The Apostle Paul, formerly called the Pharisee Saul said, “For me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” Here was a man that had an encounter with the risen Lord while on the road to Damascus that both temporarily blinded him physically, but also opened his eyes spiritually, for all eternity. This divine encounter completely changed his life, consumed his being, and charted his eternal destiny. For all intents and purposes this experience began for Paul a life of complete dedication and absolute devotion to Christ and His cause. Through this divine meeting with the risen Lord, Paul became Christ-centered instead of self, Satan, and sin-centered. Even his name was changed from the haughty, blaspheming, insolent Pharisee Saul (persecutor of Christ) to the humble, devout, faithful, obedient, loving Apostle Paul (martyr for Christ)! Perhaps we need to pray for such an encounter with the risen Christ for ourselves and for those we hope to effectively evangelize. Could this kind of experience help our resolute conviction and their spiritual conversion as it did Saul’s? Whereas these divine encounters with the Lord are in His hands, and at His discretion, should we not pray for Him to perform more of them on behalf of others and ourselves? I say that we should. It couldn’t hurt! Believe it or not, there are some professing and practicing Christians today that have had conversion experiences even more dramatic than Paul’s. These brief encounters with the Lord have absolutely changed the recipients’ lives, and also won them over for Christ and His purposes. I’m reminded of one Indian man whose co-worker I met while on a mission in Africa. He told me that his boss had been a radical Hindu who was actively involved in persecuting Christian believers in India until Jesus appeared to Him and transformed his life. He is now a Christian evangelist based in Houston, Texas, and from there he has been conducting worldwide evangelistic gospel crusade meetings for Christ! Thousands are being saved in each meeting! There are, of course, many that have had less dramatic conversion experiences and yet, their dedication and devotion to Christ is still very great. After all, Jesus said, “Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe.” Nevertheless, I have often prayed while witnessing of Christ to hardened radical Muslims that God would grant them a “Damascus Road” experience. Paul was a hardened radical Hebrew Pharisee, and it sure helped in converting him. I recently read an article written by Ken Walker in the December 2008 edition of Charisma magazine entitled, “When Muslims Find Jesus.” The article reported that there have been thousands of Muslims in the Middle East within the last few years who have come to faith in Christ through divine dreams and visions.
Having said that, my own experiences in relationship with the risen Lord through the power of His Holy Spirit have, at times, been through visions. To name just a few, at the age of nineteen I received Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior by faith, and walked with Him for a few years before backsliding, because at the time, I had not been baptized in the Holy Spirit, nor discipled by mature saints. After a couple of years of serious backsliding, having become frustrated by my apparent lack of ability to live the Christian life the way I felt Christ required of me, I was thus summarily deceived by Satan into embracing the Buddhist religion in a futile attempt to seek and find a measure of relief from my frustrated condition.

Not long after that, I unknowingly became intimately involved with a practicing witch who seduced me and cast a number of spells on me, which led me down the slippery path of unseemly sensual pleasures and lawless sexual sins. At a certain point after having become completely addicted to her seductions, she began to withdraw her affections from me and share them with another. It almost goes without saying that when this sinful relationship, which was “pleasurable for a season,” was taken away from me, I was led into spiritual, emotional, and physical withdrawals. This resulted in an experience of extreme and desperate bondage, as well as a state of dire suffering in the grip of demonic spirits.

In a sentence, I had been seduced into allowing her to “share her powers with me,” and when she decided to remove herself from me and no longer be emotionally and sexually exclusive with me, it put me on the deck. I could not get out of bed or eat for a week!

Now, being a practicing Buddhist at the time, I shared my experience with a Christian friend, and parroted to him Buddha’s phrase, “Desire is the cause of all suffering.” He looked at me and said, “Rob, sin is the cause of all suffering.” This hit be like a brick right between the eyes. It was my wake up call!


