Andrew Wommack and Faith Like A Grain of Mustard Seed

My husband and I have been followers of Andrew Wommack for several years.  It is apparently not popular to follow him and I get some hate emails from even mentioning him in my blog!  However, that won’t deter me from speaking about him.  I have found his teachings to be simple and provide a wealth of information.  While I’m still a fairly new Christian, the things that Andrew Wommack teaches were even unknown to my husband who has been a Christian for over 4 decades.  Andrew’s simple teachings have opened our eyes to the TRUTH that the devil has wanted to remain hidden for so long.

But make no mistake, even now we struggle with some of the teachings.  What we are finding is this;   Andrew is here to teach the simplest form of these truths.  He is a good place to start;  a sort of “jumping off” point.  Christians should always study the Bible on their own and with others.  And while the new information Andrew has shown us is invaluable, there is still  more to the story.  Do I doubt the Lord answers every prayer, every time as Andrew says?  NOPE.  I believe that 100%.  Then WHY are all my prayers not being answered?  Andrew says it’s “unbelief” or maybe because an improper request was made, or maybe even something else that can’t be guessed.  But whatever the reason, he is right.  There IS more… there IS something else.  And only the Lord can tell us what or why.

We have believed, and seen our prayer answered just hours later.  We were having a less than normal month in our otherwise successful business.  Our business is such that certain months are slower than others.  So we prayed for grocery money.  It was an actual “need”.  My husband was heading off to a meeting and they were doing a raffle.  And a couple hours later, he came home with money in his pocket.  He had 2 winnings actually, which more showed the Lord’s hand in it!  He first won a “draw” and then when he drew, he won the pot!  Glory to God!  We praised and praised.  But truth be told, we both somehow knew he was coming home with that money.  We felt it in our spirits.  But this does not happen every time we make a request to God.  We KNOW that we have faith and belief and do not waver from it.  We KNOW that, just as Andrew Wommack teaches, the Lord DOES answer every prayer, every time, so long as it is appropriate.  But something else is keeping prayers from being answered.  I have asked the Lord about this and been receiving some answers just recently.  

I’ve been wanting to know why the healing I am trying to get is not happening.  I have struggled with obesity for many years.  I am more active than most women I know and eat normal meals.  I don’t sit my butt on a sofa all day or eat enough food for 7 people.  I KNOW in my spirit this is a metabolism or similarly related health issue I inherited through iniquity (my mother has it, other women in the family too.)  And the Lord showed me it was because of my heart-attitude.  I’ve long wanted healing from obesity.  The Lord showed me that the healing I wanted was for my outward appearance and not because of medical issues.  And He is right!  I care more about how I look and how others see me, and the health needs are secondary at best.  I need to get my heart right and THEN the healing will come.  The Lord SHOWED me this.  That isn’t something Andrew Wommack can teach you.  Andrew teaches that there are reasons you aren’t getting your healing, but he can’t show you every possible scenario.  Only the LORD can show you what is preventing your prayer from being answered!  And I suspect that oftentimes, it is because of demonic intervention.

I can give you a perfect example on this from Daniel.  In Daniel 9:20-21, Daniel says specifically that while he was STILL in the middle of his prayer, an angel of the Lord, Gabriel, showed up with an answer to it.  He had not even finished praying and it was answered.  However, then in Daniel 10:12-14, his prayer request comes about very differently.  He waits 3 weeks for it to be answered.  The angel then comes and says that he was detained by the “King of Persia” and another angel, Michael, had to come and help him.  If you’ve been studying your Bible you know that “King of Persia” is a reference used for a demon or the devil himself.  In effect, the devil kept the prayer from being answered.  The Bible does not tell us why.  It would seem that when the devil believes he can keep a prayer from being answered, he will.  The verse also states that the angel said “Since the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard.”  It’s clear that the angel is saying that from the second He heard the prayer, the Lord answered it and it was only delayed because of demonic intervention.  And that the angel dispatched by God had to fight with this demon for so long that another angel had to jump in and help.  Clearly, there is MUCH going on “behind the scenes” that we will never see while on this planet.  This is another area where FAITH comes in!

The bottom line is that if you don’t know why your prayers are not being answered, you have to look to the Lord for the answers.

I’ll give you another example the Lord shared with me recently.  I speak to the planet and other things quite often.  I have FAITH that what I command will be done.  I believe the Bible where Jesus says:  “…Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”   ~Matthew 17:20

I have a couple examples of this.  I have a terrible fear of wasps and they seek me out in their demonic-like fashion.  When doing yard work, I am harassed to an extent that isn’t normal.  So when I walk out the door, I always speak to the bugs and tell them that they WILL stay away from me.  Whatever they need to do, they can do away from me and my yard.  Without fail, they do exactly as I say.  One day, I saw something like a large hornet coming at me at top speed and without even thinking, I started speaking in tongues straight at it and just before it ran directly into me, it veered off in a most unearthly manner and disappeared.  I use this command of the planet, so to speak, in other ways as well.  About a month ago, I spoke to the Earth and told it to snow.  We haven’t seen much snow this season and it’s something I love and was really missing it!  The snow came but not exactly as I spoke it.  When I thought on it, the Lord put it on my heart that the reason it didn’t happen the way I commanded was that my request was self-serving.  He reminded me of the stray cats we feed and asked what I thought of them having to walk a long way in cold, wet snow to get to the food.  And what about people that have car or personal accidents due to snow?  His communication was simple;  my request for snow was selfish and served no godly purpose.   Boy, did I feel dumb after that, albeit wiser now. 

In conclusion, I believe that Andrew Wommack is NOT wrong.  The advice he gives and his interpretations of the Bible are spot on.  In my opinion and my own experience, Andrew is trying to get people on the right path.  He’s giving advice that IS simple.  Now, that being said, it’s NOT ALWAYS *that* simple.  Sometimes there is demonic intervention or a prayer that was ungodly, or maybe an open door in your life due to sin.  There are too many reasons to count as to why your specific prayer may not be answered.  But just as Andrew says, if your prayer is not answered, there’s a reason for it.  It’s up to YOU to find the reason, and NOT up to the Lord to work around it!

This Christian Fat Girl is Using the Lord’s Help to Overcome Obesity…

Well friends, it’s been a crazy couple of months. I can’t even begin to tell you how the Lord is moving in my life. We live in very interesting times, with a lot of people saying that the “end times” are here, and I don’t disagree with them. But with all the new information that the Lord has shown me lately, He actually has put it on my heart to write about something else… being overweight and battling obesity.

All my life I have struggled with my weight. As a kid, I seemed to be hungry ALL the time, and us kids played outside DAILY back then! With all the activity, I still wonder why I struggled with my weight. I remember always telling my mother how hungry I was and she let us kids eat whatever we wanted from the kitchen, not really supervising or proportioning things for us. I’m sure that had some impact on my chubbiness. But, I know now that it is a demon causing me this trouble for all these years.

