If this is true, if the anger of God will flash in the eyes of the same One who cried and died for us, the how would we answer a survey that asks how inclined God is to be angry?
Does this sound like a God who is uninvolved or uncaring – or in any way unworthy of our fear, trust, and love?[Back to Home]
Temptation and Its Beneficial Effects
Nowhere is the true significance of temptation more clearly seen than in the historic forty days in the wilderness by Jesus. We watch that tremendous scene, the last Adam, the Word made flesh, come to fight and win the battle that the first Adam lost. We see Him with His human instincts, passions and powers, true Man in Spirit, soul and body (1 Thessalonians 5:23). Jesus understood the concept: I AM a spirit, I HAVE a soul, and I LIVE IN a body. We see this Man complete in manhood’s powers, forty days “tempted of the devil.”
Temptation had started before then, of course. We catch a previous glimpse of it when by a subtle solicitation through the channel of His enlarged and illumined spirit, the young lad of twelve might have been led away by the devil in disguise to follow the trail of false favor in place of filial obedience to His parents.
But now He was a Man in the fullness of His power, and the only Man in history to whom those tremendous words had been or could be spoken, but a few hours before: “You are My Beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”
Knowing Himself to be anointed by God’s Spirit to fulfill the greatest commission ever given to man; to be the world’s Savior, to be the Man of Destiny whose Name had been on the inspired lips of sage and prophet since the world began, the longed for Messiah. But there was still one thing needed: a firm and final choice of free will, a voluntary self-dedication of every power of spirit, soul and body to this one end. And for that the devil was necessary!
Man cannot really know his nature fixed Godward except by his refusal to fix it devilward. So Jesus met Satan in that deserted place.
After forty days, He was weak and hungry in body. And then the suggestion was stabbed home to Him: “Your new powers over nature. Use them. Make bread.” In a moment, the battle was joined. Was His body to be master or servant? Was He to move at its dictates, or was it to move at the dictates of the Father who controlled Him? Jesus said, “No!” But a mere “no” would leave the nagging temptation unrelieved. So He followed up this powerless negative with a triumphant positive that swallows up the negative: “Man lives by every Word of God.” This was BODY victory. It was settled. From then on, His body was an instrument for God’s glory – His appetites were the natural means by which it could be kept in working order.
Next came the temptation of the soul. In the soul repose all the vast powers of the personality – to think, to will, to feel. All the mighty achievements of man, in art, in science, in literature, in action, flow from the soul. The genius, the leader, the inventor, the discoverer, have all great souls. And none so great as the human Jesus. Satan knew this; for to only one Man has he offered complete world dominion and promised Him the attainment of His objective. The devil showed Him “all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time”; said to Him “all these will I give You.” The condition? That He commit Himself into the hands of “the prince of this world” (as He later calls Satan), absorb the spirit that is in the world, and act according to “the wisdom of this world”.
In other words, all the powers of that greatest of human personalities, mental, emotional, volitional, would become the vehicle of world dictatorship, based on the age-old methods of conquest and compulsion, the only technique of government known to man and the spirit that works in the ungodly man.
The alternative? The worship and service of God; and that meant the subordination of these same soul-powers to the ways of His Spirit, to the carrying out of an alternative technique of ultimate world dominion which was in the wildest sense improbable and fantastic, and as totally removed from the way of the natural man as light from darkness. This was SOUL victory. This was the material from which the plan of the ages took its shape in Him.
Yet, spirit is deeper than soul. It is the essence of a man – “I AM a spirit”. It is that which expresses itself through soul and body. It is the center of my being where, as a Christian, Jesus Christ dwells in union (Galatians 2:20). And if body and soul must be fixed in God through the stabilizing processes of temptation, so also must the spirit.
So Satan sought to reach the spirit of the Savior, when he could not touch body or soul. Let’s see Him descend through the air upheld by supernatural power. Let them flock around Him as the miracle worker. Let them all see who He is: the Son of God in Spirit with power. The masses will be at His feet.
The alternative? To give Himself to show forth the Father in His human spirit. To point to the Father within Him so that thought, word and action will be controlled from His spirit – not of the visible Jesus, but of the invisible Father.
