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I was talking to God last night when I couldn’t sleep and I was relating my sadness to Him like this, “You know, LORD, what it feels like to carry a child inside you for so long, birth it, love it, nurture it, and teach it?  You have automatic unconditional love for that child.  Then to have that child shun you and reject you, not believe in you at all, and walk an entirely different direction away from you in their life?

And then I felt Him looking at me with compassion and I saw in His heart that He knows exactly how that feels because He endures it every day since He created man.  I have 5 children who shun me.  He has 5 billion who shun Him.  For,

“…wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it.  Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.”  ~Matthew 7:13-14

God knows exactly how I feel.  What’s more, if His children can shun Him as the Perfect and Loving Father that He is, how much more can mine shun me as a sinful woman?

I chose to mate with a man who was taught about God and who shunned God, as I myself had shunned God.  I forced us to have children even when God was not blessing us with them.  I built a life upon the shifting sand with this man and in the end I lost my children and everything I created with him.  I thought I knew many things.  But in the end only God matters.  He is the rock upon which everything should be founded, and if we choose to build outside the Rock, then we should not be surprised by the outcome.

It is a heart-wrenching thing to watch the humans you love most turn their back on Life, knowing that they are headed for certain destruction.  But God does this every day and understands.  And that gives me a certain comfort.  ❤

Praise you LORD for understanding first-hand the source of our grief.  ~selah

I disagree with the Baptist tenet of ‘once saved, always saved’, and have for a while now.  The Baptists cite Calvin and other church leaders in supporting this false doctrine, but they do not have any clear references to biblical origin in their arguments.

Just because one becomes born again in the Spirit, does not mean that he will abide in the Spirit, any more than Adam abode in the Spirit while he lived in Paradise, even though the Spirit Himself walked among Adam and Eve.  Adam and Eve were literally born into the Spirit (as we are now born into the flesh), yet they fell away and found death.   As Adam was cast out to certain death, so is anyone else who falls away from Christ, even who at one time-as Adam-was born into the very same Godly Spirit.

Jesus said, “Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven.”  Blasphemy means to commit an act or offense of speaking sacrilegiously about God or sacred things.  To blaspheme means to speak disrespectfully about God.  But only blasphemy of the Spirit will not be forgiven.  What is the Spirit?  It is the living Christ, as explained in the gospel of John:  “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.” (~John 14:26)

So the Spirit is always among us and never leaves nor forsakes us, but we can blaspheme the Spirit, and fall from grace.  It is a matter of ongoing, daily faith that determines whether we are saved.  God does promise us in John 3:16, ‘For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”  ‘Believes’ is a present tense verb, which means we must choose to believe in Jesus as Christ every day, every moment.  If once we were saved, we were always saved no matter what, this verse would be written with the word ‘believed’!  Furthermore, Jesus said also, ‘Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in Me.’  (~John 15:4).  So it takes constant belief and faith in Christ to remain in salvation, and it takes abiding in the Holy Spirit to produce life.

Abide means:  to wait for, to endure without yielding, to bear patiently, to accept without objection, to remain stable or fixed in a state, to continue in a place, and to conform to.  Abide is also a present tense verb.  To abide means to stay under the gift of His blood, and in our heart to want to be with Him.  Believing and abiding happen with a right heart, led by the Spirit and not by the flesh.  If someone has fallen away to the point of following their flesh, they are not guaranteed eternal salvation through the scriptures, because they are believing and abiding in their flesh, not Jesus Christ.  Abiding in Christ on a daily basis, or living corum deo, makes it hard for us to sin, because God, through the Helping Spirit, will guide our paths and make us to go straight.

Paul states in Romans 11:23 how the Jews were considered first for the salvatory gift of Christ, but when they did not believe in Christ, God reached out to the Gentiles, as related in the Old Testament.  It was because of the Jews’ unbelief that they fell from God’s goodness (Romans 11:22), yet they can be grafted in again, if they choose to believe:

“And they also, if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be graffed in: for God is able to graff them in again.”

There is really no ‘lukewarm’ Christian.  You are either in Life or in Death.  Headed for Heaven or Hell.  Jesus said lukewarm Christians were to be spat out:

“I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth.  Because you say, ‘I am rich, have become wealthy, and have need of nothing’—and do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked—  I counsel you to buy from Me gold refined in the fire, that you may be rich; and white garments, that you may be clothed, that the shame of your nakedness may not be revealed; and anoint your eyes with eye salve, that you may see.  As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten. Therefore be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me.  To him who overcomes I will grant to sit with Me on My throne, as I also overcame and sat down with My Father on His throne.”  ~Revelation 3:15-21

We must be zealous and dine daily with Christ.  Instead, if we choose to dine with whose who shun our Lord and continue in their worldly ways in blindness, and believe ourselves to be saved, we are ultimately headed for certain rejection, even if we at one time believed.  We have fallen asleep.  Again, Saint Paul clearly states in the following passage how falling asleep in Christ invites final judgment upon those guilty of such a thing, just as if they were part of the world all along:

“Therefore whoever eats this bread or drinks this cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup.  For he who eats and drinks in an unworthy manner eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.  For this reason many are weak and sick among you, and many sleep. For if we would judge ourselves, we would not be judged. But when we are judged, we are chastened by the Lord, that we may not be condemned with the world.” ~1 Corinthians 11:27-32

