Letter to my sister who I led to Christ and poured into for decades
Linda,
There is a sense in which you are my dearest and oldest friend. We have known each other all of our lives, and I am so very glad that we have. But the place where we have known each other going back to our earliest memories, is on a level where all things will be destroyed. Even families and friendships. There are no marriages partnerships or business ventures in Heaven or in Hell. Even the people we know in Heaven will have their significance only in relation to what we were and had in Christ together here.
I have attempted to increase what we have in Christ together steadily over a period of decades. As noble as the human spirit is it must submit to the will, and you have willed otherwise. I would not change your decision even if I could apply greater force to do so, it must be surrendered of your own free will. It is the only way the Father will have it. Many years ago I shifted all of my emotional and spiritual capital to the only other level that exists, the one made up entirely of things that last forever. You have known this for some time.
It has been my greatest desire toward you to shift more of your spiritual and soulical capital to the only things that will last forever. We have spoken of it a few times over the years, and you have confessed that it was never your intention to become that obedient. It had never been important to you on that level. You will be given a second chance along with almost everyone else to come up higher, if you want to. I have loved you but our values themselves are different, and we value different things. Only because of greater obedience, not something inherent.
As you well know to some degree, love is spiritual and as it relates to our flesh in this life, it is much more of a discipline than a feeling. No flesh likes that, so being fleshy it sticks to what it likes and what it feels so that self can pursue what it wants. You have excelled at this, and like those who are less committed, have avoided most of the spiritual discipline the Lord has had for you through me. I don’t dislike you for it, I simply hate all flesh. Your flesh my flesh, all flesh. You want to come closer but you cannot, your flesh restrains you.
I am not keeping you out of my life, you have refused to come in. It is the same way with God. He does want us and He will take us, but not on our own terms. He insists that we give Him all of our self, He will take nothing. I only deal with the fully committed, and even that is only with those He sends me to or sends to me. It is the way of the prophet. I am not supposed to deal with everybody, but I was the one to deal with you. Many more have left than have stayed. They have loved either this world or their life in this world more than they love God.
Like them you love too many things that God hates. Love of the Truth and Hatred of Sin are two essentials that must be established in the core, then overflow into the life of every true follower of Christ. He is the one who called them disciples, it was not my idea. If I have failed you in this then it is to my great regret, and I apologize. But then you never really were a disciple. You were testing the waters, you were kicking the tires, inspecting the process. This would be completely acceptable and understandable, had their been no authority.
The acceptance or denial of authority in the presence of authority changes everything about what we are, what we do and why we’re doing it. It shows whose side we are on. I taught you long ago that we have these two competing and contrary natures inside our self: the spirit that wants to please God and the flesh that wants to please Self. It’s easy to see that in your heart you mean the good bottle of wine as nothing more than a small peace offering, a truce after a couple of non confronting communiques. Yet there is more to it than that.
What may be harder for you to see is the nature of your own flesh. Natural is how we were all born yet staying natural is death for any of us. In the natural I am your brother and your flesh wants to keep it that way. In the spiritual I am a prophet which is an affront to your entire way of life, including your religious life. If being a prophet is far more important than being your brother, it is because God’s claim on me is far greater than your claim. The highest and best the most excellent brother and friend I could ever be to you or anyone, is to be what God called me to be.
In answering this Call my refusal to back down from the Lord’s will or be moved from the godly position He has put me in will be an enemy to every part of you but your spirit. Yet I am still your friend, still your brother and love you still. As a discipline not a feeling. And am still at this very last minute willing to discipline you in this love. Yet we both know you will not have it. Other things are more important to you and the spiritual is not that real to you. The other things are. Natural people emphasize the natural, spiritual people emphasize the spiritual.
Even greater than the reality of these other things is the pull they have on you. As you have conditioned your self to want them. You could just as easily have trained your self in rightness and godliness, because they are an exercise. Faith is all about what you do not see, remember. It is the Lord himself that has graced me enough in this letter to speak to you as a friend. Not to condemn you for sin, but so that you will not be condemned along with the sin that will sentence everybody, if they do not sentence it. To death.
