Inner Devotion, Outer Chaos

The most pronounced conflict for Christians starts with inner battles within various portions of someone’s mind (Romans 12:2).

  • God’s work is to transform us from the inside into His image, while the Satan works to undermine Him at every step.
  • The requirements for change make following Jesus inherently uncomfortable, even while there’s joy in that discomfort (James 1:2-4).
  • In practice, it means constantly admitting insufficiency on everything, while accepting the Christ is sufficient.

The New Testament from Acts onward vividly shows the necessary sacrifices the early Church had to make. They were persecuted in every possible sociopolitical direction, but the core believers never strayed from their faith.

One of their most prominent traits was an undying mission to share the Kingdom of heaven with everyone around them, and they met the world’s opposition with bold, peaceful resistance. This was driven by Jesus’ message, which can summarize as “follow me all the way to death itself, and you will find peace”.

This wasn’t a grand movement sweeping hundreds of people, but was a quiet and personal set of convictions for each Christian individually at key times and places. If someone professes the truth of Christ and changes because of it, they’ll adopt more of God’s attributes and grow disinterested in day-to-day contentions.

Enter the Order

Unfortunately, our minds are volatile things that don’t change easily or predictably. We imagine things that don’t exist, don’t see what’s plainly in front of us, obliviously build stories out of what we do know and generate bias from the stories, and overall misjudge reality.

Most Christian thought leaders imply that our understanding distorts only because of our fallen nature, and will propose more order in our day-to-day lives.

And, it’s true that God asks us to self-discipline in light of our shortcomings, all for the purpose of attaining eventual perfection.

However, that’s not the entire story.

Enter the Chaos

One truth of pure chaos, however, is that God still has authority over it (Revelation 4:11). To Him, it’s all under control, even when it’s humanly impossible to conceive how it could be a well-regulated system.

God has made everything beautiful for its time (Ecclesiastes 3:11), and that includes disorder.

Mental strength, like its physical counterpart, can get us into severe trouble if we overuse it, and the trauma of this world can easily provoke us to over-burden ourselves with an obsession about creating spiritually impactful results.

The actual results God creates are nothing short of miraculous: God works individually to allow literally every personality and culture to align with a shared cause, even while any practical agreement on absolutely anything else will devolve into dramatic conflict.

This becomes even more complex in light of people who were raised in Christian culture, took a step away, and came back (my testimony as one of them). They have seen both sides of the situation, vividly.

Enter the Inner Results

By definition, faithfulness in Christ always requires risk.

  • A direct relationship with God without an intermediary (e.g., a priest, Moses) is a blatant risk, where there are no secrets and our complete insufficiency.
  • Even in Christ, a truly compassionate High Priest, is the most change-prone experience we can ever do (Hebrews 5:7-10).
  • Trusting in His will (which is entering a lot of belief in the unknown) and acting in love is against our nature because it’s never fully safe.
  • In this changing, we gain knowledge, assent that leads to an increased capacity for trust, increased capacity for love, and increased risk tolerance.

However, this paradoxical living is the only way for us to reliably get rid of all defective feelings that have turned into beliefs:

The growing Christian will be in a state of perpetual “lucky misfortune”, where the hardships never destroy them (though they’ll happen like anyone else).

  • It won’t be predictable, either, since God is too creative to do the same thing twice.

Ironically, this arrangement will not create a Nietzschean Übermenschen.

  • Living like Christ is taking the role of a servant, meaning we won’t see the faith we are exhibiting as we live it (Philippians 2:5-8).
  • Christians are still fully sinners, but will have the unique and confounding qualities of quickly repenting and quickly forgiving.
  • While the sins will diminish as they continue their journey, believers will battle their own existence to the day their body finally gives up (Romans 7:21-25).

