This week the inevitable war between the incumbent Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and the ex-PM whom she deposed 20 months ago, Kevin Rudd, has come to a head.  Next week, members of the Australian Labor Party will vote on which one of them will be the PM.  While Gillard is loved by her colleagues, she is disliked among voters.  Rudd, while popular among voters, has a caustic management style which has alienated his parliamentary colleagues.  The question is, who will win?  The nerd (Rudd) or the redhead (Gillard)?  This cartoon captures it well:

What bothered me about the movie was its eagerness to try and pscyhoanalyse her, rather than look at the politics.  THose who knew her, including a former Tory minister and her former personal assistant both have said that the movie is almost at odds with what Thatcher was really like.  The movie portrays as her being bumbling, unable to remember and haunted by ghosts past.  But it was hardly so.  Thatcher eventually sat in the House of Lords and gave advice to Labour prime minister Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.  Nothing haunted her.  Her husband Dennis never ever put pressure on her to quit politics: he was immensely proud of her and the accusation that their marriage was one of political convenience didn’t square up given the incredible personal devotion that they had for one another.  Sir Dennis never got involved in politics.  Much of the movie had Thatcher in very dark places, wearing dark clothes, and with dark thoughts.  She seems to have a big complex with men, and while that might have been true in reality, it was done to death I felt.  Much of the movie bored me.

When Oliver Stone made his movie on Richard Nixon it suffered the same problems; sadly, by the time ‘Nixon’ was produced, the former president was dead without the right to correct the record.  Thatcher is not far from death herself and is currently largely incapacitated and not able to speak publicly.  If anything I feel the ‘Thatcher’ movie lacked adequate depth and background research.  As someone who really knows his politics, I felt this movie was a poor rendition and the terrific acting abilities of the performers- like Streep and Jim Broadbent- doesn’t make up for the lack of proper work done on the politics of the Lady.  I don’t agree with a lot of what Thatcher did: her policies left a terrible scar on Britain and divided communities to the point of a near civil war.  But honest work was due and it wasn’t properly done, I felt, in this movie.  Her character was erroneously portrayed and much of the political content was missing. And, after all, that’s what made her who she is today.  5/10

 Matters affecting the body are often treated the same way.  Autism- a condition where children are unable to express and receive emotional signals- is treated as a strictly psychological occurrance.  Addictions, compulsions which people have where people are controlled by base appetites that drive some people literally mad if they are not met, are cast as ‘syndromes’ and ‘personality issues’.  Depression?  Well, that’s quite complex and I don’t have time to discuss it here, however I do tend to think it is often a side-effect of sin in someone’s life and even the influence of demonic presence. Not always, but it has been known to happen.

Were a Christian to stand up and describe these things for what they are in spiritual terms, what would be the reaction?  With increasing frequency I come across men with unwanted same-sex attractions where then it turns out that he has uncles, aunts, cousins, a father, and a brother who all have addictions, broken sexuality, and compulsive natures. Modern science would likely see this as happenstance and coincidence, completely disconnected.  But if I read the Bible (e.g. Exodus 20:5-6) it would suggest that something profoundly spiritual is going on: generational sin (GENE-rational sin), which is sins passed down in the genes.  (Science has actually backed this up: recent data has shown that if people do not live a responsible life with healthy eating and exercise they can become obese and get diabetes, which can then be passed down genetically onto their offspring through DNA.  The Bible is very much ahead of science!  Another example is where identical twins, separated at birth and raised in completely different environments, are able to act, behave, and think in almost completely identical ways without ever knowing one another.)

You see countless examples of generational sin in the Bible: Abraham lies to a king TWICE; his son Isaac does it; Isaac’s wife is a liar; his son Jacob lies; Jacob’s father in law is a liar; Jacob’s sons prove themselves to be liars and sexually loose like their father. See how it develops? David is sexually immoral and so is his son. Sin gets passed down thorugh the generations.

 Think how this might go down.  Sadly, when people use spiritual categories to interpret physical phenomena, they lampooned as ‘superstitious’.  That’s because science is really the big religion in town: it’s priests (the scientific ‘experts’) tell us what to eat, how to eat it, when to exercise, and what to think, but only they have the keys to generating the information in the first place.  Never mind the contradiction between them, the questionable philosophies behind some of them and their equally dicey funding arrangements: as long as an ‘expert’ says it, it must be correct.  The new religion’s Bible is the newspaper, where scientific experts’ findings get reported almost every day.  The synagogue where the research is conducted, in labs, is a private clinical place where few have the privilege of seeing what really goes on, but where reality is ‘duplicated’.  Man has found clever ways to interpret reality through his own fallen logic and faculties.