Teaching others to recognize and love Truth is a large part of what the Lord does through me. God loves you more than all the wine His grapes have ever made, and in that love I love you. But we both belong to Him, and I am not for sale. If I accepted this payoff of your flesh to salve your conscience, I would be. So here is a very small test to put down a tiny bit of your flesh. If you decide not to I will not be offended, you can drink the wine yourself. You will have to put on childlikeness and humility after getting in the Spirit just to want to do it.
What has happened here is not the making of an argument but the passing of judgment. If you submit to the Lord’s judgment you will be yielding to His authority being expressed through me as His prophet. Which has a level of Blessing proportional to the yielding. You can if you so choose, bring the gift to Muvico and give it to Brother Jason, who will pray over it with you and Bless you. If not, then enjoy your trip wherever you are going. The saving of your soul is more precious to me than all the fine wine and fine food we have ever had together.
Brother Greg
Letter to a fellow Navy Diver whom I had been stationed with 20 years earlier at EOD, which was written about two years ago. He had asked a loaded question concerning my agreement or disagreement with a Baptist preacher whose protest and hatred against gays had been well publicized.
Jeffrey my dear brother, you know very well this is not a page on social discourse or cultural commentary. Nor do we invite it. It is specifically for putting out the Spiritual Truths and the Biblical Principles that run the entire universe. Whether people see these Truths or not is entirely up to them, and a part of the free will God has given all men until He gets back. At which time they will be Judged for what they did with this free will. We all will. The thing that will Judge us is His Word.
God loves homosexuals but He hates homosexuality. He loves liars but He hates lying. He loves people but He hates the Sin they love. Because He loves sinners but He hates sin. All sin. Your sin my sin gay sin – all sin. This is the Biblical position. Anything else is not Bible, but simply the opinion of men on the Bible. Not what it actually says, but what they think about what it says. Which of course is not even remotely the same thing.
During a large part of my many years in part time ministry, I was living in sin. Like many many preachers, as a single man, I was sleeping around. Not in any sort of congregational sense, prophets aren’t over churches. Prophets are over pastors – pastors are over churches. But you have to grow up into that, by obeying the Bible. For years. Most ministers do not. They stay at low levels of Blessing and provision because they live at low levels of Obedience. I was living like this during our years together at EOD. After being in ministry for a decade.
One of the few part time jobs I did for 20 years before coming up into full time ministry was that of a professional bouncer. I ran the door at everything from Irish pubs, to big private parties, to the largest dyke bar on the west coast. I was the head bouncer at a very trendy and hip nightclub called Mannikin in Pacific Beach when I met Dave and Jeff as instructors at dive school for my refresher training, when James and I were coming back in the Navy in ’85. It was there that I met Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer, and a few other stars, as it was a well known and popular club.
Most of the work I did was at clubs where the owner asked me to work for them, because they either knew me or my reputation. All that said only to say that I’ve been around, had many friends of every persuasion, most of whom knew I was a Christian, knew plenty who died of AIDS, and I spent more than enough time living a life that was displeasing to God. Now I do not. I live to please Him, and do it of my own free will. Which is the only way He will accept it. The problem with real Ministers is that they are just like you. They are people. Their life is not anointed, they have to get through this just like you do. It is the Call that is anointed, the Office of Ministry they stand in. Not their life.
If you really want to know what God loves and what He hates you would have to read a lot more of the Bible, which explains all of it at length. Like most who believe on some level, you just don’t take these things that seriously. You don’t believe them on that level. Which is up to you. Here, on our pages and in our Ministry – we do. So I love you brother, but we oppose the culture and society of the world not just to oppose it. We do it because we are commanded to. You may choose to delete it, but only in response to your comment here, I’ll put a link to one of our 40 posts on WordPress. It’s called World’s End, and is all about what it is that God loves. It is the last one. Over and out. Have a great day brother.