Thus, on the pinnacle of the temple that final battle of the spirit was fought and won. Satan’s weapon of temptation was turned to his own confusion and made the means of confirming the Son as the Servant of the Father. The high road to man’s salvation was now opened. The body was not for self-indulgence, nor the soul for self-aggrandizement, nor the spirit for self-worship – the forty days confirmed in His own consciousness and declared before heaven in spirit, soul and body, to be the Son of God with power, His Father’s willing Servant and the world’s Savior.
Only once more had such a battle to be fought; shorter, sharper, even fiercer, in three hours of bloody sweat; this time to gather strength by conflict and conquest to be the offering for the sin of the world.
The Lord’s prayer says, “…lead us not into temptation…”. Jesus is saying, “Father, I know that You do not lead us into temptation Yourself, but when Satan does, You will deliver us” – the Lord’s prayer continues, “…but deliver us from evil [the Evil One].”
From this perfect insight into temptation, we learn that temptations met and mastered are the only high road to stabilization of character and spiritual progress. We do not meet the pull of the carnal with an ineffective “No” (the “thou shalt not” of the law), which leaves the conflict unresolved, or at best gives victory only by the skin of the teeth. But we meet it with the positive alternative of the gospel, that “Christ has delivered us from the curse of the law”; the ringing declaration that “I am crucified with Christ – yet not I – but Christ lives in me.”
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Pleasure - A Reflex Effect And Not A Pursuit
What should be the Christian outlook on “pleasure”? The US Constitution talks about the “pursuit of happiness”. This is not the same as the pursuit of pleasure. Happiness is a deeper thing of the spirit than pleasure which resides in the soul, the intellect, emotions and will.
We are real human selves as well as it being Christ living in us. Therefore we do have pleasure as well as giving Him pleasure; we do have motives as well as being motivated by Him.
If a person thanks me because something I have said or written has made Christ more real to him, I have no necessity every time to stop him short and say, “Give the thanks to God.” In thanking me, he really means as a channel, and I as a channel am rightly also pleased that I have been a channel for Christ. I must not accuse myself of pride because I do feel pleasure.
Equally, when my main motive in some action has been believing it to be God’s will, Yet I see also that I had a personal motive of the gain or enjoyment or pleasure I also get from it, I must not therefore accuse myself of pride. As a real human self, I have my pleasure, my motives, my sense of personal gain in a thing.
The point is that, as a Christian with Jesus Christ in a living union with me, Christ’s motives are being established day be day in my soul AS MY MAIN MOTIVE. God’s will, God’s work, and God’s glory are becoming my main objective – as it is He by me, I too anticipate pleasure, satisfaction and gain from it.
This is how it is with God himself. Years ago I began to justify my conscious ego of pleasure by discovering that the Bible said of God that “for My pleasure they are and were created,” and of Jesus Christ that “for the joy set before Him He endured the cross.”
“Then God does things for selfish reasons,” I said, “the same as I do.” Of course, that missed the point which I saw later, as I began to exchange my self-centeredness for God-centeredness. I saw that true living is when the purpose is for others, and the secondary effect is the pleasure or gain I have from it.
False living is when my pleasure or gain is primary and the purposes of my living for others incidental. This is true in all life’s activities, such as the simple difference between eating to live (and incidentally getting pleasure out of it), and living to eat!
God’s pleasure, Christ’s joy are an outcome of His giving Himself, not pleasing Himself. True pleasure is when my self-pleasing is fulfilled in self-giving, and my self-love finds full satisfaction in other-love. There is total self-fulfillment, a combination of spirit happiness and soul pleasure.
As Jesus said, we find ourselves by losing ourselves in God’s love activities, and the REFLEX EFFECT of such living is the pleasure, gain and satisfaction it brings us.
We, the redeemed, though we do not live a life of continued sinning, do commit sins of attempted independent pleasure – pleasure not derived from godly motives. What then do we do? We have not broken relationship with Christ dwelling in us; we have just temporarily forgotten that relationship. We have interrupted fellowship from our side of the relationship. We have asserted our freedom by acting as if we were not one with Him and looking for some form of pleasure separate from His motives.