As an adult, these ‘hunger’ and ‘craving’ problems just got worse and worse. When I starved myself, I didn’t gain one ounce. But as soon as I even tried to eat normally, even if I watched what I ate and tried to eat right, I would start rapidly gaining weight. No diet ever worked long-term except the one where I was a slave for many years to counting calories, exercising vigorously and never eating out… ever. And for those that think this is a medical issue, it isn’t. I have had blood work done off and on over the past 20 years and there is absolutely nothing wrong with my thyroid or whatever else might be a cause of weight gain. Every time a new doctor would say that I might have this condition or that condition, my blood work never showed it and therefore I’m told, nothing is wrong with me. And when I look at what I eat, and how much I eat, in a single day, most days I don’t come close to what I see others eat!

In the last 25+ years, I’ve done everything from weight loss clinics, diet pills, limiting what foods I could eat, counting calories every day for years and even brainwashing myself to believe that certain things would or wouldn’t happen if I was overweight… just to keep myself from eating, to keep myself thin. In this area of my life, it has been a miserable existence. I would end up sacrificing one unhealthy thing for another so no true happiness or accomplishment was ever made. Another tell-tale sign I was dealing with something demonic. But to be fair, I was not Born-Again at this time, so I had no idea that the true cause of my troubles was satan.

ALL my life, from every possible source, I have been told that I am fat and I should lose weight, and if I can’t, it’s ALL my own fault for not having willpower. Even in a society as medically advanced, and supposedly TOLERANT of people’s problems, food addiction/obesity is still looked down upon as something YOU did to yourself and you’re supposed to starve yourself and be skinny like the rest of us. And what hypocrisy it is! In today’s society so many believe that drug addiction, gambling addiction, alcohol addiction, etc. are DISEASES, but somehow my obesity… considered by most to be a FOOD ADDICTION… is NOT a disease? If you are addicted to alcohol, you are sick but if you’re addicted to food you lack willpower and are looked down upon? Excuse me but that has got to be the most hypocritical thing I ever heard!

Now that I’m finished ranting, I’ll get to the meat of this post. No pun intended. If you follow my blogs, you know that I am a huge follower of Christian teacher Andrew Wommack. I really needed some guidance about what I should be doing at this point in my life concerning my life-long weight problems. I wasn’t sure if I needed deliverance from a food demon or I should be laying hands on my body and healing it of obesity, or what about iniquities inherent in my family? So I wrote to Andrew’s ministry and got back a very eye-opening response! It was a very long and detailed message, including scriptures to back up the message. Due to it’s length, I won’t post the entire thing here but instead I will highlight a few key points. The first one being that Andrew does not believe we should impose a ‘law’ on ourselves concerning our diet and what foods we eat. Just like what happened to me, the ‘law’ then makes us a slave to it. While Andrew does say that we need to have common sense and eat as wisely as we are able to, he also recommends “eating by faith.”

It says in part… “If our faith for healing is in food, then we are submitting to natural sources for our health and we will live or die according to those natural things. If we eat by faith (true faith), blessing each thing that we eat and receiving it with gladness, knowing that God is our healer and the Word is medicine to our flesh, then we are free from a new dietary religious bondage. We can easily see if our eating is by faith or not by the results. Health and weight problems would indicate that we aren’t eating by faith.”

So the end result is that my husband and I have started praising God and thanking him for everything we put into our bodies, even water, and asking that the food be a blessing to our bodies, in Jesus’ name. In the short amount of time we have been doing that, we have seen a great difference in how the food makes us feel. I didn’t say anything to my husband at first, but some of the foods we ate tasted different to me, and they even FELT different once inside my stomach! When I finally mentioned this in passing to my husband, he stopped me and said, “Wow I was feeling that way too but thought it was just me!” So we have discovered that “eating by true faith” is all that was needed all along. I feel set free from my obesity and hope to update everyone in the coming months to the numerous, positive changes that occur in my body!

The Answer To Each And Every Question is JESUS

As soon as I woke up this morning, I knew the Lord wanted me to write this post!  This is something my husband and I discussed (again) recently.  Politics and Religion.  Now, if you think that I’ve blogged about this before, then you are right.  You can read that post here.

The Lord has been wanting me to reiterate what I already said, so here goes.  In the news as of late, there is all kinds of political talk, contraception and abortion talk, socialism and I could go on and on.

But you don’t have to argue your point about the evils of abortion;  you don’t have to argue your point about how wrong and hurtful bringing socialism into our country will be;  and you don’t even have to argue your point about how evil, it is to attack, rape and murder people because your religion allows for it (ya Islam says it’s okay.)

The Lord has told me that every breath you spend trying to argue or convince someone to see your side… to see that you speak the truth… are ALL wasted breaths.

Each and every thing, whether it’s viewed as political, societal, economical, etc. is still ALL ABOUT THE SAME THING;  RELIGION.

We ARE, in fact, in a religious war.  It’s NOT a race war… it’s NOT a war of cultures…  But it IS a war of beliefs, what we commonly and generically call ‘religion’.

The Lord said that you need not concern yourselves with trying to change any person or group of persons from the way they are thinking.  Without the Lord in their lives, they are open to each and every evil work the devil will use them for.  So all your arguing or gentle persuasion of truth will have ZERO effect on them, and will probably have the opposite effect of enraging their demons to the point of anger or worse.

The Lord told me specifically that once they find their way to Jesus, their evil ‘beliefs’ in abortion, socialism, etc. will all CHANGE by default.

The ONLY ways you can help those types of people is to pray for them to receive Jesus as their Lord and Savior or help bring them to Jesus yourself.  But whatever the route, they need the Lord!

Until they find their way to the Lord, you will NOT be able to change their minds.  Their minds are so clouded by the devil’s deceit and lies, only Jesus’ light will be able to penetrate it so they can see TRUTH.

I urge you all to pray DAILY for those on the planet that do not yet know Jesus.  It is the only way we will have a good future for our children!

Communication, Children and Evil Ex-Spouses

Well, something came up with my husband’s x-wife and through it, the Lord has put it in my heart to write a new post!

The situation that came up is a repeat of something I still cannot understand fully.  My husband’s X-wife is one of those people who often do and say things that are just plain wrong, and many times downright evil.  In my humble opinion, I would classify most as ‘evil acts.’  That is the honest truth.  She does and says things that most people do not agree with.  BUT, no one –and I mean no one– in her life ever tells her that her actions are wrong.  People either go along with whatever evil plans she has, or just nod politely, listening to her but never saying anything.

The people in her life that don’t speak up and tell her she is acting in an evil manner are clearly those who fall in the category of poor and/or fearful communicators.  I’m sure that some are exactly like she is and do their own evil things, so of course they would agree with her.  But I know MANY really good people, some who claim to be Christian, that never speak out when she acts in an evil manner.  I realize I wrote about this Fear of Communication in my last post.  If you missed it, check it out here before reading any further.  The Fear of Communication is a big one these days, so I believe the Lord has put it on my heart, yet again, because it is really important!

