God Will Reveal

Posted on March 23, 2014 by Mark McMillion

The first year after I became a Christian, I was often really desperate in prayer. That can be good and usually is good. So often for many people, it’s like the verse that says, “No man stirreth himself to call upon Me.” (Isaiah 64:7).

But for me, maybe it had to do with the very rough experiences I’d had prior to coming to faith where my unbelief and life of debauchery had brought me to some real depths. So even after I came to faith and later came to the Lord, I guess it was almost like what nowadays is called “post traumatic stress syndrome” that was still affected me. Or perhaps it was like what Paul said, “knowing therefore the terror of the Lord…” (II Corinthians 5:11). The Lord had had to smash my pride and contrariness in order that the seed of the new life He wanted me to have could grow. And, at times, those experiences were terrifying.

So even after I became a Christian, I often was very desperate in prayer. Many of those prayers were along the lines of what King David prayed, “Search me oh God, and know my heart: try me and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” (Psalm 139: 23 & 24) That’s a good verse and a good prayer to pray; what could go wrong?

Well, for me, some of my friends were beginning to tell me that perhaps I was so overwrought with desperation and heart-searching that it seemed like I was almost nervous or tense much of the time, rather than really resting in the Lord. I was so desperate, yearning and serious that it was an imbalance and the Lord wanted to lead me into a further understanding of His ways.

One thing that did come of all that prayer, the Lord often really did come through and I had some marvelous answers. But still, something wasn’t quite right. A friend talked with me about this and said something to the effect that “any time something hinders more than it helps, it’s time to abolish it.” He was saying that all my continual desperation and vehement concern to have a clean heart was making it so that I didn’t have the fruits of the Spirit that I should have, like peace and joy.

I knew the Lord was speaking through him. As so often happens, the answer came through reading the Word. Somehow I was later drawn to read Philippians chapter 3. There are those famous verses there, “I count not myself to have apprehended, but this one thing I do: forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth to the things which are before, I press towards the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:13 &14) Great and famous admonitions and I felt I’d been doing the part of “pressing towards the mark”.

But it was the next verse, verse 15, that the Lord really used to punch through to me and to highlight what I needed to realize from His Word. Philippians 3:15 says, “Let us therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded. And if in anything you be otherwise minded, God will reveal that even unto you.”

Boy, did that hit my heart just where it was needed. Basically the verse spoke to me this way, “Let us therefore, as many as be perfect be thus minded.” [No one is really perfect because all have sinned. But we who are saved are now perfected in the spirit through salvation] “And if in anything you be otherwise minded, God shall reveal even this unto you.”

That was the part that really hit home and laid a new foundation stone in my Christian life. We are “perfect” already, in a sense, through salvation. But also there are times where things still need to be changed, where we are “otherwise minded”. And for those situations, there’s that huge promise there that “God will reveal it unto us“. He will reveal where we need to change and grow, where we are not all that we need to be in Him.

So it wasn’t like I needed to stop praying effectual, fervent prayers to the Lord. But this promise was something that I could claim and that would make it so that I was banking on His promises that He would reveal things that I needed to change in, rather than feeling that I needed constantly to whip myself into virtually a frenzy of prayer before God would be willing to communicate with me.

It really helped. It was a major step forward in my Christian life. My prayers were enhanced by being based on faith in His promises to reveal , rather than my anxious efforts to be desperate enough that God would be willing to answer.

“They that believe have entered into rest and have ceased from their own works.” (Hebrews 4:3 & 10) Those are pretty deep verses and probably there are more people around who actually need to “stir up the gift” (II Timothy 1:6) and keep their lights burning before their lamps go out through indifference or leaving their first love. But there may be some who could use this lesson the Lord taught me, that we do better to know and trust in His promises rather than our own self efforts. “The Lord will perfect that which concerneth me: thy mercy oh Lord endureth forever: forsake not the works of your own hands.” (Psalm 138:8) “He that has begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.” (Philippians 1:6)

Pray the Word

Posted on March 9, 2014 by Mark McMillion

I don’t know about you but, for me, life is a fight every day. And we have a lot to fight, especially with (as the Bible calls them) “the sins which do so easily beset us.” (Hebrews 12:1) Almost everyone has to fight laziness, indifference, boredom and the swarm of little distractions that assail us each day. This happens to everyone, not just Christians.

That’s why for me, prayer is utterly, absolutely essential. Life can be wonderful and beautiful. But at the same time, I’ve found that to stay alive and survive, I have to never lose sight that this life also is a battleground. Some may not like that but this truth is something I’ve found by difficult personal experiences.

Life is full of amazement and joy. But there’s a darker side which fights the Light of this world and will do all it can, in whatever way it can find, to extinguish the Light and those who hold onto the Light, if it can.

And of course, I’m of the opinion that the Light came to this earth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. He said so. He said, “I am the Light of the world, he who follows Me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” (John 8:12) I’ve found that personally true and have lived that for over 40 years.