I knew from my past relationship with the Lord that the only way to deal with sin (the cause of my suffering) was through faith in Jesus Christ. “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” My rationale was, “If I want to be rid of this suffering, I’d best be rid of this sin.” It was in this wretched and painful condition that I found myself once again calling on the name of the Lord for deliverance from my sins. He miraculously restored my life and rescued me from the powers of darkness. This was the result, in no small measure, of the prayers of my Christian mother and sister and their prayer partners who had been recruited by them on my behalf to offer supplications unto God for my deliverance.


I offered my prayer to God with desperate, heartfelt and sincere confession of and repentance from my sins, while I was crying out in faith for Jesus Christ’s mercy. Suddenly, I had an open vision!

For those of you who have never had one, it is like you are watching a movie, but not from your seat in a theater or from your armchair in your family room. You are actually in the scene, and are playing an active role in the drama. In this vision, I was actually playing the lead role. But it was no plaything; it was a real open vision. For all intents and purposes, I was there. In this vision, God was showing me my spiritual condition at the time.

The Vision

I was struggling to walk through a waste deep quagmire swamp. The humidity was 110%, and the heavy air was weighing down on me, making it very difficult to breath. There were several ashen white, dead, barren, and leafless trees lining the edges of the swamp. As I struggled to make my way through the swamp, there were several ugly poisonous vipers slithering on top of the murky water hitting at me. “I was afraid I was gonna get hit.” In this horrible place and in this desperate condition I cried out upon the name of the Lord. I heard the name “Jesus” come out of my heart (chest), resounding and echoing through the caverns of the swamp. As soon as His name cleared my being, I was out of the swamp and standing on top of a high mountain. The air was fresh and clear, and a gentle breeze was blowing through my hair. All the oppression, bondage, and sin had been removed from me. I was washed clean, and I was high and dry in the Lord. Jesus had delivered me once again. All praise and glory to His holy name!

Not long after that blessed experience, Jesus manifested Himself to me in the pure light of His absolute compassion, eye to Eye or spirit to Spirit, if you will. I was soon to be speaking in “the tongues of men and angels,” having received the baptism in the Holy Spirit. Not long after that He called me and anointed me into Christian service and ministry. “His mercies are new every morning; great is His faithfulness!”

Anyway, back to Paul. This brother, after conversion, spent all of his time, resources, and strength in an effort to know Christ better, to offer Him to others, and present to Christ a pure and holy church, zealous for good works. Jesus said that He would show Paul the things that he must suffer for His name, and indeed He did! As an apostle, it was required of Paul to embrace Christ’s sufferings and be conformed to His death. He wrote many of his letters to the churches that he had established from prison cells. Because of his love for Christ, His church, and the Gentile world, he was beaten with rods and whips, stoned, shipwrecked, starved, made homeless, despised of his Jewish brothers, abandoned by his Christian brothers, imprisoned, and the list goes on and on. He did not fear suffering for Christ. Rather, he embraced it.

In these latter times, as in the former days, the same will be required of many, if not most, sincere Christian believers. The good news is that those who bravely choose to do God’s will and not deny Him, even to the point of “resisting sin to the shedding of blood,” shall not partake of the second death (Hell), but will share in the first out resurrection from the dead, and become citizens of God’s tangible eternal kingdom on earth!

It should be noted that Christian believers shall not fear persecution or martyrdom at the hands of their enemies, provided they are living in the spiritual revelation and practical reality that they are already dead, buried, and risen with Him, “seated with Christ in heavenly places” right now! In other words, those who live like, and “reckon (account) themselves dead to sin (their sins) and alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord” will not fear persecution or physical death as martyrs for Christ, but they will, as Paul did, be enabled to embrace death and consider it gain! Because they truly fear God, they will not fear what man can do to them. “Perfect love casts out fear.”

Quoting again from the previously mentioned Charisma article: “Three new converts (to Christ) in Egypt recently told Janssen that Christians in America should pray “with” them not “for” them.” “If you pray for us, you will pray for our safety, and the persecution will stop,” they told him. “If you pray with us, we can be sure the persecution will increase. Pray we will see millions come to Christ. We know there will be backlash. Pray we will be faithful, even if it costs us our lives.” Amazing!

