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creative essays revelation Uncategorized

How to Overcome the Lusts of the Flesh

I’m not going to tell you to pray more. I’m not going to tell you to worship more, or begin a program of positive confession. I have tried all of this myself, and it doesn’t work. It seems like the flesh always has the upper hand, no matter what. It seems like sin will always out, always win.

I know the way it is. You pray aloud in your prayer closet. You play some worship music and worship the father in spirit and in truth. You are feeling good, ready to transform the whole world through faith, by love and charity.

25 minutes later you are watching porn.

Or you are cursing someone out over the phone.

Or you are flipping someone the finger on the highway.

Or you are ripping open a pack of cigarettes with your trembling hands.

Whatever the answers are, I knew that nobody has ever shared them with me. I was just told the same tropes over and over, to pray more, read my bible aloud, ask God for help, and so on. I decided this advice needed an updating. I would go to the Bible for the answers and search and seek until I found the answer, the solution to putting down the lusts of the flesh.

I new I had the answer when I read Galatians, chapter 5.

Galatians 5:16
But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh.

We are told to “walk by the spirit.” That is all well and good, but how are we to do that?

Imagine, for a second, that God was with you, walking with you, accompanying you everywhere. You could not escape Him. He was with you when you woke up in the morning and He was with you when you arrived home from work.

In that kind of situation, it would be difficult to sin. It would be hard to find a way to open up your laptop and watch porn, for example. But this concept is the key to overcoming the lusts of the flesh. You have to realize that God is always with you, always watching, always inside of you.

When you are aware, at all times and at every moment, that God’s precious Holy Spirit is in you and with you, throwing yourself headlong into a mortal sin will not be easy. For one, if you have a relationship with the holy spirit, as you should, you will not want to do anything that might grieve him.

This is why we are commanded to “walk in the spirit.” What that means is to develop a relationship with the Holy Ghost, so much so that you are aware of his nearness and presence at all times. It means to walk in the spirit, as in a marathon walk, and not just a morning jog, as it were.

Once you understand that you are never alone, you begin to act differently. Certain sins are impossible, and completely off the table. It is not that you don’t want to be a partaker in that sin, it is that you will not want to make the Holy Spirit a witness to that sin. And the only way to realize that you are never alone is to walk in the spirit.

Talk to the spirit. Speak to the person of the Holy Spirit. And listen to the spirit, for his guidance, for his comfort, for his help. He will always advocate action on your behalf. So don’t be afraid to start a relationship with him. That relationship is the key to everything.

Walk in the spirit.

How are you to ‘walk by the spirit’ if you cannot hear the direction of the spirit, if you cannot hear his voice?

The Word of the Spirit is the Bible. We must read the bible and listen to the Bible. Once we know the bible, we know the mind of Christ.

Coming to know the bible means coming to know the will of God for your life. It means coming to know the will and voice of the spirit.

This is literally the key to everything. If you can overcome the lusts of the flesh, you can overcome addiction, to food, to sugar, to carbohydrates, to drugs, to masturbation, to sex, to anything. I look back on my christian walk and realize that my body, my flesh, my physical temple has always been the number one enemy of happiness and peace for me.

Basically, you need a closer relationship with God. You need to feel that God is with you at all times, because He is. You need to have a constant sense of communion with the Holy Spirit inside of you, at all times. This is the key element to overcoming lustful practices.

Get to know God’s presence. Get to feel His presence with you, become aware of it always. Become more God-conscious and less sin-conscious, less flesh conscious. And you will sin less, and cave less to the desires of the body. You will become more “spiritual,” as it were, which should be your ultimate goal, to “walk in the spirit.”

This is the key to overcoming the lusts of the flesh, as much as it can be overcome, because we won’t fully overcome those lusts while we are “in the body” as Saint Paul says. Many may have to marry, even young, in order not to burn with sinful desires. This is another overlooked solution, due to our modern cultural climate, which sees marriage as a thing that should be put off until your 30s.

Fact is, throughout all of human history, men and women were marrying young, for over 50,000 years. The truth is that we were built for our child-raring years to be in our late teens and early 20s, when out fertility levels are the highest, and our energy levels almost inexhaustible.

Better to marry than to burn, as Paul and Christ said. But better to be married to the Holy Spirit, first.

