Steve Simms's Blog, page 183
May 30, 2021
Recognizing racism (It’s not always easy to spot)
Racism is a heart problem. The Civil Rights movement ended many racist systems, but many hearts still remain racist.
Racism has frequently been supported by laws and government systems. Getting beyond that isn’t easy.
Ignoring (or denying) the history of racism isn’t wise. Injustice needs to be remembered so that it isn’t repeated.
Racism is deceptive. We, humans, can avoid people because of their skin color and be unaware that we’re doing it.
Racism often operates (both externally and internally) under the cover of darkness. It’s hard to see racism without night vision goggles.
Racism is irrational. It makes no sense to rank animals by the color of their fur or people by their skin color.
Racism is unfair. It judges people differently depending on their skin color, not on their character or ability.
Racism lacks compassion. Racism refuses to listen to and understand people who have been mistreated by racism.
Racism is unethical. It tries to evaluate and prioritize people based on something as insignificant as skin color.
Racism isn’t always aggressive. Sometimes it’s apathetic.
Racism forgets. It doesn’t remember color-based injustice. Racism also forgets many great Americans who gave their life for freedom–runaway slaves, lynching victims, Civil Rights heroes, etc.
Racism is based on insecurity and a perceived need to feel like you’re better than some other people. It’s pride-focused.
Racism is often driven by economic factors. Modern racism was established in the 1,600s as an attempt to justify the economic-based enslavement of people, by declaring them inferior.
Racism is anti-Christian. Christ-followers come from “every kindred and every tribe.”
Racism is wrong. Even the US Declaration of Independences declares that people have God-given, inalienable rights.
Racism is demonic. It’s an unnatural rejection of people, based on their skin color, and is driven by evil spirits.
Spiritual problems need spiritual solutions. Racism is a spiritual problem. The Bible has the solution–Christian Racial Togetherness.
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May 29, 2021
Christianity’s more than religious oratory
For far
Too many Christians,
God’s glory
Is just a story
Taught by religious oratory.
Don’t seek approval.
Seek repentance.
Strive to align
Your life with God’s will.
To Christ in you
Be true!
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Feelings, thoughts, & desires are sometimes demonic
Many feelings, desires, and thoughts are demonic. Your conscience warns you and tries to protect you from them. Before you go along with a feeling, desire, or thought, check with your conscience.
The most dangerous demons are the ones trying to fill you and inwardly coerce you with tormenting feelings, desires, and thoughts. However, those demonic feelings, thoughts, and desires are not all powerful. You can learn to resist them, refuse them, and overcome them.
This matters! It’s important who wins the battle between your conscience and demonic feelings, thoughts, and desires.
Inner compulsion, bondage, or obsession are often demonic attacks. The Holy Spirit leads; He doesn’t force. Christians, especially, need to be trained to recognize, resist, and overcome demonic feelings, desires, and thoughts and not to go along with them.
When you see anger, hatred, or violence manifesting, people have turned their self-control over to demons. A country whose people don’t know how to resist inner demons, will experience much hatred, injustice, crime, and violence.
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“I hear the screams.” –Viola Fletcher remembering the Tulsa Race Massacre @ 107 years old
Seven year old, Viola Fletcher, was put to bed on the night of May 31, 1921, in her home in the Greenwood community of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Suddenly her family woke her up and told her they had to leave.
Over the next 14 hours a white mob burned, looted, and murdered up to 300 of the residents of Greenwood, a black neighborhood also known as Black Wall Street because of its prosperity. 35 blocks of homes, businesses, schools, and even churches, were destroyed by the mob.
The survivors were rounded up and detained in the Brady Theater, one of the few buildings in Greenwood that was left standing after the massacre. In 2019, I visited the 35 block Greenwood community, which is now mostly vacant lots, and wept as I walked those empty streets.
After the massacre, Oklahoma declared martial law and forcibly put Tulsa’s Black residents into camps, however, they didn’t prosecute a single white person of a crime. Insurance companies refused to pay the survivors’ claims and no one was ever paid any reparations for their losses.
