Impact, a challenge to pagans

With the Lord has done so much in my life, fulfilling prophecy that was given to me years ago. Those words that I felt at the age of 11 ring out to me today. That promise he made me, “You were here in the beginning, and you will be here in the end.”

God has always had something planned for me. It does not seem to me that it is “ordinary.” I do not claim to be extraordinary or special. I have just taken a walk that, Thankfully, not so many have taken. Those that have, unfortunately, did not find their way back out, or have not yet.

The ministry, if you will, that I feel may be in my future is not an easy one. Not that ministry is easy. Taking people with Occult backgrounds and either drawing them to Christ Jesus or helping those people heal. Ironic, bringing pagans to Christ, that was the mission so many people in the bible was tasked with.

Idolotry is something that this country, nay, this world has issues with. The worshiping the all mighty dollar and those worldly possessions, however, is not what I am talking about. No, I am talking about those that worship false gods. The worship of the Great Mother, Diana, Odin, Loki, Ares, Athena etc. is for fools. These figures are like Gods as the Angles are to The God. 1^st Corinthians 10:18-19 tells us a truth that I knew even when I was not a Christian! When I was in darkness, as now when I am in the Light of the Lord, this truth is sound. These pagan gods are only Demons and Fallen Angels in guise. Lucifer’s former heavenly host.

I will not dispute the existence of beings that prey off followers of these idols. They want you to worship them to take you away from God. Many pagans are fine with this as well. They would not be pagan if they loved God. So these angels that fell from Gods grace use this void put on a mask and draw victims into dark places. They draw them to a place where they hide themselves away from Gods light. They take you to a place where they can whisper lies to you.

Brutalness is just. Might is Right! If you do this ritual, you can be with child. If you make this oath I will reward you with Power, Love, Money, Strength and/or Courage. If you let me in, I’ll give you even more! This is a Lie! These are false promises. They MAY give it to you on short term, but the damages left behind is simply not worth it. And I am not even talking about after you die and what your soul will be forced to endure.

I know this to be true, because I walked it. There is only death from the worship of idols. Pagans do not want to hear this truth. You want to believe in the Gods and Goddesses that you chose to follow. You want to be so in the face of every Christian so that you can have justification for your opinion that Christians only want to cast you aside and shun you. You want to make Christians persecute you so you can say you are persecuted.

I challenge each and every one of you to this. Give Christians an honest chance to show you love and the love of God. Do this without being argumentative and hatemongering, and you will see what you get from them. “Hate begets hate, but Love brings forth love.” The love that the one true God has for you is pure and it is just. If you allow yourself to open up to him and allow him into your heart, then you will know what Love is.

The Power of Faith

Faith, we are told, is one of the most powerful tools that we have to combat spiritual, emotional and physical conflict or strife. We are told that if we have faith the size of a mustard seed we can move mountains. For many these statements work, they sound great and life you up. For others they just see pretty words. Faith is a powerful thing.

I believe in my Lord God, and I believe in what he can do. In dark times it is challenging to faith. Why are we suffering so? Then we look to the Book of Job and see that faith will be challenged. What Job went through, in my opinion, no man should have to go through. It was horrible and awful, but Job stood true. My focus here is not about strife that one will meet in that regard. No, here I will discuss the power of Faith when you are under direct attack.

Now to get a few things in the open: 1) I am a Christian, 2) I believe in the power of God, Jesus, the angels of heaven, 3) I know that demons and Lucifer exists in as physical of a form as angels, 4) I believe in deliverance ministry, and 5) I believe in what the bible tells us about how to deal with the darkness. The path that I have walked to return back to Christ was not a pretty one, but I learned a lot along the way that I hope to share with others to assist them in life.

The darkness is not to be dabbled with. It will grab hold of you, once you look into that darkness once it will see you forever. Even worse, everything that you promise to the darkness, it will hold you to. Once you find out how bad things are and just want to leave it alone, you can’t just stop looking at it. You opened the way and it will remain open until it is shut, and to do this requires you renouncing the paths that you walked, every promise that you made, every vow you swore to EVERY being you talked with or worked with. This is deliverance ministry in a nutshell.

