Son of God have mercy on me.
My identity
Is Christ in me,
Not what I feel
Or what I want,
Or what I see,
But daily
Letting Jesus
Direct me
From within,
And living
By His mercy.
“Christ in you,” the inner Jesus, is infinitely more than a church service or a sermon or a Christian concert. He’s the Creator of the Universe, waiting for you to lay down your ego and quit blocking His way, so that He can release the ongoing flow His glory within you, though you, and around you.
Secondhand Christianity creates religious spectators. Firsthand faith produces Spirit-led Christ-followers. God’s more concerned with what you do the remaining 167 hours per week than with what you do for one hour on Sunday morning.
Hand-me-down Christianity is never as powerful as firsthand interaction with Jesus. Sermon-hearing and church programs are forms of hand-me-down Christianity that don’t require any actual interaction with Jesus. Toss out your religious hand-me-downs and begin to seek God and read the Bible for yourself! Be taught and led by the Spirit.
Secondhand Christianity is taught from mind to mind. Firsthand faith is more caught by the heart than taught by the brain. Religious hand-me-downs often entrap us in casual Christianity and prevent us from having frequent firsthand experiences with Jesus.
Hand-me-down Christianity is propagated by religious institutions. Firsthand faith is birthed in a human heart by God’s Spirit. Secondhand religion is a sedative. Firsthand faith stirs up the fire of God. Religious hand-me-downs may be comfortable but many of them block God’s light from our heart.
What a preacher tells you is hand-me-down Christianity. What the living Jesus tells you is first-hand faith! Jesus says this about religious hand-me-downs. “You nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition.”
Jesus wants to give you a living relationship with Him, not second-hand religion! Let Jesus make you a new creature in Christ, not a religious hand-me-down.
Beliefs about God are frequently religious hand-me-downs rather than resounding revelation. Which are your beliefs? If you’ve accepted all the religious beliefs you were taught by a church without questioning them and seeking God yourself, you have religious hand-me-downs.
How I lost my hand-me-down religion: I experienced a most unusual “if” thought once while sitting through a sermon as a teenager: “If you were born a Hindu what would you be today?” After pondering it I realized that I would have been a Hindu. Another thought rapidly followed: “Why do you think you’re a Christian?” In a flash I realized that my Christian beliefs were just hand-me-down cultural religion that I had blindly accepted. That revelation made me hungry for reality, so I asked God to show me the truth. About two years later I had a personal encounter with the risen Jesus that filled me with unrelenting passion to follow and obey Him.
The Jesus revolution is the daily fight to “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.” Colossians 3:2. Every believer who has been inwardly changed by Christ still lives in this physical world that is under the influence of invisible demonic principalities and powers. The Bible calls the devil “the god of this age.” 2 Corinthians 4:4. The Jesus revolution is the call to shift your obedience from the god, demons, and desires of this age to the living Jesus and the invisible kingdom of God.
The Jesus revolution is to engage in ongoing spiritual warfare in order to bring your every thought, imagination, and mental stronghold into full alignment with the living Jesus. The Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness to fight the devil. When you’re enduring life’s wilderness, let the Spirit lead you to the Scriptures that you can use to resist and refute the invisible devil and his demons that are trying to discourage, defeat, and destroy you.
The Jesus revolution isn’t a religious institution. Continually spoon-feeding Christians with religious talks makes the more dependent on church attendance than on the risen Jesus.
The Jesus revolution is a lifetime battle to resist and overcome the invisible demonic desires that tempt and torment you and to unconditionally surrender to and obey the risen Jesus throughout each day. “Fight the good fight of faith.”
The Jesus revolution isn’t a religious band-aid or a superficial solution to life’s problems. It’s the risen Jesus working in and through ordinary people who are continually filled with and consumed by His presence and power. The Jesus revolution revives and empowers Christ-followers to consistently resist, refute, and repel the demonic thoughts, feelings, and desires that try to capture and control their mind and heart.
Never make choices
To listen to or obey
Demonic voices;
Resist them
And drive them out
Of your mind and heart!
Demonic words
Coerce and torment,
Like birds
Of prey.
When they fly
Into your mind
Never let them stay.
Always drive them away.
