The Anchored in Truth Ministries “Reality Check” Conference with Paul Washer

This was in Chattanooga, TN on the last weekend of December. It was about 5 1/2 hours there…well, more like 6 hours because it rained pretty good going there and back. Much needed rain in this drought cursed South.

Well, I’ll just go over my notes here.
Tim Challies was at the conference and covered it a little better, probably, than me. You can check out his coverage here.

Brother Washer preached out of the Beattitudes for all 4 sermons and didn’t get too far through them. I mean, how can you so quickly go through what he called “The Christian Manifesto”? It oughta take almost 2 months to go through them if you want to do them justice. And Paul Washer being a prophetic man is simply not able to restrain himself from speaking in that fashion and as a result does not much teaching, per se. But that’s why they had prophets and teachers at the Church in Antioch. The prophet is the demolition man, the teachers are the nuts and bolts men. I’m not saying that Paul Washer can’t teach, I’m sure he can. He did draw out the meanings of some of the words in the original language and spring board off that, but again, he’s not a teacher. He wears a camel hair garment and a leather belt around his waist.

On the evening of 12/28 he talked about how possessing great privelage neccessitates great responsibility and drove home the point that this responsibility can have the potential for shameful judgment before God one day when we see the worthlessness of what we are about, thinking ourselves to be doing “the work of the ministry”. He made a statement that night (he made many that I’ll be putting forth here) that I had to jot down. He said, “People have wrong questions. Instead of asking, ‘why do bad things happen?’, they ought to be asking, ‘why does anything good ever happen?’”.
That is a perspective that really helped change me as far as being so quick to complain about life. This world is under a curse of sin and death and as a result, NOTHING good should logically ever occur. We should really be thankful for breathe, taste buds, the laughter of giddy children and anything else worth experiencing that has pleasure in it.

He also said that when it comes down to it, we really have only 1 problem. It’s not bills, it’s not our boss, spouses, children’s attitudes or any outside force—it’s a lack of Christlike character. And if you think about this, it’s absolutely true. Think of every sin, every short coming. Every problem rests under the umbrella of a lack of Christlike character. Fix this issue, and all others seem to wither in time. Deepen the roots in Christ and the tree stands strong and produces good fruit, resistant to wind, storm, drought, you name it. You become more and more impurturbable to life’s difficulties. Also, having a mindset that WE need to develop that Character puts the impetus upon us and crucifies our ability to blame others, or even the desire and propensity to do such.

I didn’t take very good notes on the morning of 12/29 because he seemed so full of words that I had to hear that I couldn’t even stop long enough to jot much down. This is why I’m stoked to find out that I can get the DVD’s off of www.anchoredintruth.org
So I jotted down 2 notes, but man were they powerful in the force in which they impacted my spirit, right into the guts. He said, “Jesus filled the apostles in a fraction of a second but it took Him 3 years to empty them”. Dang. Really makes me reflect on so much shallowness in Pretendacostalism and showed me the reason why there is absolutely no power, no real “filling to the full” and this is directly related to our lack of desire to be emptied of SELF. For crying out loud, some who may read this even have that accursed magazine on their coffee table. What a symbol of the radical love of our flesh and soulish natures, but I digress.
Again, he says, “You can’t know the joy of Christ until you know the depth of sin.”
Yeah, but isn’t this unloving? Didn’t Jesus just love? How can you show love while at the same time being so dogmatic about what sin really is to God, I mean, who are we to judge?

(For those of you who don’t know me, that was my typical sarcasm.)

OH! the love of God, the love that opens my eyes to see sin as not just hatred of God and His law but as a preference for what is humanly good and nice in the face of what is manifestly righteous and needed in a given situation!! How blind we really are. If we only knew the holy anger and burning hatred that a holy and loving God has against sin we would surely all the more love Him for first loving us! When it is revealed that even in our sin He loved us, died for us and made us His….when we see the sick and disgusting nature of sin at the same time that we see the love extended to us in that disgusting condition that is anti-christ, then we will truly know joy and love to the fullest degree. The American church lives as a loveless church toward God because she will not allow this God she says she love to open her eyes to her foulness and depravity. “It’s too much, I can’t bare it! I feel a bunch of condemnation!”. And you should, you are condemned outside of Christ.
I’m getting preachy…let’s move on…

In the evening session on 12/29 he had still not gotten past the second or third Beattitude. In fact, by the end of his last sermon he told us that he still had 24 pages of notes! Those will also be available on the Anchored In Truth website.
He spoke something to the affect of many of us having received the innoculation of the American Christian Gospel and as a result being impervious to Reality and Truth. We have no idea have damaging the “just choose Jesus”, or “just ask Him into your heart and mean it sincerely and He’ll definitely come in and you’re saved” message has been to America. It’s harder than ever to get Evangelicals Saved, as Paris Reidhead so wonderfully put it in a book he wrote by the same title (now called “Finding The Reality of God”, a MUST read). I honestly believe that there is nothing in store for America but true, heaven sent awakening and revival or judgment or both…the former on the heels of the latter. It’s a scary proposition, but how can you read prophetic scripture and see life any other way than how God Himself has revealed that He Himself sees it?

