Time Out! Get Still, Get Quiet... Listen. (Part 1)

        Did you know that if you stand in front of a mirror in a crowded store and look at yourself, you'll see something completely different than if you stand in front of a mirror in the quiet and stillness of your home?  This is because when you're in the busy environment in public, you're going to be paying attention to who's around you, and you'll be seeing all the things for sale in the reflection behind you. You will be paying attention to how much time you linger in front of the mirror and about the way you probably appear to those around you.  Your mind will be focused on so many different things that you won't be able to focus on the fine details.  Standing in front of the mirror at home, you have none of those distractions.  You can stand there and linger as long as you want, with yourself as the focal point of your attention.  You can see yourself in a way that is completely honest and thorough (if you really want to, that is).  Basically, what I'm saying is: when you want to see something for what it really is, environment matters.

       Lately, because of a lot of things that have happened in my life, I have developed a bunch of questions and I wanted to find answers at ANY cost.  I needed to hear from God!  Over the last few weeks I have spent a LOT of time and energy trying to seek/hear from God, but to no avail.  I had sought healing, guidance, encouragement, and frankly, just reassurance that I hadn't been forgotten.  I had turned to the Bible, had conversations with friends, read books, listened to sermons, and they all only led me to more questions and uncertainty. I decided that it was time for me to find out from God Himself what to do and I knew that I needed to get away from everything and find some silence and solitude so that I could. Up to this point I had been having difficulty connecting with God and hearing from Him, so I knew that I needed to go someplace that I could be in a - for lack of a better word- sanctified environment. I knew that I needed to go someplace that got me away from everything that was burdening me so that I could see things as they really were and a place where God was at work because I needed to get as close to Him as I could. I soon found myself composing an email my old pastor/mentor and his wife and asked if I could come stay with them in Southeast Missouri for a few days.  When they agreed, I just knew that God was going to do something amazing on this trip and boy was I right!  I reached out to several of my friends and told them of my plans, requested prayers throughout the weekend, shut my phone off, left my laptop at home, and then began the journey southward to see what God had waiting for me in the town of Dexter, MO.

     My weekend was split between three things:  Spending time alone and in solitude, spending time with Steve and Cheryl (my gracious hosts), and helping out with the massive youth rally at their church called Disciple Now.  At first I was kinda hoping that I would be able to lock myself away for the duration of the weekend and just be utterly alone, but I remembered what God had said about serving others so I agreed to help with the youth as well.  I think God knew better than I did (as usual) what I needed because I got to meet some interesting people, I got to watch God work in the lives of dozens and dozens of students, and I was blessed with the outpouring of wisdom from a wonderful couple who have served in ministry for, well far longer than I have even been alive, and on top of that I STILL got to spend the quiet study and prayer time that I needed so desperately.  That being said, within the first hour of my arrival God began working on me and taught me the first lesson of the MANY that would follow over the course of the weekend.

    Now, I was originally going to attempt to write about everything I learned in a single entry on here, but then I realized that there would be NO WAY people would keep reading long enough to get through it all, nor could I come close to finishing in a reasonable amount of time.  Instead I am going to begin sharing everything in a series of stories and lessons that I learned over the course of several posts.  Please bear with me and keep an open mind.

LESSON 1: Spiritual Warfare is real, as are angels and demons. Don't ignore it.
     For anyone who doesn't know me well enough yet, I absolutely LOVE stories.  I love telling them... I love hearing them...stories are what motivate me to adventure, to risk, to live!  I love stories so much I even wrote about it previously (check out: Telling Your Story) and lately I've been sharing a lot of stories with people about their encounters with angels and demons.  The coolest, scariest, and most eye opening part of these stories is that they are all true!  For example, in 2005, a mission team I was on in Alabama had an encounter with a demon who was trying to scare us into inactivity and distract us from our mission down there.  More than a dozen people (myself included) were there to witness it and I got my first in depth lesson on this kind of spiritual warfare that is going on all around us.  The year before, a mission team from our church, Steve included, were in Puerto Rico working with a partner church to get some construction done on a new building.  Steve was asked to deliver the Sunday morning sermon for the church and he felt led to preach on the Fire of God.  After the message a demon possessing a girl manifested itself. It became so violent that several large guys had to restrain this tiny little girl while Steve and some of the elders of the church prayed over her for an extended period to drive the demon out of her.  Someone I know very well told me a story of how he felt a dark presence with him in his bedroom several nights in a row and one morning woke up to find scratch marks that looked like claw marks on his body in places he couldn't reach.  This weekend, I got to meet a gentleman this weekend who shared a story of how he was on a mission trip in Haiti during the uprising in the early 90's and was saved, from a group of terrorists, by an angel who showed up in the middle of a war-torn rebel-occupied city as a Haitian-looking man dressed in a white suit, riding a white motorcycle with the word "Jesus" written on the gas tank.  In perfect, unaccented English, he warned them that they were being led into a trap and then proceeded to lead them out of the city.  Several of my friends have told me similar stories about their own encounters but were always hesitant to share with anyone because they don't think anyone would believe them.  Those stories don't even include the many many stories and testimonies I have heard from people I didn't even know.
     Call me crazy but at times, even without actually seeing demons in certain places, I have just felt a sense of the presence of darkness and evil in a place.  I have felt spiritual oppression, as though the invisible demons were running wild and had control over certain people or places.  Likewise, there are times I've been places and with people in which I have felt so full of goodness and at such peace that they must have had angels surrounding them. I decided that since demons are real and their presence can affect my life so substantially, it would be a great idea to spend some of this weekend investigating them. This is what I learned:

