T. L. Osborn's "This Is How I Pray"

From Legacy of Faith Collection: T. L. Osborn, Pioneer of Mass Miracle Evangelism (2011, Osborn Ministries International, Tulsa: Harrison House Publishers), Chapter 18, "Victorious Prayer," This Is How I Pray, pages 300-301 of 351:

1. This is how I pray. On my knees, I worship the Lord and I commune with Him. I meditate on His Word and on His ideas. Then I attune my spirit and my emotions to His Holy Spirit for action in His will. I align my plans with His.

2. This is how I pray. I adapt my perception of people to what His redemption has made possible for each individual. I absorb His love so that I can witness for Him effectively. I thank Him for His gifts and for entrusting me as His interpreter.

3. This is how I pray. I correlate my spirit with His attitude toward people. I reform my notions to harmonize with His Word. I assimilate His faith, hope, and love expressed in the Scriptures. I ponder His dreams to be enacted through me. I contemplate how much He needs me and believes in me as His associate in reaching people.

4. This is how I pray. I pour out my plans and my concepts before Him, then I listen for the response of His Word and of His Spirit. I conform my agenda to His guidance so that I can always be involved in fulfilling His will.

5. This is how I pray. I drink from His Spirit. I am inspired by His vision. His love and compassion infuse me so that He can speak effectively through my lips, touch with my hands, walk in my feet, embrace with my arms, hear with my ears, and see with my eyes. He said, “I will dwell in you, and walk in you.…I will be a Father to you, and you will be my child” (2 Corinthians 6:16,18 paraphrase mine).

6. This is how I pray. I rejoice in the presence and power of Christ alive in me. I re-commit myself as His witness, knowing that He always causes us to triumph (2 Corinthians 2:14). This is the way I wrestle against principalities and spiritual wickedness in high places. This is how I fight the good fight of faith. This is the way I prepare myself to persuade people about Christ, as the apostle Paul did (Acts 13:43; 18:4,13; 19:8; 28:23; 2 Corinthians 5:11).

7. This is how I pray. I thank the Lord Jesus for fighting my battles and for winning the spiritual war on my behalf (Isaiah 40:1-2.) He has triumphed on my behalf. He has delivered me from the power of darkness, and has translated me into the kingdom of His dear Son (Colossians 1:13-14). He has spoiled principalities and powers, and has made a show of them openly, triumphing over them (Colossians 2:15). I rehearse those triumphs and thank Him that as His co-worker and interpreter, He has made me more than a conqueror through Him who loves me (Romans 8:37).

Link: https://christiandiet.com.ng/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Legacy-Of-Faith-T.L.-Osborn-Christiandiet.com_.ng_.pdf

More Of What We Can Learn From T. L., Daisy, And D. L.: The Love Of God Caused The Reward

D. L. Moody, that is. How much does a mother love her child? An immeasurable amount. How much does God love us? So much so He gave His Son to die in our stead, to return us to Him. That returned state is the Gospel, the reward God gives us for believing that it is so. In it we have no condemnation, but reconciliation, for Christ has done away with all guilt. ALL OF IT, for it was all on the Son. Learning of and believing God's love for us is the first step in D. L. Moody's book The Way To God (1983, Whitaker House).

How then to pray? Searching around for the Love of God as a topic I ran into a book about T. L. Osborn, Legacy of Faith Collection: T.L. Osborn, the Pioneer of Mass Miracle Evangelism (2011, Osborn Ministries International, Tulsa: Harrison House Publishers--if you want evidence of Jesus Christ, take a good look at the book's cover; link: https://christiandiet.com.ng/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Legacy-Of-Faith-T.L.-Osborn-Christiandiet.com_.ng_.pdf). The Table of Contents led me to chapters 17 and 18, "God's Love Plan" and "Victorious Prayer" (excerpts from God's Love Plan). The first captioned section of Victorious Prayer, "Prayers that Bear No Fruit," made me think of Thomas Westbrook's Christian experience. The Osborns were Pentecostal missionaries to India who failed miserably. They were zealous, earnest, and wrong. It took them years to learn how to pray aright. "We realized that the two things we prayed for the most would never be answered by God because, (1) we were asking Him to do what He had already accomplished through Christ’s sacrifice, and (2) we were asking Him to do what He had already commissioned us to do" (pg. 292 of 351). The chapter is very insightful, which see. Remember Fenton's teaching regarding the Lord's Prayer, page 299 of 351: "Your name must be being hallowed, Your kingdom must be being restored, Your will must be being done." God is on a course!!

