One man's testimony of Salvation and Life in the Jesus Freaks movement

I hope this brother doesn't mind that I commandeered his post for my blog. If he comes by and sees it and wants me to give his identity and where I got it I'll do that, but for now I just loved this testimony and wanted to put it "out there." It's in the context of a thread about how the church should deal with single mothers who come to faith.

It fits what little I've known about the Jesus movement, much from Keith Green's story, who got saved during that same time and became well known as the author and singer of many Christian songs. Green followed the command to love brothers and sisters in Christ by buying houses in which many homeless hippies who came to the Lord could be sheltered.

This man's story has a similar spirit. His name is "Brother Tom:"

I was saved out of the hippie movement,and all of the entrapment's of it, into the Jesus People movement. There was a day when Salvation happened all around us, every single day. It was a rare day, when someone was not saved. We baptized once a month in the nearby river..[ Russian River ]..and often had 20-30 confessors of faith.

We carried, and read our bibles everywhere, and wore them out. When people got saved, there was nothing in between them and God. The Holy Spirit entered them visibly, and they became radiant with a holy glow, and they smiled with joy and love toward one another. They had really been born again from above the second time.

The depravity in us before our salvation was no less, for sure, than those today, nor the wounds of sin among us no less severe than today. We were a sick mess, and after being born again, we were healed and delivered of our sicknesses.

Issues like this were trivial, and very common...with most all of us coming out of free love ideas that was founded on immorality as a life-style. There were lots and lots of single mothers in our church.

Almost every one, over the years, got married off, and went on as happy Christian moms. I guess what I'm saying, is that we never worried about figuring it out; We just did it in a very normal and common fashion; loved our brothers and sisters...and in a worshipping church...we all got healed up. God provided, it seemed, for everyone.

Back then, there were "Sisters houses", where perhaps 3 or 4 sisters lived , and some with children. Everybody got a job...and paid rent, and chipped in with the kids. I adapted a family of five boys, and one girl, living with their single mother.

I was single, and had a good job, working with my hands. I cared for those boys, took them fishing at the Ocean, took them out about every weekend, and provided extra's for them, in everyday needs. This went on for several years. I never thought twice about it, or that I was doing some special deed..I wanted to.

Today, these men now, still have respect for me..and made it through into manhood without too much craziness. It was always a joy for me to be there.

This was born out of Community. The Church [ local community [ always precedes the Meeting. Otherwise, you have a dysfunctional Body; usually wrapped up into the divisions of a Priest/pulpit ---Pew/congregation type mindset, and never, ever develop a family, a functioning many membered body, that edifies itself in love.

Life flows through this body that meets house to house, and breaks bread together, devoid of the ecclesiastical control , or respect that the religious live by. I have written in my Bible, that RELIGION KILLS!...and the solution to matters like these will never come to us in the current Clergy/Laity model, as neither will Revival...no matter how much you preach about it.

A healed Church, which is what we are talking about here, is one where Faith works by love, and my experiences in this church that brought life all came from a natural flow of loving one another with Christ Jesus in our midst as Lord....not a program or a defining system of ministry.

One day God will pour Himself upon us again, those who really want Him, and we will become a body again, of equal brothers and sisters, unto the very least of the brethren, and again issues like the single mom ministry will just fall in place, naturally, because they are loved, and worth it.....and no man or woman will ever be judged after their old nature or sins...but as New Creatures! Hallelujah!

A Christian Worldview the result of the Christian work of being salt and light

If only the Lord might give us revival across the nation it wouldn't be long before a Christian worldview was reconstructed. There's always a question how much can be accomplished by purely intellectual means -- even through the sanctified intellect of born-again Christians. But we ARE to be salt and light to the culture so it's hard to go along with some who advocate just leaving it all alone while these worldly and pagan views that are dominating the world today are not only bringing about God's judgments on this earth but dragging millions to a hellish eternity. At the very least there are Christians who are saved but who nevertheless accept ideas that contradict a Christian worldview, and it has to be important to shine some light on that problem.

I've been reading in an older book about Christian Worldview, 7 Men Who Rule the World from the Grave by Dave Breese, which discusses the effect of seven thinkers on today's cultural climate: Darwin of course, Marx of course, Julius Wellhausen, Freud, John Dewey, John Maynard Keynes, and Soren Kierkegaard. Brannon Howse of Worldview Weekend has also written a book, Grave Influence, that uses much of Breese's thinking and expands the list of influential anti-Christians to 21, and I suppose more could be added.

