SWINE: TIME FOR MESSIAH OBAMA TO WORLD GOVERN

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


B. H. Obama is proclaimed as the New Messiah who will be crowned king of the One World Order.


Well, devotees, here is your time.


If there was ever an entry into Jerusalem for the Anointed One, it is when the globe drops prostrate before the pig flu.


Raise the palm branches. Let the shawls fling heavenward. The warblers are singing.


Obama, the mystic weaver, the mob hysteria creator, the Marxist Muslim claiming to be Pied Piper of the proletariat, come forth!


The Community Organizer can now go to it. The wordsmith to fool may position center stage. Time to spring forth as the Global Village Networker par excellence.


Biblical prophecy states that prior to the True Messiah Christ’s Second Advent, the spirit of antiChrist will settle upon several. Then upon one in particular.


Revelation 13:1-10 specifically lays out the symbolic detail. What is intriguing is to figure out the literalism behind the symbolism.


But for biblical believers, none of that is fanciful for it is the Christ vision afforded the Apostle John on the Isle of Patmos circa AD 95.


In the meantime, biblical enthusiasts lay the Scriptures down alongside newsfeeds, praying for God’s gift of discernment.


But now in present-tense it, seems as if, even apart from the discernment gift, one with half a brain tied behind his carbuncles, The Boy is ripe for filling the shoes of the One World Governor—pig flu oinking loudly.


Read SWINE FLU: PROPHECY = ‘PLAGUES’ OF END TIMES at http://www.michnews.com/J_Grant_Swank_Jr/jgs42909b.shtml

OBAMA: NO WATERBOARD TORTURE. WHAT’S ABORTION TORTURE?

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


It is amazingly grotesque how liberals can compartmentalize their angst.


B. H. Obama proclaims that waterboarding is torture. He’s against it.


However, Obama does not even wince regarding abortion torture. Obama
instead pushes killing womb babies without his batting an eye.


That is typical liberal. Liberals work on moral relativism. There are no moral absolutes to them.


Moralists use divine revelation set forth in the Scriptures for their ethical profile. True moralists don’t budge. They do not dare for the Scriptures are from the God who stands at the Judgment Seat.


Liberals have no fear whatsoever of God or the Judgment Seat. They never think of either, actually. They have woven their lifestyles so much around their own egos being gods that the Bible’s God does not exist.


Obama abhors waterboarding and anything like unto. However, when it comes to spreading torture via HIV/AIDS, all okay when it’s spread by homosexual license. After all, moral relativism works on situation ethics. If that kind of ethic gropes for sodomy, approved.


Obama is typical political, religious, philosophical, pragmatic liberal to the nth. His followers are legion. That is why our nation is heading for the pits.


Obama compartmentalizes his sympathy. His own hunch dictates for whom
he will feel sympathy and to whom he X’s out.


Unfortunately, womb girls and boys are X’ed out without apology for the torture they have to endure just for sperm meeting egg.


Obama’s day will come, however.


Note: JUDGMENT DAY


Hebrews 9:27:


It is appointed unto men once to die, but after that the judgment.


Matthew 7:21-23: the words of Christ:


Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? And in thy name have cast out devils? And in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.


Matthew 12:36-37: the words of Christ:


But I say unto you that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.


Romans 2:6-11:


God who will render to every man according to his deed: To them who by patient continuance in well doing seek for glory and honor and immorality, eternal life; But unto them that are contentious and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, indignation and wrath, Tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile; But glory, honor and peace to every man that worked good, to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile: For there is no respect of persons with God.


Romans 14:10-12:


For we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ. For it is written, As I live, saith the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God. So then every one of us shall give account of himself to God.


I Corinthians 4:5:


Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsel of the hearts: and then shall every man have praise of God.


II Corinthians 5:10:


For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad.


Numbers 32:23:


Be sure your sin will find you out.

THE HOLINESS BLESSING UPON TODAY’S MARRIAGE

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


When Crystal, our daughter, married Greg Miller, I was fortunate to be not only the father who represented her mother and myself but also the pastor who officiated at the wedding ceremony.


It was a beautiful summer Saturday afternoon in Maine. Nature blessed us with sunlight. Heaven smiled upon our gathering in the Lord’s sanctuary.


Crystal had come to know Greg because he was seeking God’s chosen one. He had been married before; that union ended in painful severance. Then Greg, in his mid-30s, found Christ by reading the Bible. There was no human intervention regarding his understanding the way of salvation; instead, it was in reading the Scriptures through that he discovered Jesus’ holy sacrifice for his sins.


Crystal had been reared in our parsonage. She knew the Lord as Savior when a youth. However, in her mid-30s she had not yet come upon God’s chosen partner. She too was praying for divine guidance.

The Lord crossed their paths—she living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, while he resided in Portland, Maine. They met by way of worship in our church. What a way to decipher the divine chapter for their next journey.


It was not a hasty decision to become one. Both pleaded earnestly with God regarding His perfect will. These young adults were mature enough to understand marriage as a most significant institution set in place by the Creator Himself. Finally, they knew they were divinely meant for each other.


With that, invitations were sent out far and wide with friends and family gathering from across the county and Canada. Much excitement filled the air. Prayer in praise had preceded the wedding.


The ceremony included communion, encouraging hymn solos, the lighting of the unity candle and exchange of vows with rings. But the highlight was the commission offered the newlyweds as they stood before God’s holy altar.


When this commission was pronounced, then mailed to our extended spiritual family, so many responded with appreciation that we were overwhelmed. In other words, the message seemed to be that our spiritual community was truly encouraged by a young couple dedicating themselves to such spiritual depth. It was a commitment true to the Scriptures.


With that, I share with you this commission, praying that it will likewise be an encouragement to you and yours. . .


WEDDING COMMISSION TO GREG AND CRYSTAL MILLER


Greg and Crystal, Jesus is your Lord. He has forgiven you of your sins. He has planted the hope of heaven within your souls. He has provided you with your Christian lifestyle.


You found Jesus through the Bible message. That Bible continues to govern your thinking and choices. You witness that you would not trade that Bible treasure for any alternative.


As you individually committed yourselves to Jesus, now you commit your marriage and home to His direction. This is your joy. This is your fulfillment.


You serve Jesus, not out of obligation, but out of gratitude for His sacrifice upon the cross in order to rescue your souls from darkness unto His marvelous light. You serve Jesus because He has proven His love to you.


With such Jesus as the sole foundation in your personal lives, you now embark upon the creative excitement of crafting a Christian family and home. Naturally, being a part of a spiritually fallen world, there will be numerous attacks against your ambitious endeavors. They will come from all quarters—daily. You are already aware of this reality.


Nevertheless, you already know that the Spirit of Jesus within you is greater than all the foreboding threats. Therefore, you will determine to overcome every obstacle for Jesus’ sake. Nothing will deter you from your Christian principles. You have dedicated your lives to living out the divine plan.


Your Christian testimony in marriage then will witness to keeping the Lord’s Day holy. You already live out this joy. His day is given to faithful worship, Christian fellowship, deepening your understanding of Scripture and renewing your souls for another week’s labor.


Your Christian testimony in marriage then will witness to recreation and leisure that are pleasing to God. Nothing will taint your offering of entertainment and pleasure for God’s blessing and approval.


Your Christian testimony in marriage then will witness to daily prayer and Bible reading, seeking to instruct your children in the ways of God. You will teach them early the message of salvation, interceding that they will live for the same Christ who rescued you from despair and sin.


Your Christian testimony in marriage then will witness to giving and sharing, loving others and sacrificing for their good. You will delight in opening up your hearts and home to those in distress, those in need of a real friend. Instead of living for self, you will live for lifting others’ burdens in the name of Jesus—for this Jesus has lifted your burdens of hopelessness and waywardness.


Your Christian testimony in marriage then will witness to growing older gracefully in Jesus—growing in divine wisdom, being more perceptive to the divine will, seeking out ways to serve Jesus that are lowly and humbling. While the rest of the world wakes up each morning to gather for self, you will awaken to help someone in need of Jesus’ love. While others go to rest at night counting their moneys, you will go to rest counting your blessings in serving.


Your Christian home will be used of God as long as you yourselves are laid upon His altar of caring and compassion. Your Christian home will be lighted by heaven’s smile as long as you remain faithful to one another and loyal to God’s holy way.


Few have discovered this treasure. Few houses are homes. Few marriages know real
happiness and contentment. But yours will be different. Why? Because yours will be cupped in Father’s hands for you have willed Father to craft your love for one another and for your children.

WHEN GOD IS SILENT

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


To begin with, learn how to surrender your thoughts to Jesus each day—during the day. And at nighttime when you wake up.


Surrender thoughts and let go.


That will fall in line with His counsel: “Take no thought for tomorrow. . .” He means that. He’s not speaking poetry. He’s speaking practically. Matthew 6:34


We spend too much time planning for future security when we should be living for Jesus’ plan in the moment. Forget your plan. Live for Jesus’ plan.


After all, that’s what Christian commitment is all about. “Submit yourselves a living sacrifice, holy. . .” Romans 12:1


As you surrender your mind to Jesus, He will speak to your head. Your thoughts will recess. His thoughts will take mortal thought patterns’ place.


That is what you want.


Isaiah promises that whoever keeps his mind stayed on God will experience “perfect peace.” Isaiah 26:3


Then live that peace by surrendering your thoughts to Jesus. This takes some discipline but after awhile it becomes a lifestyle. The more you faith those thoughts to Jesus, the more excited you become in realizing that Jesus is actually alive to work in your minutia.


But what do you do when Jesus says nothing?


You let the quiet remain. You rest in the nothingness. You permit Jesus to keep the rhythm of speaking and then not speaking.


You know that in music there are the black rectangular boxes on the lines of the music scale. Those boxes are called “rests.”


Rests are when the music is to stop for silence to take over. Our ears need the rest. Musicians need the rest. Our heads need the rest. The rests help make the melody balance.


It’s the same with surrendering your thoughts to Jesus. He plants the rests in the life music. Then let them stay right where He puts them. You need them. He knows that.


Do not think that Jesus has left you. He promised that He would never leave you or forsake you. He keeps His promises. Being quiet does not mean that He has taken off. He’s there, alongside you, but quietly so.


Jesus knows that one cannot take His divine input every second. That would be overload. In those silent segments, thank Him for the silence.


During those rest moments, praise Him. Lift up your soul in thanksgiving. “Bless His holy name,” as the Psalms advise us.


Sometimes conscientious believers conclude they have to be super spiritualizing their souls every second. Not so. We mortals cannot take such strenuous activity. And it’s not necessary.


Therefore, in the middle of the day when Jesus seems to have taken a short reprieve, let Him do just that. He is there, working beneath the surface, far more than you realize.


I say to friends that Jesus is always working in the disciples’ lives in the subterranean levels. We cannot imagine how intricately Jesus is moving, preparing, arranging. Only when we look back do we begin to understand how Jesus was programming certain variables that we had never thought possible.


Our minds are so limited that even then we do not pick up on all the dimensions Jesus has worked and is working. We miss much of what His love is performing. Eternity will provide us the span to take in that analysis.


However, in the silences Jesus is doing what needs to be done for you because He loves you.


Then He breaks the silences to give you another Jesus-thought. Take it. Live it out. And go on from there.

SWINE FLU: GOD’S MERCY RUNNING RAW

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


God’s mercy now is far more stretched than any mortal can imagine. Witness the biblical data.


There comes the time when mortals’ sin can go over the divine mercy line. Many biblical believers are concluding that the world is now experiencing God’s wrath.


Why would God’s wrath come at this particular time? Only the spiritually insensitive would ask that question. Nevertheless, obviously there are scores in that category or we would not be faced with the swine flu pandemic.


As I type, the level has moved from Phase 4 to 5, 6
being the highest.


America has a President who claims to be “Christian” who in fact is Marxist Muslim. Those who contest that can contest it against the facts all they want. Their conviction that he is “Christian” flies in the face of his anti-biblical ethics.


B. H. Obama says he is “Christian,” a member of the archliberal United Church of Christ. He falls right in line with that apostate Protestant denomination’s public proclamations.


The UCC’s headquarters’ doctrinal tenets are not in line with the Bible. They are morally relativistic and politically liberal.


Obama has been raised a Muslim, in a Muslim school, admiring publicly the Koran’s cadences, mothered by a woman who concluded all religions are the same, all gods the same. His relatives are Muslims in Kenya, one being an extremist politician who ran for the Kenyan presidency. When he did not win, carnage was set loose through the entire country.


Obama sat under Jeremiah Wright’s brainwashing cultic diatribes for two decades—anti-white anti-Jew pro-Muslim anti-American. Obama has been close friends with the Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam. He hires Muslims on his DC staff as he did when campaigning.


When Obama does quote the Bible, it is usually politically opportunistic, not sincere. Obama finds it particularly helpful to refer to certain benign Scriptures when wooing evangelicals, many of the latter duped by his masquerade.


This Marxist Muslim advertises America ready for abortion on demand, including partial birth abortion.


He is an enthusiast for homosexual practice, a friend of sodomy lifestyles. Though saying he wants to combat diseases, Obama furthers sexually transmitted diseases as HIV/AIDs by his applause for expanding homosexual activity under the government’s blessing.


Now when the United States has that kind of diabolical leadership in the White House, God’s mercy is strained.


Further, Obama works laboriously to erase the Christian heritage to this Republic. He will do everything he can to eliminate Christianity and thereby replace it with secularism. Secularism is his god alongside Allah.


In his inaugural address, Obama elevated atheism to the level of Christianity. No prior President would have ever thought of doing that. Yet he was applauded by millions mesmerized by his cultic persona.


Is not America ripe for spiritual discipline? Yes.


Canada is at the same footing before heaven’s throne. Canada has gone godless some time ago. I live there. I know.


Europe has done everything possible to eliminate God from its culture. When the European Union was drafted, the pope asked the leaders to include the mentioning of God and the Christian backdrop in EU documents. They refused.


Is not Canada ripe for spiritual discipline? Is not Europe ripe for spiritual discipline?


The Second Person of the Trinity created this planet per the Bible. Christ is Alpha and Omega of this sphere. He has the first and final say concerning everything on the Earth.


Therefore, though mortals’ hubris spring forth to rule, they ultimately do not. They must answer to the Judge Christ. Non-Christians never take that into account.


Presently, in the U.S. the Democrat controlled Congress and B. H. Obama have no regard for God, the Bible and the Judgment Seat of Christ. They are consumed with their own conceits, the Oval Office mentoring how to do it.


The same is current in Europe.


It is so in England. Prince Charles said that he should not be called to endorse the Faith, namely, the Christian faith, but should be known as caretaker of the faithS, plural. That statement was made when Islam crept across Britain.


The Queen in her annual address to the world spoke highly of the Muslim killing cultic “faith.” When one does that, one cancels out Christianity.


It is Christianity’s Christ who claimed to be “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” He said that no one goes to the Father but through Him, Christ. That is a particularizing of the Christian faith; it does not open the door to other routes to heaven’s graces.


Throughout the world, the apostate church is growing. This is the false religion within Christianity that is not Christian. Instead it is dominated by demons. These apostate sanctuaries espouse lifestyles totally contrary to the biblical moral base, e.g., abortion, sodomy.


Biblical believers are in daily war with these spiritual reneges, many of these anti-God personages standing in pulpits every Sunday. That does not set well with the divine.


Christ said that in the latter days prior to His Second Return the times would be like unto Noah’s generation. Read the Genesis account to discover that detail.


The age in which we live reads like Noah’s rebellious, stubborn, smart aleck clod. It appears we are now inhabiting a world on the verge of the flood, on the cliff edge of God’s wrath descending.


Hence the swine flu floodwaters increasing.


Read” Pharaoh Obama vs. Moses' God” at http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/swank/090428

THE BIBLE AND WINE

THE BIBLE SPEAKS STRONGLY AGAINST DRINKING WINE:

Prov 20:l; 23:29-32; 3l:47; Isa 5:ll-l2; Isa 28:l,3,7, Hab 2:l5; Lk 2l:34; Rom l3:l3; l4:2l; Eph 5:l8; I Tim 3:l-3, Titus 2:3-4; I Pt 4:3-5.

___________________________________________________________________

WINE AS A MEDICINE:

In an age when medicines were not what they are today, wine in its diluted form could be prescribed as a medicine:

Prov 3l:6-7 (wine as a sedation prior to death); Mk l5:23 (Jesus near death); I Tim 5;23 (for bad stomach).

___________________________________________________________________

WINE BRINGS BIG TROUBLE:

Gen 9:20-25 (Noah = setting; first mention of wine in Bible; the lesson in the Word would have us understand not to drink strong drink, that is, undiluted wine). Lot and his family: wine = trouble. King Belshazzar: wine = trouble. King Solomon: wine = trouble, loss of power, soul and standing before God.

___________________________________________________________________

WINE IS DILUTED WHEN PRESENTED IN POSITIVE LIGHT:

When wine is presented in a positive light, it would be diluted wine, that is, grape juice, for God cannot contradict Himself in His Word. That is, when he gives warning not to drink wine, then when it is permitted, it is to be understood as diluted wine or grape juice. One cannot have God state a prohibition on the one hand and then make for an allowance on the other. Therefore, the defining wine drunk in a positive sense is to define wine as diluted or grape juice.

Gen l4:l8: Melchizedek (wine = diluted, as in ancient times, and used to purify water, as in ancient times; compare Homer (800-700 BC)).

Gen 27:28: Isaac's blessing; wine (Hebrew: tirosh = meaning "fresh grape juice") (interpretation same as above).

Ex 29:40: (wine = not consumed, but burnt off in whole burnt offering sacrifice at the temple).

Deut l4:26: (same as Gen l4:l8 interpretation).

Ps l04:l5: (wine = diluted, yet enjoyable; that is, grape juice) (compare Eccl l0:l7, l9).

Eccl l0:l7,l9: (wine = same as above; note that verse l7 is against drunkenness).

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JESUS AND WINE:

Lk 7:3l-35: (l) Jesus did NOT drink wine, but simply gave the supposed edge of the argument to his persistent enemies; or (2) Jesus DID drink wine, therefore, it would have had to have been DILUTED for WATER PURIFICATION for He could not contradict God's Word regarding such prohibitions.

Jn 2:l-ll: ("good wine" = DIVINE MIRACLE WINE: the first and last of its kind in history --which could not have produced drunkenness for it came from God and God cannot contradict His own Word).

Lk 22:l8: (Passover wine: Talmud (Jewish oral tradition of 200 BC = 200 AD) = 4 cups of Passover wine = 3 parts of water to l part wine, therefore DILUTED).

Mk l5:23: Jesus refused sedative at death: wine and myrrh.

___________________________________________________________________

WINE IN ANCIENT TIMES:

* usually stored in pointed jugs, then poured into large bowls where it was MIXED WITH WATER, then poured into cups for drinking.

* ratio of water to wine varied:
(l) Homer: The Odyssey: 800-700BC: 20 parts of water to l part of wine
(2) Pliny: Natural History: AD 23-79: 8 parts of water to l part of wine
(3) Evenos: poet: 5th century BC: 3 parts of water to l part of wine

l part of water to l part of wine or less = "STRONG DRINK" AND WAS CONSIDERED A BARBARIAN PRACTICE.

* Question: Why water mixed with wine? Answer: Water often unsafe in those times; therefore, BOILING, METHODS OF FILTRATION OR WATER DILUTION were the safest and easiest routes to go; therefore, wine = purifying agent when necessary.

* Early Church Fathers (Justin Martyr, Cyprian, Clement of Alexandria) = wine in communion was to be mixed with water.

* In Roman Catholic Church, when priest partakes of wine in the Mass, he always mixes much water into the goblet in order to drink diluted wine. However, even with this public practice, there is much abuse of wine by Catholic clergy due to the wine being near them daily. There is much alcoholism among Catholic clergy--and always has been. It is a sad problem within the Roman Catholic Church, admitted by the clergy themselves.

___________________________________________________________________

PHARAOH OBAMA VS. MOSES’ GOD

PHARAOH OBAMA VS. MOSES’ GOD


J. Grant Swank, Jr.


As Marxist Muslim B. H. Obama strains to install his left-of-left secularization throughout America, he’s proud obviously of his “I won” proclamation.


So it goes with anti-God hubris.


Now DrudgeReport posts on April 28:


“Swine Flu Case at Orlando/DISNEY...


“Confirmed: Indiana...


“Cases in NYC rise to 45...


“Officials in Mexico City on Tuesday ordered all eateries closed to public...”


Obama could not care a twig about “Christian heritage America.” In his inauguration speech he elevated atheists on the level of Christians. What prior President would have stated that? None.


His “Christian” claim is bogus for his ethic is totally opposite to biblical morality, e.g., pro-abortion, pro-sodomy, pro-all-religions-the-same, any-god-okay, etc.


However, as God’s foes are warrior-lined up in DC—both executive and legislative—Moses’ deity proceeds with a plague.


Will Pharaoh Obama strut and prance before his throne, pointing to the “I won” seat of power dressing his Oval Office?


What will it take to convince anti-Bible God Obama that he is on a diabolical course warring against America’s Christian founders’ prayers and present-tense believers’ intercessions?


What is occurring in the Republic and indeed worldwide is the spiritual conflict described in the Book of Revelation—light versus darkness, God versus Beelzebub.


Genuine believers continue to watch daily the scene, reading newsfeeds alongside biblical prophecy.


Moses, stay the course. Yes! Pharaoh will beg for mercy in the end.

PURGING

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


". . .every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit." John l5:l2


When believers as branches continue to take in the daily life flow from trunk Jesus, then they bring forth fruitage to the Father's pleasing.


The more believers remain in close communication with Jesus, the more they are "purged." That is, they are refined in the way; they are matured in matters spiritual; they are tutored in the finer detail of the cross way.


Purging is not always pleasant. It is to bring forth a pleasant result; but the purging itself will be painful.


This is especially the case when purging focuses upon the egocentricity which forever seeks to return as center piece to the believers' very existence.


Jesus is a jealous God. He will not tolerate the human conceit to sit upon His throne. He is Lord God. The throne of the believer's inner room must be reserved only for the eternal royalty. Therefore, when Lord God Jesus insists that pride removes itself from the pivotal position, such will bring its own pain.


That pain will cause the sensitive soul to wince, even at times to cry out in excruciating agony. In that reaction is the telling of what choice believer will then make. Will believer give in to pride or oust pride on the spot? The former is extremely hurtful to King Jesus. The latter is most reassuring to King Jesus.


And so the purging must continue for the good of the branches, also for the producing of holy fruitage. In all situations, Father must be pleased. There is nothing which can detract from blessing Father God.


Consequently, indwelling Spirit of Jesus, having been true to Father's will while on earth, will continue to be true to Father's goal in believer's soul. There can be no compromise with deity. He must be true to His own integrity. His holy character demands it.


Therefore, cross carrier realizes from the start that when Jesus instructs to deny self-absorption, such commission is operative till the close of earthly sojourn. There can be no letting up for any reason. Self-surrender must be daily discipline in order to remain Christian.


In that course, cross bearer understands that on-going, in-depth purging will take place. Sometimes it will be extremely intense in order to see through the deeper works of purification.


When Paul wrote that he sought to live out Christ, he was confessing to coming under the personal purging. He was undergoing surgery of the human spirit. Paul, being particularly headstrong, ambitious, intelligent, and persistent, must have gone under the divine knife on numerous occasions in order to witness to the sanctification enjoyed. Through it all, Paul gave thanks to heaven for seeing through the severe work.


So it is with the cross carrier. The cross is meant to cut deeply, completing its surgery in order to lead to resurrection presence. It is the way of earth's travels when such are intersected by heavenly parenting. Father knows that we grace children must be governed in such a way of purification that nothing can deter the purging. Purging yields increased fruit, the most precious being the total obedience to the indwelling Christ King.

TO WILL HIS WILL

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


There are those who are forever seeking to decipher the divine plan. What is God doing with my life? How does this situation fit into the plan? What should I do about that? Why did this drop into my day?


And so the questions continue for a lifetime. What fury.


It is not trying to figure out what God is doing with our days that should consume us at all. That is not our turf.


When one reads the personages of Scripture, one realizes that over and over God does this and that with a dedication which, at any one point in time, would have not been clear to that disciple.


Take John the Baptist, for instance. He was the warrior for evangelism. He was even biologically related to the Messiah. He had grown up with Him.


Yet when John was sitting in the dank prison cell with rats about his feet, he told his followers to inquire of Jesus as to Who exactly He was. In other words, John was trying to figure out the identity of his kinsman as well as the plan of deity for His life's work.


How close that sword blade came to John's psyche until one day it sliced off his head. Now how was such apprehension and final tragedy plugged into the "grand will of God"?


So it may be in your life. You wonder why you are in such straits. You have done your best. You have yielded your life for The Work. There are others who seem "to get ahead" while you languish in the dust--lost, tired, unrecognized.


Of course it is only in your private thoughts that you permit your confusion. Public anguish would be out of image for the happy-go-lucky evangelical of today. However, there is such pain at times in wondering
what is happening with your life.


The short of it is this: What is God doing with these weary days of mine? Why am I sitting in this jailhouse? Where did the rats come from? Is this the Super Plan promised. In other words, Who are you Jesus--the One you said you are or do we seek another?
Stop. Wrong track. Get off it.


The right track is this: realize that since you are serf and He is King, you have no right to know anything about an overall plan. That is the trouble with westernized thinking. Each thinks he is the Chief Executive Officer. No, not when it comes to the eternal Kingdom of the Almighty God.


God is God. We are love slaves. He is in charge--totally so. We take orders; He gives them. We bow down; He commands. He knows what He is doing for the "over-all"; we simply comply with the next directive.


Now when you size up life in those terms, you are starting to get back on track.


Consequently, that also brings you back to square-one regarding time. It is not your prerogative to spy into the future regarding anything, especially your personal grand scheme of things. The tomorrows are the property of God alone. That is why you cannot get into them. He alone can get into them.


As far as the past is concerned, you cannot get into it either. As soon as last minute's time frame vaporized before you, it left you for good. You will never return to a minute ago. It likewise belongs to God alone. Make certain then that it is under the blood of Jesus Christ.


So where does that leave you? Right now with this fleck of time. That's all you have. And even that, you do not have in the sense of ownership. It is on loan to you.


Why then are you fretting about your place in the sun? Being a success? Catching up with the others? Making it? Discovering God's secret scope for your existence?


Cease from such nonsense. It only yields more of the round-and-round of worry, self-introspection for self's sake and eventual exhaustion of soul.


Say to yourself: I do not own me. God owns me. His blood bought me. I am not in charge of anything except my consecration. Therefore, if my all is surrendered to the One in Charge, then that is all that is necessary. This fleck of time will fold into the next one and all of them strung together will eventually yield a plan. All will add up to "the will of God" for my life.


The bottom line then is this: you do not psyche out His will. When you surrender moment-by-moment to Him, YOU BECOME HIS WILL.


Imagine that! What a thrill that is! That is the concept you want to
implant in your head from here on out. When you surrender moment-by-moment to Him, YOU BECOME HIS WILL.


Your searching days are over. No more straining to figure out the divine hand. No more deciphering your biographical spectrum.


The journey ends and starts with total surrender to the Master--one moment at a time. This is His will. You become His will.


In that, you have come home. In that, you have peace. In that, you have joy: TO BE HIS WILL.

JESUS ON FLA PLATES?

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


Governor Charlie Crist said he’s for it.


We have to find out what the state legislature says about Jesus and the cross on Florida license plates.


The plates read “I Believe” with an imprint of Calvary and Jesus on them, per AP.


If a person doesn’t like it, he doesn’t have to go for it. If a person likes it, fine; he can get the Jesus plates. Freedom of choice. Right?


America has a Christian heritage—not Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, Muslim, Hindu, blah or animist. It’s a Christian heritage.


Let the plates slide on the vehicles. It’s right in keeping with this Republic’s backdrop.


When America dumps the God of the Bible, America will dump itself. Right now, it’s in the process of dumping with shovel help from the Oval Office’s Marxist Muslim and Dem Congress.


Florida Jesus plates might be the start of saving the nation’s soul. One never knows. From a seed a tree is born.


Read “Crist says he'd OK to Jesus, cross license plates” at http://www.miamiherald.com/news/florida/AP/story/1020559.html

OBAMA THROWS AROUND SERMON ON THE MOUNT

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


"We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand," B. H. Obama said. "We must build our house upon a rock."


Obama was speaking to an economics conclave at a Catholic campus. His house building was from the Sermon on the Mount, of course.


That’s how Obama tries to make himself appear “Christian.”


When campaigning in New Hampshire, the Marxist Muslim was asked about his position on sodomy. He told the inquirer to check out what the Sermon on the Mount had to say about that.


There is nothing in Mathew 5-7 about active homosexuality—or latent, for that matter.


Obama, like all liberals, delights in picking and choosing what Bible passages are opportunistically convenient. Therefore, these liberals say what they want the Bible to back up for their own purposes.


