
I was listening to a podcast that was in turn listening to a talk being given by a woman. I won’t go into details, other than to say her talk was massively problematic. She went on about how something she called “god” and “the holy spirit” interacted with her, finally concluding that this holy spirit was (to her) like the genie in Aladdin. A bit mischievous…and blue. She carried on about the color of her “joy” and the infinite shades of grey (which this “god” had told her to google). I listened for about 10 minutes, paying close attention to whether she would touch on anything at all that might refer to what the true God actually says about himself and the Holy Spirit from scripture (or at least something I could compare to scripture), and in all that time, her only mention of the Bible was to quote The Message where it says “God does whatever he wants.”
I’m reading Acts right now (in the deluxe readers’ version so I have no chapters or verses to reference), and all I could think was “when Paul spoke, it was always along the lines of reasoning with his listeners, explaining out of the scriptures how Jesus was the Christ, and having his listeners asking for more so that they could check for themselves.” And sometimes (quite often), they would disagree and he would end up getting stoned or something like it before being chased out of town. Maybe he should’ve told them about the blue genie…
The bottom line though is this: There are nothing but empty words in the worldly pep talks given by those who don’t even have a basic knowledge of God and the Bible (or even worse, do know, but choose to deceive, which is probably more likely the case). That’s all it is. And it’s tiring. We don’t have time for this. The world is bad enough without us wasting our time on pseudo-religion and the mere opinions of charlatans who prey on the weak minds of the spiritually lazy.
We would do well not to waste our energy.