Christians just ARE influenced by the thinking of such men as it's been diffused throughout the culture over the last century or so. I don't think we can ignore it and hope to say anything very effective against it. I guess we could take the position that our job is simply to make spiritually strong Christians, hope for revival, and leave the culture to itself. Breese on the other hand wants to see Christians become educated to answer the culture, although in the following example revival played a big part:

History teaches us that a single strong voice for God in a leaderless generation can be effective. Historians agree that the revivals of John and Charles Wesley in England did save England from the terrors of the French Revolution. Surely the single voice of Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms liberated northern Germany, then England, then major portions of the world from incarceration behind the purple curtain of Rome. Liberalism in America was impeded in some places and stopped outright in others by simple fundamentalist preachers who spoke strongly for the truth of God.[p.230]

He believes that all of us need to be educated for this purpose:

Lenin himself, speaking of the Communist revolution in Russia, said that it could have been defeated by a hundred purposeful people in St. Petersburg who knew what they were doing. One effective debater, or even an intelligent Christian conversationalist, might have stopped Rousseau and his nonsensical arguments in one evening in the salons of Paris. By so doing, he might have prevented the French Revolution.

And:

Keynesian economics, with its assertion that government is God, might have died aborning had there been a Christian position on government and global economics ready to meet it.[231]

And:

Let is also note that the anti-Christian tides of thought prevailed in no small measure because the church had lost even its own message. Across the world Christians are often remiss, not only in not presenting position papers on global problems but also in not presenting the gospel.[231]

Crash Courses available on Christian Worldview

In the previous post I mention that we've lost our Christian worldview, which means western culture is now laboring under something else, a sort of pagan secular conglomerate with false tones of quasi-Christianity, which is exemplified in the examples I gave. We did once have a coherent consistent Christian worldview, and so did Europe. Not perfect, not unchallenged, but dominant, coherent and consistent. Its loss is part of the judgment western nations are under.

In recent years some ministries have sprung up with the intent of identifying the Christian worldview for the sake of Christians who are also losing it under the onslaught of the world, the flesh and the devil. I just want to point to them in this post and maybe later discuss them.

The Truth Project which is taught by Del Tackett and put out on DVDs by Focus on the Family is a twelve-part seminar style teaching that systematically addresses all the elements of society explaining the Christian view of that element and the pagan worldview that has been supplanting it. My brother who is a fairly new Christian fell in love with this training, found it incredibly eye-opening and hopes to find time to teach it himself when he retires next year. Here's the website

The other major ministry devoted to teaching a Christian worldview that I'm aware of is Brannon Howse's Worldview Weekend. He offers courses that cover the material systematically but on his website you find discussions of separate elements in no particular order, which may fail to get across that there is such a thing as a consistent systematic Christian worldview. Here's the link to the main site.

He does have a Christian Worldview test you can take, however, which may be the most concentrated way to get a sense of what is meant by a Christian worldview, at this link. (I passed with "flying colors" as they say, I don't remember if it was with a perfect score, it's been a while, but near-perfect anyway).

The sadness of misplaced compassion that is destroying America

Somebody posted this video on one of my "favorite" worldly politically correct websites, a Republican Representative giving her view of the gay marriage issue in very emotional politically correct terms. How she wouldn't want to deprive anyone of the kind of close relationship marriage can bring. Her daughter is a lesbian which must contribute much to her feelings on the subject.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CbmbdWK6338

I remember a Christian woman from some years ago who likewise embraced the idea of gay rights when her daughter turned out to be a lesbian.

This kind of thinking is very influential these days. We no longer have a Christian worldview shaping our once-Christian culture, even within the churches. Such questions are often decided based on feelings instead, and feelings such as this woman's are often misconstrued as compassion, even "Christian" compassion.

How are we to answer this? Christian opposition to gay marriage is treated by the world as a simple lack of compassion, even as anti-Christian according to the popular notion of what a Christian is supposed to be, as "mean-spirited," as "hatred against love" as I saw it expressed today. When ill-taught Christians join the chorus it becomes very difficult to get the topic onto a genuinely Christian footing and make sense.

I realize that it does not help to get angry as I did in my previous post because this is a problem of worldviews and understanding and the majority of people have no way to understand WHY a Bible Christian would get angry, all they can do is think we're being mean.