But how did the ancients view phenomena?  It was, of course, through spiritual lenses.  Famine was caused by prayers of righteous men (1 Kings 17); almighty winds were God’s mouthpiece (Job 38-42); fish swallow men as a symbol of God’s judgement and goodness (Jonah); suicide is a sign of involvement in the occult and false religion (1 Sam. 28-31); earthquakes and poisonous snakes are there to take the lives of heart-hardened, disobedient people who tempt God’s wrath (Exodus).

And if you think these are things that just afflicted those in the Old Testament you’re not on the right side of wisdom: 1 Corinthians 10:8-11 makes it as explicit as possible that those things can still happen to Christians NOW.

Scary?  Yes.  But no less real just because it is scary.  The Old Testament is so critical in the canon of Scripture because it describes what can happen to God’s people today, the Church of Christ.  Just because a person is saved in and washed by the blood of Jesus does not mean that they can still tempt the judgement of God (see Hebrews 12:25-29 for another example).  What’s true for the goose is, in many (if not most) cases true for the gander.

Yet it is remarkably at odds with modern thinking.  Many churches pride themselves on being scientific and intellectual, but the question is, is that necessarily spiritual?  Science reinforces the Bible in many places but it cannot explain the spiritual.  Christ’s people must, I add, be very careful to not falsely attribute cause and effect without revelation from the Spirit (e.g. Luke 13:1-5, John 9:1-5).  But too often, I fear, the baby is thrown out with the bathwater.  Just because people get spiritual discernment incorrect does not mean it is impossible or doesn’t exist.  In fact, Scripture seems to suggest otherwise.

For this reason it is so important to have deliverance ministries, where people are healed of demonic oppressions having previously worked through the roots of their bondage (e.g. generational sin; curses; soul, spirit, and body ties; legal rights; strongholds; and bitter roots).  Otherwise addiction will continue to have a hold.  People may swap the substance they’re addicted to, the object, but unless the roots are dealt with and the demonic oppression sorted out, they really will have no (and can not ultimately have any) freedom from it to cleave to God.  It’s the only way people can be free of affliction in spite of all their hard-worked (but, sadly, futile) efforts.

How different modern Christians are to the first family of Yahweh.  We have much to learn from them.

 Rudd has gone to great lengths to remind the Australian electorate that he is a “Christian”, though he’s cautious not to do it too much because otherwise he’d be seen to be using it for political advantage; in Australian political parlance, that is a definite no-no because, like flaunting wealth, you not meant to  advertise your Christian faith and rub it in people’s faces, lest it get up their noses and you get voted out of office.  Yet I have found myself struggling to believe that Rudd is a genuine Christian.  He was turfed out as PM for a number of reasons, one of them primarily being that he is impossible to work with, is a control-freak who uses people to get what he wants, and is foul-mouthed (hear what he said about the Chinese ‘rat f******’ Australia, this being the former diplomat who speaks Mandarin and was meant to deepen Australia’s relationship with China) and petulant and abuses stewardesses on planes for not giving him his whisky on time.  In his party, he was a loner and still is.  His former colleagues such as Bill Shorten are adamant that they will not work with him if he were to get the prime ministership again, and while the public is smitten with him, the people who have had to work with him are filled with gall at the very notion of him coming back again.  Rudd’s own brother Greg has given interviews in newspapers saying that he trusts Kevin as a brother, but not as a politician.  So much for a prophet being honoured in his home town.

I wonder how a “Christian man” like this can manage to rankle people so much.  Scripture warns Christians to live peacefully with all, that godly conduct may win a man’s enemies over, but Rudd seems to be a contradiction of that.  To thicken the plot, he recently has been seen associating with pro-gay marriage advocates in order to shore up support within the ALP to recapture the party leadership.  It was not all that surprising that Rudd’s own sister, a Christian, quit the party for moving in that very direction.  Kevin was not too pleased about that because it put a dent in his drive to re-capture the leadership.  Again, he’s happy to cosy up to people when he needs them, but once they’ve supported him he gives them nothing.

