Passion from God's View

As I traveled last night I listened to a sermon that talked about the story of Saul on the road to Damascus and how Jesus introduced Himself to Saul. It really stimulated my mind and heart about many new things I had not thought of before and as I continued to ruminate about it this morning I realized how much it related to what I am studying in Romans 9. Interestingly that story is found in Acts 9, maybe not totally a coincidence.

Saul's passion was of great interest to the heart of God even though it was seriously misdirected. Because God looks on the heart much more than the outward appearance, even when the outward appearances included killing and terrorizing God's children, God saw tremendous potential in Saul that was revealing his true heart of passion for God.

When Jesus spoke to Saul on the road, He did not enforce the guilt and shame that Saul naturally felt when he realized that he had been fighting against the very God he thought he had been honoring. We might naturally think that God needed to make sure that Saul realized the extent of his rebellion before “letting him off the hook”. But God does not treat people that way. Guilt and shame and blame are all part of the kingdom of darkness and tools of the enemy that God does not employ against us. No, instead Jesus simply told him the next step to take in preparation for his inauguration.

After spending three days like Jesus in the heart of the earth in blindness and allowed to review his life and beliefs in light of his immense storehouse of intellectual knowledge of the Scriptures, Saul was sent a messenger, a brother from the very people he had been trying to persecute and kill to relay to him the vision, the true identity of Saul's heart to him. God “resurrected” Saul from his three days of darkness by casting for him a glorious vision of who he really was inside despite all the external activities that seemed to contradict those characteristics.

God cared deeply about Saul and had implanted the gift of passion into his heart before he was even born. God had put that there for him to use in the service of God and just because Satan had twisted the outlet of that passion to be used against the people of God did not thwart God's plans for Saul but actually brought even more glory to His reputation. Along with unusual intensity of passion Saul also had clear, sharp mental abilities and had filled his memory with enormous amounts of the Word of God. That too was in God's plans for him even though Satan had used that intellect through deception to be distorted and twisted in its applications.

When Paul later wrote that all things work together for good he was speaking from experience. And he was also speaking first hand when he talked about vessels of wrath and vessels of mercy in Romans 9. For part of the vision that Jesus related to Ananias for brother Saul was that he had been chosen to be a chosen vessel for Him. Up to that point in time Saul had been a vessel of wrath and had been hardening his heart like Pharaoh and suffering the increasing pain of doing so. He had been filled with the spirit like that of Ishmael, the first-born son of Abraham born of the flesh and full of pride and independence. Like Jacob he had been loved of God but instead of responding to and receiving that love he had been trying to earn it through works of the Law all of his life and methods of his own devising.

But God, who is full of mercy and because of His own passion for the heart of Saul allowed Saul to mature his evil plans only up to a certain point and when the time was right, when his heart was ripe, he revealed Himself to the amazement of Saul, He introduced Himself to the heart of Saul and, as they say, the rest is history. God had endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction – prepared by Saul himself. But now Saul, through the mercy of God, became Paul, a vessel of mercy. And He did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory. (Romans 9:23)

What can I say – what an incredible, awesome God we have! And if He is that kind and patient and persistent in His pursuit of the heart of one of the most ferocious persecutors of His church, surely He has something planted in my heart waiting to be exposed and used to make known the riches of His glory as well.

This causes me to think about something that right now is extremely politically unpopular. But I believe that we should pray for the eyes of heaven to see even religious fanatics from even such sources as Muslim cultures that the world considers terrorists. God sees things very differently than we do and if we insist on judging people using the world's paradigms we will end up protesting against God's apparent nonsense when He invites us to participate in capturing them for His service at most surprising times and in ways that may frighten us.

But if we are to be true followers of the radical God of love and patience and kindness that we learn about from the life of Saul/Paul, then we are going to have to look at others with radically different paradigms and begin to view others through the eyes of the Spirit of God instead of our fears and prejudices. The passion of those who claim to believe in God may just be the tip of the iceburg of something God intends to amaze the world with in the life of someone just like Saul, the terrorist of the early Christian church.

