Tuning Out That Little Voice

In doing research for the next book, I read an article about a man who called his wife and said he was worried because the Eagle Ford Shale tower/oil rig on which he was working was not stable and was swaying in the wind. His boss told him if he didn't want to climb back up that was his choice. But they weren't going to pay him for standing around. Do it or go home.
[The age old dilemma:  "That's not right... but I need my job ... but that's not right ... but I need my job...]

The next day the rig tilted over and fell ... and crushed him to death.

In life we all get these intuitive alerts or warnings. And then we have to decide to ignore and proceed or listen and take precautions.

That little voice says, "They're behind you; they're following you; they're on you right now." You turn around and there's nobody there. So what do you do the next time you hear the voice? At some point you stop looking behind you and move on. You let the priorities of the day drown out the little voice and invalidate its legitimacy. Otherwise, you tell yourself, you'd never get anything done.

At that point you've tuned out the spiritual side and the universal consciousness of God that offers us guidance. You've placed your fate in the hands of a callous world driven by the ebb and flow of the Dow Jones, a new beach house and a Mercedes emblem on the hood.  At that point you're primed and ready to be crushed.

Stay focused and move ahead. But never neglect that little voice. Always be ready to check your rear. For all you know, they're on you right now.

Common Myths Can Distort The Truth

In my books I spend a lot of time exploring and (if I feel qualified to do so) correcting common myths. I believe it to be a worthwhile undertaking, and perhaps, one of the purposes for which I have been placed on this earth. So many people accept tradition and long-standing adages without doing the slightest bit of research. 

So the question might be. “What's the cheapest way to get to Los Angeles?” And the long-standing, accepted solution might be to catch the bus. And so they buy a bus ticket without doing the research, without discovering Southwest Airlines is running a $99 special all month. The old adage is wrong but because of fear or laziness or a reluctance to step outside their comfort zone, they accept tradition as fact.

So here's the common myth I want to explore. When contemplating a new venture, we often discuss the decision with friends or relatives. We say, “I want to attempt this new thing but something keeps telling me I won't be able to pull it off.”

Depending on the dynamics of your circle and relationships, some will tell you to pray on it. This is good advice “assuming”you have a relationship with God, you know how to get a pray up and you know how to recognize a spiritual response. In other words there is a common myth that advising people to pray is always the best solution, when in reality, it won't help an unbeliever at all.

Here is the second common myth and then I'm through. Some friends will tell you your reluctance is fear.  They say, “you've got to stop being afraid. You got to be willing to step out and try new things.”

To always equate reluctance with fear is a misnomer. In fact, fear may very well be the culprit ... or the voice you're hearing may be the accumulation of knowledge and experience that is speaking to your subconscious mind.

So you were engaged to John who had a long nose, and who broke off the engagement just before the wedding. You met a new guy named Felton who had a long nose and stole your checking information and emptied your account. Now, 10 years later, you have this guy named Victor with a long nose who has bought a big ring and is proposing marriage. And you're saying to your friend, “I don't know why, something is telling me this is not going to work out.”

It's that $#!*!*!#  nose! ... All those hurting experiences have coalesced and personified themselves in a symbolic visual that only your subconscious understands. Maybe this Victor guy is different.  Many Rottweilers turned on their masters, but not all. When I go to the pet store, do I want to take a chance? And can my reluctance (after doing the research on dogs) be automatically classified as fear?

Don't automatically dismiss reluctance as fear. Your experiences are just as important as your boldness in moving forward. Don't ignore that little voice. Try to understand where it's coming from

False Prophets: A Simple Litmus Test

The Endless Pursuit of Bigger Barns

You will find that most false prophets are never happy with the current structure or number of structures under their domain. Even when the congregation is not growing, the pastor will insist the physical building should grow … more sanctuary space, more meeting rooms, a fancier, modernized looked and decor. The drivers for this obligatory growth is both ego and financial gain. The more construction and more money that flows through the system, the greater the opportunity to be enriched by it. There is also a thing called “pastor’s bragging right” in which false prophets get together and compare sizes and numbers and who’s the big dog in town. Is your pastor the big dog in town?