But in the world as it is right now, the powers of darkness are very strong and seem to be getting the upper hand more and more each day. Recently I found that a dear friend, a missionary comrade who fought together with me on the mission field 20 years ago is now virtually totally secular. They have put down their candle, taken off their armor and relinquished the banner of the Lord they once did so mightily hold high. Will others arise to take their place? Maybe. I hope so.

So what can we do? As Jesus said to His disciples after multitudes of them went back from following Him, “Will you also go away?” (John 6:67) Is there anything any of us can do to overcome the insidious tide of darkness that grows in these times?

I for one believe that it really comes down to each individual. The devil can’t quench your light and steal your crown if you recognize him and resist him. When the Bible says, “Resist the devil and he will flee from you” (James 4:7), it’s presenting one of the greater truths in the Bible.

Of course one of the devil’s favorite and successful ploys is to convince you that he’s not there in the first place. That’s why so much darkness today is presented as “light”, which we are encouraged to view as “modern” ways of looking at the world, culture, values or truth itself. Jesus said, “If the light that be in you be darkness, how great is that darkness.” (Matthew 6:23) So much in our times is presented as enlightenment and rational relativism but it’s just the latest darkness, packaged in today’s trendy way.

Again, what can we do? First, recognize the battle. Two, if you have faith in God, nourish it and defend it with all your might. How can you do that? You feed your body every day, no one has to be told to do that or reminded. In the same way, it’s essential that you have a spiritual feeding every day. The Jews of Moses’ time knew this. God told them, “These words which I command you this day shall be in your heart, and you shall teach them diligently to your children.” (Deuteronomy 6:6 & 7) In the Old Testament, there were daily rituals that were commanded them in order to keep the blessings of God. There’s even an obscure verse, “The fire shall ever be burning upon the altar; it shall never go out.” (Leviticus 6:13) Does that have any meaning to us in these times? Yes. The fire of faith, commitment and love for God should ever be burning upon the altar of our hearts, the depths of our soul, daily. It should never go out. It should be something that is a part of you daily.

Let’s face it, it could seem the Catholics and even the Muslims know more about prayer than most Protestants. I know Catholics who go to Mass every single morning. And everyone knows that Muslims are called upon to pray 5 times a day and ten’s of millions of them do. So our prayer life is one place where we can personally take action to “be strong in the Lord and the power of His might” (Ephesians 6:10).

And for me, I find that praying the Word is a great strength. When I go to the Lord in prayer, I bring His Word with me. I “pray the Word”. It pleases God when we honor Him by reminding Him of His Word and His promises. We have been given “exceeding great and precious promises, that by these we may be partakers of the divine nature” (II Peter 1:4). Even Jesus Himself prayed the Word. On the cross, Jesus cried out to His Father, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” (Mark 15:34). And at that moment He was quoting the first verse of Psalm 22, one of the strongest of the prophetic passages about the Messiah in the Old Testament.

My friends, it’s a battle. It’s a battle to keep the faith, hold on to your crowns and not to be part of the “falling away” of the last days. We each want to be one of the virgins who kept their lamps burning, not the ones who ran out of oil and so their lamps went out. Have some kind of personal devotions daily. Have some kind of personal private, even desperate prayer daily. Try to help your loved ones to do the same. “Put on the full armor of God, that you may be able to stand in the evil day. And having done all, to stand.” (Ephesians 6:13).

The parable of the Seed and the Egg

Posted on January 27, 2014 by Mark McMillion

A verse that’s always been interesting to me is where it says, “The seed is the Word of God”. (Luke 8:11). And since we know that Jesus is the Word, made flesh, then we can see Jesus as “the Seed”. But what are the eggs? We are.

Jesus is The Seed. We are the eggs.

I was having an impromptu Bible class with some young Christians who’d just come to the faith many years ago when, out of nowhere, this class came to me to share with them. If Jesus is the Seed, we are the eggs. Every human being in this world comes into this world in a condition that could be compared to an unfertilized egg.

An unfertilized egg is either going to go one way or the other. Within its nature is the possibility to get fertilized. If it is fertilized, all that potential that’s within it is realized. And it goes on to be all that it ever could be, a completely “new creature” and it continues the process of life that it’s a part of.

But if an egg doesn’t get fertilized, what happens? Sooner or later the time is up for that egg. It is cast out. The life process ends. All that potential, all that possibility that’s within it doesn’t come to fruition because it never received the seed it needed to continue the life process.

Salvation for a Christian involves, in a sense, a fertilization. “As many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name” (John 1:12) Immediately we begin to become “new creatures in Christ Jesus, old things past away and all things become new.” (II Corinthians 5:17)

Have you ever seen one of those documentaries that show the instant when a sperm enters an egg? Almost immediately, immediately things begin to change. The egg isn’t really an egg anymore and the sperm isn’t a sperm. They “become one”. No more sperms can get in. And a process starts that begins a totally new life from the combination of the seed and the egg.