Demonic thoughts are dangerous. As long as I can remember I’ve had voices come to my mind that try to torment and coerce me. Even as a small child I realized that those voices weren’t mine and I gradually learned to continually resist them and to allow them no uncontested space in my mind. As I got older, I read self-help books to learn techniques to protect my mind from those voices. When at age 19 I encountered and began to follow the risen Jesus I started to devour the Bible and I learned many Spirit-empowered ways to protect my mind from demonic thoughts. Later, I found the Philokalia, a 5-volume collection of the writings of ancient Orthodox monks, and I was amazed to learn that the closer they got to Jesus, the more they had to fight and resist demons. Through the years, their writings and the writings of other Orthodox monks have helped me greatly in my walk with the living Jesus and in my fight to refute and drive out the voices of demons both in myself and in others.
Demonic voices want to identify you by your tormenting feelings and your compulsive desires. Don’t let them!
Biblical Christianity is a spiritual revolution, not an institution. The risen Jesus (not church attendance) is the foundation of true Christianity and a Spirit-led life. Continually surrender to Him! The Jesus Solution to self-focus is
“Deny yourself, take up your cross daily, and follow Me.”
The invisible teacher (the risen Jesus) will speak clearly in the heart of the people who truly want to hear Him. Do you? When you’re being taught by God’s Spirit speaking within you, the words of the Bible will come alive in your heart. Just because you can’t see Jesus doesn’t mean He can’t teach you!
Trying to learn the Bible without daily doing what it says, is like trying to learn to play baseball while never picking up a glove, ball, or bat. Openly and humbly interacting heart-to-heart with other passionate Christ-followers while embracing the risen Jesus and staying aligned with the Bible will keep His fire ever burning in your heart.
Recipe for spiritual doldrums:
1) Hear a religious talk,
2) Walk away and forget it,
3) Come back each week and do it again.
Recipe for spiritual awakening:
1) Daily listen to Jesus in your heart,
2) Verify what you hear with the Bible,
3) Say and do what He tells you to.
Even after decades of sermon-hearing and 3 years of seminary, I’ve learned very little through religious lectures. Oh, I’ve obtained some dry theological information that way, but little of it has inspired me. I was taught the knowledge that keeps my heart ablaze with passion for Jesus by God’s Spirit speaking in my heart and making me hungry to continually devour the Bible, to bask in His presence, and to align my thoughts and behaviors to His will.
Christians can gather without organizing into a religious institution and instead let God’s Spirit lead and empower us. Will we? I don’t think the living Jesus likes being structured, systematized, and nationalized by religious organizations. Intuitional Christianity where Jesus speaks directly to human hearts is often abandoned for institutional Christianity that inserts a pastor between Christ and His people.
Jesus never said, “Wherever a big crowd of people is gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.” He said, “two or three.” It’s much more difficult to get a crowd of people to be led by God’s Spirit than it is to get two or three (or a few) to hear and obey the Spirit together.
A problem with man-led religious structures is that the person at the top who claims to hold others accountable, has no individual in the organization who is allowed to effectively challenge him and hold him accountable. When he’s out of alignment with God, the whole group feels coerced to follow.
2,000 years later we can still follow Jesus. He remains alive and continues to lead those who are willing to listen to and obey Him. The new wine of revival will quickly spill and lose its thrill if it’s pulled into and tamed by religious institutions.
Revival happens in individual hearts. It’s not confined to a particular place or building. “Stir up the gift that is in you!” Be dependent on the living Jesus, not on a church or preacher!
The profound simplicity of New Testament ekklesia: Gather with one or more Christ-followers and listen to Jesus together. Then let each person say and do what Jesus tells them to.
Revival happens when Jesus is allowed to take control. Search: Beyond Church Ekklesia.
God disrupted the apostles’ (sent ones) early efforts to institutionalize the body of Christ. After Pentecost there were thousands of new Christians. Jesus wanted them to go into all the world, but they stayed in Jerusalem as the apostles (sent ones) began to organize and direct the Christian movement as if it were a local megachurch. A man they had appointed to “wait tables” (Stephen) did more than they had authorized for him to do and was killed for openly proclaiming Jesus. Great persecution broke out and all the believers were scattered everywhere preaching the Good News about Jesus, except the apostles (sent ones). Their attempt at putting the move of the Spirit into religious wineskins left them empty handed. Surely there’s a lesson there for us contemporary Christians.
Many Christians
Have been taught
By religious talks
But haven’t let
Themselves be brought
By God’s Spirit
To stay at the foot
Of the Cross.
Let the heartache
Of human heartbreak
Cause you to
Hunger and thirst
For more of Jesus.
Here’s a truth that our society is ignoring today: You can’t truly define who you are by the desires and appetites that torment, tightly control, and sometimes triumph over you. You’re much more than the things that you crave. You are a human being created in the image of God and you have been granted free will.