For the next section I will probably get a lot of criticism from my friends at church because the passage I am about to quote is not one that is in most bibles. The Catholics have this book in their bible and I feel it is a book that anyone that is dealing with demonic warfare should read. The book of Tobit is a book of the Apocrypha, and is a story about a righteous man named Tobit. Tobit was struck blind, and he begins to pray a lamenting prayer begging for death. Well at the same time a woman names Sarah begins to pray a lamenting prayer begging for the same.

Sarah, at this time, had been married seven times, but a demon killed the husband before the marriage could be consummated. So an Angel of God comes to Tobit and allows him to see again, and promises to Sarah Tobias son of Tobit. So Tobit calls in his son and instructs him to go to Gabael to get the family money. Tobias sets off and meets a traveler to go with him to assist him on the journey. So the story goes on Tobias catches a fish and the traveler tells him to keep the gall, heart and liver for they are useful as medicine. He eventually finds his way to Sarah, they marry and the Angel reveals himself as the traveler.

He tells him to use the gall and burn it in the bed chamber and it will drive out the demon.  So the question is, will burning a gall of a fish really drive away the demon, or was it the faith of the follower that put his trust in an Angel of the Lord to drive it away? That is a question of semantics. I am no biblical scholar by any stretch so I leave that to others. However I see that in this story it illustrates things that many other books of the bible do not.

We humans have the power to fight off demons and drive them away. However, our bodies are made of sin, the substance that the demons use to fight us and enslave us. This complicates things. So when things are complicated by man, we must turn to God and his angels. Between the Holy Trinity and his Holy Host of workers, and our Faith in them, the demons can be driven away.  As you are wondering what the point is, allow me to ask you a question, a few actually.

Have you ever experienced a time when more than one person in your home had bad dreams? You ever wake feeling a weight about you? You ever see an illusion of the eye that looked like a round ball in the dark? You ever get angry for no reason and words come out of your mouth that are not your own? You ever do something that is REALLY out of character that you know would hurt someone? These are a few of the ways Demons attack us, beyond addictions, bad habits, depression and lust.

You need to know what to look for; you need to know how to keep your family safe. This is not a scare tactic. I just want you to be aware of the dangers that are out there. I know many Christians out there that do not believe in demons in the physical and real sense. I wish that were true. The demon of depression or the demon of lust; well they do exist, and have names. The angel in the book of Tobit is Raphael and the demon is Asmodeus. Asmodeus is a demon of lust and not a nice guy.

So how does the power of faith help with this? It is our strongest weapon against them. Where the flesh is too weak, the spirit must be strong. And faith is how we strengthen our spirit. It will be forged by our trials and tempered by our struggles. You don the Whole Armor of God, and you pray. You bring the light of God into your home and into your heart. Where there is light Darkness cannot exist.

Once you are prepared you call to God, to Jesus Christ and you call forth their Angels. Ask for the angels to push away the darkness, evil and the demons that are trying to hurt those you love. Go through every room of your home praying this in Christ’s Holy Name. You push the spirits out and anoint the doors and windows with oil that you have prayed over to bless with God’s love and light. Ask for the angels to keep these boundaries safe and secure. Go through every room, every door, every window. Then say one last prayer to let the Love of God shine throughout this home. Welcome to spiritual warfare 201.

Keep the faith strong in the house. Let the love of God flow through it because it is true, “Where there is light Darkness cannot exist.” Sit the candle up high for everyone to see, shine as a true example of God’s love. Know your power, the power we receive through the blood of Jesus Christ. Your faith will keep you vigil. Your love will keep you diligent. Do not fight fair, use everything that God has to offer you, because the demons do not fight fair. With God’s Love and Grace.

The Grey Door

Do you have an object, person or event that you use to get you back into focus? Do you have something that you think about to get yourself back to center and help you focus? I know a lot of people that are of my faith typically have a few things: a bible, a cross, Jesus Christ and God. For me I have a very unique item to return me to focus on the journey that I have taken. There is a single grey door that I use to help me align myself with the Lord.

What is this door? Where does it go? It’s not about where it goes or what it is for. It is a symbol of where I wrestled with the Lord until I bowed to him and accepted his grace and glory. It is a door at Durham County Jail in pod 3B. I no longer remember the cell that it belongs to by number, but it was the bottom floor and the second cell on the right side.

