Creating a Theology from Unbelief

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Christ raising LazarusThis is one of the most difficult posts I’ve ever written on Cerulean Sanctum. I have no doubt that there will be people who delist me from their blogroll or who will never visit this blog again simply because of this post.

But what I write here is something that has to be said. I hope you will read it to the end.

A couple weeks ago, Christianity Today online posted an article entitled “Can I Really Expect God to Protect Me?” (I would encourage everyone to read the entire article.) The author of the post goes on to relate the tragic story of her daughter who was born with a rare metabolic disorder and later died. This was indeed a heartrending event. However, I believe the author proceeds to deconstruct Psalm 91 and come up with a new theology that attempts to shoehorn her personal tragedy into the Scriptures and pull out something that does not exist.

Psalm 91 says:

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say to the LORD, “My refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.” For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence. He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness is a shield and buckler. You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday. A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you. You will only look with your eyes and see the recompense of the wicked. Because you have made the LORD your dwelling place— the Most High, who is my refuge— no evil shall be allowed to befall you, no plague come near your tent. For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone. You will tread on the lion and the adder; the young lion and the serpent you will trample underfoot. “Because he holds fast to me in love, I will deliver him; I will protect him, because he knows my name. When he calls to me, I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble; I will rescue him and honor him. With long life I will satisfy him and show him my salvation.
—Psalms 91:1-16 ESV

The disturbing issue for me is that the author takes the promises of Psalm 91 and spiritualizes them in such a way that they no longer refer to earthly protection, but instead have been translated into a form of gauzy spiritual protection by bringing in Matt 10:28a (“And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul….”) and using it as a means of tempering the starkly-framed promises of Psalm 91. The end result of her exposition of Psalm 91 is that God doesn’t truly mean He’ll protect our physical selves, only our spiritual selves. The pestilence may very well kill the body, but it cannot kill the soul—we should be satisfied with that.

But is that what Psalm 91 really says? Or has the article’s author tried to bend the Scriptures to account for her experience?

The more I stand back and look at the state of Christian belief in this new millennium, the more I see that our theologies, while good on the surface, are rife with our own unbelief. We insist that the Bible is God’s inerrant word (and this I wholeheartedly believe), the very truth that frames our salvation and belief, but why then do we spend so much time trying to construct theologies that negate the truths we supposedly endorse?

Nothing makes me grind my teeth more than attending a funeral of a person who died from an illness, especially a protracted one, only to hear a half dozen people offer the same platitude: “Well, he’s finally healed.” What I have to ask is if Jesus or one of the apostles would have been satisfied with that assessment? Can you imagine that coming out of the mouth of Paul? Or who here, no matter how much of the Bible is believed to be inerrant, has the nerve to go up to James and say, “In this case, you really messed up in your chapter 5, verses 14 and 15!”

Am I the only one that thinks that the sort of attitude displayed by those half dozen at the funeral is nothing more than a theology of unbelief? A theology that says, “Plan A didn’t work, so we now have to settle for Plan B, shoehorn it into our experience, and explain it to our kids.” Despite the fact that we say the Bible is true, I suspect that many Christians today—even seasoned apologists—simply don’t believe it is, so they dance around the things they don’t believe and try to come up with verses and high-sounding enlightened spirituality to explain away the stuff that doesn’t seem to work.

Since we’re on the topic of healing, here’s a well-known passage to illustrate:

Of David. Bless the LORD, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name! Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.
—Psalms 103:1-5 ESV

Okay, so here’s the checklist of what God does here:

Forgives sins—check
Redeems our lives—check
Crowns us with perpetual love and mercy—check
Satisfies us with good—check
Renews our strength—check
Heals all our…hey, wait a second!

Wait a second, indeed. We seem to have no problem believing all the things we just checked off above. I would dare say there’s not a person reading this now who doesn’t assent to the truth that God makes those checked items happen. But do we believe God heals all our diseases? He said the pestilence wouldn’t touch our tent in Psalm 91, didn’t He? He ended that passage by saying something about blessing the righteous with long life. Well?