Over time, this will adapt a Christian’s perspective into love, which will spread as a few major themes across the scopes of their life:

  1. On a personal level, they will find themselves possessing increasing compassion for others.
  2. On a group level, they will look to the interests of everyone else.
  3. On a grand political level, they will have a seeming “aloofness” over what happens (often mixed with humor), since they believe God is in complete control and they will reign with Him someday (Colossians 3:4).
  4. When hardship arises, they will draw from Him more deeply, and will become even more righteous as they learn more humility.

Enter the Outward Results

When a believer is exposed to the world after their soul has started shifting, the world doesn’t accept that unpredictable change, and it’s not difficult to understand why.

  • Mature Christians identify part of a spiritual “high society” in a close connection with God.
  • But, they are often the underclass in this world, with no proven reputation to validate that spiritual inheritance.
  • In that sense, it’s easy for the world to see them as entitled.

Given everything under the sun, followers of Christ portray a confusing and seemingly contradictory narrative:

  • On the one hand, sincere Christians are generally more motivated, hopeful, patient, loving, kind, and virtuous.
  • On the other, they’re less motivated to gain things like money, politically difficult to pin down, not hungry for power, and slow to advertise their successes.
  • Many of them, like the mythical Saint Patrick, tend to respond with kindness instead of justifiable anger over the things that happen to them. Others, like Martin Luther, protest and die for causes that don’t appear to be that big a deal.
  • Further, there are plenty of so-called believers who are Christian-in-name-only, often to the benefit of their reputation, and they dilute the public perception of Christianity.

In general, the world doesn’t know how to respond to them because they don’t know how to predict them, both individually and politically:

  • Christian culture frequently encompasses quite a bit of common-sense wisdom (e.g., Proverbs), but it typically won’t come with the cold-hearted shrewdness endemic to most of this world’s wisdom.
  • Many of them will react in anger, which the Christians will meet with grace.
  • When they do provoke a Christian to anger, that’s only for that time, and they may likely be more virtuous the next time around.
  • The presence of false Christians will only magnify legitimate Christians’ lifestyles even further.
  • They will feel, but won’t be able to state, a constant paradox:
    1. What they do is sinful, and not approved by Christians.
    2. They are, however, still loved and accepted by those same Christians.
    3. Upon inquiry, Christians don’t want them to act sinfully because it will harm them.
    4. However, they’re still free to still do what they wish to do.
  • When persecuted, strong believers are more keen to feel pity than anger toward their persecutors, which frequently makes their persecutors more angry, leading to more grace they won’t know what to do with.

This forces a massive decision on the non-believer as they experience this paradox:

  1. The Christians’ motivation fascinates them, so they ask more about it.
  2. They accept their perspective as valid, and convert to Christianity themselves.
  3. The ideas and views they hold to are so taboo and dangerous that the Christians must be silenced, and possibly exterminated.

Broken Power Games

We’re trained from an early age to submit ourselves to more powerful people and organizations out of a general fear of their punishment and a desire to gain at least some of that power for ourselves.

Christians disrupt that natural power dynamic. They’re still submitting, but to God’s authority above those people in power. And, unlike mob rule, they’re more at peace with whatever those leaders do, even if it turns out worse for them.

Thus, leaders are unimportant and respected, two traits that shouldn’t coexist toward the same human at the same time, and it makes the leaders feel both valued and existentially small.

As a result, a Christian is statistically less likely to hold a high-rank position in society as their secular analogue (e.g., the sciences). An equally skilled and intelligent Christian will receive fewer job opportunities, affirmations, awards, commendations, and respect from their culture than a non-believer with approximately the same attitude. They just can’t fit in.

This becomes even more complicated when Christian-in-name-only groups spring up in those communities (e.g., Christian apologetics about science).

For God

This public shame and inner struggle stems from that Christian’s choice. If they denied God and went back to pursuing money, media presence, happiness, human relationships, and anything else this world values so much, that discrepancy would vanish.

