Spiritual Growth

    Heretics from the Word of Faith movement, some members of NAR, and the temple of the devil known as the Lutheran Church of the West have declared that the protest of the Protestant against Rome is over. But for the true faithful, the protest is completed by the damnation of those old, dead religions of both Orthodox and Catholics. We are not protesting against the dead; we are declaring that the dead are dead and that salvation is only through grace alone, by faith alone, based on the Bible alone, through the blood and truth of Jesus alone, and all for the glory of God alone.   The reason the heretics have to declare this is clear. With the protest of the Protestant, the decline of Rome and the rise of Protestant assemblies was dominant world history for centuries. Those protesters were rightly justified in keeping the fire of the gospel alive because it is a matter of spiritual life and death, between hell and heaven. Yes, sometimes the gospel was preached agai...

    There is an apparent contradiction in the Bible, as it seems to tell us to judge and not to judge at the same time. Yet this is only an apparent, not a real, contradiction, because there are two steps to judgment. There is judgment of sin, and there is judgment of punishment. Even human courts first judge guilty versus not guilty, and then they determine the punishment. The first part of judgment is strictly by the law, but punishment is done in a way that builds and teaches by the law.   Many who do not know God but love the world and have a deep heart to tolerate sin love the fact that Jesus did not judge the prostitute. But Jesus did judge her as a sinner; He simply did not condemn her to death by stoning. He was not willing to punish her by the law because nobody was following the law.   Many laws of God in the Law of Moses were kept harsh so people would be fearful of breaking them. That is why the law says to do this so others should not repeat it. It makes...

  Even though spiritual growth is a continuous process that extends from second birth to the identity of Jesus, for practical reasons we could divide the faithful — based on some vague threshold — into two groups: the infants and the mature. This division is only possible among born-again faithful, not among those who follow the dead religions of the world. A dead person cannot grow, after all.   When faith is in infancy, character defects and theological errors are the norm rather than the exception; as a result, they are not indicators of heresy. Let us take the messed-up assembly of the Corinthians, with both serious theological and behavioral defects, yet who were wealthy in gifts of the Spirit. It is not only that their behavioral and theological defects did not make them heretics but infants in the Spirit — they were also gifted with the powers of the Holy Spirit.   Why would God give gifts to such ungodly faithful? Because they need them more. As sin incr...

    There is a Hollywood movie named “The Negotiator” about a successful police negotiator. Yet, in his house his baby girl has a dispute with her stepmother (his wife), and he finds it hard to negotiate with his baby girl, who is angry at her stepmother. Then he talks to himself in surprise, “I can negotiate with the worst criminals, but not with my daughter?” and the girl responds to him, “It is because there is no SWAT ready to attack at home.” So, it is a simple fact that the equation of police negotiation is absurd when it is without the SWAT variable. Without SWAT force, police negotiation is a boring joke or foolishness.   In faith, God is the core variable of any equation. What is funny is the way we think and live often is based on equations that exclude God. When prophet Jeremiah stood in front of the temple and declared to the people that they should not say “God’s temple, God’s temple,” but that they should repent, it is foolishness without God in the e...

    Why does God want us to declare His greatness, His holiness, His might, and His inevitable victory? It is because such declaration, when it is from the heart, will wire our brain in a way that affirms the nature of God, and it will be shown in our life and character.   What is funny about human beings — us — is that we join certain schools of thought, be it a certain denomination or some social science school of thought, and we end up thinking in a way that affirms the school of thought that we join. Take any new faithful and send him to any denomination, and after intensive training, the theology of that denomination becomes his second nature, and he will promote and defend it as universal truth. Why? Because they are rewired through intensive training and education to affirm the school of thought by people who are programmed by such a system in the first place. They learn history and it affirms it. Then they learn logic and it affirms it. They learn different ...