So going back to my husband’s X…  The only explanation I have for how a person can get away for so long with not one single person telling them the TRUTH, must be that she, whether consciously or unconsciously, has surrounded herself with people that wouldn’t.  I am a truth-teller ALWAYS and it’s been my experience that the vast majority of people don’t want truth.  They might SAY they want truth, but only if it doesn’t hurt their feelings or go against what they really want or [insert many other ridiculous reasons here].  So in the end, regardless of their hyperbole, it ends up being that they really don’t want to hear truth.

It is only recently that my husband has even dared to start speaking truth with his X-wife.  After reading Andrew Wommack’s January 2012 newsletter where he firmly states that “You do not have the right to reject the Truth for another person”, and that if you do not speak up, you too are guilty of the sin (me paraphrasing), he has started to come around and understand that the Lord WANTS us to call people out when they are acting wrong.  My husband has always ‘feared’ his X-wife, even when they were married, because of what she ‘might’ do.  Her angry outbursts he has seen affect his children negatively, and he tried to avoid it at all cost.  Now long after the divorce, he is still afraid that she will take things out on the kids and fears saying anything to her.  I’ve been trying to teach him that if he communicates properly with her, he need NOT ‘fear’ what she will do.  If he presents her with the truth and she takes it out on the kids, then it’s time to get fully custody of ALL the children and she can answer to God for her evil actions.  He has spent a few years still ‘fearing’ this idea at all.  He wants to play ‘nice’ and ‘pretend’ to get along with her by just not speaking up.  But when she’s not feeding the children properly or caring for them, it’s time to speak up and/or take the children!  If you do not, then you are letting the demon of fear RULE YOU and I KNOW God would not agree with that!

About 4 months ago, we had to switch out the 14 year who lived with us for the 10 year old who lived with his mom.  He has been having trouble for awhile.  He’s been caught cursing, writing nasty things on the walls of his bedroom, getting into trouble at school, and the list goes on.  He wanted to support a friend of his being bullied at school and took a ‘shiv’ to school that he made.  Well, of course he was caught and the school was going to expel him.  We intervened and quickly had to switch out the boys.  This upset the 14 year who did NOT want to live with his mother, but with the 10 year old in trouble, we had no choice.  I mean, he had one foot in the door to Juvenile Detention, and next stop is jail!  The X-wife will not give us custody of both boys because she worries about having to pay child support to us.  She doesn’t want whats best for her children, she see only dollar signs.  Saying she is selfish and only self-serving is actually too nice a definition.  Seriously.  But since coming to live with us, the 10 year old has profoundly changed.  He is a different child completely.  He is happy, well-adjusted, hardly ever does anything wrong, and is a complete joy to be with.  It is CLEAR to us, the extended family and even the officials at this new school, that he NEEDED out of his mother’s home.  She and the step-dad have caused this boy damage that we are still working to reverse every day.  His emotional damage runs deep.  There is so much more I could go into to provide further evidence of the mother’s lack of caring for her children, but I will stop so as not to shock you with details, that will make you want to hurt her as much as I do sometimes.  (I try to be Christian always, but with some people it is so difficult…)

We took the 10 year old, who just turned 11, to the doctor for a check-up.  In the 4+ months since his last visit, he grew a full 1″ and gained 25 pounds.  This all happened while he’s been with us.  He is getting proper nutrition and we know that is the reason for the growth spurt.  The X-wife is all-consumed with the children being ‘fat’ (probably because she is fat herself) and we do not believe she was feeding him properly.  In the past 2 years, I cannot count the number of times the kids would come to our house, either STILL hungry after eating at her house or having not been fed at all by their mother!  Apparently, she’s been limiting their portions, not giving them enough or not bothering to feed them.  (I secretly believe that she’s too busy spending her money on herself and her needs to keep proper groceries in the house for the children.  Based on the behavior the 10 year showed when he came to live with us, this makes sense.  He would not want to eat cereal or drink milk so he could ‘save’ it for school days.  I had to tell him that if we run out, we WILL get more right away and he didn’t have so ‘save’ anything.  Some things like this he said really broke my heart!)

So my husband did something, on his own, that I never would think he could do.  He sent an email to his X telling her of how much the 10 year old has grown and that he didn’t think she was feeding him enough.  She sent back an email attacking him, as per her usual behavior, and kept calling the 10 year old ‘fat’ in the email.  My husband emailed back a very short and to the point email basically telling her that the boy is NOT fat, he is getting proper nutrition now which is what caused the growth spurt, and told her all she cares about is money, she doesn’t care how HER actions affect others, and that he will no longer keep silent when he sees something wrong!  WOW!   I was so PROUD of him I almost burst!  Finally, after 15+ years of knowing this woman, he was finally seeing her evil ways and speaking out against them.  I know that the Lord was proud of him too!

She sent a huge, long email to not only my husband but also to his mother.  All of us agreed, this email was her ‘pity party’.  Sentences upon sentences, over and over and over again, about she ‘tried’ to do this and ‘tried’ to do that but nothing is good enough for us.   The ACTUAL TRUTH is that if she has tried ANYTHING for more than one day, she would have had success.  We work with the boy every day, and even the simple act of praying with him before bedtime, means EVERYTHING in the world to him.  If she cared… if she ‘tried’… she would have had the wonderful boy that we have now.  A secondary email she sent after the big one was absent pity, since she saw that tactic wouldn’t work on my husband any longer, and was replaced with anger and pointing out how ‘wrong’ he was.  She even attacked me while speaking of herself and the step-dad glowingly.  She has let her demons completely rule her.  She REJECTED THE TRUTH my husband shared with her and refuses to accept any of it.

But there’s a big difference… My husband gave her the truth about how she has hurt the children, that she is all consumed with money, and her actions affect others.  She flat-out rejected this truth and will apparently be continuing on with her evil ways.  However, this time, my husband does not ‘share in her sin’ and that makes all the difference to the Lord.  I am so proud of him!

GOD REACHES OUT TO EVERYONE, AND THE SIN OF OMISSION…

I know it’s been awhile since my last post.  I only post when the Lord puts something on my heart to write.  And so a couple of things have come up recently, again and again, urging me to talk about it. The point of topic for the first half of this post is concerning:

THE SIN OF OMISSION 

I’ve had several occasions come up where people were watching others do something they know is wrong but saying nothing, and in some instances, even going along with it.  Every time this came up, I was reminded that the Lord does not like someone watching another do wrong, and making no effort to speak up or try to stop it, or worse.. actually going along with it!  This is commonly referred to as “The Sin of Omission.”  Regardless of whether YOUR actions are defined as sin, they become sin for you because you didn’t do what was RIGHT.

“If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.”  ~James  4:17 (NIV)

“If anyone sins because they do not speak up when they hear a public charge to testify regarding something they have seen or learned about, they will be held responsible.”  ~Leviticus 5:1  (NIV)

It is clear, then, if you go along with someone in their sin, you have sinned as well.  For example, if you know of someone who robbed a bank and you do not report them to the police, or if you participate in hiding them or spending the money they’ve stolen, then it is the same as if you robbed the bank also.  You too are guilty of the sin for not telling them they are wrong for stealing, for not reporting it to authorities and for going along with it.