A few months ago I blogged on the least-believed verse in the Bible, Mark 11:23:

Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. (ESV)

Suffice it to say, Jesus drops a nuke here. When that ICBM explodes in our lives, I think too many of us erect a theological shack over the resulting crater and say to others and ourselves, “Move along! Nothing to see here.” Still, the crater and its fallout persist. Our choosing to ignore their existence is not a measure of God’s truth, but the tortured theology we’ve created to explain away the fact that whatever the mountain was that we needed moved, it dauntingly stayed right were it was.

Call me immature in my walk, if you wish to. Trot out all the great theologians over the centuries to lambaste what I’m saying. All I know is that I can’t escape the fact that far too many of the Bible’s promises, especially the most outlandish ones that don’t always fit with our experiences, are glossed over by Western Christians, explained away by complex manipulations of the Scriptures to suit whatever our personal blind spot is.

Why can’t we just come out and tell the truth here? The problem is not the Bible; it’s us. It’s our lack of faith. It’s our doubt. We can’t help but doubt because we live in a world where divine healing or exorcisms or mountains being cast into the sea are ruled out scientifically. Though Peter can’t be considered the be all and end all of scientific knowledge, he knew that a man can’t walk on water. Yet for a brief moment he was able to—until he let his earthly knowledge overrule heavenly faith.

Sadly, our willingness to believe only our eyes, our microscopes, our newspapers, or what our grandma says has led us to question the veracity of the Bible. In the end, every last one of us has traded at least some part of the truth of God for a lie. We’ve constructed a portion of our personal theology on smoke because some verse or passage in the Bible, from our point of view, just can’t be saying what we think it’s saying.

So when we doubt and use our manufactured theology to prop up that doubt, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy that ensures that none of those promises of God that we have a hard time swallowing will ever come to pass. We can believe 98% of what the Bible says is the truth about the world we live in and the world we cannot see, but what about that other 2%? How easy it is to find a religious-sounding means of explaining it away!

I am by no means a saint. If I listed all the sin in my life that routinely holds me back, you’d never visit this blog again. I’m sure if you posted your sins, there’d be a collective “Ooh!” from a lot of people, too. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. My heart truly goes out to the author of the Christianity Today article. This post is not meant to burden people, but to ask if we are as bold in our faith as we think we are. It’s a gut check for us to examine ourselves and see how we fail in regard to truly believing the promises of God.

I confess my own theology is not 100% faith-based. I’ll come right out and say that there are Scriptures that I mentally assent to, but deep in my heart I don’t fully believe them. One that always trips me is from the most beloved Psalm in all the Bible:

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life….
—Psalm 23:6a

I don’t always believe that goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. Too often I think that surely calamity and injustice will follow me all the days of my life instead. However, what I can’t escape is that somewhere in my inner man, in that place where the Spirit of God dwells, I know that if I truly did not doubt what Psalm 23 said, my life would be radically transformed.

That kind of unflinching, unwavering faith is the call of God, not only for me, but also for you. To fully believe all the Bible at face value is what God asks of us all. He doesn’t want us constructing negations of His truth from other parts of His truth. He wants us to believe and not doubt.

Are the dead still raised? Or are we going to try to spiritualize the raising of the dead by saying that God doesn’t really raise anyone physically from the dead anymore, but just spiritually, while piling on a heap of other Scriptures that speak tangentially to the issue we would rather not confront at face value? What other tough sayings or issues in the Bible cause us to trot out our finely-honed theological excuses? Are we ready to abandon them at the foot of the cross and take on a faith that believes the mountain can be cast into the sea?

Say it with me now: “I believe, Jesus! Help my unbelief!”

The Truth About Women (and Men)

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After Brian Colmery said such nice things about me, I’m going to take him to task a little for his post “The Need for Protection in the Church” because I think it presents an overly romanticized view of women, men, and our cultural assumptions. Playing into the theme we see so often on TV of men who are utter dolts but are married to women who possess the wisdom of Solomon and the patience of Job, Women of Olden TimesBrian gets a little lopsided on who’s to blame for the sorry state of relationships.