That’s how salvation is. When we receive Jesus, we are born again. Jesus said, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.” (John 3:3) And while there’s that moment when life starts when the seed enters the egg, there’s also an ongoing process, after that, of growth from just a tiny embryo to the full and complete being, ready to be born.

Even though we may have received the Lord years ago, we’re still growing (or should be) in Him. “He that has begun a good work in us will complete it to the end”. (Philippians 1:6)

But if we’re just an unfertilized egg, we’re very incomplete. And, so often, we know it. We just feel that something is missing. Many “unfertilized egg” kind of people can wax philosophical and sound very intellectual. They can be very self-realized eggs. But they’re still incomplete, unfertilized. They may seem to really have a lot of answers. But still, at their deepest point, they sense their hopelessness and finiteness.

So many of those kinds are disdainful of the promises of God’s Word. They’re dismissive and mocking of the promise of eternal life through receiving the Seed, Jesus. It’s all too simple for them; it’s beneath them, it’s not intellectual enough.

But it’s there all the time. The enlightenment, the completion, the fulfillment, the release that they’ve been missing can be found. They can be “translated into the Kingdom of God’s dear Son” (Colossians 1:13), into a new and endless universe of light and love, answers and restoration, the fulfillment of more than they’ve ever dreamed of.

But the egg has to be willing to no longer be an egg. If it receives the Seed, it won’t be an egg anymore. It will have accepted the Seed. But if it doesn’t, sooner or later is comes to its end and is cast out. Forever.

What is hell?

What is hell? It’s an egg that has been cast out, having never received the seed. Like the verse that says, “Today, if you will hear his voice, harden not your heart.”(Psalm 95:7 & 8)

God somehow gave me experiences that were very much like what it must feel like for an egg to have been cast out of its place forever. Never having done what it was planned for. No longer within the cycle of life, with the potential to be something more than it was.

I was in eternity, but alone. I’d missed the boat and there was no way back. Ever. No hope, no truth, no life, no understanding. Just confusion and fear, no longer any opportunity to ever again make things right. An unfertilized egg, cast out forever.

Thank God He somehow had mercy on me in the lowest hell and showed me the truths of the spiritual world enough that I could choose Him and, months later, His Son.

Don’t remain an unfertilized egg. Receive the Seed. Realize your potential by getting with the program our Creator has designed for our eternal happiness.

Right now, for us fertilized eggs, “Our lives are hid with Christ in God.” (Colossians 3:3) But the day will come for each of us that we will pass out of this stage of our existence. We each will “die”. But it actually will be more like a birth at last into the eternal world of the spirit, where in some ways we live already. We are right now already “sit down in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” (Ephesians 2:6)

At our death, we will not be cast out into infinite, eternal nothingness and incompleteness. We will find ourselves “complete in Him” (Colossians 2:10) in the eternal world of the spirit, with “the Father of Spirits” (Hebrews 12:9), God Himself, and His dear Son, Who came and died for us, rose in victory from the dead, and has given us life through Him, the Seed, to do the same.

“Ghost”

Posted on January 1, 2014 by Mark McMillion

In was in Budapest, Hungary around 1996 and I was sharing my faith with a young man, endeavoring to bring him to belief in Jesus. I told him about the spiritual experiences I’d had which helped me to come to have faith, some of which were fairly strange.

And one point he said to me, “I know, I know. I saw ‘Ghost’”. I was struck by this. He was talking about a movie from a few years before which, to my mind, gave a very interesting portrayal of the realities of the spiritual world, at least in a Hollywood-originated movie.

In the movie,”Ghost“, the main actor, played by Patrick Swayze, is suddenly murdered while out with his girlfriend, played by Demi Moore. The movie then goes with him into the spiritual world where he’s what we’d call a ghost, disembodied from his former self but still living in this world, unseen by mortals.

It’s a fascinating movie with great acting, romance, suspense, humor and an intriguing narrative. But the reason I’m writing this is how one scene or character so strongly impacted me when I was seeing it at that time.

I won’t go into the details but in the 80’s and early 90’s I had two traumatic life events that were unexpected, deeply unwanted and which could have even snuffed out my life. They left me gasping for breath spiritual and emotionally for a long period of time.

For me, what was needed was deep and total spiritual and emotional healing if these events were not to be the effective end of my life. My personal life as a disciple of Christ and as a happy, complete human being was in danger of being ended through trauma over these two events.

So it was with great interest that I viewed one portion of the movie “Ghost”. Patrick Swayze’s character had had one or two encounters with other beings in the spiritual world who could see him and communicate with him, which normal humans could not.

At one point on an underground subway, he encounters what can only be considered a ghost. This very belligerent ghost claimed ownership of the subway Patrick Swayze was travelling on. With great difficultly Patrick Swayze engages in a dialog with this angry ghost, trying to find out how the ghost can do things and use spiritual powers that he had which Patrick Swayze didn’t have.

But in the conversation, it comes out that this ghost had either jumped off a platform of the subway to commit suicide or that he’d been pushed. One way or the other, he was not at all settled with the events of his life and was extremely unresolved, unrepentant, unforgiving and basically stuck in eternity with his anger, bitterness and unreconciled life.