Why the Left LOVES Civil Disorder

If there is No God… Faith Keeps the Human Race Going

A Thought on White Privilege

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apologetics atheism Uncategorized

Why Atheism is Wrong in Two Worlds

We have all heard about the “assumption of atheism.” It is the idea that, all things being equal, one is born with an assumption of atheism, and that this is man’s initial resting state, as it were. This post is not designed to be a logical rebuttal to this idea, as William Lane Craig has annihilated this premise here. But in thinking about this, it is difficult for me to imagine a world where atheism comes naturally, in fact. So what we have here is a tale of two worlds.

The first world is pre-industrial. You are born before the titans of industry, before the highways and automobiles and the airplanes and the digital age. Before the theory of evolution, before Einstein, before the professional naturalists and trained philosophers. All we had was common sense, accumulated wisdom in holy texts, and a wide array of philosophies in their infancy stages We herded sheep and made campfires. We sharpened sticks, slept on rooftops, and some even lived in caves.

In this world, superstition is prevalent.We know this as a historical fact. Hell, even cro magnum man and the neanderthals showed signs of having superstitious beliefs and afterlife ideas about death. I’m not sure that atheists will challenge this idea. If you were born in these times, it is likely you would believe in gods, the arrangements of funereal stones, the afterlife, and some form of magic or prayer.

It is interesting to note that we find religion appearing in different parts of the world, independent from each other.

So, let us fast-forward to today.

Atheists don’t see God anywhere, or room for superstition anywhere in our modern world of big tech, big science, theoretical scientists and modern philosophical thought. Though, to be fair, more than a billion people do. The common atheist line here is that the common man is uneducated, ignorant, clinging to his relics, religion, the bible, and his guns. The modern evangelistic atheist is an elitist, privileged to hold beliefs that the common man isn’t savvy enough to own, and capable of affording a belief system that the lumpen masses cannot.

Everything can be explained, they might say. They speak of the “god of the gaps,” which is the idea that in the gaps of our knowledge of how the world and the universe works, believers use God to fill in those gaps. They also claim that these gaps are becoming smaller and thinner all of the time. They speak of the march of knowledge, even.

But the point is, even in today’s world of science and discovery, there is a lot of room for belief in God. Because with the progress of science, theology itself has kept pace, arm in arm and neck in neck. Theology has evolved and matured with the advance of secular knowledge. In fact, in my opinion, they have not merely kept pace, but superseded the march of atheism.

Right off the top of my head, I can come up with 4 or 5 arguments for the existence of God, all taken seriously in academic, theological and philosophical studies. There are new arguments arising each year. Even old, antiquated arguments that are hundreds of years old are being constantly resurrected, updated, upgraded and being thrown back into play. I have two posts right here at John Claudio world where I creatively free write and document reasons to believe, some questionable and others not.

So basically, in all, when you consider all of the philosophical arguments, the prophetic evidence, the witness of personal testimonies, and all of the modern-day logical work, you find that, in some ways, faith in God is easier to justify today than it was 1,000 tears ago. 1,000 years ago, God only had gap-filling power, much like the theories of atheists today. In today’s world, you have a plethora of arguments in the positive for the existence of a God, that don’t seek to be explanatory, or gap-fillers, but seek to prove, through logic, philosophy and theological work, that God exists and Jesus is the Son of God.

There are more and better reasons to believe in God now, than there were in the old, ancient world.

The fact that the old philosophical formulas are still in widespread use today by theologians and philosophers are evidence of their natural, long-term immunity to serious critique. Instead of dying off, they have grown stronger and become more-defined through time. They have been strengthened by opposition, and some of their formulations have evolved under scrutiny, but still they persist to exist as a gadfly in the atheist’s ointment.

This is hardly an exhaustive list, but here are 8 arguments for the existence of God.

  1. The cosmological Argument
  2. The moral argument
  3. The teleological argument
  4. The Ontological argument
  5. The argument from Design
  6. The argument from Consciousness
  7. The argument from Testimony
  8. The Argument from Faith

Here is a small list of helpful philosophical resources:

William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith.

Inspiring Philosophy’s You Tube channel.

Christian Philosopher Robert Koons.


How an Atheist Argued His Way Back to Christianity
Reasons to Believe
A New Argument for the Existence of God

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creative essays Uncategorized

But my Loved Ones are Going to Hell!