If you look further in the story of Saul you will notice the great reluctance and fear in the answer that Ananias gave to God when he was called to go lay his hands on Saul and heal him of his blindness. Ananias apparently thought Jesus had forgotten what Saul was like or maybe had confused his identity with someone else. It may appear almost ludicrous to us how Ananias was willing to argue with God about His plans for Saul, but are we not even more devoid of faith and hope and love in our unwillingness to view others in the light of heaven?

In the story of Saul it is seen later that when he tried to join himself with the leaders of the Christian church that their fears will still so intense that none of them were willing to trust the work of transformation in his heart that God had effected. It was only due to the bold faith of Barnabas and his courage to believe in the goodness and power of God that enabled him to come alongside of Saul and embrace his former enemy as a brother even when it was most unpopular. It was the open-minded spirit of this “son of encouragement”, which is what the name Barnabas means, that brought encouragement to the heart of Saul and opened the door for him to become accepted and received by the rest of the less-believing leaders. In fact, I personally believe that quite possible Barnabas had been praying for Saul for some time for God to intervene in the life the this archenemy of the church. Barnabas was willing to view Saul through the eyes of heaven instead of through the eyes of fearfulness and so God was able to use him to bring reconciliation and glory to the name of God.

I find it quite interesting that even though all of these men (and women) had been baptized with the Holy Ghost not that long before and had been speaking with boldness the truth about God and His amazing power to change lives, when faced with putting their own lives on display in this situation where their mouths were, so to speak, at least to this extent they were suddenly very reluctant to trust in God's unusual ways but instead still demonstrated the symptoms of fear. Fear is maybe the single most powerful element of the enemy that he uses against us to keep us away from experiencing the full life of faith, joy, love and fellowship that God wants for us.

These disciples were still growing in grace and still had a certain amount of fear that they needed to let go. I find it encouraging that even though they displayed such apparent lack of faith in His work in Saul's life that God was still in their lives and was using them in the power of His Spirit. But I find it even more encouraging to see the example of Ananias, the reluctant but willing messenger to embrace Saul in his darkness to bring him into fellowship with the people of God. And I am encouraged to see the example of the high-risk taker Barnabas who had a bigger picture of God who he believed to be well able to turn around a hard-nosed terrorist into a passionate worshiper of the One who is the essence of passion, Jesus Christ Himself.

As I think about these example of people that God delighted in and saw hidden potential in I am inspired with hope for myself. When I look inside there are times when I sense an immense reservoir of passion that has very strong barriers built around it. But every once in awhile some of that passion leaks out and sometimes it even feels confusing because it is so inconsistent with what I have been trained to be. But I believe that all passion originated with the God of passion and when the time is right and the heart is ripe God will step in and surprise everyone with His amazing grace and His unusual ways. For He does so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory, even us, whom He also called.

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Exclusiveness Theology Intro

As Gentile Christians we generally like to focus on the idea that God has embraced us as being part of His chosen people to replace the “chosen” status that the Jews formerly held. Depending on the theology you subscribe to, many still believe that the Jews are going to once again become “more chosen” than the rest of the Christians and they have built very elaborate scenarios around this kind of thinking, not the least of what is popularly known as “The Left Behind” series.

I do not wish to tackle these scenarios right now, but the issue of “chosenness” is one that has created a great deal of confusion and even intense persecution because of misunderstandings about what God is really like and how He relates to us. The last part of Romans 9 addresses this issue a great deal and there is much to learn here. It also sheds a useful light on the surrounding passages that I have been moving through over the past few days and weeks that I want to take time to explore further.

I think it is well known that Jews in the times of Jesus were very hung up on the idea of their supposed exclusive advantage with the emphasis on “exclusive”. They firmly believed that only the biological descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were of any notable consideration by God. With very few, and very carefully filtered exceptions (see Matt. 23:15) the Jews considered themselves to be the only breed on earth from which God would chose the saved. Therefore, in their minds the rest of the pagans and mixed breeds were considered to be hopeless and unsaveable and therefore objects of their scorn and, of course, the wrath of the Almighty.