At the time this spoke to me so much; it almost screamed at me, haunted me and scared the hell out of me. I saw so clearly how this ghost had gone out of this life and into eternity without restitution or reconciliation with those around him or with the events of his life. It was a very great provocation to me to not let my life become like that ghost. I saw how I must do all I could to find peace with God concerning the events that had happened to me. A not famous but powerful verse spoke to me when I thought of the lesson of what I’d seen in that movie, “Whosoever’s sins you remit, they shall be remitted and whosoever sins you retain, they shall be retained.” (John 20:23)

That evil ghost was living in anger and bitterness about the things that others had done to him in his life, retaining the sins committed against him. And he went into eternity with those grudges, bitterness and lack of forgiveness or reconciliation. I also knew of situations that had happened in my grandparent’s and great grandparent’s lives where divisions, cruelty and unresolved animosity had stayed that way for 60 years or more. I saw the results of things that had happened in 1915 which were still causing divisions, hostility and damage 50 years later, when I was a teenager.

It was all something the Lord was using to impress on me the urgency and the essentialness of reconciliation and healing from bitterness or being captured by some traumatic event in my life. Happily I can say I really feel I was able to have the heart washing and deliverance that was needed so that I could go on with my life in the blessing of God, not defeated or captured by events of my past.

But it was a searing, grave warning that I feel I was only barely able to make it through by the grace of God. And, sadly, I know right now today many who’ve been through similar things who perhaps have not really been able to survive it. Some incredible injustice, some betrayal by ones they loved most, some disappointment that effectively ended their hopes, dreams and even their belief in God.

If any of this rings a bell with you, think about going into the afterlife and still having those unresolved bitternesses, grudges and unreconciled events following you right along into eternity. If that’s you, I implore you to do what you can to “First be reconciled to your brother” (Matthew 5:24). Or if nothing else, at least be sure you have peace with God about any unresolved, horrific events of your life that may haunt you into eternity unless you find or make peace with God and others.

Angel stories: Lights on the Road

Posted on September 18, 2013 by Mark McMillion

It was like being able to go back and see where you died. I recently went back to a country road west of Austin, Texas where, for all intents and purposes, I really should have died in October of 1969. It’s a sad, sobering story of what was truly God’s infinite mercy and my depraved wrongdoing.

This is another story, similar to the ones I wrote earlier, “Lucifer and the White Moths“, “The Radio Miracle” and “Don’t Ever Ask Again“. Those events all happened a few short months earlier in July/August of 1969.

You’d think, after all I’d experienced, that I’d be a good boy for the next 80 years. But that’s not what happened. Like I wrote about in “God Is Chance”, at this time I had a fancy European sports car which was in every way a real idol for me. After my near death experience involving drugs in the summer, I stopped using strong stuff. But I soon got back to smoking marijuana again. And later that fall I decided to go out for a “joy ride” with my girlfriend.

She and I were smoking marijuana, driving along winding Hill Country roads west of Austin at night and listening to Jimi Hendricks on the cassette player. I guess I was thinking, “Everything’s back to normal”. In the last month I’d been reading my Bible, a new thing for me, and praying. But I didn’t know who Jesus was; I wasn’t saved and I still was hanging out with my old friends.

The car could go very fast and I liked that. We were driving in an area where there was often a rock wall on one side of the road and a drop off down a steep hill on the other. And recently I went back to this place so I could add photos of the actually location.

What happened next was this. We were driving down a long straightaway that I knew took a slight turn to the right at the end of it. That’s what you can see in picture “A”.

While driving down the straightaway in the dark, probably doing 80 mph (about 135 kph), suddenly on the side of the road in the darkness, just before the curve, I saw two lights. I recognized that they were supernatural as this was in the middle of nowhere. And I said loudly in my mind, “There are angels here!”

Almost immediately I went into the turn. What I didn’t calculate in my driving was that the road not only turned to the right but it had a dip also in the road there. My car was going so fast that, because of the dip, the back end of the car spun around completely backwards, 180 degrees.

So the next thing I knew, we were going totally backwards at the same speed I went into the turn. I furiously clutched the car, looking behind me into the darkness, applying the brakes, trying to steer the convertible, going backwards at high speed on drugs. Utterly miraculously, we came to a stop on a small shoulder of the road around 100 yards passed the turn with the dip in the road. I turned off the engine and we sat there. I turned off Jimi Hendrix and by then all the effects of the marijuana were totally gone. The second picture “A” is the same turn and dip in the road, seen from further along and around the bend. And picture with “A” and “B” is taken approximately at the place where my car came to a stop, still backwards, around 100 yards past the turn and dip.

That moment was one of the greatest zeniths (or nadirs) of my life. If I ever, ever felt that I didn’t deserve to be alive right then, that was the place. After all God had done to save me from death and the devil just a few short months before, there I was back at it again.