I was watching William Lane Craig do a Q&A session when a Christian asked him about unsaved loved ones, and how to have joy when they are on the road to hell. They also asked about how to deal with the question of a “good God” sending people to hell. His answer was twofold.

He made the point that we should focus instead on God’s grace toward us, and be appreciative. I didn’t like the answer, as it seemed a bit self-serving for my taste. He also pointed out that we are ALL deserving, or worthy of hell, and we should focus instead on their salvation, and our efforts toward the accomplishment of that objective. Here I can find a point of agreement.

The idea of loved ones and family members going to hell should provoke us into fervent action on their behalf, through prayer, through witnessing, by setting a good, Christian example and making a shining light of our lives. In my opinion, whenever there is a principle or truth in the kingdom of God, there is a point to that principle or truth. For example, Jesus said that the Sabbath was made FOR MAN. Man was not created for the Sabbath day.

But I think what is being missed in all of these responses is an appreciation for God, who is love. Love is patient, we are told. Love is kind. Love forgives. Love overlooks wrongs and is compassionate. And God *is* love. We should never assume that our sense of love is greater than God’s. This is never a point of conflict that we should have in our heads, or in our hearts. God is love, and He will act out of Love.

The Bible also tell us that God is just. We must always keep this in the forefront of our minds while considering these challenging matters. We must trust that God will do what is fair and just. It is not for us to judge, but God is the judge, and we would do well to confess that He is a fair and honest judge of people’s hearts and souls. Trust in God means to trust his righteous judgment, also.

Now, there is one other matter I want to address, and that is the idea that a person can sanctify an unbeliever who is immediate family. We know that a believing wife can sanctify her unsaved husband, and vice versa. The verse is here:

For the unbelieving husband is sanctified through his believing wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified through her believing husband. 1 Corinthians 7:14

This idea makes a certain bit of sense, if you think about it. When a man and woman come together in marriage, they become one person, and the two become one. It wouldn’t make sense for only half a person to be sanctified.

However, sanctification is not salvation. It does not mean to be saved. We know this because just two verse later Paul provides this context:

“How do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or, how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife?”

I do not think anything is impossible with God. Jesus says as much when he is talking about rich people going to heaven, and though it is unlikely that your loved ones will be saved because you prayed for them, you can always hold out hope.

In the Old Testament, it is recorded that Job prayed for the sins of his sons, constantly, and sacrificed on their behalf.

In the Old Testament we also find Abraham pleading the case for the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. We also find God appearing to save Lot’s life because of just this kind of intercessory prayer, also.

So, in all, just remember that God is just. He is fair. We believe in His love, His mercy, His grace and kindness. God will always do the right thing. He will always do the just thing.

Trust in his goodness. Have faith in his righteousness. Believe in his goodness and mercy at all times.

This is the hope of our faith, and it is important not to forget it.

Read my article on White Privilege Debunked

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Civil War is Here.

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creative essays racism Uncategorized

Christians: Say No to #AllLivesMatter

Firstly, I am a white evangelical, charismatic, protestant Christian, who holds disdain for leftism, godless socialism, and the alt-right. I speak in tongues, diurnally study my Bible, oppose the killing of unborn babies, and the metastases of government into every area of our lives.

But I do not support the #alllivesmatter hashtag, and I’m going to tell you why.

There is a black internet personality named Jesse Lee Peterson, who has a weekly show called “The Fallen State,” a Sunday Church service, and a daily talk show on You Tube. He mainly interviews woke leftists and liberal African-american social and civil leaders and tightens the screws on them on race, evil, and other topics. He exposes their hypocrisies on these matters by suggesting them to be exactly what they believe others to be, whether racist or intolerant or privileged.

One of his favored lines of questioning is to ask liberal black civil rights leaders if they love white people. Their response, show after show, is always the same: “I love ALL people,” they will say.

Jesse will ask them again, and they will repeat their original answer.

He will then ask them again, but often they will not submit or break under this interrogation. “Yes,” almost never comes out of their mouths, unless it is followed up by an inevitable “all” or “everybody.”

They will often say that they love latino people, or black people, but they are not able to force “I love white people” out of their mouths.

The hypocrisy has been clarified, and their own racial feelings exposed and outed. It is compelling theater, and addicting to watch, because even black gospel preachers and evangelists regularly falter under this line of questioning.