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

Praying For Those In Desperation … Lord, Keep Them From the Healing Vultures

I was scanning the religious channels a few nights ago and came across three men standing at a podium … obvious shysters … pitching their spiel about miracle healing. I only caught the last part. But it seemed if you sent them your loose coins scattered around the house, they would turn those coins into spiritual weapons which would facilitate your mental and physical healing. One guy was so “full of the spirit” he was swollen up and sweating and wiping his face with a big towel.

These guys were like junior imitators of Benny Hinn, but a lower class pedigree. As part of their shaky bag of theatrical tricks, they started reading letters from “previous believers” who had sent in money and discovered themselves to be miraculously healed.

My heart went out to the sick and dying, those desperate souls searching for hope beyond the doctor’s grim prognosis. The Bible says that God is unequivocally capable of miracle healing. So maybe these “television men of God” had been ordained with a secret that no one else had uncovered. Maybe they were special.




This was always Benny Hinn’s claim. He was special, slain in the Spirit, a called-out and set aside conduit through which God’s healing could flow. Always adorned in milk-white suits and flashy diamond rings, he claimed his jacket was imbued with the Holy Spirit, and used it to flog followers to rid them of their life-threatening diseases.

He also claimed to have special insight from God. He told viewers God had intended babies to come from the sides of women’s bodies, as the rib that created woman had come out of the side of Adam. But then, God changed his mind. And since God gave Adam dominion over the birds Adam could fly and was, in fact, a superman and the first man to reach the moon. Also, God would destroy the American homosexual community by 1995.

Yet, Hinn still plays to huge audiences, hundreds of millions worldwide. His crusades have now branched from North America and Europe to include stops in places like Guatemala, the Philippines, Malaysia and Ghana. The money keeps rolling in.

Back to the poor, low class, junior imitators. I suspect they are unsaved and have no internal restraints on the actions they will take to make a dollar. But think about the saved people who own Daystar and TBN who gladly allow them to come on as long as they can pay the fee. Who’s really worse?

Finally, and this is the most important point of all, imagine if you were a true healer from God. With the vibrant, all-consuming love of God in your heart, wild horses couldn’t keep you away from the hospitals. In other words, you wouldn’t be on television selling prayer cloths or begging for coins or scaring people into giving large sums of money to your ministry. Rather, you would be like a Mother Teresa possessed, running from hospital to hospital, clinic to clinic and to all the poor, downtrodden, desolate countries and divers places where people were begging for relief. You wouldn’t be able to sleep because you didn’t get to that little girl with leukemia or the young boy with Down syndrome. You would be immersed in using your gift for good … not to pay the note on your new Creflo Dollar look alike Rolls Royce.

No matter how desperate your mental and physical infirmities have made you, there is no reason to be taken in by the healing vultures. Their works are before you, right there on the big screen. Take heed, use sound judgement and stay away.


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Bestselling author of Exorcism At Midnight and Black Church Blues.

Why Christians Often Find Righteousness Too Risky

With every decision there is a price.

Years ago, while teaching at a small college in Texas, I used to ask my students this question:
If you were back in old Germany and worked for Adolf Hitler, would you follow his orders?
Of course, some of his orders had to do with exterminating the Jews. So in essence I was asking if they would carry out an order to kill.

I was careful not to use the word murder because in many of my classes there were discharged veterans who had been sent to Iraq to kill the enemy. In war, killing is not considered murder. So if you worked for Hitler in a war against the Jews you might kill with the immunity of a soldier defending his or her country.
Still, at some inevitable point in time, each person would have to come to grips with the underlying moral question: “Is what I’m doing or what I have been ordered to do … right?”

In 1968, during the My Lai Massacre, US Army troops murdered five hundred Vietnamese civilians at the villages of My Lai and My Khe. Many of the victims were sexually assaulted, tortured, or mutilated. Villagers who tried to surrender were shot or bayoneted. Several soldiers who refused to take part were labeled traitors and cowards and reprimanded for disobeying orders. In the end one man, Lt. William Calley, served four months in military prison.


