Practical Thoughts on Raising the Dead

Charlie Kirk’s execution/assassination yesterday has many people unsettled for a range of reasons, but I don’t plan to go into any of that.  What the situation has done in one of my specific areas of focus is something that consistently happens almost any time some major news event that deals with death and dying occurs.  And that is a focus on what I refer to as “Celebrity resurrection.”  I define “Celebrity resurrection” as a focus on attempting to raise the dead specifically in the case of a high profile individual, regardless of whether that person is high-profile due to their profession, news coverage of an event, or any other cause that makes it become high-profile.  What tends to happen any time a high-profile individual passes away is that for some believers it reminds them that through Christ Jesus we can raise the dead, and they have a desire to extend that offer of life to that individual.  I both love that and am frustrated by that simultaneously.  This is a difficult subject to navigate well because there are multiple factors in play that all stand in tension with another, and all of them have their own measure of validity.  So in light of yesterday’s atrocity, keeping in mind that we, the Body of Christ, are meant to provide solutions to every problem, I want to discuss some practical thoughts on raising the dead and specifically look at the barriers that one will deal with when it comes to celebrity resurrection.

Any time we are raising the dead we will ideally look to get access to their body.  Is it possible to raise someone from the dead without that? Yes. Can God re-create a body from ashes such as in cremation or a house fire? Yes.  Can He teleport someone’s body that is washed away in a flood back to you so you can raise them?  Yes, He both can and has done so. But that doesn’t change the fact that the predominant means of raising the dead is quite simply to command life over someone’s body. I don’t say this to create some sort of mental or theological limitation, but to recognize that the vast majority of the time that is how it will occur, and as such, gaining access to the body to pray should be a goal of ours.

In most first-world countries, we like to hide our dead. There are legitimate sanitary and legal reasons for some of this, but it does create barriers and restrictions to gaining access to a body for resurrection prayer.  I had someone ask me yesterday if traveling in the spirit to pray over someone’s body is an option.  Yes, that is always an option. And for those who want to understand more about what that means or what that is, I teach on the subject at length in my book The Beginners Guide to Traveling in the Spirit, so I’m not going to cover that further here.  But while it is an option, as I said above, it’s not the primary option and gaining access to the body should still be a main goal/method that we use.

Where the issues of body-access comes into conflict with raising the dead as a whole, and especially with celebrity resurrection, is that we generally need family permission to gain access to the body.  Obtaining family permission can be difficult all on its own without even considering someone’s potential high profile status.  Most people, and even most Christians, still consider the concept of raising the dead to be extremely fringe even though it is a pivotal aspect of the Christian faith—to the point that if raising the dead doesn’t happen, Christianity has zero value as a belief system because if the dead are not raised then it would be a lie.  Fortunately, God does raise the dead, Christianity is not a lie, and raising the dead is gradually becoming more mainstream as people get a greater revelation of God’s desire for abundant life for us.

Obtaining family permission is generally as straightforward as asking the family for permission.  But straightforward does not mean easy. I don’t know that there is almost ever a time when asking someone for permission to pray over their deceased loved one is not daunting.  Our own fears and doubts start to rear their heads and we have to militantly govern over our thoughts in those moments. Broaching this subject with someone has very real risks from being the target of ridicule and anger up to and including a complete loss of relationship with both the person we ask and others around them.  Nevertheless, if we want to obtain access to someone’s body, we have to have that uncomfortable and risky conversation.  And we have to have it with the right people.

Outside of situations where someone dies right in front of us, we first have to have access to the family.  Then we have to have a favor with the family in order for them to say yes. Even once they say yes, there has to be follow-through on their part to actually give us the access that they told us we may have. The logistics of that follow-through may have a number of hoops to jump through as well as potential monetary costs associated with it.  For example, a funeral home may charge the family each time we want access to the body to have time to pray over it, and they may have limitations on certain hours when we are permitted to do that. And at least in the United States, there is nothing illegal about the funeral home doing that.  All of that can create more barriers to the resurrection effort, and at any step of this process we can lose the person’s interest or buy-in for any reason

Where this gets more tricky with celebrity resurrection is that due to the high profile nature of the circumstances, family is usually being bombarded by people.  Whether it is a famous actor or singer who has potentially hundreds of thousands if not millions of fans, or something that is big in the local news and it’s getting a lot of local attention, the family is dealing both with the death of their loved one, as well as having to handle media and social media pressure and attention.  Without immense favor from God in these circumstances or a pre-existing relationship, it is usually very difficult for someone to get access to the family to even bring up the request.

So does that mean that because it’s hard that we simply abandoned the attempt in those situations and only try for ones that feel less-difficult?  Not necessarily.  However, the guidance I would give on the subject is that we need to be conscious about staying within what the Bible calls our metron, also known as our “area of influence.”  I firmly believe the Body of Christ has this solution available to offer Charlie Kirk’s family on his behalf.  However, on a personal level, I do not know anyone in that family and I don’t think I know anyone with even two degrees of separation to that family.  So while the will of God is for him and every other person on the planet to be raised from the dead, unless something happens and God opens that door for me (which I am very open to), I will not be making personal attempts at that in this specific circumstance.  And again, this is where it’s a sensitive subject with nuance. Because neither the will of God or the situation have changed. His desire is for life. But there is a very real matter of divine order in how God chooses to do things in most circumstances, and unless/until God opens things up to bring that into my personal Metron, it simply isn’t, and is therefore someone else’s job. Again, that doesn’t mean that someone shouldn’t attempt to raise him from the dead.  It just means that unless things change, that person isn’t me and likely it isn’t anyone I know either.  Which means if you’re reading this, unless you have either a specific leading from the Holy Spirit, a relationship with the family or the ability to get it, and divine favor for access, then it isn’t you either.  And in a situation that is as tragic and evil as this one is, that’s not nice news to hear, which is part of what makes this a sensitive issue, but that’s not all.

There is a separate matter of motives and motivation.  I think this is never a bad question to ask, but I think it is all the more appropriate in the case of celebrity resurrections. We each have to ask this question in our own hearts, which is “of all of the people who have died in the last week or month, why am I focusing on this one?” There are a range of potential answers, and most of them aren’t necessarily bad answers. For me, in some situations, I have directly and personally known the deceased.  At times, it has been a friend of a friend or a friend’s family member.  In other circumstances people have reached out to me because they have read one of my books or articles on the subject, heard me talk on a podcast, or been informed about me some other way.  On occasion I will get a request from another minister who knows that I believe in raising the dead because I live comparatively local to the person who reached out to them for help.  It varies from circumstance to circumstance.  For me, the motivation is always that death is an enemy, grief and pain and death are evil, and God desires that person and their family to experience life. What is generally never a motivating factor for me is the level of famousness of the person involved.  But that is often a primary motivator for many people who want a celebrity resurrection.  And it is another part of what makes this a sensitive subject to discuss.

I don’t want to discourage people from praying to raise the dead because I firmly believe it is always God’s will to resurrect them, every single time. And yet there is also this issue of operating in our God-assigned sphere of influence, and those two can at times be in conflict with one another.  How I resolve what can sound cognitively dissonant in my own mind is to recognize that while God may want someone to do that thing, God isn’t always assigning that thing to me. Nor should I necessarily assign it to myself.

I have had plenty of times in my life where I have prayed to God and asked Him to do something in a situation and His reply has been “you do something”.  That might sound like a strange response to hear from God until we understand that we are collectively assigned as His change-agents in the earth. In other words, long ago, God delegated everything in the earth to us to fix, and he has never undelegated that to us. Which means it’s still our job, not His.  Whether it comes to raising Charlie Kirk from the dead or anyone else, that is our job as followers of Jesus Christ.  The individual details of which person does which things are largely at the direction of the Holy Spirit, but it is conclusively our collective job to do the things that remove death and decay from the cosmos and fix all creation to make it become on earth the same way it already is in heaven.

So while God has assigned dead-raising to us, God has not assigned every single one of those to me personally. This means that in every situation, whether it is raising the dead, healing the sick, speaking a word of encouragement to a neighbor, or anything else, we have to be aware of those things that are within our sphere of influence and therefore are our God-ordained responsibility, and those things that are outside our metron making them someone else’s.  I believe looking at heart motivation is important in this type of situation because if we don’t look at it, we can assign things to ourselves that are outside of our metron, which is unwise at best and is otherwise fairly nonfunctional.

Why do I care more about raising someone from the dead who is on the news than I do the grandmother down the street?  When the news and social media give something significant public attention, it signals to our subconscious minds that this thing is more important than all of the things that are not receiving that same public attention.  And that is where the trap is. Increased public attention has nothing to do with whether something is in or outside of my metron.  The two are unrelated, which is why I ask the question I did before about internal motivation.  Am I motivated to do this because my subconscious has been signaled by a bunch of outside influences? Or is this because this is what God is actually saying and doing right now with me personally?  I challenge myself with these kinds of questions, and suggest that anyone reading this do the same.  We must be people to discern what God is saying and doing with us on an ongoing basis.