Is there any way to explain this that would help? Probably not, but that's no reason not to make the effort.

First, there is a HUGE confusion these days on many issues between how God deals with individuals and how He deals with nations and government. This is a big problem in talking about how America is under judgment, which I keep trying to deal with on these blogs. If we say that 9/11 was God's judgment on America people get indignant about how we are "blaming the victims" when that is not the point at all. It's not about the victims, it's not about individuals, it's about the NATION.

The same problem comes up in discussing an issue such as the head covering for women as spelled out in 1 Corinthians 11:2-16. It's very hard to try to make a case for the head covering that doesn't get people upset thinking you're criticizing individual women for not covering their heads, failing at the most basic task of giving grace to others and generally being a legalistic Pharisee. Over and over you may find yourself having to say "But I DON'T think women who don't cover their heads are spiritually inferior," and "No, I am NOT speaking from my own feelings about this, much of what I'm saying actually contradicts my own personal feelings, I am simply speaking from what I understand the apostle Paul to be teaching." I keep being surprised to keep having to deal with this sort of misunderstanding but I guess I shouldn't be. Maybe there is no way to answer it effectively, but obviously it needs to be expected that people will mishear in this way because of worldly influences on our thinking, and this has to be regarded as a major impediment to getting across a Biblical position on it that needs some focused attention.

I may get more into the head covering issue soon because I've been discussing it on a forum recently, I bring it up here only because it has some features in common with our ongoing battle with the culture at large on issues such as gay marriage. The world thinks it's compassion and fairness toward women to allow them to have abortions. They can't seem to absorb the idea that the pregnancy represents an actual human being whose life must be taken in the service of such "compassion."

Likewise, the world thinks it's compassion toward homosexuals to treat them as exactly the same as heterosexuals and extend the rites of marriage to them. They can't seem to grasp the PURPOSE of marriage, which is to sanctify a union that is naturally or at least on principle able to produce offspring. They constantly misconstrue the objection that gay marriage "would destroy marriage" as a PERSONAL objection, like it's going to destroy MY personal marriage, unable to grasp that it's about marriage as a cultural institution that transcends all personal expressions of it, and that what would be destroyed is its cultural MEANING, a meaning that goes back to Creation through all time and all cultures. Apparently such an idea strikes them as too abstract and trivial to take seriously, compared with the much higher value they place on personal feelings and desires.

I watch all this with my teeth on edge, knowing that the nation is digging itself deeper and deeper into the grave by defying God's laws. So I talk about God's judgment coming against America, hoping that will get something across, only to find that the same kind of misunderstanding immediately clouds the issue. "Our compassionate good God would not do that," they say, "God doesn't cause suffering." This is of course why I think the revelations God gave Jonathan Cahn about 9/11 are so important -- which I've been writing about on Faith's Corner -- because they show in irrefutable literal physical facts that it IS God who brought about 9/11 and they teach WHY He did it -- the attitude of defiant independence from God and arrogant self-sufficiency -- and only if this is understood is there any hope of America seeing the light and repenting and thus avoiding the further horrors of further judgment from God. Now that IS God's compassion, showing us how to escape such sufferings. But so far few are listening that I'm aware of.

But America needs also to recognize the particular sins that have been digging us into the grave over the last few decades, the abortions in the tens of millions -- their blood crying out to God as the blood of Abel did -- the sexual sins of every type imaginable including the horrific notion of "freedom of pornography" and "freedom" for every kind of sin and deviation from God's law imaginable.

Truly the culture is in lemmings-to-the-sea mode, blithely tripping to its doom without a clue, thinking we're all making such "progress" in "freedom" when we're really stumbling around in the dark about to fall into the abyss, about to be consumed by terrible destruction, economic disaster, poverty, even starvation, violence from within and without, encroachment by enemies and aliens, because we're aggressively defying God's laws and putting in their place laws that actually reverse them, putting evil for good and good for evil.

And of course the trump card of the unbeliever is always that they don't believe in God and God's law anyway, that's just "religious" foolishness, any disasters have natural causes. Which may make some Christians feel like sinking back into a corner and covering our eyes while they invite their own destruction. Our wonderful powerhouse church seems to bave been deprived of all its power these days, as if there's a blockage in our fuel line from God.