Attending a theologically liberal conference at arch-liberal Riverside Church in Manhattan during the 1980s, I heard the speakers wear out the Bible’s verse that God will make “all things new.”


They were intent at that time on molding American politics per their base. They were excited. They and liberal politicians were going to make “all things new” for the nation.


So far it hasn’t happened.


Actually, there are scores of evangelicals who fall for Obama’s game playing with Scripture. These are the airheads in pews who simply cannot get it that this man is The Enemy.


Actual biblical moralists know exactly what is going on in DC. It’s the spiritual war of God versus Satan, an old battle. But now it is in bold relief throughout the North American continent.


What would one call the espousal of “gay marriages” and abortion rights?


What would one label the secularizing of a Christian heritage nation?


What would one conclude concerning Obama discarding biblical ethics for moral relativism?


What would one say about hate speech leveled
against Christians telling Bible truth in public regarding God’s abhorrence concerning active homosexuality?


What would a genuine patriot conclude about the Fairness Doctrine out to mug conservative voices throughout the country?


Every generation has to live with the Devil. Now this present-tense is faced with the dark powers at every turn—education, religion, politics, arts, international relations, you name it.


The Dems as the death party have given themselves totally to desecrating the Bible and the Bible’s God. That is especially evident when so-called Congressional Catholics continue to take the sacrament while endorsing killing womb babies. They don’t care. They are used to telling God where
to go.


So it is with theological liberals in the nation’s churches and seminaries. Take Notre Dame, for instance. That hierarchy is more than willing to have abortion enthusiast Obama as their chief speaker. Devout Catholics of moral bases have clamored. But naturally that means nothing to the apostate.


Why should it?


After all, they have a President of the United States who quotes the Sermon on the Mount?

BRIT AIRLINE FORCES STEWARDESS TO MUSLIM DRESS, WALK BEHIND MALES

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


Lisa Ashton said NO.


She walked off the job at BMI per TimesOnLine.


That Brit airlines told her to wear the full Muslim garb—head to toe—and walk behind men when serving the airlines going to Saudi Arabia.


Ashton told BMI that not even in Saudi Arabia is that law.


She is defending her rights as an individual. All free thinking persons should support her. BMI should apologize and hire her back with increase in salary.


Ashton should take the airlines to court and win, BMI paying court costs.


It is insane how some non-Muslims quarters are bowing and scraping toward Allah in order to make the devotees comfortable.


Muslims do not change one iota when non-Muslims enter their borders.


Muslims then should learn to live with non-Muslim cultures or stay within Muslim confines. It is in no way enhancing freedoms for non-Muslim countries to adopt Muslims demands.


BMI is making a worldwide fool of itself. Its powers-that-be should be fired. Ashton should be put in their places.


Read BMI told stewardess to wear Muslim robe at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article6169989.ece

ABIDING

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


I was in tenth grade. More than anything in the world, I wanted to know that I abided in the Lord. I needed to know that He was with me.


I had read testimonies of other Christians who related how near God was with them. He went with them to work. He directed them in their decisions. He was a real friend who could be counted upon.


I wanted that kind of relationship with God, too.


Therefore, to prove to Jesus how serious I was, I set my alarm for 3 o'clock in the morning. Then I would tiptoe out of my bedroom down the stairs into the family room. With a small light on, I would kneel by a large couch. In front of me was my Bible--open.


Alone--in the quiet--I beseeched God to abide within me. I needed to know for certain that He was taking complete charge of my life.


Night after night, I kept my vigil with the Lord. After an hour, I would return to my bed and fall back to sleep till morning.


During the school day, I would fast my lunch. While other students went to the cafeteria, I went to a storage closet on the second floor of our huge high school. Opening the door, I turned on the light. There was no chair in that room, just shelves upon shelves filled with supplies.


Retrieving a small New Testament from my pocket, I crouched down alongside a wall, preparing myself to fast and pray for the Lord's abiding presence.


Day after day, I kept faithful to my earnest desire to experience God within.


One day, my math teacher opened the door. Was I surprised!


"What are you doing in here?" she asked sternly.


I knew that I could not lie to her when seeking the fullness of God within. Therefore, I told her the simple truth.


"I am fasting and praying for the infilling of the Holy Spirit."


With that, she made a U-turn, shut the door and never bothered me again.


After awhile, I became frustrated. I wondered why I had to try so hard to know God
in His fullness.


Then I thought back to some of those saints' testimonies. They were glorious. They related how God was especially close--there in front of them, behind them, inside them.


Why was it so difficult for me to come upon that same real awareness?


Then it was that God spoke to me within my heart. It was without doubt that God said to me: "I was with you the first night you sought me. Do you not remember? I was there in that family room. You knew my peace and power in a very special way."


It was true. Immediately, I recalled how the room that first night seemed to fill with His holiness. There was a splendor in that space which had come from without. It had to have been the Lord Himself.


It then dawned upon me that I had been seeking others' experiences rather than allowing God to be personal with me.


He had not held me aloof. He had not kept His distance. He had been most faithful--punctual to the nighttime hour.


From that moment to this, I have thanked God for His abiding presence--heart to heart. It has been over 50 years since He proved Himself to me in that remarkable manner.


Now when others ask me how to know God within, I simply tell them to ask. He will answer if they are earnest. Time after time, they have returned to tell me that it has been true with them as it has been with me.


God keeps His word. He has promised to abide within us if we but ask.

THE HALIFAX ANGEL

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


The violinist soothed us with soft melodies as we lazily wandered by,
dropping a bill into his crumpled hat tossed on wharf’s edge. Others stopped
to ponder his rendition. Soon a semicircle enclosed his offering to
evening's sky. Dusk began cautiously to settle down upon us.


We had spent our usual lingering in the metro's public gardens laden with
exotic rose bushes and winding walkways laid in order years ago.
Children, playing tag, dodged about our feet. Young parents pushed their
baby strollers, nodding pleasant greetings.


Halifax in any season is sheer delight—from downtown churches to
museums and ice cream stands perched near water's rim. Usual
tourist types gawked about as city dwellers wove in and out of
traffic, running their shopping errands.


We were particularly blessed in beginning our day at Peggy's Cove, climbing
over stark rock formations, then buying a choice, delicate bone china cup and
saucer from a nearby gift shop. From there we drove past cottages tucked
away, picturesquely dotting their paintbrush intrusions into trees and
bushes alongside water's keeping.


Traveling from that famous lighthouse site to city's heart was our
pleasurable intent. Doing so year after year, we have never been
disappointed.


So it was that while making a turn when walking that Nova Scotian wharf, we
spied a woman dressed in scanty shawl, drab clothing and scruffy
sneakers. She played her accordion as if the only person breathing.
Her gaze into the crowd was glazed, appearing not to see us at all.


"Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once
was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see. . ."


I stopped. I was riveted. I was going to drink this in with whole soul.
After all, happily stunned, I had just come upon an unexpected treasure. And I know one when I see one. No way had I dreamt I would close out a vacationing day with such inspiring surprise handed me on an evening's platter.


I looked into her eyes. I studied her worn face. I etched into my mind's
sketch pad her profile, her leaning against the old shingled wall of an
abandoned shack, then opened my ear doors as wide as possible.


"’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, And grace my fears relieved. How precious did that grace appear The hour I first believed!"


"Thank you, Jesus," I exclaimed within. Whew! Am I among the fortunate, or
what?


Scripture warns us to note the angels attending us, though we usually
don't give that divine promise a passing thought from one hour to the next.
So cupped inside her gentle singing, I had to recall an angel's place among us.


I concluded one indeed had gifted us with a hymn of mercy. With that, my typically curious mind flicked off all sorts of questions: How did she come to know Jesus, when, what were the ins-and-outs, and what wonder had He presented her recently?


Yet such was out of order. I was not to query her. Instead, I was to admire her
witness and so thank heaven for her simply being there—unadorned except
for her divine message of hope.


"Thank you, Jesus."

DEFENDING BARBARA

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


“I didn’t have anything to do with it!” she cried.


Seated in my counseling room, her words crammed into one another. One jam session, for sure.


“I tell you. It’s true.”


Sobbing, Barbara attempted to set the record straight—true—factual—honest to the nth.


He didn’t buy it.


“They were screaming at one another. He lunged at the car. Bob yelled back. I was caught in the middle.” Sobbing uncontrollably, she leaned to right, then left. I thought she was going to fall onto the floor. “Why are you accusing me?”


Barbara was one of my clients. Her problem? Addiction. Well, actually with an “s”. In short, her life was one grand mess.


But Barbara was one of those individuals that you take to, that is, if you don’t have prejudices, particularly if you take to persons whose lives are so complicated that you wonder if the anyone can fix them.


That’s where my job came in. I thoroughly enjoyed it. “I leave work on a high,” I exclaimed to a friend. Why? Because I’m one of those loony fellas who gets an adrenaline rush out of helping people.


I knew Barbara. I trusted her. She’d been clean from drugs for a good long time and was making a Herculean attempt at being nice, decent, friendly-to-all and paying her bills without stealing a dime. Now with that I concluded, as her counselor, that she warranted an Emmy.


But my boss didn’t agree. He was sure that Barbara was one of the villains in the clinic’s parking lot who instigated a tussle that brought police and messed up staff’s morning coffee break.


Oh brother, was I ever caught between the devil and the deep blue sea; you can figure out who the devil was in that scene. (It wasn’t Barbara).


So I spoke up in her defense, loyal fool that I have proven myself to be on more than one occasion. That did not set well with boss. Not.


I persisted. I won’t budge when it comes to truth; it’s one of those ethical things that a few of us dimwits still give our lives to.


Presently, boss left room. Barbara was in shambles. My heart was beating out of my chest cavity. What in the name of God was going to happen next?


At 1:30, boss walked in to tell me I was done, over, up and out—“for insubordination”. Ever been there? Am sure there are a few out there who can ID on that one? Yep.


By 2, my coffee maker and I were in the auto trucking home for my last day at the clinic. My heart was torn in shreds. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I wondered where God had gone all of a sudden. Sometimes you pay a dear price for never giving up on a friend—and for standing alongside truth.


However, that was years ago. This evening I was thinking back over all that hellish glee that demons set loose. But, guess what, they didn’t win. Nope. They didn’t. They never do. God won. Yet that’s another story—grand and teaching and deepening and painful.


But my point is this: stay true to your real friends, glue yourself to God’s truth and let Him swing you wherever He deems. In the travels you will scan back to see He knew what He was doing; but more: His confidence in you going along for the ride is one boost that hardly has its equal.

CUKES, EGGS AND BEANS FOR JESUS' SAKE

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


“Have some beans—fresh from my garden,” Ray offers upon entering worship.


On other occasions, he brings cukes and fresh eggs. Still other times he walks in with tomatoes and corn.


An offering? No doubt Ray looks at it that way—his giving to God, his sharing with believers. It is a part of his joyous summer ritual. And of course the recipients are particularly grateful for his generosity.


Ray Alley, long-time Windham resident and garden-grower, spends many hours weeding and caring. At 78, he can look back over years of plenty.


On Wednesdays he can be found at the Senior Center assisting with noon meals. Not a pushy fellow, he finds his most comfort in being a background doer. Doing he does best when it comes to Christian witness.


Of course, when needed, Ray can speak up for his Lord; but just as ably he acts out his service before God. Naturally his friends are especially thankful for his sensitivities to others' needs.


Ray’s particular unique worship style is sharing garden produce with others—at the outset of a gathering. The veggies are laid out for willing takers. Following the service, those who came in empty-handed leave with hands full. Delicious morsels are enjoyed at their next mealtime.


A tithe of Ray’s income is also a “bottomline” to his obedient Christian faith. A tenth of his income—and sacrificial offerings besides—has been his style since first beginning on The Way. Others may balk at the tithe; Ray quietly explains to new believers that he has found it an undeniable blessing.


Giving garden gifts to friends and offering tithes to God is part and parcel of Ray’s reason for believing.


Maine’s Lakes Region is replete with others who quietly go about their daily Christian testimony. This is the way Jesus commissioned His followers to give forth. He cautioned disciples not to blow their trumpets on street corners; instead He accented performing their good deeds for the Father alone to see.


Why?


Because giving can turn in on itself so as to become a selfish gesture for attention and applause. That’s when religion turns sour. Such doing cancels itself out. But when giving for heaven’s glory alone, God notes it for eternity.


I recall a fellow elsewhere who landscaped a striking summit acreage with statuary and religious plaques positioned among flowering gardens. At first glance, the view impressed others with awe. But over time, the outdoor architect revealed motives of self-pride. It became apparent that what he labored on was not really a gift to God but a showcase for his own ego. Sad. His yield bloated his conceit but it did nothing to please heaven’s smile.


That could never be said of Ray and his ilk. They do what they do simply to do for Jesus. That is reward enough. In that, they got hold of why believers are here. Also, they understand that our egos will flash off history’s pages soon enough; it is only what is done in Jesus’ name and for His sake that will outlast us.

FUTURE TENSE

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


I positioned the fez atop my head, then climbed onto the camel’s back, imagining myself in control.


Typical American notion. So there!


Not really. A most cordial guide stood close to camel and me for
safe journeying across those Egyptian sands. It surely was a different power
play than setting my Acura’s cruise control.


When trekking a desert half the world away, one does want to get his travel
money’s worth. So it was with Priscilla and me as we set ourselves to gaze
upon the pyramids. We did not have to work up much of an aesthetic sweat to
bring it off. The specimens themselves elicited response truly beyond
words.


Pyramids: “steps to heaven”, “kingdom tombs”. Whatever lingo fits your
fancy, they are burial wonders of the Egyptian ancients.


Inside those mysterious architectural extravaganzas were chambers,
galleries and corridors to protect the mummies from robbers. Tunnels also
held equipment for the next sphere once exiting this earthly realm.


Our evening offered us the “Sight and Sound” feature. We sat as audience to
sky and sand, taking in the phenomenal presentation accenting the
historic edifices mounded before us.


So it was when visiting the Cairo Museum we saw for our intensely
curious selves King Tut’s (Tutankhamun; ruled 1332-1322 BC) encasing.
When years later that prize made its North American tour, we recalled
the wonder impression it had made upon us.


Egyptians certainly believed in more than ‘now.’ ‘Then’ demanded its own
preparatory mandate, hence the pyramids.


I fondly remember a very dear Lakes Region friend, William A.
Tierney. A Christian, he thoroughly enjoyed the ‘now.’ With that, he also
wisely prepared for ‘then’ by keeping his life in order under God.


When chatting with his wife about his friendship imprint left upon our
hearts, we treasured especially various meanderings over Maine’s hill and
dale orchestrated by William’s inventive nature.


“Just get in and don’t ask any questions,” he would instruct passengers
boarding his vehicle for a day’s excursion. What a delight not to have to
manage trip logistics; just sit back and let William take the controls.


When it came to overseeing his journey beyond this sphere, William leaned
upon Scripture. One verse of particular comfort was II Corinthians 5:8: “.
. .absent from the body. . .present with the Lord.”


“It’s that simple,” he would witness.


In other words, God revealed to His own grace children the eternal secret.
The beyond is not a maze of unknowables nor an elusive mystery kept from
their questing spirits. The believer’s beyond is where the Lord
is-heaven, land of light. No wonder Jesus comforted His own with “Be not
afraid. . .Have I not told you? I go to prepare a place for you, that where
I am you may be also.” (John 14:1-5)


William counted on that baseline for his eternal future. Therefore, on
this, his first anniversary away from us, we too count on that revelation.
In that, we anticipate being reunited with him when we also “go through
the door.” Welcomed by Savior Jesus and angels, we will know even
as we are known, according to Scripture.


Fez in place? Yes. Camels behaving? Sure thing. Then keep moving, for the
Christian is already buoyed by the hope yet to realized.

SWINE FLU: PROPHECY = ‘PLAGUES’ OF END TIMES

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


NOTE: Pastor Swank authored MOMENTS TO GO, A STUDY OF THE SECOND COMING, Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 1974, the book now out of print. However, a few copies are available via such venues as Amazon books.


Matthew 24:7: Jesus speaks:


World English Bible
For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and there will be famines, plagues, and earthquakes in various places.


Young's Literal Translation
'For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.


Webster's Bible Translation
For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there will be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes in divers places.


Darby Bible Translation
For nation shall rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and there shall be famines and pestilences, and earthquakes in divers places.


Douay-Rheims Bible
For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and there shall be pestilences, and famines, and earthquakes in places


King James Bible
For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.


American King James Version
For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.


Thanks for above to Biblos.com at http://bible.cc/matthew/24-7.htm


Jesus’ literal End Times prophetic statements are found most clearly in the Gospels: Matthew 24, Mark 13 and Luke 21.


Jesus’ symbolic End Times prophetic statements are found particularly in the Book of Revelation, the latter as a vision circa AD 95 given by Jesus to John the Apostle on the Isle of Patmos off of Greece.


Plagues / pestilences are to be a part of the End Times signals prior to the Second Coming / Rapture.


We are experiencing such plagues now as I type. Note DrudgeReport’s headlines at the latter part of April 2009. Click onto http://www.drudgereport.com/


DrudgeReport:


CALDERON TELLS MEXICANS TO STAY CALM, COOPERATE WITH AUTHORITIES...
CDC RECOMMENDS PLANNING FOR SCHOOL CLOSURES...
Positive: NYC students...
WHO: Swine flu could mutate to 'more dangerous' strain...
Flu fears prompt quarantine plans...
Mexico City residents staying at home...
CLOSE TO 1,400 SUSPECTED CASES...
Russia Suspends Imports of Meat From Mexico, Some U.S. States...
New swine flu likely widespread...
Asia on alert...
10 New Zealand students in scare...
Mideast First: Israeli man hospitalized on suspicions...
6 CASES CONFIRMED IN CANADA...
Spain announces 3 suspected cases.


Yet there are those who say that we have always had plagues. True.


However, put that plagues prediction alongside the other Gospel accounts’ predications. Then add to that data Ezekiel 36-39 regarding Israel becoming a Jewish nation.


You have the generic signs in the Gospels with the particularization sign of Israel as a nation on May 14, 1948. That combination is lethal when deciphering biblical Second Coming / Rapture predictions related to present-tense newsfeeds.


The generic signs have always occurred. However, the Ezekiel sign is only graphed as of 1948 and following. Generic signs plus Ezekiel sign conclude we are living in the End Times.


Now, today take note especially of the plagues/pestilences prophecy Jesus gave to His disciples on the Mount of Olives. (It will be to that Mount that Jesus’ two feet will touch down, causing the Mount to split in half from east to west, signifying His divine power to rule the planet.)


Read “Whose Turf Is The Earth?” at http://www.postchronicle.com/religion/article_212215035.shtml

REPS DON’T STAND A CHANCE IF THEY DON’T FIND YOUNG CHARISMATIC LEADER

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


Republicans and Independent conservatives can rant and rave all they want about B. H. Obama and the Dems. But if the Reps don’t come up with a young charismatic leader, it’s nix.


Rep leaders are getting older. That does not make for a win.


Spiritual leaders like James Dobson are leaving their previous posts. That means that unless Rep spiritual leaders into social issues are there on the front line, Reps are crippled.


Political leaders like Newt Gingrich are not appealing to those under 30.


Conservative voices like Rush Limbaugh are moving up the age scale.


Where are the replacements for James Dobon, Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh? If they are “out there,” they had better move center stage soon.


B. H. Obama was put into the Oval Office by mob hysteria and liberal media.


He is not capable. He is not going to match up to the pressing problems. Nevertheless, those who put him in the White House are crazed by his presence. That’s what counts if he is to remain on Pennsylvania Avenue.


Reps must meet that challenge with a young talented personage who can win the eye as well as the head. He has to strike it hot on social and political issues that are genuinely conservative.


Where is that person? Reps are hard pressed to locate him.


Instead, Fox News’ stars are grappling with issues ad infinitum. And what they say most of the time is quite on target.


Now that kind of intelligent give-forth can continue till the cows come home; but unless there is the right individual to match up to the conservative intelligence, the diatribes will continue without producing anyone as United States President.


Right now conservatives are giving themselves totally to dissecting issues. Fine. These are usually brilliant dissertions.


Nevertheless, those must have a grabber face attached to them or it’s only so much Rep wind blowing to the whim and the willows.


Poor America. It’s conservative leadership is growing older and older, not replaced by a younger cadre capable of swinging to the crowds in a meaningful fashion.


Poor Republic. It is believed by the folk over 40. But what about the American voters 30 and under? They are not mesmerized by the Republican Party, sadly.

I BELIEVE IN MIRACLES: FAITH SURVIVED

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


The demons crawled the church walls. Now I knew what the missionaries were talking about. They said they were attacked by devils on the mission field. Sometimes it was a witchdoctor. Other times it was the invisible spirits. But devils they were. And those agents were after blood.


SINNERS was “painted” with shaving cream in letters 10-feet high across our American church parking lot. That’s what welcomed me when returning home from visiting a parishioner in the city hospital. SINNERS. That one word was meant for my parsonage family. We evidently were tagged as the “sinners.”


Another day my wife and I drove back from shopping. As we walked to the front door of the parsonage, we saw the bottles. An array of liquor bottles lined up in front of the door jam. We don’t drink. They weren’t our leftover liquor bottles. Somebody or some persons had lined them up where we had to pass in order to get into the house.


The phone rang. I looked at the dresser’s lighted digital clock. It was 3:30 in the morning. I lifted the receiver. “You’re going to die.” Click. You’re going to die? It was a female voice.


I looked out my church study window. I saw the church custodian — a woman — running from the church to the fellowship hall. I thought nothing of it. She was simply in a hurry. Another day I walked by the same window. There she was again — running from the side door of the church toward the fellowship hall entrance. Running. She was simply in a hurry, I reasoned again.


I learned that Linda was not in a hurry when going from the church to the hall. She was running from me.


I noticed that when I was in the church, she was working in a directly opposite part of the building than I was. And when possible, she left the church for the hall. You see, she informed others that I was filled with the devil; therefore, she could not be near me. Not even my shadow.


Linda would come to worship. She sat with her husband. During the entire service, they glowered at me. As soon as the service was over, they left immediately, rushing for the door. She let others know that I was filled with the devil.


Another night, the phone rang. I looked at the digital clock. It was 2:30 in the morning. I lifted the receiver. Heavy breathing. More heavy breathing. Click.


We drove up northward to Wiscasset for the day, visiting another pastor and his wife. Upon our return, I noted black wires strewn across the parking lot between the parsonage and church. Hanging wires. Sure enough. When I lifted the phone inside the house, no connection. Someone or some ones had cut the phone wires. We had no way to communicate by phone to the outside.


One Sunday I had preached the sermon and pronounced the benediction. While walking down the sanctuary’s side aisle to shake hands with worshipers at the church’s front door, I saw Fran and his wife, Barbara. But what I noted in particular was that Fran was holding a tape recorder. Recorder? It was not customary for parishioners to bring tape recorders to worship.


I learned that Fran was recording my sermons in hopes of finding something demonic. He then could take the “evidence” to the district superintendent. How long he had hidden the recorder in his place in the pew I did not know.


I noted that after services, Jim clustered with a group of men around their cars parked alongside the church building. The men were part of the growing antagonists. Could one of them have sketched SINNERS on the parking lot hardtop? Could one of them have placed the liquor bottles at my front door? Could one of their wives called to my phone in the middle of the night? Could one or more of them have cut through the phone wires?


Of course, we had the phone company repairman put wires back in place. We had service. Then still another night, mid-morning actually, the phone rang. “You’re going to die.” Click. Not too original, I thought.


One day my wife and I were visiting an ill parishioner. When leaving her apartment, Jean, a neighbor who also went to our church, ran into her yard. I turned quickly in her direction, listened up and heard all sorts of nasty words. They were directed at us as we walked toward our car. She kept screaming. Then finally she walked back into her apartment, disappearing. But of course she and husband appeared once again Sundays in church.


Jeff had been quite the Bible student. I appreciated his intelligence. So it was with surprise when I got in the mail a caustic letter from his professing Christian father informing me that I was not of God. The father attended a companion congregation in our denomination. I had always thought him to be a friend. He had glowing remarks to make regarding the various seminars I conducted. He had been one of the most enthusiastic loyalists to those special gatherings.


With his father showing his real colors, Jeff and wife sent me their own caustic letter. Dominoes fall down together when pushed in the same direction.


Jim kept corralling the grumbling cluster after services — sometimes downstairs in the hallways, sometimes outside by their automobiles, other times in the back lot behind the church. Mike began joining the cluster. That was especially disappointing. I had thought more of Mike than giving into those making dissension.


The mid-morning phone calls kept dittoing themselves. Staccato staccato staccato. Like sharp sounds in the night season. Finally we had them traced. Sure enough, it was who we thought it was. Not good. We had the police visit her, warning her to discontinue the harassment.


Bob turned on us. But not until his wife discovered him in liaisons with other women. Interestingly enough, when his wife found out what was going on at work, in parking lots, on business trips, she bonded with him against us, the parsonage family that had worked alongside her throughout her investigative journey. Dysfunction can magnetize dysfunction on occasion.


All the while, we were dealing with an adopted teen son out of control: drugs, sex, runaway, then criminal acts that sentenced him to several years in federal prisons. He had finished off his relationships at the Christian school, the public school and left me with homeschooling him. But that obviously was not the cure to his yen for trouble.


Life was a bit stressed out throughout those several years. Finally, the ones who concluded I was of the devil logged their nonsense complaints with the district superintendent. This is the man who in 1991 was told by another pastor that I had said concerning the superintend, “We’ve got to get rid of him.” I had never said that. That was a lie manufactured by another minister. But the superintendent believed the lie, never finding out the truth by asking me about that statement.


From the lie-moment onward, the superintendent sought how to get rid of me. When he received the bogus complaints from parishioners, he filed them as ammunition. He left the district for another position out of state. But the pastor who followed him in the superintendency had disagreed with me about a matter. A young couple from my church asked to use his church facility for their wedding and reception because our building was not large enough. That pastor told them they would have to pay $400 rental. He then told me I had to support him in that figure.


I disagreed, telling him it was not realistic. The couple had little money. They could not afford that. Further, in our denomination it is a custom to share facilities without charge. Now this? That man never let me forget the fact that I would not bow down to his dictate. When he came into the superintendency , he followed through with my ousting. He and his district board showed up unannounced on a Sunday evening, interrupting me conducting a prayer meeting, to announce that I had 30 days to vacate the parsonage, lose my salary and health coverage and leave that pastorate.


The cluster had got its way. The devil had climbed the walls and outside the walls. My wife and I were left housing in an old trailer, substituting teaching without health coverage and paying over $500 a month for temporary health insurance. Our furniture was stored in friends’ houses, garages, basements, attics and backyard sheds.


Since that devilment, Jim was found dead in his camper bed one summer morning. Mike died. Jean died. Barbara died. Bob died. The woman who was the middle-of-the-night threatening caller as well as the one who cut the phone wires and deposited the beer bottles died. The one who spelled SINNERS on the parking lot died.


Many in the “men’s cluster” pulled out of faith altogether, their children having lost hope in anything Christian. Sunday mornings the church building is still begging for bodies — and that’s years after the devil set up shop to undercut my ministry.


Through all of those attacks, my teen daughter agonized, especially when seeing adults turn against God and her parents. I felt so sorry for her. She was born into the pastorate. She never asked to be a minister’s child. One by one, she was betrayed by those whom she once loved and thought they loved us. One by one, she saw the vacant sanctuary slots.


She cried. What was going on? Why were some of her close teen friends no longer close? How could adults hold church office, testify publicly in services, and act like they did? What was the men’s cluster all about? Why did Jean scream at her parents? Why did Linda say her father was filled with the devil? Why had the district superintendent held a lie as true for all those years without investigating what was real? Why had a pastor charged $400 for rental, then pressed her father to agree to such madness? Why? What was church all about if this was what it ended up to be? Who were Christians anyhow?


As my wife and I went off to the trailer in the woods—what I came to call “God’s Tin Can”—my daughter went off to college. It was good that she did. It gave her another place to be. But she went for counseling in order to deal with the betrayals. I kept praying for her, that she would keep the faith. Above all, we could not lose faith in God. After all, He had not brought on the betrayals. The demons had set up house in our church, as they have done so in many churches these days.


God proves Himself, sometimes immediately and sometimes over time. At this point in our lives, we have a beautiful cottage in Maine and a lovely country home in Nova Scotia. We have our health, especially our health of soul. We have a son who’s served his time, is married and the father of two precious children. We have our daughter, happily married and teaching in a Christian school. She kept the faith, wiser than prior.


It’s been a miracle over time.

PASTOR: OUSTED? TELL THE TRUTH

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


You have been ousted from your pulpit. The enemy has taken advantage of you. They have bloodied you up.


Or perhaps you have quit. No one ousted you. You burned out. And there you sit, stunned and undone.


In any case, there is no ministry called “local pastorate” any more. You are gone, out, unpasted, unglued, no more.


Then with all that, tell the truth—and all the truth, so help you God.


Put away your pious mouth and start telling the bald truth about what happened.