The world needs Christ-enthralled people. Be one.
Let churches be filled with Jesus-thrilled people! Instead of stuffing God’s Spirit, let’s do Spirit-led stuff! If Jesus is the Head of a church, let Him literally run it! If not, quit pretending that He is!
To be ever enthralled by the living Jesus is to experience perpetual peace, joy, and love. If you ever think you have enough of Jesus in your life, you don’t! He always has more of His presence and power to give you. The more I follow Jesus the more I want more of His presence and power in my life.
Here’s Jesus! He’s everywhere and always the same. The emptiness you feel is hunger for a closer relationship with Him.
Heart-connection with the risen Jesus can’t be staged from a church pulpit or platform. A humanly choreographed program can inform people about Jesus, but it’s a poor substitute for actual demonstrations of His presence. Biblical Christianity is an ongoing intimate personal relationship with the risen Jesus, not a study or a lecture about Him.
Most every church has a few people who are intently aware of Jesus’ presence, but they’re usually kept off of the Sunday program. Perhaps the people who are most aware of and yielded to the presence of Jesus are the ones who need to speak in churches; not the ones who have studied the most theology.
Preachers, if you ask, “Who this morning is excited about Jesus?” and then say, “Please come to the mic ad tell us why,” God will show up! Stubbornly sticking with one-man control of a church service drastically limits what the living Jesus is allowed to do.
If the person in the pulpit isn’t visibly thrilled about Jesus, the congregation won’t be either. I’ve never seen anything in the Bible to convince me that a person in a pulpit should control a Christian gathering.
The desperate times today call for a Christianity that’s led by the living Jesus. Human-led churches aren’t up to the task! For example: the false, modern definition of healthy sexuality is: “Anything anybody wants to do with anybody they can manipulate to do it with them.”
Enthralled!
Jesus facinates me,
Holds all my attention
And keeps me
Immersed in His presence.
My heart is
Tangled up
With Him
And ever awed
By my awareness
Of His reality.
Come hear Jesus,
Here, there, and
Everywhere.
Keep your ear
In gear
To clearly hear
And obey
The here Jesus.
Demonstrations of Jesus’ love are far more effective than sermons about it. People in alcohol and drug recovery learn to “Let go and let God.” Why don’t pastors let go and let Jesus peddle?
Revival happens when Jesus takes control of Christian gatherings. When people take it back, revival fades away. Too many pastors hold on and block God! It’s time to let go and let God.
When church meets like a chain of command under the control of a human leader there’s no room for the living Jesus to take charge. When Christians gather to worship like a bicycle wheel with each spoke (person) directly connected to the risen Jesus, He steers them into His presence and glory and God’s Spirit rolls on!
Churches are so addicted to human control that they almost never give Christ-control a chance. God’s Spirit is too often pushed away by human organization and religious control. Church seems to me to be like people playing “keep away” — keeping control of the meeting away from the risen Jesus. When someone other than the living Jesus has control of a church, the people will miss out on the glory of seeing Christ personally lead His body.
Church needs to be about releasing daily doers of the word, not about holding on to Sunday hearers. It’s time for sermon-hearing church attendees to become Jesus-obeying Christ-followers. Make the shift today!
Every true Christian has a direct relationship with the risen Jesus that no one should ever come between! No one has a right to control a meeting that’s been dedicated to Christ. Let’s take our hands off and let Jesus take charge. Any Christian leader who uses manipulation or coercion has stepped out of the will of God.
Pastors need to train and release people to go and freely follow the living Jesus, not hold on to and control them. Here’s great sermon idea! Read the Bible verses about the boy Samuel hearing God’s voice. Then have the congregation listen to God and share what He tells them.
Jesus calls us to submit to His authority and to turn away from the domination of our own desires. Every Christian can graduate from being a spectator and begin to experience the book of Acts stuff every day. Search: The Joy of Early Christianity book. Here’s an example:
I was a counselor and chaplain in an alcohol and drug rehab for 5 1/2 years. Men would tell me stories about the evil that they had done, and I would be shocked and appalled at the things I heard. Then I would be equally shocked by the kindness, mercy, and compassion that rose up in me and flowed out as I prayed for them and often wept with them. Afterwards, those same men treated me with such respect and kindness that I was in awe at how God changed their attitude.
Let Jesus lift
Your heart on high
Like a balloon
Rising in the sky.
You don’t have to try
Or work hard to fly.
Just nurture the gift
Of Christ in you.