Yet he is now moving lock, stock, and three smoking barrels to get back the Prime Ministership.  Originally I was happy to see it but now- and I think the Australian public are beginning to see it too- I feel that Rudd is only trying to get the position to settle scores and undermine colleagues.  In a word, it’s to do exactly what he accused the Chinese of doing to Australia!  I might expect a non-Christian to behave like that, but a Christian?  Christ’s words were that a man was to turn the other cheek to his enemies, not to smite them.  In Paul’s letter to the Romans, it is said that justice and vengeance is God’s, not man’s, to take.

What I find troubling about Rudd is that on the one hand he says he’s a Christian, but on the other he’s out with sharpened knives to get payback.  Is that what the highest political office is to be used for?  The job name is Prime Minister (which, in Latin, means the First Servant).  Is the first servant of Australia to be using his office to get others back and domineer them?

To top it off, Rudd has publicly said he’s not pining for the leadership and yet it’s common knowledge that he is and that during the 2010 election he leaked secrets to destabilise his own party (it’s the biggest open secret).  The diaries of former Opposition Leader Mark Latham tell of Rudd doing precisely the same thing a few years before the 2007 election.  Yet publicly he denies it all.  Funny that, because when he was knocked off as PM he carped about how he was done over by ‘faceless men’ in secret.  I can’t see how he can complain about that when he’s just repeating the same cycle.

 When John Anderson quit Australian politics and left parliament, even his most strident political opponents (Martin Ferguson, Bob Brown) had nothing but kind things to say about him.  Rudd, on the other hand, seems only to have a long list of enemies who bristle at the thought of him returning to the helm.  Even his own siblings have publicly distanced themselves from him.  Former Prime Ministers Bob Hawke and John Howard had his own enemies, but never did they treat others in politics as badly as Rudd seems to have.  I have many doubts about whether he really is a Christian, but more than that I doubt he is really the leader that the party needs.  I don’t like much of the style, decisions and policies of the current PM, Julia Gillard (such as her recent cabinet reshuffle), but I think she really does care about Australia and she has its interests at heart.  Would Rudd do a better job?  The jury is out on that, but given his blood lust I think it would bring the ALP into disarray.  Already the cross-benchers have declared that they will not work with Rudd as PM.  He may fly over to the backbench and spend his time white-anting the PM from there, but he’s such a loner in Canberra I think it would fizzle out and he would be seen as too negative.  I think his colleagues are right to worry about him.  He’s a skilled salesman, using his victim-status as dumped PM to elicit public sympathy for him to return as PM.  But the problem is that the closer people to get to him, the less they trust him and the more they seem (generally) to loathe him.  Time will tell, but I think he is too negative as this programme shows.

If the talks are recorded, I will link them on this blog.  Churches in Australia need to know and come to grips with sexual brokenness and hear the good news that people do not have to be “gay”, but make better and informed choices.

Much of it involves being grounded in the present and reparenting inner families that never were allowed to express self and emotion.  For me, these are just some of the things that I am dealing with.  Other things include cursing that has been shown to me; gene-rational (hereditary) sin and the involvement of ancestors in Freemasonry and the New Age; legal rights; addictions and compulsions; bitter roots; and strongholds.  As part of dealing with all these things I am working through these things from the past, that all those things may no longer have a hold over me but that I may be set free.  Sometimes I am shocked by my own pride and even the ways that I often feel so upset and angry with God, assuming that He expects me to relate in the same manner that my parents demonstrated to me.  All these things I am in the process of getting undone, of unlearning.

It’s not easy: it’s the refiner’s fire and fire, as anyone knows, is never easy to touch.  What keeps me in it is the knowledge that it is reaping a harvest of righteousness that nothing else will surpass.  A few resources have been helping me in all this which I thought I would share here, that other may benefit from:

1. Read the book, ‘Blessings and Curses: Biblical Truth Simply Explained’ (based on Isaiah 54:17) by the late Derek Prince;
2. Watched some instructive videos by Prince on how to overcome dark spiritual influences;
3. Internet PDF on how to break curses;
4. Prayers to break soul ties and curses;
5. Other prayers to break soul ties and curses.