But even within the Jewish community there was marked separation and distinctions in classes and factions of people who were considered to be more “holy” than others. This struggle to define one's self as being worthy of God's favor was a constant and public issue especially among the Pharisee's, Sadducee's and other teachers of the Law. Not unlike today, the “chosen” people of God were fracturing themselves into divisions that argued and split hairs over details of the righteousness of the Law that caused them to reject and revile anyone who did not agree with them. While they went to enormous lengths to be obedient to every rule in the Law and many more that they came up with themselves to protect the Law, the spirit that they possessed was the very opposite of the spirit of the Lawgiver Himself who showed up in their midst in human form to demonstrate to them the way God feels and acts when He comes into the arena of humanness.

In Romans, one of the groups that Paul is addressing and is identified in chapter 2 is the Jewish converts to Christianity who still carried some baggage from their past about righteousness by rule-keeping. We have developed our own version of this kind of thinking today that is nearly identical but without the biological ingredient. While righteousness is not the absence of obedience to God's laws, the tendency to think that keeping rules makes a person righteous is one of the lies of Satan that has to be exposed and corrected if we are to grow in grace and the true knowledge of God and the principles of life. Paul is also directly addressing the prejudice of the “exclusiveness mentality” that was not only still very prevalent in the minds of Jews back then but is also seen in many Christians today.

When we begin to think that we are quite sure we know who God is saving and who is going to be lost we are becoming deeply infected with this same poison that caused God to become divorced from His “marriage” to the Jews as a chosen nation. This was due to their rejection of His last attempt to reconcile the marriage in the person of Jesus His Son. When they killed off this last offer of mercy and subsequently began killing off His Spirit-empowered followers, God was forced to accept their final decision and the divorce became final. That does not mean that Jewish individuals cannot be part of the redeemed through faith, but they must now enter into that intimate relationship with God apart from any advantage formerly enjoyed as God's “chosen nation”. Under the new covenant (new marriage), those who make up the bride of Christ are from every class and people on the earth who accept the invitation of God to become intimate with Him and submit to being led by His Spirit.

How Paul explains this and the illustrations he uses in this chapter I believe will be very instructive as I further examine them. But due to lack of time again I will leave that for another day.

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Who Prepares Vessels of Wrath?

What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? And He did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory. (Romans 9:22-23)

I find some more helpful insights in researching the original words for these verses. They enforce what can be seen even in some of the English translations when viewed with correct paradigms.

Look at these words with the backdrop of a God who is intensely passionate in His love, almost impatient to be reunited with all of His children and yet restrains Himself to protect us from that very intensity because of the danger it poses for us until we are in harmony enough with Him to live in His fiery presence.

It starts out by saying that He is willing for His wrath to be demonstrated or revealed. In chapter 1 almost the very same thing has been talked about. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. (Romans 1:18-20)

This wrath referred to must not be confused with human-type wrath that is mingled with evil feelings and desires to harm others. God's wrath when properly translated and understood is His intense passion. And while we generally only experience intense passion when we get hatefully angry or are full of lust, God's passion is perfectly pure and untainted with any evil whatsoever. But God's presence itself is a consuming fire and is very dangerous for anyone who is not in perfect synchronization with His heart of selfless love and service for others. It is not an arbitrary rule but is simply a description of reality.

Even in the laws of physics there are many examples of the need for harmony to avoid destruction. Certain sounds can destroy a crystal glass because the glass cannot be flexible enough to resonate in sympathy with the intensity of the note. This is just a tiny example of what is referred to in Romans 1 as a revelation of God's invisible attributes through what He has made.

But while it is true that God has been protecting us from Himself and His overwhelming intensity of passion, the text in Romans 9:22 quoted at the beginning reveals that God will not always protect us from that passion. Those who choose to suppress the truth about God literally prepare themselves for destruction by choosing to make themselves vessels of wrath by clinging to lies about God instead of embracing the truth He wants to reveal to their hearts. So this verse says that God is willing that the results of those choices bear out the natural consequences of the dissonance, pain and ultimate destruction that is inevitable.

But there is more. While people are choosing to suppress the truth about God and are making themselves vessels of wrath, even during that time God is still sustaining them and protecting them from the full effects of their wrong choices in hopes that they will yet turn to Him and accept His love and grace for them before it is forever too late, before their hearts are beyond repair. The word translated “endure” is usually translated elsewhere in the New Testament as when someone carries something or someone who cannot move on their own power. It is used to describe situations when people were carried to Jesus to be healed or when objects were carried around with someone.