So again, any time the matter of celebrity resurrection comes up, I encourage us to look at our heart motivation and identify whether this is in or outside of our personal metron.  If it is within our metron then we need to take practical steps to walk that out, which usually is going to look like contacting the family, receiving access to the body, and commanding life.  If you are not sure how to go about doing any of that, or want to up-level your beliefs on the subject, I encourage you to pick up a copy of my book Faith to Raise the Dead.  If you are currently in the middle of a resurrection attempt and don’t have time to read a longer book on the subject, pick up a copy of my book Practical Keys to Raise the Dead, which is short excerpts from the other book and is designed to cover just the immediate practical things you need to know in the moment. For additional resources, I recommend the books How to Raise the Dead and The Dead are Raised by Tyler Johnson, and the book Saints Who Raised the Dead by Father Albert J Hebert, a Catholic priest who chronicles over 400 resurrection stories throughout church history.

 

 

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None Of This Is Life Or Death

Do you ever have those moments where you say something and when you hear it come out of your mouth you realize it carries a lot more wisdom than you intended? I was in line at the grocery store the other day. The cashier was getting extremely flustered because she had messed something up on the register and the line was backing up. And backing up some more. And backing up some more. And she was visibly stressed out by it all. Eventually, it was my turn to check out, and without me saying anything she apologized for everything taking so long. I replied, wanting to be encouraging and not meaning to be dismissive, by saying “Yeah, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. None of this is life or death.”

And right when I said that, it really hit me. I think sometimes because of my job as a nurse I forget that most other people’s jobs really aren’t life or death issues. I think there are very few professions in the world where you can be driving home after work and truly wondering if you might’ve accidentally killed someone today. And I am fairly certain that every nurse, doctor, paramedic, EMT, and others in the medical field know exactly what I’m talking about. But most jobs aren’t like that. In reality, most things in life as a whole aren’t like that.

And that’s not to say that other large life decisions don’t matter, because they do. But if I look at the number of times I get stressed by something in a day, it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that in the grand scheme of things it’s really just not a big deal. Has traffic backed up and it’s taking longer than I thought to get somewhere so I will be late? Possibly. But is it life altering? Generally not. We all have stressors in life. And some of them are bigger than others. Having bigger stressors doesn’t automatically make the smaller ones disappear, but I think sometimes a shift in perspective can help, and in some cases help a lot. As that saying not-always-accurately goes, “Don’t sweat the small stuff. And it’s all small stuff.” I don’t think it is all small stuff, but knowing when to not sweat the small stuff can be a valuable skill to develop.

But the more I thought I about this idea, I then thought about how sometimes things we don’t think about much actually can have far more significance than we realize. How many times do we make a light of something when in reality it is participating long-term to producing life or death for us? If I am stressing over something insignificant, is that now producing death in my body when otherwise it never needed to? What about complaining about unimportant or minimally frustrating things? Or even just complaining as a whole? I won’t pretend that I have mastered that one by any stretch of the imagination, but are there areas in life where we consistently align ourselves with death without realizing it because we have become so accustomed to doing it?

The Bible tells us quite plainly in Proverbs 18:21 that, “the power of life and death are in the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit.” It mentions in Matthew 12:36 that we will be judged for every idle, careless, or useless word we have spoken. Now I’m not saying we need to be hyper legalistic or critical of every word that we or others say, as that is just creating its own special path toward religion and bondage. But I do think it becomes an opportunity to encourage us to check back in with the words that we say and the ideas that we communicate on a regular basis.

There is a rather obscure verse in the Old Testament, Isaiah 28:15, that talks about how the Israelites made agreements with death and covenants with the realm of the dead, and it really begs the question, how often do we through our word choices make agreements with death as well? I lay this concept out in significantly more depth in my book The Gospel of Life and Immortality. In that book I also go over some very common everyday examples of where we use our words to produce death. But I think this can actually be a very important subject for us to understand better. Often we produce death in our lives without even realizing it, and it is largely because we have gotten so used to it as a culture that few of us even think about the long-term effects of some of the simple statements and beliefs we hold. If this subject speaks to your heart at all, I highly encourage you to get a copy of that book. It is available in print, Kindle, and recently just became available on audiobook. Because so often the things that we think, say, and do in life really aren’t life or death issues. . . Until we look a little deeper and realize that maybe in fact they are.

 

Appropriation versus Enforcement of Dominion

There is a disconnect or divide among some groups of believers when it comes to walking in the fullness of all that Christ accomplished for us on the cross. There are those who fall more into a “finished works” mindset, who believe that Jesus accomplished everything on the cross and we just have to believe it to receive it.  This group tend to take exception to the other group, who usually say things like “Jesus did it all on the cross but now it is our job to appropriate what he did.”  I understand why the divide exists because they are both partially correct so I want to offer a third option that I think more fully pulls together the various accurate ideas of each camp under one conceptual head.

The first group rightly believes that when we understand and believe the truth that it brings us into freedom, and it facilitates us operating in the fullness of everything Jesus accomplished.  On the other hand, the second group has understood something vital that also needs to be recognized and addressed.  The second group realizes that while what Jesus did legally on the cross was complete, the world does not yet fully look like everything He accomplished on the cross.  And this is where the idea of appropriation as a Christian term comes from— the notion that to the extent that things are not already on earth as they are in heaven, that it is the job of the believer to make it that way.

I think that these two groups are actually in greater agreement than they think, but both operate in certain areas of error and both are focused on different aspects of the situation.  As such, I don’t think that we will make much headway moving forward in unity on this matter without a change in terminology.  I propose we move from speaking of Appropriation to talking about Enforcement of Dominion.

Before going further, we need to understand some of the basic errors of each of the two groups, and then define some terminology.  What I refer to as “Finished Works” theology and the resulting camp of followers essentially believe that because Jesus accomplished everything on the cross there is now no longer anything else for us to do and we just sit back and believe God and then watch Him do the rest.  And when people struggle to live in fullness, the common rationale is that they need to “believe more/harder in the Finished work of the cross” and that will solve everything.  Ultimately the finished work group has turned belief into a form of work.  Now they don’t phrase it that way, but at the end of the day, that’s the underlying message, and belief/faith just becomes the new form of works.

The appropriation group tends to not focus enough on changing our beliefs and letting our heavenly identity guide what we believe and how we live.  That group tends to be more effort-focused in a different way.  This group tends toward encouraging spiritual warfare and intercession to tear down strongholds and principalities, prayer walking one’s neighborhood or town, breaking curses, and doing inner healing and deliverance ministry.  And while each of those activities can be effective tools to release the Kingdom on earth, they actually work best when they are combined with something closer to a Finished Works mindset.  And I say “closer to” because it only works better if they don’t trade out the flaws of the Appropriation mindset for the flaws of the Finished Works mindset.

Before going further, we also need to firmly keep in mind that while ministry is not something that needs to be done in heaven, it absolutely needs to be done on earth, and will continue to need to be done until we are all walking in fullness. Jesus is the one who appointed apostles, prophets, evangelist, and pastors, and teachers to bring the whole Body into unity and maturity (Ephesians 4) because He recognized a few thousand years ago that we aren’t there yet even now and would need overseers that He has appointed over His Body to help shepherd us on the way.  And I say all this because no one in their right mind who has also logically thought through what the scriptures say could arrive at the idea that everything is already the way it needs to be and all we have to do is believe. The Holy Spirit doesn’t even think that.

It is the Holy Spirit who has divinely given us empowerment such as “gifts of healing,” and not because Jesus did something incomplete, because the Holy Spirit only ever works in agreement with Jesus Christ. In fact, without the Holy Spirit, Jesus couldn’t be “Christ” because the word Christ means “the anointed one and his anointing” and it is a direct reference to the work of the Holy Spirit in Jesus’s earthly life.  This is important because we must understand there is ministry work to be done. We should not be telling people to stop doing or receiving ministry and just to believe that Jesus did it all because Jesus is the one who set up ministry to begin with. However, we do need to shift some of how we do ministry and the focus or approach we take with it.  I think this will make a little more sense once I define a few words.

The word appropriate has two meanings; one means that which is fitting or right, as in one is having appropriate behavior in a situation, while the other has to do with taking something for one’s own use, and the implication is usually that it is done without the owner’s permission.  In Christian terms, we use the word appropriate to say that we are taking what Jesus did and we are applying it to our life or the current situation.  And while that is accurate to a certain degree, the word itself suggests that we’re doing something without permission, which is untrue.  And I think there is a level of mindset that it creates that comes into agreement with this idea that Jesus didn’t accomplish certain things so we have to take it and do the rest of the work.  And while some of this is nuance more than anything else, I think we are at a place where that nuance has become important, and it has actually become a barrier to people receiving fullness.

This brings us to the word Enforce, or Enforcement.  According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, to enforce something means to compel observance or compliance with a law, rule, or obligation.  The word Dominion means sovereignty or control, and is generally used in context of a governing individual or governing body having rulership.  We need to understand that while God is sovereign, which means He is the highest authority or highest governing body in the cosmos, not everything goes God’s way.  God is sovereign, but He is not in full control of everything.  As such, it falls to us, the Body of Christ, to enforce his dominion in the Earth.  To the degree that rebellious principalities and powers seek to establish their own dominion, it is our job to enforce the dominion of Jesus Christ in the Earth.  To the extent that sickness and disease and decay and death want to continue to reign, it is our job to enforce the dominion of Jesus Christ, who reigns in life.  We are not appropriating something as if we are taking something that didn’t belong to us to begin with.  We are enforcing that which Jesus already accomplished on the cross.  To the degree that someone’s body does not yet fully look like wholeness and life, we enforce His dominion.  To the degree that decay still functions in the cosmos, we enforce His dominion.  To the extent that fallen principalities and powers seek to enslave, afflict, and torment humanity and creation, we enforce His dominion.