• Demons are not actually angels of light and beauty, they are quite frightening indeed.
• They cannot possess a believer because One greater than they already occupies your body (believers are filled with the Holy Spirit, and what demon can overpower God?) but they CAN attack, oppress, and suppress a believer through fear, distraction, temptation, making your believe lies, or other such methods...Sometimes if they are strong enough, can even physically manifest themselves and cause bodily harm (see below).
• They hate us because we were made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), and since they hate Him they want to take it out on us.
• They can enter a home or a life through anything that is not submitted to God (i.e. dishonesty, greed, sexual sin, anger, bitterness, resentment, anxiety/worry, control... you get the idea).  Anything that is not submitted to God is an open door for a demon to use to get in.
• Occultic things supercharge demons and give them extra power/influence. 
• They make it harder to hear God and sense His presence.  (This is a reason I felt it necessary to go someplace I felt was completely sanctified and had no hint of a demonic presence)
• Praying in the name of Jesus is how you get a demon out of someone or someplace.  We have been given authority over the demons because we have identified with Christ.  They don't always respond right away because like a tree that has taken root, the longer a demon has been present the stronger the hold it has and harder it is to get it out.  This is why it took these pastors and elders so long to get rid of the demon from the little girl in Puerto Rico even though they were praying in the name and with the authority of Jesus.   

    What I decided I needed to do was to make sure that there was NOTHING in my life that I had refused to let God do with what He wanted.  That's what it means to be submitted to God.  It's like it says in the Lord's Prayer " your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven." and when you're praying it you could even *gasp* change it... and say  "Your will be done on earth and in my life, as it is in Heaven".  Frankly, its a really good idea to reach this point of submission to God anyway, and this was just the final boost I needed.  I think I made the devil kinda angry this weekend because I became wise to his schemes and stopped letting him mess with me, but I don't care.  

     Oh, one last word on the topic.  I found a verse to give you some hope when the devil tries to mess with you, tries to make you fall, tries to attack you, to tempt you, or to make you believe a lie:  James 4:7-8 (NIV) says "Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Come near to God and He will come near to you."  If you stand with God, you can then stand up to the devil and all his little minions and when you do, he's gonna see that you're not alone and he's gonna run like a scared little rabbit as fast and as far as he can.

To Be Continued with Lessons 2-4 at Time Out! Get Still, Get Quiet...Listen. (Part 2)

Double Life

So, it's been several months since my last post, and I do apologize. I have been on a journey of self-discovery and have learned quite a few interesting things. It's a funny thing, comming to terms with oneself. In my opinion, too few people take time enough to look within themselves and come to grips with who they really are. Among those who do, even fewer actually have enough courage to share any of that with anyone else.


It is my observation that every person lives two lives... the one they share with people and the one they live in private. Rarely does the life they live in private surpass the one they live in public in terms of respectability and reputability. It was Plato who first suggested a dualistic (double) nature to the universe. His philosophy was that there was a physical world and an immateral world and both were identical in some ways yet different in others. He theorized that the immateral world was perfect/ideal and the physical world was nothing but shadows of the ideal world. This is illustrated by his famous Allegory of the Cave. You can look it up on your own if you're curious about the full and complete details of that stuff on your own, but if you don't want to wade through all the deep thinking and analysis that is necessary to understand it, I'll cover the basics in a short paragraph, then explain why I am bringing up the works of a long dead Greek philosopher.