Fifty years ago though far from perfect our nation was a light to the world, just as England had been for centuries before us. As a people we still retain much of the moral strength we had had since our founding. After the rebellion and upheaval of the sixties our virtue and light declined rapidly. The climate of political correctness that began in the 80’s and 90’s of doing the wrong thing for the wrong reason at the right time has resurfaced twenty years later as an all encompassing virus of dysfunctional policy, and it has crippled us. Like the most failed person you could possibly imagine leading our heroic troops on a white horse into a desperate battle, political correctness decapitates true authority and exalts the false and the disqualified with the convict, the self promoter and the man who has stolen the most money from others, without getting caught. These are our new heroes and they have become the death of us. God has established order and we have desired something else, now He will let us have what our heart desires. Dozens of navy divers were taking part in a group discussion over the controversy of the role of woman in combat and in the service in general, with the center of the subject being this female diving officer who had just made admiral, and was the first to do so. This letter seemed to end the discussion.
My hat’s off to any man or woman who does their job, and does it well. Even more if their work is done in service to the benefit of others. God bless you and thank you, in all sincerity. It does not seem to me that anyone here is filled with disrespect for another who has served their country and done it honorably. Rather it is a question of what they should or should not be doing in relation to what we do Honor, and being Honest about it. This is the center of the conflict.
Honor is a Biblical word and it means to set someone or some thing above your Self. It has always been the role of men in civilized society to honor women and to guard their honor. It has never been the role of women to do this. Honesty is all about telling the truth, even when it costs you. The truth is that mankind is made up of male men and female men. Who collectively make up man mankind or men. It’s nothing new.
Men and women are not the same, they are different. They did not make themselves, even though they like to talk and act like they did. Any more than they made the air they breathe or the light they see by or the ground they walk on. They were made and they were made to be different, and actually to compliment each other. The word woman also comes from the Bible and nowhere else, and it means the man with the womb. Womb and man, woman. Track with me for a minute because you might think I’m giving a Bible lesson when I’m actually talking about tradition.
Our traditions are part of who we are as a people. We stand on the shoulders of all those who have gone before us, whether we want to or not. Does anyone think we can go on making one mistake after another and nothing come of it. This current administration is just a culmination, the final blow of what we’ve been doing for decades. Departing from everything we know that works, and worse still departing from what we knew was right.
Most of us here were born long after the last Great War, but the memory of it is still with us. There has never been a single one where women were sent into combat, not one. Throughout all of history in every civilized country, women were cherished or prized. The uncivilized ones did not use women for fighting either, they just treated them as property. It is this very difference that woman possess, and the things that make them different which is honored. And to a very large part, defines any society.
You cannot include Islam in this as they are an uncivilized tribal people living in and off of a civilization created entirely by the West. Which has been entirely Christian ever since Christ came. The idea of the Knight is Christian, it did not come from or out of anywhere else. The warrior in shining armor defending among other things, the virtue and honor of women. Including often times the Queen for which the knight fought. This is where we came from.
You can scream and shout all you want but this is the source of our long standing good traditions, being kind of argued about and kind of agreed or disagreed with here. In the Christian nations they have always been honored as the fairer sex and the weaker vessel, and were actually the guardians of morality in the family. This was lost when, well into the Industrial Revolution, a lot of women decided as a group to leave the home, enter the workplace, and begin competing with men. Women are not supposed to compete with men.
Now if you just look at what I’m saying in the narrowness of your own personal experience of about two or three decades, without a great or global war, under the dysfunctional pressure of political correctness and the failing morality of a falling society formed by a liberal media, then you’ll just repeat some of the misdirected loyalty others have already given. I am talking about the big picture of millennia, not the current trend of masculinizing women and feminizing men.
What we know of governments both ancient and modern, is that they fail. Civilization as we know it is a graveyard of failed governments, and we are at the top of the top layer. The last two which were the largest and most successful in terms of actual conquest were Greece followed by Rome, and had this in common before their fall – the acceptance of homosexuality as a norm. Including in their military.
London which like all of Europe had been a former colony of Rome, later became England. Who consider themselves more Greek in form and thought even today, than Roman. Which not only birthed the U.S., but also has the unique and privileged distinction of the longest running monarchy in history. For almost a thousand years, the throne of England. A people who have kept the distinction of men and women clear all those years. We should follow the example of our mother. Until just recently in the last 60’s when they passed a law decriminalizing homosexuality.
