Elijah and the Charismatics - FBN blog post

I just added some RSS blog feeds to Thunderbird, (e-mail program) so I'm reading some of the messages that came in on the feed. This one from the Free Believers Network blog touched on some of what this blog and my ministry is all about. It's a year old, but very good, by Darin Hufford. A few paragraphs are below:

Baal worship was about emotionalism.

The evidence is in the emotionalism. They are certain that God showed up because they got emotional and others did, as well. People were crying and sobbing with their hands in the air. After all, this is the normal human response to the Spirit of God. When God's Spirit begins to move, everyone in the room begins to break down and cry. I must have heard my Pastor over a thousand times speak the words, "The Spirit of God is in this room tonight - people are literally crying and sobbing." This has become a common understanding among Christians in America. When the Spirit moves, people get emotional. As a preacher, you can see the moment the Spirit enters the service because tears begin to stream down people's faces.

The irony is that I haven't found one account in all of Scripture where this was the human reaction to the presence of God. I don't recall anyone sobbing and crying the moment the Holy Spirit touched them in the New Testament, yet today we act as if the sobbing and crying is evidence of His presence. No one laughed uncontrollably either for that matter and believe it or not, in the almost 8000 year span of scripture from Adam and Eve to the Apostle Paul there wasn't one single person who "twitched" under the power of the Holy Spirit. No one was "Slain in the Spirit," no one's hands shook violently and thank God no one barked like a dog. I have come to the conclusion that modern day Charismatic emotionalism is nothing more than the resurrection of the Baal religion of the Old Testament times. I know for a fact that not every Charismatic behaves this way or believes like this. I know I don't. There are thousands of others however, who are in serious bondage to outright Baal worship and they don't even know it.

Many Christians today are caught in a ‘Prophets-of-Baal' mindset. I'm not saying that it's wrong to become emotional while in the presence of God. I am stating, however, that it's wrong to think that just because you get emotional, it is evidence of the presence of God, or that getting yourself worked up into an emotional frenzy is the same as creating an atmosphere where God will "show up." I have five children and trust me in this. When they get emotional, I CAN'T DO ANYTHING WITH THEM. In fact, that's about the only time when communication with them is impossible.

It's the straight-faced times that I long to share with them. That's exactly how your Father in heaven is with you. If you feel that God's dealings with you will always result in emotionalism you are basically missing out on an entire life with him. Unless you are suffering with chronic depression and feeling emotional ALL the time you won't have a daily walk with your Father. God cannot be conjured up. The act of trying to conjure Him up is Baal worship. New Testament Christians need to understand that He doesn't "show up" to our services. He lives inside of us always whether we feel Him or not. That's what faith is.

22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, against such things there is no law. (Gal 5:22-23 ESV)

Switching to Linux - the saga

This is going to be a somewhat long post -- I'll keep it as brief as I can. Before I decided to switch to Linux, I decided to see if there were any books on the topic at my local library. They had 1 (one) whole book about Linux, that being the 4th edition of Learning Red Hat Enterprise Linux & Fedora, by Bill McCarty . It's 4th edition copyright was 2004; and there were 2 installation CD's enclosed. It explained some basics, which helped me decide to go ahead and make the switch. And of course, I also backed up a lot of important files to CD as well as to an external USB hard drive I got a few months ago.

I had a good idea there was probably something more recent available at a book store, so the following week I bought a Ubuntu linux book at Barnes & Noble that had an installation CD and DVD included. I tried out the live dvd, and it was slow due to having to access the DVD drive, but it came up eventually and I decided to go ahead with the install, after reading the instructions.

The Ubuntu install didn't work, when I used the text install option to see what the hang-up was, I got a message about a kernel panic. I'm not sure how a computer or a kernel can panic, and it's impossible to reason with a kernel that wants to panic; so I went online and read some things that suggested that it needed disk space for the install, it didn't know it was going to get the whole hard drive. So I spent much time defragmenting the 20 gig drive (which had 4 partitions), tried installing again, then got the same error message.

Since Ubuntu isn't the only linux distro, and since I had the RHE Linux and Fedora book with 2 disks, I decided to try to install Fedora instead. It went without a hitch. But then I discovered that I couldn't get online, since I'm using a usb - ethernet adapter for my DSL modem, and/or a Linksys cardbus (pcmcia) wireless adapter -- Fedora core didn't recognize either of them. That just wasn't going to work. Now I was ready to panic, since Win2k was no longer on my computer. I thought I'd see if I could find something newer at another book store.