It was this unlikely place that I found my way back to God. I promised myself that I would not forget that door, and if they ever tear it down the jail I just might buy the thing to hang it up in a garage or something just to keep it. So why is this door so important to me? For many people they see going to jail as the end of the line. Others see it as a stop on their road along their destination called life. For others still, it’s a reunion of sorts.

I was amongst the second group. It was a stop that I was expecting to see on the roadmap of my life. So with each stop on the journey of your life you have to decide what to make of it. Jail is not the end of your life, but it certainly will make life a bit harder for you. For those of you that see Jail as a place to reunite with friends and family, well you need to really make a choice about your life. There are options, which lead me to my first point.

I know most of you that are reading this know the parable of the sower from Luke 8:5-8. The sower went out and cast his seeds; some of them fell on rocky soil others fell amongst thorns and the last feel on fertile grounds. The parable talks directly to the willingness of the heart of the person. Now we all know that these three kinds of ground can be good soil to plant in, they just need a bit of work for the seeds of God’s word to bear fruit.

A jail is a very fertile ground for sowing seeds, but the soil is cluttered with briars, rocks, weeds and many other things to choke out the seed that God would plant in their hearts. It takes a lot to keep that soil good for planting. Well that is where my own soil was cleared away allowing me to accept the seed of the spirit. I have become a very different person. I look back to those days and see who I was coming into that place and the man that I was when I walked out, there is no comparison.

The power that God has to change a person that is WILLING to change is amazing. This message is to give hope. By now everyone is probably getting used to the fact that I am here to say that no matter what you have done, there is a way out. You can say what you want about what you have done, but Christ shows us that there is hope; people can change if they want to change. Not once will you hear me say that it will be easy. Change is hard, and people in general do not like to change.

You do not have to go to jail to change. Look at one of the most influential people in the New Testament, Paul. When he became Paul, he was hunting Christians to kill them. God struck him blind along the road and changed his heart forever. He also disappeared for a few years and came back a different man. So change that drastic was not quick.

Each and every day is a struggle as we go along trying to figure out how to survive in the world today. We learn through repetition and pattern. If a plus b equals c once we expect it be that way every time. Which leads me to question, do we actually know how to think and learn for ourselves?

Well for this statement I say that we only do what we can. Why is it so hard to change? Because in life people begin to expect things from us, if we have acted a certain way most of our lives, well people expect that from us. When we do something that is different, people ask if we are OK. Maybe we are not, but is that always a bad thing? No. If we always take the same roads in life, we can miss out on so much. People are the same way. If you only talk to the same people that you have talked to all your life, you will be missing out on so much from those you are not talking to.

Change is what you make of it. If you want to be changed you can be. You have to allow yourself to change and allow yourself to submit to the will of God. He will handle a lot of the rest. Trust in him and devote time to him daily. Draw yourself close to him and he will ensure that you have what you need. Not one day has gone by since I became a Christian that I have not had what I needed. Many have gone that I did not have what I want, but that is not his promise to us. The door worked for me, but it doesn’t have to be what works for you.

This door that I am talking about was a good seven foot tall and about 32 inches wide. It had one narrow window to look through. Where it lead to? Again nowhere. It’s not about where the door leads you, it is only about what it means. It means lessons learned. It means you are dead and holds you in the birthing womb until you are ready to be born again. It means that God has you where he needs you to be to work on you. This hideous and ugly door means that you have a choice to make.

The choice is this. You can either a) keep living your life the way you have and accept the fate that will come from it, or b) make a change that will reverberate through every other change that you will make from this day to every day beyond it to live different. This is so much easier to say than to actually do. Ecclesiastes 11:8 tells us to rejoice in each day that we are given and remember the dark days for we will see many of them. These days come to temper us and strengthen us.  Ecclesiastes also tells us this in which I will leave you with: “Remove sorrow from your heart, and put away pain from your flesh…” for it is all Meaningless. Live life and enjoy it. Remember to take time out of your busy schedule to actually live life. Have fun; enjoy your partner, your family and yourself.