Standing, sitting, walking, or knelling, prayer for revival needs to be from the heart! Here’s my revival prayer:
Send me, Jesus! I don’t want to continually sit and be satisfied with Sunday sermons about You. I want to hear, to follow, and to obey You every day and be a light that helps make everyone I meet aware of the reality of Your presence and love.
Revival is the wake-up sound of God sending . . .
Too many Christians
Are content
To conform
To the culture
Around them
Without a hint
That God’s intent
Is that we’re all sent
To show and tell
People how
To repent
And be
Set free
By the
Risen Jesus.
Go into the world
And make disciples.
When I first wake up in the morning, I sense Jesus’ voice while I’m still in bed. As I listen, His words focus me on what He wants to say and do throughout the day.
Hearing what the Spirit is saying, noticing His promptings within you, is the first step to being Spirit-led. If people were trained to daily hear what the Spirit is saying and verify it with the Bible, they would no longer be dependent on sermon-hearing.
The resurrected Jesus repeatedly told His followers to hear what the Spirit is saying to them when they gather as His body. It’s time to meet to hear and obey His inner promptings and then be sent by Jesus to change the world with His love. Jesus wants to send all His followers into the world to make disciples, not to have them forever sit and hear sermons about Christianity 101.
Be aware.
Notice people’s pain.
Dare to care
And to share
Some kindness
Everywhere.
Christians are meant
To be sent
To spread good news,
Not to stay
In a church
And waste away.
See a Jesus Revelation on the screen of your heart and you’ll never be the same. Revival needs new wineskins: Search: The Joy of Early Christianity book.
I meet with God here, there, and everywhere. Throughout the day I seek to stay in His presence and obey the inner promptings of the Spirit. I want to let the risen Jesus be my interior decorator and continually rearrange my heart to be like His.
If you will quit running and let Jesus get a firm hold on your heart, you’ll finally find your happy place! When your interior is morally inferior to your exterior, it’s time to listen to your conscience, confess what you’re hiding, and humbly repent.
Where the battles inside of us are being won, spiritual warfare is victorious because inner violence is driving out deceptive desires, feelings, and demons! First, we need to let the living Jesus help us defeat our inner enemies and establish His absolute Lordship and reign within us and among us. Then wherever we go we’ll be contagious carriers of His victory and His presence, and we’ll spread and revive His kingdom authority everywhere.
Many Christians have ears to hear the Spirit, but we have been trained to listen to a weekly sermon together instead of hearing and obeying God’s inner promptings as the body of Christ. As Christ-followers we need to frequently gather to hear the Spirit and to act on His inner promptings together. “Where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.” Where the King rules, there is His kingdom! Let His reign be demonstrated through our ongoing surrender and obedience everywhere we go.
In the inner wilderness where we are alone in our own heart without outward distractions, the devil sends his thoughts to tempt and torment us. It is there, deep within us, that we can learn spiritual warfare: to resist the demons, to cast them out and to make them flee. It is also in our inner wilderness that angels come to minister to us, and we can learn to recognize and obey the voice of our Shepherd leading us to life, spiritual authority, and unspeakable joy. To avoid the inner wilderness is to avoid spiritual growth. “Be still and know that I am God.”
A church service should make it easier for Christians to be led by the Spirit, not control them and make it more difficult. Revival introduces us to heart proximity to the risen Jesus and the people who passionately love Him.
The Jesus Revolution movie ended by saying that much of the Jesus Movement happened outside of and independent of churches. That was my experience and the experience of multitudes in my generation.
In early 1970 some students from Asbury University came and spoke at a small college in a small town in West Tennessee (University of Tennessee Martin) and spread revival to a weekly “Dorm Devotion” meeting there. A few weeks later I visited one of those meetings and found a room full of people visibly thrilled about Jesus.
What I heard students say and what I saw on their faces that night immediately changed me from within. I have never been the same. It still moves me to tears when I tell people about how Jesus showed Himself to me in an instant that night.
Those students quickly became family as together we celebrated our love for Jesus. We met weekly to sing songs, pray, hear testimonies, share Scriptures, encourage one another and enjoy Jesus’ presence working among us.
We continually hung out with each other during the week sharing our excitement about what Jesus was showing us and the amazing way He was working in our lives. We felt a deep bond that went far beyond theology or church affiliation. When we would run into each other in various places on campus, we often held hands and had spontaneous prayer meetings. We wanted to tell everybody everywhere about the living Jesus and even though most of us weren’t hippies, we were all known as Jesus Freaks.
During my years there I didn’t go to church much. When I did attend a sermon-based church service it was always a spiritual letdown from my daily and weekly experiences with my fellow campus Jesus-lovers.