Of course, God is a jealous God. He originally designed for all humanity to fixate its purposes on Him, then He’d direct it liberally to the rest of creation as He saw fit. It would have given us plenty of liberty to act out the minutiae according to our natural identity. It was His first plan before we sinned (Genesis 2), and Jesus promises the same thing, but with the added side-journey of transitioning out of our sins.

Big Picture

Christianity has a profoundly simple progression:

  1. Jesus is inwardly transforming people.
  2. These transformations are impossible to accurately or consistently track.
  3. Those people are the start of a New Kingdom without borders or limits.
  4. The old kingdoms of this world naturally oppose the New Kingdom.
  5. There’s no long-term peaceful solution, and this world will try to destroy the New Kingdom.
  6. The New Kingdom will eventually prevail when Jesus comes back, but only after the New Kingdom has been nearly destroyed in any outward political sense.

Therefore, healthy Christians are in a perpetual state of peaceful devotion to God above while suffering a parade of misadventures in the world around them. God designed those hardships to both eradicate their idols and advertise the New Kingdom to the world.

In light of that, we should be more concerned in this world with “right now” than anything else, and living in God’s promises. The rest is the devil’s agenda.

blessed

Definition: a God-given capacity to enjoy the goodness of God

christ and culture (the world-spirit cycle)

reference Richard Niebuhr book

Indicate the necessity and significance of Christ alone
Show the analysis, and how it’s wrong (christ and culture, christ with culture, etc)
Indicate the 3 ways it breaks when we add things
experientialism
Emotionalism
Intellectualism
While it’s arguable that God made all things, the spiritual concerns itself with WHY and not simply WHAT
Therefore, it should be for God’s reputation alone

Every single 2nd book attacks false doctrine
2 Co
2 Pe
2 Th
2 Ti
2 Jo

Christianity Was “Borderline Illegal” in Silicon Valley. Now It’s the New Religion | Vanity Fair

When Did Jordan Peterson Convert to Christianity?

christianization

make things “biblical” instead of “sustainable”

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how to lament

Psa 69

1 acknowledge who God is
2 display what trust looks like
3 call on God to powerfully rescue
4 acknowledge that salvation only comes from God
5 God will answer in His time

man does not live by bread alone

Man doesn’t live to get his needs met
He lives to get his needs met from the correct source

stockholm syndrome

if we see the hardship of Christians without the long-term glory awaiting them, God is basically providing a spiritual Stockholm Syndrome to believers

  • at the same time, if that glory is true, then Christians who suffer much have a tremendous blessing waiting for them
  • in short, a Christian is essentially an utterly cursed indivdual, or an utterly blessed one, but never something halfway in between

the Christian redpill

We must live for eternity
Francis chan rope illustration

Christian culture generally doesn’t concern itself with legitimate spiritual gain
They say ‘lets get real’ and ‘lets devote ourselves more’ and ‘practical steps’, but it’s all useless jargon

Side thought: spiritual abuse can never separate God’s predestined child
Parable of lost sheep and prodigal son together

Why do Christian culture calls to action sound like catchphrases?

Christians must come to understand that there are MANY cultural values, and that each individual Christian will only have some connection with some of them, and WILL find offense with others.

  • it’s awareness of the need for open-mindedness about some things (bible verse about condemning a slave of a different master in Romans 14)
  • it also means we all go back to a higher authority, but they ALL are God.

waiting

3 meanings for “wait”

1 dont do anything
2 expect something
3 serve someone

have no shame

Christians need to be free of guilt or shame

  • they have nothing to hide, nothing is wrong
  • [protectors and reals]

identifying by Christ alone

when a crisis arrives, our inclination to (fix) it marries us to it

we may succeed, and the identity is BUT I AM, an opposition to the original crisis and hardship

we may flounder in trying, and become what the crisis defines us as

we may try and succeed, and then fail elsewhere, which is VERY painful and ravages our soul

in all of this, we instead must define ourselves by something else

only Christ is the defining (identity) that we can lean into and succeed over

  • we become children of God, and that is what builds us into something of more valur than what we overcame

without that alternate state of identity, we are bound into the (results) we create to fix those things that our (ptsd) has flagged as problematic