At first, you will feel so ashamed in admitting that you were done in by the lunatics. That’s because you are a refined individual with standards.


But keep in mind that these slaughterings happen to the best of us. Take Jesus for example.


Therefore, put aside as quickly as possible your middle class self-assessment and start speaking the awful truth about what was done to you. Tell your clan what happened. Tell your trusting friends what happened.


But be careful to whom you speak when choosing fellow clergypersons to talk to. Remember that many of them are not on your side once you have been ousted. They are very much a part of the politic.


I know that they have shared coffee and do-nuts with you morning after morning, meeting after meeting. I know they have slapped you on the back and congratulated on this and that. I know they have bowed their heads in prayer with you and given their assembly reports alongside you and shook hands with you after one worship service after another.


I know all that.


But keep in mind that you are surrounded by opportunists in the ministry. The laity never know that. They have this nonsense opinion of fantasy weaving that all clergy are truly people of God. Many green horn clergy have the same fancy. They are new to the work, so why shouldn’t they have
that notion. After all, just a short time back they were creatures called “laity.”


Nevertheless, you should be seasoned enough by now to know that you just cannot confide in everyone—clergy included, in fact, clergy at the top of the suspicion list.


Ask any minister who has gone through the slaughtering how many fellow clergy have proven themselves to still keep in loving, caring contact after the slaughter. Ask any minister how many of the old guard were still there alongside the bloodied pastor. Ask. You will find that those ministers who have been so mistreated confess that very, very few of the so-called fellow clergy even admit that they once knew the bloodied pastor’s name. Truly.


That is an interesting phenomenon, isn’t it? But it is realistically true. It is fact.


Why?


Well, haven’t you figured that out by now. Recall that above it was stated that more times than not clergy are more a part of the church politic than they are of the eternal kingdom. They are genuinely in league with what is visible, tangible, political. They are not that much in alliance with the invisible, eternal workings of the Lord God. Sad, isn’t it? But true, nevertheless.


Now all of us in ministry should have got hold of that postulate long before this. How come? Because we are supposed to be students of the Word. And in the Word we read that clergy were the very ones Jesus mistrusted the most. Jesus had the most trouble with the clergy of His day. Jesus was gossiped about, maligned, and eventually murdered by the clergy. It was the temple guard who did Him in. It was the High Priest who worked His demise.


Jesus did not have all that much trouble with the riff-raff. In fact, they allowed Him to save their eternal souls. But He had one daily mess-up with the scribes, Pharisees and political ward at Jerusalem’s center.


So. . . with that historical reality check in place, make a lateral time move to where you and I sit today. We are going to have to deal with the same devilment in the system. It is there with the spiritual leaders, so-called, beginning with those who rose to the supposed “top” of the ecclesiastical ladder. There they are in their splendor, preening themselves, guarding their turf and banding together to deny they ever knew the bloodied pastor.


Got it? Got it! Sad, isn’t it? But true, isn’t it? Yes, it is sadly true, friend.


Consequently, when you are determining to tell the truth about what has happened to you, you will tell it only to those who can trust truth. Watch out for clergy. They cannot. Now that sounds all-inclusive. And I mean it to sound that way for your immediate tendency, because you have been used to clergy comradeship, is to call a fellow minister and start spilling the beans.


Therefore, I am underlining in a bit extreme fashion to trust no clergy so that you will really get that stark message. Pick only those very few clergy you have trusted over much time to tell anything to. But choose others more earnestly—family, friends whom you have known for a long time, other pastors who have been “through the mill.”


I recall that some of the pastors emailed me about “What happened, Grant,” wanting every juicy detail. How soon they got in touch with me after the slaughter. I knew immediately by vibes that can’t be put into words that I was to tell those emailing pastors nothing. Nothing. Nothing, for certain.


And I didn’t.


I deleted their emails as fast as they came in. Those pastors had never communicated to me a trustworthy vibe. They were political to the nth. Therefore, when they lunged toward me wanting to know what had happened, I knew instinctively that they were after the data to spread it on their gossip chains—and that quite quickly.


Thank God I did what the gut told me to do. I was so anxious to get healing from a fellow friends. I wanted to gush out what had taken place—to anyone who had an ear. I would’ve talked to the lamppost.


So those who emailed me knew of my vulnerability at that moment and were more than ready to take advantage of that. But somehow grace slipped in to stop me from confiding in them. I will never have enough thanks to the divine grace for saving me from the vultures.


Please take to heart this counsel given you at this point. You are more vulnerable than you think because of the extreme anguish. You are very near collapse. You are crying out for posts to hold you up. You want friends to endear themselves close to your hurt.


But—remember—the last ones you need are those political fiends in the system who are not really your friends at all. They are going to turn on you. They are going to feed you to the gossip machine. Count on it.


Speak the truth. And in speaking the truth, keep the truth standard close to your own common sense factors. Use that truth gauge to keep you from further hurt.


Speak only the bald truth to those who are truly genuine in their friendship ties with you. They have gone the journey. They have matured over the years so as not to be green horns out for blood.


Then to those trusted comrades, let the cry go forth. Tell them all about it. Let them in on the deepest levels of betrayal. They can take it. They have no doubt suffered likewise and can thereby shake their heads knowingly, providing you with the sympathetic heart God’s has for you at this time.


Now take care of the family. Yes, please.


By that I mean the obvious. Take care of their emotions. Tend to their fears. Huddle.


I know that you yourself as the chief victim of this devilment are bleeding all over the place, but as mentioned in a previous chapter, most of the time there is family.


So take care of those close to you for they have suffered on a different level than you. You have suffered because you have been the focal point of the meanness. They have suffered in that they have not been the focal point of the meanness.


Instead, they have been on the sidelines. And in that is a very, very special anguish. It adds up to be this: spouse and children want to kill. They have the urge to slice through. They want to find justice. For whom? For you. There’s no doubt a better, more civil way to put it. But I’ll still stand with the “kill” and “slice through” for I cling to reality. I like truth.


Your spouse and children want to get even, not so much for their sake, as for your sake. But their tools are limited. They have not been the center of the madness and therefore they cannot lash out like you can. They must come to your defense, but that is not the same as being in the driver’s seat.


In other words, they want to check in first with you to see if what they do in defending you is going to make matters worse for you. They are confused at that point. They are worn out. They are upside down. They are inside out. They are not thinking at their clearest. And their emotions, too, are running ahead of their logic.


Yet through all this mayhem, they have this dreadful drive to get even—to carve out justice in their own ways. And that is laudable. Thank God that we have family so near and dear as to want to defend us to such lengths.


But that still does not diminish their pain. So you have to come to their rescue to some degree. The best way to do that is to huddle. Talk things out with spouse and children. Cry things out. Do this often. Do this impromptu, that is, when it needs to be, on the spot, right now, not waiting for a more convenient time for in this mess there probably will never be a convenient time.


Those precious ones close to you need to lend an ear, need to scream a mouth, need to lean on a shoulder, need to burst forth with whatever is on their tethered hearts. They need to be given permission to vent—say whatever without being judged or corrected. They need it just as you need it.


And when you as a family have these bombastic, healing, painful times together, you will find bonding taking place that you had never known was possible. You will also find some awful emotions exploding that you had never dreamt were there. But it is all in the mix. It all needs to be honored and let loose for what difference does it make finally?


What is worse? Penting up those emotions or letting them fling out in all directions. What is better? Cooping up the wildest notions or opening up the windows for them to fly thither and yon?


There are times, too, when you need to give permission to the children to worship somewhere else. You need also to tell them that they can forget ever seeing those “kind church folk” again, never answering their phone calls, never trusting those they thought were once friends. That’s hard. But that’s a permission that at least can be granted by you, the parent.


And at other times, those children need to go away for awhile, even changing residences and schools for a year if necessary. Let them find other turf to bleed on.


Do whatever is necessary to bring good health back to those bloodied in the parsonage family. The anguish may consume you daily; but there are others who have been tortured. They are those under your roof and they need protection, shelter and, if need be, a chance to get away.


Quit church buildings for awhile.


Yes, stop it. Stop going to church buildings. Church building now represents the devil in white clothes. It stands for politics in the pulpit and pew. It
looms up as the enemy.


Can you ever again look at a church bulletin, hear church announcements, listen to a sermon, bow your head during the benediction, and leave to shake hands with the speaker in the same way you did before the slaughter?


And that goes for your family.


So take a much-needed sabbatical from church buildings.


Now with our family, it was not all that difficult. I left the church building immediately, never to return. That meant that I worshiped in my living room or a friend’s living room—or outdoors on lawn chairs during summertime.


There was a small remnant that left the establishment with our family when the slaughter took place. That remnant covenanted to gather on the Lord’s Day for worship, but never to look back to the sanctuary of yesterday. That sanctuary was now inhabited by demons. We would never trust its environs. We considered it covered with a curse.


Nevertheless, in that August breeze we met together the next Sunday morning in God’s open air—sunlight and pleasant winds blowing across our faces. We sang. We prayed. We shook hands with one another. We listened to the Word. We gave thanks. We hoped for the future blessed with the divine smile.


And we got it.


With that there came the “church in a box.” That’s right. We put a few hymnals, an offering basket, a simple wooden cross, some chorus books and a Bible into a large plastic box. That was henceforth to be our church. To this day, it is our church.


We meet on Sundays in the mornings and evenings as well as mid-week in our own homes. We have no more mowing lawn expenses. No more plowing church parking lot expenses. No more heating and electric bills. No more church bulletins. No more church newsletters. No more copy machines. No more business meetings, elections, voting, membership rolls.


We meet for the basic reasons believers meet—something like the Early Church—to worship, pray, learn about God through the Bible, and then go forth to live for Jesus weekdays.


That’s it.


And for you? You must get over your drive to find your body in a church building every Sunday morning. I have talked with others who said that that was one drive that proved most difficult to overcome. They just felt guilty if they were not in a church building every Sunday morning.


But in further reflection, I have heard those same people say that if they had to do it over again, they would take the sabbatical. They would plan on a healthy breather from all that represented slaughterhouse. They would find a quiet place for worship on the Lord’s Day, but it would be far from any symbols of the old guard. They would find that which was fresh and unthreatening.


There is always a living room where you can meet. Even if two or three gather, Jesus has promised to be there with you. So how can you miss with that divine promise?


There is a seashore in summer. There is pasture in spring. There is the back
yard with lawn chairs in good weather. There are plenty of sanctuaries available for keeping the Lord’s Day holy.


Think long and hard before you strap yourself down to walking into a church building soon after the slaughter. But keep in mind that you are going to have to make some sort of plans for Lord’s Day worship for one-in-every-seven-days comes around once in every seven days. So you’ve got to have something in place when it comes to worshiping on His holy day, don’t you?


But it does not have to be the traditional church building. Does it?


Now it’s time to breathe in and breathe out. That’s right. Breathe in and breathe out.


These pages have dealt with a lot of emotion. Now it’s time to put these pages aside for some breathing exercises.


As you breathe in and breathe out, look to God. I know it is hard. God appears nasty and mean. God appears unfeeling. God does not seem near at all.


So where is your theology going in all this? Where is your doctrine flying through all this?


Nevertheless, as difficult as it is, breathe in and breathe out, looking to God, far away as He seems to you. That’s okay. God can handle it if you can handle it.


Time not so much to reason anything out. Put away the logic board for awhile. No more strategizing where you are going to live, how you’re going to pay the bills, how you’re going to tell your friends that you graduated with, and all the rest that is buzzing around in your weary brain.


Time not to make another phone call nor write another letter nor mail out another resume nor check another classified ad.


Time not to talk to anyone in the house.


Time to shut off the television and radio and CD.


Time to breathe in and breathe out, looking to God, far away as He seems to you. That’s okay. God can handle it if you can handle it.


Sit there for an hour breathing in and breathing out, looking to God. Maybe get up and walk around a bit and then sit down some more.


You might even get up long enough to walk around the house. Then go back to breathing in and breahing out, looking to God.


You can cry. You can yell. You can whimper. You can fall to the floor, hugging your knees. You can do all that. No problem.


Just let it go. Let your feelings run their course. God can handle it if you can handle it. Breathe in and breathe on, looking to God.


Tomorrow read over these pages again. And the next day do the same. Then
the next day read them again. When reading them, end the reading by putting these pages aside to look to God, cry, sit still, groan a bit, walk around the house another time, and breathe in and breathe out.


Do it.

STAYING PURE--IN AN IMPURE WORLD

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


We unpacked our suitcases and looked longingly at the motel pool. It would be pleasant after a long day's drive.


Later that evening we prepared for a sound sleep. Before turning off the light, I flicked on the television to catch the late news. On that channel were naked bodies in an orgy.


I turned the television off promptly; but I was left with such disgust, such anger at sin, that I was in on mood to rest. I was ready for battle.


How can a Christian stay pure in an impure world? Jesus said, "Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God" (Matthew 5:8, KJV). If He said it, it must be possible.


In our own strength we cannot be holy. Therefore, His Spirit must empower us with such righteousness.


Jesus accented the heart. He went to the heart of the matter of holiness when He focused on the center of our longings. Our core of commitment must be so aligned with Jesus so that the impurity encircling us does not lodge in us.


We must furnish the heart's desires with Bible reading and prayer. We must fellowship with those who likewise hunger for more of Jesus.


Determining to know more of the Spirit of Jesus in practical holiness is to "see God," Jesus promised. That means seeing God now.


When we separate ourselves consciously from the evil in the world, we must likewise separate ourselves to the purity of Jesus. The more we walk and talk with Jesus, the more we see Him with the vision of our hearts.


Paul wrote: "Those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit" (Romans 8:5, NKVJ).


Wickedness never takes a vacation; it was loose in the first century. It was necessary for Paul to preach about separation from evil to righteousness, the flesh warring against the spirit. Paul pointed to the victory one could gain by setting one's mind on things above. He joined the accent on the head with Jesus' accent on the heart.


Paul stressed the free will of the believer, instructing Christians to set their minds on the Spirit.


That means consciously working out personal salvation in fear and trembling by refusing to have anything to do with sin.


This underlines the need for developing holy habits. Being holy does not happen automatically. It results from a disciplined life, one rooted in the Scriptures and determined to pray through to triumph over evil.


Paul also wrote: "Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. But you are not in the flesh but are in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you" (Romans 8:8,9, NKJV).


Paul contended with those who testified of the Spirit's presence but did not live up to the profession. Holiness is not only a testimony; it must be a daily reality.


Paul continued: "Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit" (Galatians 5:24,25,NASB). Jesus calls us to live holy lives, even in an impure world. Believers must crucify the flesh with its passions and desires.


As we look about us at the decaying world, we give God thanks that we have hope in Jesus. Our ties are not here. But in the meantime, we have work to do. It is the work of purity.


God "chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him," (Ephesians l:4, NASB).


What a privilege to live today. We have the glorious opportunity to be God's salt in the earth, His lights of the world.


Place your heart in the Bible. Pray. Fellowship with the saints. Keep your eyes on Jesus.


With all that going for you, you need never fall.

SANCTIFICATION IS SWEET SURRENDER

J. Grant Swank, Jr,


For many, the Bible teaching regarding sanctification is difficult to understand. Perhaps it is the length and strange sound of the term itself. Maybe it is because it has not been defined simply enough.


Actually, its thrust is easily grasped if one does not take tedious detours.


Sanctification, simply stated, is sweet surrender.
When one becomes saved, he takes Christ's blood upon his soul. In that, he receives divine mercy. Sins are cleansed. This is a divine act beyond our fondest imaginations.


When the saved one then becomes sanctified, he yields his all to Christ. In salvation, one takes grace. In sanctification, one gives all to God.


Picture yourself now standing before God. In your hands are all that you have and are: wardrobe, vehicles, properties, family, friends, wallet, health or sickness, desires, reputation, abilities, dreams, future ambitions, finally death and eternal destiny.


Lift all of this to God. Give it all to Him without reservation. That is the surrender of sanctification. You received at salvation; you now yield at sanctification.


In that moment of submitting completely, the Holy Spirit accepted your all. He then cleansed it in order to return it as holy to you. Now what you submitted is ready for the kingdom's good.


Previously, it was used chiefly for your own self-focused "good."


At the time of sanctification, you are made pure by the Holy Spirit. He takes away your selfishness, stubbornness and stupidity which clung to things for your own welfare. In place of all that, He gives you grace to abandon to God. Now you no longer live for self but for the Savior alone.


When you were first saved, your sins were cleansed. Now that you are sanctified, your sin nature is cleansed. This is the "double cure" of which we sing in the hymn, "Amazing Grace."


How does the Christian remain sanctified? Simply put: remain surrendered to the Holy Spirit in everything. Do not take back anything that you yielded to God. Leave all with Him--everything old, everything new--past, present, future.


As long as your soul submits completely to the Lord, you are continually cleansed. This is all accomplished by His grace, not of works, lest anyone should boast of his own human achievements.


Grace saves us from our sins. Grace sanctifies us from our sin nature. Therefore, God receives all the glory.


Can one remain sanctified completely until death? Certainly. By an act of free will, one becomes saved and sanctified. One chooses these opportunities of divine grace. Likewise, the believer may exercise free will for holiness till death. The decision is always left with us.


Less than surrender is misery. It is a double-minded life--living for God, yet living secretly (and sometimes obviously) for one's self. This is evidently difficult and trying to the soul.


Total surrender is sweet in that it returns one's soul completely to God. Instead of straining to plot one's own benefits, one yields all such maneuvering to God. Therefore, there is a freedom from striving in everything.


The on-going life of sanctification then is perfecting the surrender. It is learning from the Holy Spirit how to consecrate the most practical items to God--life's minors and majors. It is being taught how to think with God ("the mind of Christ").


It is discovering that material less is spiritual more.


Sanctification in this life has no conclusion but "more." There is always more to come upon in God, more to precision, more to uncover of one's own self and of God's self. That is why it is such an exhilarating adventure.


How then does "the law" enter into this sanctifying grace? Is one at liberty to do as one pleases once one comes into this release? No. Instead, one finds that God's commandments are the key to freedom within. Therefore, the sanctified yearn for more of God's statutes.


The Bible speaks of the "law of liberty." This is one more aspect of the sweet surrender. It is experiencing being a slave to God in order to be free from sin and self-centeredness. These paradoxes are lived out dynamically in the sanctified walk.


When the sanctified read of God's expectations (laws) in the Word, they become as delicacies to be enjoyed. Before sanctification, the double-minded believer shunned God's laws for they appeared restrictive. After sanctification, the believer binds God's laws to his heart for they are indeed liberating.


Abiding by God's law releases one from being legalistic. Legalism is adhering to man-made laws.


Living by God's laws is not cold, sharp and unkind legalism; instead, it is gentle, understanding and patient.


Satan thrives on a legalistic religion. The Holy Spirit tutors the sanctified in the eternally true laws of God.


First century Judaism was founded upon legalism. Jesus offered the truth which would set one free from such humanly manufactured bondage. For that reason, Jesus was murdered by the religious system.


Live out the law of holy love and you yourself will be set free. Strap the commandments of God to your soul joyfully; in that you will be released from your chief enemy--stubborn self.


Sweet surrender not only includes yielding tangibles and inner drives. It also includes pain, confusion, tormented thinking, betrayals of the past, disappointments, ponderings of suicide, doubts and dreads.


The true sweetness of this surrender is realizing that the Father is willing to accept these hurts--for healing. Many have been made whole when they submitted those wounds of the heart which they thought they had to contend with till death. No. "Cast all your cares. . ." means all.


Frequently, Bible preachers and teachers request their hearers to yield tangibles and inner drives.


But it is not that frequently that such speakers get around to the awful burdens that many sincere grace-children carry all the time. Therapeutically, it is needful that we preach the "full gospel"--submit to Him the bleeding souls, too. He can soothe. And He does.


Sanctification is one of the most enticing dimensions of the gospel. It is sad that it is not set forth more often. Our souls are made for this opportunity of grace. To lack this experience is to remain partially bound in spirit.


When Jesus said that He came to set us free, He meant it. Sanctification is that wide, open door.


Have you come to God with your all? Have you stood before Him with everything? Then have you yielded all of this--pain and pleasure--to the One who formed you?


Let Him take this package for its cleansing. Satan will lie to you that God will rob you blind, leave you bankrupt. Do not believe the father of deceit.


The Holy Spirit will instead make your offering holy, returning it to you for heaven's sake.


From that moment onward, keep that package in God's plan. In that, you will experience in the depth of your soul the sweetness of your on-going surrender.


Such will continue, if you will it, till you see Him face to face when walking through the door of death.


Eternal life will be continuing the sanctification without threat of Satan's intrusion. It will in fact be "holiness forevermore."

SO YOU'RE GOOD AND ANGRY, ARE YOU?

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


Remember the "good" part. For sometimes it is good to get good and angry.


Are you?


If you have been ditched by the system, betrayed by the higher-ups, lied about, cheated, undercut, manipulated, twisted and turned in the night winds, then you have the human / mortal right to be good and angry.


If you have lost your salary, your pulpit, your parsonage, your health coverage, then I would think that you could be good and angry.


Tell your spouse that this goes for her / him as well.


And be sure to tell your children that they can get in on all this, painful though it be.


You see, good and angry is quite different from bad and angry.


Bad and angry takes place when road rage explodes on the interstate. And when a parent beats up a child because he is crying too long in his crib. And when Hitler gasses Jews in roasting ovens across the German plains.


That twosome--bad and angry--should never be exhibited by a rational adult--Christian or not. However, if it is exhibited by a slip of the spirit, where there is repentance, there is forgiveness and "startover" with the Father.


But let's get back to you--shredded by the churchly clique, broadsided by the ecclesiastical politicians and knocked down / dragged out by the congregation's church boss.


So you are good and angry.


Go for it.


Your shrink will tell you that all this good and angry is healthy, cleansing, necessary, therapeutic. And your shrink is correct. To suppress legitimate anger will cause a grand, neurotic swell-up in future time; no need for that.


So let loose.


Jesus did. He got good and angry when the religious clique stocked Him at every turn, twisting His teachings into nonsense, lying about His personhood, questioning His integrity and just plain seeking to undo His holy mission.


How did Jesus express his good and anger?


He gave the plotters riddles instead of straight answers. He told them that they were the children of the Devil, not of the Father. He ignored them on occasion when He then took trusted disciples aside to explain to them His lessons not fit for the reprobate.


Jesus instructed His followers in how to be good and angry. He informed them that they were to know the enemy as snakes--being as harmless as doves yet wise as the serpents. If they were to be Jesus-like, then they could act out the Jesus-like good and angry.


On at least two occasions--at the start and finish of His public ministry--Jesus overturned the hypocrites' merchant tables, sending pigeons and coins aflying. He was good and angry. After all, the religious empties were desecrating Father's holy house of prayer. Son would not stand for it;
therefore, He gave forth with a dramatic public display of good and angry.


I know that it all comes down to motive. If you work your anger from a motive that is seeking revenge, then that is not good anger. But if you are working your anger because you are distraught with the evil presence in God's otherwise holy church, then you are in league with Jesus. If you are working your anger because of defending with conviction the eternal truths, then you are right up there with Jesus.


Ask Martin Luther about good and angry. Ask John Wesley. Ask John Huss. Ask Joan of Arc. Ask Desmund Tutu. Ask Billy Graham. Ask Mother Teresa. These persons, and scores more, have been overcome with the holy anger of the Spirit.


In that, they have warred against the demons, calling truth truth, not tolerating the tawdry nor compromising. They have labeled wickedness wickedness, sin sin, and stood alongside justice while others sought shelter beneath convenient roofs of selfish protection.


These good and angry disciples of the cross have put their honesties on the line for God, no matter what the consequences.


Check it out.


If your anger rightfully has "good" attached to it, then let the anger work its therapeutic healing for your cleansing and the furtherance of the gospel's integrity.

BEATING UP THE PASTOR

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


I had pastored a denominational church (Church of the Nazarene) since 1964 when in 1998 I was ousted by ecclesiastical political conniving.


In 1992, I attended a pastors’ and wives’ Christmas dinner sponsored by the district. Unbeknownst to me, another minister told the district superintendent that I had said we had to get rid of the superintendent. I never said that. But the superintendent believed the lie.


From that day onward, the superintendent tried to oust me from my Maine pastorate. That’s the power of a lie.


I had ministered from west to east over years in the denomination in which I had been born on January 4, 1939: Calgary, Alberta; Kansas City, Missouri; Manchester, Connecticut; Indianapolis, Indiana; Fishkill, New York; Akron, Ohio; Walpole, Massachusetts and then Maine.


I had pastored not only in the denomination in which I had been ordained in the ‘60s, but also in the Methodist Church, Nevada, Indiana; United Church of Christ (Congregational), Broad Brook, Connecticut; and St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church, High Point, North Carolina.


Now I was without a congregation, parsonage, health coverage, and salary. On that August Sunday evening, the superintendent who followed the one who believed the lie walked into my house unannounced. He was accompanied by a district advisory board. I had been conducting a prayer meeting in our parsonage living room when the interruption came.


In any church, there are troublemakers. Ask any pastor of any denomination. Sometimes those troublemakers mass themselves into a political block to oust the pastor. That’s what happened in my case. The block went to the second superintendent who had believed the 1992 lie. That brought the superintendent to my home with his back-ups.


You see, the first superintendent, Clarence, who believed the lie moved on to another position out of state. The one who followed him, Roland, had it in for me because I would not support him in a mean move. A couple from my church planning their wedding ceremony wanted to use his city sanctuary for it was larger than our village sanctuary. The superintendent, then pastor of the city church, told me that he was going to charge the couple $400 for the use of his facility. He wanted me to endorse that.


I told him that I could not do that. It was unfair to the couple who had little money. He countered by stating in no uncertain terms that I would indeed back him up. I told him that I could not ethically do that. With that, we came to an impasse. With that, he held it against me till he became superintendent.


With the troublemakers in my local congregation going to him with their manufactured grievances, he then unreasonably concluded he had leverage by which to oust me. So he did, with the help of his advisory board — clones of the superintendent. Politics works its devilment not only among the ecclesiastical clergy but the laymen who side in with the dark political mode.


Therefore, on that Sunday evening, with the enemy having left my living room, I and the parishioners there for a prayer meeting concluded by organizing our own independent, evangelical congregation. We would meet in our homes since our church building had just been taken away from us. We would dispense with annual elections, committees, boards, membership, newsletters, bulletins and all the trappings of the denominational organization.


However, I was in shock. Within 30 days, I had to vacate my home. I had no place to go. In 30 days, I would be absent my health coverage, salary and roof over my head.


My wife recalled a humble summer camp community not too far away. She phoned to discover that there was an old trailer there that we could move in to.


We stored our belongings in various parishioners’ homes — attics, basements, garages, sheds. In fact, one house ended up with our piano in the owners' living room. Other homes housed our rocking chairs, straight-back chairs and end tables. My pastor's study library is still stored in boxes in a friend's backyard shed.


My wife and I went to substitute teach. On that meager salary total we survived. But emotionally I crumbled.


The trailer interior was dark paneling. I dreaded evening and nighttime. The quarters were cramped. Winter snowstorms howled around our windows, sometimes creeping in around the edges. Our front door screen was broken down. We seemed to be out in the middle of Maine's nowhere. That went on for months.


I woke up mornings anxious to get into a classroom for in those environs there was light and movement and people and chatter and something to do with my brain. But in mid-afternoon when leaving the schools, I felt a suffocating, crawling dread crippling my body and soul. It was beyond description.


God seemed far far away.


One day my brother-in-law was visiting us. We walked down near the lake to come upon an aged, worn cabin. It had a simple porch. The only door was unlocked so we walked inside. There was a living room, kitchenette, two bedrooms and a bath. Though covered with cobwebs, that rickety cabin looked like a dream house to me. I said, “You know, if God would only provide the two of us with a dwelling like this, I could call it ‘home’.”


But that of course was impossible.


Several months later we were visiting with Christians in Standish, Maine. Our hostess said, “I think a couple we know has a rental available.” I asked for the number, got it, and called. The next evening we were walking into the rental. And we got it. Our landlords happened to be believers, now new friends to us.


The layout of the rental: a small porch, living room, kitchenette, two bedrooms and a bath.


Today I still walk around this cottage by Lake Sebago where we live. I call it a house with seven rooms, but four of them are invisible. I like the number “7” because it’s the divine number of perfection.


I look out my living room windows every day and night to see God’s nature wonder all around me. Three large windows make up one of the living room walls so that when you stand in that room it’s like standing outside.


All four seasons breathe inside as well as outside from that room. Now today I looked out to see the lake covered with ice — thick, so that ice shacks are planted atop it. I see snow mounded all over everywhere, sporting limbs laden with white coverlets.


I just love this place. It’s where we live. It’s where our house church meets three times every week for worship. It’s where I thank God for miracles.


Now if that’s not enough, we also have a beautiful, cozy country home in Kennetcook, Nova Scotia. Our neighbor there across the meadow calls our place “an estate.” I think that’s a bit overmuch, but I’ve never corrected her. You see, if I did, that would not be fair to my godly mother-in-law who willed the property to us. After all, she made it the “estate” that it is.