On May 19, 100 years later, the three living survivors, Hughes Van Ellis, Lessie Benningfield Mother Randle, and Viola, testified before the US Congress about the Tulsa Race Massacre. (Watch the video of her here.) Here’s some of what Ms. Fletcher said:
“I will never forget the violence. Black men being shot. Black bodies lying in the street. I still smell smoke. I still see Black businesses being burned. I hear the screams. I live through the massacre every day. Our country may forget this history, but I cannot. I will not.”
She also said: “I’m here seeking justice and I’m asking my country to acknowledge what happened in Tulsa in 1921.” Wouldn’t you ask that, if you were her?
Here’s one more quote from her speaking in Tulsa: “They murdered people. I still see it today in my mind … I have survived 100 years of painful memories and losses. By the grace of God, I am still here. I have survived. I have survived to tell this story. I believe I am still here to share it with you. Hopefully, now you all will listen to us while we are still here.”
Here’s a short video with more of the story.
The survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre were forcibly brought to this building, one of the few that that was left standing in the Greenwood community.
May 28, 2021
Inner Christianity as taught by the Bible
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Reading the Bible with an open heart leads to experiencing God like the Bible writers experienced Him. Christianity begins within. Without inner Christianity, outward religion is powerless.
Say goodbye to self-focus & hello to Jesus
The best
Thing
That you
Can do
Is to
Pursue
Jesus.
When I focus on the living Jesus, happiness fills my peripheral vision. The persistent pursuit of the living Jesus is the discovery of unspeakable joy and peace beyond understanding.
Jesus didn’t give His disciples the keys to a church building, but the keys to the kingdom of God. For an amazing inner life, filled with the fruit of the Spirit, read the Bible daily with an open heart.
To pursue the kingdom of God, I have to dismantle my kingdom. “He (Jesus) must increase; I must decrease.”
Jesus and the early Christians taught “deny yourself” and “humble yourself.” They never taught “find yourself.”
Feelings and desires often lead people into self-destructive pursuits. Wisdom and rationality are much better guides.
You already are yourself. There’s no need to “find yourself.” Happiness comes from forgetting self and pursuing a worthy cause. The best way to create happiness is to get your focus off of yourself. If you haven’t been able to drag yourself into happiness, try forgetting about yourself and let happiness sneak up on you.
Calling a patch of weeds a garden won’t produce a harvest. Reality matters. The disinformation highway distorts reality and makes truth a casualty. Changing what you call something doesn’t change what it is.
Just because you want something, doesn’t make it right. Just because you feel something, doesn’t make it true.
Any agenda humans set for a church service is irrelevant. God’s agenda (kingdom) is what matters!
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May 27, 2021
TN Commissioner of Agriculture, Cotton Ivy, at a Pentecostal Church
I just heard that Cotton Ivy, former TN Commissioner of Agriculture, was promoted to glory. Read how when I was in college, Cotton helped free me up to love Jesus more!
Free Gas For Your Think Tank (A blog to jog your mind and unclog your heart . . .)
Cotton Ivy was the Commissioner of Agriculture for the state of Tennessee from 1989-1995. The building in the picture is named after him: the L.H. “Cotton” Ivy Laboratory at Ellington Agricultural Center in Nashville, Tennessee.
Once when I was a student at the University of Tennessee Martin, Cotton Ivy asked me and a few of my friends if we would like to go to church with him one night. We said yes, and he drove us to a Pentecostal church in Kennett, Missouri.
I had never been to a Pentecostal church before and had no idea what to expect. (I grew up Presbyterian.) The small building was packed with people. Cotton led my friends and I down to the front row.
To begin the meeting, the preacher stood up and passionately quoted a Bible verse: The God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly. Then…
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Amazing Grace is inner Christianity — freedom from bondage to sin
Society says to follow your feelings, desires, and opinions. The Bible says to make them all obey Jesus.
Amazing grace
Gives you power
To replace
Deceptive desires
With what God requires.
Clear out your heart.
Make room for
The living Jesus
To freely work
Inside you.
Inner Christianity is about what the living Jesus is doing inside human hearts. It’s not focused on meetings and events.