Sin is not a popular or politically correct word nowadays. But I knew without a doubt that I had sinned and gone back to the ways that had nearly killed me before. I didn’t deserve to survive that experience. I deserved punishment, big time.

But God had shown me two angels just a few seconds before that incident who were there to somehow guide that spinning car, hurdling backwards through the darkness along that mountainous road so that the car came to a standstill instead of flipping over or going off a cliff.

The total, undeserved, mercy of God. My willful, sinful self. The revelation of angels to show it was an act of His unearned clemency. We were totally unhurt. The car didn’t even have a scratch on it. We drove back to Austin as I was silently in awe, deeply stunned, sobered and humbled by what had happened.

Why had this happened? First, I was not yet a Christian and didn’t have the power of salvation to give me the strength to flee temptation and follow Him in a new life. But God evidently had a plan for my life. It wasn’t His time or place for me to have a big car wreck as there were a number of things that kept happening during the fall of 1969, leading up to my meeting some young radical Christians during the winter who led me to receive Jesus.

But if I ever have any doubts about where Jeremiah said “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked” (Jeremiah 17:9), then I can think back to my depraved foolishness as I tempted fate and God after He’d delivered me from death just a few months earlier. “His mercy is from everlasting to everlasting“. (Psalms 103:17) “The angel of the Lord encampeth round about them that fear Him, and delivereth them.” (Psalms 34:7)

The Radio Miracle

Posted on July 30, 2013 by Mark McMillion

It took more than one experience to bring me out of my deep spiritual darkness, kind of like when a sculptor has to first knock off huge chunks of rock from a bolder before he can begin to make it look like a statue.

Maybe a week or so after I had my experience with Lucifer and the white moths, here in Austin, I was in my tiny apartment. And in torment. Indecision or what the Bible calls “double mindedness” can kill you. “A double minded man is unstable in all his ways”, (James 1:8). That was really how I was.

I’d gotten a Bible from my parents and also taken some time to really apologize to them for the hurt I’d caused them over the last few years. We weren’t close but at least this was the beginning of a long term reconciliation. But I was very far from the person that God would have me to be.

In fact, as so often happened, I was going back to my old thought patterns of unbelief and skepticism. Things like, “That didn’t really happen! That was all in your mind! You just imagined all that, just stray thoughts bouncing around inside your brain!” That’s what I’d always thought before and now that I was “back to normal”; that was still my default mode of thought on all these things.

But then another series of thoughts were there. “It sure did seem real. It was more real than what I am experiencing right now. And it wasn’t really the first time because you’ve had a lot of experiences that are unexplainable unless there is some kind of spiritual world.”

So I was lying in my bed in the middle of the night, just tormented between these two worlds of thought. And I was desperate. I’d been reading the Bible every day, for hours. I was getting very little out of it because there was so much I didn’t understand. I was reading from Genesis to Exodus and on through it like that, heavy going.

Finally I’d just had enough. I got up out of bed, in my pitch black room, clasped my bible to my chest and said this prayer to God:

“God, if you are really there, you have to be bigger than my mind. You have to be stronger than me and my mind. And I am not going to do anything till you show me if you are there.”

Then in the total darkness I started trying to just shut down every single movement of my body, twitches, trembles, just any movement that would distract me from completely and utterly bringing my prayer to God, if He was actually there. And alone in darkness at what hour of the night I didn’t know, suddenly my clock radio on my refrigerator came on.

I certainly hadn’t set it to come on at what was around 3 in the morning. But just at that moment when I was the most desperate to have some kind of answer from God, the radio came on. And maybe you know this song that was playing right then because it was popular at that time,

“Lift up your fellow man, lend him a helping hand, put a little love in your heart.

You see it’s getting late, oh please don’t hesitate; put a little love in your heart.

And the world will be a better place, and the world will be a better place for you and me, just wait and see.”

Now maybe you’re an atheist and say right now, “Oh that was just an accident, just a coincidence.” At 3 AM my radio came on when I surly didn’t set it at that time. It came on right at the moment of my greatest desperation to have some kind of answer from God to overcome the domination my mind had on me. And on top of it all, an extremely significant song was on the radio right at that moment. You can call it a coincidence if you want to but I’d had things like this, although not this stunning, happen to me before.

I fell to the floor on my knees, overcome by that experience and the amazing answer to prayer. As I’ve shared in another post, it was for me almost like what happened to Jody Foster in the movie “Contact” when she first heard signals from outer space. Just indescribable amazement.

But there was more. As I was there in the darkness on my knees, I heard clearly two voices, with words I don’t think I’ll ever forget and which fundamentally spoke to my greatest weakness and changed my life. That story is going to be my next blog post, “Don’t ever ask again.“

“God is chance!”

Posted on July 25, 2013 by Mark McMillion

I was a freshman in university in Austin, Texas years ago, in the middle of a conversation with my friends when I blurted out, “God is chance!” At the time it really seemed like an epiphany.