And catch how the Osborns prayed "per the Bible" after years of correction, page 300 of 351.

I will work on it and post next.

What Can We Learn From T. L. And Daisy Osborn?

T. L. and Daisy Osborn did not claim to have any special power or ministry. They had the Word of God in the Bible, and they believed it. They had the Love of God in their hearts, and they preached it. God did all the rest. Their get-up-and-go came from Jesus having walked into their bedroom at six o'clock in the morning as an actual physical presence standing in the air; it was kind of convincing. His evidence to them (just T. L. at the moment) was personal. I mean come on, their bedroom? I have not read their book Jesus Visited Our House. The only description of Jesus I have heard of this visit is that Jesus had eyes like blue blazes embodying not God's anger, but His love, and His feet were as pillars of integrity. There we have the top and bottom of it: Love, and Integrity. No message, no instructions, no commission, no sermon or call. All that is in the Bible: He did not need to say a thing. Jesus' presence was enough. I would like to find Osborn's book The Purpose of Pentecost. He mentions it in one of the videos below, suggesting Pentecost is to validate the Truth of Scripture, that it is inerrant with regards to THAT world, not this world. The Bible is not an inerrant record of secular history (does it ever suggest that it is? or am I missing something?), but of what God is doing: "As the Beginning, the Son of God CREATES the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1 Alexander, emphasis mine). Everything in the Bible pertains to us NOW, not to history. God forgive us for reading it wrongly.

Listen to the first 30 seconds of this testimony: I Saw Jesus! T. L. Osborne

Listen to this starting at 14:30 T L & Daisy Osborn - Jesus Visited Our House 01

And this starting at 32:00 Dr TL & Dr Daisy Osborn tell their Story!

Edit: I just found this: The Power Of Positive Desire. Enjoy.

Agency Beyond Coincidence In The Knowledge Gap

There are countless reasons for people to dismiss Christianity and the the idea of there being a supreme God. Not small on the list is the miraculous being attributed by Christians to what is merely coincidence. To the religious, there is no such thing as coincidence. God is sovereign and all is foreknown and predestined for His purposes, which is one of the main reasons people wind up dismissing Christianity and God: there is too much bad stuff He would ultimately be responsible for.

My problem is response by the Gap. There is distinct display of agency in response to x. I am a dodo encountering a demon, and my mind's eye is empowered to see it for what it really is. That is admittedly weak, but it was my first conscious spiritual experience. I am imagining the scourging and crucifixion of Jesus as "what He did for me," and that Imagination speaks to me audibly in my brain's physical nervous circuitry, in a voice which is not one of my imagination's. It was impressively distinct. Something in the Gap is monitoring my thoughts and imagination and is powerful to transcend from spirit to physical energy at the appropriate moment. Charles Hunter prays for a few dozen people scattered among a couple of thousand, and at the exact moment of imploring Jesus to make what appeared to be mismatched lengths of limbs even, my arm grows out a fraction of an inch.

Coincidence? Are you NUTS?! These are all evidence that there is agency in the Gap of our scientific knowledge. Can I show any one of them to you to prove that there is a God? No. The evidence is personal. I KNOW what happened to me. I accept many testimonies of what has happened to others, many of which are far beyond the pale of Christianity. Because while I know there is agency in the Gap, I do not know what It is, except that It is a Consciousness intelligent, powerful, and deliberate. And It appears to be pursuing something. Its display is congruent with THAT: It is compelled by no other thing. Right or wrong, It acts for progress toward Its own manifestation.