I found a Fedora 7 'bible' at another store, and that installed just fine. And it did recognize my DSL modem connection, so I could get online. (While the software itself is 'free' -- these books sure aren't! Both books were about $50/each, which wasn't exactly in my budget, but it's nice to have them as reference. I'd actually recommend having at least one.)

Then I ran into the issue of getting Flashplayer installed and working, as well as getting my Linksys wireless cardbus adapter working, all of which required more research since that wasn't covered very well in the book I'd gotten. Thankfully there are a lot of good instructions online, you just have to be able to find it. For the wireless it took several attempts, trying different drivers, but eventually I got it working. Yay!

By now I found out that Fedora 7 was an 'old' version (it's only 2 years old, much newer than Windows 2000! But Fedora pushes out a new release about every 6 months, and they recently released Fedora 11.) I tried twice to install F11, using 2 different methods and it didn't work. So I had to re-install Fedora 7 twice. And F7 runs rather well on my laptop, I just thought it would be nice to use the newest version. It's also running the newest version of Firefox (3.5) just fine, too.

After relating some of the issues I had installing F11 on the Fedora Forums (here), someone agreed with me that my laptop configuration was at the lower edge of what is expected to work with F11 and then suggested I may want to look into Puppy Linux. I looked at it and since it's only about 100mb for the CD, I downloaded it, and tried it 'live' (meaning it'll boot from the CD and run in RAM, without disturbing your hard drive), which also had some issues. I discovered I could use the boot command option of 'acpi=force' to get it to boot, and it did run pretty fast. Since my 2nd (3rd?) installation of Fedora 7 used what they call a 'logical volume manager' I couldn't install Puppy on the hard drive with LVM.

I didn't really want the LVM anyway -- it's probably a good thing if you're running servers and need to add or remove drives while everything else keeps running, but for a single home computer, I didn't think it performed as well as using it without the LVM. So back to re-installing F7 yet again, with a free partition so I could install Puppy, too. I actually ended up installing a puppy derivative called 'Slaxer-Pup' because it recognized my wireless adapter, loads the drivers and everything -- which wouldn't work with Puppy 4.2.1 because the 'acpi=force' option disabled the IRQ that the wireless device uses.

One of the reasons I wanted to get Puppy Linux working was because I also have a 9 year old desktop PC that only has 64mb of RAM. I may decide to add more RAM, but if Puppy will run on it as it is, all the better! I'm not going to attempt that for at least a couple of weeks though. I suspect that if I had a newer computer, in the range of 2-5 years old, instead of a 10+ year old laptop, everything may have gone smoother. Some people install Linux and 'it just works', with a few tweaks here and there. I've certainly learned a lot, and I'm happy with my setup of a dual-boot of Fedora 7 and Puppy Linux.

One thing I noticed while visiting various websites, is that pictures and graphics seem to be sharper and crisper under Linux than they were in Windows(tm); I'm not sure why. I also noticed that some websites were un-readable, due to font issues. I did some research on that, and found some 'web core fonts' as well as some other fonts to install (in /usr/share/fonts); and during my several re-installations of F7, I always had a copy of those to put back on the system, so now everything looks good.

During the several weeks I was doing all of that, I also managed to listen to a couple of online radio programs about the new EFT 'open hand policy', and I'll do a post about that in the next few days or so.

Why I switched to Linux

I haven't posted much to the blog for the past few weeks, mainly because I've been spending a good amount of time switching the operating system of my used laptop to Linux, replacing Windows 2000. Why did I switch to linux? That's what this post will
answer.

As anyone who uses Windows(tm) and accesses the internet knows, no matter how careful you are, you really need to have a good virus scan or 2 available. I had been using Comodo and AVG scanners for at least a couple of years, both of them are free for home use. (The very first virus-scan software I used was McAfee, which ran on a floppy disk!) At the end of 2008 I was notified that Comodo was changing their software from single-purpose firewalls, virus scanners etc. to a 'suite' where all of those functions would be integrated -- and the minimum (operating) system requirement was Windows XP. My laptop has (only) 256mb of RAM, and if it would run XP it'd be very slow, so that wasn't an option. Spending several hundred dollars to buy a new laptop or desktop computer also wasn't an option. I still had the AVG scanner, but at the beginning of this year they basically went the same route, going to a 'suite' of virus and malware detection with minimum system requirements of Win XP. I did find one anti-virus software that would run in Win 2000, that being ClamAV. Since I'd heard of linux several years ago, I decided to do a bit of research and find out if that would be a viable option.