I’ve seen some blogs that say you’re not supposed to speak up and tell people they are wrong because you then would be ‘judging’ them.  WRONG.  Jesus pointed out bad behaviors ALL the time.  He didn’t judge them… he tried to correct them in their evil ways and turn them toward God.  This is similar to how I treat my kids.  I’m not ‘judging’ them when I see them doing something wrong, but I will point out the bad behavior and institute punishment if necessary.  Judging someone and offering corrective instruction are two VERY different things.

              

It’s interesting that some people get stuck on the 10 Commandments as the ONLY sins.  If they just read their Bible, they would see that doing the right thing is godly and ANY TIME you do the wrong thing, it is ungodly and therefore, a sin.  I do believe that most ungodly people are always looking for justifications for their actions.  As long as they can justify in their minds, or to others, why they sinned, they will live guilt-free.  I’ve even seen some that purposefully find others who agree with their sinful justifications and get those people to also go along with them to FURTHER the justification.  The problem with that is that God SEES everything you do and, I promise you, He’s NOT buying your bullshit justifications.  One day you WILL stand before Him and will see clearly all the sin you have committed.  So it just astounds me that anyone can live that way knowing what they do is wrong.  I don’t know… I guess I was just raised better than that.

GOD REACHES OUT TO EVERY PERSON ON EARTH

I was raised in a family that celebrated Easter and Christmas but we were not taught anything about Christianity, or any religion for that matter.  I would hear talk of God and Jesus and I would ask questions.  My parents would politely respond but they didn’t go into any great detail because, frankly, they didn’t know themselves.  The only thing I knew for certain was that my father thought it was all nonsense, and my mother had stopped believing in God when she was a small child and her grandmother died.  She prayed for her to live but she didn’t, and then she blamed God for taking her grandmother away.  So even though I didn’t know much of anything, I still started praying to God.  I don’t remember when it started but I was doing it nearly every night by the time I was 10 or 11 years old.  I had questions who no answers, so I talked to God about them.  By the age of 12, I was being bullied at school and relied heavily on God to get me through it.  I came out of it changed and a much stronger person, thanks to the Lord!  He was there to help me, where my parent’s failed me.

The point to all that is this;  I didn’t have to be ‘taught’ about God or Jesus.  The Holy Spirit inside me was guiding me to Him!  God reaches out to EVERY SINGLE PERSON on the face of the earth.  Some refer to it as ‘the still, small voice’ and the ungodly dismiss it as their own conscience, their own thoughts. (There is a difference and if you develop a relationship with the Lord, you will know the difference!)

In Romans 1:18-32, Paul is speaking to the gentiles about God and sin, and he is clear that everyone on the earth KNOWS God.  In my own experience, that is very true considering the fact I was taught nothing about Christianity but even as a small child, I FELT GOD’s presence inside me!  There is no other explanation for it.  What Paul says is true!  Here is an excerpt, but I encourage you all to open your Bibles and read it in its entirety:

“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.  For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”   ~Romans 1:18-20

If someone tells me that they are not Christian and they don’t know God, or that they only believe in [insert false gods here], I know one thing for certain:  they have turned their backs on the Lord.  The Holy Spirit is inside everyone, trying to get a message through.  You can CHOOSE to listen or ignore it but the Bible is clear:  PEOPLE ARE WITHOUT EXCUSE.  Come judgement day, you will NOT be able to tell God that ‘you didn’t know’ or that He ‘never showed Himself to you’, or some other such nonsense.  At that time, it will be too late for you.

Politics and Religion… Hypocrisy and Integrity

My grandfather used to say “don’t talk about religion or politics unless you WANT to start a fight with somebody.” I talk about religion all the time and my husband talks politics all the time, so I guess we’ve got the taboo topics well covered. You already know we are Christian, the title of the blog gives that away, but we are also Conservative. You might think the title gives that away too, but you can’t be really be sure.  I’ll talk more about that later…

I have, for years now, seen my husband talking in political forums on the Internet, and fighting with others about his political beliefs. I also have been telling him, for years, that it’s a waste of his time. All it does is get him worked up, angry and upset, over nothing. He hasn’t ‘converted’ anyone to his way of thinking. Everyone just fights and tries to get others to change to his/her point of view, and none do. All he did was hurt himself by letting the devil get under his skin to the point of anger.

One day recently, I was just standing in the kitchen and he had just commented on someone’s post in the forum, and I was suddenly hit with the truth. I said, “the Lord just informed me that you are wasting your time because it’s not really about politics, it’s really about religion.”  The Lord basically said that if you can bring someone to Jesus, thus changing their religious views, then their politics will change too.  He wanted me to remind my husband, yet again, that his time is better spent talking about the Lord with others, than talking about their politics.  And it makes perfect sense considering you’d be hard-pressed to find an atheist or buddhist, etc. that has a Conservative way of thinking because they are not Christian.

Now, before a bunch of you start writing me and proving me wrong, I admit that everything has variables. There are always some that ‘don’t fit the mold’ and I acknowledge that. BUT… and this is a BIG BUT… Hypocrisy plays a huge role here as well. Let me explain…

I know some people who claim to be Christian and also say they are Democrats. Sounds like they ‘don’t fit the mold’ of the Conservative Christian,right?  Well, that is, until you go deeper and find out that they rarely attend church, they don’t talk about the Bible at home or even read it. And if you ask them questions about the Bible, you’ll find they don’t really know it at all, and couldn’t tell you the last time they actually sat down to read it! I was raised ‘Christian’ but I knew less than 1% of what the Bible was actually about, we never went to church, never talked about the Lord at home, etc. Some say just believing in Jesus and God makes you a Christian, but I say, No.. it really doesn’t. So now those ‘Christian Democrats’ I just mentioned, don’t appear very Christian at all. If you aren’t ‘practicing’, then what are you really? Can I just ‘say’ I am a Christian and be one without doing anything else? Nope. I can ‘say’ I am a man but if I’m sitting here, a woman just like God made me, then I am NOT a man at all. Just SAYING something doesn’t make it so;  Your ACTIONS have to back it up. Just like those that say they are on the side of a certain political party, but they never vote. Can I just say I am a Conservative, but I never vote in any elections or share my Conservative opinions with others? I don’t think so. If you are not actively participating in your chosen Religion or Political party, then what are you really?

Answer:  a HYPOCRITE. The more I think on it, the more I think Jesus would say these types of people fall into the category of hypocrite because they are not practicing what they preach. The very definition of hypocrisy tells us that it is a DECEPTION or LIE.  And in Matthew 23, we see several examples of what Jesus thought of hypocrites:

Matthew 23:13 – “But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.”

Matthew 23:14 – “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.”

Matthew 23:23 – “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.”

Matthew 23:27 – “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.”

Jesus, clearly and plainly, pointed out to them the many ways they were hypocrites, and in the process, showed us all the EVIL of it. These are also clear examples of a lack of INTEGRITY. If one is a constant flip-flopper on your morals, ideals, opinions, etc. then they lack integrity. If you’ve been reading your BIBLE, you know then that integrity is spoken of often as being something that is GODLY:

Proverbs 11:3 “The integrity of the upright shall guide them: but the perverseness of transgressors shall destroy them.”