I think many people have these issues in their lives, even Christians, even though they are unaware of them and may even deny them (e.g. reading of the Twilight series and similar books like Harry Potter).  In modern western cultures which pride themselves on being so-called ‘sophisticated’ and ‘intelligent’, topics like this are more likely to be dismissed as superstitious nonsense, but that doesn’t make them any less true.  Demonic influence is still around today and unless it is cast out and renounced in Jesus Christ’s Name and Authority, it will not diminish but grow.  I hope they can be a blessing to others too

Recently, Alan sought to clarify what he said, but having read it, the clarification came over as more of a defence.  That was the first issue.  The second one was that it betrayed a theological ignorance, or should I say blindedness, on issues such as holiness and matters of salvation.  The issues that Alan touches on are things like the doctrine of Once Saved, Always Saved (OSAS), which is the belief that once a person is saved by Christ they can do nothing to do to lose their salvation.  It certainly came across to me when I read Chamber’s response that he was defending this, rather than dealing with the issue of change.  And I felt that Alan gave away far too much when he was saying things like “It’s not my place to judge” and hiding behind a defence of good intentions.  I say these things not to attack Chambers, but to question what he did regardless of what he said or intended.

But, taking a step backwards.  We’re talking here about matters of ‘change’ and that is a word that gets loosely thrown around and is often poorly defined by the one using it.  The problem is, it is not a Biblical term.  The Bible never talks about ‘change’, though it is often demonstrated: a person once was demonised, but after an encounter with Jesus they are cleansed, or healed, restored to their right mind as they were always meant to be.  I have seen this happen to a number of people that I know and have encountered: people who were plagued with all manner of addictions and compulsions which they equally thought they were ‘born with’ but had taken to God in prayer and trust for Him to redeem and restore.  Some of those people were same-sex attracted.  One person I know with SSA became healed of that part of their life by simply going to a very supporting church and by connecting with God through prayer and devotional time, with participation in Christian community being the biggest catalyst for healing.

Does that mean that such a ‘method’ (to use a crude term) would work for everyone?  No, but it does mean that cleansing and healing are possible.  And no, it doesn’t mean that the “change” that people demand will happen overnight or cleanly or according to a man-made schedule.  It can happen over a long period of time with persistence, support, and dedication but it is possible.  Recent research has demonstrated that the brain is elastic and can change and adapt if a person wishes to change direction in their life and overcome a particular addiction, even a very stubborn and persistent one.  So Alan Chambers’ statement that 99.9% of people with SSA don’t experience change, or overcome to use another Biblical term, is misleading and doesn’t actually address the issue.

What I am concerned about in particular with Chambers’ recent response is that it makes no allowance for holiness.  The God of the Scriptures is a holy God who asks of His people to be holy as HE is holy (1 Peter 1:16).  He is also a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:29).  It is not enough simply to say you are saved (Matt 7:21) because while one person may say he/she has faith, they need to demonstrate their Christ-centred identity on actually living a life that is consistent with how God has saved them.  James 2:14 asks the question bluntly: What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faithbut does not have works? Can faith save him?.  I wonder, if post-salvation behaviour makes such little difference as Chambers implies, how Paul could say to the Corinthians that although some of them used to be gay that God had actually saved and redeemed them (1 Cor. 6:9-11)?  The grammar of Paul’s statement is “That’s what some of you WERE” (past simple).  Not “That’s what some of you are struggling with” or “That’s what some of you are or have been” but “Were”.  Paul could only use the word if he really meant that such people have successfully overcome.  And a high success rate is not out of the question.

This means that complete “change” is possible.  What’s true 2,000 years ago is the case now because God has not changed.  While Chambers may have tried to sound well by saying “It’s not my place to judge”, I think it’s important to remember that when people die they will give an account to THE Judge and the role of Christian leaders today is to prepare people for that judgement.  Discernment is needed to say what is what and the Bible allows Christians a certain degree of licence to do that.  Workers of Satan are not those of Christ, and they can be identified when they life lives contrary to God’s good plan (1 John 2:19) and teach warped doctrine (Galatians 1).  That’s not judging someone as if you’re better than them; that’s telling it like it is (Ephesians 5:11) and warning them.  That’s love, not hate.  It also makes no sense that God would not judge people’s sin seriously while people are still living when there is evidence to the contrary (1 Corinthians 10:8, where 1,000 Christians were slain by an angel because of sexual immorality).  It makes me wonder how a God who will judge every idle word that a man speaks (Matt. 12:36) will not demand a strict reckoning of life both now and after death.  God is also tremendously forgiving and graceful, not wanting any to perish but to instead have eternal life, but He will nonetheless demand a reckoning.