I discovered that linux has come a long way since I'd first heard about it 10-15 years ago; as far as ease of use, etc. When I heard about it back then, I'd heard it required a lot of programming to get it working, and learning programming wasn't something I wanted to do. I've been using a PC since the early 1990's, back in the DOS days, so I was comfortable with a command line, but it had been several years since I've really used one.

Also, back in the late 1980's / early 1990's or so, IBM and Microsoft had entered into a joint venture to develop a 'multi-tasking' OS -- they called it OS/2. At some point they parted ways, and IBM took over development of OS/2, when they released the version they called 'Warp' in 1994 I got it, and really liked it. It ran Windows 3.1 programs as well as DOS programs and OS/2 programs. There weren't many native OS/2 programs, but it seemed to run Win 3.1 and DOS programs better than they ran on their own. And being able to have more than 1 program running at the same time, back then, was pretty incredible for the DOS platform. It wasn't just a pretty task-switcher, it would really run a report in 1 task while you were writing a letter in the other task-window, while you were downloading your emails in yet another window; all in 8 mb of RAM, which is hard to believe today.

For various reasons, I believe mostly due to marketing agreements with Microsoft, almost no 3rd party software developers were working on or planning OS/2 software releases, and then Win95 came out, and though I thought OS/2 was a superior OS, it basically lost out to newer Microsoft developments. You can read the Wikipedia link above for more of the details. Though I tried at various times over the years to be a fan of Microsoft, I never quite succeeded. So now seemed like the right time to find a viable alternative.

In my quest for a Win2k virus scanner, I did run across a good malware detector that I used for a couple of weeks before I switched to linux -- I'd recommend it to those of you still using Windows. That is WinPatrol, it was nice to have Scotty on patrol for a brief time.

I decided to take the plunge, and part of that story will be in the next blog post.

You Have A Destiny - Article by Andrew Wommack

I really liked this article; below is a few paragraphs:

The word destiny is defined in the America Heritage Dictionary as “the inevitable or necessary fate to which a particular person is destined. A predetermined course of events.” However, I believe that definition is wrong. It implies that your destiny cannot be avoided or prevented. That is not scriptural and therefore just not true.

It’s true that your destiny is preordained, but it is not inevitable. Whenever I teach this, it always brings up questions about the sovereignty of God. There are some who teach the sovereignty of God in a way that leads one to believe everything happens for a reason and that God is behind it all.

If this is true, then you have to be prepared to blame God for every evil and bad thing that happens on the earth. That means every catastrophe, every war, every murder, every rape, or anything else you can name must be God’s will. If that were true, then God has not done a good job of running the world. I believe this teaching is the worst heresy in the body of Christ today. And it’s very destructive because it takes away the will to resist evil.

God does not force His will or His plan upon anyone. So, is He sovereign? Yes, if the correct definition for sovereign is used. Sovereign means supreme in power or rank. We all would agree with this definition, but I totally disagree with the way religion today uses “sovereign.” God does not make His will for our lives come to pass. We have to submit to God and resist the devil (James 4:7). We have responsibility.

God has a destiny for you, and He wants to reveal it. But He is not going to run you down. He is not going to steamroll you or force it upon you. That reminds me of Romans 12:1, which says you are to present yourself as a living sacrifice. A living sacrifice is a volunteer. If God were to force your destiny upon you, it wouldn’t be a sacrifice; it would be slavery.

Once you believe you have a destiny, you must be willing to sacrifice your will for His. Then, you must renew your mind to the Word of God so it can help you separate soul from Spirit, your soulish plans from God’s plans. Once that is in order, you simply do what you want to do. What a deal!

The whole article is very good, certainly worth reading.

eft-sw website not available Tuesday the 26th of May

I received a notice from my website host that they're moving the servers to another location on Tuesday May 26, just in case you tried to reach the site and stopped by here in the meantime. Projections are for it to down from approximately 6am to 6pm Eastern (U.S.) time.

Also, I'd mentioned in an earlier post that Gary Craig (who developed EFT) had changed the rules regarding the use of the EFT logo, so I put a palm branch in it's stead. It's a public domain graphic I found on a clip-art page a while back and I think it'll work unless or until I come up with an actual logo for my ministry or until I find another small graphic to add. When I designed (and re-designed) my website I set the colors so they'd be compatible with the EFT logo colors. Now that I have a different graphic, I decided to also change some of the website colors. If it's too much lavender / purple, feel free to leave a comment. I may reverse the light/ dark placement for a while. I liked the colors for spring, and then I may change them again in a few months.