It has 9 rooms, a welcoming wrap-around-front porch, those tall old-fashioned windows, a sun porch and plenty of acreage — perfected-by-nature groomed land. There's even a creaky back screen door that makes its own off-key melody every time it's opened and shut. Plus: there's a barn with several sheds.


Down apiece, you can meander to the Kennetcook River. A tiny village of 400, a white steepled church in the middle, and a school nearby, plus a few scattered neighboring homes make up our "other home place." My in-laws called the property "Cedar Grove" because of the cedar trees all about.


That’s where I like to go when feeling “Canadian.” When “American USA” I enjoy my Windham cottage. In either cozy-down, it’s home. Besides, it’s another miracle.

LEARNING HOW TO TRUST ALL OVER AGAIN

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


Once one has had the hatchet put to his ministerial neck, blood flowing in all directions, it is only natural / normal for one to be gun shy about any further relationships. That is so particularly when trying to build any bridge with a person called "Christian" or "religious" or "spiritual".


After all, it was in that camp that one was led to the slaughter. Like, dah!


So. . .one has two choices: become a hermit with Jesus in the wilds or take time to build wise relationships with a few trustworthy persons.


Keep in mind that some of those trusted souls may in fact not be all that Christian or religious or spiritual. You will discover that there are some persons who do not have personal relationships with God who yet have come upon a generous supply of "general grace" from the divine. That is, they have natural qualities of decency, manners and respect that can be lacking in some of those who claim to be "Christian." To God be the praise for general graces.


Therefore, back to the two choices: one can decide on one or another.


When first being put under the ecclesiastical guillotine, it may be prudent to go for the hermit-with-Jesus-in-the-wilds environs. That provides time to gain sight again, come upon a balance once more and recoup emotionally from the terrible blows leveled against one's innocent soul.


In God's time of healing surely, that hermit state will usually give way to an edgy, cautious moving out into the social circle once more. With each of us, it is a different time frame, of course, because of our individualities.


Nevertheless, if we live long enough, the move out will no doubt--hopefully--take place.


But when it does, be careful. Your innate senses will no doubt aid you at this point; but when even they go a-hiking, move logic into high gear for being legitimately careful.


Take it from one who has wrestled with this bottom-line a long time and still has come back to it to believe it as truth: one has only a FEW trusted friends in a lifetime. There are many how-do-you-do acquaintances out there; but the sincerely tried-and-true companions number as the fingers on one hand. Maybe an extra one or two for good measure. But that is about it.


So settle for small numbers and quality in those relationships. It is the wiser move.


(Because we live in a spiritually fallen sphere where most is upside down, inside out, there are more betrayers than friends potential in this life span--usually).


So when carefully returning to the social circle, ask God to warn you of land mines. Then heed every nudge.


Further, you might try building bridges with those outside your previous churchly world. Those persons are not of your previous politic. They too have had their slaughter experiences. But when they meet you--outside THEIR churchly worlds--they will no doubt latch onto you, too.


Why?


Because they and you are on safe turf. Neither of you can damage the other.


I recall talking with Catholic priests who dumped on me all kinds of their personal, painful stuff. Why? Because I am Protestant; they knew I could not do them any damage. So they reasoned: Go for it! And they did! Why not? It was good therapy; but more, it was the start of a sound friendship.


Hey, you: Been put under the ecclesiastical knife?


Then consider yourself among the prophets of whom Jesus spoke highly. And then ask God to lead you back to trusting only the few who have hearts of gold.


There are only a few. (Ask Jesus, for starters, how many He had at The Close.)


But they are there. It only takes the divine lead to locate them.

COPING WITH BETRAYAL

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


When I was first in ministry, I wondered why older clergy and their spouses frequently looked tired and aloof. At gatherings, they would be somewhat distant. It was as if a screen had been put up between their inner selves and the rest of the world.


Even among the more gregarious, there was that subtle, wary look that kept the eyes surveying the scene, a protective radar at work.


I would say to myself, "Aw, come on, let your hair down and be yourself. Open up a bit. Enjoy!"


Yet the shielding continued, so that for years I never really knew some of the colleagues I would see the most often.


Now I have been in the pastorate over 30 years. I believe I have figured out why the older ones had been distant.


With some of them, they had died inside due to betrayal. With others, they were struggling to survive.


What brought this on?


In large part, it had been the surprise of betrayal--not realizing that it was really there. Those pastors and pastors' wives started in the ministry with the sincere desire to save the world for Jesus. They wanted to be a friend to mankind on behalf of a kind Creator.


However, as time went on, they discovered that their naive, open vulnerability cost them something.


Betrayal's sword the worst to bare.
For friendship promised, treason seized,
And thus dared prostitute the name
Of honored Friendship, crushed its reed.


Betrayal is an experience that we do not want to admit to; therefore, we do not talk about it. After all, we are professionals; many of us are perfectionists with extremely sensitive personalities.


Most of us have lofty achievement aspirations; to admit defeat in friendship bindings can be traumatic.


Consequently, it is one of the most painful of the occupational hazards.


Too often as giving pastors and wives, we have been regarded by our parishioners as being so close to God that we have no feelings. If they turn on us--subtly or obviously--they think we can take it, for we are not all that human. We can withstand anything.


However, we are human; and aching desperately to embrace the human race for God, we are cut deeply by these surprise attacks from our parishioners.


No one told us that when we visit regularly and try our best to deliver those stirring sermons, and at the same time craft a smoothly operating church program to meet the needs of the young and old, there would still be some who would turn in dissatisfaction "to do us in."


I have had fellow parsonage couples say to me, "The very ones I gave my blood for have turned on me."


"I thought I was doing what they wanted done; now they tell me I'm not doing anything right."


"The ones I had in for evening meals are the ones who have set up the coalitions to get rid of me."


"The ones I had thought to be trusted are the ones who have been the most vicious."


Because we fear being considered inferior to the task, the wounds of the job are whispered only in private with the very select; and even they are held in guarded suspicion.


After all, political snares are here and there, who knows where? After a while, we wonder if anyone, especially within the ecclesiastical machine, can be truly trusted with the inner questions of the occupation.


I recall one pastor and wife who--in an off-guarded moment--opened up to his superior. He candidly spilled out his frustrations, only to be grilled by the very one who should have extended an understanding hand.


In sharing this with still another parsonage couple, the minister seeking help reasoned that his superior had attacked him because of the latter's own jealousies of the pastor's accomplishments in other endeavors.


Somehow there has to be a solution, at least a partial one, if we want to conclude that it is too soon to die inside.


1. For starters, we must admit to reality. We must confront the truth of betrayal in the ministry, some of it coming from parishioners and some coming from other clergy.


It is simply one of the negatives of existence. To gloss over it is to submit to a positive thinking that is not true to fact.


Some of us think we are unspiritual if we admit that betrayal exists in the church. We are always playing a game of erasing the hurting facts.


We keep manufacturing mirages, usually furnishing these with traditional, religious clichés. All of this merely complicates the process of analysis and solution seeking. Calling a spade a spade is not admitting to being an unspiritual disciple. It is using the logic of
Jesus, who commanded His followers to be as wise as serpents.


2. We must turn the betrayals over to God, even though this is
particularly difficult emotionally. When we give so much to help certain persons, only to have those same individuals silently leave or stab us in the back, the shock is hard to take.


Nevertheless, the wounds are to be given over to the Lord for His balm. Thankfully, He can heal our pain. After all, He has been betrayed since the Fall. We are the visual victims of the continuing betrayal against God. Imagine the ache that has been forced upon the eternal heart. It anyone can empathize, it is He.


3. We must share the frustrations of the vocation with our family. They will sense our dilemma, for many times we have taken our hurt out on them. We need to ask for their understanding during the severe seasons by telling them about our disappointments. They will surround us with special care. This can often be the life that God uses to keep our inner self alive.


Sometimes we keep our hurts to ourselves rather than burdening our spouses. In turn our spouses may also harbor their own bruises rather than communication them to us.


Eventually, the pileup of pain produces a network overload. Something, then, has to give. And more times than not, the "giving" is not pleasant.


The wise move is to share the hurt with our spouses. Dialogue develops understanding. Opening up eases the hurt and gives a more precisioned perspective. A practical, team spirit forms, which enables both partners to have greater strength in carrying the load.


Coupled with this, we need to keep our families in high priority. This does not set well with those of us clergy who have been taught to put family way down in the listing, thinking that such sacrifice is expected by the Lord.


Nevertheless, nowhere in the Bible does God ask such from the pastors; instead, it has been a part of the ministerial myth, particularly within religiously conservative groups.


As the wounded pastors and wives, we can find great solace from our families if we have been keeping close to them all along. This obviously means then that we enjoy our spouses and children by spending time with them--partying, picnicking, making time for recreation, sharing the children's homework, reading to the younger ones, buddying up with the older ones.


We can then conclude that if any persons can finally be trusted not to be betrayers, it will be those under our own roof. What a boon!


4. We must develop meaningful friendships outside the congregation. It is so easy to become so hounsebound with our parishioners that we put aside to a future date the making of companionships "on the outside." Yet when betrayals surface, where will we go? To whom will we turn?


After all, the ones within the congregation cannot be our closest friends. Parishioners want a respectable, professional distance with their clergy even in this supposed relaxed age when everyone is trying to be so open with one another.


The Bible commissions us to perfect our people in the image of Christ; this can be best done when we do not allow ourselves to be open to compromise for the parishioners' laxities. Instead, by maintaining a proper distance with our own in the church, we give ourselves the leverage to still pronounce with freedom, "Thus saith the Lord,."


Friendships outside the congregation are a must. These may be with other clergy. More importantly, they may be with clergy of other groups.


The latter, after all, pose little if any threat when it comes to betrayal. They are not a part of the political machine in which we find ourselves.


Making ties with laity outside the local church is also helpful. Such alliances permit friendship sharing that will not revolve around the shoptalk of the local group. These friendships engender freer relationships. Fellowship on the outside may find a meaningful level by mail and telephone contact.


I have a very good friend who lives 3000 miles away; yet we communicate openly by letter. Another minister friend is half a continent removed; he phones regularly for an hour's chat!


When the betrayals surface, these friends will be used by God as legitimate buffers. They will be there--tried and trusted.


They will listen. They will empathize. They will understand.


5. Understand that betrayal is a part of life in general. The hurts of the ministry are especially deep in that frequently the betrayals are double-edged--betraying God and the minister of God.


Further, the betrayals often trigger eternal consequences with the chance that souls may be forever lost.


Yet on lesser levels betrayals are common to the Fall. Therefore, to sympathize with laity who experience the death inside, we must also walk that path just as Jesus walked it.


6. Look on the betrayals from the long range. Ten years from now it will be difficult to recall the names of most who betray today.


Yet how often do we wake in the morning with the faces of the opposition staring at us from the mirror?


Let us wipe away those faces as best we can and move on to other things, putting into working practice the guidelines above.


Moving on to other things can healthily mean that we do something other than church work for a day or two. Get away to another part of the country. Go to the library or coffee shop for a day. Enjoy some sport. Travel overnight to some relatives.


It is encouraging to note how the change of scenery--even for a short while--can drain our retaliatory feelings relating to betrayal. Simply seeing another environment, chatting with other people, moving the body into other activity does rejuvenate the mind. Then when returning to the job, the air is clearer. The burden is lighter.


One day a friend of mine phoned from out of state. He wondered if he could bunk out at our parsonage for several days.


He had been undercut; the pressure was too great at home base so that he simply needed to get away.


Fortunately, we had been friends for years, so that his house was always open to me, and my house was always open to him.


After he had completed his visit, he thanked me for "the island" our home had provided him--an escape from the vice that had been squeezing him in.


At least he had sense enough to deal positively with his emotions when under fire. He had realized that a change of place was what he needed in order to get back on the track. This holds true for pastor's wives as well.


Having experienced betrayal, we are more cautious in choosing close friends. However, we must not be so gun-shy as to give up. There are those out there whom God will reveal to be true.


I know what it has been to be tossed about by ones I counted on as friends; and I also know--thank God--that He has provided others to fill in the vacuum. And these others are more dear to me than life
itself.

GOOD MEETING OR HOAX

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


My wife and I came upon an eatery: quaint and country.


As we ordered breakfast, we fell into conversation with several. In the process, we ended up staying over three hours. It was some conclave, for sure. Camaraderie maximum.


We ended up not only in the café by the river but also in two village homes. We were invited to see the antiques and the art work. We were introduced to family photos. We heard stories about marriage and divorce, children astray and those nearby. Biographical detail flowed like the river over spring waterfalls.


In the conversation, I related how I came upon a miracle. I told being fired as a substance abuse counselor at a methadone clinic. My friends there were heroin addicts seeking to kick the habit.


One day my supervisor came into my office to accuse the client I was counseling. I could tell from my client’s overview that she should not have been accused of the altercation the supervisor said she was involved in. As the talk progressed, I said, “I am going to absent myself from this dialogue because I don’t professionally agree with where it’s going.”


The supervisor was using undue pressure on the client. Barbara, addict, was in tears. Supervisor took away her weekend privileges to see her mother in upstate Maine. She had earned those take-homes of methadone doses because of her compliance at the clinic. Now they were wiped out. So was her weekend visit with her elderly mother.


At 1:30 my supervisor opened my office door with these words: “You are fired for insubordination.”


I went to the counselor next to mine and said, “I’ve just been fired.”


“What?” With that, she helped me empty my office of my personal belongings. The second time to my van I looked out the clinic’s front windows to spy two police cruisers driving into the parking lot. They were coming after me. The supervisor was going to have me arrested. For what? God only knows. Odd happenings occur in methadone clinics sometimes.


I walked calmly to my van, turned the key, and drove out of the parking lot to lose my vehicle among hundreds of others at the nearby mall.


Then I looked at my watch. At 2:30 I had an appointment at the county jail for a substance abuse counselor position for a new agency contracted by the jail.


I showed up on time. The fellow from Virginia asked me all about life in Maine. I told him. About forty-five minutes later he scanned my resume and said, “I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t hire you.”


I was fired at 1:30. I was hired at 2:30.


I thoroughly enjoyed my jail job. It was fulfilling to the limit. I counseled rapists,
murderers, robbers, you name it.


One day I came upon a handsome dude walking toward the laundry where he was assigned. He was carrying a Bible.


“I was facing twenty years! I knew nothing of God. My first night here I dropped to my knees and cried out that if there was a God for Him to help me. My life was over. Done. Dead. When I opened my eyes, I saw this Bible in the corner of my cell. I have read it through three times.”


I told Glenn I was a believer as he was a believer.


God performed a miracle. Glenn was released from his cell in less than a year. I followed him as a close friend, Bible student, and counselor on the outside. He became my son that I never really had. That was over seven years ago.


If I had not been fired from the clinic, I would have never met Glenn, my son surrogate.


When that true story was over, those in the eatery gasped. Some wiped tears from their
eyes. A mother came to me to embrace me. “It is divine intervention that you and your wife are here today. My son is on heroine. You have given me hope.” Her tears were real.


Another mother asked for our phone number. “My son too is on drugs. If he calls you, will you help him?” I assured her that I would do my best. Interestingly enough, only half a dozen customers came into the eatery during our entire exchange. God blocked off the time and space.


But one of the women informed us throughout the back-and-forth that she was into "spirits." Then she spoke of a life before this one, of incarnation.


When I told her that I pastored a church, she mentioned off-handedly that she did not particularly like the Bible. She informed me that the eatery owner was of like “spirits communication.” They had the “voices” speak to them all day long. The two women were never alone. They received their guidance. It was real.


“We disagree on politics. We disagree on Protestant versus Catholicism. But when we first met, we knew that the spirits brought us together. And in that we agree!” the one exclaimed.


My wife and I left the new friends near noontime after having had that stretched-out breakfast.


On the way home, I said, “That was quite the morning, eh? Who would have thought?”


Yet we both knew that the camaraderie was but surface. We would return. We would probably see those same people for they hang out there every day. That’s the way it is in a small Maine village.


And we would smile. We would exchange weather reports. We would ask about health and so forth — everything that makes the American converse merry-go-round function.


But deepening spiritual friendships? We would have hoped. But we two knew it would not happen. Christ and “spirits” don’t mix. It’s that simple. Christ and “spirits” don’t mix.

PRAYERS START AT THE LOCAL MART

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


"'The things which are impossible with men are possible with God.'" -- Jesus (Luke 18:27)


I walked into the nearby mart in early morning for coffee. But Ken was not in his usual place to greet me with that broad smile. Not! And not good.


"Where’s Ken this morning. Having a morning off, is he?" I asked one of our favorite Lakes Region clerks, Rita. She had no other customers waiting at the time so she took a moment to explain that Ken had just had triple bypass surgery.


"What?" I exclaimed. Ken was just there at his post in supposedly fine shape several days before; now he was in intensive care. Could hardly believe it.


You see, for months we had been praying for Ken’s wife. She had been diagnosed with cancer. So the whole routine was set up to bring her back to good health — chemotherapy, the works! She is one determined lady. Therefore, perseveringly she has returned — almost — to the health she enjoyed previously.


In fact, recently she had the clan over for "the big meal". Ken let me in on all the detail. "We won’t have anybody’s turkey stuffing but my wife’s," Ken underlined. So it was that the family thanked the good Lord for bringing good cells back to Ellen this winter season.


"But now it’s Ken’s turn," Rita said with concern.


"Yes, we just spent the last several months interceding for Ellen. And now we remember Ken," I answered, remembering Jesus' words: "'Said I not to you that if you believe, you should see the glory of God?'" John 11:40


Ellen and Ken are both extremely strong and basic in their faith. Therefore, I have no doubt as to how they are persistently making their soul journeys. They love one another. They love God. They are in good hands. "For He (Jesus) said, 'I will never leave you nor forsake you.'" (Hebrews 13:5)


Yet this Saturday morning as I walked through the mart's front door I got that lonesome feeling all over again. Sales are to the right and left. The coffee shop is buzzing with conversation. Of course, shoppers are tugging at their bags and wallets.


But it’s just not the same. And I don’t like it. But though it’s not what I would have ordered for friend Ken, I know that I can grant him another gift. The gift of prayer. With that, I recalled: "They who wait on the Lord. . .shall walk and not faint." (Isaiah 40:31)


"We prayed for Ellen. Now it’s time to pray for Ken," a friend put it rightly. So it is with prayers we surround others in hospitals or nursing homes or armed forces or wherever.


It’s one of the finest presents we can wrap from the heart.


"'If you can believe, all things are possible to that one who believes.'" -- Jesus (Mark 9:23)


"'Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you.'" -- Jesus (John 14:27)

AUNT GERT’S ‘BLESS OUR HOME’ GOSPEL OVEN

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


We just left Aunt Gert’s home. It’s been a bright spot in a rather lackluster winter month.


While relaxing over breakfast this morning, I looked again at the attractive banner hanging from a door that leads into her basement. The banner reads simply: “BLESS OUR HOME.” It’s been hanging there for years upon years. In fact, sunlight shining in on it day in and day out has blanched it somewhat; but the message is still as clear and warm as when it was first hung.


I spread butter with strawberry jam on the Irish soda bread Aunt Gert had prepared for our visit. She’s the best when it comes to Irish soda bread. Maybe it’s because she’s from Ireland and has visited family over there on several occasions. Whatever — it’s delicious beyond words.


You see, Aunt Gert is known for her baking excellence. But not only her culinary skills, but also the Christian love that goes along with them. She’s now 86 years old. Yet still she considers it her delight in baking delicacies “for the old people.” So it is she gets behind her steering wheel to meander about her village with pies, cakes and cookies. These gifts are presented especially to those who are sick or housebound. After all, those people need a friend.


I have known Aunt Gert since I first met my wife — 45+ years ago. Down through all those years, Aunt Gert has used her kitchen oven for gospel good. Never to be a selfish person, she’s breathed out God’s gift of giving. In that she’s discovered numerous fast and loyal friends. Some of them have walked already through God’s eternal door; others are in nursing homes; and still others are her equals — keeping house and going about town.


This morning I sat back in my chair to listen to Aunt Gert and my wife discuss their latest recipe finds. Aunt Gert has stashed away so many recipes that she could print her own book. She often laughs about her collections, concluding that she has clipped far more recipes than she can ever bake. “Nevertheless, I can’t resist. When I see in a magazine one of those tasty recipes, I have to cut it out and put it in my boxes." So how those recipe boxes have grown over time!


Aunt Gert has lived for Jesus since she was a little girl. Her parents were Christians who introduced her early to the Lord. Therefore, her life has centered on the church. She’s been the church organist since young adult years, was treasurer for the congregation for 14 years, taught Sunday school classes, involved herself in missions work, cooked for church suppers, and been faithful to worship week after week.


Where Aunt Gert has excelled beautifully is in her role as the Lord’s hostess. In that, she’s entertained in her home missionaries on furlough, visiting evangelists, gospel singers, and Christians from out of state who needed a meal and overnight. She’s welcomed family driving through on their ways thither and yon, new persons to the church, single young adults without family nearby, senior citizens who’d lost spouses, and sometimes young people in need of a long-term boarding home.


All of these fortunate individuals have sat at her table. They’ve drunk from her teapot — hot and brimming. They’ve noted her fancy table clothes with matching napkins. They’ve been treated to a refreshing and relaxing meal — never in a hurry, never in a rush. For all of that, they’ve thanked her over and over for sharing those coveted baking prizes.


Before leaving her home, one’s always invited to write in her guest book. I leafed through the pages recently to note names I hadn’t recalled for quite some time. There were also addresses from across the continent. And of course those friendly notes of appreciation filled up the pages.


I can attest to the fact that Aunt Gert has lived out that banner hanging in her kitchen. Her home has been particularly blessed by the Father. He’s smiled upon her open heart, her willing hands to bake, and her welcoming smile to so very many knocking at her door.


“Bless Our Home.” Yes, thank you, God, for answering her prayer. We in the Lakes Region especially have benefited by your graces bestowed upon your faithful servant — giving of herself from her gospel oven.

TIME FOR AN OIL CHANGE—AND FAMILY FINDING

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


Oil and filter change -- $12.95! What a deal.


“May I bring in my Acura at 1:45 this afternoon? Would like that bargain price oil change.” The secretary set me up. Fine.


I drove in at 1:30 — early. Seated in the lounge, I figured in a short time I’d be on my way, errands to run in the second half of Monday afternoon.


“I’m sorry,” the technician said as he walked from the shop to where customers were seated. With that, he looked straight at me.


“I don’t have the filter for your car. Phoned for one. It should be here in a few, then I’ll be done with the change,” he explained.


Okay with me. No problem. I’d just leaf through another magazine.


But when 2:10 came and there was still no Acura-with-oil-changed, I began to wonder what was going on. Other customers had made exit; I was holding the fort.


“I put a call through. They say they’re on their way. This can happen,” Harry recited apologetically.


And with that we two fell into conversation.


“I see you’re a Christian,” was it for openers. Harry had already nabbed my ID.


“How do you know that?”


“Because of the GOD BLESS YOU sign on your dash. Kinda gives a person away, doesn’t it?”


I chuckled, confessed he was speaking the truth, then proceeded to meet another member of “the family.”


That’s the way it always is.


I recall sitting under a pastor’s parsonage in Guyana. You see, there the houses are on stilts; so to sit under a house is what one does. There was a large group of us — my wife and I and then Amerindians who’d traveled down river for Bible studies under the parsonage.


What impressed me particularly was their easy manner — nice and comfy does it. They were open people, ready to smile gladly, chattering away freely, singing at the top of their lungs, witnessing to God’s love as naturally as sharing a meal.


We had never met these folk before flying into South America. But that never matters when coming on “the family.” It is as if all gathered had known one another for a lifetime.


So it was with Harry at the oil change depot.


“My wife and I moved here with our two sons from Arizona. I’m into gospel singing. In fact, am looking for some churches to sing in. If you know of any leads, I’d appreciate some info,” he said.


It was not long before Harry began to share with me some problems. Can you imagine what specifics might have been related when he told me he was rearing two sons — ages 15 and 17? And so forth.


We talked about the past, the present and hopes for the future. We talked about favorite gospel singers, where he and family worshiped, how he took to Maine’s Lake Region, the business he himself owned prior to moving here, and answers to prayer.


Ah, there was the oil filter delivery. So Harry was on his way. The clock showed 2:50! Hmmmm.


Inconvenience? Worth the wait? Another bump in the road?


It was a miracle come upon — meeting a brother in the Lord for the first time, sharing in prayer, reminding one another of Scripture promises, covenanting to intercede for one another in between oil changes.


That’s the way it is when a believer folds into the divine plan — daily — just letting God have His way. In that, there are times when a person comes into finding “the family” expanded.


Nothing like it. Over a lifetime, it really adds up — whether in Guyana or southern Maine.

WILL ‘THE BOY’ LEARN FROM WISE GUY AHMADINEJAD?

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


The Boy in the Oval Office has a lot to learn, though the mob hysteriacs never dreamt that since he was the celebrities’ choice for these four years on Pennsylvania Avenue.


Was is not B. H. Obama who told the world that he was ready to walk into the Iranian thug president’s office suite to embrace that murderer, torturer for world peace?


Now The Boy hopefully will realize that liars are liars still. And thugs are thugs still. And those who dupe for Allah’s sake are true Muslims for the Islam World Rule. They are not into diplomacy or the good of all mortals.


So it is that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the world that The Boy is beneath Islamic protocol by boycotting the recent United Nations conference on racism.


The Iranian despot screamed his message, per usual.


Per AP he even sent the conference into zipville when he spiked Israel just one more time. That yielded a “mass walkout and furious rebukes from western capitals.”


You see, Mr. President, thugs don’t change their demonic spots just because a Marxist Muslim sits in the Oval Office. They don’t. They can’t. It’s against their overarching plot.


Oh my oh my, how much more of this naivete does the United States have to endure under The Boy? Much more, I fear.


Smiling at dictators and embracing them as well as bowing before them only makes the most powerful nation on Earth appear desperate for survival.


Yet The Boy thinks that because his charisma swept him into the White House it likewise can remake the planet for “change” and “hope.”


Not. It won’t. That doesn’t work.


Yet I can picture B. H. going off to his White House gymnasium for workouts whistling his happy tunes while all the time concluding he’s got the world by the tail.


If only the rational public could get to his other ear.


Yet that seems not the case these imploding days.


Not so.


Read “Ahmadinejad raps Obama for shunning racism meeting” at http://www.breitbart.com/print.php?id=CNG.d4d89ece3df2630c2310a9b47eb1af01.b11&show_article=1

HEIDI

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


After Priscilla had brain surgery in 1970, her neurosurgeon told her that it would be wise for her not to have another baby. The pressure in giving birth could be too much for her neurological state, particularly what had been done in the brain area during her operation.


She had had a shunt inserted between the brain and heart for fluid to flow from one to another. The neurosurgeon had discovered that that was necessary because she had developed scar tissue atop the brain that did not allow enough space for fluid to reside healthily, hence the shunt. Pressure, such as a delivery in giving birth, could endanger that network.


Therefore, we were most thankful that we had Crystal born to us prior to the brain surgery. She was and still is precious.


As time moved along, we became more involved in the civil rights movement, just as we had been committed during the early 60s. It was then that we assisted in pastoring a black church in High Point, North Carolina.


In my last year in seminary, I was praying for a full-time black congregation to pastor. In fact, we drove from Kansas City to East St. Louis one Saturday with the express purpose of seeing where a particular black congregation met.


We cased out the church building with no one there to meet us. We peered into the windows. We checked out the section of the city. Then we went back to our apartment convinced that God would lead us there. But of course there had to be contacts made with the powers-that-be. And when we made the contacts, all doors closed. We were learning God’s detours.


We ended up in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, just about as far from the civil rights problem in the United States as God could fling us.


“No doubt God was protecting your lives,” a friend reasoned to us one day. Then I thought about that. Perhaps he was correct. We were more immersed in those doings than we had thought.


In fact, when we lived in the black pastor’s parsonage in North Carolina, my mother later confided to me that she wondered if would be shot. She pictured us seated on the couch just alongside the large bay window in the living room.


“That would have been a perfect spot for someone to put a bullet in your head,” she said. I had never thought of that. Am glad that I didn’t for we two enjoyed that summer like no other summer. It was filled with excitement and joy.


With all that work with the black folk, we wanted a black child of our own. Since we could not have a second child of our own, we set plans for adopting a black baby. One day while watching television from our Fishkill, New York, parsonage, commercial-type announcements were being telecast. They were appealing for people in the greater New York area to adopt black children.


“We should look into that,” I said to Priscilla. So we did.


And when speaking with the Poughkeepsie social worker in February, we were gifted with Jay, a 2 l/2 month old multi-racial son, in September. His mother was white. His father was black. Other than that we did not know anything about him except for a few medical notations the mother had jotted on a scrap piece of paper.


We wrapped Jay in a new blue blanket, then took him from the social worker’s office to our home. Proudly we showed him off to our congregation that next Sunday.


