This Week in Witchcraft - S1:E21

Sunnyside Baptist Church

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Welcome to This Week in Witchcraft. The elements have been conquered with intense heat, and witchcraft has become more cosmopolitan.

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Can you spot it out in the wild? I'm Dylan Hamilton, and with me are

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Michael Deere and David Kassin. Today we have some witchcraft that's been given to us from one of our listeners, and we're going to read the question now.

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It reads, I was recently engaged in a conversation with a coworker who was asking me what they thought about the law of attraction, or what

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I thought about the law of attraction. My initial response was that God is the one who dictates reality, and not our thoughts slash emotions.

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At the same time, I agree that what we think and say matters, and does affect us to some extent. How would you respond to a person who believes this type of paganism?

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What are the roots of the law of attraction? David, you got a definition worked up for us? Yeah, so this, what we call the law of attraction is, well one, it's nothing new, but if you just do a couple of quick Google searches,

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Wikipedia searches, and stuff, you can come up with a basic definition, but it's a law of attraction, or a new thought, it's a spiritual belief that you can manifest positive or negative in your life based upon your thought patterns.

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You are manifesting reality based upon positive thinking.

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And this kind of thoughts, and it is pure energy, the more intense your will and your faith in this, the more you will attract those kinds of people around you that you want.

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You will manifest the kind of life that you want. Some people call it the power of positive thinking, some people would just call it, pick your pagan poison, but it is essentially taking the role of God into your own hands, because you are

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God, you can create your own reality purely by your own thought.

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Yeah, so this is a good definition, it's a good survey of the ideas here of the law of attraction.

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Part of the question that Dylan read for us was about what are the roots of this pagan thought.

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So again, this is very easy to look up, but you look it up, you find the things that, the ingredients of this law of attraction include things like hermeticism, which comes out of the

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Renaissance and the ideas of alchemy. So when we think of alchemy, we're thinking of changing one thing into another thing by the combining of elements and so on.

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This is intrinsically part of witchcraft, wherein you're bringing two things together that ought not be together, which is sorcery, wherein you're trying to change one thing into another by way of magic, in this case, just by using words or thoughts or ideas and so forth.

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It's also based out of the transcendentalist movement, you ever heard the expression mind over matter?

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That's what that is. And obviously, Eastern pantheistic monism is a part of this, which means

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Hinduism, Buddhism, all of that. What we find with this is that there is a real effort to draw from various authorities in an attempt to create a way of thinking of spiritualism that is greater than any religion.

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And so they draw on various traditions and they try to make it sound like, yeah, this teaching, this idea is latent within all religions, within all worship.

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And this is really the true essence of what religion is all about, what spiritualism is all about, is that you are to manifest the world in which you want to live and to bring that about in your life.

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So this is a very dangerous form of witchcraft in that it places you as the center, it makes you

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God. In fact, many people who push this type of thinking, such as on TBN, anything from TBN, the more

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Christian versions of the law of attraction, they'll actually say that we are gods, so on and so forth.

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Why are they saying that? Because you're the one who's creating the world in which you live. You're speaking it into existence, you're manifesting it, you're designing it, you're in control of it.

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Bad things happening in your life, it's because of you, you're manifesting that in your life and you need to manifest other things in your life.

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And so for a lot of people, they gravitate to it because they're trying to find some sort of a structure, some sort of organization for what to do with their life.

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And they think that if I just think positive things, then I'll do positive things. If I think positive things, positive things will happen in my life and I'm going to focus on that.

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And then they find that if they take initiative and do things, they get things done and they think they've discovered the power of positive thinking.

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So if bad things happen to you, that's because you manifested negativity in your life and you got to rid yourselves of those negative thoughts?

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Yeah, exactly. So in some sense, the effect is not much more different than Jordan Peterson's clean your room.

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Self -fulfilling prophecy type stuff. Yeah, exactly. But the witchcraft involved in it is something where it elevates the self and it takes things in God's world and begins to rename them and mix them and so on and so forth into this kind of menagerie of various religions all put together.

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We said that this is actually nothing new. This repeats itself throughout history. You can see things like this in other religions.

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I hadn't thought about this book in a while, but there's a book called Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. Very popular book in the 1930s.

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It's along that theme. So this law of attraction, it's basically just secret knowledge.