This all started because of an article in the laddie magazine Maxim in which advice is given to guys looking to score with “church babes.” However, if you really want to go back to the source, John Steinbeck’s classic, The Grapes of Wrath, features a minister who advises that the best time to take advantage of a young woman is right after she’s walked out of the Sunday morning service. You’d be frightened at how accurate that statement is. Mixing the emotional nearness that people feel worshiping the Lord with romantic feelings of love and nearness to another person is all too easy to do.

But Brian weighs in:

I have plenty of thoughts on the issues that men have in the church – including, but not limited to, the fact that they’ve lost any coherent concept of masculinity, they need books telling them to go hunt things in the woods to awaken the “man within,” the single ones tend to be deathly afraid of speaking to women of any type, not to mention that they haven’t the foggiest idea of how to properly treat a woman (which involves cherishing, caring for, appreciating, encouraging, and protecting, not stammering in front of and equivocating on everything under the sun). These issues, while the root of the problem, have given birth to one of the saddest and most ignored issues in church life: the lack of protection of our women.

Now I don’t disagree with Brian on the issue of protection. Nor do I disagree with his trashing of the inane culture we’ve made out of Wild at Heart. Whenever I hear that men are bored in church, I have to ask myself how bored we can be when we’ve all got responsibility to not only ensure the protection of our own kids, but also the sons and daughters of all the other people in the church. Honestly, few things in this life are more precious than young women and young men growing into their adulthood. Our lame-brained rugged individualism in the American Church, though, has told us that someone else’s kids are not our problem, so it’s no wonder that our teens and tweens are getting picked off by the Enemy.

Brian goes on:

We’ve failed on two fronts, and the article makes it obvious. The first is that women in the church have been exposed to such weaklings in the pews next to them that they are tempted to connect with men who haven’t been born again. The fact that Christian men today do not stand out as above and beyond non-believing men in terms of their moral core, security (in Christ), capacity to make decisions and create, to work and make difficult decisions and simply to stand, is a blight not only on Christian men but on the God they serve. With the very Spirit of God living inside their chest, they squelch it enough to come off as spineless.

Whoa. That’s a pretty heavy accusation and one that I must say has not been my experience in toto. I’ll talk more about this in a bit.

Brian’s second point:

The same insecurity and androgyny that has led Christian men away from their rightful place as the culmination of masculinity has prevented them from being able – and even willing – to protect the women God has placed around them in their church. Again, women are more than capable to make good decisions, and yet I can’t help but feel (and read in the bible) that men have a responsibility to care for and cherish the women God has put in their lives. This shouldn’t have to involve a “program” effort, where this is outlined in three points and given out in memo form to the congregation. This desire to protect and cherish should arise from the inside of every man. And yet, if it must be programmed, let it be. The women in our churches are being preyed on by men who have nothing but their worst interest in mind. And the first line of defense has laid down their arms and sat down.

While I’ll certainly be scourged for offering that most young women I see in churches today are making terrible decisions, I’m going to stick with that for now. More in a little bit.

He finishes with this:

Anyone who isn’t a member of the church community and attempts (or even desires) to get close to a female member should have to go through the men of that community. Not in an “ask the father first” sort of way, but, well, yeah. Shouldn’t the men in the community be of such a caliber that the women would seek out their advice (in the same way that the women of the community should be of such a caliber that the men should seek out their advice)? And shouldn’t it be understood that there are men of such a caliber surrounding the women of a church community that wolves know not to enter there?

Now I’m going to weigh in based on my own experiences over the last nearly thirty years of being a Christian.

When I was a single Christian guy I know that just about everyone in the church around me held me in high esteem. I was teaching Bible studies by the time I was sixteen and discipling others. No one ever said a bad word about me. I was a clean-cut kid, 6′ 4″ tall, strong as an ox, well-built, smart, and fine to look at. I treated every woman I dated like an absolute queen and was universally acclaimed for my creative dates that made women feel special. Despite this, I lasted a very long time “on the market.”

If we applied Brian’s standard of masculinity here, I should have had the young women in the churches I was a part of fighting to be seen with me in public. So what was the problem?