What this tells me is that even while I am making sinful choices that increase my disabilities to live and move, God continues to carry me, sustain me and hold me up while offering me chance after chance to respond to His love and receive the truth about Him into my heart in hopes that I will turn to Him.

What I see this verse saying is that He endures – holds up, sustains – with much patience those who are preparing themselves, by their choices to suppress the truth about God, as vessels of wrath for destruction.

And why is He doing that? Think about it. The very next verse says that He does this so that the riches of His glory can be made known upon the vessels of mercy. But wait – who are these vessels of mercy? Are they people that God arbitrarily picked ahead of time to receive His favor while rejecting all the others? NO! They themselves are former “vessels of wrath” who have responded to God's invitation to return to Him and be healed by Him. They have seen His mercy and have acted on the revelation of the kindness of God by repenting and coming to Him for healing and grace. For we are all vessels of wrath at one time or another, totally unfit to survive in the presence of the Almighty. And until we embrace His mercy and allow His transforming power to ravish our hearts with His love and allow Him to make us fit to come closer to Him, we will all be in mortal danger from the passion of God.

It is now becoming more clear to me in this chapter who is choosing what. While God is not arbitrarily determining who will be safe and joyful in His presence and who will suffer torment and fear, He also is not going to forever hide behind the protective shield He has put around Himself to protect sinners from the lethal effects of His fiery passionate love and the truth about Himself. Love desires intimacy. But intimacy at that intensity can only be survived and enjoyed when everyone involved is in perfect synchronization and sympathy with the principles of reality that God has set up in the whole universe. It is each one of us that makes the determination by our choices whether we will remain vessels of wrath – dangerously out of sync with God's passion – or we will accept the gift of salvation through the gospel as revealed in Jesus our Saviour and Redeemer.

But the heart of God continues to burn with intense desire that every one of us become vessels of mercy by believing in His mercy, compassion and the truth about His character. For He wants nothing other than to lavish us with the riches of His glory.

Wow! I never thought I would find all of this when I first started reading this chapter. But then again, I knew that where I find the most troubling ideas on the surface in the Bible that there is usually some of the most exciting discoveries waiting beneath the surface for those who are willing to dig. I am in awe at all these revelations that He has shared with me in my pursuit of knowing Him better in this chapter. And I look forward to much more as I continue my way through the book of Romans.

Please feel free to share your thoughts and impressions with me, even if you don't agree or even if you have no idea who I am or you just happen to come across this web page at random. I enjoy connecting with others in my study of the Word and I pray that God will use my simple bits of sharing of what I am learning to enlighten others and motivate them to dig a little deeper themselves. Feel free to share with me on my journey.

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Who Makes Vessels of Wrath?

I am finding still more interesting clues about God's attitude toward the wicked and the righteous in Romans chapter 9. I find that when I read it and it still disturbs me that the very tension of being disturbed about what I am reading is the incentive to ask questions. And asking questions creates the very environment more conducive to learning and changing my thinking at a deeper level. Feeling disturbed actually engages the emotional side of the brain which is very important to changing deep-seated assumptions and beliefs at a more important level. It creates a more effective opportunity to make changes in my thinking that are more fundamental and longer-lasting if I take advantage of that opportunity by pursuing light and truth to resolve these tensions.

What comes to my attention this morning is verse 18 and verses 22 and 23. These verses seem to be saying very much the same thing in many ways and is part of the tension that underlies centuries of arguments and debates. I believe truth is consistent and I don't buy the idea that problems or issues that have been debated by theologians over the ages cannot be solved by simple lay persons. This is not a statement made in a spirit of arrogance. The Bible teaches that the Spirit of God knows exactly the mind of God and is available to anyone who is humble and willing to be taught the things of God if they will take the time and energy to search and pray for answers and insight. I do not believe in always looking to theologians for the final word on answers about God. That is the world's way of thinking – that only the “experts” have enough credibility to be believed and counted on to come up with definitive solutions to difficult problems. That kind of thinking has produced the fractures and divisions and confusion that we see in religion of all kinds today. Depending on so-called experts or human-appointed “authorities” is not the way to arrive at unifying truth.