If you’re an atheist, as I was, “Chance” seems to be the ultimate ingredient that’s caused everything. Atheists believe that everything “just happened” from a series of accidents. Those beautiful eyes of your loved one? Just a series of numberless mutations over trillions of years that ended up being a human eye. Or that flower, that strange bird, and on and on? Just chance, accidents, coincidences and happenstance.

My life back then was already on a huge rollercoaster with unseen forces I was totally unaware of. But I really believe that off Somewhere, Someone saw me say “God is chance” that day and kind of marked it down right then. Because for the next couple of years, things kept “happening” to me. And I gradually realized more and more that those things just defied the law of averages that I thought was the ultimate arbitrator of all that occurs on earth.

But like I said about reason in “Reason? Or the Miraculous”, it’s not like I don’t believe in chance. The Bible certainly talks about reason and it talks about chance too. In I Samuel 6:9 it says, “…it was a chance that happened to us.” And Ecclesiastes 9:11 says “…time and chance happen to them all.” On the other hand, some things are not chance. But so often our eyes are blinded to the spiritual cause and often angelic intervention that brought something on. I’ll give you an example.

For years I’d been an idol worshipper. No, not Moloch, Baal or Ashtoreth. I worshipped a certain kind of sports car. I’d had a picture of it on my bedroom wall since I was 14. I dreamed of it, I longed for it, I spoke of it and I was determined in my heart that I would have it, no matter what. And so, in university, I finally got it.

But it was like how the Israelites lusted after meat in the wilderness and finally God sent so many quail that they gorged themselves on the quail and many died. Speaking about this in Psalms 106.15, it says of God, “And He gave them their requests, but sent leanness to their souls”. That’s how that sports car was, something I “just had to have”. So I got it but God really “sent leanness” to my soul. In fact, He got a lot of mileage out of that mistake.

A few days after I got the sports car, I was driving near the campus, just bursting with pride. The top was down, I felt so totally cool and I was virtually expecting that hot women would be jumping into the passenger seat when I stopped at a red light. What I didn’t notice was a car that had stopped in the street ahead of me. While I was distracted, I plowed into the back of that stalled car. Because my car was so low to the ground, it went under that car, seriously disfiguring its high class looks and somewhat damaging the engine.

My response? Shock of course. And anger. But somehow in my heart, I knew it was more than an accident. I remember so distinctly either that I literally shook my fist into the air or, if I didn’t do it physically, I certainly did it in my heart and mind. Who was I shaking my fist at? “The Fates”, as I called them back then. I just knew that it was something with a message to it.

“So you want this fancy car? OK, you got it; but now this is going to happen.”

“Why?” I screamed in my heart. I just instinctively knew that it was more than happenstance. It was part of something that was greater than me. What, I totally didn’t know. Had “the Fates”, some mystical Greek gods, done this to me? But God had smashed my idol. “I will have no other Gods before Me,” He says. (Exodus 20:3)

Other things keep happening to me from time to time during those years. Some were “incredible good luck” and other things were “really bad luck”. But I kept all these things and pondered them, trying to make sense out of it. Now I know that much of the time, it wasn’t chance. It was the hand of God, allowing some things and keeping me back from others.

There were so many incredibly foolish things I nearly did or actually did do. But the hand of God either prevented me from doing them or kept me back from suffering very badly for my foolishness. Another example of this was when the police raided my apartment, looking for drugs. I wrote about this in “Up Against the Wall!”

“A man’s heart devises his way but the Lord directs his steps.” (Proverbs 16:9) In time and ultimately, like I wrote in “Lucifer and the White Moths”, the Lord delivered me from my unbelief and darkened life, translating me into the world of His Spirit. I found that my idea of “God is chance” was a very dim statement. But it was almost like the Lord decided to take me up on that one and kept letting “accidents” happen for a couple of years, just to show me that “there’s more than meets the eye”, a whole world of spirits and spiritual activity that we mortals really need to realize, acknowledge and get on the right side of, the side of the God of Abraham and His Son, Jesus.

Angel Story 1: Lucifer and the White Moths

Posted on July 22, 2013 by Mark McMillion

The first experience I had with an angel is one I probably won’t relate right here and now. It was the most traumatic and basically indescribable. Sadly but righteously, it was with Lucifer. He came to claim me, as was his right at that point in my life. I won’t relate it all here as it is not easy to describe or explain but I’ll try to do that sometime in a post or a video.

But that experience when I was 20 was I suppose the pinnacle experience of my life. The Bible talks about “some saved by fire” (Jude 23), that is certainly true with me. Or like Jesus said of Thomas, “Thomas, because you have seen me, you have believed.” (John 20:29) A lot of things are not as much “by faith” for me because the Lord somehow let me see things so I sometimes feel like Thomas in the Bible. Some people in life-after-death experiences have an angel of God come and take them to heaven. It is such an incredibly wonderful experience that often they really don’t even want to come back to this world. In my case it was the opposite. But more about that at another time.