We aren’t working for something that we have to earn.  We aren’t battling from an earthly perspective to try to bring something from the heavens down.  We sit enthroned at the right hand of the Father with Jesus Christ, having fully established all power and dominion on the cross from a legal standpoint in all of the cosmos in all of time and eternity, and we legislate and enforce that dominion in the Earth.

This means that when we cast out demons (and as believers we do cast out demons), we aren’t asking them to leave. We expel them because we are enforcing the domain of heaven. We aren’t asking sickness to please get fixed, and we definitely aren’t asking God to heal someone when He already told us to go do it. We are enforcing His dominion in the Earth and command it to be so.  When a Son or Daughter of the Most High who knows their position and authority shows up, Creation’s only option is to bow its head and obey.

It might sound like nuance to some, but I think it’s vitally important we shift our terminology from Appropriation to Enforcement of Dominion.  Appropriation sounds a lot more gentle. It sounds like we are tenderly acquiring something that we think we should have.  Enforcement is really what we are doing. There are spiritual offenders out there who have transgressed against the Law of Jesus Christ, the Law of Love, and who have set themselves up against His reign of Life in the earth.  The Bible says in Matthew 11:12 that the kingdom of heaven is advancing by force and forceful men lay ahold of it.  When death, loss, and destruction show up on our doorstep, we are never to treat it passively or tenderly or gently.  Spirits who have corrupted and perverted creation and who have chosen to make mankind enemies don’t get asked to please follow the rules. We don’t suggest that maybe they should do what Jesus said. We enforce his rule in creation.

The Bible says that He has already given us everything pertaining to life and godliness. And that’s where the Finished Works crew gets it right. We aren’t asking Jesus to do something as though He didn’t already do it.  But sometimes it’s not just about believing the right thing.  It’s about actively taking dominion over rebellious spirits and enforcing what Jesus Christ already did and never taking “no” for an answer.

 

 

What is Pre-Incarnation and Why Does it Matter?

I was on a Zoom call the other day and we got onto the topic of pre-incarnation— the idea that we existed in the heavens in eternity before our spirits incarnated into our bodies and formed a living soul.  What brought it up was somebody mentioning the idea that we choose the type of pain we will experience in our life—and how for some, this can be a difficult concept to reconcile with their belief in God.  Because why would God pre-choose suffering for me? That idea doesn’t seem to match with a good and loving Heavenly Father.  In this article, I will try to help reconcile some of the perspective about a pre-incarnation existence in heaven and choosing our incarnation, with the fact of God’s nature being good and loving and kind, etc.

As with most things, I think we need to begin by understanding Jesus is our model.  When I look at Jesus as our model, I see that Hebrews 12:1 says this of him: “for the joy set before him endured the suffering of the cross. Therefore let us run our race.”  It wasn’t that God desired suffering for us so He sent us to incarnate into the earth.  Rather, it’s that in order to incarnate into a fallen world that needs restoration, it was a fact that we would experience pain, suffering, and problems.  I believe that our Heavenly Father is a good God, and so I believe that He actually gave us a choice with *disclosure* of what we would face.  Our Father wasn’t simply condemning us to some sort of painful 3-D reality, bur rather He invited us into a partnership with Him to restore the cosmos. One that He knew would cost us each individually, but ultimately was going to cost us far less than it cost Jesus.

If I back up a bit and explain this concept of pre-incarnation which I have sometimes referred to as preexistence, there are a few different Bible verses that point to this being a possibility.  I say “possibility” because the Bible doesn’t explicitly state the level of depth of pre-incarnation experience that I’m talking about, but it does hint at the fact that there was some sort of “ before” that we each experienced in some sort of conscious manner.  To explain from the scriptures, I am pulling a quote from my book The Gamer’s Guide to the Kingdom of God.  This comes from the first chapter of the book.

 

“Numerous verses in the Bible point to this reality of predestination or pre-choice.  Jeremiah 1:4-5 says, “Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.’”  This says God had already chosen Jeremiah to be a prophet long before Jeremiah was born, but that’s not all it says.  This passage suggests Jeremiah and God had a discussion about it.  To know someone is an active and ongoing process, not simply a momentary absorption of knowledge.  According to Strong’s Concordance the word know in this passage is the Hebrew word ‘yada’, which is not just a factual head-knowledge, but a perception, discernment, and understanding of a person or thing by experience and acquaintance.  Simply put, God said he knew Jeremiah because he didn’t just know about him, but that God and he knew each other relationally before Jeremiah came to earth as a baby.  Thus, Jeremiah had pre-existed in Heaven.  Furthermore, the word ‘appointed’ in the above passage is the Hebrew word ‘nathan’ which means to appoint, consecrate, bestow upon or put onto.  The very nature of that definition suggests that God didn’t just have an idea in his head but actually held a ceremony of some kind in heaven to consecrate Jeremiah and bestowed that office upon him.

Psalm 139:16 says, “Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”  Simply put, David recognizes here that God actually wrote a book about David before David was even born.  Both this passage and the passage from Jeremiah point to the reality of our pre-existence.  Here, David recognizes and has some memory or revelation of the fact that his destiny—the choices he pre-determined to make before coming to earth—were decided and recorded in heaven before he became a living being.”

 

Jeremiah mentioned God knowing him experientially before he was formed in his mother‘s womb . And I clarify above that it was experiential because the Hebrew word yada means to know something by experience.  It wasn’t simply that Jeremiah was a concept in God‘s mind before he incarnated, but that there was an experiential relational knowledge that God had of interacting with him in some way before he incarnated. Whether there are any other verses that discussed this or not, there are at least two places where the Bible communicates that there is something that happens *before* we incarnate more than simply not-existing or being a thought in God’s mind.

Something else to consider is that in the New Testament in 1 Peter 1:20-21 it says that Christ was foreknown apart from the foundations of the world, ie. outside of space time, but that he was manifest (incarnated) for us at that time.  It is the same Greek word (conjugated differently) as the one in Romans 8:29 that says for those of us He foreknew He predestined to be conformed into Christ’s image. I think no one would argue that Jesus was only a thought in the Father’s mind. And it is the same word used to describe us in “the before.”

A bit more anecdotally, I have a few friends who actually have preexistence memories.  I even once wrote a post on social media asking others to share any pre-incarnation memories or experiences, and in less than 24 hours I had ten different people who either had either had their own experience of pre-incarnation or knew of someone else who had one.  I personally find this to be an interesting phenomenon because most people when they incarnate either at the time of incarnation or sometime in very early childhood seem to forget whatever came *before*. Chinese mythology actually has a belief that explains this to a certain degree.  In Chinese lore, Granny Meng waits at a bridge by the six springs of reincarnation.  Before someone reincarnates they have to drink from her bowl of water or soup or whatever it is, and when they do they forget all memories of their past life. Now, I don’t believe reincarnation is God‘s plan for us, nor is it something I teach.  I do, however, find it quite fascinating that there is an existing cultural mythology to explain this phenomenon of forgetting an existence prior to our current life, as much mythology has at least a grain of truth to it.  This overall idea would explain why there is such a disconnect between who we have always been in eternity and what happens when we incarnate into a body and form a soul.

Now, before going further, I want to be clear about something—this is honestly optional cosmology. You can be a Christian and you absolutely don’t have to believe this. There are some things in Christianity and in life is a whole that we really have the freedom to pick and choose what we do or don’t believe because the ramifications of believing or disbelieving that thing are fairly small. I personally want to know more Truth, if for no other reason than because I believe everything in creation fits together the way it was designed, and I would rather understand the way God made it, free of veil and mystery and confusion. And for a variety of reasons, including the ones I have shared above, this feels right to my spirit, so until God clarifies something further, this is what I believe about this subject.

I want people to know that this is optional not because reading this article automatically forces you to believe what I am saying, but because I think sometimes we get into situations where we feel like we have to make a decision for our theology to move forward.  And I don’t want anyone feeling stuck over this.  Yes, more and more people are coming into revelation about this, and I personally believe that is simply because it is true.  But I also don’t think there’s any real harm that is done if for some reason someone chooses not to believe it.  On the converse, even if it isn’t accurate, provided we take the right perspective on it I also think it has little to no ability to cause harm.

And this may sound like a strange disclaimer to make, but I want to briefly explain something about beliefs, discernment, and harm before we dive back into preincarnation.  We all have things we believe that aren’t true.  The problem is that we *don’t know* they’re not true or we wouldn’t believe them.  Healthy people, anyway, want to believe truth and are willing to adjust their thinking once they learn new information.  So whenever I come across new beliefs that force me to look at making significant shifts in some area of my belief system, especially when it just feels “right/true” in my spirit, I do a bit of a risk analysis.  If I am completely wrong, what is the potential harm of accepting this belief as true over and above what I have been believing before?  If the risks are low and/or approaching zero and the benefits are good or at least no worse than the previous belief, you’re likely just fine to switch to the new belief system, especially if it feels like God is already confirming it in your spirit.