Regrettably, this will not be the stance of the unrepentant backsliding Christian or the reprobate, apostate Church now or during the Great Tribulation. The likes of these will easily be deceived and embrace the False Prophet and anti-Christ, and they will gladly receive the mark of the Beast in order to save their lives and the lives of their loved ones. God forbid, but it is true. Remember, Paul prophesied a great falling away from the faith in the latter days.

Towards the end of Paul’s life, just before his martyrdom, he testified that he had “run the race and finished the course, having kept the faith.” He was soon to receive his “eternal crown and reward!” He proclaimed, “To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.”

I ask myself, am I running the race and staying the course that God has ordained for me? Is Christ my reason for living? Could I consider death in the cause of Christ, gain?



In reality, I am a man that has had a propensity in the past to get off course through both internal pressures and external distractions. In other words there have been sins in my personal life that I, through rebellion against God, have allowed to exist, as well as circumstances orchestrated by Satan that I have allowed to throw me off of God’s course and His purpose for my life. My greatest obstacles to doing the will of God have been self, Satan, and sin in their many forms. Nevertheless, by the grace of the Father, I keep getting back on course, but alas, only to be distracted again!

Now this is particularly concerning to me because God has ordained me to bring healing to hurting bodies and souls, as well as to bring salvation to lost sinners in the name of His Son Jesus. This, of course, involves my chosen consecration unto Him (spirit, soul, and body) and my willing separation from those sins that so easily entangle me, namely, “the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life.” After all, “He that is wise wins souls.” And, “The wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy.”

As I see it, at this time, the majority of the Church, or if you will, professing Christians in the United States of America are represented by “the seeds that fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them.” Jesus speaks of these as “those who hear the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and it proves unfruitful.”

Having said that, I, for one, am once again “in pursuit of holiness” in the hope of “perfecting holiness in reverence of God,” through an appointed season of separation unto Him. It is my hope, through repentance and faith towards God, to make an effort to accomplish my consecration unto Him by His grace through faith coupled with my resolute will beginning on January 1, 2009. I made a similar effort twice in 2008 only to be quickly distracted upon my return from cloistered life to “civilization” and “modern society.” Having said that, cloistered life is not designed as a retreat from evil. It is designed to be a time to face evil and overcome it by God’s grace. There have been times in my life when I have been successful at this, and other times when I have failed. I believe that my lack of success in the past has been due to a failure of my human will, at the point of temptation, to appropriate God's grace through faith, in order to resist the temptation effectively. My proper response to this lack of success is to "rejoice, knowing that the trying of my faith produces patience, and to allow patience to have its perfect work that I might be perfect and entire, lacking nothing." After all, "it is through faith and patience that we inherit God's promises," and "He has promised to be faithful to sanctify us wholly, sprit, soul and body until the coming of the Lord." If the truth be told, our success in resisting temptation is dependent upon our ability to draw upon the presence of God's grace on a moment-to-moment, hour-to-hour, and day-by-day basis. So, whether one is living a cloistered life or a life in the world, the world and the things of it have no dominion over you but, you "reign in life by Christ Jesus."

Dear Heavenly Father, in the name of your holy child Jesus, may Your will be done this time concerning this matter of my change from a life motivated by self, Satan, and sin to a lifestyle of holy consecration, communion, and sanctification in Christ. May I learn to practice your presence and appropriate Your righteousness through repentance from all my sins and faith towards You. Amen!

I must ask myself these questions. Is my wife my life, or is Christ my life? Are my children my life, or is Christ my life? Is my career my life, or is Christ my life? Are my natural and carnal pleasures my life, or is Christ my life? Are my appetites, addictions, and emotions my life or is Christ my life? Are “Mammon,” materialism, and money my life, or is Christ my life? Will I ever be able to say, as Paul said, and mean it, “For me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain?” I pray that this will be the case for all of us. Why? Because if we won’t learn to live for Christ every day by denying self, taking up our own cross, and following Him, we will never be able to think, as Paul did, of dying as gain!