During the  “Freedom Summer” of 1964, only 2% of Blacks in Selma, Alabama could vote. The Ku Klux Klan tortured and murdered protesters who came in to help eliminate the Jim Crow injustice. And during the Democratic National Convention, white Southern Democrats issued an ultimatum to President Johnson. If he allowed the 60,000 strong Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party made up of African-Americans to participate in the Convention, white Democrats would leave the party, perhaps, causing Johnson to lose the election. Thus, the African-American delegates were never seated.

During the convention an old sharecropper named Fanny Lou Hamer told her story.

After attending a civil rights workshop trying to learn how to vote, three State Highway Patrolman kicked her in the stomach, threw her into a patrol car and took her to jail. She was carried to a cell where two other male Negro prisoners awaited her. The Highway Patrolmen ordered the first Negro prisoner to lay her down on a bunk bed on her face. And then he began to beat her with a large blackjack. After the first Negro prisoner beat her until he was exhausted, the second Negro prisoner was ordered to take the blackjack and beat her more persistently, until she stopped screaming; All of this because she wanted to register to vote.
When we look into the raw face of injustice, we cringe. A dark fog envelops our consciousness and the voice of morality cries out for righteousness to somehow prevail. How could people be so heartless? Why won’t people do the right thing?

And then we go and do exactly what they did. We trade in our righteousness for the expedience of the moment and the fruits of being a member of the status quo.
In January, 2013, a twenty-six year old Mexican immigrant named Maria Sanchez died in Houston from the effects of an inoperable spinal tumor. This was four days after U.S. officials refused to allow the parents to cross the border and visit her on her death bed. U.S. Customs and Border Protection rejected a humanitarian plea that would have allowed Sanchez’s parents to cross the border from Mexico and see her. The agency said the plea had to be an extraordinary measure granted only for a “very compelling emergency”.

Two years earlier, the University of Texas Medical Branch ejected her from the hospital shortly before a scheduled surgery after discovering she was in the country illegally. Her discharge papers suggested she seek surgery in Mexico.



Here’s my point. At every phase in this tragic scenario, someone had to decide to follow orders.

Just as the two Negro prisoners had to decide to save their own skins by beating, unmercifully, the old woman sharecropper, someone at Texas Medical Branch had to decide to protect their job, follow orders, signed the papers and eject Maria Sanchez from the hospital. The same decision-making process held true for the person who signed the papers denying the parents the opportunity to cross the border to see their dying daughter. Like the people who turn on the gas in Hitler’s death camps, someone had to decide to follow orders.

Many Christians are like that. They go to work each day, see injustice unfolding before their very eyes. And then they looked the other way. They follow orders to trump up charges against innocent employees. They follow the company’s rules to the letter, knowing they have the opportunity to intervene, but are unwilling to take the chance because their position might be jeopardized.

Here is the hard cold spiritual fact about these matters. Doing the right thing will most often result in persecution and suffering, that is to say, God is not going to step in to block the consequences of a righteous decision. Just as cigarettes executive Jeffrey Wigand was fired, blackballed from the industry and loss his family for exposing the truth about cigarettes killing people, and just as John the Baptist got his head cut off for criticizing the King’s unrighteous policies, you will have to endure your fair share of suffering. In other words, you must be prepared to do right for the sake of right, fully aware there will be a heavy price to pay.
This requires a profile in courage, character and spiritual maturity. Not everyone is ready to take this leap of faith. But if ever you do, I can guarantee this. You will see a new person in the mirror, a stronger more resolute person, in sync with your purpose for living, and at peace with the universe and with God.

Remember this before you make a Martin Luther King decision to go against the status quo and do the right thing. The arc of the universe bends toward justice only when someone is willing to pay the price. Are you that someone? Are you willing to pay the price? Or do you limit your righteousness to the show on Sunday morning?

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Bestselling author of Exorcism At Midnight and Black Church Blues.

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