  • if not fixed, for whatever reason, we will lose our sense of wellness, even if things are simply par for the course

we can prove nothing but today

indicate how utterly NOT prepared for the future we ever are

James passage: “tomorrow we will do such and such”
Gospel passage: “self, eat drink and be merry, for you are prepared with a second barn”

however, that calendar is made of 1 box you can control, and 29 boxes you can only speculate or remember

it doesn’t work well with our highly-ordered society of computers and [bureaucracy]

we mustn’t worry about our body

Cain’s sin:
negotiate to save your flesh

We really shouldn’t be too concerned with our status

  • financial
  • social
  • reputation
  • wealth
  • lifestyle

none of that matters in comparison to the spiritual reality of things

the sin of flesh preservation is God’s ultimate resentment:

  • Cain
  • Esau
  • Saul

There’s a very clear distinction for when you can see it.

A. WHEN A GOD-FEARING PERSON SINS

  1. sinner has sinned
  2. sinner has been outed for their sin
  3. sinner is repentant at this point
  4. the consequences come down for that sin
  5. the sinner feels very sorry for what they have done

B. WHEN A REPROBATE SINS

  1. sinner has sinned
  2. sinner has been outed for their sin
  3. sinner is NOT repentant at this point
  4. the consequences come down for that sin
  5. AFTER the verdict, the sinner feels very sorry for THEMSELVES and not the people they’ve harmed

MISC

ONE OF THE MOST ODD THINGS THAT HAPPENS TO A DEVOTED CHRISTIAN IS THE RATCHETING UP OF PERSECUTION

  1. THE BELIEVER STAYS FAITHFUL
  2. THE WORLD SEES THAT FAITHFULNESS AND PEACE
  3. THEY ARE ANGRY THAT THE [POWER] DYNAMIC ISN’T IN THEIR FAVOR
  4. THEY TRY TO DESTABILIZE AND DESTROY THAT POWER BASE
  5. IN THE PROCESS, GOD HAS THE LAST WORD, SOMETIMES IN THIS LIFE, SOMETIMES IN THE NEXT, SOMETIMES POST-MORTEM IN THIS WORLD (SUCH AS A TRANSCENDING LEGACY LIKE PAUL’S)

Andrew Walker: Rethinking influence | WORLD

Pastor Ed Newton

Joy in the Middle of It
“Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” – Psalm 30:5

God has a heart full of joy, but that doesn’t mean your life will be full of ease. Sometimes people think that if they’re walking with God, everything should feel light, happy, and pain-free. But that’s not the reality of this world, and it’s not what God ever promised.

The truth is, joy and sorrow are not enemies. You can cry tears of heartbreak and still hold on to the joy of the Lord. You can feel the weight of grief, disappointment, or pain, and still believe that God is good and still working.

What makes God’s joy different from the world’s version is that it doesn’t depend on your circumstances. It’s not anchored in everything going right. God’s joy is rooted in who He is, not in how you feel.

Jesus knew sorrow. He knew loss. He knew what it meant to sweat drops of blood, to be betrayed, to cry at the tomb of a friend. Yet in all of it, He walked with purpose. He trusted the Father. He carried hope.

That same Jesus lives in you. So even when life is heavy, joy can still be present. Not fake smiles. Not pretending everything is fine. Real, soul-level joy that says, “This hurts, but God is still here. I don’t see the full picture, but I still believe He’s doing something good.”

Psalm 30:5 reminds us that the night doesn’t last forever. Joy is coming. It might not come in the way you expect, and it might not show up on your timeline, but God promises it will come.