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It's appropriating authority that you don't have, but ancient Gnosticism is just repackaged.

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But if you have the ability to manifest your own destiny because of your own thought patterns, so you can create the world that centers around you, you just want to be

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God. That's nothing new. That's not exactly innovative.

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So as far as the law of attraction goes, and I love that word, they have to redefine law because they have no law giver, unless it's you, unless you become a law in and of yourselves.

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Yeah, that's what it is. Autonomy. It's a web of works righteousness, and it's a continually ever -changing law that you're setting up because you're basically doing a trial and error law, right?

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Like where, okay, I've thought this way, so it must be good because good things are happening. Or I've driven this route to work, and good things happen on days that I drive this route, so I must do it from now on until that fails, and now we have to have a new law.

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You can see the superstition that's involved with a lot of this thinking, can't we? This is a demonic appropriation of alternate authority in that this is a deceit, it's a the ultimate authority, and it is navigated by the hermeneutic of experience.

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Like Dylan just said, if I do this, this, and this, and I experience this, then this is the new authority, this is the new way that I do this.

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But this witchcraft, I think about how it manifests and the practical implications of it.

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If by positive thinking and by the law of attraction, I'm only going to manifest positive things about who

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I'm with, about the kind of people that are going to be in my life, kind of things that I'm going to have in my life, and so on.

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What if somebody comes along, let's say they're somewhat negative, and they don't agree with your positive assessment about how everything's going to go, and they may say, when it comes to making a billion dollars, maybe you need to learn something about finance.

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I don't think you really understand what it means to be an influential person.

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What if somebody brings negative vibes into your life? You don't want that. What do you do?

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Well, you manifest them right out of your life, don't you? What does this do to marriages? What does this do to families?

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What does this do to relationships? What does it do to people who you thought, oh, my workplace was just a negative vibe,

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I had to move to something more positive and affirming, until you create an echo chamber and a safe space in which you live, so that you can only ever positively manifest what you want to manifest.

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And then, where does that lead? Sounds incredibly lonely. It's funny, you look back in history, and you see some of these royal families that would only breed among themselves.

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Things got pretty ugly pretty fast, right? That happens with people with their thought life. When all of their thoughts are inbred, it gets really ugly.

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I'll give you a practical example, and I don't know this for sure, but there was a woman who was brought into a,

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I think it was a White House press briefing. No, no, no, it wasn't White House. It was a sheriff's department.

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It was a sheriff's department. I think it was in Florida. It wasn't. It was Florida, man, but anyway. She comes in, and very, very important topics were being discussed, and the public needed to know.

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The sheriff is explaining what was going on, and their policies, and so on. She's over to the side, and she's doing sign language, so that the deaf people will be able to understand what the sheriff is saying.

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She does not know a lick about sign language, and she's just making all these funky motions, and it looks like maybe she knows what she's doing, but she does not know what she is doing.

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How did she get there? She is dead serious, believing that she is communicating to the deaf accurately.

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She just manifested that, right? Maybe she was even spiritual. Maybe she was very religious.

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Maybe even in a Christian type of tradition, where the Lord's going to ... I'm going to speak in tongues, and they're going to understand, or whatever it was.

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She just manifests this. Nobody got in her way. Nobody said, no, you can't do that. No, you don't have the qualifications.

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No, you don't know what you're doing. Why not? This is an example of ...

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Who knows what the situation was, but that kind of thing will happen to people who go down this rabbit hole of a false religion.

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I'm only going to manifest positively. There's nothing going to stop me. You have this echo chamber, and speaking things into existence, and that is essentially what we have, calling one thing another.

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We have ... That is the modern transgender movement. Yes, it is.

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You just speak it into existence, and you gather people around you that will echo your words, and those voices that disagree, those hateful voices for the greater good, must be silenced.

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It doesn't matter if it's true or not. You say it's true. Therefore, we're going to treat it as true, and we're all going to tell each other the same lie.

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It's okay that we don't believe it, because ultimately, it's for the greater good. That's the echo chamber, and you can make that into anything, including ...

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I hate to use words like this, but you're talking about pedophilia and bestiality, and you have ...

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Don't you mean minor attractive people? I do not. You do not. I get it. I get it. I get it. It just degenerates, and the things that ...