What strikes me in saying all of this is that Chambers has not really thought out his position or understood the ramifications of his actions.  Let’s face it, Hebrews 12 says that no one will behold the Lord without holiness: it is a key ingredient to being saved and knowing God!  There’s no way to gild the lilly about that.  It is a terrifying reality to come to grips with, especially if someone is not living as God would have them, but for those in Christ it makes well-reasoned sense.  God sends His Holy Spirit to help people to live as He would have them do, but to silence the Spirit’s voice to live in sin and justify it is what grieves God.

I wished that Chambers had clarified these things when he spoke and blogged last week.  I will continue to pray for him on these matters, but I must say I still find his position troublesome and one that I cannot connect with.

Many times when I have heard ministers preach about Israel’s patriarchs, Esau and Jacob, there’s a kind of stereotype about him that often gets thrown about: Esau was the “man’s man” who hunted, was daddy’s boy, and a ‘real man’.  Jacob, by contrast, was a mere ‘mummy’s boy’, it is said, because he received his mother’s love, preferred the indoors, and cooked.  (I personally think the fact that Israel was a chef is actually a tremendous credit to God’s grace and sense of humour.)  It’s often said in jest and is meant to add a humourous touch to sermons to make audiences feel at ease.

I was talking today to a young man today about his struggle with same-sex attractions and we touched on this story, and actually came to the conclusion that these characterisations completely miss the point of the story.

As I came to realise, the issue is not that Jacob was a mummy’s boy as much as he was a boy who missed out on father’s love.  Boys at the ages of 4-5 leave mum as the source of comfort and strength and begin to cleave to dad; if dad is not there, to whom can he cling?  Mum is the next best option.

So what is Jacob’s problem?  He’s not a mummy’s boy: he’s a daddy-less boy.  His lack of prowess in the hunting field is never commented on as a problem, but the favourtism demonstrated by father Isaac towards brother Esau is.  It’s the source of sibling rivalry and deception to compensate for lack of connection with dad.

And how funny it is that God would choose to be the forefather of His kingdom, of all people, a fatherless man?  He didn’t choose someone who had it all together, but a father of fatherless.  Israel the nation is as fatherless as the first man named Israel.

It adds illumination to the very last promise of the Old Testament:  “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.  He will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the earth with a curse.”

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It’s an interesting look at how God deals with issues like addictions and illness is people’s lives through deliverance.  It is Biblically based, so I encourage you to watch it through to the end, even if you don’t necessarily agree with [all of] it.

One video that I have recently been watching is a documentary about the topic of ‘transgendered’ kids, or what I would call gender confused children.  These are children who, despite being born in one sex, want to change their sex and be the opposite.  I found this video highly disturbing and what I see as being a demonic assault on children and God-determined sexuality, one the fundamental building block of a person’s identity.  In this video there are a number of children who were born one gender and wish to be of the other.  One ‘girl’ said that having a penis was grotesque to him.  What makes it worse is that the adults in their lives- especially their parents- have embraced and endorsed their sex transitions.  These children are both pre-pubescent and their parents are embracing their self-chosen emasculation.  Their parents even see the transitions as a “blessing”, and seem to have little discernment.  God made their children as boys, but they are fighting their God-determined design.  These children have little idea of what they are really doing to themselves, but their parents are enabling folly and self-destruction. 

For whatever reasons, these parents have not inducted their children into accepting their God-given gender.  Particular influences, demonic ones, seem to have been allowed to influence their children’s view of themselves.  Perhaps in reading this it may seem odd why I would choose to call this influence ‘demonic’.  But it stands to reason, why on earth would a child, of all things, want to change their God-given sex?  What voice in their head would prompt them to reject such a core part of themselves and seek to change their bodies?  The Bible says that the body is God’s temple.  Satan hates God and his temple and prowls around as a lion, seeking to devour, and what a better target than a child who wouldn’t know left from right who lives under parents who don’t know left from right? 

Interestingly, one family featured in the documentary the girl had grown up with a father who said that he always wanted a boy.  Was it any surprise that his girl decided to become a boy?  The power of words are tremendous.  Another family said there was a history of homosexuality and sexual brokenness in its lineage, so unsurprisingly, their boy wants to be a girl.

God has made these people according as the gender they were born in; in spite of their efforts to try to be otherwise, they will always have the image of their original gender, and I am certain that when they face God He will recognise them as He made them.  Can transgendered people come to healing in Christ?  They sure can, and they can even go back to living in their original sex (not without side effects).  Two people who have come out of transgenderism are ministry leaders Sy Rogers and Leslie Lung in Singapore.  God can do His work in redeeming people, but it is sad to see when children wish to cut their bodies up like that.