Repentance does have to start with the church and the church isn't doing much in the direction of repenting either for our own deviations from God's rule. Christians who got saved out of this culture also subscribed to all its insanity before being saved, I certainly did, but once born again all that changes completely and now we ought to be able to say something relevant about it. Unfortunately the churches themselves have been falling for the craziness and need themselves to repent.

Yes, God CAN turn suffering and judgment to good purposes for Christians, opportunities to bring people to salvation, for instance, personal spiritual growth for instance, but let's not be naive -- this is not the easy way to bring that about. Judgment means the destruction of the way of life we've all become accustomed to and it's going to be hard to deal with physically, emotionally and spiritually -- for us for sure but more so for the poor unbelievers who have no way to understand any of it and no trust in God to support them, whom we must help when our own resources are lowest. Yes, we have His strength made stronger by our weakness -- if we have the spiritual sense to draw on it, and at the moment the churches aren't exactly spiritually alert.

So, the compassionate lady in the video is defending a position that can only bring doom to this country, just as those American leaders who pronounced the defiance of Isaiah 9:10 that God revealed to Jonathan Cahn were pronouncing God's sentence against America.

Is there any appeal from God's sentence? Is repentance possible at all? Will the churches finally wake up and repent for the sake of the nation? Is there any cure for this blindness or do we just have to sit back and helplessly watch it happen, watch Americans destroy themselves and the nation that once enjoyed great blessings from God?

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Later; Must add that sometimes I write on such subjects as if the most important thing were what is going to happen to the nation and not to individuals. This is due no doubt to what I said I keep encountering, the misreading of what does apply to the nation as applying to individuals instead. But it does also have to be recognized that saving individuals is more imporant than saving the nation. Saving them from an eternity of suffering for their sins, that is. This is all about sin, sins that are bringing the nation to destruction, but they first of all bring individuals to destruction. The misplaced compassion of the woman in the video is actually condemning her own daughter to death. She may have a wonderfully happy "marriage" with her lesbian partner but a miserable eternity because she was kept from the knowledge of salvation by Christ. Same for all the unfortunate women who have had abortions not regarding it as murder. They need to repent and be saved by Christ who died for them. God will judge the nation only on this earth; but He judges individuals for eternity.

The gay marriage "right" in California: another nail in the coffin being built for America

I gotta say that after a California court just decided today that a majority of the voters can't ban gay marriage (they forget that MAJORITY RULE is the constitutional standard and simply impose their own godless standard instead), I feel like doing an Elijah and praying for the state to dry up with no rain for three years.

No wonder the nation is under judgment. I still think Jonathan Cahn's revelations of 9/11 as indisputably irrefutably God's warning judgment to America ought to be sufficient to wake enough people up to save the nation (shouldn't take a majority. What was it, ten righteous for whom God said He'd save Sodom?), but it could be we've gone beyond His patience with us and I don't see anybody waking up anyway.

We actually think voting can possibly make a difference at this point? God's in charge of politics too and obviously He isn't in a mood to give us much hope there. Business as usual. All the way down to the grave, or Sharia Law or whatever is going to be our judgment.

Please listen to God's amazing revelations about 9/11 as His judgment warning to America

I've been writing about it at my Faith's Corner blog.

What is Political Correctness REALLY?

Buz, one of the Christian creationists at EvC is getting accused of being a racist. I haven't seen anything he's said that justifies that accusation myself, but it's typical of EvC political correctness to accuse Christians and conservatives of it.

But then along comes this poster who thinks it's BUZ who's being politically correct, completely reversing the actual meaning of the term. I've seen this mistake made elsewhere from time to time, so I figure I should do what I can to set the record straight.

The definition was given a decade or so ago by William Lind, and he continues to speak on the same subject. When I first read his classic piece on it I was impressed at how he'd explained my own experience and identified recognizable causes going back to the sixties where all that leftist caustic self-righteous rhetoric was first getting spewed. Yep, Cultural Marxism, it was part of the air I had to breathe in the sixties. Lind traces it back to WWI but it came to full flower in the 60s. Yep, it's designed to intimidate, to bully and force its own narrow perspective on the world, and that perspective is, in a nutshell, Whatever Will Destroy Western Civilization.

THIS is political correctness, Bill Lind's classic essay on the subject.

And here I found a video of him giving the same talk.

And here's a better video of the same material, using old news footage and interviews with relevant people.