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It keeps going spiraling, spiraling down, and if you have that echo chamber, even if that echo chamber just gets a little bit smaller, a little bit smaller, as you cut people out, they're no longer willing to believe or echo your lie.

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That is essentially what you just described. You're manifesting the reality that you want, and if anybody disagrees with you, the problem is with them.

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In reality, be damned. If you apply this to government, where do you go? What does it end with?

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I mean, what we're seeing is actually, it is being applied to government right now. If you say 9 .1

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% inflation enough, everyone ought to believe it. Right? We better not check into how the

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CPI actually is dealt with, or if we say that what we're doing is for the good of democracy, we better keep doing what we're doing in order to preserve democracy.

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I listened to a representative for the White House Council Economic Affairs literally two days ago. They're talking to him about inflation.

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He's like, no, the economy's actually very strong. Right. He actually couldn't support it. It was hysterical.

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Yeah, because of unemployment, right? He just kept saying it over and over. Yeah, and let's not think about the job projections of everybody just being laid off here in the next six to 12 months or whatever, but yeah, it's trying to manifest the outcome, right?

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So it's like peak pragmatism applied to governance, which is basically what you get with communism, right?

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Like Marxism is trying to speak into existence your own reality in order to get the desired outcome.

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Live not by lies. Yes. Yeah. So you see that in order to maintain various deceptions, you have to have this type of witchcraft where only in group form, this positive manifestation is maintained at all costs in order to forward that project.

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I think David, you've mentioned an article earlier about a government funded echo chamber for grooming children into the

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LGBTQ, whatever funded by the CDC run by the

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CDC, grooming them into perversion in the name of health, right? Grooming them into a life full of disease and disaster and death in the name of health.

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And then nobody can speak otherwise against it. And then again, like what Dylan is saying, words are used, terms are used, changed and new definitions, but everybody must say the new thing or else you're excluded from the conversation.

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So the CDC changed the definition of that, of a vaccine. So they could create a shot, the shot that they created, that they've approved was outside of that definition.

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It was outside the definition of the vaccine, the early one. So they changed the definition. So now we can now call this shot a vaccine.

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When it was before, never considered that. They do the same thing with inflation, right?

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They do the same thing with recession. Oh, this used to be the definition of the term, makes us look bad. We just simply changed the definition of the term and now everybody must affirm the new definition.

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Which is depression originally. Right. So what we have here is several clear expressions of paganism, wherein the civil government itself is engaging in the law of attraction, wherein they're insisting that things are good until they are good.

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It's a very much a pagan religion and they believe that the more that they can positively manifest it, the more it'll be so.

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So just like the lady who was signing but can't sign, they're governing but can't govern, right?

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Because they're not basing their work upon anything objective. So example from the scriptures.

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Example from the scriptures is from first Kings chapter 22. And the background of the story is that Jehoshaphat comes up to Ahab in Israel and they're gathering together to decide whether or not they're going to combine their forces to go attack

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Syria. All right. They got a big decision to make as these governing authorities. And they get together and Jehoshaphat says, you know, we really ought to inquire of the

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Lord whether we should do this or not. And Ahab says, no problem. Let me call up my prophets. He's got 400 prophets on his payroll, 400 experts all come together and they say exactly what the king wants to hear.

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Right. Oh yeah. Go up. You'll win. You're strong. You're mighty. Success. Rah. Rah. Rah. Rah.

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Rah. And Jehoshaphat smells a rat. Uh, could we get a real, you know, a real word from the

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Lord here? You know, somebody who is willing to say things as it is obviously somebody who you don't have on your payroll that you've created this echo chamber.

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You've positively manifested the will of the Lord here. But I want an actual word of the Lord. And king of Israel said, there is still one man,

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Micaiah, the son of Imla, by whom we may inquire of Lord but I hate him because he does not prophesy good concerning me but evil you know there's nothing new under the

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Sun right and so they do bring Micaiah and when they get to Micaiah they're like look everybody else all the other experts have said that this this mission is a go we're gonna win the day and Micaiah says as the

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Lord lives whatever the Lord says to me that I will speak well he gets before the king and obviously he understands what the expectation is and so the king says this is

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Micaiah shall we go to war against Ramoth Gilead or shall we refrain and then Micaiah is very sarcastic and he says go and prosper for the