Back to the subject of pre-incarnation, I want to lay out why this matters that we understand this.  If it causes us to believe that God is afflicting us with something harmful then I could see how that would be a very toxic belief.  It would cause us to believe that God is not in fact, good, that He’s not actually very loving, and that He doesn’t actually care about us much at all, because no good Father would intentionally subject someone to the level of abuse and pain that He would knowingly be subjecting us to unless there was a deeper reason behind it.  But I believe there *is* a deeper reason for it, and a good one.  I believe that God spoke to each of us individually in advance and gave us each a choice because we each had a mission to play—a role in the redemption of all creation.  We have to remember that the Bible says Jesus is the firstborn of many brothers, but *we* are the brothers. Meaning, our eldest brother paved the way for the rest of us to come, and the rest of us are here to finish the job in restoring all creation back to full union with the Father. Honestly, it’s a noble mission, and one that I’m rarely sorry for agreeing to.  Is it hard sometimes? Absolutely.  But I believe that’s a significant part of why God gave us a choice in advance—because He knew that things would get tough and be painful and hard at times. But He also knew that there would be joy set before us that would help us to endure every trial and tribulation and problem that we would face.  And then, as I mentioned in a previous article, Jesus already conquered every enemy that we would face, so restoring creation is not an impossible task.  It’s an extremely doable one.

About two years I was in a time of prayer and encounter with the Lord and He showed me the globe of the Earth. And as He did, so, I began to see represented before me in the vision all of the problems and opportunities that humanity was facing at the time He was showing me.  What made it interesting is that while I was very clear that God was showing me both problems and opportunities, there were zero problems and only opportunities. And that seems strange at first until we understand that with the right perspective, *everything* is an opportunity. My friend Barry Maracle has a saying that I absolutely love, but which I am also going to butcher a bit.  The general gist of it is that opposition is not meant to delay or deny you, but to propel you into your destiny.  Every obstacle that we face is an opportunity to conform into the image of Christ Jesus. It’s an opportunity to trust the Father one more time.  But a little bit more this time than the last time. It’s an opportunity for God to reveal a new aspect of His nature as provider, protector, or some other aspect of His being that He wants to reveal to us.  Problems aren’t enjoyable, but with the right perspective, they are opportunities.  I believe likewise that this belief in pre-incarnation is an opportunity.  It’s an invitation, taking one or two deeper steps into fulfilling the plans and purposes of God in this generation.  And I believe understanding pre-incarnation helps clarify some of our purpose and position here on the Earth.

I want to share with you three more examples that point to the reality of pre-incarnation to leave you with more data-points to consider about all of this.  The first example is that of a friend of my ex-wife’s who we will call “Katy.”  She once had a dream where she was talking to an infant girl planning on coming to earth.  Katy told her it wasn’t the right time to do so, and shortly after this dream she had an early first-trimester miscarriage—early enough that she hadn’t even known she was pregnant until the miscarriage occurred.  Katy was not even aware she was pregnant, but her spirit knew and told the baby it was not time to incarnate yet.  Keep in mind that this is only possible if there is a not-yet-incarnated person in the spirit realms who she can talk to in order to tell her not to incarnate into a body.

A second example is that of Kat Kerr, a prophetess who travels and speaks to various churches about her revelation on heaven and who has taken multiple trips to heaven herself.  She speaks in a number of her messages, including at meetings I have personally attended, that we are all spirits that exist in heaven with God beforehand and how we choose to come down to earth, knowing our parents and families and the trials and difficulties we will face, which closely matches what I have been saying.

Third is the well-known minister Jesse DuPlantis who was taken into a heavenly visitation which he recounts in the video and audio recording titled Close Encounters of the God Kind.  In that message, he shares that he saw in heaven a great many spirits going up to the throne where God was seated and these spirits clamored excitedly, asking God to send them to be human spirits here on earth.  As Jesse watched, he saw God take a deep breath and as he exhaled those spirits were sent from heaven into bodies here on earth, much like in Genesis 2:7 where it says that God breathed spirit into Adam and he became a living soul.

Because eternity operates outside of the realm of time, it is not bound by our human understanding of time.  God and each human spirit have decided together when in history we will be born and to what set of parents.  Before conception, we are shown in heaven what our life will be like on earth, including the problems we will face physically, emotionally, and even spiritually.  As hard as this is for some to believe, we chose to be here in this time and place.  We did not create the physical circumstances, but we did pre-know and willingly choose to enter the body that would accompany those traits.  The good news about all of this is that if we agreed with the Father to come here, then it means we were sent on a mission and *also* were properly equipped for the task.  God doesn’t sabotage people.  If He asked us to incarnate here in this time and place, then He already had a plan to meet us at every turn.  He already foreknew the challenge we would face, and in many ways we were picked because we were *more* capable of dealing with those things than anyone else!  Think about it.  No matter what difficulty I face in life, it’s probably a good thing I’m the one dealing with it because anyone else would be less-prepared than I am to deal with that task.  Its my life and God asked me for a *reason*.

 

I hope this is enlightening and encouraging for you, but if nothing else, keep in mind that God the Father and Jesus have been clearly expressed to be one and the same in nature and purpose.  So regardless of what you choose to walk away with as a belief, know that the Father’s nature was revealed in Jesus, so whatever we believe, we have to remember that Jesus is perfect theology, and let our understanding of the Father reflect that.  Be well and be blessed!

Are Curses Real, And Can Christians Be Harmed By Them?

This is one of a few different subjects I see tossed around on social media from time to time, and especially among those who are deconstructing/remodeling their beliefs to better match New Creation realities in the Kingdom. As people go on this journey of rediscovery of what it looks like to be a Christian, there are quite sensibly a lot of questions about most of the things we have been taught in the past.  As such, it is no surprise that the subject of curses would come up. And I don’t think the problem is that people are asking questions.  The freedom to question is imperative.  The problem is that some of the conclusions people reach are problematic.  I want to break the subject down a little from a perspective of the fact that we are already new creations in Christ, from a position of what Jesus already finished on the cross, and also keeping in mind that we have been given a job to transform and transfigure creation.

The first question is pretty easy to answer.  “Are curses real?”  Yes. Proverbs 26:2 says “Like a fluttering sparrow or a darting swallow, an undeserved curse does not come to rest.”  There are some shades of detail to this that I won’t go into here, but Proverbs is quite clear that curses fly forth and have the potential to land.  The Bible also quite clearly states of Jesus Christ in Galatians 3:13 that He became a curse to redeem us from them. Jesus isn’t an idiot, and He didn’t spend his time and energy to take curses upon Himself to set us free from something that doesn’t exist.  So it doesn’t matter whether we are talking about a generational curse, a curse thrown at you from witchcraft, or any other sort of curse, they do exist, and part of Jesus’s work on the cross was to set us free from them.

And this brings us to the next question, which is “Can Christians be harmed by them?” The short and extremely incomplete answer is also “yes.”  Christians can be harmed by curses.  But there is a lot more to the subject than a simple yes/no answer that we really should understand about it.

First, we need to understand free will. Every single human alive has been created in the image of God. We have been given free will, and God does not violate our free will even if we are doing something ill-advised or even flat-out evil. Which means if person A chooses to curse person B, then a curse is released from person A to fly to person B because they chose to by enacting their free will. Now whether that curse will actually land or not is a separate issue, and there are multiple factors that can influence that, including: the belief of person B, prayer for protection over their life, angelic involvement, demonic opposition, contracts and agreements in the spirit (which is often referred to as “open doors”), or anything else that creates access for the demonic to attack or afflict someone.  This can even include agreements in an individual’s bloodline that they are not consciously aware of because they were not personally the one who made those agreements. This is a result of the principle of Federal Headship, which is found throughout the Bible, and is both one of the major reasons why generational curses exist, as well as the primary reason they are broken in Christ.

The reason I mention all of this is that when it comes to walking on the path of truth, it can be easy to fall into a ditch on either side. On the one side, we have people believing some version of the idea that curses don’t exist, have never existed, or cannot influence believers because Jesus already took care of it on the cross. On the other side, we have hyperfocus into trying to cleanse one’s generational line all the way back to Adam step-by-step through every generation in order to root it all out.

The latter is both a ton of work, and also wouldn’t fix all of it anyway because if you deal with bloodline issues and don’t deal with all the other stuff in the spirit, things in pre-incarnation, etc. then you did a lot of work and yet probably still didn’t catch it all.  With the former, you simply ignore the problem to begin with and act like it’s going to automagically go away if you ignore it—which it largely will not.  Now, part of where people get caught with this is that both sets of erroneous beliefs have certain things going for them that will yield a measure of fruit.  And that measure of fruit becomes the corroboration someone is looking for to tell themselves that their belief is accurate.  The problem is that there are aspects of each belief that are accurate or that produce results, but it is by no means the full picture.

So how does believing that curses don’t exist produce results?  Faith. In Ephesians 6:16 it tells us that faith is protective. It is a shield, specifically to extinguish the darts of the evil one thrown at us, which could include curses.  So if I don’t believe that curses exist, then some of the curses that are sent my way will automatically get extinguished and will not land because my faith that says they don’t exist revokes their right to influence my life.   The problem is that for whatever reasons, this doesn’t always work.  And truth be told, I can’t honestly tell you why it works for some curses and not others, but that’s just how it is. It might have something to do with the fact that people who believe curses don’t exist quite often also believe that demons don’t exist, which is categorically inaccurate, and opens them up to another set of problems.