While speaking on “Blessed are they that mourn”, he spoke to the preachers in the room and said, “If your knee’s aren’t bleeding for the people your preaching to, stop preaching to them.” Amen. I can’t add anything to that.
I jump ahead to his speaking on the issue of mercy and he again admonished the preachers to be careful that in their zeal for hungering and thirsting for righteousness they don’t lose touch with mercy. He mentioned that it’s easy to be so zealous in this pursuit of God that we can look down our noses at those in sin, or those struggling with some issue that doesn’t tempt us. He said, “When you find someone in sin, don’t say ‘how could you!’ You should say, ‘how come I didn’t?’” In other words, we should ask, “Is it I LORD?”

He then said something that is a staggering blow to those who believe that those praying in the upper room were ‘agonizing’ in prayer. You see, especially in Pentecostal/Charismatic circles, we believe we have to rile ourselves up to shrieking, crying and screaming in prayer (agonizing) so that God will “do” something. Not all of us believe that, but it’s prevalent. And let me say really quick that agonizing in prayer is good if it is the burden of the LORD burning in you, the Spirit groaning things that words can’t express. Entirely biblical and right, but WRONG to be worked up in the flesh as a way of doing a thing a certain way to accomplish a certain end, i.e. manipulating God through emotional catharsis. It’s nothing more than the false prophets of Baal cutting themselves and jumping around their altars…but again, I digress.

Paul (Washer) said that those disciples were joyfully waiting for a promise that Jesus made to them. That statement hit me with that sort of a “duh!” kind of sentiment; like, it is such an obvious and scriptural truth, yet we seem to never have seen it. Jesus told them what to wait for and gave them something of a small taste of it before hand (when He breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit”). They saw Him make good on His promise of resurection, so there’s now no doubt in my mind that they were more than full of joy at the prospect of a part of the book of Joel being fulfilled soon.

Then he ended the night with this doozie: “People are going to hell not because of Hollywood but because of the church”.
Amen. It’s easier to blame others. But it’s rediculous to really be upset with the world for just being what it is. What do you expect, holiness? That’s like being mad because dogs bark. We oughta be mad at ourselves for not appropriating His means of Grace into our lives so as to be a channel of it to the lost. Don’t blame Hollywood and the porn industry, blame yourselves. You’re like a man who didn’t defend his house from a burglar/rapist even though you had many guns and endless ammo. You’re no man, you’re worthless and didn’t deserve your possesions or wife if you so lightly regarded your responsibility to defend their lives with what you possessed in the way of artillery. And so it is with the church: we sit on our one talent, doing nothing. This is why many will be “cut to pieces” and thrown into hell with the hypcrites.

And for the last morning session on 12/30, again I must confess, I was so riveted and attentive that it was hard to take notes. But he did speak on the uttmost importance of gaurding our hearts/minds. He spoke about the nonsense of boys playing Xbox for hours and years and never becoming a man, never being around grown up and Godly men and becoming wise, which in turn means that years were wasted and intead of being a man at 18 years old you are still an immature boy with no grounding in God, wisdom or His word because you twiddled your fingers and thumbs on a stupid control paddle trying to “beat the next level”. He also spoke about how young people don’t need to be around young people in order to grow, but that scripture teaches that young men need to be around grown men so that they learn to stop being dumb teenagers and become wise, Godly men. Same goes for silly, giddy girls walking around the malls acting loud and foolish, immodestly and sensuously dressed. The young don’t need to learn from other youngsters who are “just as dumb as you are”, as Paul told the kids; just look at what happened to Solomon’s son Rehoboam. He spurned the advice of his fathers counselors who were wise men and instead listened to his friends that he grew up with and as a result lost 10 tribes. Idiot.

He mentioned something that I’m going to do an entire blog on (one of these days). He said youth groups aren’t scriptural. You know what? He’s right. And I realized this a little more than halfway through my own season of youth pastoring. It only furthers the ‘generation gap’ and keeps the young from the older and as a result they stay stupid and immature and never grow up. They really only begin to grow in God once they leave the youth group and finally begin to be around older folks who know Jesus and then begin maturity….but this is unneccesary!! They should have begun that process at home with mom and dad and in the church with the elders so that by the time they are 18 and ready for the world at large they need not take 5 years to get “manned up”. No wasted time, just hit the ground running.

Well that’s it in a big nutshell…

…Paul, thanks for just being in Christ and being available to Him for His use.

mark jr.