Yep, accusing people OF racism -- or sexism or "bigotry" -- is political correctness. Excoriating people for opposing gay marriage is political correctness for instance, or illegal immigration -- that's racism according to them; or abortion -- that's hatred of women according to them. But it's always WHITE PEOPLE that get accused. There is no such thing as racism or bigotry otherwise, it's specifically a disease of white people according to Cultural Marxism (hear Lind out to the end); There is no such thing as "intolerance" if you're a leftist either, even though lefties are the most intolerant of all of anything that disagrees with their leftism; "intolerance" is specifically something only a conservative European white person can commit. The whole point of Cultural Marxism is to destroy Western Civilization, the work of "white people" (talk about your racism, THEY've got it in spades) and of course particularly the work of "Christianity" (despite the many other threads that contributed to Western Civilization.)

They are knocking themselves out inventing accusations of poor old Buz at EvC. Whatever he says they find some way to turn into racism or religious intolerance or something. He contributes to black causes? It's racist of him to mention that they are "black" at all. He contributes to Voice of the Martyrs that works on behalf of Christians of all races across the world. That's "religious intolerance" because they work for Christians. Never mind that VOM was conceived as an aid to Christian martyrs and it makes no sense to ask them to do something else. The fact that the lefties are viciously intolerant of Buz's views is of no concern to them -- catch crashfrog doing the PC number against him, he's got it down to a science of the most caustic possible language in the service of his self-righteousness. Because they KNOW they are RIGHT. Cultural Marxism says so. And they don't even know they've been propagandized and are just spouting the party line and bringing down what was for the most part their own civilization on their own heads.

And so on. It's all about EXCORIATING people from a position of LEFTIST self-righteousness. (Or writing laws against them and putting them in prison for it, or cutting off their heads or whatnot). EvC is amazing in its fidelity to the idiom. (One could of course point out the connection between leftism and evolutionism, and atheism too for that matter, as they're blind to those connections too, and trying to do that will get you quite a bracing blast of righteous indignation).

Not many posts go by there these days before somebody is up on his leftist high horse blasting some poor hapless conservative or Christian in the most caustic tones of high and mighty righteousness for violating one of the tenets of PC.

Here's what this very confused poster had to say:

To be fair, buz is just being politically correct. And this is exactly the reason I am so opposed to this politically correct culture that we've evolved into. It's ok to be racist, bigot, homophobic, sexist, etc. as long as you put your words in a politically correct phrasing. Look at all the republican candidates. They are a bunch of racists and bigots, but since they are also masters of political correctness, they are presidential candidates.

No no no, you've got it all backwards, being racist, bigoted, homophobic or sexist, whether covertly or overtly, is NOT political correctness. DENOUNCING people for being racist, bigoted, homophobic or sexist is PC. In fact this very paragraph is a masterpiece of PC. And of course 999 out of 1000 times the terms don't fit the accused at all, they're just part of the PC Conformist bag the Left is determined to hang around the necks of conservatives. Not ONE of the Republican candidates deserves any of those epithets, and neither does Buz, but the Thought Police that enforce the PC codes are determined to pillory them for violating those codes. That's where we've come in America -- and the West in general -- today.

So read Bill Lind, and listen to him. If you're one of the EvC type -- duped by the Cultural Marxists and now propagandizing their message -- you won't like it at all, but the fact remains that it's YOU who are PC, and Christians and conservatives are not, we are the victims of PC, of Leftist-minded bullies and totalitarians. That's just the facts of the matter, that's the history of the matter, try as you might to rewrite it to suit yourself.

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Who are the real racists these days? The people who come up with stuff like Political Correctness. The Frankfurt School was out to get the White Race (racism there, right? Absolutely but not according to the inventors of PC who made the White Race the ONLY race capable of racism by definition. Clever eh?). Their reason was their fear of anti-semitism but they weren't waiting around to see if any real anti-semitism was going to come out of America, or out of post-Nazi Europe, they were going to make sure the white race (racism, again) and the culture it had built collapsed -- which has just about been achieved.

Susan Sontag wasn't a member of the Frankfurt School but she had the same mentality: As Wikipedia put it:

Sontag drew critism for writing in the 1967 Partisan Review that:

"Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history."[21]

According to journalist Christopher Hitchens, Sontag later recanted this statement, saying that "it slandered cancer patients".[22]

It's PC to hate the WHITE race. That's the only racism going down these days.