Fundamentally, categorically, absolutely that changed my life. At that moment when I struggled with every iota of soul and spirit I had within me just to not be taken from my body, I said in my mind, “If this is real, then there’s supposed to be the opposite of this. There is supposed to be a God of Love, a God of Truth and Light.” So I “prayed” at that moment to the God of the Bible to help me not die right then. I put “prayed” in quotation marks there because we so often think of prayer as a subdued religious ceremony, with our eyes closed and our hands folded. My prayer back then was from the deepest place of my existence, with every ounce of meaning I had in me.

I didn’t die and go with the devil to hell then. I couldn’t sleep for 3 days because I didn’t have the faith to sleep. I didn’t know what would happen to me if I went to sleep. But gradually, very gradually some sense of normalcy came back to my life. But it had changed, utterly. Paul, speaking of how God delivers people from Satan said “Who has delivered us from the power of darkness, and has translated us into the Kingdom of His dear Son.” (Colossians 1:13)

For me, I wasn’t even there yet. I heard someone say one time about great sculptors, when they’re going to make a statue, the first just start off with a big chunk of rock. Whack! They knock off one big piece. Whack! There goes another chunk. For me, it took quite a few whacks before I was even ready to become a Christian. First and biggest was just getting me to understand that there is a real, true, spiritual world. Seeing Satan and being drawn out of your body by him for your eternal damnation will do a lot to destroy your unbelief.

But there were other angels. And I think I’m going to try to make some kind of rating system for all this. Angels are not always, not even usually, 10 feet tall with white robes and big wings. I’ve never seen one of those. And some things are supernatural but you don’t see the angels involved although you know they must be there.

Here’s one like that. This event with Lucifer took place in a tiny efficiency apartment near the University of Texas campus. It was so traumatic and all consuming that I remained in something of a condition or state for a few days where the spiritual world was closer to being my real world than this physically one we all usually consider “the real world”.

But a somewhat lesser or minor thing that happened at that time was that one evening, probably 2 days after these huge events, I was in my bathroom. And it filled up with maybe 100 tiny white moths or butterflies. They were very benign and non threatening and I remember at that time that they seemed like angels or that perhaps God had allowed this to happen in the physical to represent what had happened in the spiritual. It says of Jesus, “Then the devil departed from Him and angels came and ministered to Him.” (Matthew 4:11) I didn’t know that verse as I didn’t know any verse in the Bible at that time. But I felt all those little white fluttering insects were symbolic of angels who’d come to be with me after I’d turned from my evil ways and had chosen the God of Abraham rather than the devil.

Bottom line for this first story: it was definitely an angel, just the wrong kind and the wrong one. He’d been allowed by God to come and claim my soul after I’d gone so far away from the truth and the light. As for the little white moths or butterflies, they weren’t angels. But God allowed them there right then to be a symbolic sign of the beginning of my altered spiritual condition.

Reason? Or the Miraculous

Posted on July 14, 2013 by Mark McMillion

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against reason. Isaiah 1:19 says, “Come, let us reason together” says the Lord. And it says that Paul “reasoned” with the Roman governor, Felix (Acts 24:25). But let’s face it, the devil has gotten in somewhere with the whole thing about “reason” in more modern times. Because it seems like 9 times out of 10, when people talk about reason, the implication is that we should forget about the miraculous. “We should depend on our own reasoning”, they say, “our minds and our intellect.” The idea is that there really isn’t anything other or better or higher than that.

That’s a serious mistake. It’s “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”. Or letting the pendulum swing too far in the other direction. It’s like what Jesus said, “These ought you to have done, and not to leave the other undone.”(Matthew 23:23) In other words in this case, we ought to use our minds but not to where we reject the supernatural and miraculous intervention of God.

Our minds don’t have to be considered our enemies. (Of course the unbelievers would hoot and squawk immediately at that idea there, if we were to even think that our minds could be our enemy.) But in the same way that our bodies can be our enemies if we let our physical desires and impulses take us over, our minds can be our enemies if we let our “carnal mind” (Roman 8:6) take first place in our decisions.

It’s a big subject but really important. Many people have faith in God, but it’s like they say, “Let’s not take this thing too far!” “Let’s not think that God can do anything outside of the rational laws of science that we all believe in today.” This seems to be the often unspoken faith of multitudes. So they limit God by their minds. It ends up just being unbelief or a very limited form of faith.

But as God so succinctly spoke to Job around 4000 years ago, “Should it be according to your mind?” (Job 34:33) Things were going really bad for Job. He’d been so good, really, and he’d tried so hard, sincerely. But then it seemed all hell was breaking loose. It just didn’t make sense! It wasn’t fair! And he was right in many ways; it didn’t make sense and it wasn’t fair, according to the natural, normal way that most people in their natural reasoning would look at things. But in the end it all worked out, totally contrary to how Job saw things happening and he ended up being doubly blessed.

In Isaiah 55: 8 & 9 God says, “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are you ways My ways. For as the heaven is higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.” Our natural reasoning and understanding might make it through some situations but those things totally fail at other times.