Proverbs 20:7  “The just man walketh in his integrity: his children are blessed after him.”

Proverbs 19:1 “Better is the poor that walketh in his integrity, than he that is perverse in his lips, and is a fool.”

The true point I am trying to make is that even some people who claim to be Christian are not really Christian.  You have to talk about the Lord, read your Bible, speak with others about the Lord, have an intimate relationship with the Lord, and do godly things to be a true Christian.  Just saying you are one and doing nothing else but praying once in awhile, does not make you a true Christian.  It does, however, make you a hypocrite.

The same is to be said of politics.  If you say you are for a certain political party but you never vote, do not speak to others about your opinions, and just basically don’t get involved at all, then what are you really?  Your actions have to back up your beliefs or you are nothing more than a hypocrite.

What the Lord was telling me, in essence, is that true Christians don’t have to be convinced to be for any certain political party.  Once they are brought into a true intimate relationship with the Lord and true godly living… they will change their political thinking automatically.

Blame, Aspergers, Bullying and Being a Messenger…

Another blog recently talked about blame and it inspired me to write about it too. I understand always being the one accused and the one blamed. This was a common theme during my childhood. But I knew in my spirit I was not to blame, or at the very least, not ALL the blame. The first defense mechanism MOST people employ when faced with trouble is ‘it’s not my fault’. The second defense is to look for a scapegoat, someone they can force blame on. My mother laid ALL blame for everything on me, and still does to this day. She treated me bad as a child because she said “I made her angry, and I made her act like that” so it was my fault. She accepts NO blame whatsoever, and after four decades of strife with her, I am finally happy with her gone from my life. And if you’ve read my previous blogs, you know that I’ve tried many times to talk with her, but then she employs defense mechanism number three… continue to deny, while playing the victim. But I digress…

I found out when I was 40 years old that I have Asperger Syndrome. When I realized it to be true, I cried like a baby. It explained EVERYTHING about my childhood… all my awkwardness, why I was bullied and socially inept. My husband and one of his children both have it too. I think another Asperger is the only one that could really live with me the rest of my life. During my first marriage, I didn’t know about it so I’m sure my x-husband thought me insane. He used to call me ‘weird’ (not in a nice way, one reason we are divorced) and that about sums me up… weird. When I was bullied as a kid, I had no one to talk to. I was afraid to tell my mom for fear that she would blame me for the bullying. So at age 12, I started standing up to the bullies and they backed down. I was prepared for a fight to the death! I was so afraid and truly believed these kids wanted me dead. When I saw them all run away and just stop all of it, as soon as I stood up for myself, it opened my eyes to the truth. They were bluffing! I was the strong one, I was the smart one and they were weak and pathetic. No one ever bullied me again after that.

This experience did other things for me. For example: it gave me profound COURAGE. I literally could do anything I set my mind to after that, and still can to this day. I can say anything to anyone, without any care how they will react. As an adult, my bosses have always hated this about me. LOL I will, respectfully and professionally, ask questions no one else dare ask. Some find it refreshing and others have hated it. Another thing the bullying experience did was leave me not caring what people think of me. The bullies said all kinds of things about me that weren’t true and hated me for ridiculous reasons. Some things they said were out and out lies. I tried to reason with them by attempting to prove what they said was wrong. I soon realized they didn’t care… they were going to bully me regardless. They simply HATED me and that was that. It was then that I grew to not care what others thought of me. They could say anything to me and I would dismiss them. When they saw they couldn’t get to me with words anymore, they tried hitting me. When I started hitting back, they gave up altogether.

The point is that to this very day, I could care less what anyone thinks of me. No ones approval is desired nor required of me. I find it wonderfully refreshing when someone likes me for me. When I cannot be myself with them, or have to ‘keep up appearances’ by acting one way, while actually feeling another, I have no respect for them and they won’t last long in my life. If I cannot be truly 100% honest with someone, I can’t have them in my life. One note here… I’m not talking about being MEAN to people. I’m talking about telling the truth ALL the time. I’m talking about standing up for injustices, standing up for those who cannot defend themselves, and if a friend is out of line, be able to tell them that without them acting all offended, and saying I’m mean, I’m wrong and must apologize. If you need me to be someone who keeps your dirty, ungodly secrets.. someone who acts like your ungodly behavior is okay and/or participate in it with you, that’s NOT a true friend and I won’t have you in my life. My husband often says that my words are mean. The truth is hurtful to MOST people, so I don’t doubt that. And YES, MOST people are not used to anyone being truthful with them, so they feel like they’ve been slapped in the face. The important thing to point out here is that ‘keeping up appearances’, not being truthful with people, being phony… these are ALL lies and manipulations… EVIL behavior. BLAMING others for your own shortcomings is EVIL behavior as well. The devil would have you believe that everyone is supposed to be ‘nice’ to you. That is a lie and deceit of the devil to keep you in the dark to the TRUTH. The sooner people start seeing that, the sooner they will accept truth above all else.

That all brings me to another reason how the bullying experience changed me for the better: confidence and self-esteem. People have told me OFTEN all my adult life, that I am intimidating. Now the definition of intimidating would lead one to believe that it is intentional. But my intimidation is not. They are intimidated by my strong self-esteem and confidence. I didn’t know anyone felt this way about me, until a friend pointed it out in my 30s! Some people won’t question a doctor or lawyer because of their knowledge or power or wealth.. whatever the reason, they are intimidated by them. But I see all people on the same level. I look at a lawyer as being just like me, so I can be comfortable and ask questions without feeling intimidated. As I write this, I realize that I can’t think of one person that intimidates ME. Wow! Because I have ZERO FEAR about what people will think of my words and actions, I am actually FREE to say the things others won’t say and do the things no one else will do.

The title of this blog appears as though each thing is unrelated, however, they are all connected. Aspergers doesn’t go away. It is the base of my personality. Through having Aspergers, I have grown into the woman I am today. Without Aspergers, I may never have been bullied. And that would be a shame since the bullies actually got me to emerge from my shell to grow further into the person I am today. My loved ones and bullies blaming me all my life for THEIR bad behavior taught me that MOST people commit evil acts every day and blame others for it. All of these things have had a profound effect on me and brings me to my next point: being a ‘messenger’.

When I finally got fed up with people acting bad, doing bad things, I learned to stand up for myself. Now at age 43, I’m known as the ‘bitch’ because I don’t let people get away with anything. They make a nasty remark, I call them on it… they try to blame others for their own shortcomings, I call them on it. A friend said this to me recently, and I actually agreed with him… “you’re not A bitch.. you’re THE bitch.” I say the things that nobody else will say, and I am enemy No. 1 when I do. People do not like to be told that their bad behavior is WRONG or EVIL. They also turn that around on me. I’m a nag or bitch, they say, or they play the victim, again putting blame on me for ‘saying something hurtful to them’. I feel that God’s destiny for me involves being a messenger. He has chosen me because I don’t care what people think. God knows I can say anything and get the job done regardless of their response.