If today feels more like a storm than a celebration, know that you are not disqualified from joy just because you’re walking through sorrow. God’s heart is full of joy, and He still invites you into it, even in the struggle.

You don’t have to choose between honest sorrow and holy joy. You can carry both. One reminds you of your humanity. The other points you to your hope.

AI FB post

Peterson ends Chapter 2 the way certain televangelists end a sermon: after forty minutes of describing your soul as a mouldy basement, he offers you a mop: ‘for a modest monthly fee of attention, obedience, and existential guilt.’ It’s a familiar structure. First, you are informed you are wretched. Then you are offered a ladder. And then, crucially, you are told that the ladder only works if you accept the wretchedness as your true ontological address.
This is his summation: Genesis 1 is order spoken into being; Genesis 2–3 is the fall into self-consciousness, shame, suffering, and moral knowledge. But the fall, he insists, is not merely tragic, rather, it is also the doorway into earned goodness, into moral agency, into “walking with God” again through truth and responsibility (Peterson, pp. 56–58). The divine spark returns as chosen discipline, not as innocence.
There’s something here I can endorse. There’s also something here I don’t trust.
Peterson’s core proposition in this closing stretch is: the antidote to self-contempt is responsibility grounded in truth, and the spiritual mechanism of that antidote is the recovery of Genesis 1’s creative speech; Consciously (Peterson, pp. 56–58).
He frames it like this:

  • Genesis 1: God speaks order out of chaos; creation is pronounced “good.” Humans are made in God’s image, meaning they share (in miniature) this capacity to create order through word and action (Peterson, p. 56).
  • Genesis 2–3 and onward: the fall ruptures this goodness: shame, suffering, violence, corruption; Cain and Abel, flood, Babel; the long grim history of moral catastrophe (Peterson, 2021, p. 56). (I should mark that this is Michael’s message to Adam in Paradise Lost. I won’t say Peterson is attempting to pass Milton off as his own…. But…. There’s no textual citations here. )
  • Yet we retain “nostalgia” for paradise: childhood innocence, animal unconsciousness, the cathedral-forest of untouched nature (Peterson, p. 56).
  • But there’s no turning back. The innocence was “bestowed,” not earned. Post-fall humanity is worse in suffering; but potentially greater in moral significance, because it can choose (Peterson, pp. 56–57).
  • So perhaps the problem is our refusal to “walk with God” despite fragility: our hiding, our shame, our evasion (Peterson, p. 57).
  • The cure: live in truth, speak truth, orient toward heaven rather than hell, and treat yourself as someone you’re responsible for helping (Peterson, pp. 58, 62–64). Again this is all Milton Books 9-12.