Just because we ARE one with Christ, we know that pleasure we were after was wrong. The way back is as simple and plain as on our first coming to God. If we are quickly born again by accepting Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord in a quick cleansing, then we are just as quickly accepted back into that indwelling relationship by humble repentance. It is as if God says to me, “Yes, you sinned, and honest confession and repentance were necessary. But as for the sin, I settled the whole sin question 2,000 years ago in the atoning death of my son. Through Him sins are no more. I have forgotten them. You can forget them.”
At this point we have to be careful not to add a second sin to the first. The first was the sin itself, the second and greater is if I don’t believe at once that what God has cleansed, He has cleansed. Not to believe in the efficacy of the blood of Christ for all sins both before and after conversion is a worse sin than the first. For unbelief, Jesus said, is the only REAL sin (John 16:9).
Some are also troubled by the repetition of sins and their human pleasure in their lives. How can they be delivered from doing it again and again? We do not find deliverance by looking to the past or future for some foolproof formula; but forgetting our search for deliverance, we become occupied by the simple say to day walk with the Deliverer.
Live in the “now moment” of His presence. The past is no longer there through the atoning sacrifice of Christ; the future is not my business; so if at this moment you are walking in a union with Jesus within, be thankful. Take pleasure in that walk. If and when the sudden fall comes again, get in the clear again with God, and walk on – looking neither to past nor future. We are much less likely to be tripped up in such a simple single-eyed walk than if we are tense about the past or future and holding on to some supposed formula of deliverance.
Even if we are bound by a sinful pleasure-seeking habit, or even if we are not willing to be delivered from a habit, the deliverance or the change of will to make us willing can never come by our attention being centered on the habit. It is only by a daring leap of faith and awareness which affirms that Christ is our deliverer and that He is the one living in us promising to bring us along on a day by day basis to “will and do after His good pleasure.”
So let’s not get the cart before the horse in our pleasure seeking. God wants our human pleasure – but He wants it as a reflex effect of following His purposes.
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Will God "Foreclose" On Your Salvation?
We see all the headlines in the news today about home foreclosures. People got in over their heads with adjusted-rate mortgages and now can’t afford the upward adjusted mortgage payments.
I once viewed Jesus’ sacrifice as a down payment on salvation. I believed that what Jesus did at the cross made it theoretically possible for me to be saved, at least in principle. Jesus had died to pay the penalty for sin, so my own eternal punishment wasn’t necessarily required – as long as I was able to pass the test and do the rest. I just had to keep up the “mortgage payments” on salvation, so to speak.
I was laboring under the delusion that I could in some way make myself acceptable to a holy, just and righteous God, but the truth was that nothing I did could ever be adequate. Fortunately, God used my experience in legalistic religion to bring me to the realization that there was no hope of salvation if it depended in any way on anything I did. Once I finally realized how bad the bad news was, I was ready to appreciate just how good the Good News is.
The Good News is that Jesus did not just make the down payment on my “adjusted-rate” salvation mortgage. He purchased my salvation in full without a mortgage and gave it all to me as an absolutely free gift.
Once the full force of this truth hit me I found that all my fear about sin punishment after death (a foreclosure on my imagined salvation mortgage) vanished. I now know that whatever happens, I am safe in union with Christ. That doesn’t mean that I won’t ever face hardship or even tribulation of one sort or another. But I have the absolute assurance that my position in union with the indwelling Christ is secure because of the cross of Christ.
The cross was much more than an exemplary object lesson in love. While the cross was most certainly a demonstration of God’s great love, the cross reconciled sinners to God, not by example, but by substitution.
Because Jesus is our substitute, we need not fear that our salvation is based upon our own ability to pass a test or withstand tribulation.
Now that I better understand my place in Christ, I’m no longer trying to make impossible “mortgage payments” on salvation. My fear of the uncertainty of after-death punishment is gone, chased away by the assurance of Christ’s cross. I have nothing to fear but fear itself as President Roosevelt stated during World War II. Why? Because I am safe in the love of Christ.
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