If we won’t live for Him now, we won’t die for Him later, and if we won’t take a stand and die for Him when the time of Great Tribulation comes, we will easily deny Him to save our own skins. And, “If we deny Him, He will deny us.” This means the second death (Hell) for all those who do so.

Jesus said, “If you seek to gain your life, you will lose it. But, if you lose your life for My sake, you will gain eternal life; and what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?”

I know that there are many things that God is leading me to do, and there are also many things that He is leading me not to do.

These can be summed up in a sentence or two, “To cast off the works of darkness and be clothed in the armor of light.” “To put off the old man and put on the new man who is created in righteousness and true holiness.”

My spiritual mentor, David Pawson, has recently said, “Jesus didn’t just come to save us from Hell. That’s just a bonus; He came to save us from our sins!” And I might add, any sinful thought, word, action, or re-action that we allow to exist in our lives or deliberately continue in, robs us of our holiness unto God, and, therefore, robs us of our happiness in Christ. Most of us don’t want to be saved from our sins, because they are pleasurable to our sin nature. This sin nature was crucified with Christ upon His death, but we must account ourselves dead to it by faith in Christ’s accomplished work on our behalf, and thereby, not “allow sin to dwell in our mortal bodies that we should obey it in the lusts thereof.”

The kingdom of God is the realm of eternal happiness, and “it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you His kingdom.” Let us not be like Esau and sell our inheritance for a brief moment of natural or carnal satisfaction. May we not sell our inheritance of God’s eternal kingdom within for the fleeting pleasures of sin!

“For sin is pleasurable for a season, but the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

May we appropriate God’s grace and mercy, by faith and faithfulness to do His will, which is our sanctification from sin, to Him, and thereby enjoy the life of holiness and happiness, the gift of righteousness that Christ has purchased for us through the shedding of His own precious blood. May He once again grant us repentance from all our sins!

Now, “God will not allow us to be tempted beyond that which we are able to bear, but will with the temptation make a way of escape.” This scripture points to the fact that if we, as Christian believers, yield ourselves and give in to Satan’s temptations, we are without excuse, because the way of our escape from sinful behavior has been provided in Christ.

The way out of yielding ourselves to evil temptations is to abide in, dwell in, and continue in Christ, by keeping His commandments and following His Spirit’s leadings, and by following the example of Christ’s life as a human being while living here on this old earth as the Son of Man. Jesus Christ was a man of covert prayer, covert fasting, covert communion with God, and the constant covert consecrated giving of Himself to God in His service to others. Therefore, He was a man of the Spirit. In our Lord’s life, doing His heavenly Father’s will was always of paramount importance to Him, instead of following the dictates of self, Satan, and sin. Jesus testified, “My sustenance is to do the will of My Father who sent me and to finish His work.” On the cross Jesus cried, “It is finished, and He gave up the ghost.”

May sin be finished in us also, as we covertly fast and pray and read our Bibles every day, as well as follow the leading of the Holy Spirit at all times, in every situation and every circumstance. May we thus become empowered to hear Christ’s voice, follow Christ’s lead, and do Christ’s will instead of our own. After all, our way of escape is Jesus Christ who said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life!” Let us therefore, “reckon ourselves dead indeed to sin and alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Let us “come out from among them and be separate, and touch not the unclean thing.” Let us “be in the world but not of the world.” Let us be quick to forgive others their sins against us, and quick to receive forgiveness for our sins against God and others, and quick to repent, confess, turn from, and forsake all of our sins against God, ourselves, and our fellow human beings. Amen!

But, someone might ask, what if there are iniquities and infirmities in my life that I would like to repent of, and be rid of, but I don’t seem to be able to? We must get real with ourselves and with our God. Paul said, “In the latter days men would be lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof.” He added, “From such turn away.” Jesus said, “He who loves Me keeps My commandments.”