We had our Crystal. We had our Jay.


But lo and behold, we next found out that Priscilla was pregnant. Yet she was not to have another child. It could hurt her. The brain might not be able to take the pressure exerted in delivery.


“Perhaps you should consider having an abortion,” the doctor told me wife. An abortion? He dared to suggest that to an evangelical pastor’s wife? Yes, he did. And he was Roman Catholic at that. We were quite disappointed in that doctor’s lack of faith.


As the months progressed, we prayed. And we prayed. And then we prayed some more.


I did not want my wife to be in danger. And yet she was to have a baby. I wanted the baby healthy, as we all want our babies healthy. And so there was a full plate I handed God when thinking of our future. What did it hold?


In the meantime, we changed pastorates from New York to Ohio. After arriving in our Ohio parsonage, still unpacked, my wife closed the garage door down on her three fingers. She was rushed to the emergency room. Near to the time of delivering a baby, Priscilla impressed the receptionist as entering the hospital to deliver. No, she was there because her fingers were badly hurt. She received medical care and returned home.


Several days later she was rushed to the hospital again, this time to deliver Heidi, our third child.


And how did my wife fare in the delivery? Of course, it was like other mothers giving birth — not a picnic. But she was quite healthy through it all.


And our new baby girl? She was just as healthy as the mother who delivered her.


How thankful we were. How star-struck we were in the wonder of God to gift us with
still another member to our family.

In counting up life’s marvels the other day, this one was listed near the top: Heidi, our miracle baby.

I BELIEVE IN MIRACLES: PAUL AND EVELYN

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


I had just attended my 40th high school reunion in Maryland. It was one of those emotional mixes — both grand and confusing.


I had not seen those friends since our 1957 gradation from High Point High.
Therefore, it was the usual identity questions, hugs and memories. But also, it was knowing we would not all be there after another 40.


Of course, the reunion committee had planned such galas over years — every five years, in fact. But this was the first time I’d been able to get to one. After leaving the hotel gathering, I concluded I would kindly refrain from another.


It’s not that the reunion was not wonderful. It was. But there’s another side to those smiles and kisses. At least there was for me. I left on such a high that it was unbelievable. Zing — way way up there in the netherlands. But there was also a lingering heavy loneliness, a depression that clung like an anchor.


I had an appointment to go to the next morning at ten o’clock. That meant driving through the night from Maryland to western Pennsylvania. Wide awake the whole way. Priscilla was with me. I could have asked her to take the wheel. But no need. After that reunion — faces still glowing in head and heart — I was wide wide awake.


Nighttime. Trucks. Cars speeding along. Motel signs. Directionals. Intestate’s state of the art road ribbon. I sucked it in as drinking a cold ice tea with lemon. Click click click. One memory after another flicked across the years..


I recalled that at our graduation we as a class sang, "We May Never Meet Again." Now that was one tearjerker that held on for dear life. Nighttime miles gave me lots of hours to remember — most of it quite marvelous. I had had a terrific high school log-in at High Point.


Our class got in on the ground floor of everything. The school had just been built. We walked into fresh environs — shiny floors, colorful tiles all over the place, brand new desks. We chose our school colors, ring, mascot, yearbook design, special events. From start to finish, I can’t think of anything but fun years at that school — most of all the students and faculty. Some of us keep in touch.


Therefore, seeing them for the 40th was a boon extraordinary.


All night long I thought of nothing but days past, memories that time had covered over and over again. Then seeing those teachers and fellow students shot the focus in clearly. While Priscilla slept, I meandered through scenes, relishing the nostalgia.


However, the dark pit of our next appointment dug far deeply in my innards and of course wouldn’t go away. We were traveling to visit our adopted son in prison. It was directly from the gala to the Big House.


Of course, I had cranked those miles before. It was a five hundred-mile journey one way. That’s a day’s trip. Then another day’s return with a two-day visit in between. Talk about emotional mixes. Yet after being with such love and memory flow at the hotel, I shoved the approaching prison coldness far from my thoughts. I didn’t have to mesh the two until I got to the prison parking lot. And then I’d just buck up.


I was still dealing with a lot of anger and discouragement from what my son had put us through during his mid-teen years. Not a year, but years. All the while, I attempted to minister to my congregation about the keeping power of God.


From the day my son left that foreboding courtroom in shackles, wearing his horrid orange prison suit, I wrote him a letter. He got a note from me every day for 5 l/2 years. Every day, including weekends.


In the first letters I told him frankly about my anger, my disappointment in him, my fear of what he could have done to us when breathing under our roof. I told him all that came to mind — stream of consciousness reamed.


I informed him that he needed to read all I wrote for one day he might have a child. Then he would want to know what that child could do to him. And he needed to know what parents go through when their children turn utterly selfish and violent.
"Milton." That meant Milton, Pennsylvania, as in "behind bars."


Now I’d better shape up, I lectured my heart. It’s time to disembark, walk straight ahead.


Why bother staring upward to take in blocked cages in the sky where armed guards spied out everyone who stretched across the lot?


Next: take in faceless guards in lobby, put things in the wall locker, keep locker
key in pocket, take off shoes and anything else that would set off alarm when walking through metal detector.


Make small talk with other visitors. Smile at children. Keep up happy front. After all, I’m Christian. These people had feelings, too.


Then put out right hand, palm downward, for infrared purple stamp to press against my skin. Walk through metal door, hear it close mechanically behind me.


Walk across newly mowed yard, smell the grass, take in ducks flying overhead, stare at next metal door awaiting us in the clutch.


Wonder about young guard: where he came from, was he married, how many children, how’d he get that sort of job, did he like it, did he ever get weekends off, what were his thoughts at a prison site every working day, did he care a twit about us, did he know God?


And then into that large visitors’ room — chairs and more chairs, all lined up perfectly so in rows. To the back was the stark platform, not all that large. Big enough to hold a desk with phone and chair and then a few floor feet to spare. So it’s a uniformed she who’s watching over us today, eh? Yes. Did she care to smile? It didn’t matter. She would take in our every move — every move.


Time for checking out the candy machines and the coffee and cocoa machines. We pulled out our plastic bag full of coins. No paper money allowed in prison. Plastic bags full of coins were acceptable for using in food machines. After all, food machines were our only entertainment and recreation for the next 8 hours or so. It was the excuse to get up from the hard chair, walk around the room, and have a destination to go to. A diversion — minimalism at work.


Inmates could eat from those machines whatever was given them by visitors. And did we eat. Not that we were hungry. We just wanted to handle something, do something. Of course, when mealtime came and there were no meat and potatoes, then food machines with candies and hard sandwiches came in handy.


Eventually the day was over. Time to leave. We hugged our son, tears in our eyes.
Back through the mechanical doors, guards checking out our infrared purple stains to make certain we were visitors and not escapees. Then on to lobby, unlock locker, leave key in locker door, put on watch, slide wallet into back pocket, belt up, and walk out into fresh air again.


It’s awkwardly quiet when leaving a son in prison. What do you say? There is a time for keeping silent, turning on key in ignition and then driving out a dreaded parking lot into the lovely countryside toward Milton.


Ah, Milton. Not the "behind bars" Milton but the Milton Paulyn Bed and Breakfast.


There awaiting us were our dear friends, Paul and Evelyn, Mennonites. It did not matter what time we got in, the lamps were on.


Just inside the front door was a welcoming side room where miniature white lights glowed night and day. They decorated a huge, real-live plant in the corner. All around were antiques — desks, chairs, coverlet’s, pictures, cups and serving dishes, and a pump organ.


In the bedroom awaiting us was a comfortable bed laden with quilts. The sidetable held an antique china doll and Bible with lamp lit. Walls were graced neatly with 18th century cloth napkins — crocheted — in frames. Heirlooms were aplenty. A large chest housed blankets. In dresser drawers were tucked away doilies and snapshots of yesteryear. Plus much more that warmed us to the soul.


Sleep. Welcomed sleep. Most welcomed sleep.


I could smell the coffee, half-awake. Had the night passed so quickly? Evelyn and Paul got up so very early to ready their guests for the day.


"Good morning!"


And so we were there once again, welcomed by Evelyn’s embrace and Paul’s manly hug, just as in the numerous visits prior.


What a relaxing pleasure to be seated at their breakfast table — juice, fruit cup, eggs, bacon, ham, homemade breads, muffins as well, jellies and jams, coffee or tea, and a treat to take on the road when we bade good-bye.


"It’s too much," we’d sigh as we took in the table delight in front of us. "Just too much." Yet we surely did enjoy every bite and never complained when the eating was done.


Paul and Evelyn always held out their hands toward ours when we first sat down to eat. It was time to say the blessing. The blessing. Paul prayed, he the head of the house. Then I prayed, thanking God for such friends along the way. Indeed, they were more than friends. They were angels.


As we would drive away from their country home toward the interstate for another five hundred miles in Maine’s direction, I’d offer a sigh of gratitude to the Lord God for yet another miracle along the way — fast, understanding friends who know Him, too.

SCULLEY SQUARE

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


I was a sophomore in a church-related New England college outside Boston. I could not go home for Thanksgiving because I just couldn’t. I was planning on being home for Christmas and being in Maryland for November vacation was too close to December’s get-away.


So I went from student to student on campus to ask for money. I had an idea. I would feed the Boston poor in Sculley Square on Thanksgiving Day. But I needed money — cash.


Fellow students gave away their money. I put it in a jar in my dorm room. And then most of my friends left for Turkey Day elsewhere. It was an eerie feeling at the college when dorms were mostly empty. But I was so excited I was beside myself.


Prior to Thanksgiving I went into Boston where they sold clerical collars. I, a
Protestant, would dress as a priest. It was the only way I could be certain that I’d be safe at nighttime in Sculley Square — the dregs section of the metro. It was after all where the prostitutes stood on corners, vagrants slept in the gutters, and a downtown mission sang hymns like, “Softly and Tenderly, Jesus is Calling.”


I knew Sculley Square. I was a part of the college’s Evangelistic Association. We made our ways into the slums of Boston to sing and preach and hand out hymnals in the mission. It smelled badly in that mission house. But it was one grand place to be. Straight backed chairs. Floppy hymnals with paper backs. An old piano at the front of the room. No microphones. Hanging bald light bulbs strung from the stained ceiling. And the gospel preached with gusto, especially by students preparing for the ministry.


I can recall when I preached my first sermon. It was in the Sculley Square downtown mission. When I got back to campus, seated in chapel the next morning, I wrote the outline of my sermon on the back of an envelope I was mailing home to my parents. They would be so proud that their son was preaching, let alone at the slum mission. I was elated with that sermon outline. I wish I still had it.


So it was that preparing for Thanksgiving I went to buy my Roman collar. It worked. It fit. I weighed only 120 pounds, so I didn’t need a large collar. I had a black suit; most of the preacher-wannas had a black suit. So I was all set. I had my cash. I had my collar. I had my black suit. And I had my Thanksgiving in Boston rather than with family in Maryland. Perfect.


The day came to get onto the T — the train that went from Quincy to Boston. There I sat, looking very much like a Father. And so it was that people seated to my right and left greeted me kindly: “Hello, Father.” “Good day, Father.” I smiled and nodded in reply. I recall especially two old ladies. They were whispering to one another. I heard one say, “He seems awfully young to be a priest.” Oh, if they only knew!


Of course, then, in 1958, Catholics swarmed all over Massachusetts, particularly Boston. Priests in garb and nuns in habits were all over the place. So for me to be one of them fit in quite readily, though truly I was a bit young to have finished one’s priestly schooling.


Presently I disembarked and walked up the dungeon steps from below ground onto Park Street and Tremont Street, the Boston Commons to my left. It was mid-afternoon. I walked down past King’s Chapel right into the heart of Sculley Square. I was home!


Sure enough, vagrants, otherwise then known as “bums,” were to right and left. I approached my first customer. “Hello, Father.” “Hello. I hope you’re having a blessed Thanksgiving Day, sir.” “Not at all.” “Then here’s some money. Take it over there to the cafeteria and get yourself a turkey dinner. God bless you.”


I handed him the cash. I had already checked out how much the meal was. It was
indeed a cafeteria where you served yourself and paid the cashier when filling up your tray.


With a flash the man took my money and darted into the shadows. He had no intentions of eating a turkey dinner. Liquor was better. And he had my cash in hand.


That taught this naïve Protestant teetottler a lesson. So for the next fellow I
approached about a turkey dinner, I walked with him to the cafeteria, watched him put the food on the tray and then paid the cashier myself for his food. That was that.


But before any more men had their free meals, I walked them right into King’s Chapel. The doors then were never locked. It is an historic church — stone, awesome, quiet, perfect for meditation and prayer. There each fellow along with myself knelt before the altar to pray. I prayed aloud. Then we two stood to our feet, walked to the cafeteria and the man had his turkey dinner.


Night began to fall. I still had money. I was on one grand high for Jesus. Truly. I had never felt so good in a long, long time. I thought my heart would burst.


I came upon a flophouse. I walked in. I talked with the clerk, who herself was a bit of a vagrant. Everyone was that in Sculley Square. The building was dark and dirty. For fifty cents a person could literally flop down somewhere under its roof.


I walked further down the street to be called out to by a fortuneteller. “Father, let me see your palm. I will tell your future,” she beckoned. She was seated in a storefront type of station, dressed as gypsy fortunetellers were garbed in Sculley Square. Behind her was a fancy, colorful curtain. “No thank you,” I replied. “God bless you.” Then I went on my way as she kept calling me to have my fortune told.


Presently, as I was standing under a lamppost, its light forming a perfect circle all around me, I looked up several stories high to an apartment of sorts. There was a light on and a man peering out the window. He must have caught sight of my collar and concluded he hated priests. So with that he opened the window to shout obscenities at me — clenching his fist all the while. I concluded I wasn’t going to linger there under that light.


Finally all my money was gone. I boarded the T for a return to college. All the way home I was thrilled beyond words. What a Thanksgiving Day I had had. It was delightful, fulfilling, out of this world. No one could ever believe what a grand time I had in Sculley Square.


Looking back on that day many, many times — and sharing the experience with numerous friends not only at Thanksgiving — I truly believe it was one of the most miraculous spiritual experiences I have ever been privileged to know.

SUSAN BOYLE TOPS THE HIT CHARTS

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


There have been more than 100 million hits on Susan Boyle’s Internet fame via Britain’s Got Talent.


“And it has been watched five times more than US President Barack Obama's inauguration ceremony in January, which has had 18.5million views.


“US-based firm Visible Measures tracked 200 videos from top sharing sites and worked out that all clips related to Susan have generated 85.2million views in one week” per Lizzie Smith on MailOnLine.


Note: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1172203/And-said-wouldnt-change-Susan-Boyle-Britains-Got-Talent-star-shows-new-look.html


Now Susan continues to greet her well wishers in the same down-home fashion as is her persona. She is such a welcomed guest to all of us because she is real.


Susan made fame with her entry on Britain’s Got Talent when the three judges were astounded by her talent. But more—they were won over by her sincerity.


When a journalist asked her how all this attention has impressed her, she responded by saying “It humbled me.”


That’s vintage Susan Boyle.


A singer in her village church as well as at the local pub’s kareoke, Susan keeps her music at the top of her voice. She’s quite ready with a song as was evidenced when Larry King asked her for a song. She
simply stood there in her living room and started to sing.


Britain’s Got Talent judge Piers Morgan invited her to London for dinner. She replied via the Larry King Show: “I accept!”


It was a crisp two word reply, of course from the heart.


Read SUSAN BOYLE DOESN’T QUIT at http://jgrantswankjr.blogspot.com/2009/04/susan-boyle-doesnt-quit.html


Read SUSAN BOYLE: CYNICS’ WAKE UP CALL
at http://jgrantswankjr.blogspot.com/2009/04/susan-boyle-cynics-wake-up-call.html

WINNER ALL

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


It was 1964. I had just graduated from seminary in the Midwest.


“You will have to cancel your trip. I need you here to start pastoring this start-up congregation.”


That was a district superintendent in my denomination. He had focused on me as the minister for a suburban church in Missouri.


Yet I had already traveled to my first church in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. However, this man had other ideas. He had decided that it was God’s will that I leave the Canadian west for returning to the United States. He had it all put together. I was to submit to his more mature judgment.


I was in a quandary. What should I do?


I had finished my senior class exams before my wife completed teaching in elementary grades in a nearby community. Therefore, with some time on my hands, I wrote an essay.


I had spied an announcement on the seminary bulletin board. It invited seniors from any
American Protestant seminary to write a winning essay. So I tried my best. I wrote about the evangelical witness to the gospel’s social callings.


In the 60s, there was a lot of ferment in the U.S., much of it having to do with civil rights. My wife and I had spent a summer between my first and second years in seminary working in a black church in High Point, North Carolina. We assisted the black pastor of St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church. Therefore, we were immersed in the evangelical testimony to various social issues of that time.


I had also majored in sociology while earning my liberal arts degree. I had always had a nose for social issues related to the Christian message. Therefore, in writing my essay for the contest sponsored by Winona Lake Bible Conference, I centered in on what excited me most.


After writing the piece, I slid it into an envelope, then promptly forgot about it. I had so much on my mind with graduating from seminary and then packing up for traveling a long distance from Missouri northward to Alberta..


After settling in to Calgary’s Seventeenth Avenue Church, getting to know our new
parishioners, the phone call came from Winona Lake Bible Conference. Would I appear in Indiana?


Indiana? From Calgary, Alberta?


Yes, I was supposed to appear there for a Sunday afternoon presentation. But what was the presentation? That was a secret. I would find out details when I got there.


Well, did I win first place in the essay contest? Or second place? Or third place? Or honorable mention? The caller did not tell me. I was simply to appear there for a Sunday afternoon presentation.


My wife and I boarded a train for the hundreds of miles journey. When we arrived, our luggage had not arrived. We got there Saturday afternoon with no suitcases. I therefore had no Sunday suit for the Sunday afternoon gathering of hundreds.


Therefore, off to J. C. Penney’s to buy myself a suit. As if I had extra money to buy myself a suit. After all, my first pastorate’s salary totaled $45 a week. That was it. From that, $4.50 went back to the Lord as His tithe. Then we gave an extra dollar+ for our offerings.


I bought the suit. I was ready for Sunday afternoon. When the time came for announcing the winners of the essay contest, I could hardly believe my name was mentioned as First Place Winner.


I was stunned when walking across that endless platform to shake the man’s hand. Who was he? I don’t recall. All I know was that he handed me my prize.


I was first place winner! That meant a $500 gift certificate to Moody Press and a year’s
subscription to Billy Graham’s magazine, DECISION, as well as a 21-day trip to the Middle East! Twenty-one days to the Middle East! Unbelievable.


The gift certificate to the publishing house would open up all sorts of book purchases for me as a young pastor seeking to build up my pastor’s library. And of course I was most pleased to receive the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s monthly publication.


But the journey half way around the globe was an outright impossibility — that is, unless I had won first place. And that I did indeed!


Upon returning to Calgary, the Missouri district superintendent called, informing me that he knew the will of God. It was that I was to leave Canada for the United States. And that was to happen shortly.


“But I just won a trip to the Holy Land and Egypt and Lebanon and Greece and Italy and Egypt and Jordan,” I exclaimed. Obviously that win did not mean a thing to the voice on the other end of the phone. It was accepting his offer and canceling out my win that mattered.


After all, he knew the will of God.


If I did not follow through, I would be missing out on pastoring on one of the most prestigious districts in the denomination. (Presumably he considered himself of fairly high station with the title he carried for one of the most, if not the most, prestigious districts in the denomination!)


I had always dreamt of visiting the land where Jesus walked and taught. But I never dreamt in a million years that I would ever actually be there — and in my mid-20s at that!


I discussed the dilemma with my wife. After all, the trip was scheduled for a year from my win; therefore, we could save up money to pay for her trip as well.


We concluded that the district superintendent did not know the will of God. God wanted us to stay put right where we were and then take the journey to where Jesus had lived. Therefore, the next spring we boarded the plane for the Middle East. A dream come true, surely.


That’s why I believe in miracles. And believing in them at the start of a lifelong ministry was one big assist from heaven’s grace.


Thank you, God.

SUSAN BOYLE DOESN’T QUIT

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


In 1999 Susan Boyle had her first release.


Note: http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/2009/04/16/exclusive-susan-boyle-s-first-ever-song-release-revealed-listen-to-it-here-86908-21283564/#sitelife-commentsWidget-bottom


Did she give up because she didn’t shoot off the success charts? No.


Now she’s known around the world because of Britain’s Got Talent. She is wowing millions of those listening to her sing on YouTube.


She’s never been married. She’s never been kissed. She took care of her mother and father till they went through the final door.


She lives alone with her pet cat, Pebbles.


She attends the village church where she sings praises to her Lord. She also enjoys karaoke in the nearby pub.


When she sang before Simon Cowell and cadre, she sang a sad song of youth’s dreams imploding over time. Yet in her informal comments she let it be known that her hope remained alive.


Susan is surely a bright smile in a gloomy world. Thank you, Ms. Boyle.


Listen: http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/2009/04/16/exclusive-susan-boyle-s-first-ever-song-release-revealed-listen-to-it-here-86908-21283564/#sitelife-commentsWidget-bottom


Listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

SUSAN BOYLE: CYNICS’ WAKE UP CALL

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


The audience truly was cynical because Susan Boyle did not look the win. She looked the fool, actually.


This 47-year-old Scot however has turned the world over flip with her voice.


“I’ve never been given a chance before,” she answered when Simon Cowell asked her why she had not made it as a success prior.


“But tonight may make the difference,” she replied confidently, hopefully on Britain’s Got Talent.


As soon as she opened her mouth to sing Les Miserables “I Dreamed a Dream,” the audience was on its feet. The three judges were astounded, their faces spreading volumes.


She made her cat Pebbles proud.


She also has turned her snide neighbors who put her down over years to be “nice” to her, to use her word for the sociological change brought about by her worldwide take.


Presently, media hang out at her abode trying to get a picture, an interview. But she’s housing at some friend’s place. It’s safer there.


With invitations to appear on Oprah, interviewed by major networks, and perhaps even the chance of singing before the Queen, Susan Boyle has every chance of seeing her dream—not die—but come alive. The world in such a dire straight is surely in need of such a smile.


Cynical.


“When you stood there and said with that cheeky grin that you wanted to be like Elaine Paige, everyone was laughing. But no one is laughing now,” Pierce Morgan said.


“We were all being very cynical and this the greatest wake up call ever,” Amanda Holden confessed.


True.


Susan Boyle: Britain’s Got Talent: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

OVERCOMING STRENGTH

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


One Thursday morning the parsonage phone rang.


When I answered it, I found it was Mark, a young man who had started attending our church.


"I would like to talk with you about a matter in my life," he commented.


A couple of hours later, we met in the sanctuary.


"What's up?" I asked this good-looking fellow.


"I have decided to become a Christian. But it is so hard to live for Jesus, especially in this world."


"Yes, it can be rough going at times," I agreed.


"Being a new believer, I'm finding it especially hard," he added. "I'm beginning to realize how vulnerable I really am when it comes to temptations."


"I can understand that. Many people wrestle with the same battles you are facing," I assured him.


"I wonder if you and I could have some prayer time together. I feel that might give me more of God's power to withstand Satan's enticements," he leveled.


"It would be my pleasure. Why don't we kneel here and tell God about the dark moments you're facing? Let's ask Him to shine His light into your life."


I pointed to the altar at the front of the sanctuary where we could spill our cares before the Lord.


The next Sunday, when the congregation was given the opportunity to share, Mark was the first to testify.


"I want to thank God for being so real in my life," he began.


The rest of the worshipers beamed. They were doing all they could to support this young
man. They wanted him to know victory in his spiritual life.


"This last week I got a call from a girl I once knew. She said a lot of other friends of mine were at her apartment. She invited me to join them," Mark continued. "So I drove across town and climbed the stairs to her apartment. I rang the bell. She came to the door. Then I saw what she was up to.


"No one else was there. She was all alone.


Mark hesitated, caught his breath and then went on.


"She looked at me and whispered, 'April fool, Mark. Come on in.'


"At first, I felt a tug inside. It would have been so easy to accept her invitation. But even though it was April Fool's Day, I knew I would not be a fool for Satan.


"I looked at her and simply said, 'No thanks.'


"Then I walked to my car. I am so glad I did. I have now proven to God, Satan and myself I can resist temptation if I really want to. I am determined to live for Jesus Christ, regardless."


As Mark sat down, excitement filled God's house.


We were all enraptured with his victory as we were all reminded that through Jesus' power, we can resist the baits of hell.

POWER AND PENTECOST

J. Grant Swank, Jr.



If the power of the church is not of Pentecost, then it is of the flesh. If it is of the flesh, then it is useless. Further, it is detrimental to the ultimate desires of the Holy Spirit.



There are seasons when well-meaning believers run ahead of God. This may be done with the misuse of power. Such may be evident today regarding some political- social issues related to morality.



Christians, particularly in an age rife with ethical dilemmas, may go scurrying about in one power play or another in an attempt to Christianize society. Sometimes this agenda even includes pushing--in the flesh--Jesus Christ upon eternally lost souls.



If the Holy Spirit has nothing to do with this agenda, then it is folly. Further, it can become an embarrassment to the Spirit it means to elevate. It may even frustrate the heaven-meant agenda.



For example, the moral impingements of today include: abortion, condoned homosexual practices, heterosexual promiscuities, abuses of horrific varieties, hunger, poverty, spiritual laxities, occultic inroads, media secularism, blasphemies of varying sorts, apostasy within the Christian religion, and souls yet unredeemed.



With such a build-up of desperation, many sincerely driven Christians go forth to battle against evil in the flesh. They usually implement their energies with one power play or another.



At times this is an individual drive; in other instances, this may be organizationally maneuvered. In various periods of history, even segments of Christendom have been responsible for taking perceived God-might into their own hands in lording it over some body. For example, Protestants have burnt "enemies" at the stake. This is power of the flesh. Further, Catholics have burnt "enemies" at the stake. This is power of the flesh.



We have seen in our time the anti-abortion enthusiasts scowl, scream, punch fists into the air, threaten, shoot at and torch properties in the name of Jesus. This is power of the flesh.



We have witnessed so-called Christian anti-homosexual energizers torture, threaten, malign, send hate letters, and publicly screech at these persons. This is power of the flesh.



How then should Christians behave in an immoral world?



Our standard is always Jesus. The only persons Jesus openly castigated were religious hypocrites: Pharisees, apostate scribes, reprobate high priests. Jesus never leveled such treatment against anyone else: Roman soldiers, Pontius Pilate, Herod, thieving tax collectors, prostitutes.



Following Jesus' example, we then should begin with our own religious house: Christendom. Jesus started with His own religion in cleaning house. He railed against the temple regime: white-washed tombs, generation of snakes, foxes, swine. He tossed over tables in public display--power visible, tangible.



When His Spirit fell upon the 120, He power-housed their carnal souls clean, rearranged their priorities, revamped their egos, blew them over with mighty winds, and set their tongues gospeling in intelligible news understood by the 16 dialects gathered in the streets.



If believers want to make a Pentecost impact against the abortion trade, Hugh Hefners, exhibitionist homosexuals, and black witches then Christians need to get their own house cleaned up. And there is plenty of cleaning to do.



With that seen through, what then?



Again, Jesus is our standard. He never forced salvation upon anyone. He never thrust holiness upon anyone. He offered. He invited. He explained. And then he left the matter with the human free will. God always honors that free will mechanism He planted within His height of creation.



God never screams grace, threatens mercy, scowls the gospel, nor uses hate to offer peace. God never burns down a Buddhist temple, shoots at a Hindu nor punches His fist in the air against an atheist.



God has slain lying religionists. Ask Ananias and Sapphira. He has spanked an adulterer who professed to be moral. Ask King David. He has publicly, pointedly warned a lapsing disciple. Ask Peter.



Yet when it comes to those outside the gospel circle, God convicts in love.



No wonder the portrait of the Savior depicts Him knocking on the closed door. He never pounds down that door. He always waits for the free will to open it--or let it remain closed.



Jesus is always a gentleman, especially to those who have lost their ways in the abortion trade, practicing homosexuality, New Age nonsense, pornographic addictions, cultic entanglements, sexual promiscuities, and the like.



Can we dare be less?

PREACHING PENTECOST

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


Pentecost is probably the most forgotten holy season in the church year, that is, outside the more liturgical framework of Christendom. Such is sad for it is on that historic occasion that the Spirit gave power to believers for the gusto of the Early Church start.



Reviving then preaching the Pentecost worship can be the sheer delight of any biblical preacher.



What then CAN be accented to worshipers during Pentecost?



By bringing believers' attentions to Acts 2, the preacher reminds the worshiping community of the SWEETNESS of that first gathering just prior to the Spirit's infilling. There were about l20 disciples waiting upon heaven's witness, just as Jesus had predicted. Their union had tallied ten days.



So it was in that upper room conclave that followers' hearts were made obedient to the heavenly directive. In that fellowship individual souls were made transparent to glory and to one another. In the process, each individual was humbled before the divine eye.