If I believe a sentient entity who is attacking me of its own free will doesn’t exist, it doesn’t suddenly make the attack go away.  As philosopher Descartes once said, “I think therefore I am.” The converse of that is not true though. If I don’t think something, it does not automagically blip that something out of existence.  So maybe some curses that are thrown by people without much demonic involvement don’t take purchase in that individual‘s life because faith is protective, and when other ones do land its because there is more significant demonic influence behind them that overpowers the shield?  I don’t fully understand the mechanism behind why some curses land and others don’t in those scenarios.  I just know that because faith is protective, people who believe curses don’t exist will see a measure of results from that belief, and those results will serve to them as confirmation their belief is accurate (it isn’t).  What they will not see is freedom from any of the other curses that are affecting them that are not influenced by that belief.

On the other side of things, we have people who are trying to manually deal with every curse step-by-step throughout their generational line and anywhere else they find them.  To a certain extent, this will also yield fruit because they are actively breaking curses that do exist. The problem with this belief is the exact opposite of those who let curses run amok in their lives because they think they’re not real.  In this case, this generational cleansing is a treadmill that is almost impossible to know when to climb off of.  It can also generate a certain measure of legalistic thinking that gets us more focused on following or breaking cosmic laws and as a result it prevents us from fully walking in what Jesus already accomplished.

So where should we land in all of this??

Obviously, I’m going to recommend that we land somewhere in the middle. We need to recognize that curses are real.  We need to not be naïve, and understand that humans who actively partner with the enemy through witchcraft, voodoo, sorcery, necromancy, and the like can and do send curses on people, and Christians are not exempted as targets.  If anything, Christians are primary targets because they are Christians.  We need to understand our identity in Christ and the authority that comes with it and break any and all curses—on us, our bloodlines, other people, and anywhere else we encounter them.  And we need to also not get so bogged down with all of it that we spend a decade going through our ancestry with a fine toothed comb to pray through anything and everything that maybe could somehow possibly potentially be set against us.  And how do we do that?  It’s actually such a simple answer that it sounds too obvious to be the truth—we just need to ask the Holy Spirit.  It is His job to lead and guide us into all truth and to counsel and guide us, so it is His job to help us walk the middle path in all of this.

We access things in the Kingdom through belief.  But it is possible for someone to not even know about curses and yet still be affected by them.  And then, if we pray to break those curses, and the curses get broken at that time, the oppression leaves.  We could argue that it’s a problem of belief system, but if somebody’s belief system doesn’t include it to begin with and yet they are still being afflicted by it, then there is obviously more to it than simply belief, and there is something we have to do in the moment to enforce what Jesus did on the cross.  And when we do enforce it, what Jesus did shines through.  This isn’t because we are trying to “do more” than what Jesus finished, or even necessarily because we “don’t believe”.  It’s a matter of enforcement.  If things do not yet fully look like “on earth as it is in heaven” and if as Romans 8 speaks of, we the sons and daughters of God have not fully removed the decay from the cosmos yet, it isn’t a lack on Jesus’s part of failing to do something on the cross.  It is simply that some things require enforcement, and we are God’s enforcement team in the earth.

I’m going to use an adjacent example to drive this point home, and possibly make it a little clearer to the reader using something more tangible than curses  The Bible is quite clear that Jesus took care of all sickness, infirmity, and disease of every kind on the cross.  And yet in the New Testament there still exists a divine empowerment from the Holy Spirit called “gifts of healing”.  On a very real level, if what Jesus did on the cross was sufficient to manifest all healing for everyone without us ever doing anything to enforce it, then a gift of healing would be entirely unnecessary.  And theologically, I actually agree that it should be unnecessary.  But all of the injured people who check in at my hospital still need help in the moment, so what I think should be theologically accurate doesn’t really matter at that point.

The error of the “Finished Works” teaching of the 2010s is that it explains that the solution to healing (and every other problem) is simply for people to believe harder and believe more, and if they just more fully and completely believe the truth, then it will manifest for them. Which means any problem they have in their life is directly due to a failure on their part to believe what Jesus did, and it makes “belief” the new works.  What it does not take into account is how fragmentation works and how one’s core believing something is not always the barrier or the solution (I write on this extensively on this blog and in my book Broken To Whole).  It also does not account for the overlap in free will from one person to another and how that overlap affects us.  If person A chooses of their free will to injure person B, then person B is most likely going to get an injury.  Now because of what Jesus did on the cross, we can command healing and watch it get healed right in front of our eyes. But the injury will probably still occur because somebody enacted their free will upon the situation. Curses are the same.  If someone enacts their free will to curse someone, that person will receive a curse (with the exception of mitigating factors as mentioned before).  However, it can quickly and easily be broken because of what Jesus did on the cross.

We don’t need to spend time with endless focus on curse-breaking because we can believe what Jesus did is sufficient and walk in freedom by faith.  And we can also take authority over curses in our lives as they get revealed to us and enforce the work of Jesus on the cross.  Likewise we can live in divine health as a general lifestyle, and yet if an injury comes or an accident happens, we can command it to be healed and walk in wholeness and life once more.

There is much more I could go into detail about regarding fragmentation of the soul and how it influences free will, but this article would end up becoming so long it would be what I plan to someday write on the subject—another book teaching on all of this so we can walk in the freedom Jesus already worked out for us on the cross.  Regardless of where you find yourself on this journey we call Christian Life, I encourage you to seek the Holy Spirit to help you walk the middle road where you can live from a place of rest, not needing to re-accomplish what Christ already did, and also not being so rigid in your thinking that when it comes time to enforce what He did, you are ready for the task.  Be well and be blessed!

 

 

There Is No Such Thing As Christian Reiki

I want to take some time today to expose and expound on something that I see pop up from time to time in Christian circles—people who practice what they are calling “Christian Reiki”.  It seems to happen most often when people either don’t understand about the gifts of the spirit and our authority in Christ or when they are legitimately hungry for more and start looking elsewhere for answers. And before going further, I believe the heart motivation of these individuals are in the right place.  They desire good things for people and they want to see them healed and restored and have everything that God plans for their life. The problem is the methodology.  There is no such thing as Christian Reiki because Christianity and Reiki are inherently in opposition to one another.

Let me clearly and unequivocally state that Reiki is demonic. I cannot tell you how many times I have made that statement to Reiki-practicing Christians and their first response is to tell me that I just don’t understand. Believe it or not, it is actually possible to call something demonic because I understand it, not because I don’t.  Sometimes when we call things demonic or evil it’s quite simply because the thing is demonic and evil, not because of ignorance and misunderstanding on our part.  And Reiki fits the bill.  So what do I mean when I say “demonic”?  What I mean is that the function of the practice of Reiki comes from demonic activity. There is no way to practice Reiki without this demonic involvement because if it didn’t include the demonic activity then it wouldn’t, by definition, be Reiki.

Let me explain. In my book The Gospel of Life and Immortality I have a chapter where I explain the difference between primary and secondary energy, what you could potentially consider to be creative light and created light. Creative light is that which comes directly from God and, as you can guess, is the power of creation. Created light is the energy that exists in all things and has already been created. Hebrews 1:3 references this when it explains that Jesus is the representation of God‘s glory who sustained all things by the emanation of his power/word/energy.  Created light is the sustenance of Jesus Christ into all creation that allows us to continue to exist. Energy work, or energy healing, is the practice of harnessing that secondary energy and applying it to people and things to heal or restore them. It’s honestly really easy to do, and you don’t need any special abilities to be able to do it. Simply being a human means you possess the bodily technology to be able to do that.

On the other hand, Reiki is a specific school/process/practice of energy medicine that teaches people how to do this. It uses a series of sounds, hand symbols, and hand positions on parts of the body to reach the desired results. There are various things I could say about all of that, but without getting into the weeds on the methodology itself (which could be an article all on its own), I want to hone in on the nature of what Reiki is so we can understand why I not only differentiate it from energy medicine practices as a whole and also why I specifically single it out as being demonic.  Keep in mind that by singling out Reiki it doesn’t mean that every other form or version or school of energy medicine practice out there is demon-free, just that Reiki itself is inextricably tainted.  And here’s why:

By definition, it is impossible for someone to be a Reiki practitioner if they have not received something called a Reiki “attunement”. If someone uses all of the hand positions and everything else but has not received a Reiki attunement from an existing practitioner, then they are not, by definition, practicing Reiki.  They’re just doing energy medicine and borrowing Reiki techniques.  For something to be Reiki, it requires a process of impartation from an existing Reiki practitioner.  This impartation, called an attunement, is supposed to open up the individual to be able to channel this universal secondary energy all around us.  The man who initially received the download about Reiki was a man named Usui who was meditating on a mountain somewhere, and had a spiritual encounter of some kind.  During this encounter he was given the basics of Reiki practice, then began to pass this down to disciples. Now, in my book The Power of Impartation I go into some depth explaining what impartation is and how it works, but quite simply impartation is the releasing a spiritual virtue from one person to another, usually through the laying on of hands. It is called impartation because there is a spiritual substance or an energy that is being passed or “imparted” from one person to the other.  And this gets to the crux of why Reiki is demonic.