We must ask ourselves, are there sinful pleasures in our lives, sins of commission that we are continuing in even though we know they are not pleasing to God? If so, we must repent, and train ourselves in His righteousness, as we trust Him for the grace to utterly forsake them. Let us ask ourselves when tempted to do something that we know God will not be pleased with, “Do I love this sin more than I love my Lord and Savior or do I love my Lord and Savior more than this sin?”

If we truly love God more than we love the sin, or anything else in the world, we will make a resolute decision to prove our love by abstaining from the sin so that we might please God! “It’s a kind of diet of the mind.” This is the nature of Christian discipline and discipleship. The same is true of sins of omission (good things we should be doing but neglect to do). But, back to sins of commission (bad things we should not be doing, but do anyway), there are many pleasures and luxuries of the flesh that self, Satan, and sin cry out for to be satisfied. However, these are pleasures and luxuries that we Christian believers cannot afford to partake of if we want to inherit the eternal kingdom of God, which is “righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.” We cannot afford the luxury of being unforgiving, bitter, or resentful. We cannot afford the luxury of anger, rage, and wrath. We cannot afford the luxury of being slothful or gluttons. We cannot afford the luxury of sexual immorality or impurity. We cannot afford the luxury of greed and selfish ambition. We cannot afford the luxury of envy, jealously, slander, and covetousness. We cannot afford the luxury of being cowardly and unbelieving. Well, the list goes on and on of what we can’t afford to do as professing and practicing Christian believers. Fill in the your own blanks.

Jesus calls us to be His disciples, and tells us that in being such, we must “deny ourselves, take up our cross daily and follow Him.” The fruit of the Spirit is self-control and if we walk in the Spirit, we will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh.

Lord God, fill us with your Holy Spirit, and cause us to remain filled, so that we might live in your Spirit, and walk in your Spirit, being led by your Spirit and enjoy the fruit of your Spirit which is self-control. Amen.

Now for those struggling with sins and strongholds that you can’t seem to forsake, realize that Jesus promised, “All things are possible for him that believes.” Place your faith in God and patiently wait for His deliverance.

“Ask, and keep on asking, seek and keep on seeking, knock and keep on knocking.”

“Believe you receive when you pray and you will have what you prayed for.”

“Follow after those who through faith and patience inherit the promises of God.”

And remember this, “We have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleans us from all unrighteousness.”

And don’t forget to, “Count it all joy when you fall into different temptations, tests, and trial, knowing that the trying if your faith produces patience. Let patience have its perfect work that you might be perfect and entire, lacking nothing.”

Jesus promised, “Continue in my words, and you will know the Truth, and the Truth will make you free.” (Free from our sins).

And remember, “We walk by faith, not by sight, calling those thing which be not as though they were.”

“We have been made the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus.”

We must appropriate that righteousness through “repentance from works that lead to death and faith towards God.”

“Do not let sin therefore dwell in your mortal bodies, that you should obey it in the lust thereof.”

And this is possible because “sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law, but under grace.”

Question: What is this grace we are under, and what does this grace do for us in allowing no sin to have dominion over us?

Answer. The grace of God teaches us. Let us be good students and learn!

“For the grace of God has appeared to all men, teaching us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself and people for His own possession who are zealous for good works.”


I will close with some final scriptures for your meditation and edification.

“If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ Who is your life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory. Put to death therefore your members that are on the earth: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming upon the sons of disobedience. In these you, too, once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth.” Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old man with its practices and have put on the new man, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator. Here there is not Greek or Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all. Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another, and if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs; with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.” Colossians 3:1-17

Let us say yes to Jesus, and no to self, Satan, and sin throughout this New Year. May it be said, “Jesus is mine in 2009” so that we will be able to shout the victory and sincerely proclaim in 2010, “we win!” Amen, Amen, and Amen!

And let us remember, we have not yet attained to the character of our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ, the perfect Son of God, but becoming like Him is our goal, and the expression of His character in thought, word, action, and reaction, is what we, as His disciples, are all aiming for.

In this quest, may we all be blessed!