Having a lot of time to think about this over the years, I’ve come to a few conclusions:

1. Many women today want financial security above all else

I never saw the guys who were ultimately on the fast-track career path suffering for the ladies, no matter how cloddish, caddish, or half-hearted about the things of the Lord they were. To a lot of young women, money alone talked. I’d chosen to go into camping ministry—not a direct path to being Bill Gates. I even had one girl I was particularly enamored with tell me that she didn’t see how I could fulfill her monetary aspirations making less than a thousand dollars a month out in the woods somewhere. Well, at least she was honest!All those guys I knew who were poor, but loved the Lord with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength…well the ladies weren’t banging down their doors. Sure, if one of those poor guys was going into the ministry, he might get a few takers. But the poor laborer rarely got a second look from the girls who ran in the church circles I did. Makes you wonder what the real priorities are and where those young women were getting those priorities.

2. All that most young women today know is the fallout of feminism

The Church in America bought the lies of feminism, and like Pandora’s Box, going back to what pre-feminist womanhood in the Church was like borders on being delusional. The same goes for manhood. The very foundations of our culture have changed because of feminism and the Church seems to be okay with what that has wrought, sadly. We may talk about spineless men, but that pandemic erupted because of feminism.I’ve talked much about the radical shifts in the work world and how they affected Christians, but few seismic shifts were greater than women entering the workplace. Now I’m not trying to excuse the Neanderthal mentality of men at work, but the repeated assaults they encountered for doing all the things men for years were told they needed to do with regards to women and to work made them gunshy. Rather than face a lawsuit for saying, “That’s a pretty dress,” or getting screamed at for holding a door open, men got used to ignoring women at work altogether for fear of losing their jobs. Better not to say or do anything that was formerly consider gallant than to say or do something that an “emancipated” woman would deem inappropriate. This has even gone so far that the military explicitly teaches young men (now that women make up a large part of our armed forces) to ignore the sounds of women soldiers being raped and tortured.

All this has carried over into the American Church. This does not excuse it at all, but to get at the root of the problem, the Church has to question some assumptions that it holds about the workplace, sex roles, and culture in general that it absolutely is not willing to discuss for fear of being branded “out of touch” or “patriarchal.” We’d rather get riled up about gay marriage than to question if women should be assuming work roles that were prototypically male. I don’t see James Dobson railing about lowering standards for firefighters and police to ensure that enough women can fill those roles. We conceded that issue a long, long time ago.

3. Our expectations about adulthood have changed

In the not-so-distant past, unmarried children stayed home with their parents until they eventually did get married. That was the Christian norm. However, many Christians today are of the opinion that kicking Johnny or Janey out of the house at eighteen is the godly thing to do. As a result, Johnny and Janey better have some marketable skills or else they’re dead in the workplace water. With college becoming the de facto requirement for getting a real adult job, if a young man or woman doesn’t leave the shelter of home for college, their chances for “making it” go down considerably. Yet as we all know, college has become a hive of sin, even, sadly, at a Christian college.Yet what option is given to Christian young people anymore? Unmarried Christian women aren’t at home learning how to become “a homemaker” like they used to be. Instead, they’re expected to be out on their own, making their own decisions, and earning a living. Again, much of this is do to feminism, but it’s hard to fault men entirely for this outcome. Is it any wonder that problems result?

4. Our culture denigrates the role of the elderly in aiding youth

    We have a tendency to shuttle our old people out of the way by sticking them in nursing homes or lumping them into church groups designated especially for them. But that lack of integration into the functioning community, even in churches, keeps the wisdom of the elderly away from the young people who need it the most. Grandparents used to have a much more important role in mitigating youth problems than they do today. This puts young people at a great disadvantage to their peers of a hundred years ago. Many youth live nowhere near their grandparents, either, but you don’t hear the Church saying anything about how following jobs around the country has broken up the extended family.

5. We set-up singles (and couples) for moral failure

Because our churches corral singles into peer groups, we fail them. We toss sexually-frustrated people into a sexually-frustrated pool and expect folks to be paragons of virtue. It’s like asking a starving dog not to eat the steak we just tossed him. Even the Church has an obsession with career success and this has led young men and women to stay single longer. It only invites moral failure. Again, the Church is sitting on the sidelines and encouraging behavior that only creates wounded people.Because our churches don’t begin marriage and family classes for kids as young as ten, we fail them. Domestic abuse in my area of Ohio is rampant. One reason is that we don’t teach boys at an early age to never strike a woman—ever. Worse still, we never teach young women to avoid the losers out there who are most likely to hit them at some time in their relationship. I know so many promising young women dating guys who are losers, it’s not funny. One of the girls I dated broke up with me and started dating a guy who abused her. She then turned around and started crying on my shoulder about it, while still dating the guy. Folks, that’s pathological, but more common than we care to admit.