When the Christian faith was externalized and began to focus on meetings and rituals instead of on the living Jesus, it lost power. Christianity, without personal observation and direct experience of the living Jesus, is just a shadow of what it is meant to be.
Church is to often about manipulation. Inner Christianity is about liberation from inner bondage.
When they’re not attending church, too many Christians act like they’re indifferent to Jesus and His will. If Christians aren’t thrilled about the living Jesus and passionately following and obeying Him, they’re not “being fed.”
You have free will. You don’t have to obey feelings, desires, and thoughts. Instead, make your feelings, desires, and thoughts obey your conscience.
To obey your feelings, desires, or opinions, when they contradict the voice of God, is sin. The reality of sin causes much human misery and denying sin never overcomes it. Mismanagement of the mind and the will, that used to be called “a sin,” is now frequently called “a disease.”
Racism is an example of sin. Sin isn’t healed by government laws. Its cure is confession and repentance–acknowledgement and turning away from it.
God’s building blocks,
That make you strong,
Are often disguised
As road blocks.
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May 25, 2021
Taming your inner wilderness
If you don’t tame
The wilderness
Inside you,
It will overgrow
And devour you.
If you’re having trouble finding happiness around you, that’s because it must first be discovered and developed within you. Trying to spread happiness and hope to other people is the secret to being happy!
Every thought, every feeling, every desire isn’t good! Some of them are evil and need to be rejected & overcome.
Inner hygiene is important. If you don’t regularly clean out your heart and mind, your whole life will get out of whack. If your mind and heart are like drawers stuffed full of junk, it’ll be hard to find any happiness inside you.
The more tormenting thoughts, desires, and feelings are fed, the stronger they grow inside you. Regardless how your life looks on the outside, create and maintain a healthy, hopeful environment in your mind and heart.
The atmosphere you carry around inside of you will be the atmosphere you create around you. Self-improvement begins within. Improve your thoughts, feelings, and desires. Then outward improvements in your life will follow.
It’s often easier to edit and alter your thoughts, feelings, and desires than it is to try to change your circumstances. Try it!
Your conscience is designed to protect you from guilt. Ignoring it almost always leads to activities that make you feel guilty.
If you own anything, it’s the space inside your mind and heart. If you don’t take control of that, life will always kick you around.
It doesn’t much matter what people think about you if your inner life is a mess. Inner fear and weakness keep people from being honest. Strength and courage walk in the light.
If you’re dying inside
For lack of an inner guide,
Confide
In Jesus.
You can’t train athletes (or Christians) by lecturing them. It takes ongoing practice and coaching. When the love of Jesus is written on your heart, you don’t need notes to talk (or preach) about Him. Genuine Christianity continually changes and improves you from the inside out.
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May 24, 2021
Thoughts to blow up religious boxes
The early Christians preached and demonstrated the presence of Jesus everywhere. They didn’t just sit to be passively preached to.
Christ in you,
Woohoo!
The hope of glory.
Celebrate His story!
Prayer’s not talking
To the air.
It’s airing your heart
To the living God.
Pentecost was rowdy
And Spirit-led.
Church is tame
And can feel dead.
Fans at a tailgate party, expressing enthusiasm for their team, have a level of passion and freedom that’s often missing in church.
A national sports championship is invisible, Yet millions go wild when “their” team wins one. I find Jesus much more thrilling.
If you dismantle the wall between you and God, (self-focus, unforgiveness, pride, anger, etc.) you’ll be overcome by His presence.
It’s inspiring to see the living Jesus when ordinary people open their heart and let Him shine thru.
The greatest help to fight invisible enemies (tormenting thoughts, enslaving desires, and evil feelings) is invisible. Focus on Jesus!
There’s no time limit on conversation with God and enjoying His presence. “Pray without ceasing.”
I love when Christians set aside religious formality and gather for a free-flowing, group conversation with Jesus.
If your heart is open to Jesus, you don’t have to go to a special place to connect with Him.
Think what will happen when Christians are as quick to respond to and communicate with the living Jesus as we are with our phone.
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