If you don't see the changed colors yet (previously blue/gray and now lavender / purple-y), it's because I'm posting this before I've actually made the new page 'live', which will be later tonight or tomorrow. More later!

Hebrews Highlights: What Do You Believe? - Article - Andrew Wommack Ministries

Excellent article by Andrew Wommack.

Here are a couple paragraphs:

Yet today, the Old Covenant thinking is still prevalent in the body of Christ. Average Christians have been taught, and believe, that the sins they committed before they were born again were all forgiven the moment they were saved. But they believe the sins they commit after their salvation all have to come under the blood and be confessed, one by one.

The extreme legalist believes that if a Christian does not confess their sins they will go straight to hell. The less extreme believe that at the very least, the person will lose their fellowship with the Lord, and He will not answer their prayers. Both are wrong. If you have made Jesus your Lord, you’ve become a new creature, and sin is no longer an issue between you and God.

Hebrews 10:10 says,

“By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”

Verse 14 goes on to say,

“For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified.”

I'm still working this out for myself, with His help, of course; it's a process.

Quantum Touch and channeling demons

I wanted to flag this article, regarding a family that encountered something called 'Quantum Touch'. I hadn't heard of it before reading this article, but it sounded similar to Reiki, from what little is mentioned in the article.

Apparently QT was developed by someone who listened to or studied the teachings of someone who channels a demon that calls itself Lazaris. I was introduced to some of those (Lazaris) teachings by someone in the mid 1990's; I had a couple of his cassette tapes as well as one of his books. They went into the dumpster (trash can) a few years ago, when I understood what it really was.

I also thought it might be a good place to tell my short Reiki story, particularly since there are some sites that purport to use what they call 'christian reiki'. In this, the devil uses deception in order to gain a foothold. First I'll quote a small portion from this article at the site linked above :

The spirit-world is real, but no one- not even the reikimasters have a clue- of what really is going on. ONLY Jesus Christ can help us!

... and from another comment on the page:

Many Christian websites and books make it seem very appealing and [say] that this is how Jesus healed. Your website makes perfect sense and in my heart I know that you are right, Reiki is not of God.

Around 1998 I attended a level-1 reiki 'atunement' and class in Seattle (I lived in Seattle at the time). I attended a sort of pre-atunement introduction on a Friday evening, and the next morning I had a major allergic reaction of some sort; with sneezing and runny nose, watery eyes, etc. Those symptoms were with me all day. There were 2 other women in the class in addition to myself. When it came time for the atunement, it was done separately for each person, with the other 2 people waiting in another room. During my atunement, the 'master' did whatever she does -- and then she was sort of baffled, because she said that it didn't 'take' for some reason. So she did it again, and I had the impression that it may not have taken the 2nd time either, but she said it did. I now believe the Holy Spirit was probably protecting me from my own deception.

Then, after the atunement we were shown how to use reiki on others, with each of us taking turns on the massage table, being shown where to hold our hands on another person to do the 'healing'. The whole process of doing a 'healing' takes about 45 minutes or so. Our only role in the process is to be a 'channel' of the 'healing energy' -- and I basically decided before the day was over that it would be a really boring way for me to spend my days. My thinking was that God gave me a brain for a reason, and performing reiki sessions as a career wouldn't be a good use of that. I think I tried using it on myself a couple of times and didn't get much out of it. So my reiki career was very short-lived, for which I now praise God.

If you're involved in reiki or 'quantum touch' (which appears to me to be a similar modality), please look at the reiki dangers site I linked above, which also has links to other sites on the topic.

he that doeth sin is of the devil; for the devil sinneth from the beginning. To this end was the Son of God manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil. (1Jn 3:8 ASV)

Struggling - the avenue of growth

I follow this blog on Google Reader, and really liked this message, so I thought I'd flag it here. It also reminded me that I'd heard something about the trees in the first 'Biosphere', that they didn't really develop their roots and fell over, because they didn't have any wind. Here's a quote from a climate study on that:

Wind is also necessary for creating hardy and strong trees. When it was first created, there was no wind inside of Biosphere 2. Plants grew relatively quickly, but they frequently fell over before they were of reproductive age. After some intensive observations and experimentation, it was determined that the lack of wind created trees with much softer wood than that species would normally make in the wild. They grew more quickly than they did in the wild, but they were harmed in the long run as a consequence.