Which throne by the way is sat on by a woman. Who has had that position longer than just about any who have had it, both men and women. With the exception of her great great grandmother, Queen Victoria. Whose grandfather was King George III. God save the Queen, but she should not become the King. This quasi acceptance of quasi combat being waged by women partly doing what men do in the age of machines, is a very modern invention. It is both dishonest and removes their place of honor. Women are not men, they are not supposed to be. Get over it.
To a fellow soldier who thought herself and her service unworthy of adding her photograph to a group where so many had seen combat. Many have some sort of advantage over others, military or not. God sees this one way while the pride of men see it another. All strength and ability and every good advantage you could name, even victory itself all come from God. If you don’t know this then you don’t know God, nor do you know the difference between what is Him and what is you.
Nancy my dear sister, having been in combat or not is completely irrelevant. It is the distinctions made by The Lord that matter not the distinctions made by men, and men do make them. But they have no authority. Soldiers do not decide when nations got to war, rulers and politicians do, and sometimes not even they have the say.
As Solomon said in Ecclesiastes, time and chance happen to all men. Few people ever decide where they will be stationed once they join, and none can determine whether a war will begin or end while they are in. Their choice is whether they will serve or not, and you did. Just the willingness to serve is a big deal with God.
Don’t you dare buy into the Lie that your service was somehow inferior because you were not in combat. It is completely untrue and it is ungodly for men to say so. The only thing said anywhere is what God said through David when half the men went with him to do battle, while the other half stayed behind to guard the stuff.
Division broke out as to whether those who stayed behind were to get the same share as those who went into battle, and The Lord said that they do. That ends it, and you can read all about it in the Book of Samuel. Now some might choke on lining up with that, but that’s just their pride. Which contrary to secular belief is not a virtue, it’s a sin. It is in fact the great sin.
Men who think themselves more special than their brothers for getting to draw the same sword that all are wearing, aren’t looking at it right. They are not special, they were more fortunate that they got to fight. Our generation has lost sight of Who God Is, and just how much of everything Good comes from Him. It is not good.
What God has to say is the only say that matters, and there is always great danger in disagreeing with Him on anything. Be at peace holy woman, and give us a pic. Even if it’s just you at a typewriter – in uniform. We thank God for you and your service.
This letter is to a dear Sister who was confusing familial loyalties with the need to love the truth of God and to stand in that truth, no matter what. Because obedience to the Word of God is thicker than the blood of our own family, and more important . .
Claire, this is not about your sister and you sticking up for some perceived reputation you think she has – this is about you standing up for God and what He says. This is about you doing the best thing you can possibly do to help your sister come closer to God and actually obey Him, by being a disciple and obeying Him yourself.
The salvation of your sister and everyone else on the planet is between them and God, you have no say in that at all. Changing words to try and cover or modify what they are actually doing does not change the Bible or what it says, it’s just playing word games. Which of course the Bible forbids.
Remember when Lot’s wife looked back and turned to stone while she was in the very middle of being delivered – Jesus warns all of us to remember that. Becoming a disciple delivers us from religion, which is all we had before that. You cannot save your sister or turn back in your heart or your thinking like Lot’s wife as though you could save her. Many people think of their family and friends that way, as though they can save them because they want them saved, but that very thought is a lie and a sin. The turning back itself just shows what is more important to them than God and what He says.
Jesus is the only one who can save anyone, and each person must come to Christ alone – and the only way they can come is through total repentance, not through partial obedience. Testimony is only about what God is doing, not how we feel or what we think about it. Just learning to give true Testimony instead of saying what we want, is one of the hard things to learn as a disciple.
Truth wipes everything else out of the way, and the Scripture says it is a lack of this very love of the truth that sends people to Hell. You have to practice loving the truth to get good at it like we all do, you’re practicing right now. This post is going in our groups not on your personal page, so she doesn’t have to see it. But even if she does – You are on The Lord’s side. And that is the very reason you will be hated.
None of us have the option of not doing what God says because we don’t want to be hated, we only have the option of going to Hell or obeying Him. Jesus preached about Hell more than anyone in the Bible and people don’t want to hear it, but that doesn’t change it.
so says the man of God
Hallelujah!
pastor Nick
Spirit and Life 