So it is when we gather together. There is to be that sweetness known only to those consecrated to the risen Lord. It is evidenced in our total loyalty to the heavenly will, openness to God and one another with the divine gift of humility clothing us all.



Further, the preacher recalls for worshipers that such a ten-day prayer vigil yielded its own souls' SETTLING INTO GOD. The variety of personalities gathered in the room would have been astounding. There were extroverts, introverts and all in between. There were followers and leaders. There were verbal and non-verbal types. There were the tall and short, large and small, young and old.



Yet in that collection of diversity there came unity in prayer. How did it occur? By each soul moving eyes off of self onto God, from hurry onto slowing down, from earth to the heavenly vision. Such is the marvel of quieting one's inner being before the Lord. Such is the reward of collective intercession. Such is the deepening that can only come upon us when we surrender the flesh to the Spirit.



Today more than ever there is needed the preaching which brings the prayer hunger. When humans move from the tangle of earthly struggles to the settling into the heart of God, then the church is the church at prayer.



In addition, the preacher lifts up the SUDDENLY of God. "Suddenly there was a sound from heaven. . ." Sometimes we consider God to be rather slow in what He is doing in our lives. Yet, of course, the Timeless knows how to intersect time according to eternal wisdom. That is an awareness not always grasped by human intellect.



Therefore, when God decides to act, there are the suddenlies in contrast to the graduals. It was a sudden divine breath that sliced in half the Red Sea. It was a sudden stone thrust that toppled Goliath. It was a sudden "Peace!" call that calmed the Galilean Sea. And it was a sudden sound from above that brought the holy winds upon Pentecost.



How many suddenlies can the church count up in looking back historically over divine workings? And how many suddenlies in each individual believers' life? Numerous suddenlies. They all go to work the everlasting plan. Such knows how to interweave suddenlies with graduals in order to see through a holy scheme often hidden from human eye.



Moreover, the preacher shares with worshiping listeners that God's SUPPLY is full.
". . .filled the whole house. . ." Because God is God, God works completely. Satan can work only partially in order to bait followers further into the dark. God works perfectly in order to guide us into the full-orbed light.



As a counselor with addicts, I hear over and over their tales of heroin's rush. Such a high. Then they go for more opiates in an attempt to bring back the initial high. But the return is never quite enough. I pray to help those souls to realize that they are being lured by a power which cannot finally satisfy nor supply. Yet truly those addicts know that piece all too well; now it is that they are begging for relief as to how to get out of their fix. Quite sad.



When God does whatever He does, God performs to the full. That is why He asks His followers to fill up their consecrations to the top. After all, God gave His all to save us; therefore, He asks us to give our all to serve Him. That is the "perfect" of Matthew 5:48. Be perfect in sweet surrender to God as He has been perfect in His sweet sacrifice upon the cross.



In addition, the preacher underlines the SEEN of Pentecost power. There were seen upon the l20 heads divided fiery tongues. They were visible. That was heaven telling earth that He expects faith to be worked out in everyday life--visible, knowable, accountable.



Christianity is not ethereal in the sense that it is vaporized. The Pentecost faith is heaven-come-to-earth within our own incarnational infillings with the Spirit. The family will see it. The church will see it. The workplace will see it. The world will see it. The Pentecost believer cannot hide the Spirit's presence nor would he wish to.



So it is that that presence is holy, lighted, alive with truth. It is Spirit-owned. It is burnt through and through so that all that is of self-centeredness is extinguished. All that is prostrated before the eternal throne becomes preeminent. So it is that the believer experiences the work accomplished in the soul. So it is that the world around that believer is witness to the divine lordship.



This Pentecost season come into the Spirit with the assurance that He awaits your entrance. He wishes to host you into His power, His peace and His purity. Now share that with those who gather in the name of Jesus.

REPS KEEP RICK PERRY STAR SHINING

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


It just could be that Texas Governor Rick Perry could become the Republican Party’s real-life real-time star.


If so, it won’t be because of mob hysteria that flushed B. H. Obama onto Pennsylvania Avenue. It will be because Perry’s brain works in logic time. That has made connection with the thinking citizens of America.


It’s about time.


Mob hysteriacs fed by liberal media have had their day with the Marxist Muslim now ensconced in the White House. But time moves on—quite quickly, in fact. With that, events change.


So it just could be that Perry’s championing of state’s sovereignty could be the patriotic reality “change” and “hope” to save the Republic.


With the Internet now as each day’s “newspaper,” thinking Americans are getting their news detail from their computers.


In addition, they are watching Fox News night and day because they believe in Fox’s ethic. They know that Fox defines what should be in this country. This galls B. H. and cadre. Fine. The more galls, the better the nation in the long run.


Perry’s call for states’ rights over federal dictatorship is the focal issue around which other prime factors will spin. It will not take that long for the spin to fly right from shore to shore.


Not all America voted in the Marxist Muslim. Those who did not are not sleeping. They are already marching as is evident in the Tea Parties power scene. Though the liberal media taunted the Party or ignored it, the Internet newsfeeds and Fox News valiantly filled in the truth gap.


Our knowledgeable public knows where to go to connect with the actual. And that number will grow. It is growing.


That will eventuate in democracy’s healthy “change” and “hope” traditionally honored.

HOMOSEXUAL BARNEY FRANK UPS HATE CRIME VS. CHRISTIANS

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


Barney Frank will see to it that Christians are mugged throughout America via H. R. 1913.


The date is set for April 20.


Canada and Sweden have already gagged Christians, particularly prohibiting biblical clergy from speaking God’s Word regarding the divine abhorrence concerning active homosexuality.


America could be next.


Christians throughout the nation must protest this evil. B. H. Obama will sign on with the homosexual supporters.


This is one more nail in the cross. It is another affront to the God of the Bible. It is just plain sin advertisement as part of the American way of life.


Christians know that if this bill passes, their statements referring to the Scriptures will open them to be jailed. Pastors have been jailed in Canada and Sweden. It could come to the United States.


The Anti-Christian Defamation Commission is fighting this bill. But they must get grassroots backing or the homosexual enthusiasts will win the day.


Read “Hate Crimes Legislation Vote Coming Next Week” at http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/10280


FOOTNOTE:


ANTI-HOMOSEXUAL PASSAGES IN THE BIBLE


Leviticus 18:22: "You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination."


Leviticus 20:13: "If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act; they shall surely be put to death. Their bloodguiltiness is upon them."


Romans 1:18-32: "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. . .For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God, or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools. . .


"Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, that their bodies might be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. . .


"For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire towards one another, men with men committed indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.


"God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, malice; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice. . .without understanding. . . and, although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them."


I Corinthians 6:9: "Do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, shall inherit the kingdom of God."

TEX GOV TELLS OBAMA WHERE TO GET OFF

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


The Texas Governor puts it on the table for B. H. Obama to digest right quickly or else.


Governor Rick Perry means business. He’s sick of DC robbing states of their rights. He’s had it with B. H. Obama playing dictator to the Republic.


He is informing the Obama clique to quit their despotic measures or else Texas will slice through DC’s power clutch.


“Gov. Rick Perry joined state Rep. Brandon Creighton and sponsors of House Concurrent Resolution (HCR) 50 in support of states’ rights under the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution” per DrudgeReport Tuesday night.


It is the last straw for the Governor and his rights-sensitive colleagues. They have drawn the line in the sand. More states should follow their integrity. It is time to take America back for the people rather than permit the Marxist Muslim Oval Office holder to rob us of our history as well as our future as a democracy.


“’I believe that our federal government has become oppressive in its size, its intrusion into the lives of our citizens, and its interference with the affairs of our state.


“That is why I am here today to express my unwavering support for efforts all across our country to reaffirm the states’ rights affirmed by the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution” the Governor stated.


“’. . .all across our country. . .’”


The appeal is not only to Texans but to the entire nation. It’s time for the genuine citizens to take back what we have had since the start—our freedoms.


B. H. Obama would steal those liberties from us without batting an eye. He is entrenched in his own anti-democracy philosophy believing that his liberal support is strong enough to wreck our foundations in favor of Marxism.


“’I believe that returning to the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution and its essential 10th Amendment will free our state from undue regulations, and ultimately strengthen our Union.


“’Millions of Texans are tired of Washington, DC trying to come down here to tell us how to run Texas.’”


That is echoed throughout the land by those who have not been hoodwinked by Obama’s mob hysteria techniques. Thinking Americans know full well what this shyster is up to. And they are going to fight him out of office sooner than he thinks.


One way to cut right through his power grab is for states to overpower the feds when feds usurp states’ authorities. Obama thinks nothing of robbing states of their authorities. Despots do that every day of their lives. Obama is one of them.


“A number of recent federal proposals are not within the scope of the federal government’s constitutionally designated powers and impede the states’ right to govern themselves. HCR 50 affirms that Texas claims sovereignty under the 10th Amendment over all powers not otherwise granted to the federal government.


“It also designates that all compulsory federal legislation that requires states to comply under threat of civil or criminal penalties, or that requires states to pass legislation or lose federal funding, be prohibited or repealed” the Governor explained.


True patriots cannot merely wish for things to return to normal. They cannot wait until the next election. They must act now because Obama surely does not lag when it comes to liberalizing every facet of our lives. His secularization of America is moving faster than anyone could have predicted.


The way to halt this atrocity is to follow the Texan’s leadership. It has to be a concerted, aggressive move to plow through every liberal tenet lifted high for Marxism by B. H. Obama and his undermining thugs in DC.

BIBLE CHRISTIANS ARE ‘RIGHT WING RADICALS’ PER OBAMA GUARD

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


Homeland Security has put out a paper that is racist. It labels conservatives as anti-Obama’s skin color. If that is not racist-in-the-face, what is?


But more. The Homeland Security document is unbelievably prejudiced against every moralist in this Republic.


You, patriot, therefore can be certain that as a biblical believer you are being watched. Your church is scanned. Your righteous movement is going to be scoured from front to back. Your alliances are going to be scrutinized. Homeland Security is going to see to it.


What has happened to America’s freedoms? They are being eroded by the paranoid destroyers in DC.


That’s what happens when leftists take over. They are not sure of anything, not even their own creeds for the latter are falsely based. They are grounded on relativism, not absolutes. Therefore, even their own postulates change according to the winds of the latest power grab, by the latest mental disorders lodged within the liberal heads at work.


Those into biblical absolutes like defending womb babies because God does not want our children murdered as in the Old Testament era of babies laid on idol Moloch’s hands for burning had better heads-up.


We anti-abortionists are considered dangerous according to Homeland Security. True. Homeland Security has put out a directive stating that government officialdom is in danger of being thrown under the bus by biblical believers who defend womb babies.


Further, those returning armed service personnel are likewise out to destroy America for they are tainted as “right wing radicals.” They must be tagged. They are going to spread “violence” from shore to shore. Though B. H. Obama has embraced them in Iraq, his true feelings are that military personnel are out to lay low America.


In addition, those seeking to keep this nation ethically based, for instance, opposing sodomy under the guise of same-gender “marriage,’ are threatening the nation’s fiber. We are the real foes out to implode the societal structure.


The mob hysteriacs have shoved into the White House B. H. Obama’s cadre geared to wipe out those who actually are the foundational security of this nation. We are labeled outright as “right wing radicals” who must be searched out because of our undermining potential.


This is a travesty against civil citizens who stand up for what is morally sound, the very ethical stability that has built this nation into the greatest societal entity on the planet.


However, now we are the enemy. Obama’s league has labeled us. We are now the disease maximum.


Per Fox News: “The Department of Homeland Security is warning law enforcement agencies that recent news is helping ‘right-wing extremist groups’ recruit new members and could lead to violence, and warns about the possible recruitment and radicalization of returning veterans.”


“Violence.”


Did you get that? And who may be the “recent news” makers with the catechism of violent destruction to the USA?


Fox News? Bill O’Reilly? Sean Hannity? Glenn Beck? Rush Limbaugh? Evangelicals? Devout Catholics? Biblically based moralists of every tag?


“DHS' Office of Intelligence and Analysis issued an intelligence assessment last week that said it has no specific information that domestic right-wing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence, but right-wing extremists may be gaining new recruits by playing on fears about the recession and the election of the first African American president. The office called them ‘unique drivers for right-wing radicalization and recruitment.’”


“’. . .may be gaining new recruits. . .’” Are these the young adults who have had their eyes opened to the Marxist Muslim Obama agenda and therefore are converting to the patriotic right?


But what is with this: “’. . .playing on fears. . .of the first African American president.’”


As far as I can tell, any conservative newsmakers have done nothing but steer clear of any racism regarding B. H. Obama. Yet this is the President who was brainwashed by Jeremiah Wright’s anti-white anti-Jew pro-Islam catechism for two decades? So it is this Oval Office watchman who now labels freedom-endorsing citizens as anti-Obama skin color.


This is an obvious evidence of the paranoia filling the DC cup to overflowing. Obama is brain sick and surrounded by the like sick. Would not one expect this finally to come to the fore with the Wright brainwashing imbedded in the President’s brain center?


As conservatives remain civil regarding the Obama skin color, his very liberal henchmen attack the civil citizens as racist by stating this racist sentence in the Homeland Security document.


Be very much aware that this Homeland Security document is anti-evangelical, anti-biblical devotees, anti-conservative of every stripe—political and theological.


This is one of the most blatant anti-true-patriotic American slap-arounds that the B. H. Obama regime has tried. They are testing the genuine Americans. And their subversive testing aggression will increase. This is just the start.


They are out to cut us to ribbons.


Read “Homeland Security Warns of Rise in Right-Wing Extremism” at http://www.foxnews.com/politics/first100days/2009/04/14/homeland-security-warns-rise-right-wing-extremism/

‘SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE’?

J. Grant Swank, Jr.

Liberals have run off with this phrase, prostituting it per usual.

The matter is simple. It’s this: America does not want a state church. England has a state church — the Anglican Church. America does not want one denomination considered The Nation’s Church.

On the other hand, America has a religious heritage. It’s not Muslim. It’s not Hindu. It’s not Shinto. It’s not animism. It’s not New Age. It’s not Paganism. It’s not Voodoo. It’s Judeo-Christian.

America, while not desiring a state church, does desire religion in life. That includes religious expression in everyday exchange. Because Judeo-Christian is America’s heritage, most citizens honor that heritage expressed and honored. Its expression then should not be thwarted. It should not be belittled. It should not be erased in the name of “separation of church and state.”

Unhampered religious expression is promised in the First Amendment.

Further, America, having a Judeo-Christian heritage and the right to present-tense expression, permits freedom of religious expression to other religions. Therefore, there are those of other religious persuasions who practice without fear their religions in America.

What the liberals want to do is redefine the phrase “separation of church and state” to exclude Judeo-Christian religious expression in America. They want not only “separation of church and state” defined on their terms but the exclusion of the Judeo-Christian religion and anything coming close to that particular religious expression—period.

Liberals believe that if they continue harping on the “separation of church and state” phrase, brainwashing the public with their prostituted definition, especially indoctrinating the next generation with their prostituted definition, then they will have won secularism for America’s future.

They, in other words, want not only separation but exclusion of religion — completely so. Note however that the chief religion they want excluded is Judeo-Christian.

They will even tolerate other religions, as they are presently doing with the Muslim infiltration, but it is Judeo-Christian that they want cleansed from America. In other words, it’s a religious cleansing they desire for this nation — the extinguishing specifically of the Judeo-Christian faith.

Therefore, if tolerating another religion such as Islam helps wipe out Judeo-Christianity, then so be it. Islam is far better a tolerance than the American heritage of Judeo-Christian. Therefore, there are school districts hiring Muslims to speak to teachers on how to give Muslim students honor and space. No such invitation, of course, has been extended to Judeo-Christian specialists speaking to public school educators on how to give Judeo-Christian adherents honor and space.

In a nearby high school, a prayer room was set aside for Muslim students. No such prayer room or any other respect has been presented those of the Judeo-Christian heritage.

Liberals, in other words, will do whatever it takes to obliterate America of its rightful Judeo-Christian heritage. This is accented every year particularly during the Christmas season. Any other so-called “religious expression” can come to the fore but the Christian particulars must be silenced at all costs. So we hear throughout the Christmas season, not Christian hymn carols, but “separation of church and state.”

Once again, liberals have taken language to serve their own twisted purposes. They took “homosexual” and made it “gay.” They took “pro-choice” and made it “protecting females.” They take “separation of church and state” and make it “wiping out America’s Judeo-Christian heritage.”

What those of the Judeo-Christian heritage must do — and far more concertedly than they have ever done in the past — is to make clear to the public what “separation of church and state” really means. This must be put in print in magazines and journals. It must be preached from pulpits. It must be taught in religion classes. It must be spelled out in letters to the editor.

Unfortunately, this simply has not been done. The church in particular has permitted the liberals to carry on with their prostitution of the phrase. I have been appalled over the years to note that the church specifically has not risen to expose the liberals’ misuse of that phrase. Therefore, the young have taken quickly to the liberals’ definition while the church has sat, in the main, silent, allowing the enemy to win out.

WIPE OUT PIRATES VS. AMERICA

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


Arm our ships.


Kill pirates threatening our ships.


Sink the pirates’ vessels.


Go for the Muslim terrorist camps in Somalia in particular. Our government knows their locations.
See that those camps no longer exist. Bomb them if necessary.


We were fortunate with this latest threat. Hostages lived to tell about it. That cannot be guaranteed forever.


Further, these Allah devotees who resort to piracy thirst to die. When they die for Islam World Rule, they go immediately into the arms of countless virgins for eternity per Islamic teaching.


These devotees are not put off by being told that they will be killed. They yearn for martyrdom.


Therefore, there is no use planning dialogue with Islamic pirates. They don’t dialogue. They demand. Nothing in between. That is the mindset of every radical Muslim.


These Muslim pirates also are irked due to President B. H. Obama switching from Islamic to “Christian.” He claims to be “Christian” though his liberal theology prohibits him from being a biblical believer.


Consequently, he is “Christian” in label only.


Nevertheless, when one leaves Islam for another world religion, even when that profession is bogus, such is anathema. Allah demands per the Koran that that individual be slain.


Consequently, there must be countless numbers of Muslims who conclude that Obama should be slain because of his simple move from Islam to Christianity, even an anti-Bible “Christianity.”


There are those Muslim pirates who are motivated in their threatening American vessels because they are baiting Obama himself. Will he turn against his own Muslims or will he defend the Republic?


Obama has been tested in this recent confrontation. It is just the start.


Read the Koran at http://jgrantswankjr.blogspot.com/2008/02/koran.html

GOD'S FURTHER GRACES

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


God's further graces begin in servanthood. There is no short-cut, no detour. God writes the system; we obey or disobey.


Servanthood is the realization that God is Lord. When He is in fact Lord, then the believer acknowledges Him to be in utter control of the entire life.


Lord is Lord. God is God. Master is Master. Yet these are the divine titles which we tend to overlook in favor of the more comfortable titles such as Savior, Redeemer, Friend. Nevertheless, the more demanding titles are just as much a crucial part of deity's nature as the ones we deem "more comfortable".


Submitting to this divine sovereignty is to understand one's lowly yet serene estate before the King. Practically lived out this becomes the proof of our Christian witness. It is the stuffings of our religious integrity. All else is merely supportive material.


When one has decided for certain that God is Chief Executive Officer, then he bows before His awesome authority willingly--constantly. All directives--every one: minor and major--therefore originate in the eternal Mind. As His kingdom's slave, one then breathes to yield to His scepter without argument at all times.


On the other hand, the wily carnal mind demands to live out God's rule. This is the old Eden game posited by the snake, yet still very much in vogue in every generation of churchmen and women. Such is a fumbling, foolish project; nevertheless, it is persisted in by scores every day.


Such a stance seeks to recognize God, yet refuses to permit God to rule. This is the wretched double-minded state warned of in Scripture.


Continuing in such spiritual schizophrenia is a well-kept private misery of the soul. It is testifying to knowing God, on the one hand, yet consciously refusing to allow Him to be Monarch.


Christians in such on-going agony are a contradiction to their own creed. God is God, they profess boldly; yet in the work-a-day He is not. Because of this fact, their consciences reprimand them for such audacious rebellion.


The only remedy for this inner turmoil is for one to genuinely surrender the mortal's claim to self-rule so that God indeed may reign fully. When this is purposefully realized, the Holy Spirit then cleanses the soul of its carnal disease. It is a miraculous cure of the human spirit.


In place of the carnal malady enters the promised peace of servantship. Such relief is sighed for daily by the Spirit for His children of grace. Yet only the few take advantage of the kind Spirit's intercession to the throne (Romans 8).


Maintaining this lowliness is the sanctified believer's moment-by-moment willful choice. However, sadly at any time the believer may foolishly attempt again to "play God"; if this occurs, the old misery returns to haunt the soul's dark closet.


On the other hand, if the Christian truly maintains his earnest surrender before God, actual holiness becomes an on-going lifestyle. That which may have begun in conflict--the wrestling of the human will against the divine will--yields to a sweet resignation.


Experiencing this grace is the original plan of Creator God for His own. Yet often one journeys through pain of soul conflict to reach the Father's first intention for His own.


When completely surrendered, knowing the Spirit possess all, the believer inwardly senses the imparting of marvelous grace. Outwardly, others witness it lived out in the disciple's real-life.

Over time, this grace grows into saintliness. To be saintly is to so build a life of servanthood under God so that that lifestyle becomes as natural as breathing. It becomes sensitive, instinctive, normal, the "foretaste of glory divine."


Purposefully permitting the divine control constantly opens the windows of the soul to heaven's holy breezes. These bring with them God's further, more delicate, graces: self-giving, sacrifice, quietness in holiness, the culture of Christ, kindness shown, honoring the holy, communicating with angels, loving heaven with all one's being, yearning for the invisible powers to be set loose even more so in the practics of everyday.


Such welcomed winds refine and brighten, enliven and refresh. They inspire and spread spiritual health.


In that, these waftings have their own unique, precious wonder.

PRAYERS = MIRACLE RESCUE OF CAPT PHILLIPS

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


“Evil is never triumphant. Evil never has the final say.”


The pastor of the Captain’s Vermont church gave that witness to media on Resurrection Day.


Captain Richard Phillips was rescued from Muslim Solami pirates. His family had prayed. His church was in prayer. His wife in particular communicated with her husband that he could be assured of their prayers.


In the give-out of rescue detail, the return to prayer’s power continues to reverberate via Fox News in particular.


It is interesting that while B. H. Obama told the Turk Parliament that America is not a Christian nation, when a Captain is ready to be slain by Muslim pirates, that Captain’s Christian church and Christian household go to their Savior in prayer.


It is interesting that as the President of the nation with a Christian heritage disavows that heritage publicly, Americans go to their knees on behalf of the Captain and his family.


It is our background. America has been struck with tragedy over and over again because we inhabit a spiritually damaged world. However, America has a biblical backdrop grounded by its founders.


That backdrop knows how to find the God of the Bible. That heritage has been schooled in how to have faith in troubled times.


Though secularists and anti-Bible leaders like B. H. Obama would have us scrap the Scriptures, this nation is still held together by a righteous remnant that will not bow down to today’s idols. That remnant is the baseline as to why God’s mercy continues to umbrella our country.


Though some of our political and religious leaders have lost their ways of soul, there are countless disciples at the grassroots who still hold on to Christ’s redemptive power to save.


Therefore, what the Captain’s pastor told newsfeeds on Easter is exactly what these biblical believers broadcast by their lives. They testify that evil does not have the last word. Christ as Alpha and Omega has the divine right to write the last sentence in every committed life.


On this Resurrection Day, celebrating the greatest event in human history, genuine Christians give praise to heaven that this miracle at sea caps our resolve to keep strong America’s Christian heritage.

ABIDING IN HIM

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


I was in tenth grade. More than anything in the world, I wanted to know that I abided in the Lord. I needed to know that He was with me.


I had read testimonies of other Christians who related how near God was with them. He went with them to work. He directed them in their decisions. He was a real friend who could be counted upon.


I wanted that kind of relationship with God, too.


Therefore, to prove to Jesus how serious I was, I set my alarm for 3 o'clock in the morning. Then I would tip-toe out of my bedroom down the stairs into the family room. With a small light on, I would kneel by a large couch. In front of me was my Bible--open.


Alone--in the quiet--I beseeched God to abide within me. I needed to know for certain that He was taking complete charge of my life.


Night after night, I kept my vigil with the Lord. After an hour, I would return to my bed and fall back to sleep till morning.


During the school day, I would fast my lunch. While other students went to the cafeteria, I went to a storage closet on the second floor of our huge high school. Opening the door, I turned on the light. There was no chair in that room, just shelves upon shelves filled with supplies.


Retrieving a small New Testament from my pocket, I crouched down alongside a wall, preparing myself to fast and pray for the Lord's abiding presence.


Day after day, I kept faithful to my earnest desire to experience God within.


One day, my math teacher opened the door. Was I surprised!


"What are you doing in here?" she asked sternly.


I knew that I could not lie to her when seeking the fulness of God within. Therefore, I told her the simple truth.


"I am fasting and praying for the infilling of the Holy Spirit."


With that, she made a U-turn, shut the door and never bothered me again.


After awhile, I became frustrated. I wondered why I had to try so hard to know God in His fullness.


Then I thought back to some of those saints' testimonies. They were glorious. They related how God was especially close--there in front of them, behind them, inside them.


Why was it so difficult for me to come upon that same real awareness?


Then it was that God spoke to me within my heart. It was without doubt that God said to me: "I was with you the first night you sought me. Do you not remember? I was there in that family room. You knew my peace and power in a very special way."


It was true. Immediately, I recalled how the room that first night seemed to fill with His holiness. There was a splendor in that space which had come from without. It had to have been the Lord Himself.


It then dawned upon me that I had been seeking others' experiences rather than allowing God to be personal with me.


He had not held me aloof. He had not kept His distance. He had been most faithful--punctual to the nighttime hour.


From that moment to this, I have thanked God for His abiding presence--heart to heart. It has been over 50 years since He proved Himself to me in that remarkable manner.


Now when others ask me how to know God within, I simply tell them to ask. He will answer if they are earnest. Time after time, they have returned to tell me that it has been true with them as it has been with me.


God keeps His word. He has promised to abide within us if we but ask.

HOLINESS IN THE STREET

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


Horace Greeley once said, "Fame is vapor. Popularity an accident. Riches take wings. Only one thing endures, that is character."


Looking at character from a biblical point of view, such is spelled HOLINESS. The highest level a human being can reach in this life spiritually speaking is the level of purity of heart and life. That produces the sterling character.


Do you have character? In other words, do you have "holiness in the street"--out there where people are? Are you living at your height in the Spirit of God?


When we become saved by diving grace, the Lord forgives us of our sins. But when we become sanctified in His Spirit, the Lord cleanses the carnal nature--inbred sin--the old man. Call it what you will, it is that rebellious nature against God's way in order to demand our own way.


There is the fact of the need for two operations--surgery upon the soul for cleansing of sins and surgery operation upon the soul for cleansing of the sin nature.


Then the Christian becomes complete in God--to go into moment-by-moment completeness, always arriving and yet never arriving.


What happens if a person does not permit the Spirit to have control over the old man, the self-centered life? Then you have a stinking tree in the back yard of the soul. You have a foul odor. You have the beginning of soul rot. It works its way out in pettiness, contrariness, selfishness, egotism, devilishness, gossip, wrangling, fighting, bickering, childishness, undercutting, spending every moment on self rather than spending energy on the Spirit's agenda.


You end up with an in-grown, stunted character, a dead end street, a sore that festers, a wound that never heals, a runny seepage that is repulsive on the body of Christ.


Jesus called such a state a white-washed tombstone--looking shiny on the outside--going through the motions of being right, carrying the Scriptures, knowing the sacred language, looking pretty--but on the inside there is death, stinking carcasses, decaying souls, spirits that have an awful stench to them, darkness, worm-eaten personalities, maggot-infested spirits. Is that too strong a terminology? Hardly, not when comparing the language used by Jesus.


Man may see the shiny exterior, but God sees the inside, and that is why Jesus said to the hypocrites of His day: "On the outside the cup looks clean; but on the inside you are all dirty."


Human nature has not changed. There are still those who on the outside look okay; they look like they are living out the doctrine of their orthodox theologies. But on the inside they are dirty; they are double-minded; they are devilish.


No wonder Thomas a Kempis of the Middle Ages cried out: "I beseech thee, Lord Jesus, thou crucified one, cleanse my heart from all that is worldly."


What did he mean by "worldly?" Pornography, drug misuse, cursing, promiscuity, theft? He meant all that is worldly within the sins of the spirit--not only the sins of the flesh but also the equally damning sins of the Spirit.


There are two main categories of sins: the sins of the flesh and the sins of the spirit. The sins of the flesh are outward; they are usually the ones that make the headlines: murder, rape, incest, robbery, adultery. But the sins of the spirit are just as deadly.