Plato living today would explain his theory as thus: Suppose you're looking at a chair. That chair is only an imperfect illusion. In reality, the perfect chair exists in the ideal world, the immaterial world, the perfect world, and all we're seeing is a physical copy of that perfect chair. But, because it's physical, it can never be as perfect or as real as the chair in the ideal world, and since we exist in the physical world, we can never fully comprehend nor see that ideal chair.
Having explained it not much clearer than Plato did, I will now explain why I brought that up. We all live a dualistic nature. We have an ideal life (the private one that no one sees) and a physical life (the one that everyone sees). The difference between Plato's philosophy and what I'm talking about is that because we're human and can choose to reveal ourselves as we see fit. However, not enough of us understand our double lives enough to bring the hidden one to the surface.


When we go to church on sundays, why is it that no matter how our week was, no matter what crap we tread through,when asked how we are doing, we always put on that smile and reply with the usual "I'm good thanks," and move on? Why is it that we let our friends in to deeper parts of our lives, and our families into others. No one, and I mean no one knows every deep dark secret that we have to hide. Why is that? Is it because we're ashamed of who we are?



One of the things I've been thinking about recently is Christian culture and other things that go along with it. Why is it that every human being has made a judgement of someone else. You think you're better than someone and I promise you that every person feels the same way. I know that in church, there are a TON of suit wearin', bible-thumpin', scripture quotin', blue hairs (old people) walking around and just as many church goin', worship music listenin', small group attendin', bible readin' young folks who are all the same: Self Righteous. I know this because when a young woman comes in off the street with her little baby and no daddy in sight... some people will pass judgement and ignore her while giving her "the eye", and others will think "She needs my help, I'm going to reach out to her and show her through my life that she too can be freed of her life of sin if only she accepts Christ."


Right away, the instinct is to say "that's a good thing", but lets take a look at the mind set of the person saying that. The "considerate" person really has several things going on inside of them and some of them might be as follows:
1) "Every one of us has sinned, but I have accepted Christ and now try to live a holy life, one that can be used as an example for how Christians should live."
2) "Wow, I'm sure glad my sins aren't as big as hers." or for some "Wow, I'm sure glad I don't sin like that anymore"
3) "She needs my (or at least someone's) help"

Each and every one of these things might, on the surface, seem innocuous or even good! However, this is too a dualistic reality. See, with these thoughts and ideas, the "considerate person" has elevated himself or herself above the young mother in righteous stature. There is, in fact, a term for this... Self-Righteousness. The supposedly considerate person has obviously spent a long time working to purify their lives and this holds himself or herself to be more holy than another. What this person has forgotten was that at one time or another, they too were a lowly sinner destined for Hell. Christ came into the picture and completely forgave them of their sins. Now, they live their lives completely without the need for Jesus. They're not sinners anymore by their own standard. They have all the answers and holy life. They've forgotten that they still sin on a daily basis. They've forgotten that we still need Christ, and that we are no better than the young mother.

The person who attempts to live a Holy life soon forgets that they need Christ and not long after, take the place of Christ in their own lives. They become obsessed with living Holy lives and soon become disconnected with the people still not knowing Christ. Enough years go by and they become the folks who ignore the young mother but give her the "eye". The self righteousness becomes a way of life and they become like the Pharasees of the New Testament and forget what Grace really is. The funny thing about this whole scenario is that most likely, the person has some deep sinful secrets... a hidden life, a private, secret sin that they refuse to admit to, deal with, or even ask Jesus for forgiveness for. I mean, they have already taken the place of Christ in their own lives, so they don't need Christ to forgive them! In their minds, their goodness outweighs their one little sin, and BAM! They've fallen into the same trap that people have been getting caught in for centuries... They're trying to earn Heaven by their own good works. To reference Led Zepplin, they're "Buying a stairway to Heaven". Shoot, if they keep their sins a secret for long enough, they might begin to believe that they don't even commit that sin.


I, for one, do not wish to become like the Pharasees. I would recommend that you come to grips with your own sins, stop denying that they exist, lest you too begin to believe that you're better than everybody else. Stop living a double life. Find someone to spill all your deepest secrets to. It will make certain that you never live a double life again. You'll finally be able to live the life like Christ would really want you to: completely dependent on Him!

A Disclaimer: This is not written to give license to sin, but instead to help you feel comfortable with who you are and not feel guilty while trying to pursue a deeper relationship with Christ. Ultimately the goal of everyone should be to become like Christ, but I know human nature and I know that people aren't that good.

-The Sailing Preacher

PS. If there are any questions, feel free to e-mail me.