Just in case I lost anyone, let’s put that in perspective first. In the Old Testament of the Bible, God used Angels as messengers. When God needed to send a message and help someone, he sent an angel. After Jesus’ death, a new covenant began and it doesn’t work that way any longer. God uses people now. If you pray for money to pay bills, an angel doesn’t appear and point you to the help or drop money in your lap. Instead, God sends a person to help you. And if God wanted to get a message to you, he would send a person to do that too. I feel in my spirit that all these events in my life have come together to teach me to be a good messenger. I’m still working on it. I still, sometimes, don’t use words that people like or my tone will be wrong (especially when I see something appalling.. my tone can be quite bad lol). That’s when people tend to ‘shoot the messenger’. But, other things are happening too. I’m starting to discern more than I ever have. I can actually feel God preparing me for what’s next. The changes inside me are so profound that it’s really that clear what is happening. I’ve always been ‘intuitive’ and just knew things about people from just shaking their hand or even just standing next to them. But God is taking this to a whole new level. The things I’m feeling are beyond words… wonderful. I can’t wait to see where God takes me now.

When I call someone on their bad behavior, they can dismiss me all they want. Because, there is one thing I know in my heart to be true; In the still moments of the day, the Holy Spirit will reach out to them and put what I said on their hearts, in the hopes that they will SEE the truth and want to do better. They can continue to dismiss and turn that away, or they will SEE and reach out to God for help. But someone had to first deliver the message to get that ball rolling. It just might have been me.

Demons, Patterns and Messages from God…

I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend in the last few months, that has suddenly stepped it up a notch in the last 48 hours. There is a push by the demons to get to me; Get me to back down from the work I’m doing and get me to back down from my Lord. Let me explain…

It all started a short three months ago. My husband and I were lying in bed and asking God why he wasn’t healing us, and why our prayers weren’t being answered. Instead of the same prayers night after night, we finally said, “Lord we know we must be missing something! There is no reason why you wouldn’t answer our prayers. We have prayed correctly and in great faith, so please show us what we are missing, what are we doing wrong?” Just a few short days later, we were directed to the books and videos of Andrew Wommack. Since reading two of his books and watching countless videos on his website, our eyes have been opened like never before. My husband got the healing he so desperately needed. Once we came into this new knowledge, the demons even tried to hit him with harder sickness, like he’d never felt before. In the past, his back would start to hurt for no known reason. Then he would be out of work for a week and possibly taking two trips to chiropractor, after which our finances would be hurting badly! My husband paced the living room for two hours, praising God, rebuking the pain (which we knew was demonic), and Praise God!; He was healed! We realized then that God had answered our prayer for knowledge! We had done exactly as the Bible told us to do, “And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” (LUKE 11:9) We ASKED GOD FOR KNOWLEDGE about what we were doing wrong, and he showed us through Andrew’s teachings! And so through Andrews teachings, we have gained so much new insight that it really has had a huge impact on our lives… we ARE changed!

Every so often, I feel the demons hanging around, testing the waters, trying to see how they can get at me. And I admit, they were successful a couple times. But I ALWAYS know they are there, as they can no longer hide from me. And they do get rebuked DAILY. The disturbing trend I noticed just in the last couple days is about how others are dealing with me, which I do feel is demon-inspired. In two separate instances, I responded to friends’ posts on Facebook. (I don’t get out of the house all that often, which is fine by me because I am a homebody, so my interaction with others is limited and that’s why I think these things happened on Facebook.) In the first instance, the ‘friend’ was acting in a manner I had never seen with her before. She had *rarely* ever responded to my posts in the past but in this instance, she was over-the-top with her comments, even going so far off topic that I had to remind her to get back on topic of the post (which she ignored). I admit that since I knew this person, I actually got frustrated with her over her comments and then angry later on. I think that she ‘got’ to me because I know her. If it had been a stranger, it probably wouldn’t have bothered me so much. Anyway, she was pushing and pushing her point of view touting a double-standard of how so-and-so could have his opinion, and she refused to back down, bringing it up over and over again. Apparently I couldn’t have an opinion because no matter how many times I stated that I didn’t share that view, she kept hammering it, and I believe, EXPECTING me to back down from it. She had kept her comments to a ‘nice’ tone, so to speak. I do not know the actual definition of the behavior she was exhibiting but she was ‘acting’ nice while trying to FORCE her point of view and get me to back down. Maybe that’s just pure manipulation? I don’t know. When I was FINALLY driven to anger, she then proclaimed herself the ‘winner’ of the conversation, as though we were in some sort of competition. I had heard that this particular person was extremely competitive but this was the first time I had witnessed it first hand, and decided right then that I never wanted to see it again!

This scenario played out again the next day. A different ‘friend’ posted something about legalizing marijuana. Most of the comments were all for it. I stated in a very respectful way that I had worked in the mental health field for many years and knew of many instances where marijuana was not as ‘harmless’ as people think it is. It can often be a ‘gateway drug’ because when marijuana doesn’t kill whatever pain they are trying to hide, some often turn to harder drugs like cocaine and heroin. So I basically said that I don’t agree with it being harmless, that people should remember it is an illegal drug for a reason and I don’t think it should be legalized. Someone who was a friend of the friend who started the post attacked me for what I wrote. I didn’t know this person, but she hit me with everything she had. She said that it had medicinal uses and people don’t rob stores to fund their marijuana habit and that I was ‘small-minded.’ I responded, again very respectfully, that in my experience marijuana is not harmless and that, while it does have medicinal uses, most people are not using it for that reason. I said that I didn’t deserve to be personally attacked for simply having a difference of opinion. I just wanted to remind everyone that it CAN hurt people, which is why it’s illegal, although that doesn’t happen to everyone of course. After that post, three people gave comments of being in agreement with me. Then the same girl comes back and attacks me again, not addressing the three new people that also shared my opinion, just attacked ME. Her post started to be nice saying that attacking me was not her intent. Then she hit again with even more force than the first time, with the name-calling and just generally saying I ‘didn’t know what I was talking about’, then though she acknowledged my first hand experience in her previous post. She just needed to ‘win’ the argument, and didn’t care how she won, even contradicting her previous comment. It was clear to me that her opinion was the only one that mattered, and all of this started to hit me like a ton of bricks. I realized then that this same scenario had just played out the day before! The only difference was that one person acted nice and one acted angry, but both were doing the same thing; trying to win the argument with no respect for the opinions of others, and neither were going to stop until I acknowledged them as right and me wrong.

The reason I said that this was a ‘disturbing trend’ is that similar situations have happened to me before, although not so close to one another. I kept wondering why I was experiencing this sort of thing because it was as if I was drawing them in like a magnet! To find out what really was going on behind these incidents, I asked God. He told me that the events were definitely demon-inspired but that He used them to give me a message. He said that I needed to see that the ‘nice’ person was not being nice at all and that her actions were just as wrong as the angry person. He said that I needed to understand the difference for the coming days ahead. I asked if it had something to do with His destiny for me, and He said YES.