Paul lists both kinds of sins alongside one another when he provides his cataloguing of various wrongs. Murder is put right alongside gossip, for gossip is murder.


I have run into some people who would not put a literal knife into another person's back but who have killed the reputations of plenty of people They would not think of killing with a gun for fear of being put in jail; but they have killed others' characters and reputations.


They have sliced up and down the good names of other people.


These persons have yet to be sanctified They may testify to the experience and know how to spell the doctrinal terms. But that does not mean anything if there is not the life of "street holiness" to back it up.


In fact, it means much in reverse for it brings shame upon the church. It is also an embarrassment to those who are genuinely holy before God.


There are those who would not commit adultery. They would not even smoke a cigarette let alone dabble in harder drugs. But these pious folk will spend long periods of time on the phone gossiping about innocent persons, finding fault, having an unruly attitude, cutting up the work of the Lord in fine fashion.


Yet ask these same people to visit the ones in the convalescent homes or weekly call on a person who is bedridden or come to the aid of others in distress, and they do not seem to have the time for it.


Why?


Because they have to spend their energies on the things of the devil---plotting, scheming, undermining. They do not have time for the things of eternal good because they have to maintain their own selfish games.


It is frightening to see such persons within the church. I have a hunch that Jesus was thinking of these people when He said candidly: "On judgment day there will be those who will say: 'Did not we sit in a Sunday school class, were not we there with our thick King James Versions in hand, did not we stay away from the drugs and lustful license, did not we keep our refrigerators free from liquor, did not we keep our tidy skirts clean?'


"And then they will hear the Judge say: 'Depart--away from me--you who work sin, for I never knew your name. You did not do the Father's will. You did your "own thing" in the name of religion. You saw through YOUR plans and did not take time to seek out the FATHER'S plans.'"


Now you explain why Jesus has the right to tell those "good people" that they were committing sin? They were, that is why. It is that simple.


They committed sins of the spirit over and over again. They bucked the heart of God the Father. They came into the organization called "the church" in order to set loose their own petty, conceited aims. And with determination they did work their carnal goals to fruition.


No wonder Thomas a Kempis prayed: "O how needful for me is purification--the cleansing from my sins! Whatever thou findest in me that is carnal, cast it utterly away. Remove from me all that thou seest unclean in me. That being inwardly cleansed from sin and adorned with the beauty of holiness, I may have a perpetual love of thy holy name, and be found a meet partaker of thy heavenly kingdom."


Give us more prayers like that one today!

FAITH STARTS THE JOURNEY

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


". . .Christ crucified. . ." I Corinthians 1:23


Salvation comes to us by faith. There is no work possible to mankind which can forgive sins. Only the sinless sacrifice upon the cross is able to cleanse us from our wrong-doing. That is why the cross is absolutely central to the Christian life and faith.


Before the world was created, God schemed the redemption plan. It would be activated if mortal disobeyed Creator God. Our first parents unfortunately did trespass against the law of Creator God; in that instant, the cross came into play upon the planet. Prior to that moment, the cross was a divine plan housed in the eternities.


Down through Old Testament history, the shedding of blood was the means by which mortals could find forgiveness. It was the sacrifice. It was the pain. It was the reminder that first parents had attempted to play deity--foolishly so--by believing the tempter.


Then came the Calvary Cross atop Golgotha. There was stapled the perfect Lamb. There He bled, scarified His all upon the wood, suffered, cried out in anguish, writhed beneath the awful blows of a slow death. There Christ became sin for us. There the Lamb became likewise goat of humanity--the scape goat carrying into the tomb our sins upon His holy head.


From that cross point in human history, all other history looks back upon Jerusalem's tree. And from creation's start, all human history looked forward to Jerusalem's tree. The cross is the cross roads of all human history.


Therefore, it is paramount that everyone who claims the name "Christian" realizes that the Christian life is summed up in the cross. There is finally no other place to go in this life. It is the cross from alpha to omega.


One can travel all over the globe--back in history, forward in expectation--and yet find no greater height than the hill upon which Christ was nailed to a piece of timber.


Likewise, it is of utmost significance that each believer reckon with the fact that the Christian experience centers upon the cross--sacrifice, pain, relinquishment, surrender, yielding, emptying, soul nakedness, death to self-striving and acclaim.


Yet this very truth is the concept most ignored by the Christian community for at first blanch it appears to be repulsive, so absolutely impossible. How can a good God ask this of us? How can such a bloody scene be the central crux of a religion?


Yet it is. Once one then grips the fundamental fact of the faith, one can then move into the reality of the cross by his own personal obedience to emptying all into the hands of Christ. This is what Paul called for when he wrote for believers to die in Christ, to be buried in Christ, and then to know the resurrection peace.


This must become personal to you otherwise you are merely holding to a religious coin without knowing its value. You are merely toying with a religious emblem without understanding its blood stain upon your soul. You must climb up Calvary, stake out your very existence there and bed down till the last breath beneath the body of the crucified One. Anything less cannot be tolerated for it is God who demands this of His own.


It is by faith you start the journey. It is by faith you continue the journey. It is by faith you will end the journey.

SOMALI MUSLIM PIRATES VS. MUSLIM OBAMA

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


Here we go.


The Marxist Muslim B. H. Obama is now confronting Muslim Salami pirates.


No wonder we are not hearing much out of the Oval Office on this.


So there are critics of George W. Bush regarding his lack of prompt attention to Katrina? Now what gives with B. H.?


These anti-US Muslims versus Muslim Obama will continue ad infinitum. This is just the start. Obama, claiming to be Christian but not so, is going to have to pipe a strange flute from here on out.


When in Turkey, B. H. was certain to tell Turks that America is not a Christian nation. Well, if it’s not, what is it?


It’s not atheist or agnostic or Hindu or Muslim or Buddhist or animist. It’s a Christian-heritage nation, that’s what America is. History is there. It is written.


B. H. wars against every Christian ethic at every possible turn, starting with killing womb children and endorsing sodomy.


Further, he praises the Koran. Of course, he praises the Koran for he was schooled in it, said in the past that its lyrics brought delight to his emotions and has relatives throughout his bio that are Koran devotees.


B. H. has Muslims now working on staff in the White House just as he did during his campaign and while an Illinois politician.


More could be documented, but it is fairly known except for the hysteriacs who cheered The Boy onto Pennsylvania Avenue. And, unfortunately for our Republic, their number is legion.


However, back to the bottom line: B. H., Marxist Muslim, is now facing Muslims ready to slaughter Americans on the high seas, not just now but in the future.


America is in deep waters.


Read Socialist 'The Boy' will lay low America at http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/swank/090410

SOCIALIST ‘THE BOY’ WILL LAY LOW AMERICA

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


Mob hysteria rushed The Boy where he is today.


Liberal media worked alongside mob hysteria.


Now The Boy sits in the White House, surrounded by the crooks he has known during his so-called career mired in Illinois.


What is so frightening is that the socialist Marxist Muslim B. H. Obama is the brainwashed child of Jeremiah Wright.


Though not much is said these days about Wright, he is right there in the Oval Office. He is implanted in the thought patterns of both Michelle and B. H. They are just beneath the skin anti-white, anti-Jew, pro-Muslim and ready to crush any semblance of a Christian nation.


The Boy and wife have no regard whatsoever for the Christian heritage to this country. They play out their church membership in the most liberal denomination in the United States. But behind that act out is their allegiance to the Koran, Allah and Islam World Rule.


As The Boy has traipsed across the planet recently, he has acted out in body language and spoken word his admiration for Muslims wherever he went. He bent over backwards to befriend the very coalition out to destroy this Republic.


Having drained our nation of its economic security, The Boy will march forth under Allah’s banner. Those Muslim cells planted in America are waiting for their chance to join The Boy in usurping every office in the nation.


With the Dem Congress on The Boy’s side, both the legislative and executive branches are linked to subversive alliances. Both segments have no idea regarding biblical morality or the Christian backdrop to America. Their only other choice for alliance is anti-Bible and anti-Christian.


The Boy is Marxist. He is Muslim. He is therefore not what we have always defined in the generic sense as “American.”


If the hysteriacs had only known who they were pushing into the presidency, they would have never elected The Boy. Even now most of them do not see his destructive agenda. They are still blinded by his charisma.


That in itself is so frightening for it reminds thinking citizens of every despot who ever bobbed to the political and powerful top.


Now the United States is victim to “one of them.”

HOLY WEEK. . .TAKING TIME

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


"I am crucified with Christ." Galatians 2:20


Crucifixion does not bring death in a moment. It takes time. It took time to kill Jesus and the others strung up atop the Place of the Skull.


It was an agonizing scene. It was obviously a barbaric badge of gross abuse blighting the rule of the Roman emperor; nevertheless, the cruelty continued.


Yet it was Paul who said that he was willing to be crucified as well. "I am crucified with Christ."


Earlier on, Jesus had commanded that those who would follow Him had to pick up their daily crosses; if they did not, they were not in His number.
Why this call to death?


The reason is because until we die out to our own self-centered lives, we cannot life our souls into Christ's holy presence.


Christ provides us the gift of mercy against our sins; however, sanctified life can only come about when we will to give all to Jesus for His plan to be imprinted upon our practical everydays.


That may sound sweet at first hearing; but it is grueling. The human being does not really want to surrender totally to anyone but the subtlest of egocentricities.


Therefore, the sweet call to entire commitment to Christ is soon wiped away as sheer overzealous religious enthusiasm. Worldly logic dictates that the urge to make surrender be tempered with a more reasonable religion.


However, those who know Jesus, know that He is God. Therefore, whatever God demands must be met on His terms for He is God. Following then that logic, one must come to the pain of personal crucifixion. It is the willingness to die out to personal ambition, dying out to having to have life one's own way.


That may start with a lunge forward toward the cross. But it is usually followed up with a time frame of crucifixion since crucifixion does not take place within a moment. There were hours and sometimes days that it took for the cruel act to take place during the Roman regimen.


So it will be with most of us. We will wrestle against the nails. We will argue against the timber. We will fight against the darkness that settles upon our mid-afternoons. We will not want to take the taunts from close relatives who think we have lost it. We will want to be more accommodating to those in the office, at the factory.


Therefore, it usually takes some time for us to really reckon with crucifixion with Christ. But those who do so do come upon the holy life presence of Jesus. And only those who do.


Contemplate your own state. Where are you with Christ?


Are you on the cross, letting Him have His blueprint stretched across your canvas? Or are you still claiming the cross while informing heaven of what is best for your existence?


Yield yourself to the crucifixion over time and know that it is sure.

THE CROSS IN THE OLD TESATMENT

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


Christ upon the cross is foreshadowed in the Old Testament, as far back as Genesis 22 when Abraham offered his only son, Isaac, as a sacrifice upon the altar atop Mount Moriah.


The parallels are so striking as to strongly suggest the divine work through Abraham and Isaac was nothing less than a cross-symbol predating the crucifixion of Christ upon Mount Calvary.


First, Abraham’s obedience was tested by God’s command to offer Isaac as a living sacrifice. In parallel, Jesus’ obedience, being mortal as well as divine, was tested. Thankfully, He was found true in His commitment, being “obedient, . . .even unto the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:8).


Further, when God called out Abraham’s name at the outset of his trial, the Father of the Faithful replied with “Here I am.” Likewise, Jesus stated as much when He assured the Father that Jesus knew His time had come for laying down His life for the world’s sins (John 17:1).


In addition, Scripture states that Isaac was Abraham’s sole, much loved son. Jesus, too, was the only begotten of the Father (John 3:16).


God explicitly stated to Abraham that his offspring would be yielded as a human sacrifice, a burnt offering atop Mount Moriah. So was Jesus offered as the human-yet-divine, perfect sacrifice—a whole burnt offering sacrifice, if you will—atop Mount Golgotha.


Abraham chopped up wood for the stone altar sacrificial proceedings. For the journey, Abraham also placed the wood on Isaac’s shoulders for carrying to the summit. Jesus likewise was pressed against the wood—the cross, His holy shoulders carrying it up Golgotha’s slopes.


Genesis states that the whole sacrificial scene for Abraham and Isaac was at a place, a particular geography. So it was that Jesus was led to a particular place outside Jerusalem. In other words, both incidents were historically located; they were not fiction, but fact.


As Abraham was leading his son onward, Abraham told his servants to wait at the foot of the mountain. Likewise, Jesus took His close comrades with Him to Gethsemane—but only so far. The rest of the trek was to be seen through alone with Father God.


Abraham promised his servants that it would not be long until both he and his son would return to them. How interesting that Jesus forecast that, though He would be slain, it would be but a brief time frame until He would return to His servants. As forecast, so it occurred.


On the jaunt up the hill, father and son making the journey together, Isaac called out, “Father.” So it was with the Son at the Calvary location; Jesus cried out, “Father.”


Isaac asked father Abraham the whereabouts of the sacrificial lamb. The wood was there. The makings of the fire were there. The stones would be gathered atop the mountain. But where was the lamb? The youth wanted to know.


Here the parallel breaks down—purposefully. The reason? Jesus knew Himself to be the sacrificial Lamb foreordained prior to the planet’s creation. It was He, Jesus, who created the planet. It would be He, Jesus, who would redeem the planet. At some future date, it would be He, Jesus, who would rule upon the planet.


When Isaac asked his father the whereabouts of the lamb, wise Abraham responded by comforting that God would supply the lamb. Likewise, Father God promised Old Testament believers that the Lamb of God would be provided by heaven’s resources, earth not equipped to yield such a provision.


Eventually, Abraham and Isaac reached the summit. There they built an altar. In parallel, the altar of the cross was hoisted at Golgotha’s height.


Then it was that Isaac was laid upon the altar. So it was that Jesus was laid
upon the altar.


Abraham took the knife to kill his only son. Jesus too was struck through—hands, feet, side—by the knives of the Roman regime.


Yet Abraham could not follow through with the slaying of His only heir. An angel cried out for the father not to kill his son. Such a final slaying would be reserved for the perfect sacrifice—Jesus Christ. Isaac would be rescued; Jesus would be murdered. Isaac was the foreshadowing of the Christ Sacrifice.


Abraham named the place “The Lord will Provide.” Likewise, Calvary has been honored, indeed reverently cheered by repentant souls, as the literal, earthly location where God provided His ultimate for our salvation.


In the Old Testament record, one can locate the cross shadows.

OUR EASTER SECURITY

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


While seated by one of Lake Sebago's bays the other day, I marveled at its expanse. The water comes; it goes. With it, season folds into season. Day into night. Month into month.


The lake is with me. The lake is not with me. It is there. It is moving. It is changing. What is secure about the lake?


What lessons for living can I learn from pondering the lake?


Then I realized how we tend to concentrate on the situation at hand--or its frightening unpredictabilities. The day is with us. The hour is moving. The night is coming. Tomorrow may not be as we had seen it in today's fashioning.


I consequently resolved henceforth to concentrate more firmly on Easter Jesus.


Circumstances at hand indeed will blow with the winds of history. Yet Easter Jesus remains secure.


Think back ten years. What pressure was upon you then?


Think back fifteen years. What were you doing on that day?


You cannot recall it. It is a blur. Sometimes, as years pass, it is as if another person lived out our situations, places, and events. One of God's gifts is to blur the past in preparation for eternity.


Paul said, "Forgetting those things that are past. . .we forge ahead in Christ's prize." (Philippians 3:13)


The accent is on the now in Jesus, regardless of the lake in motion. Then this now will pass as does the lake move before our eyes. Therefore, it is not so much what is the content of the now, but Jesus in the now--the risen Savior who will never leave us.


I would resign my right to know
The morrow with its mystery hidden.
'Tis only God who has the right
To hold the key from now till heaven.


Frettings would have us focus on our settings: poor, confused, threatening? God would have us focus on our Easter Savior: more than adequate, abiding, loving, leading.


As we approach Holy Week with its assurance of victory, let us remember that it is Jesus who is our all-in-all. It is He who undergirds our mortality. It is He who understands our fragility.


That is why Scripture refers to us as clay--cracked. As dust--blowing in the winds. As wheat strands--at the mercy of the weather.


Yet over our humanness is the God-man--Jesus Christ. Our very breath derives from Him.


The vow of poverty I take
In order for the soul to find
Its riches only in His grace,
Its wealth within His kindly mind.


Sometimes dire situations are permitted by God in order for us to cast off all our attachments to the world. It is so difficult for some of us to let go of our manufactured securities: position, academic accomplishments, standing in the corporation, bank accounts, political savvy, talents, connections.


Yet none of these can be our ultimate security. None. Easter Jesus is our only sure security.


In speaking with a newly widowed friend, she commented on the stark adjustments: loneliness, financial details, scheduling doctor's appointments with only herself for transport. Sometimes, she intimated, it can seem overwhelming. What practical security had she?


Then she reassured me that she reminds herself that victory comes in her moment-by-moment faith in Jesus.


So patiently I keep my pulse
To measure motion by His pace.
Then calm in Christ shall settle in
So as to see naught but His face.

GOD GIVES HIS OWN PEACE

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


The other day I read of a group of Muslims somewhere down South. They were demanding an addition to one of their buildings.


They were all dressed in similar shirts that read demanding words. They showed up at the public meeting where citizens were permitted to express whether they agreed to or opposed the addition.


The non-Muslims hardly stood a chance against the mean, in-your-face opposition leveled against them by Muslims.


So is this what American communities are going to have to deal with henceforth? Could be.


Muslims multiply more than non-Muslims. In short order, this country could be overrun by Muslims who elect an American Muslim government.


As I thought of that I opened my Bible to read of my God and His power. I also read in that same passage how this God provides His grace children with the gift of peace.


“The LORD gives strength to his people; the LORD blesses his people with peace.” Psalm 29:11


I concluded that no matter what goes on in this upside down world, the peace gift is always there for the true believer. It is a gift deposited in our hearts.


Unbelievers know nothing of this gift for they turn their backs against the God of the Bible. The backslidden know nothing of this gift. They once knew the gift was theirs; but now they have turned back to their evil lifestyles.


I also read throughout the newsfeeds of other threats to our Republic. Then I remembered that our Republic—founded on a Christian base—has always been threatened by the enemy of democracy. Every generation has had to fight its own battles against the
foes.


So the present Muslim threat is confronting not only believers but the believers’ God of the Bible. Believers know that our God is more powerful than the Muslim Allah, the latter being Satan.


Consequently, we win while fighting. We have victory in the midst of the battle. The reason? The battle is the Lord’s.


With that, we have the peace gift as canopy for today and every day.


Psalm 24:


Ascribe to the LORD, O mighty ones,
ascribe to the LORD glory and strength.


Ascribe to the LORD the glory due his name;
worship the LORD in the splendor of his [a] holiness.


The voice of the LORD is over the waters;
the God of glory thunders,
the LORD thunders over the mighty waters.


The voice of the LORD is powerful;
the voice of the LORD is majestic.


The voice of the LORD breaks the cedars;
the LORD breaks in pieces the cedars of
Lebanon.


He makes Lebanon skip like a calf,
Sirion [b] like a young wild ox.


The voice of the LORD strikes
with flashes of lightning.


The voice of the LORD shakes the desert;
the LORD shakes the Desert of Kadesh.


The voice of the LORD twists the oaks [c]
and strips the forests bare.
And in his temple all cry, "Glory!"


The LORD sits [d] enthroned over the flood;
the LORD is enthroned as King forever.


The LORD gives strength to his people;
the LORD blesses his people with peace.

CAN OBAMA BE AS DUMB AS BUSH?

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


“We will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over so many centuries to shape the world for the better, including my own country,” Obama said per AP.


Obama was speaking to the Turkish parliament.


When I read those words coming from the President of the United States, I could not help but conclude that Obama has not read the Koran.


Of course, the truth is that he knows the Koran front to back. He was schooled in it as a child. He was tutored in it by his Muslim relatives.


Once again, Marxist Muslim Obama lies for the sake of Allah who approves of lying to further Islam World Rule.


Obama is The Terrorist.


Then I thought of George W. Bush and his relationship to the Koran.


It was President Bush who placed the Koran in the White House library for the very first time. He did this at a Ramadan dinner for Muslim men and women in America.


When he did that, Bush chucked his so-called evangelical faith and sent tremors up and down genuine biblical believers’ spines. In fact, he quaked their souls’ depths.


One does not give allegiance to the Bible as God’s Word while at the same time lifting high the bloody verses located in the Koran.


So we have had a President who espoused the Koran as “holy writ.”


We now have a President who tells Muslims worldwide that Islam is the godly faith that has brought humanitarian kindness throughout the planet.


Is there ever a time when insanity sits high upon the throne?


Both Obama and Bush committed the horrific act of
lauding Islam. Obama does it as a lie to further Allah’s power hold. Bush did it out of stupidity.


Either way, the God of the Bible is not pleased.


Read the Koran at http://jgrantswankjr.blogspot.com/2009/02/koran_1380.html

GOOD FRIDAY'S VICTORY

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


Within l2 hours prior to His death on the cross, Jesus was literally dragged through 7 trial courts: once before the retired high priest, Annas; once before the son-in-law of Annas, Caiaphas, the latter serving as high priest; once before the Sanhedrin, the highest tribunal in Jerusalem with the high priest as president of such; once before Herod Antipas; then twice before the Roman procurator, Pilate.


At least l0 reversible errors occurred during this fiasco in injustice.


1. It was against Jewish law to initiate legal procedure on a Jewish Sabbath or on a feast day. This regulation was obviously violated as Jesus was arrested on the Passover Feast Day.


2. No legal procedure could be begun during the night of a trial which was to take place before the Sanhedrin. Jesus was taken as a criminal around midnight on that Thursday--consequently this rule was broken.


3. The Sanhedrin had no jurisdiction concerning capital punishment situations. The Jewish court had been divested of that authority some 40 years prior by the Romans.


4. It was legally wrong for High Priest Caiaphas to have served as judge when he had publicly proclaimed, before the trial itself, that Jesus deserved to die. Caiaphas should have disqualified himself in that he evidently revealed his bias in the case. Jesus was confronted with 6 trial courts prior to the crucifixion. However, there was a seventh trial of Jesus.


5. Caiaphas, serving as judge, should not have tried to press Jesus to confess. This was an attempt to coerce a conviction by the accused's own confession without having supporting evidence. Such violation of law infringed on the person's guarantees against self-incrimination.


6. The Sanhedrin had not convened for a regular meeting, therefore the group was not actually in formal session, and consequently was without legal power.


7. The Roman Empire stipulated that trials were to be public; the grilling before Annas and Caiaphas were held in private, so were legal errors.


8. Jesus was appointed no lawyer. He had no legal counsel. If He Himself could not have provided one, then the political system was under obligation to provide Him with one but no lawyer was given Jesus.


9. It was not legal for the Sanhedrin Court to convict an individual on the same day of the trial. The Court could acquit on the same day but it had to wait at least two days for a verdict of guilty concerning capital punishment cases.


10. Procurator Pilate, having taken the position that Jesus was in fact not guilty, erred in allowing the crazed mob to win out with their verdict of guilty. The judgment on evidence was overruled by the insistence of the mob.


Jesus was confronted with 6 trial courts prior to the crucifixion. However, there was a seventh trial of Jesus. This latter was conducted in the courts of heaven before the Judge Father. Six is the number of man, but 7 is the number of deity. And deity had the last sentence--the sentence of innocent/victory--in the dedicated life of the Son. The Supreme Court of Eternity pronounced Jesus free from guilt.


Then why was it that Jesus had to undergo such injustice?


In part, to fulfill the Old Testament prophecies. For example in Ps 35:ll there is the prophecy that He will be maltreated, spat upon and the hair of His beard plucked.


In Isa 50:6 and 53:5 there are the predictions that He will be beaten with stripes.


In 53:7-9 it is foretold that He will be condemned and oppressed as well as mercilessly maligned.


Yet through it all, the providence was at work to yield the verdict of the seventh trial court in heaven: innocent/victory.


The personal application for the believer is to trust the same God to be at work just as meticulously in His bringing triumph out of trial. Can the Christian have faith in God to believe that through the injustices of life in the dedicated believer's days there will finally be victory in light of eternity?


Corrie ten Boom wrote, "Sometimes it is difficult to understand the secret of God's plan for this world. But one thing I know: God did not make a mistake when He drew His eternal blueprint. God never makes mistakes. He knows exactly what He is doing."


Then she tells of how she and her sister, Betsy, in the Nazi concentration camp, prayed that God would heal Betsy who was so weak and sick. Betsy had said with confidence, "Yes, the Lord will heal me."


But she died the next day and Corrie could not understand it.


When she viewed Betsy's thin body on the concrete floor along with all the other corpses of those who had died that day, it was hard to understand, to believe that God would have a purpose for all that.


But she says, "Yet because of Betsy's death, today I am traveling all over the world telling people about Jesus. . .Now every place I go across the world, people tell me how much they love my sister, Betsy. . .She is a blessing for more people because she died than if she had lived.


"God makes no mistakes."

COMFORTED

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


"Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted." Matthew 5:4


The supreme mourning which a cross carrier can offer heaven is to empathize with the heart of the Yoke-fellow.


He came unto His own; His own received Him not. They still don't. And that, sadly, goes for most of the world.


The One who aids you in carrying your daily gospel cross is the One who cries the most over His wayward project--planet earth. He is Person. He has feelings.


Therefore, the most precious gift a friend can offer another friend is true understanding of that friend's lot. So it is with you and Jesus.


Thanking Jesus today for His grace upon your own soul can take on the genuine care you have for the heart of God. Such is to bless God, as Scripture encourages us. "Bless the Lord, oh my soul, and all that is within me."


Then bless God Christ alongside you by telling Him how much you thank Him for saving your soul, then tell Him that you care for His own burden of an uncaring world. Let Him know that you will never renege on your love fellowship with His heart. He can count on you. Let Him know that you will be most obedient always to whatever He tells you to do in order to bring another soul to His grace door.


When you mourn with Christ, you find His comfort in the depths. In that giving of your own heart, you will find His heart wedded more intimately to yours. It is the mystery of bonding come upon in real tender strength. It is the opening up of the inner secrets of God. It is the mentoring of your own spirit as to how to sensitize your soul to that which is eternally significant.


Comfort--what you have been seeking. Had you ever imagined that comfort can come to you by way of your giving your heart away in genuine sympathy to the very Christ who redeemed you?


It is so.

FILLED

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled." Matthew 5:6


The devil's cross carriers are forever hungry, never filled. Lust and more lust. Money and more money. Success and more success. Never getting enough.


Those who are yoked to Mentor Supplier Christ are always filled. That is, they are always filled as long as they continue to hunger and thirst. Once they stop hungrying and thirsting, satisfied with the crumbs of their own success and comfort, then they go empty again.


The believer's existence is always being maintained by always being in need. When believer concludes that he is all right, then believer begins not to be all right. It is the need for being filled that makes believer attentive to his hungering and thirsting. In that, he is totally dependent upon Mentor Supplier.


The snake's trick is to convince believer that once he eats the forbidden fruit he is his own supplier, his own god. Then it is that believer ceases to believe in Mentor Supplier and subtly begins to believe in self-supply. That is the start of doom, the beginning of damnation returned.


Carrying the daily cross is not easy, yet it is. It is a burden that is light because indwelling Christ carries the heavier end of the beam. However, though carrying the cross is in a sense easy in that it is light, it a journey which forever empties in order to be filled up again. And only Yoke-fellow can see through the success of that rhythm.


Therefore, cross carrier is always at the mercy of Yoke-fellow. And Yoke-fellow, being the source of love and kindness, is always ready to extend mercy. The crux comes in whether or not cross carrier is anxious enough to hunger and thirst for that mercy. When he is, he is filled. When he is not, then he languishes and starts to wilt on the way.


Hungering and thirsting then is to be utterly leaning upon Yoke-fellow for life source. When believer is so desperately and yet delightfully in need of all that Yoke-fellow has to offer, then believer is content, filled, sufficiently cared for.


It is always the aim of good God to fill up His own. Yet only their free will actions make this possible. Supplier can only fill when believer is aware of the source. It is a daily test. It is a daily test of will direction. Will the will direct toward self-sufficiency and so die or will the will direct word God-sufficiency alone and so live?


That is the rhythm of the cross journey. And only the cross carrier can will the journey an eternal success. It is always up to the frail, fragile mortal to make that awesome choice that spells doom or delight. Always.

N. KOREA: OBAMA FORCED TO HARD UP IRAN

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


“North Korea broke the rules, once again, by testing a rocket that could be used for long-range missiles," Obama said in Prague.


“It creates instability in their region, around the world. This provocation underscores the need for action, not just this afternoon in the U.N. Security Council, but in our determination to prevent the spread of these weapons” per AP.


That means that B. H. Obama must say the same to Muslim Iran. Will he say it? He has to or else prove himself to be favoring Islamic over non-Islamic.


Put “Iran” in place of “North Korea” in the AP release and realize what it now puts to B. H. Obama.


B. H. Obama, Marxist Muslim, is now confronted with what he had hoped would not happen. He has been faced with a defiant North Korea. All the while, he has bowed before Muslim leaders while on his global jaunt.