Then he, meaning Peterson, pivots to a social diagnosis. We used to be surrounded by barbarism (human sacrifice re: Carthage, death sports re: gladiatorial games, casual violence re: well… Roman life) and the primary moral task was suppressing impulsive brutality (Peterson, pp. 58–59; Pinker, 2011). But now, he claims, modern people often suffer from the opposite: not narcissism, but self-disgust. They will care for others (and animals), but not themselves (Peterson, pp. 59–60).
And he threads this into a critique of distorted self-sacrifice: Christ’s sacrifice is heroic acceptance of finitude; not a mandate to be exploited, enslaved, or bullied by institutions, partners, or one’s own internal tyrant (Peterson, p. 60). He adds Jung: love your neighbour “as yourself” is an equation, not a syrupy instruction to be nice; fail to bargain for yourself and you become a slave, and someone else becomes a tyrant (Peterson, p. 60).
Finally, he performs a rare tonal manoeuvre: gratitude. The everyday heroism of disabled workers cooperating, families holding together, infrastructure functioning, ordinary people persisting through illness and grief. This is “miraculous” (Peterson, pp. 60–62). Humanity deserves sympathy. You deserve respect. You matter. Therefore: you are morally obliged to take care of yourself (Peterson, pp. 62–64). Cue Nietzsche: “He who has a why can bear almost any how” (Nietzsche, in Peterson, p. 63).
That’s the sermon. Now lets ask what it does.
Peterson’s ending has three big effects.
(1) It makes self-care into a moral duty, not a human need.
You don’t merely deserve care because you’re alive, finite, and relational. You deserve care because you have a role in the cosmic struggle between chaos and order, heaven and hell, meaning and resentment (Peterson, pp. 62–64). Self-care becomes metaphysical labour.
(2) It turns psychology into theology without admitting it.
He speaks as though he’s giving clinical advice. Here’s direction. Here’s discipline.
How about some principles. Have some future-orientation. However, the scaffolding is explicitly sacred: divine image, walking with God, spark of the divine, heaven/hell, judgment, flaming sword (Peterson, pp. 56–58, 63–64). This would not be considered neutral therapy by any school of modern counseling. It’s spiritual formation in a Christian-tinged mythic key. It’s Christian guidance.
(3) It produces a coercive emotional logic: shame → duty → redemption.
He spends the chapter constructing humanity as uniquely vile (pp. 53–55), then tells you: precisely because you are vile, you must redeem yourself through responsibility. That can work as motivation. It can also work as manipulation. Because if your self-worth is always conditional, always needing to be earned, then you never quite arrive. You are always one step from the whip.
And notice the structure: he grants sympathy, but only after ensuring you accept the premise that you are the kind of creature who could build an Iron Maiden in his spare time (Peterson, pp. 54–55, 62). You are granted dignity the way a judge grants parole: under supervision, with conditions.
3) The central theological problem (let’s treat this as the theology it is.)
Here is the issue, stated plainly:
Peterson’s positive turn does not logically follow from his negative anthropology.
He says: you are fallen, ashamed, self-contemptuous, capable of evil; therefore you must treat yourself as someone you’re responsible for helping (Peterson, pp. 56–64). But why does the obligation emerge from the depravity?
He tries to answer: because you bear the “spark of the divine,” because you matter to others, because your self-destruction harms them, because you can speak order into being (Peterson, pp. 60–62). Fine. Those are reasons. But those reasons don’t require the prior degradation campaign.
Here is my question:
Do I need to be fallen to deserve care?
Or more sharply:
Why must dignity be purchased with self-hatred?
Peterson has built a motivational engine that runs on poison. It moves people, yes. But it does so by first convincing them they are contemptible. Then it offers them the honour of self-respect as a project of moral repayment.
That is a penitential economy. This resembles a cult tactic. This is not therapy.
4) Here’s some counter-arguments (where Peterson’s “evidence” is thin or ideologically loaded)
i) His modern diagnosis is selective: self-disgust is real, but so is narcissism.
Peterson frames our age as one where many people “don’t value themselves at all” (Peterson, pp. 59–60). That’s true for some. Examples of depression, anxiety, shame cultures, perfectionism, trauma abound. But it’s not the whole story. Social media ecosystems routinely reward grandiosity, grievance performance, and moral exhibitionism. The age is not simply self-loathing; it is oscillating between self-worship and self-erasure.
ii) His use of Christ is rhetorically convenient
He insists Christ’s sacrifice is not a directive to become a victim or slave (Peterson, p. 60). That’s a welcome corrective to masochistic religiosity. But it also allows him to have it both ways: he can praise sacrifice as the highest virtue while condemning anyone who points out how easily “sacrifice” becomes an alibi for exploitation.
iii) The “spark of the divine” functions as a loophole, not an argument
He claims we’re “low-resolution” versions of God, capable of creating order with words (Peterson,p. 60). But this is asserted more than demonstrated. It’s mythic rhetoric. It’s not evidence in the scholarly sense; it’s a metaphor that becomes an ethical demand.
And here’s the deeper problem: if humans are so uniquely evil (pp. 53–55), why trust their “semi-divine” speech at all? Why is our language the instrument of order rather than propaganda, domination, or self-deception? Peterson wants speech to be salvific; truth as a ladder out of hell, but he’s already shown how speech can be rationalization, accusation, and cruelty.
iv) His Eden nostalgia is doing ideological work
He mocks “atheistic environmentalists of the most anti-human sort” who worship nature (Peterson, p. 56). But he also indulges the same nostalgia: the untouched forest, innocence, childhood. He wants paradise as a felt memory, yet he scolds those who love it too purely. It’s a minor hypocrisy, but revealing: nature is allowed as symbol when it serves his anthropology; it becomes suspect when it underwrites politics he dislikes.
Here’s my verdict (in the tone of the thing).
This Chapter 2 ending section is Peterson at his most persuasive because it is Peterson at his most human. The chapter ends with ordinary heroism: sick people showing up anyway, disabled men repairing power lines, families holding the machinery of life together (Peterson, pp. 60–62). That’s real. That’s true. That’s even, God help us, beautiful.
But he cannot give you that beauty without first kneecapping you with metaphysical disgust.
He wants you upright, yes. He also wants you permanently aware that you began in the mud.
And this is the manipulative turn: he frames self-respect as a moral obligation extracted from your supposed wretchedness. Take care of yourself, he says; because you’re terrible, and because you might become worse.
That’s probation. There is no grace here.
You can accept the advice, direction, discipline, honesty, refusal of self-bullying without accepting the anthropology of rot that precedes it. You can treat yourself as someone you’re responsible for helping because care is good, not because you are fallen. You don’t need Eden to be ashamed. You don’t need Genesis to justify brushing your teeth.
The truth is simpler, and less theatrical:
You are worth caring for even before you earn it.
And if you only care for yourself once you’ve been convinced you’re vile; then the care comes with a hook in it.
That hook is Peterson’s real genius.
He teaches you to climb.
But he makes sure you do it while bleeding.
Commentary 21 — The Spark of the Divine, or the Sales Pitch of the Damned
(On Peterson’s summation of Chapter 2, pp. 56–64, 12 Rules for Life)