THAT is what Christianity is all about. What we call God is a Consciousness, Mind. I believe It to be the Consciousness of some Ineffable Being, of which we can get no closer than consciousness. It has self-evolved to physical manifestation of Its spiritual imaginings, shepherding Its Manifestation to Its self-determined end. We call Its intention the Holy Spirit and Its shepherding the Son, but in any case It is all there is, and what It is doing is really our only option.

So what do we do? We learn to imagine, to control our thoughts to do what It does. It assumes it is what It wants to be, a loving expression of Itself. Thought - no more - the impression of being what It wants to be - and It becomes satisfied with Its being what It desired. The Intelligence is power to become whatever It believes It is. And we are OF that intelligence. Not to our end, but to Its, is agency. Learn from T. L. and Daisy Osborn. 

In Defense of Thomas Westbrook: Raised on Unholy Koolaid

To regular readers of this blog, my apologies for a long absence. I have been pondering. I try to not teach error, and I was not quite sure where I fit with the error of Thomas Westbrook, who has become something of an evangelical atheist. Like Thomas, I reject religion, but unlike Thomas, I discovered God, whereas he has utterly (we will see how long that lasts) rejected the notion that there is a god. For Thomas, we are all on our own. For me: on our own, we have missed Him.

The deal is, if you watch and listen to Tom Westbrook's many Youtube videos ("Holy Koolaid,"which see), in his many years of devoted, dedicated, intense and sincere life and practice of what he believed was Christianity, he never gained any evidence beyond emotion that it was true. It was just sweet poison: feel-good dogma, doctrines, rituals, philosophy, and practices based on scripture. These present a picture or illustration of God, an "illusion." One of the most insightful lyrics I have ever heard is the line in the song "Torn": "Illusion never turned into something real." Thomas had been raised on Holy Koolaid, an illusion, and for him it never turned into something real, not into evidence which would convincingly demonstrate to him that God is real.

For me it went the other way. Raised with at least attendance in the Methodist Church, I grew away from Christianity into Eastern religions and kindergarten-ish occult philosophies and practices. I was convinced that an actual spiritual reality existed on a deeper level than we normally experience, and that both the superstitions of the church-minded and the occult were distant indications of its actual nature. That is why I got into meditation and the occult--to find the real thing.

Fortunately for me, my mother had gotten into Charismatic Christianity and had a kazillion people praying for me and her best friend, Lynn, whom I lived near in Honolulu (I had moved to Hawaii to get away from my crazy Pentecostal mother in California). Well, in one occult meditation exercise we were to open our minds to an ascended master, to allow him or her to enter our minds to teach us spiritual secrets one-on-one. My "ascended master" was -- ta da! -- Jesus Christ Himself!! Even Thomas Westbrook would have seen that he was as phony as a three-dollar bill, but he (it?) was there, and Someone opened my mind's eye, without my approval to do so, to see it for what it really was. I quickly figured that if all this was really happening, then I was going the wrong way!

Again, here is the thing: for me, illusion became something real. Really real. In this I learned that the Bible was explanation of spiritual reality, not secular history, and that the world really is the way the Bible says it is, not bound to the expectations of my experience and education. I was astounded by the miraculous. People were healed, prayers were answered, "doors" were opened by providential orchestrations sometimes occurring before prayers were prayed. GOD WAS ON DISPLAY BY HIS WORKS.

Jesus spoke audibly to me, and I decided to try to find out what he had said to other people. With no qualifications but a barely procured high school diploma, I started seminary as a college junior. I learned therein to really read, and began to distinguish between the Christian fantasy and the Consciousness which/Who is God. It has been a long haul, but Thomas Westbrook is correct in this: there is no god apart from us. My daughter pointed out recently that in Michelangelo's painting in the Sistine Chapel, "The Creation of Adam," God appears to be inside the human brain! THAT is where we find Him, within our consciousness. For we are Him pushed out!!