Will the bow before Muslim leaders now change to warning them that they must empty their nuclear pantries?


Obama cannot speak out of both sides of his mouth, however much he has done so in his campaign and now Oval Office tenure. The world is listening to every word coming out of his mouth. The entire world is listening, not just the mob hysteriacs who pushed him into the White House.


If he is inconsistent, especially favoring Muslims over non-Muslims, he will have shown his true allegiance to Allah, the Koran and Islam World Rule.


This is a terrific moment for pressing integrity upon The Boy who is used to lying for Allah’s sake.


This North Korean missile burst is a blessing in that it now—early in Obama’s presidency—is forcing him to say something for peace, on the side of nuclear control.


Whatever he says can be translated from non-Muslim countries to Muslim countries such as Iran.


Will The Boy be consistent? It will be hard for him to be so since he is at heart a Muslim Marxist.

GREAT GOD NAMES THE STARS

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


“He counts the number of the stars; He gives names to all of them. Great is our Lord and abundant in strength; His understanding is infinite.” Psalm 147:4-5


He also knows the numbers of hairs on your head.


So God knows the stars, naming them. He knows your hair total. From stars to hairs.


“His understanding is infinite.” Say He more?


What does that speak to you about today’s global security? It says everything to me.


So often we biblical believers are quagmired in world-think. We are swamped in it. We fill our heads with secular newsfeeds all day long, even nightmaring about them in the night.


Move more into the Bible and you will find more comfort than you had ever imagined. You believe the Bible is God inspired. Therefore, whatever you take in there is from eternity. Truth.


You believe that God has provided you with divine secrets in that Book. There is also Book encouragement on life’s journey.


Then take it. Digest it. Ponder it. Meditate upon it throughout the day.


I am so uplifted by these two verses alone from the Psalms. They tell me that God is into minutia, even that of naming trillions of stars. They are out there. He has tagged every one of them with identity. Why? Who cares? He’s done it.


Then move from the stars taking His attention to the sun and moon. Then the galaxies. Move into the seasons, coming and going. Into tomorrow’s dawn and today’s weather changes.


God is tending to all of that.


Do you really think then that the Devil is going to sabotage all that God-superintended activity? No. God is God. Creator God blossomed everything from nothing. The Devil cannot do that.


Therefore, with world think via newsfeeds deluging our thought patterns 24 / 7 we are scared out of our wits. This should never be. We have the daily reliable Good News from the Book. It’s there. It’s waiting for us to invest in it.


God names stars. God keeps other heavenly bodies in their proper stations throughout the skies. God folds winter into spring and spring into summer and summer into autumn and autumn into winter. He performs just as He promised Noah.


Is that not peace enough? Why are we worrying then about the mortals who govern us with a straw stick?

“MY GOD, MY GOD, WHY. . .?”

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


The other day my young adult daughter phoned me. She was quite upset. She had thought she had a firm position as teacher at a nearby Christian school. But after several delays on the school's part, she was once again put on delay. Now she was informed that there might not be enough students enrolled for the upcoming year.


That meant the school would not have enough funds to pay two new needed teachers, she being one of them.


Ooops! Life just slipped out of joint. God just slipped behind a cloud. And my daughter was not at all pleased. She had married in June. The couple had moved into their apartment soon after the honeymoon. Her husband was in his new position. Now she awaited assurance of her job. Assurance would mean pay checks that could be counted on. The salaries would equal money to pay bills.


But her job was not jelled yet. So that salary check was still at bay. Go figure the rest.


"Why does God do this to me?" she asked between tears. "He knows that I need assurance. I need some stability. For the past several years most of my life has been 'up in the air.' And now this. I keep my daily devotions. I keep His day holy. I tithe our moneys. I trust in Jesus, at least I try hard to trust in Him. I know that God is supposed to be a God of love. But I think that right now He is just plain mean. He is mean. Dad, I can't figure this whole thing out right now!"


I replied, "I know just where you're coming from. I have been in that spot many times myself."


This daughter of mine knows how realistically frank I, as both father and pastor, can be. I do not like hedging. And I don't see anything commendable in glossing over life's hard places. Instead, I have been formed by my God to go forth with clear eyes, seeing "spades as spades". In studying Jesus in the Gospels, I find these similarities in His character as well.


"I understand just what you mean," I repeated.


"I know you do, Dad," she answered. "I know what all you and Mom have been through down through the years in ministry. But I just don't want to live the hard life you two have had to live. I don't think it's fair. I'm scared. I don't want God to lay on me all these hard things."


How I wished at that moment that I could have climbed into her skin and absorbed her pain. That's the way real fathers feel. They don't like their children to have to suffer. They would rather take the rap.


But I couldn't. I had to hear her out, though that was torture for me. In addition, this was a long distance call. Further, to visit in person would have meant a wide turf to leap.


Then immediately I thought back to Calvary. Jesus knew what we two were talking about. He could get on our frequency - and quite early. After all, Jesus cried out to Father: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"


To me, that says a lot More than can be put into words. It speaks of pain beyond verbalizations. Plain and simple. Complicated and messy. Jesus had been "trialed" in all points as we, so the Scriptures state. Then He, as our Intercessor, has known doubt and confusion. He has known how to hang on the brink of sanity. He knows all that and more for He carried the confused, messy sins of all humanity on His holy head.


My daughter went on: "I know that logically God is love. I know that for sure. But right now He does not seem to be loving."


“Heidi," I said to my lovely daughter, "you are correct. In this sorely damaged world, there are those times in the disciple's life when God does not appear loving. Jesus felt that when stapled to the cross. But more, you are also correct in saying that logically you know full well that God is love."


“And with that juxtaposition we earnest ones often live out our days. So we can say with Job, 'Though he slay me, yet I will trust Him.’" And we do. After all, there really is no other place to go but to Father's heart.


We trust Him because we have experienced not only His complex nature but also His simple love. We have come upon His tenderness as well as His right hand of power.


Further, we know that in this terribly evil world, the planet itself is confused, society is numbed by its sin, and history is filled with tumbles. Therefore, we, being temporary citizens of this sphere, are caught up in all that tangle. In that, God Himself then can appear to be lost as He seems to slip behind life's cloud.


Yet in truth we know that He is always more present than we could ever imagine. And in that presence is His perfect plan worked out—just as it was on Calvary.


Who could have ever thought on that awful Friday that a shining First Day was just around the corner?


So it is with our faith. We keep believing in Him, trusting that our Fridays of gloom and misfortune will eventuate in the First Day promise. And living long enough, we come to the realistic conclusion that that is more than fancy.


It is eternal truth.

HOLY WEEK: BOUGHT WITH A PRICE

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


One of the most liberating concepts to be actuated by the sanctified is: "I don't belong to me. I belong to Jesus. I have been bought with a price--His blood!"


When that is a sanctified reality, the Christian is set free from his own manipulations and dreads. He is liberated from his self-drive and concentration on "getting ahead." There are no more comparisons with others' lives and ambitions.


The believing yet carnal mind is forever professing Jesus as Savior while ignoring Him as Lord. It is a mindset which, according to Scripture, is double-minded.


Naturally this split-head state has to be the most miserable plight for any religious person to endure. One side is with God; the other side is on self-drive.


Sanctification is a conscious surrender of one's entire existence to Jesus, not only as Savior, but just as importantly, as Master and Lord. Therefore, the sanctified must activate in practical living the "I don't belong to me; I belong to Jesus" mindset.


After all, it was this Jesus who bought us with His blood. We are indeed purchased with the priceless gift of divine blood shed at Calvary.


Why is not this submission a once-and-for-all inner experience? Because the human activates free will in every conscious moment. Life is fluid. Therefore, the crisis experience of sanctification must be followed by the continuing experience of sanctification.


Therefore, this day will call forth from you your choices for self-drive or Jesus control. To decide on the former is to be carnal. To choose the latter is to be sanctified.


When the Christian no longer seeks his own security, position, and acclaim, then he is free to be love slave to Jesus. Until then, the Christian connives, many times subtly, to provide his own security, position and acclaim.


Therefore, getting personal, do you complain to God about the small church you pastor--struggling, dealing with persons who don't seem to care that much about eternal matters?


If you are a layman, do you exist in a similar stressful situation?


If so, then say to yourself: "I don't belong to me; I belong to Jesus. I have been bought with His blood. This is where Jesus has placed me. As a love slave to Him, I will accept this for this is where He--in all His wisdom and love--has placed me."


This is spiritual minimalism at its freest.


Do you sit back and, scanning the peoplescape, wonder why it is that you are left in the dust while others are flying high in the sky? Wonder why it is that servers are not given the applause that getters seem to come by? Wonder why it is that you are left at the back of the line while others are glowing at the front of the line?


All of this is ultimately of no concern to the sanctified for the latter no longer work on self-drive; they are under directives from Jesus--solely. What happens with others' places in life does not matter.


Once someone said to me, "Where are you in your career?" I answered, "I don't have a career. I have a calling. And where I am is not up to me. It is up to Jesus. Frankly, I hardly ever know where I am; and in that I am free."


The world is large. Human history is long. Where we "fit" into the positioning this-and-that of others is finally beyond our comprehension anyhow. We could never take it in for we do not have the analytical equipment by which to do so.


Jesus views the large world. He overscopes human history. He knows then just where HE needs each sanctified servant to "fit"--especially you. Therefore, all decisions regarding your biography are always with Jesus. Live with that and be at peace. Accept that and be set free.


I don't belong to me; I belong to Jesus. I have been purchased by His blood.

CLIMBING CALVARY

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


It was that stark boney look. Calvary was smitten. Its face was just as we had been told in Scripture: rocky and dented with eye sockets, protruded with a nose-shape and vacant as a stare of death.


Along with other tourists, we trudged up the mountain, cameras in hand.


Three scrubby trees were at the very top. There Priscilla sat on some twisted tall grass spikes as I focused her in direct center of the photo. I imagined that that is where the crosses would have been punched in God's otherwise good earth.


It was a hot day.


It was time to leave the Place of the Skull--Golgotha.


In the valley was the Garden Tomb. We meandered toward it, in no hurry, sensing a reverential cast to all of nature. Greenery was everywhere. Bundles of flowering buds peered up to greet us. Sunshine filled all the gaps.


Slowly I made my way to Joseph of Arimathea's empty gravesite. It was carved out of the hillside. A trough had been dug in front of its beautifully crude stone door. Inside that trough the weighty rock slab would have been rolled to seal shut the entrance. No entrance. No exit. Tight. Any corpse inside was there for good, or whatever.


Robbers would have stolen from the tombs if the stone had not been secured.


I walked inside. There was no rock slab now to prohibit. The morning air welcomed my back to keep me moving till inside that resting place. My eyes adjusted to see the remains of shelves where bodies would have been positioned.


There I pictured His young frame wrapped in clothes, spices tucked in about the sorry piece. A separate cloth would have been wound about his head.


I suppose there were others making the same interior pilgrimage as I. But I don't recall any shadows but my own.


Timeless. It seemed as if I had left time and had no desire to return.


But time called out its practicality. With that, I was in the sun again, milling about the many as we hunkered down on rocks and patches of grass to receive the sacrament.


There was no reason to chat. No one wanted to chat. There was too much going on inside--not so much noise but voices from another time and friends from another culture than ours.


There was simply no way around it. One could not get to the dawn of the first day without going through the trudge up Skull's Mount, then making it into the valley where an empty borrowed tomb stood awaiting the gaping and the saved.


Sometimes in spring when I walk about the Lakes Region, I get that same feeling from the sun, especially when near a garden.

EASTER: EXCEEDING ABUNDANTLY IS GOD’S PROMISE TO US

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


"Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us. . ." Ephesians 3:20


Sometimes Satan would have us doubt the ". . .exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think. . ." of God's promise power.


We know that Satan is the father of lies. But such is never more evident than when he whispers his untruths concerning this particular promise.


All the believer needs to do is push back the demonic lie to two thousand years ago at Golgotha. The ". . .exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think. . ." has already occurred. This promise has already been set. It is there in historical record. Further, it is has been personally experienced by the thousands upon thousands.


God has already--past tense--seen through his ". . .exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think. . ." when He brought His Son back from the dead! That settles it right there. No other event is planetary history can equal that.


Therefore, beginning with that resurrection premise, one can reach the logical conclusion that anything after the risen Christ happening is possible. Consequently, God can do whatever is maximum in your life and mine to shore up His promise strength as has already been evidenced in the resurrection of Christ.


All promise power flows from that empty tomb.


The next time you come up against the impossible, ask yourself if it can match or top the risen Carpenter who walked out of Joseph of Arimathea's tomb. If not, then toss that impossible into the divine ". . .exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think. . ." and leave it there.


In the divine calendar, you will find in your own life the resurrection power set loose. It is the ". . .power that worketh in us." What is that power? The Spirit of the living God who brought Jesus out of the grave.


Therefore, you have all of heaven's might on your side to win all of life's battles. The strength is already within you as a cross carrier for the risen Christ walks alongside your cross. In that stride is your overcoming.


Recapping for your hope: nothing in your biography can slush under God's promise. Calvary's death and tomb's empty shelf already promise you the divine ingenuity available to overwhelm any planetary difficulty. Therefore, rest assured that the same Spirit strength that worked back then is now working in you to prove the integrity of the holy name of God.


Therefore, ". . .I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. . ." Ephesians 3:l4


One's entire life as a disciple is to be bowing the knees.


Since one cannot literally see through that oblation, one can spiritually see through that oblation.
And that is the crux of the cross life.


Continually Jesus, within His consciousness, bowed His knees before Father. It was the Father's will that He lived for.


Jesus calls us to live for Him. He lived for Father. Therefore, living for Jesus the Son is to live for God the Father. Jesus now lives on our behalf at the right hand of the Father's throne.


When we then pray, the Spirit of Jesus receives our voice, delivers our concern to the Son who presents it to the Father. In that, the entire godhead is crucially involved in our lives.


How complete is Scripture in its scope of all matters!


Therefore, the cross bearer continues the rightful stance of Jesus. The disciple maintains a lowly estate before Father's throne.


When one begins to grow cold in heart, it is because one has forgotten to "bend the knees." When that occurs, self-absorption returns. With that comes the loss of soul vibrancy, the increase of interior confusion and eventually the grieving of the Spirit.


The more one disciplines the interior to remain "bowing the knees", the more one comes into the intimacy offered each child of grace.


It is Jesus in everything. He is our pivot. He, the second person of the trinity, thereby becomes our go-between to Father and Holy Ghost. When one then maintains constant yoke-fellowship with Jesus, one maintains the blessing with Father and Holy Ghost.


There is no greater privilege on earth than that of "bowing the knees." It is sheer liberty into the joy unspeakable. It is the openness to the foretaste of heaven. It is hope realized. Further, it is making glad the heart of God.


All outward circumstances become subservient to the interior when one focuses on "bending the knees."


Continually coming to the divine throne throughout the day is what keeps the disciple's life
extremely simple. In this simplicity is that hoped-for release from worry, fear and the overindulgence in worldly cares.


Jesus walked through this world with His mind concentrating on Father all the time. He was with the mobs, but He wasn't. He was walking the Israeli trails, but He wasn't. He was in the world, but not of the world; therefore, His invitation stands for His own children.


Put your thoughts upon the Father's throne, "bowing the knees," and you will be blessed beyond measure—“exceeding abundantly”. It is that gift from above which sustains the soul in the most difficult times.


Only a few consecrated, abandoned souls experience such bliss.

GOD OWNS THE GLOBE

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


“The LORD reigns, He is clothed with majesty; The LORD has clothed and girded Himself with strength; Indeed, the world is firmly established. It will not be moved” (Psalm 93:1).


Satan wants the globe. The Bible states that the globe is God’s footstool.


Therefore, Satan concludes that if he can get the footstool, he can climb up on God’s throne to be God.


Consequently, Satan continually goes after the globe for his own possession, hence the rise in nuclear stockpiles.


Nuclear pilings have become the fashion. No mortal can control the increase. They’re there. Satan is behind the pile up.


Set the footstool on fire, then grab heaven’s throne. That’s Satan’s scheme.


With all the nuclear pressure worldwide, something amiss should have happened by now. Why has it not? The answer is because God is God. The Bible’s God owns the globe. He has the deed to the planet per globe Creator Christ.


Christ created the globe. Christ contains the globe. Christ will one day climax the globe—in His timing at the close of the millennium per Revelation 20:11.


“Heaven (the atmosphere around the globe) and earth shall pass away; but My words shall never pass away,” Christ emphasized.


Satan does not believe that. Satan, the source of illogic, unreasonably believes that he can grasp the globe out of Christ’s control, thus rule the globe, and thus sit upon the heavenly throne to be God.


Never.


“The LORD reigns, He is clothed with majesty; The LORD has clothed and girded Himself with strength; Indeed, the world is firmly established. It will not be moved” (Psalm 93:1).


“. . .the world is firmly established. It will not be moved.”


That’s God being God, speaking as deed holder. That’s God’s comfort to His grace children via His divine revelation.


Those who have eyes, let them see. Those who think the thoughts of God, let them think clearly.


“. . .the world is firmly established. It will not be moved.”


FOOTNOTE: CHRIST CREATED ALL THINGS


Psalm 24:1
Psalm 33:6,9
Proverbs 3:19
John 1:1-3,14
I Corinthians 8:6
Ephesians 1:10; 3:9
Colossians 1:16
Hebrews 1:1-2


CHRIST CONTAINS ALL THINGS


I Corinthians 8:6
“through whom we exist”
Colossians 1:15-17
“in Him all things hold together”


CHRIST CLIMAXES ALL THINGS


Ephesians 1:10
“will unite all things in Christ”
Philippians 3:21
“subdue all things unto himself”
Matthew 28:18-20
“all power is given unto Me”

TEACHING FAMILIES GOD'S HAPPY WAY -- HOLINESS

J. Grant Swank, Jr.


God invites us to enter into one of the most spectacular lives possible. It is living just a bit lower than the angels; that is wonderful, considering the spiritually distraught world we live in.


What is this glorious possibility? It is on-going holiness. Our powerful God made it possible for us to experience release from self-centeredness so as to live in outlandish freedom, doing His bidding lovingly. This is astoundingly Good News--the gospel. It is God's invitation to holiness.


Jesus calls me; I must follow,
Follow Him today.
When His tender voice is pleading,
How can I delay?


Follow, I will follow Thee, my Lord,
Follow every passing day.
My tomorrows are all known to Thee;
Thou wilt lead me all the way.


So testified Howard L. Brown and Margaret W. Brown in that well-known
commitment hymn.


How then do we get started in teaching our families about this way?


(1) We begin by telling God that we adore Him, love Him supremely, wanting nothing more than increased knowledge of Him. By looking into His gentle face, WE HAND HIM EVERYTHING--not out of coercion but gladly. More than gladly, gushingly, actually pushing our all upon His heart, begging Him to take it for His goodness.


What a thought to dawn upon our weary brains. It is coming to realize that God truly deserves this. Instead of our holding back our turf while still trying to be religious, we now fling our everything toward Him, more than willing for Him to have it, cleanse it and then give it back for service rather than selfishness.


And so we sing with all of our hearts:


Search me, O God, and know my heart today.
Try me, O Savior; know my thoughts, I pray.
See if there be some wicked way in me;
Cleanse me from EVERY sin, and set me free.


Lord, take my life and make it wholly Thine;
Fill my poor heart with Thy great love divine.
Take all my will, my passion, self, and pride.
I now surrender, Lord, in me abide.


(2) Our gracious Lord responds. Does He ever respond!


He made us for this very point in our lives. This was His original intention for us as human creatures. He desperately wants children who love Him totally as He loves us totally. It was that dreadful mess-up in Eden which got things off track.
However, when the Father sees one of His own trek back to Eden, determined to embrace Him and be embraced by Him, then heaven's hug takes over. "Oh, how He loves you and me!"


IN THAT CARESS COMES OUR CLEANSING FROM THAT DREADFUL SELFISHNESS. How we have wanted that to go, to drop off; it has been our bane for too long.


Is this truly possible--personally, practically? Yes! "Nothing shall be impossible unto you" (Matthew l7:20).


"IT IS POSSIBLE, for those who really are willing to reckon on the power of the Lord for keeping and victory, to lead a life in which His promises are taken as they stand and are found to be true.


"IT IS POSSIBLE to have the thoughts and imaginations of our hearts purified, in the deepest meaning of the word.


"IT IS POSSIBLE to cast all our care upon Him daily and to enjoy deep peace in doing it." So sang H. C. G. Moule.


How compassionate is God! How providing for His own who hunger and thirst for holiness. What gifts from glory He has prepared for such souls.


He will silently plan for thee
Some wonderful surprise of love.
Eye hath not seen, not ear hath heard,
But it is kept for thee above.


Such was the praise hymn of Mary Grimes as she came upon the holy love gift from her Father in heaven.


(3) Then having begun at heaven's love feast, would we ever want to go back? Having been folded in by the Lord's endearing arms, would we ever desire any other boundary? Surely not.


This is the start of on-going holiness. It is that grand entrance into the awareness of the consecration. WE PICTURE OURSELVES STRETCHED OUT UPON GOD'S ALTAR, YIELDING OUR ALL FOR THE SACRIFICE OF LIVING.


As Mrs. Charles Cowman has witnessed: "This is the Blessed Life--not anxious to see far in front, not careful about the next step, not eager to choose the path, nor weighted with the heavy responsibilities of the future, but quietly following behind the Shepherd, one step at a time."


With a world that is dying prostrate before the world's idols, we yearn to climb atop God's table for His holy blessing. So it is He receives us home to His heart.


(4) ALL THAT IS AHEAD IS SIMPLY MORE OF THIS SPLENDOR AS WE CONTINUE TO HEED HIS NOD. Father informs us to do this, we do it. He asks us to do that, we gladly do it.


As saintly Brother Lawrence of the l7th century exclaimed: "Let God do what He pleases with me; I desire only Him and to be wholly devoted to Him. The soul that enjoys God desires nothing but Him. If this be delusion in me, it belongs to God to remedy it!"


Our soul hunger then becomes extremely simple; it is more of His holiness, exploring those marvelous caverns of discovery, deepening and delight. It is permitting the Spirit to have His complete way in all things.


As J. Danson Smith has exclaimed:


HE GOES BEFORE! Be this my consolation!
He goes before! On this my heart would dwell!
He goes before! This guarantees salvation!
HE GOES BEFORE! And therefore all is well!


Once in a while, however, the old yen may get hold of us. It is that urge to look back, perhaps only for a second or two. "The good life," we once called it. Yet we have come to know its toys tarnish, its fads fade and its baits leave us hanging on the hook. In our best of desires, we know there is no going back.


(5) We used to fret over bills, salary promotions, vying at the work place. We stumbled over the tiniest pebble. We yanked to right and left to press our own plans, then pouted when we did not get our ways. We held the Bible in hand, yet held our own ambitions more dearly.


What a trying time that used to be. We will be done with that tripping and falling, that spiritual double-mindedness.


The sanctified believers take hands off of life's control--past, present and future. Existence itself is to be consumed by the holy God. Double-mindedness yields to single-mindedness. God. God. God.


As Francois de la Fenelon counseled: "Smite, or heal, depress me, or raise me up; I adore all Thy purposes without knowing them; I am silent; I offer myself to sacrifice; I yield myself to Thee; I would have no other desire than to accomplish Thy will."


"THY will". GOD'S will. HEAVEN'S way. ETERNITY'S dominance of my very being--all of it, now and forever.


Oswald Chambers wrote: "'Take no thought for your life.' 'Be careful about one thing only,' says our Lord, 'your relationship to Me.' Common sense shouts loud and says--'That's absurd. I MUST consider how I am going to live. I MUST consider what I am going to eat and drink.' Jesus says you must not."


With this, God has taken us by the hand, leading us into liberty. It is the pure air we now breathe, the clean, high mountain yielding to His pastures. This does not mean that all is rosy, without problems and frustrations; but it does mean that THERE IS NO MORE ARGUMENT AS TO WHO IS IN CHARGE, WHO
CARES ENOUGH TO LEAD.


Naturally there will be trials. LIfe is made up of them. We live in a spiritually fallen world. But God as Sanctifying Spirit is more powerful in you, purified one, than all the demons in this world.


So it was that Aphra White encouraged: "The time of testing that marks and mightily enriches a soul's spiritual career is no ordinary one, but a period when all hell seems let loose, a period when we realize our souls are brought into a net, when we know that God is permitting us to be in the devil's hand.


"But it is a period which always ends in certain triumph for those who have committed the keeping of their souls to Him, a period of marvelous 'nevertheless afterward' of abundant usefulness, the sixty-fold that surely follows."


Oswald Chambers tutors us in this sanctified way with. . ."Let the attitude of the life be a continual 'going out' in dependence upon God and your life will have an ineffable charm about it which is a satisfaction to Jesus."


(6) Our wallets, front yards and back yards, cars, houses, stock and bonds, our children and spouses, aches and pains are all stretched out there upon His table. We have given Him our bosses and neighbors, our relatives and health, our wardrobes and summer cottages. Our Sundays and Mondays, our nights and days, our parties and Friday night entertainments are all His.


What a wonderful way to wake up in the morning! Fulfilling! Exhilarating!
And to think that He has washed all of that life clean--holiness! Can it actually be that down-to-earth? Yes, it is meant to be that real--now and here!


As Brother Lawrence preached: "There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful than that of a continual conversation with God. The heart must be empty of all other things, because God will possess the heart alone; and as He cannot possess it alone without emptying it of all besides, so neither can He act there, and do in it what He pleases, unless it be LEFT VACANT TO HIM."
Vacant as a welcome to the purging Holy Spirit--now and here!


Come, Spirit, come--our hearts control;
Our spirits long to be made whole.
Let inward love guide every deed;
By this we worship, and are freed.


So wrote Hal Hopson, describing in choral phrasings the deep work of God upon the surrendered human spirit.


But what about differences of opinion? And then there are those people who are hard to live with. What about the doctor's report that I have cancer or the child who died in her crib?


There are also my feelings of inferiority and the twinges of prejudice which still linger from my childhood upbringing. How does holiness relate to all of that?
It relates to all of that. In time, God's continuing hug will help with those concerns--in time, with patience, in prayer, with insight.


IT'S CALLED ON-GOING HOLINESS--REVEALINGS, PRUNINGS, MATURINGS, RESHAPINGS, REVELINGS, REJOICINGS!


(7) Can this kind of companionship with the Lord continue till death? It certainly can; and it should, if one is smart. After all, there are really no other options once a person has come into the "grand awareness." All else is tawdry.


"I would have faith to keep the path Christ trod," wrote Howard A. Walter.
"Every bridge is burned behind me; I will never turn from Thee," sang Johnson Oatman, Jr.


"Follow, follow, I will follow Jesus. Anywhere, everywhere, I will follow on. Follow, follow, I will follow Jesus. Everywhere He leads me I will follow on," penned William O. Cushing.


How we love to sing those gospel hymns. And yet how much more exciting to live out those gospel hymns--for life!


Earth's stay is fluid; that is, it is constantly being challenged. So is our consecration. Yet the loving, graced child determines to keep his walk simple in the Lord.


THE FOCUS REMAINS ON HIM, REGARDLESS. That is what some saints have referred to as "a foretaste of glory divine." And it really is that: the start of heaven here, in other words.


But, again, what about those troubles, problems, testings? What about sickness and death, disappointments and dreadful surprises?


What about all of that? Remember: all of that is surrendered to the Spirit of God, just as is all of life committed to heaven's eye. In that, God answers then with His comfort and wisdom, His peace and understanding of life's situations.


Hymn writer Fanny Crosby was blinded when a newborn. The incorrect prescription was given to her parents for their child's eye infection. Then being sightless, Fanny learned when a youth how to yield all to the sanctifying Spirit.
Listen to one of her early poems:


Oh, what a happy soul I am!
Although I cannot see,
I am resolved that in this world
Contented I will be.


How many blessings I enjoy
That other people don't!
To weep and sigh because I'm blind
I cannot nor I won't!


(8) How does one enrich God's on-going holiness? Lots of Bible helps a lot. Prayer to our compassionate God is a boon. Worship with people of like hunger strengthens.


Toughening it out in trying times is needful. Stepping by faith rather than sight is a part of it. Seeing so much that is good in God's world is broadening. Smiling, laughing, reaching out to care lifts one higher.


George Mueller testified: "'For I shall yet praise Him.' More prayer, more exercise of faith, more patient waiting, and the result will be blessing, abundant blessing."
HOLINESS SIMPLY GOES ON AND ON, UNCOVERING ITS BEAUTY.


In other words, sanctification is exploring the awesome might of God Himself. As Sidney Lanier has written in "The Marshes of Glynn". . .


As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God:
I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies
In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and the skies;
By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod
I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God.


No wonder those who continue in this way become power lights in the darkness. They magnetize others around them. With so much that is self-centered in the world, these insightful believers draw us near to their selfgiving hearts.


And so it is meant by God to continue on out into His eternal wonder. How good of God!