(For more on this particular issue, read “Singleness: Radical Answers for a Harsh Reality“.)

6. Our youth groups aren’t discouraging a Girls Gone Wild mentality

When I was in youth group, activities for the sexes were often segregated. The guys played football while the girls did whatever the girls did. (Hey, I wasn’t a girl, so I didn’t know what they did.) But not only have youth activities gotten wilder and stupider, but there’s no keeping the girls out of that craziness. But girls and boys are different. If we open young women to the inane things that boys do, we give them the option to act just as stupid. In our efforts to make our youth groups cool enough to keep kids from dropping out, we’ve inadvertently encouraged the Girls Gone Wild culture.Should we be surprised then that young women today are remarkably aggressive compared to their peers from just thirty years ago? There’s a hardness there that shouldn’t be in a woman, especially a Christian one. Unfettered from whatever expectations we placed on feminine propriety back then, girls today look at themselves as being just like the boys. This is not to say that the boys don’t have a responsibility to grow up, but that we’ve crushed one of the bulwarks of human society: female normalization of males. With the girls out trying to be one of the boys instead of being solidly female, you can’t put all the blame on the boys if they respond to the girls as being just one of the guys, albeit with a different sexual attraction. That only leads to trouble.

7. We’ve encouraged young women to be their own bosses

All the issues I raised above have led to today’s young women thinking that they need nothing from men, especially protection. The problem for men here is that any man with a spine attempting to look out for a girl on the verge of making a mistake is more likely to get a “Butt out” as a response than a “Thank you for protecting me.” I know that this has been the response I’ve received whenever I’ve questioned a young woman about here choice of a guy.Empowering young women to be the masters of their own fate has had this two-edged sword effect: yes, they are more confident in their decision making, but the decisions reached are often ill-advised. And no amount of pressure will change their minds. Given the cultural edicts we’ve erected even within the Church, our hand is forced unless we are willing to question the entire basis of modern femininity within the whole Church structure. As far as I can see, no one is willing to start this kind of soul-searching.

I could go on and on.

But my point here is the same one I made in “Are You a Hamster?” when I responded to Douglas Groothuis: The fix is too simplistic. To Brian I say that it is not enough to ask men to get a spine. All sorts of deep, deep cultural and Church issues are involved here. If we do not deal with those underlying issues, all the backbones in the world won’t help.

In summary, the Church must start questioning

  • How we prepare young people for marriage
  • What expectations we set in others for determining a good marriage partner
  • What makes a true man or woman of God
  • What cultural values support or detract from godliness in our sexual roles
  • The inroads that feminism has made into Church practice and the subsequent cultural expectations of Christians
  • Whether defaulting to kicking the kids out at eighteen or sending them off to college is the way of Christ
  • Whether we are contributing to the manliness of women
  • Whether the measure of a man, at least the one is that women seem to be prioritizing, is how much money he makes or how successful his career is rather than the depth of his love for Christ.
  • Whether women belong in the roles that formerly were held solely by men

Maintaining the sexual status quo we’ve adopted in the Church over the last forty years won’t cut it anymore. It’s not enough to grow a spine unless that spine is able to bear up under tough questions about womanhood and manhood in the American Church and the culture at large.

Are we ready to question it all?

Curses

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Death and life are in the power of the tongue….
—Proverbs 18:21a ESV

And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.
—James 3:6-9 ESV

At a healing service about ten years ago or so, I was called upon by my church to help with prayer. As a prayer team leader, I was charged with making sure we met the prayer needs of the church while directing the trained volunteers who would pray for others after our meetings. That role was an uplifting ministry that I cherished.

The healing service began and all of us were praying with folks who came up front. After a time, the crowd thinned and I found myself alone. Only then did a small man dressed in a suit entirely in white approach me. He was timid, and with an Eastern European lilt he could only say, "Please pray for me."