We saw churches as mission fields where we could show up and tell people that Jesus is real and truly alive and present. We formed a choir and were occasionally invited to sing and testify in churches. We went on long weekends in churches called “Lay Witness Missions” where we took turns sharing our stories about how the living Jesus was working in our lives and saw many church people weep and repent and be transformed by the risen Jesus.
I was ruined by my Jesus Revolution college years. Since then, I’ve never been satisfied with a few songs and a sermon. I want to hear God’s people share how the living Jesus is working in and through them! I want to let Jesus take charge when we meet together so we can be led by the Spirit instead of by a pastor or a program. Is that too much to ask?
In the Jesus Revolution movie, Chuck Smith (the official church pastor) tells Lonnie Frisbee (the hippie co-pastor) that the church meetings need to be kept under control. Lonnie says that no one should try to control the Spirit. Then Chuck eventually forces Lonnie (who God had used to fill the church with hippies) to leave because he was obeying the Spirit and praying for and proclaiming miracles. (Lonnie later helped start the Vineyard Movement/churches, along with John Wimber, which was more open to the leading and gifts of the Spirit. However, it still maintained the one-man sermon and senior pastor model of church.)
After I graduated in 1974, I went to Southern California for a year because I wanted to continue to experience the Jesus Revolution. I went to seminary at Melodyland, a huge charismatic church and small seminary. I also went numerous times to the Saturday night concerts at Calvary Chapel. By that time both places had already drifted away from the Spirit-led spontaneity of the outta church Jesus Revolution into a more formal and religious approach to Christianity. There I realized that it takes hard work to hold on to your “first love” for Jesus.
“Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first. Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first.” –Jesus, speaking in Revelation 2:4-5.
Over the years, I’ve seen much “first love” from the Jesus Revolution shift into formalism, religion, and institutionalism. I’ve even been forced to leave churches because I prayed for and proclaimed miracles. I pray that this present and coming Jesus Revolution is not so quickly muffled and muzzled by churches and religious organizations but remains free to let the living Jesus be the active, literal and ongoing Head of what He is now pouring out in the earth. (The 2023 Asbury Outpouring did a wonderful job of letting Jesus lead and keeping the focus on Him instead of on human leaders.)
Go see the movie, Jesus Revolution, and observe the way Jesus showed up with glory, healing, and deliverance in non-religious people’s lives. Then notice the shift toward institutionalism in the second half of the movie. Ask Jesus to show Himself to you and to keep you passionately following Him (instead of an organization or a pastor) for the rest of your life!
A few more thoughts:
Are preachers throwing gutter balls? I just had an image come to my mind of bowling pins and gutter balls. The pins were neatly lined up and a man was rolling gutter balls so he wouldn’t disturb them. When God’s word is declared, it should disrupt us and reset us, not leave us unchanged and stuck in the same religious routine week after week.
True Christianity requires directly hearing God’s Spirit, not hand-me-down hearing through a preacher. Listen within, don’t depend on sermons. Institutional Christianity gathers spectators. The living Jesus fills, empowers, and releases witnesses who obey Him, testify to, and demonstrate His reality!
Spectator Christians are like stuck keys on a piano; no matter how much they’re tapped, they remain silent. When Christians gather as spectators, the Holy Spirit is hindered, but when they’re hungry and encouraged to freely interact with Jesus and one another, God’s glory shows up!
Jesus isn’t a religious institution. He’s the living Creator and Lord of all! Follow Him beyond church as usual to overwhelming peace, joy, and love!
It’s time to deinstitutionalize Christianity. Connect heart-to-heart with the risen Jesus and follow Him! Be daily led by God’s Spirit. Let’s drop the religious titles and just be brothers and sisters in Christ.
Troubles and trials are revelatory. They show us our frailty and cause us to deeply realize our great need for the power and presence of the living, resurrected Jesus. Trials motivate us to search our heart, to repent, to cry out for, and to cling to God’s mercy and help. When we are profoundly aware of our brokenness, we openly acknowledge our weaknesses and then Jesus steps into our inner abyss with His reality and strength.
Be Spirit-led
And Spirit-fed.
No longer live
As though you’re
Spiritually dead.
Let Jesus be
Your living Head
As you
Daily do
What He says.
Revival?
A Christian whose
Heart and mind
Are entwined
With unkind
Thoughts and
Bad desires
Needs to repent,
Unwind
And be realigned
To God’s inner light.
Free Gas for Your Think Tank -- Short Reflections, Lasting Encouragement 