note: this blog is a compiled commentary of
various members of RESCUE, an online fellowship for out of
churchers sponsored by Pam Shepard Ministries.

To find out more
about RESCUE, call
1-888-818-1117 .

Today I was reading a chapter for my social work class about resilience and
coping, and I came across this quote: researchers “found that
placing a problem in the hands of God or using prayer almost
exclusively as a way of resolving a stressful situation was not a
particularly effective way of coping and suggested an external
locus of control. The more active the coping approach, the better
subjects in their study were able to cope.”

I thought this was really interesting! I think this goes along with the notion of
passivity and losing your common sense; I think some people do not
try to solve their problems, but rather place them “in the hands of
God” without using common sense to try to make their situation
better. This kind of reminds me of Amy’s post about common sense,
and how in a break-in situation, prayer was used instead of calling
the police.

This also reminds me of what Jessie Penn-Lewis said in
War on the Saints about passivity being the chief basis of
possession, that passivity is “the primary cause of deception and
possession in surrendered believers.” It’s interesting that
research shows too that being passive about problems in your life
and handing them over to “God” isn’t very effective. I think with
certain things like salvation, it is completely up to God and we
can’t do anything to be saved. But I think also with everyday
problems, it’s silly to leave it to God without taking action for
yourself.

Charismatics think that going into passivity by doing
what they see as “giving it over to God” will be the answer, when
THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT THE ENEMY WANTS!!! And instead of using the
common sense that God gave them to make sensible decisions,people
are sitting around waiting for some supernatural sign…a lot of
times the answer aint all that magical. It’s just pure, good
old-fashioned, common sense!

Yet another way Charismatics promote passivity is to teach you that
if you’re not doing the right stuff in the spirit realm, that no matter how
hard you try, you will just be walking in the wilderness like the Hebrews,
in addition to what you said about the trusting in God thing, since they’re
so big on “faith.” I remember at my old church – now a lot of the people
there were of low-income, and many of them had to work more than
one job (including me sometimes).

Since the pastor was so big on prosperity, he did a sermon
talking about people with two jobs,saying it wasn’t God’s way
for them to do that, if they were doing the right stuff like “sowing seed”
and all that, they wouldn’t have to work two jobs. Perhaps his real motive
had to do with the fact people were missing church because of working so much.
But, looking back, I can see how the people working two jobs if they had to were
doing the right thing, if that was what their situation called for.
But him preaching things like that would discourage people from
being proactive, because you can’t get motivated to push that hard
if, in the back of your mind, you feel like it won’t work and it
will all be for nothing.

The Bottomline is that People get involved in church and throw all common sense out of the window! Religious rules and traditions are the cause of it. You get so used to following rules and traditions, thinking you are following God, that you become conditioned to doing things out of habit, for no good reason, lacking good common sense! I used to wonder why we did some of the religious practices we did. I was just blindly doing things because I thought they were the right things to do…nevermind anything about being based on truth, being moved by the power of the cross…NOPE, it was nothing like that…I just wanted to go to heaven, so I gave the church/religion power to control my mind & let me THINK that obeying all those religious rules, and doing all those religious works was getting me into heaven. NOPE, It doesn’t work that way! You cannot earn your way into heaven. No amount of religious works will earn you a ticket. AND THAT’S THE TRUTH, RUTH!

True dat! Now here is the down to earth cold skinny on this subject. The powers of darkness would make man a machine, a tool, an automaton, the God of holiness and love desires to make him a free, intelligent sovereign being in his own sphere —a thinking
rational creature created after His own image (Ephesians 4.24)

Therefore God never says to any faculty of man ” Be thou Idle”
God asks for intelligent action in co-operation with
Him!!! (Roman 12:1-2) Satan demands passivity as a
conditon for his compulsory action and in order to unilaterally
subject men to his will and purpose.. (War on the Saints) God wants
us to be intelligent and to use common sense ..wow.. This is a big
change from the teachings in the IC, where you are
suppose to go along with the go along in order to get along..
I guess that is why I was kicked out because I
refused to be passive.

 

To overcome passivity, you need some books: War on the Saints, Faces of the Religious Demon, the Fake Jesus. The New Idolatry and Be Delivered From Deliverance Ministry. You can browse at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/pam_s911