That said, aren’t white people now being interrogated in exactly the same manner?

They are, and they are failing to respond in a Christian manner.

They will say that white lives matter, jewish lives matter, christian lives matter, unborn babies lives matter, but under pressure, they will not get “black lives matter” out of their mouths.

Now I can hear you already, saying that Black Lives Matters is a socialist organization with a suspect past, that they are against the nuclear family by mission statement, and so on.

Yes. The organization itself, like any other social collective, is going to be stock full of wayward, broken and sinful members. Our churches are quite the same, if we are going to be honest with ourselves.

However, it is ridiculous to assume that everybody who voices the affirmation that Black Lives Matter is a member of that organization, or is promoting its creeds.

So don’t respond with #alllivesmatter.

Don’t act like you can’t get the statement out of your mouth.

Maybe you mean it. Maybe you honestly believe that all lives matter, and you see that there is no difference between Jew and Greek, but nobody is asking for your moral opinion on all lives, but a particular racial subset.

They are not asking for your general perspective on race and color, but are asking for compassion, they are asking for an affirmative statement, such as an amen!

When you respond with #ALM, you have suddenly become elusive. You are sidestepping the question proposed to you, suddenly mealy-mouthed, responding to a particular question with a general answer.

You are no different from the leaders of these organizations who cannot squeeze out the statement: I love white people.

Black lives matter, regardless of whether or not white privilege is real or a fiction. Black lives matter, whether or not the BLM organization wishes to destroy the nuclear family arrangement.

This isn’t about offending others, but whether or not your outward behavior is an offense to your own character.

You don’t always have to take the high road, answering out of your own sense of pride and self-righteous virtue.

Yes. We know. You don’t see color. Jesus doesn’t see color, and the Holy Spirit doesn’t see color.

The problem, as I see it, is that #ALM seeks to offend. It is the highest form of virtue-signaling. Right or wrong, as Christians, we are supposed to take the high road, but not shout from the rooftops that we are taking the high road.

If we were talking about Christian persecution and stated that “Christian Lives Matter,” and a Muslim brother responded with, “no, All Religious lives matter,” we might be offended at this, because we are not talking about anything but Christian persecution, and this brother is waving it off in order to score a religious rhetorical point. It is a cheap shot.

Instead of fighting hatred with love, we are fighting hatred with proud words. It just doesn’t work. It actually serves to make us look privileged, in fact, as if we can afford this blind egalitarian worldview that nobody else can.

It almost seems to stand somewhere between right and wrong, and when in doubt, maybe it best to assume that such a thing is wrong, rather than right. We must remember that we all naturally lean toward sin and moral error.

It is the purest example I’ve ever seen of following the letter of the law, but forgetting the spirit of the law. The spirit of the law is freedom, and sometimes that means the freedom to just keep your mouth shut.

Don’t get caught up in the letter of the law, brothers, lest we forget the heart and spirit of the law, which is the freedom to declare that Black Lives Matter.

Something Happened to Men
A Thought on White Privilege
Why All Racists are Right

Racism Does Not Exist.

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creative essays Uncategorized

The End of Science

I hope for a day when science is overtaken by common sense, logic and the practice of the basic reasoning abilities of man, and natural philosophy prevails once again.

It may happen. I see a path with my prophet’s eye. But it will come with pain, perhaps a full flask of suffering.

Perhaps it will be a flare from the Cairn collider that wakes us up. Perhaps a new civil war over a counterfeit moral value, such as racism. Perhaps a lab-escaped virus that sets the world on edge and makes prisoners of us all in our own homes.

But perhaps it will take a mini-apocalypse. Maybe a nuclear exchange would finally force us back to casual talk about metaphysics on the riverbanks. Perhaps a reset is what is needed. Our religious texts seem to prophesy this, without doubt, that there will indeed be a last day, and that it will come upon us as a thief in the night.

A new heaven, and a new earth.

Today, a man can no longer think for himself, and if he does, he is branded a rebel, even an enemy of society. Consensus is the order of the day. Consensus and not truth. Truth is of no import today.

Because there is no respect for truth today, ideological factions war with each other over the machinery of the government. They fight for the classroom; they fight for the educational apparatus; they only care about control, power, taking power, by any means necessary.