It seems to be happening more and more these days, that the demons try every trick in the book to get at me. They want me to go back to being the person I was three months ago. Even my husband said that he’s seen this sort of thing happen before. Someone starts living a Godly lifestyle and the demons do everything they can to pull them back out of that! He said that he’s seen people lose friends too, as the demons will pit them against you. Some will simply see you as someone too different to continue being their friend. Sort of like what happens when a friend gets married or has a baby. The single people feel they don’t have anything in common any longer. It’s sort of like that. All I can say is that I am happy to lose any friends that don’t like the new me. But I won’t stop because this is the person God wanted me to be all along.

Iniquities, Forgiveness and Punishment…

I’ve wanted to blog about iniquities for some time. I’ve seen them in my family members and, unfortunately, I recognize them in myself having been handed down from my parents. The Bible is very clear that iniquities (sins) are passed down to your children, going even in the third and fourth generations.

“Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.” (EXODUS 34:7)

My mother’s father was a very mean man, according to her and her siblings. It was as though he blamed the children for the reason he had to go off to work every morning. He didn’t act as though he wanted the children around. My mother says that he came home from the war a changed man. He was in Normandy on D-Day, although the beach was firmly secured by the time he arrived, I’m certain he witnessed enough to impact him greatly. However, I don’t agree that his treatment of family was related to being ‘changed by the war’. I believe that was an iniquity my grandfather received from his parents. Your views of children come DIRECTLY from your parents and how they treated you.

Both my parents are prone to quick anger, and I strive to keep that in check in myself. It is clear I have that iniquity from them. My mother never bonded with me. I was an Asperger child and didn’t like to be held much. My mother took that as an insult, as if a 1 or 2 year could insult anyone! And of course, Asperger’s was not officially accepted until the 1990s so no one knew when I was kid. The doctors told my mother I was healthy and just had a discipline problem. She then proceeded to treat me just like her father had treated her… as if I were a bad kid. Everything I did, whether good or bad, I got yelled at or worse, ignored. She still denies that to this day. She has never apologized once for anything she’s done wrong.. ever. Not to anyone in the family. My sister has even said that before. And I have tried to talk with my mother on several occasions about it. Instead of listening to what I say, she turns the entire conversation around so that she is the victim. She says, ‘how dare you say these things to me!’ and how I ‘hurt her by saying those things.’ She never actually addresses what I said, she just avoids, plays the victim, and then I am the bad guy. She then pulls my father into it and looks at him and says, ‘did you hear what she said to me?!’ Now Dad is caught between us and ends up backing up my mother, who should have never pulled him into it to begin with. I am sad to say that I have had to eliminate both of them from my life altogether. I cannot get past the hurt and the fact that they refuse to listen. I have forgiven them as the Lord wants me to. I still miss my father a lot, but I can no longer let them into my life to continue to hurt me over and over again. I have forgiven them, but I will never forget.

So the subject of iniquities now brings me to punishment. Even if you ask for forgiveness from God, you will still be punished. You are still guilty as stated in Exodus 34:7. Much like how children screw up and whether intentional or not, we still punish them. God works in that way too! This is even a common theme in the Bible. Let’s take Jonah as an example. He defied God by not going to Ninevah and then later found himself stuck in the stomach of a huge fish! He finally realizes the error of his ways but still had to spend 3 days in that fish, until he was turned white from the stomach acid and very, extremely fishy-stinky! Then that nasty fish vomited him up on shore. Now, God forgave him as soon as he realized he was wrong, but He did not rescue him from the fish! Jonah’s punishment, I believe, was to be stuck in that nasty fish and then vomited up later. A pretty bad punishment, in my opinion, for disobeying God! But the point is very clear. God forgives but the punishment still stands.

I am having some trouble on finishing up this blog! But I will end by saying that you CAN ask God for forgiveness of your sins, bear in mind that you will still have to pay for them. But repentance is important! Be sure to pray that the iniquities you inherited from family also be forgiven! Pray to have your children forgiven from them as well. I believe that God can remove the iniquities from your heart, but you do have to look to him to do it!

A Few Personal Experiences…

Since becoming born-again, I have experienced many things. But before I begin, I need to point out that I have always been a person with great discernment or women’s intuition.. whatever you’d like to call it. I often can meet someone and ‘feel’ if they are good or bad. This infuriated my x-husband to no end, as I would say that so-and-so is bad news and we should stay away from him. My X would become angry with me and say that I ‘made up stuff about people that wasn’t true.’ But when so-and-so turned out to be bad as I had said, I felt vindicated although never received any apology from my X.

Anyway, in a previous blog I told about being a follower of the ‘Law of Attraction’ and how the devil over-played his hand, which is how I began to realize that I was being deceived. Once I stopped that and turned to my fiance’ for guidance, then weird things started happening, or maybe I just started discerning them more too!

One night as he and I talked on the phone, in my left ear I heard a very loud and very long hissing sound, like a snake. I lived in the country at that time, so I jumped up and promptly searched the room, not finding a snake, and certainly not finding one that was big enough to make the loud sound I had heard! The window was not open and there was simply no explanation for the sound, other than, it was in fact, a demon. I had been staying with my parents at that time and knew there were a lot of demons surrounding them. My father believes in God, but that’s about it. My mother is a devout Catholic and I have yet to see her read the Bible. Apparently, she reads only Catholic books ABOUT the Bible. I know.. weird, right? My uncle, my mother’s brother, had just lost his job and had to come to stay with them as well. He has never been married and is a sort of connoisseur of big-chested women and never misses an opportunity to make crude comments, and this extends to porn as well. Anyway, almost immediately after he came into the house, a long-time friend was suddenly hitting on me, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. He knew I was engaged and he himself was married, and I’m no spring chicken so not used to being hit on! Then it hit me… my uncle had brought with him a demon of LUST. Since it was not my house, there was no getting rid of it. I just had to deal with it the best I could. I distanced myself from my friend which made me sad, but there was nothing else I could do.

During that same time, we had a plague of big, red wasps that would get into my parents basement. My entire life I have been plagued by them so this is nothing new for me. I think I ‘had’ a demon of pestilence around me but I rebuke him daily now. Anyway, they couldn’t figure out where they were getting in. I am terrified of them and getting my laundry done at their house was quite a challenge. Once my uncle arrived, I decided to make the downstairs bathroom my own, as sharing one with him was quite horrible. I stuck my chin up and went downstairs determined not to let the wasps get to me. One was perched high up on a box… wings up, staring right at me. I had my father kill it because apparently, he is immune to them. I sang a Christian song and got to cleaning the bathroom. I had been feeling down, partially depressed, about having to use the shower in the basement because of my uncle’s nastiness (shouldn’t he have to use it?!) I suddenly was overcome with joy, while singing, and thought ‘everything will be ok’. A big smile spread across my face, and at that VERY SECOND… I’m NOT exaggerating here, at that VERY SECOND, a huge, red wasp came flying at top-speed through the basement toward me. I screamed and flung the bathroom door shut, literally a millisecond before he came through the door. Then it hit me… the pestilence demon was at it again, using my fear of bugs to mess with me! My smile was gone, but I continued singing and got the bathroom cleaned up. Later, my father and I checked the basement but never found that wasp.