God IS on display if you are willing to go that extra mile to where He is acting (home churches, prayer meetings, full-gospel churches). Yahweh, Eil (Aramaic of the Canaanite El), and Jesus Christ are the Consciousness of the Ineffable. The Church has taught by and large the illusion the scriptures present and not the Consciousness of the Ineffable it is about. Kind of like a diagram of a ship and not the real vessel. We SHOULD be ON the ship, not looking at a picture of it. I wonder if Thomas Westbrook -- for all his Christianity -- ever learned how to pray.

Neville Goddard and Joseph Murphy learned Judaism, Kabbalah and Christianity from a Jew named Abdullah, that God is Mind, Consciousness, a Divine Intelligence powerful to become whatever It believes It is. THAT is what we are dealing with, and you expect to resolve any matters with an illustration of It? Treat the Bible for what it is, and treat the Consciousness, the Mind of the Ineffable for what It is, Eil the Almighty Shaddai. Reach for the Mind creating you, and you will get somewhere. Do not drink the Koolaid, SURPASS IT!

Why Minnie Riperton?

July 12th is Minnie Riperton Memorial Day. Says me. Minnie was just 31 when she passed in 1979, years before her mother and father. She left a husband and children she desperately loved. Why Minnie? Maybe because she was a misplaced angel. She was an other-worldly singer, a prophet's voice of there...here. Listen to her songs and hear love on display. She made herself great, and was made great. Sadly, her kind of great is not allowed to remain long on the earth. Prophets see their time is short and humbly do what they can. Minnie sang. Listen.

Psalm 66: The Recurring Loss Of Evil and Holiness Hits Home

I do not endorse John MacArthur, but I did happen to hear some of his eschatology on the way to pick up dinner the other night. Which illumined that even starting out from scratch (as it were when all the enemies of God are dead and all the living of the earth are believers) man will come to love evil rather than God. Bing! Cain killed Abel. The remnant returned from Babylon killed Jesus. Nimrod came from Noah. Churches apostatize. It is a recurring principle seen even in the initial creation: God created the earth holy, it became darkened, and He made it holy again, and Adam made it darkened again, and God accepted Abel's sacrifice, sinful man killed Abel, God gave Noah a new holy earth, Nimrod rebelled in it...and on and on it goes.

IT IS US!!! It is not an event at the end of time. It is a pattern in our lives, and it is constant. We get saved, holy-fied (holiated?), and then lose holiness by our love of some remaining evil. We repent (hopefully), and then do it all over again. It is easy to give up sin for the day, but to give up the love of evil permanently? Not so easy. First Peter four says: "If Christ thus Sorrowed in the flesh, you too arm yourselves through Him with this perspective. For whoever die through His body, He gives them rest from all their sins, so as they may not live according to the desires of humanity, therefore -- however long they are in body -- except so as they may live according to God's will. For the season of living in vain has passed, when you did the works according to the will of pagans, like drunken prodigals, in outrageous singing and demonic behavior. And, behold, now they wonder about you and curse you, as you do not engage with them in the debauchery of that old life of the prodigal, those who must answer to God, who made it necessary* (destined) for our Lord to judge the dead and the living" (Alexander).

Get made holy again. Resolve to give up the love of sin and darkness, and lift up the light of life as Moses did. See Psalm 66. If we still regard iniquity in our hearts, God will not hear, but if we don't....

Get It, For You Have Got It: This World Is That World

The so-called world to come is here. It just becomes clearer. This darkened world IS that bright world dimmed out by ignorance. Jesus is there, and He is here. Our life and our sin here are our life and our sin there. Thoughts here are thoughts there. We are thus judged. The so-called life review at death is not so much judgment as it is why we are so judged. Grace and love here are grace and love there. Adultery here is adultery there. Hate, unforgiveness, and deceit here simply are what they are. If you are a cheat or thief here, you are already a cheat or thief there, because here IS there. Cause a little one to stumble here, and you are in trouble. What you are thinking here, you are thinking there. The review is not for condemnation or forgiveness, is not up for debate, but indicates what we are. That IS our state - unclear here, but real clear there. We will think at review, "That is what I AM," because it is what we ARE. Live life as though you were there now, because you are.