There is not a truth seeker among them. Perhaps because they have concluded that truth cannot be appraised, cannot be found, and is not real. But most importantly, truth is not valuable, cannot be commoditized, sold, packaged, prettified, dressed up or hijacked for their own purposes.

A time is coming, perhaps, when the scientific institution itself will be seen as an antiquated thing. Its usefulness to us will no longer apparent.

It has already begun to happen; it has started with the erosion of science as an objective discipline, beholden to corrosive political and business influences. The fact is that, science has been corrupted by the human influence. It has been hijacked by big business and corporations embroiled in political, legal and moral struggles.

The proof of this is the state of communication and conversation between the citizenry today. We no longer debate each other using reason, rationale, logic and the elements of persuasion. Instead, we find two parties slugging each other over the head with opposing and contradictory studies and surveys. Rational discourse has become a thing of the past. The art of persuasion has been reduced to whoever can cite with the greatest precision, speed, and volume.

Common sense never had a chance. It certainly doesn’t in today’s scientific climate. Young university students are rewarded if they can come up with novel and original results and conclusions. In the field of academic psychology, it has become news that they are just winging it, faking the science, in order to grab headlines. When reproducibility tests were done on psychology studies in established academic journals, up to 65% of them could not pass the test.

What we need is a return to philosophy, religion, and thinking. We need to leave the scientific institution in the rubbish heap of history, where it rightfully belongs. We need to return to meditation, prayer, and the study of the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years of moral and ethical doctrine.

More than anything, what we need right now is wisdom. We don’t need any more pop psychology articles. We don’t need any more gadgets and handheld devices. We need to return to original knowledge and revealed wisdom.

Big business has been a point of thorough corruption in all of the scientific arts. Our aero-engineers cannot even keep our new and modern planes in the sky. In the pharmaceutical industry, we see the worst abuses. Doctors are over-prescribing anti-depressants and other psychiatric medications at record levels. Most of these patients could be helped by a few simple lifestyle changes, or talk therapy. But instead they are drugged, and hooked by the lip into a remarkably profitable business scheme.

Science itself is a system of exploration. All by itself, it works just fine. It is like a motor that is running all of its own. What has happened is that a scientific institution has arisen. This institution represents a vast collective of human scientists. This institution is a society, and like all societies, it is open to corruption, bias, prejudice, and self-censorship. Within the scientific community, there are factions and divisions. There are shared political alliances and goals, and there are shared prejudices. Science itself must be protected by the institution, above all. Once a consensus is reached, and the matter settled and established, to achieve a new consensus becomes an uphill battle. The unified ego is now involved, and the wagons are circled. Only when the old guard dies off does the new advancements become consensus.

But there is hope. If we can return to the first fruits of knowledge, we can save ourselves from the established machinery of the scientific institution. But it means a return to individual thought. It means the lone thinker in his smoking room with pen, paper, equations and rational thought. It means a return to philosophy, to personal revelation, to the actualization of novel and original ideas.

Because what science is suffering from is a drought of original hypotheses. The hypotheses are determined by the political and/or social authorities. We live in a world of pro or against.

The only hope for mankind is a great falling away from science, and a re-commitment to the natural art of thinking and doing philosophy, accessible to every man. Science is, and has been an occupation for elitists. The scientific establishment has long been hostile to the common man and his thousand years of accumulated wisdom.

If they have their way, we will one day live under constant and incessant threat of nuclear, total destruction being just one international incident away.

Oh wait.

Without the advent and hostile takeover of the man of ruler and beaker, we would have continued on our natural progression of accumulating wisdom. Maybe by now, a singularity would have been reached, or a tipping point in the spiritual struggle between good and evil. But instead, we are on the verge of annihilation, under the threat of extinction at every passing moment.

But we are told that things are great, things are better. We listened to the sociologists, and now we have racial strife, riots, anarchy and mayhem. We listened to the psychologists, those of the secular priesthood, and now our little boys think that they are girls, our children shoot up schools. We listened to the socialist left, and now our freedoms are in doubt and in question.

We are a crazed species. Sick with blood, but yet hungry for more. Two world wars will not be enough. Search yourself and you will find that this is true. We are hellbent on self-destruction, on raping the earth and plundering its resources. We are demented and broken, lost to insanity, to a diseased common psyche, and science has placed within this animal’s hands the means of its own destruction.

So Help us God.