When I laid my hands on him, I knew immediately that this man did not covet my prayers for a nice day. Asking God to reveal the man's true need, I couldn't avoid a word that kept coming back to me again and again: Curse. CurseSo I prayed that the blood of Christ would sever the power of all curses on this man's life. The instant I spoke this out loud, he began screaming and fell to the ground.

Being a prayer team leader, I swiftly summoned several others to come over and continue praying with me over this man. We prayed for about ten minutes and I witnessed his countenance utterly change from terror to peace. If ever I needed a video camera to record that kind of profound release in a tormented soul, that moment called for it more than almost any other I've witnessed in my life.

Talking with this man afterwards, he told me that back in his native country his mother had crossed the local sorceress, who responded by placing the entire family under a curse. The man's mother, pregnant at the time, later died in childbirth. The girl that was born was left profoundly retarded as a result of problems in delivery. The man's brother soon afterwards went insane and was institutionalized—until the country's asylums were dismantled in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union. The man's father went blind a few years after his wife died and now rarely spoke.

In my years as a Christian, I've prayed for a lot of people, but there have always been times when people I've prayed for embellish their stories. However, as much as I was beginning to think that this little man standing in front of me now was perhaps adding to his tale, he silenced my doubts by leading me to the back of the church where his blind father, deranged brother, and mentally disabled sister sat as quietly as could be expected, the brother only occasionally muttering something unintelligible.

I was shocked.

I was also called away for another prayer need. Telling the man I wanted to talk with him more, I went back up front, prayed for the new need that had arisen, then immediately walked back to that broken family, discovering they had left quietly in the sanctuary's semi-darkness, only one of them finding release.

Too much "Evil Eye" for you? Not the kind of thing you've ever encountered? Well let me share a more personal story.

I got a call from a friend one night who was truly suffering. He'd come to the decision that he could not be a Christian any longer, and as we talked he confessed that the reason he was abandoning the faith was me.

No Christian ever wants to be the stumbling block for another person's faith, and I was taken aback by the comment, searching through every conversation, every encounter I'd had with this friend for as long as we'd known each other. Nothing I'd said or done to him was coming back to me.

Then my friend confessed that the reason he'd come to this decision was from noting all the rotten things that had happened to me in the years since he'd known me. I won't go into that list here, but my friend recalled every item on that list in excruciating detail, some of which I had never told him, but he must have gotten from other sources. He summed up his comments by saying that he could not reconcile how a Christian like myself, who had given everything up to follow Christ, could possibly go on considering what I'd experienced. If "God" truly existed, what kind of god could he be if he treated his own servants so badly, returning faithfulness with pain? My friend also wondered if I was merely deluded for pressing on in faith with a smile on my face and hope still in my heart. It was for these reasons that he could no longer believe anything in the Christian faith was true. I was the example that proved his deduction.

We continued to talk for hours after. Only later did I learn that our conversation had probably saved his life. But what I didn't know was what was going on in spiritual places because of what he said to me one humid summer evening long ago.

I think it was just today that I came to grips with his pronouncement. In some of my darkest times, what he said to me that night haunted me, and only now do I recognize it for the curse that it was. Only now do I feel like the black power of that comment has been rendered inert in the light of Christ.

How many of us are laboring under a curse someone glibly tossed out a decade or more ago? What words carelessly spoken—or even spoken with intent—have pinned us to the ground or left us flailing?

Many of you reading this are not charismatics; I understand that. But this isn't pew-jumping, bark-like-a-dog charismania, folks. Curses are a dark demonic oppression that gets called into use to destroy, undermine, hamper, and diminish the work of God in our lives. If we do not take curses before Him and let His Strong Right Hand shatter them, they can persist and wreak havoc.

Ask God today to expose curses that have been pronounced over you in your life. Some of you may have had parents that said things to you that have bound you in chains for years. Get those before God. Or you may have said things with a fire on your tongue that has burned people so fiercely that they can't get over it. Pray that out and let God show you who you need to approach in forgiveness. Too many of us speak carelessly and unleash things that can damage many.

Life and Death are in the power of the tongue. Therefore, speak life and not death. Our witness for the Lord depends on it.