The only way that God's people will ever come into unity, both of heart and of thinking, is by listening to and being led by the one Spirit who has been sent to teach us all things and empower every individual to take their proper place in the mysterious body of Christ. We cannot formulate the body of Christ by our own machinations or denominations. The body of Christ will only be connected together when each person who has submitted to be led by the Spirit of God listens to and obeys that Spirit. And the Bible, the word of God, has been given to test the spirits so that we do not need to be deceived by an imitation of the true Spirit. For all imitations of the true Spirit are lying spirits calculated to create division and drive a wedge between our hearts and the passionate heart of God.

So, I got a little off on a tangent there. But sometimes I need to remind myself of what is important and the environment in which I need to stay to unravel some of the difficult things I am looking at.

I decided to again go back and check the original language to look for clues in these verses and I did find some. Even in the current translation there are some good clues if I read it with the right preconceptions about God in place. For instance, I notice that in verse 18 that the common denominator of God's relating to the two classes of people is His desire.

So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires. (Romans 9:18)

Some questions come to mind at this point that have to do with assumptions that need to be exposed and challenged. Is God's mercy toward those in the first group in reaction to their predetermined classification or is God's mercy an expression of who He is and what He is consistently like irregardless of who we are or the choices we make? Likewise, is the hardening effect of God on the second class His real desire for them because of their predetermined lot in life or is it simply a description of the effect that is seen in their life – like fire hardening a piece of clay?

And notice that the last part of each of these descriptions says the same thing – He desires. Is it really safe to leap to the assumption that His desire for one group is the opposite of His desire for the second group. To answer yes to that question is to betray deep, fundamental suspicions in our heart about God that resonate very much with the ideas entrenched in us that come from the father of lies and the archenemy of God. That should not surprise us since we are all infected with these lies due to our condition of being part of the fallen human race. But these false assumptions about God should not be allowed to go unchallenged and unexamined when trying to interpret the word of God.

I believe that Scripture teaches that God's desire is that everyone would be saved in heaven and live with Him in His love eternally. And that even includes Pharaoh himself! I believe it is inconsistent with the rest of Scripture to assume from this passage that God intends for some to be lost and others to be saved. That is to charge God with being arbitrary and overriding people's freedom to make a free choice of their own. This needs to become settled in the mind before one can go any further in understanding what Paul is really trying to convey in these verses.

So if God's desire is for everyone to be redeemed, to come to repentance and to be transformed back into His image, and if He fiercely protects the right of every intelligent being to have a free choice in determining their own destiny, then what is with the mercy and the hardness? I believe that it becomes evident that the mercy or hardness is simply a description of what is experienced by each person based on their own decisions of how they are going to respond to God's desire for them and the picture of God that they cling to.

Some might insist that verse 16 is saying the very opposite of this. But again, it all depends on our pre-assumptions about God as to what we will see in these verses. I also think we need to keep in mind that the translators of the Bible also wove in a certain amount of their own preconceptions about God in the words they chose to express what they believed Paul was trying to say. It is impossible to translate anything from one language to another without introducing at least a little bit of the translator's bias and that becomes one of the factors that needs to be remembered in unraveling some of the confusion that we see here. As I mentioned in a previous post about verse 16, it can be seen to really be saying that God's mercy is not dependent on anything we do or choose but is simply a description of what He is like. I think that this concept can be seen to be consistent throughout this whole passage if it is considered carefully.

Now I would like to mention one more thing I uncovered in looking at verses 22 and 23.

What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? And He did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory. (Romans 9:22-23)

There is a lot that can be said about these verses. As far as the issue of wrath goes (which is where much of the confusion about this passage comes from in the first place) I would say that I have already covered this several times, particularly in my study of Romans 1 where it first shows up. That understanding of what is really meant by God's wrath is crucial to properly understanding the other places where it shows up throughout the Bible.

But what I did look for in these verses was the meaning behind the words “prepared” used in both verses and for both classes of people. When I went back and looked up the Greek that was used to arrive at these words I noticed something very significant. The original Greek words used for the same English word “prepared” in both of these verses is not the same. While they may be very similar they have notable differences. The original word used in verse 22 simply conveys the idea of “maturing” or completion. It does not necessarily carry the notion of being predetermined ahead of time like the word used for the second verse does. The “ahead of time” idea in verse 23 does come through even in the English as the word “beforehand” and I believe is quite significant.