Once I had gotten married, my husband and I were sleeping and I got up one night around 3am feeling hot. I went down the hall and turned the corner where the thermostat is located. Peering across the living room toward the front door, I saw my first demon. He was standing facing the room occupied by my 13 year old step-son. I scared him and he turned and saw me, and then quickly poofed away. I didn’t know what he was so I looked him up on the Internet and sure enough, he looked like old pictures I saw of Imps or Goblins, both of which were a few hundred years ago described as ‘demons’. He was about 3 feet tall with grey skin and wearing a plain brown tunic that went down to his knees. His face was out of proportion, and had bulging eyes, almost like he had the head of the squirrel in the cartoon-movie “Ice Age”. My husband got up and started doing spiritual warfare. We both agreed that he was a lesser-sort of demon but we never figured out his reason for being in the house that night.

The last thing I will tell you about happened just recently. I had been praying to God and asking him to give me my ‘tongues’. I had gotten one word about 3 weeks earlier and had repeated it often, but that was all I had. My husband and I were lying in bed talking and about to go to sleep. All of a sudden, he jumps up and says “I don’t know why but there are suddenly demons in this room, like a few of them.” I said, “I thought the room was a bit darker.” He starts doing spiritual warfare and I said my one word. Then lightning fast I started speaking in tongues! I was talking so fast my mouth couldn’t keep up! It felt so good, like bubbles in my stomach, and I started giggling. My husband says, “So that’s why they were here! They knew you were about to get your tongues and they were trying to prevent it!” Obviously, it was not a coincidence that he sensed demons right before I got the tongues! Just another of the many things that we continue to experience that reminds us that we are in a spiritual battle EVERY DAY of our lives!

The Devil Wants Your Children…

I grew up in the 70s and 80s. We had not lived through wars as our parents and grandparents had. It was a prosperous time, where spending money on unnecessary items was socially expected, if not required, of you. The ‘free-love’ generation was behind us and sex before marriage was largely acceptable, homosexuals were coming out, and drugs were an accepted type of ‘fun’. The women’s movement was also behind us and women were now ‘expected’ to work. During the 80s, the stay-at-home mom’s were looked down upon, and it was expected that you would have a career. Today, stay-at-home moms are now revered for their ‘sacrifice’ of raising children instead of having a career (what a huge deception on the devils’ part!) When I think about how different life was 50 years ago, I see that we have indeed come so far… but instead of getting ahead, we’ve actually gone far off track.

In 1962, the devil successfully got prayer thrown out of schools, and almost immediately the shit started to hit the fan. As David Barton talks about in his book “America, To Pray? Or not to Pray?”, after prayer was removed from schools, there was a rise every year of teenage pregnancies to unwed mothers, alcohol consumption, pre-martial sex, violent crime.. and the list goes on. The late 60s saw the movement of free-love and feminism, and the start of recreational drug use. The serpent had once again tricked the females into thinking that sinning was the right thing to do.

As I grew up in the 70s and 80s, I unfortunately didn’t have a Christian upbringing. So when I was told not to do something, there was no scripture to back it up. I was led to believe that it was just my parents’ rules. I know now that obeying your parents is actually something that God wants you to do! (“Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.” Colossians 3:20) Instead, I learned about individuality and that if I didn’t subscribe to ‘their’ rules, I could make my own because I was simply different than them. As I got older, I had learned over the course of time what the Bible said about certain things that were sins. But all around me were people that lived much differently than what I was told the Bible said. Some of it came from television and movies too, but the people that were friends of my family and even my friend’s families lived that way. Partying on the weekends was okay, pre-marital sex was okay… I had zero role models for true Godly living!

Now it’s 2011 and not much has changed. In fact, it’s getting worse. The devil has learned that if he gets your children at an early age, he’ll have them for years, if not for their entire lives. He knows that since kids are subjected to, and give in to, peer pressure that there’s a good chance they will take their ideas and spread them like disease through their entire school or neighborhood. He knows this because he KNEW that prayer was working. Think about it… every day in schools across the entire country, millions of children each day were praising God. The devil saw the blessings it was having upon this country, and once he put a stop to it, he knew to replace it with his own disease to have the opposite effect. As I said in a previous blog, he is REALLY good at what he does.

Another great deception the devil has put on us regarding our children is the idea that we need to ‘let children be children’. I’ve even heard parents say they want their child to get to ‘be a kid for as long as he can.’ This type of thinking is exactly why I believe that childhood is extending well into the 20s now. Why? Because you simply cannot let your kids PLAY for literally years, and expect them to be adults and work-minded upon their 18th birthday. I know a 21 year old who just got his first job after playing video games in the 3+ years since high school ended. I’m sure some of you reading this know a few adult-kids as well! The one thing my parents knew was that hard work was required to earn a living. They promptly had me get a job as soon as I turned 16. Something very few parents actually ‘require’ of their children these days!

If you go back about a hundred years, not everyone even went to school. A lot had to help their fathers with his work or their mothers with her work. I’m sure that without televisions and video games, they still had a lot of playtime mixed in. But the point is that from an early age, they were taught that work was a necessary part of life. My grandmother grew up on a farm, and hard work is her middle name even at age 90! She and her sisters had to help run the family farm when they were younger. They also went off to school around age 13. My grandmother says they had to take the train to the closest town, stay in a boarding house for young girls during the week, and then take the train home on the weekends to help with the farm. If you ask her, she didn’t ‘miss out’ on childhood! In fact, she can tell you stories about the great fun they had on the farm when they weren’t working. The misconception that kids need to play to be kids, and not have to work, is a lie and deception from the devil, plain and simple.

The one thing that needs to happen to make some big changes is for Christians to actually read their Bibles! I know a lot of Christians that have no relationship with God, never pick up their Bible. When they say and do things they believe are Godly, and you ask them why they do and say those things, the only answer they have is ‘I’ve always done it that way’. They can give NO basis for it… cannot quote scripture to back it up. They can only act like a parrot repeating something someone else told them, who was repeating it from someone else, and so on! If you are not reading the Word, if you are not talking to God, having an intimate relationship with Him, and being thankful to Him, then you are absolutely not a true Christian! If you are not doing it, then HOW do you expect to teach your children properly?! How easy it is for them to be taken over by the devil for any evil work he would have them do.

Do you want to understand your God-given authority? Do you really understand what Jesus’ death meant for you? Do you know that life and death are in the power of the tongue (Proverbs 18:21), and what that truly means? It’s never too late to learn the truth! I am a huge follower of Andrew Wommack. People either love him or hate him for the things he says. I happen to be on the love side. If you are lost in your Christianity, check out some of Andrews’ videos. They are FREE on his website. Andrew Wommack Ministries.