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Lord will deliver it into the hand of the king and so the king said him how many times shall I make you swear that you shall tell me nothing but the truth in the name of the

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Lord even Ahab knows his experts are lying to him even

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Ahab gets it and Micaiah does tell him the truth and of course the king hates it and he punishes

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Micaiah and Ahab goes off and he dies chasing that white well yes yeah captain they have chases and he dies because he only wanted to positive a manifest what was positive right and this is a this is a excellent warning from the

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Word of God it's funny how you see parallels today with increasing condensing of those experts down to the ones that just tell me the lies that I need

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I want to hear so bad you actually have a lowering in competency all the way down and with each press secretary that we have that comes out there's a lowering of the bar every single time and I'm wondering what they're gonna come up with next it's amazing so you have my clearly delineated now we've

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I think we've discussed you know clearly and defined the law of attraction versus what the scriptures say you know that the reality as defined by God versus the new reality that we wanted to find by our own words and our own will and that the story that you cite perfect example of how no matter how positive your vibes are reality is what it is so what do you say to the person to the

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Christian who has started to go into this into this world a little bit and wants to you know think you know positively and and then wants to you know hey let's let's try to you know plan for the worst but you know hope for the best and let's try to plan ahead and and you know get our harvest and and if somebody is just everything is is he or ho hum nothing is ever going to work in you know then there's they're not going to be willing to be productive at all so that the

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Christian who cites mark 11 prayer I guess we can just go ahead and read it taken out of context granted therefore

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I tell you whatever you ask in prayer believe that you have received it and it will be yours James 1 6 you know ask faith and it shall be granted to you so these people are asking in faith they are manifesting that reality they are they want to it really health wealth prosperity kind of gospel stuff but they're putting a

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Christian spin on it and they're just trying to follow what the Bible says how can you respond to them and says no no no what you are what you're doing is actually paganism how is how is that I was the

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Bible different when it talks about the power of prayer asking and receiving asking with faith yeah it's important to remember that in the scriptures faith has a shape right faith is the shape and the shape is

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Christ when we think of the Christian virtues of faith and hope and love and how they interact together the faith is the shape of the

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Christian life and it's shaped around Christ the person in the work of Christ his his excellence his preeminence his person in work as a son of God and our

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Creator the author and the finisher of our faith as the image of the invisible God when we think about faith faith in the scriptures faith has a shape and the shape is

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Christ and that is irrefutable throughout the scriptures so again as you pointed out taking that verse out of context people will just think of faith in faith or believe in yourself correct but you know faith has a shape like the shape of a river and the river being filled up with water is like love love filling up the the shape of our faith but what about hope right what about what's ahead believing that there's something great ahead there's a movement towards something that is correct but even as you know faith is is in the shape of Christ and love to the fullness of Christ hope is in the direction of Christ so what is it what is ahead of us is not more of me not an exaltation of me but an elevation of Christ and in all fit so that in all things he has the preeminence all things being reconciled to him so yeah there's a direction there's a good ahead of us there's light ahead of us for sure but everything is about our

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Savior and Sovereign Jesus Christ a really good example of somebody in the Bible who really believed you know and believed in himself would be

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Herod and having acquired his echo chamber where they said oh the voice of a

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God and not of a man I mean how positive is that right and then he was eaten by worms and died because he did not give the glory to God so it's not believe in yourself you believe in yourself you get eaten by worms and die it's about believing in Christ and it is indeed victory the victory that overcomes the world is faith faith in Christ in him we are overcomers so we can have confidence that we are going in a good direction but that direction is his direction correct

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I kingdom come they will be done on earth as it is in heaven not my will be done not my kingdom come thy will be done thy kingdom come right so you're laying out a teleology you're laying out a yes

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I can end in a purpose for these things like the first question of the Catechism really ought to bring home there so in that context the context that you guys just described persecution then makes sense right enduring that persecution you didn't manifest something bad happening to you and in your life because you surrounded yourself with negative people and now you're being you're on the verge of martyrdom actually really

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Christ like you might be martyred alongside him if you truly falling after Christ and they hated him

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Christ promises that they will hate you as well in this world you will have trouble but take courage

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I have overcome the world so your direction is good because it's it's his direction he is he's the one that's directing it and he is that goal you're being directed towards him and that momentary light affliction by comparison is creating an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison so persecution and trial suffering in this context makes a lot more sense than in the context of law of attraction or health wealth and prosperity eggs

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Alice are you gonna account for it I mean Latimer was not burned at the stake clutching his signed copy of your best life now yeah yep

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I mean it really Wow it really makes sense of the quotes like play the man mr.