As I mentioned before, it is impossible to practice Reiki if one does not receive a Reiki attunement. A Reiki attunement is a demonic impartation, or said another way, it is an impartation of demonic access to manipulate and utilize secondary energy. It is already an ability we innately possess as humans. We don’t actually need a Reiki attunement to be able to practice energy work because it’s already built into our design. This is the same lie that the serpent gave to Eve when he told her to eat the fruit.  The serpent told her that if she ate the fruit that she would be like God.  The truth was that in Genesis 1 it tells us she was already made in God’s image, which means she was already like Him. The serpent got her to try to do something extra in order for her to become who she already was.  Likewise, we don’t need Reiki attunements to work with secondary energy because it’s already part of who we are.  However, when we receive this impartation, when we come into agreement with this demonic form of energy healing, we give certain spirits access to the realm of our soul so they can do whatever they want without our knowledge.  People who do this welcome these spirits in while believing the lie that they are doing something good for themselves and for others.  The reason I am so vocal about this when I talk to people is because Reiki is a form of demonic entrapment, preying on people’s good intentions.  It is the epitome of the enemy masquerading as an angel of light to make it appear that something is good and life-giving when in fact, it is not.

Now, let’s be clear about this—I’m not saying that Reiki doesn’t work.  I’m not saying that people who have gone to Reiki practitioners will get no benefits.  That’s part of what makes the deception so effective.  When somebody receives a Reiki attunement they will be working with secondary energy and they can do stuff with it. I never said it doesn’t work. I said it’s demonic. The agreements that the practitioner has to make are inherently allowing demons access to their soul realm, and if somebody goes to that practitioner to receive treatment, I can’t guarantee that they’re not making similar agreements as well. But because all of this looks and sounds nice and because the people practicing it genuinely care and truly want people to be healed and whole, Reiki often slides under the radar. And that’s why I began my entire article by saying that I believe the heart motivation of everybody involved is really very good. I don’t believe that most people would willingly tell others about a harmful energy practice that opens you up to the demonic if they truly understood it was a harmful practice.  They do it because they are genuinely ignorant of the deeper truth about it, and because they want people to be healed and have good lives.  Their hearts are in the right place.  The problem isn’t their heart motivation, the problem is the agreements they’ve made with demonic entities.

I have wanted to heal people for much of my life. It’s not a coincidence that I’m a nurse. I pray for the sick and expect God to heal them. I very much engage God’s divine healing power to touch others, and while I don’t do it very often, I also can do energy work on people.  As I said earlier, it’s honestly not hard. It’s just not half as beneficial as taking power authority over sickness and disease, doing some inner healing, and watching God touch someone and heal them And since doing energy work is largely more time consuming for less results, it’s simply something I rarely do any longer.   It doesn’t mean I can’t do it, it doesn’t mean I don’t know how to do it, it doesn’t mean I’m ignorant of it, it just means that I choose not to because there are faster and better ways to do it.

If anyone who is reading this has gotten caught in the trap that is Reiki, I want to encourage you to give it up.  And by “give it up” I mean stop practicing it, renounce your participation in it, get rid of your Reiki paraphernalia, and get some inner healing and deliverance to get fully free from the connection with the spirits involved.  If you honor God by choosing to walk in His truth, He will set you free and He will bring something along that is even better than what you feel like you are giving up.  I understand that it feels like a loss because again, the only people who are doing Reiki are people who want others to be healed. and I love that about you.  I love that that’s your heart.  And I want you to be free to walk in the fullness of everything that God has planned for you in that, but you will never be able to walk in the fullness of that as long as you are practicing Reiki because to be a Christian and practice Reiki is to serve two masters, and the Bible is pretty clear that doing so doesn’t end well.

If you want to learn more about what I have been saying about impartation and primary and secondary energy, as well as God’s plans for us for life and how to live it out to the fullest, I encourage you to get copies of my books The Power of Impartation and The Gospel of Life and Immortality, both of which are available in print, on Kindle, and Audible.

Live Life Longer

As a nurse, I both have and overhear a large number of extremely random conversations on a weekly basis. I recently was in a room where a woman was talking about how she and others her age had lived long lives and how they need to make room for others.  In other words, she was talking about how they all needed to die in order for their posterity to have space on the planet to live.  Fortunately or unfortunately, she is absolutely wrong.  I say it’s fortunate that she’s wrong because it means people don’t need to die to make room for other people to live. It’s unfortunate because she clearly doesn’t believe that. And we largely tend to receive the results of what we believe. As that saying goes, “if you think you can or think you can’t, you’re probably right.”

As I have continued to talk about life and immortality over the years, one of the major questions I get asked is that if everything I am saying about what Jesus accomplished on the cross is true, and that we were never meant to die, and that He took care of defeating death on the cross, then why do people still die?  And it’s a fair question. But I think it largely goes back to what this woman was saying in believing that she needs to die as the means to exit the Earth in order to make room for other people to live.  If we believe we have to die, then guess what: we probably will.

Science is only more recently becoming able to quantify things that the Bible has stated plainly for thousands of years— things such as “as a man thinks in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs 23:7). The Bible says it in a variety of ways, that ultimately what we behold and believe, we become.  If we believe we have to die, then we will die. If we believe we get to live, then we will live. If we believe we are sinful then we will receive sin’s payment, which is death. If we believe we are righteous, then we receive the gift of righteousness, which is life.  This principle doesn’t just touch on life and death, influences many other areas of life.

Overpopulation is not our problem on the Earth.  Waste is.  Poverty isn’t our problem. Waste is.  Hunger really isn’t a problem. Waste and mismanagement are.  Now, for any single one of those we could easily point to specific examples where they are, in fact, a problem right now, somewhere on the Earth.  But my point is they don’t need to be. If we were to get rid of all of the corruption from every government in the world, we could probably solve world hunger in under six months. We have sufficient technology to desalinate the ocean to provide water for everyone all over the world. It would definitely take a lot of construction and planning, but the point is that it’s possible to do.  The idea that we can’t do certain things or that we are incapable of certain things as far as providing food, water, or shelter for people is usually just a lie. On a local scale, it is definitely possible for there to be a temporary local hunger problem.  When the storms hit North Carolina this past year, there was definitely a local problem. But a temporary local problem is not the same thing as saying that we are incapable of providing food worldwide.  Not that the US is perfect by any means, but there are many times that the US has delivered food aid to other countries with starving populations and the leaders of that nation simply stockpiled the food as a means of control instead of distributing it to the people.  At that point in time, corruption was the problem because the hunger issue could have been solved with the resources provided.

Lack and limitation mindsets will only ever yield us the same results that they’ve gotten us before: inability and incapacity. Quite often our problem isn’t that we lack something, it is that we have very firm beliefs in our lack and limitation. Sure, there may be lack in an immediate moment, but those who overcome are those who believe that they can overcome. Those who believe they can’t overcome tend to remain stuck in their problems.

I know that sometimes talking about life and immortality, living forever and never dying and never having an old and decrepit body can sound extremely impractical to people who are dealing with what most think of as real-world problems. But explain to me how death isn’t a real world problem and maybe I’ll believe you (hint: you can’t). The truth is, though, if we can believe the truth of the Bible, that we don’t have to die, maybe everything else that feels less-daunting than that will be believable too. Maybe when the Bible says that God has supplied all of our needs out of his immense wealth that we will actually begin to believe that and watch our needs and even our wants get met.  Maybe when God says he has made us whole, he actually means for us to experience fullness in spirit, soul, and body. Maybe if we begin to believe that, we will see our bodies healed, our souls healed, and yes, even our spirits restored (while you may not be able to kill a spirit, you absolutely can damage one).

I want to encourage us today to believe for the limitless. To push the boundaries of our expectations beyond what we have been willing to expect before. The Bible says that God is “able to do exceedingly abundantly more than we can ask or think, according to the power at work with us . ..” (Ephesians 3:20).  It is a conditional statement, which means that while God has limitless capacity, we have the ability to limit that capacity based on our beliefs and expectations.  If we want to receive more, we need to believe more. I’m not talking about just working really hard in toil to believe. I am talking about transforming our mindsets to believe the truth that God has already been telling us because as we do that, we will experience the promises He has made to us.

Maybe believing in life and immortality is a bit much for you right now. Well then, maybe start by believing in a long life. And by long life, I don’t mean adding an extra five years, I mean adding an extra fifty.  If the average age at death is in the 70s or 80s, and we know that some people live into their early hundreds, than realistically long life needs to extend beyond that, or it isn’t really long. It’s just the longer end of normal.  If you don’t think you can believe for living forever, maybe start believing in experiencing constant divine health: that you never get sick and never get injured.  Because in reality, if you never get sick or injured, and your body doesn’t experience decay, then you will never die. In fact, signs of aging will begin to reverse themselves as your body regenerates.  I’m not saying you need to arrive there all at once, nor am I pretending I have either. What I can tell you, though, is that I very consistently have people tell me they think I am at least 10 years younger than I am.  I personally believe that my long-held belief in life and immortality and the end of decay in the cosmos because of what Jesus did on the cross is responsible for my experience. I have been talking about this subject for the last decade and a half— and as I continue to renew my own mind to believe the truth, it seems only reasonable that my body would be starting to match that belief in an observable manner.