So here's the blog post by the above title: Struggling - the avenue of growth

EFT Setup Phrase

I have had several people ask me about the EFT 'setup phrase' or affirmation; particularly the part about 'I deeply and completely accept myself' (or -- I would like to deeply and completely accept myself) and why do you say it three times? That is part of the basic EFT 'protocol' as it were, as developed by Gary Craig. Essentially, that part of the whole tapping sequence is to clear out any possible PR or 'psychological reversal'. PR isn't always present, but if it is it'll keep the rest of the tapping from doing any good. It's been estimated that it's only present about 30% of the time, but in some cases (like depression and cravings or addictions), it's present closer to 100% of the time. Since it doesn't take long to do the 'setup', we do it before we really know whether it's actually needed.

However, due to the questions, I decided to look in Roger Callahan's book Tapping the Healer Within , since it'd been a while since I read it, and found that he just taps the Karate Chop point 5 or 7 times IF the PR appears to be present, without any affirmation or 'reminder phrase'. I decided to try something a little different, and just say a 'setup phrase' once, rather than 3 times, (such as: Even though I have this fear, God hasn't given me a spirit of fear) while tapping the KC point -- you'd end up tapping that point or rubbing the Sore Spot, at least 5-7 times. I then move onto the rest of the tapping points with the reminder phrase. I've done that revised setup with myself and a few clients, and it's worked just fine. I have accordingly changed the tapping points I have available on my website. (see below) There was also the thought for me, that repeating the setup phrase 3 times was almost like a 'magic number', which smacks of witchcraft, which of course is in direct opposition to the topic of spiritual warfare, at least from a Christian viewpoint.

As a Christian, I have come to know I am accepted by God in Christ, so if you have a hard time with 'I accept myself' -- then by all means add it into the setup or say something like 'I know I am accepted in Christ Jesus and I can accept myself'. It's somewhat flexible. To illustrate the flexibility, here's a link (see below) to an article by someone else and how she selects setup phrases. What she uses as setup phrases, I would probably use as variations on the 'reminder phrase' while tapping the various points.

Lastly, while I'm mentioning changes, while I was reading the comments on the blog post I mentioned a couple of days ago about the online 'Summit', I discovered there was a change to the Open Hand Rights for EFT, and have accordingly removed the designation of having received the EFT-ADV certificate of completion on this blog and on my website, and have also removed the EFT Logo since it is no longer allowed to be a top of the page sort of identifier. I may add the logo somewhere else on the site as a secondary logo at some point, but for now I just have a palm branch in it's place. Since it looked silly to have the words Emotional Freedom Techniques next to the palm branch rather than next to the Logo that said EFT I removed that also. I also added a disclaimer that I'm using my version of EFT, etc. These new guidelines are apparently part of the fallout of the online 'Summit'. It's a bit annoying, but it is what it is.

20 Aug 2010 - I edited this article to remove the links to the EFT (emofree) website since it isn't up anymore. I also removed the link to the tapping points on my website since that has since moved and was a broken link, the tapping points are now an attachment to an article on the user forum of the site. In addition, I now have the EFT-ADV designation back on the blog and website as mentioned in the blog post earlier this year about Gary Craig's retirement.

Have you wondered why Gary isn’t part of The EFT® World Summit? - EFT Blog

I just read this comment by Gary Craig, about the 'world summit' and thought I'd post the link here, for those who may be interested. I'm still reading the comments, there are lots of them.

I wasn't going to sign up for the summit at all, because it originally sounded like (or I assumed?) it was going to be video presentations, and until last week I was using a dial-up internet connection. But I got a DSL connection last week and signed up for it, and it wasn't until I got onto the page the first day that I discovered it's audio, only. In addition, it's put out by the makers of the 'Try it on everything' DVD and book, and I've not seen the DVD and from what little I know of it, there's a lot of the 'law of attraction' belief, of which I have repented.

I wasn't interested in listening to all of the presenters, or even most of them for that matter; but I'll listen to a few of them and see if I can get some good pointers. But I appreciated Gary's input and figured I'd pass it on.

April 25 - update

Here's a new message from Gary Craig on the EFT World Summit topic.Just thought I'd post the link, to sort of complete the picture.