I suspect this notion of ‘once saved, always saved’ is simply a ploy of the devil to trick Christians into complacency regarding their salvation.  Think about it.  We are commanded to lovingly rebuke our fellow brethren if we see them sinning, yet our Christian culture is trending toward the opposite attitude now, one of complacent non-judgment.  Christians are reticent to get in each other’s business following the worldly attitude of, ‘It’s all good.’  Except affixing to the end of that ‘In Christ.’ ‘ It’s all good, in Christ’.  And because most Christians buy into the false doctrine of ‘once saved, always saved’, they look upon each other as living ‘in Christ’, when their neighbor may really be living in ‘the world’.  In other words, in not wanting to be ‘judgmental’ we let our fellow brethren be lulled to sleep by the devil and fall asleep in Christ, thinking that they will be granted eternal life anyway.

This is a sin on our part.  We must understand that anyone who does not daily believe in Christ and live out God’s love has fallen asleep in Christ and is as good as dead until they are awakened, which we must try to do.  We can only try.  If they will not listen, we are commanded to move on and share the gospel with someone who will listen.

Therefore to fall into disbelief is to fall from the grace in Christ Jesus, and to stop abiding in Him is to die.  And if one gets to the point of blaspheming the Spirit, he will find himself in an unforgivable state (these people are beyond hope or salvation, though some pastors argue to the contrary).  Salvation is a gift given to God’s chosen ones through justification in Christ.  To be justified by Christ, one must believe in Him and abide in Him.  This is an ongoing pursuit, and not a one-time event.

~selah

Love Your Enemies

“But I say to you who hear: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who spitefully use you. To him who strikes you on the one cheek, offer the other also. And from him who takes away your cloak, do not withhold your tunic either.  Give to everyone who asks of you. And from him who takes away your goods do not ask them back.”  ~Jesus, from Luke 6:27-30

If you’ve had a narcissist for a parent, you are probably not afraid of dying and going to hell — you have lived hell on Earth. Narcissists cannot be satisfied and do a tremendous amount of damage to their children and partners in their relentless demand for a perfect outer appearance to reflect the perfect inner image that obsesses them. Kyrie eleison.

I realize this trip home that I am truly an orphan.  Adopted by a narcissist at birth I have never known the love of a mother.  Even though I met my biological mother at 18, and knew her for a time, she ended up estranging herself from me again.  Even though I gained a step mother at 19, she never liked me, being admittedly jealous of my relationship with my father.  And even though I had the closest thing to a mother in the form of a mother-in-law for 22 years, she never really accepted me into the family, always implying that I would never really be a part of them, in large part because I was an ‘illegitimate’ child.  After my divorce, that just became more obvious.

I knew from my teenage years that my mother had control issues, and I was able to resist her control of me much of the time which resulted in her further alienating me and being angry with me.  It was/is a no-win situation with my mother:  either allow her to rule you and do her bidding, or be abandoned by her.

Now that I see it is much more serious than her merely having a controlling nature, I have consciously embraced the reality that her leaving when I was a child was actually a blessing by God; raising myself with God’s protection was far better than enduring an entire childhood living under a narcissistic parent every day.

I am happy to be an orphan.  Praise you Lord.

Galveston Island

As soon as I can rouse my lethargic sister awake, I will leave here, say goodbye to my ‘mother’ forever, and I hope to never return to this evil place:  the Texas Gulf Coast.  This is going to be for me physical closure on my young life.  I still have much emotional work in front of me before I can have final closure, I know this intuitively.  But this is a first necessary step:  drawing a line in the sand between old and new me.

I believe in the 5th Commandment:  to honor your father and mother.  But I know God understands that I can honor my mother, and her positive contributions to my life, from afar, without being involved with her; to treasure those good times we shared, and the helpful things she taught me, and the love she did give to me.

The kingdom of God does not come with observation…for indeed, the kingdom of God is within you.  ~Luke 17:20-21

The Prince of Peace by Akiane Kramarik, child prodigy

I have been practicing chastity of speech for a couple of weeks now.  It is definitely a denial of self.  Especially for me, because I have realized just how much I talked out loud with myself, which is called ‘private speech’.  It is something children do as they are learning how to assimilate language and thought together.  The final step in this internalization of speech is theorized by Vygotsky to be ‘inner speech’, when a person quits speaking aloud around the age of 7 and begins having thought-speech internally, but not audibly, in a healthy environment.

I think perhaps I got stuck in the private speech stage, and speaking aloud is something I do when I don’t have an intimate to talk to, and like a child, when I am working out something rather complex, like a problem of some sort.

I felt God calling me to be chaste in my speech mainly because I don’t want to bless demons with my thoughts anymore, as I feel like the devil often listens to me.  Not necessarily to harm me, but to be nosy and assume more rights than he should.

The Bible speaks often of being chaste in speech, and it is one of the evangelical vows nuns and monks take, in order to be more holy.

Do not be rash with your mouth, and let not your heart utter anything hastily before God.  For God is in heaven, and you on earth; therefore let your words be few.  For a dream comes through much activity, and a fool’s voice is known by his many words.  ~Ecclesiastes 5:2-3

God gave me this word in my dream last night.  I never knew it before.