If you want to learn more about how to walk in this revelation of life, I encourage you to pick up a copy of my book The Gospel of Life and Immortality. In my book The Power of Impartation I also discuss some of the principles God has created in the cosmos that you can use to help apprehend the life God has already prepared for you in Christ Jesus.  I also write regularly about the topics of inner healing and deliverance because the transformed soul is a major key for us to experience everything God has planned for us. If you want to learn more about how to do that, I encourage you to pick up a copy of my book Broken To Whole.  And as always, I write on all of these subjects extensively so you can take a look at other articles I’ve written on this website as well.

 

 

You Will Regret Missing The Rapture

A few weeks before I moved from Austin, Tx to the New Philadelphia area of Ohio earlier this year, I somehow got into what was a confusing conversation for me with one of the nursing assistants in my hospital system.  It was confusing for me largely because these days I am very far removed from the mainstream heaven-when-you-die rapture belief.  I simply forget sometimes that some people are so entrenched in that belief system they either can’t or won’t consider anything else.  I don’t even remember how the subject came up, but it ended up with her telling me that I was on “dangerous ground” by teaching people what the Bible explicitly states about life and immortality.  And to top that off, I was informed that if I don’t believe in the rapture that not only will I miss it when it happens, but that I will regret it because I will be forced to be here for the Great Tribulation.

Unfortunately, the conversation devolved quite rapidly.  I was surprised to discover she had never even heard of Preterism, much less Partial Preterism (views that deal with End-times beliefs from a different perspective than the typical Futurist belief), but ignorance is fine if you’re willing to listen to me explain what it is.  Nobody knows everything, and we all have opportunities to learn new things.  However, not only was everything I said falling on deaf ears, but that she was trying to paint me in this heretical-teacher-bound-for-judgment role, and I wasn’t having it.  Am I a Fivefold Teacher?  Yes.  Do I need to be responsible with the things I teach and say?  Yes.  Do I attempt to do that precisely because I understand why and how it is important?  Also yes.  It is precisely because I understand the value of solid Christian teaching and how it has an impact on our lives that I write books and weekly articles and will launch The Kings of Eden Podcast this year.  Hosea 4:6 tells us that “my people die/are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”  Even in my job as a nurse, I see people who grow sick and on occasion die because of things they didn’t know or things they thought they knew but understood incorrectly.  What we don’t know can and often does hurt us, and my heart is for everyone to live in the fullness and abundant life that Jesus provided for us, so I want to provide information and resources so people can access those things.

The funny thing to me is that in this conversation, while I was being told that I would miss out on the rapture and that she believed I was a false teacher, I was unphased by these things she was trying to firmly warn me about.  In fact I told her I was “comfortable with that” when she told me that what I am teaching is fringe theology.  Why?  Because I am.  It might be fringe now, but it will one day be mainstream, and as a forerunner, it’s my job to spread the word early.

The other thing this woman didn’t realize (nor do I think she would have understood if she did) is that decades ago when I still believed in the Rapture, I literally would pray and ask God to let me remain for the Tribulation so I could help people through it.  You see, I’m pretty serious about this whole Life thing.  Death is an enemy, it needs to be fully put down once and for all, the pain of the world must be healed, and the decay removed from the cosmos.  And while that all might sound like big ideals, its literally what Jesus came to accomplish, and I think that nothing less than His full reward is appropriate.

So if Rapture-ready heaven-if-you-die theology isn’t it, what should we believe and why?  We need to remember that death never has been our means of access to heaven—Jesus is.  My book “The Gospel of Life and Immortality” lays out Jesus’s plan for us.  The book title is taken from 2 Timothy 1:10-11 where Paul declares that the gospel he preached is one of life and immortality—life of ever-increasing quantity and quality.  In addition to extensive scripture references to lay out where this message is all throughout the Bible, I include an entire chapter on the subject of death not being our means of access to heaven, as well as a chapter discussing end-times theology and what to do with it. I also highly recommend my friend Tommy Miller’s books “Deathless” and “Transfigured”.  All three of these resources will help you have a deeper understanding of God’s plan for us that does not include death or a rapture.  You might also check out the book Victorious Eschatology by Harold Eberle if you want a theological deep-dive into end-times/rapture stuff.

 

 

Unmasking Kabbalah, Engaging Jesus

I’m not typically a “heresy hunter” and that’s not even my goal with this article either, but I have observed with increasing prevalence that Kabbalah is a growing thing in “mystical” Christian circles, whether those that are more Charismatic leaning, those focused on “Getting back to Jewish roots”, or those who are trying to take a more merge-science-and-spirituality approach with energy and frequencies. And when we look at what some of the well-known modern-day teachers and leaders are teaching, it confuses people even further because some are very specifically telling people TO follow things found in Kabbalah. I know it has become a trendy thing these days to teach on this stuff because it’s “Jewish Mysticism” and therefore people wrongly assume it has some relation to Christianity.

It doesn’t.

Kabbalah, Metatron’s Cube (also known as the Merkabah, which just means chariot), the Kabbalistic Tree and its Sephirot, and the view of the world that it presents all have NOTHING to do with the Gospel of the One True Lord Jesus Christ.

The Kabbalistic worldview has a totally different version of Creation where God the Father (Elohim) is actually a created being by another God-being called Ein Sof who works together with the two primary parts of the Kabbalah tree to create Elohim—which isn’t actually even in agreement with Genesis 1:1, where in the beginning Elohim created the heavens and the earth. In Kabbalah, the work of Creation was purely a result of wisdom and will, not the act of a loving Father who wants His love to find expression. Unsurprisingly, pure will is what we see as Lucifer’s mode of operation in Isaiah 14:12-14 where it says:

How you have fallen from heaven, morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations! You said in your heart, “I will ascend to the heavens; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of Mount Zaphon. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.”

If we delve into the Kabbalistic cosmic view, we see that elevating himself above the Most High is actually part of what Lucifer tries to do in this religion, which is a separate and different religion from Christianity entirely. It is this very act of trying to transcend God that caused Him to be cast down to begin with, and it was his unrighteous commerce (Ezekiel 26:16) that caused Lucifer to be filled with sin to begin with—commerce that he engaged in as an act of will because he wanted to do what he wanted to do, not because he didn’t know any better.

In Kabbalah, the first Adam wasn’t actually a living man but a spiritual entity known as Adam Ketur or AK, not Adam the human who lived in Eden. No, according to Kabbalah it was the second Adam who was the one who was in the garden and caused a shattering by imbalancing the Kabbalah tree. You see, in Kabbalah, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil are actually the same tree, not two different trees, and the second Adam was a living man who imbalanced creation. In Christianity, the First Adam became a living soul and the Second (and Last) Adam, Jesus the Christ, became a lifegiving spirit, making us into new creations in Him so that we could become his brothers and sisters, sons and daughters of our Father in Heaven, the Most High God. And this is NOT what Kabbalah teaches at all. In Kabbalism, our job is to ascend the Sephirot of the Kabbalah Tree through knowledge and enlightenment of Kabbalah (can you say “Gnosticism”?), gradually working our way up through the mysteries until we reach full ascension and enlightenment. As we do this, we gradually repair all of the things that, according to Kabbalah, the second Adam broke.  In other words, according to Kabbalah, Jesus is the one responsible for all of the problems as opposed to Christianity where Jesus is literally THE solution.

And that doesn’t even get into the half of the ways that Kabbalah twists the Gospel message. Did I mention that the Kabbalah narrative actually makes the serpent a victim of the second Adam unbalancing creation and the serpent is part of the solution to the problem? Lucifer, as a quintessential narcissist, literally is writing an alternate cosmology here where he is the victim, Jesus is the problem, and we have to enter into his religious system and work really hard in order to fix things, as though earning, striving, and trying is anything other than another version of the legalistic rules of the Old Testament that were always doomed to fail. 2 Corinthians 3 tells us that the former glory of the Law was, in fact, glorious, but that it brought death and in its place Jesus brought us a better glory that brings Life. It tells us in John 1:17 that “For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” Only Jesus has the grace and truth that we need, not a Jewish Religious Occult Magic system known as Kabbalah.

People.

Literally distance yourself from this stuff. It removes Jesus entirely from the equation, God is a created being, the solution to things is to work really hard at Kabbalah to “restore balance” which Jesus never taught even once (nor did anyone else in the Bible), and it literally writes out any need for the cross or God reconciling Himself to us in Christ.

We are indwelt by the Holy Spirit of the Godhead Himself, so should not be attempting to “ascend” into the heavens in Metatron’s cube while chanting the name YAHWEH (Yod-He-Vav-He). Sure, it’s one of the MANY names of God, but let’s not start performing magic rituals with it (that’s literally what occultists do—use Metatron’s cube while chanting the YHVH as an occult means to ascend the heavens through the Kabbalah tree). Don’t ascend in Metatron’s cube as though you need some other vessel than your own God-given spirit to encounter Him, and don’t use the Sephirot or the Kabbalah tree diagram as some sort of divine wisdom source. It is literally a template for Jewish occult magic that will bring you and those you teach it to into bondage, not freedom.

