Oh, I’ve seen philosophy, and I’ve seen guts
And to the philosophers I say they’re nuts
Because when grace of God falls like rain
Those who drink it become young again.
Well call me crazy, call me grandiose, call me whatever you want to call me, folks.
But evangelists could be doing this better. A LOT better.
But first they themselves need to be saved, at least to the point where they can understand what the “gays” are going through.
I even think a lot of the heat they traditionally caught was not even because of sins on their part, but because they embarrassed society. “We’re too good to have that kind of thing going on here!”
It showed up even as distorted views of the Old Testament mandates. Closet activity wasn’t penalized under law because it never gained the witnesses required to do it.
But look at a situation like that, and inevitably you will view a broken soul. One which was then “put back together wrong” by Satan.
It takes great quantities of grace to get such a person to loosen up to the point where Jesus can “put them back together right.” Now there still is the question of free will, by which a person could refuse every possible grace till the end. And that person then reaps a fate of damnation, since salvation wasn’t accepted. But there are also people who don’t progress as much as they could on earth after salvation, because the grace is not found to do that. As in the case of the sin against recognizing Jesus in the communion, “some are sick and others sleep.”
The churches of the first century had that kind of grace. Our modern religious institutions only see it fitfully, if at all. And it gives God a colossal headache to see us not even TRYING to put that back into practice. I’d rather even go to a snake handling church, if by virtue of its fervor it got the other things right.
But there may be other snakes that they can handle as well. And those snakes are snakes they cannot see because they are demonic snakes.
Now they shouldn’t be handled in vain, for the sake of vanity. God doesn’t like gratuitous tests. However, when a demonic snake is cast aside, for the sake of setting a sinner free, all heaven has a party over it.
God please make me into that kind of snake handler!!!