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Ridley like that we have at Saints martyrdoms they're not despairing and they know what's happening isn't a positive but past it is the ultimate positive yeah and example we have his

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Christ for the joy set before him he endured the cross yeah amen well I think that wraps up that witchcraft

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Michael what do you have to recommend as far as content goes as far as content goes

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I would recommend reading if you can after a fashion read read something from Herman Bavinck I really have benefited from reading through his reformed dogmatics but that is four volumes and there's a lot of footnotes and so on and so forth but there is a one volume summary of that I think my brother has a copy of that he's really enjoyed that as well but if you could just look up something by Herman Bavinck and read

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I think that you'll be blessed by his warmth his faith in the Lord is rejoicing in the truth of the scripture and a very informed stalwart defense against false teachers at every level and he did his battles at the end of the 1800s beginning of the 1900s in the

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Netherlands and addressed almost all the issues in his day that we have in our day so that's one of the reasons why it's so relevant so that's that'll be my recommendation all right

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David I'm gonna recommend this is an ancient work and I say ancient early church it's the first epistle of Clement to the

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Corinthians I read this years ago we're talking maybe 20 years ago and just in the last couple of weeks the guys had the particular

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Baptist podcast did an exposition of it actually read it like the first half I think it may have been a two or three part series but then they they read his entire and then they commented on it

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Clement of Rome who was he well in the most reliable list of the bishops of Rome and the list of Popes he was number four so you have something very very early we're talking like early second century like 110 and this is maybe 25 pages long so we just talked about this old to Corinthians in the you know the

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Bible so this is just a letter to the Church of Corinth just a few decades after Paul wrote them the reason

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I'm commending this if you have a pet doctrine chances are you could find an early church father that believed it you know it's it's don't look for the early early church as you in in Toto for your standard of Orthodoxy right because whatever you kind of want you can sort of find yeah

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I say that with a little bit of a smile because the early church fathers are not our standard right yeah the

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Bible is yeah of course but I gotta say this guy's amazing in 25 pages he goes through and he talks about election he does not put himself in the place of the

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Apostles and doesn't speak with their authority I thought he was a Pope talks about the Trinity and this is 110 when originally oh no when

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Christ became God that was actually the Council of Nicaea in the 300s well no he actually talks about it here we're talking 110 he quotes

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Isaiah 53 he quotes Proverbs he quotes this is saturated with Old Testament at Psalm 51 again just over and over with the with the

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Trinity and then the divinity of Christ how you can be sure of your salvation faith leads to acts of righteousness but if you were saved by grace through faith it is actually says earning our justification by deeds not by words a couple of a couple of things that he puts in there but that's really his sanctification you know what cost our father

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Abraham to be blessed wasn't on his faith which prompted him to acts of righteousness and truth so that sanctification follows faith and he just goes on and on and I found it to be it was nice to find an early church father that you can just go amen okay amen gosh this guy reads like a

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Protestant I mean it was really interesting and I really enjoyed it and it's not long and if you've never read anything by an early church father

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Clement of Rome is epistle to the Corinthians and if you want a little bit more background on it you can listen to the particular

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Baptist podcast you don't have to have to do it but it's it's it's an easy read and I hope you'll enjoy it yeah when

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I first read Clemens letter it immediately was affirming in two ways it fell so flat compared to scripture but then again he wasn't making any claims that he was writing scripture and so only affirmed the

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Word of God especially as he was doing he was laboring to upbraid the Christians in Corinth to the word that they had already received right you know and he's like look this is our authority guys yeah it was so it is refreshing yeah to read yeah if you can't find it on the particular

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Baptist one I know dr. white has gone through the letter at different times he's gone through different portions cuz he had to deal with Roman Catholicism obviously on some of these points so he just goes back to church history and nails away at him that way but there's a lot of richness there that you can you can mine my recommendation is not to consume any content but to create it