Since God already knows from eternity what our choices and destiny is going to be, He can make His plans ahead of time to take that into account, yet still without imposing any sort of coercion on us to make those choices. I discussed this a bit in some of my recent posts on this passage. Really this whole passage is made more difficult because of our general inability to be able to comprehend how God can know our destiny ahead of time without unfairly using that information either against us or to our unfair advantage. That is due to the fact that it is extremely difficult to imagine a God who is free of our penchant to take advantages for ourselves in any way possible. We have such strong bias's due to our natural selfishness that it is nearly impossible for us to imagine what a totally unselfish God – or person for that matter – would think like.

But God does not think like we do and He does not use His power or advantages to manipulate circumstances in any way that could ever be considered to be unfair to anyone. That truth will ultimately be fully revealed at the final day of judgment, but until then we need to believe it by faith, trusting in a God who has our best interest in His heart all the time.

The reason that I think this difference is significant between the two verses is that it shows that God really does not predetermine anyone to become a “vessel of wrath”. No one is forced to become a vessel of wrath and become a lost sinner. Even the choice of the potter to make vessels for different uses in verse 21 does not state that some are designed to be vessels of wrath, it only states that some are designed for honorable use and others for common use. And in the Kingdom of Heaven everything is upside down to start with from what we are used to thinking. Jesus declared that those who wish to be the greatest in the Kingdom of God must learn to serve the most unselfishly and be most humble. So just because God may have formed a vessel for common use does not mean that He intended it to become a vessel of wrath. That comes about as a direct result of the choice made by the person themselves and becomes evident in the fruit of their responses to God's appeals to them.

What is seen throughout this passage and in other places is that the only real predestination that goes on in God's mind is His desire for everyone to be saved and to be restored into intimate relationship with Him. He knows that will not happen for everyone and He knows who will make what choices, but that knowledge in know way whatsoever changes His intense desire to capture our hearts anyway. God is love and cannot be anything in conflict with that love. God does not have a good and bad side to His personality. God is totally righteous and in Him there is no darkness at all.

The repeated emphasis that Paul keeps making throughout this passage is a focus on the true desire of God in contrast to the results that occur in the lives of those who resist His good desire for them. We are completely free to choose to accept His mercy and compassion and we are also completely free to resist Him and turn ourselves into vessels of wrath. God's foreknowledge in no way affects our freedom to make this choice, but His desire is always that we will choose His love.

However, if we do choose to cling to the lies about Him and believe that He is unfair, manipulative and coercive, we will end up experiencing the “wrath” that we imagine Him to have against us – not because it is true about Him but because the image that we cling to in our mind about what God is like produces the results of that image in our psyche. One of the important concepts found in a true understanding of His wrath is that He will reluctantly release us to the results of our own decisions. That is what explains the stark difference in reactions between those who love God and believe the truth about Him and those who are afraid of God and cling to their lies about Him as demonstrated at the Second Coming of Jesus. Notice which class cry out for the rocks and the mountains to fall on them and to hide them from His glory when He returns. And particularly notice the absurd description of Him that they exclaim in terror. They are terrified of the “wrath of the lamb”. Whoever in all of history was in grave danger from a wrathful lamb? How much worse can their mental illness become?

I do not want to make the choices or continue to harbor the beliefs inside of me that will cause me to have this kind of absurd paranoia. I want to be cleaned out of these lies and be filled with the beauty of God and experience the loveliness of His character and presence. I choose to trust in His continuing work inside of me to fit me as a vessel of mercy though which to make known the riches of His glory. Even so, do it Lord Jesus.

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Very Interesting Link

I invite you to visit Greg Boyd's blog page, particularly the posts for November 3 and 6. Greg Boyd is the founder and pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, MN. He writes about his thoughts on the ministry and controversial picture of the Good News Tour and the recent exposure of the massive hypocrisy of Christians in response to the advertisements for their recent conference in Portland Ore. I find his posts very exciting and fascinating in light of what many of us are learning about God.