stoic/ascetic

these are all the same:

Stoic
Pharisee
ascetic
monk

they are all aspiring to gain some form of favor for God

in practice, the sacrifice isn’t for love

the ONLY exception to this is the sacrifices made for love:

  • fasting so others can eat
  • taking persecution so others won’t suffer
  • fasting to appeal to God

NOTE: MAKE A REF TO “OUR FALLEN FEELINGS”

sublimation

Sublimation (psychology) – Wikipedia

many believers are hot and excited at church, then go home and don’t apply it

the Christian must walk in their convictions even when things are miserable and outwardly not present

the law

the law doesn’t save

  • it, in fact, does nothing but condemn
  • this is a big deal, and a HUGE sticking point between the Jews and Christians
union with Christ

“natural” man is fallen and carnal

“original” man is in perfect unity with Christ

the entire effort by God is to restore us to original man

spirituality is garbage

indicate how so-called “spiritual” things are fundamentally garbage

occult

much of it is this crap:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kybalion

it basically asserts patterns that imply some extra meaning.

  • while those abstract ideas DO have some form of value, they are all subordinate to God’s commands and design
  • without a foundation of dominantly love of God and the secondary love of others, it’s basically a bunch of perverted rules purposed for self-interest
  • however, it FEELS deep, which is why it always keeps showing up in various forms, from Gnosticism to Aleister Crowley to Dark Souls

transcendence

it’s entirely possible we can have woo-woo things;

  • out-of-body experiences
  • telepathy
  • prophecy (e.g., deja vu from a dream)

however, that doesn’t mean anything overtly

  • there are clearly broken mechanisms in the fabric of existence, which were originally designed for a relationship with God
  • our first sin was trying to gain knowledge we shouldn’t have had in the first place (knowing morality), and ESP or TM is just the same crap