Even the so-called Star of David (which is a dumbed-down version of Metatron’s cube when drawn in 2 dimensions) is honestly pretty suspicious, and not because of antisemitism, but because it is literally NOT an ancient Hebrew thing from King David’s time. I’m going to quote the online Britannica entry to read because it explains quite clearly what is actually going on. Note how frequently it refers to magic and Jewish mystics (who practiced Jewish magic) in this entry, and keep in mind when you read it that a hexagram is used for ritual magic. It only became the image on the flag of the current-day nation state of Israel after the Rothschild family (one among other known Illuminati-bloodline families) pushed for the current-day nation-state to be created. Britannica states:

“Star of David, Hebrew Magen David (“Shield of David”), Magen also spelled Mogen, Jewish symbol composed of two overlaid equilateral triangles that form a six-pointed star. It appears on synagogues, Jewish tombstones, and the flag of the State of Israel. The symbol—which historically was not limited to use by Jews—originated in antiquity, when, side by side with the five-pointed star, it served as a magical sign or as a decoration. In the Middle Ages the Star of David appeared with greater frequency among Jews but did not assume any special religious significance; it is found as well on some medieval cathedrals. The term Magen David, which in Jewish liturgy signifies God as the protector (shield) of David, gained currency among medieval Jewish mystics, who attached magical powers to King David’s shield just as earlier (non-Jewish) magical traditions had referred to the five-pointed star as the “seal of Solomon.” Kabbalists popularized the use of the symbol as a protection against evil spirits. The Jewish community of Prague was the first to use the Star of David as its official symbol, and from the 17th century on the six-pointed star became the official seal of many Jewish communities and a general sign of Judaism, though it has no biblical or Talmudic authority. The star was almost universally adopted by Jews in the 19th-century as a striking and simple emblem of Judaism in imitation of the cross of Christianity. The yellow badge that Jews were forced to wear in Nazi-occupied Europe invested the Star of David with a symbolism indicating martyrdom and heroism.”

I hope this helps someone because this stuff is becoming worryingly prevalent and the publicly available facts about how evil Kabbalah is just don’t match what people seem to be teaching. And while sure, some want to claim that Jesus was a master Kabbalist himself, even if Jesus had been taught all of these “special sacred mysteries” which have largely only ever been used to form occult groups such as the Order of the Golden Dawn, the Theophostic society, and others, literally nothing Jesus did or taught says “Go follow Kabbalah.” If that has been the solution, Jesus wouldn’t have needed to die on the cross for us, as us, with us. He would have just taught his disciples to ascend the tree through Metatron’s cube, gather together all of the shattered pieces of divinity, and work with the serpent to fix creation. But He didn’t teach anything close to that—not even once. He DID say that we have been given power to TRAMPLE serpents and scorpions, not work with them to restore creation.

Here’s where this makes things awkward, even for me personally, because there are people I know who teach this stuff, and it doesn’t make it less-harmful just because people are well-known. If you see Christian ministers teaching this stuff, I encourage you to start challenging them on it. Be respectful, but ask them how they can merge the cosmology of Kabbalah with the cosmology of Jesus. Ask them to explain how the Second Adam, Jesus, is supposedly responsible for the shattering that the second Adam in Kabbalah is responsible for.  Ask them to explain how the serpent is actually a helper in restoring all things and is a victim of Adam, and how that fits into the Biblical narrative. Regardless of who makes a claim, we have to start doing some homework. If we are going to start accepting a teaching as true that has its backing in an occult religious system like Kabbalah, then we have to do some research and understand what we are aligning ourselves with and deciding to come into agreement with before we decide to just go along with it because it’s what all the popular kids are doing.

Fortunately for us, Dan Duval has done a really good job of encapsulating a wide body of knowledge and understanding about Kabbalah and what it really is in his teaching series “Exposing Kabbalah.” It is free on Youtube and also is available through multiple podcast apps. Yes, it takes time to listen to, and even more time if you do some due diligence and look at some of the source documents Daniel talks about, but if this is something you are encountering in teachings you listen to and from teachers you follow, you owe it to yourself to find out the truth.

God wants us to operate in freedom and life, and at the end of the day that’s what this message is about—uncovering a pitfall that can become easy to fall into. I have friends who like to run after every “special” conference, spiritual mystery, and secret things that makes them feel different, special, valuable, and worthy, and teaching Kabbalah mysteries helps fill that hole for a time—but it doesn’t bring the wholeness that deepening our relationship and fellowship with the Father, Jesus, and Holy Spirit will do, and our true identity will only be realized in Him. That is where we need to spend our time and energy and that is where we will truly grow deeper—as we engage the mystery of the ages that the Father has already revealed to us in Christ Jesus.

 

 

The Holy Spirit Told Me To Give My Favorite Jacket Away

This past week it got pretty cold in Texas. Now, to be fair, that is according to Texas standards, not those of anywhere that gets regular winter chill. Nevertheless, after living in Texas for four years, I am more maladapted to the cold then ever. I did, however, keep my winter gear from living up north, so while I may feel a little cold, I’m ultimately just fine. Well, this was the first day this winter that it was getting truly cold, and the sun had gone down, so I was wearing my winter coat when I went out. I went to the grocery store to buy food, as one does, then walked back out to my truck to get in and go home. As I was putting my bags in the truck, a guy came up to me and asked if I had any money for food.

He was homeless, looked like he was in his 30’s somewhere, walked with a limp, and seemed a bit cold. In talking to him briefly, I found out his name is Sean. I don’t tend to carry much cash on me, so I gave Sean some food bars I had just bought and a few bottles of water. It gets pretty hot in Texas, so I always keep some water bottles in my truck for exactly this purpose. When someone on the street asks me for something, I feel like I can at *least* give them some water. I handed him the small bag of food and water, and it was right then that the Holy Spirit spoke to me and said “give him your jacket.” Now, I knew which jacket God meant because it was the one sitting on my passenger seat directly in front of me. My favorite jacket. It was kind of a cross between a sweatshirt and jacket as it was a waist-length zip-up with a hood from North Face, so you could really call it either, but I like it and wear it all the time. Or at least I did up until that moment.

I asked him “Do you have any other warm clothes?”
“No, just what I’m wearing.” Sean replied.
“Then take this. Hopefully you’ll be a bit warmer. I washed it yesterday so it’s clean.”

I handed him the jacket and then that was the end of our interaction. As he limped away, eating a food bar and now hopefully getting a bit warmer, I started to reflect on the encounter. You see, I didn’t say at the time that “God told me to give this to you.” I didn’t try to preach the gospel to him. And I didn’t ask him if I could pray for his leg or whatever was causing the limp. As he was walking away it occurred to me that maybe I could say something about God, but it would have made things end on an awkward note because it didn’t flow naturally in the interaction and would have gotten tacked on as an afterthought. And maybe I should have anyway. I don’t know.

What I do know is that Sean was warmer that night and he ate more than he would have otherwise. The passage in James 2:14-18 comes to mind when I think of that evening. It says:

14 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? 15 Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. 16 If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? 17 In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.
18 But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.”
Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds.

If in our pursuit of being holy or spiritual we forget to take care of basic human needs such as food, water, clothing, and shelter, then in reality what good is this gospel? Of what value is a gospel that will do nothing whatsoever for one’s current day-to-day life and only comes into play in some theoretical afterlife? What really is that gospel saving us from, or saving us into? And how is this gospel loving if it abjectly ignores human need, lack, and pain? Now that doesn’t mean that we each individually can fix every situation everywhere. But can we change the situation in front of us? And further still, can we learn to trust God to supply OUR needs so that we always have an overflow to give from?

There’s one more piece to this story. As I was driving away, I began talking to the Lord about my jacket specifically because it was my favorite. I have other sweatshirts I can wear. I have a winter coat. I don’t have a lack of things I can wear to be warm—I suddenly had a lack of things I *preferred* to wear to keep warm. So how much was me being selfish, how much was me complaining, and how much was me processing? I don’t think I was being selfish, as I literally gave the jacket away when I was instructed. I don’t feel like I was complaining, or if so only minimally, because I truly did want Sean to be warm and be okay that night. I just also wanted to still have my favorite jacket. So I talked to Him about the mixed feelings I was having, and I didn’t really come to any specific conclusion except that I was going to choose to trust Him to be bigger than the situation and to take care of my desires and likes as well.

Fast forward two days and I was at my aunt and uncle’s house. They live in San Marcos about an hour south of Austin, and my parents had sent some Christmas gifts that arrived late. So early January here I am opening Christmas gifts, and what is the first thing I open? A brand new jacket.

I’m not even kidding. While I was giving Sean my favorite jacket and talking to the Lord about the situation, He had literally already sent me a new one and it was waiting at my family’s house for me to pick up. How often do we fail to trust God to see us through? And how often do we try to figure out ways in the natural that we can work it out for ourselves to somehow come out on top or get ahead or whatever else, not willing to trust that God not only sees and knows, but is faithful to follow through and meet us in those situations.

I think so much of our Christian walk is about learning to trust the only One who is truly fully worthy of it, and in doing so being willing to go anywhere, love anyone, touch anyone, place ourselves in any situation He leads us into no matter how dirty or ugly or unpleasant or even dangerous it may be—simply because we know He is worthy of our trust and all of our love, and so we’ll do literally anything for Him. For me that night it was giving away my jacket. Another time it could be food or money or time or anything else. But as we step out in obedience and trust, God will meet us in ways we could not have expected before—because He is faithful.

 

 

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