Thomas Paine, author of “The Age of Reason”

But “reason” came to virtually replace God long ago. “The Age of Reason”, as they called it. It looked pretty good and there were a lot of good points there. But what was the end result? In turning to exalt and embrace Reason, the miraculous, the supernatural, the living presence of God not only took a back seat, it was kicked out of the car and left by the side of the road.

It certainly was not through Reason that I came to faith in God. It was the miraculous. But how many people of faith, regardless of their religion, really are looking for the miraculous intervention of the God of Abraham in their lives in these times? For so many, their faith is subservient to their reason. And perhaps this is because they are partially ashamed of their faith and don’t want others to think of them as strange or out of line with modern times.

This is what I wrote about in “Will He find faith on the earth?” Jesus virtually predicted that at the time of His return, the level of faith in the world would be at a very low ebb. It was the utterly miraculous that turned me from an atheist to a believer, even before I became a Christian. And that wasn’t just something that happened long ago. You can read “God’s Little Miracles” to find a miraculous thing the Lord did in my life just a few months ago.

So I’m thinking about writing some articles on some of the things I’ve experienced personally, not stories from centuries ago but things that have happened to me personally, that hopefully will inspire faith in others to know that God is not dead or even sick. I think I’ll call them Angel Stories. Here’s one about an incredible experience I had where angels saved me from death when I pretty much deserved death at that time. It’s called “Lights on the Road”.

Faith in the miraculous should come first, before our reason. We need both to be well balanced. But the presence of God should have first place in our sight, not our own reasoning. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not to your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct your path.” Proverbs 3:5 & 6

Red lights and the Sabbath

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Mark McMillion

I was out for a walk. I think it was a Tuesday. I had so much to do that it was really weighing on me. In Nehemiah it says “the people had a mind to work.” (Nehemiah 4:6) I guess I’m like that sometimes. I have so many things that I feel I need to do and they all seem to be within God’s will and the way He is leading.

But sometimes I don’t take a break. Or I have to make a conscious effort to do so. Also, I am not one who is really feeling bound in a legal sense to “keep the Sabbath”. Paul said “One man esteems one day above the other, another esteems ever day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.” (Romans 14:5)

So I don’t have a real big thing about not working on Sundays. And I had worked the rest of the afternoon Sunday after I got back from church. But I wasn’t feeling really good. I just couldn’t understand why. I was thinking about all I had to do as I was walking down the sidewalk towards the park.

I finally just shot a quick prayer up to the Lord to please help me and give me some hint or nudge as to what was wrong. Immediately my attention was drawn to a bright red lawn ornament in a yard I was passing. It was the only thing red in the whole scene I could see.

I didn’t get it. So I “thought” to the Lord, “What does that mean?” Again immediately He turned my attention a different direction and down at the end of the street was a bright red stop sign.

“Stop.”

“Oh. I get it. You want me to stop. You don’t want me to keep putting my shoulder to the bolder, to take up my cross, to lay down my life and to keep sacrificing and getting things done for You. You want me to take a day off. It doesn’t matter if a bunch of stuff doesn’t get done today. I can do it tomorrow. Maybe I could have even just taken the day off on Sunday like You were talking about on the mountain with Moses. OK, I get it. Yes sir; good idea.”

And this has happened before. I’m one of those who don’t believe we are still under the Laws of Moses. If you want some real controversy, start getting into that subject. This may mean I’m an Antinominalist. But I’ll need to do some more theology reading before I’m sure about that.

But what I’ve found is that there are all kinds of good reasons and wisdom in the Old Testament law. Yes, I eat pig. But I sure want to know it’s been overseen by government regulations or I might get trichinosis. Pig was considered unclean in the Mosaic Law and there were oodles of requirements and commandments which all had a huge amount of wisdom and reason to them. So many of them were quite scientific as well, even though back at that time they might not have had the knowledge that we do now.

I’ve learned though experience that “if you don’t make an offering, sometimes God takes a collection”. If I don’t just take a day off once a week, I end up really getting run down and tired in the next few days. When the Communists took over Russia, they tried to institute a 10 day working week, instead of 7, just to get more labor out of everyone. But it didn’t work. We just seem to have some kind of inward clock that says we need to knock it off after around 7 days. Even if we are no longer under the binding legalism of the Mosaic Law, we ignore its wisdom at our peril.

Well, thank the Lord for the operation of His Holy Spirit. On that walk, the Spirit was there to answer my prayer and even use the only red things that I could see, first the lawn ornament and then the stop sign, to get through to me that it was time for a day off.

If you’re feeling you are no longer under the law of Moses and you’re a “free man” now, you’d still better watch out if you ignore the wisdom and will of God. You’re safest if you are operating with the directions of the Holy Spirit. Then you may still be able to be guided by the Lord. And that’s really what it’s all about. “If you be led of the Spirit, then are you not under the Law.” (Galatians 5:18)

Mark McMillion

Creeds and Deeds, Facts and Acts

Category Archives: The spiritual world