I’m going to go a very different direction in the new year and would like to invite you to join me. Actually it’s the same direction I’ve been headed for at least six years now, but to some who haven’t seen my last six years, it will look like a different direction.
I’m going to invite you to join me in the next stage of that.
In the midst of my political emails these past few weeks, a reader wrote me the following:
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Dear Allan,
All well and good.
Just always keep in mind that, no matter what anybody, including you, would like to think, this is a spiritual war that we are engaging in.
And you and your candidates may win the battle or election…..and the war may still be lost. Because:
“WITHOUT ME, YOU CAN DO NOTHING.” - GOD
-A Reader
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I couldn’t agree more.
At every twist and turn of political intrigue, it is very common to see one of these three options:
1.) both people opposing each other through this intrigue have no interest in doing good
2.) one is seeking to do good and one is seeking to do bad.
3.) both are trying their best to do good and are coming up against each other.
There’s only one definition of good in my book. I find it in the good book.
I’m no expert, but I’m expert enough to know that the experts aren’t all that expert either. There are many of us stumbling around trying our very best to know what is true and good — even the best experts are constantly growing.
I am about to make a confession to you. Two years to the day before this email, I understood something to be true: the Bible has some good stuff in it, but it isn’t really from God.
That’s where I was.
My faith was weak. My faith had been weak for about two decades. I nurtured weak faith in fact. I cultivated weak faith. I encouraged weak faith. So many stupid narratives from the world worked their way into my mind and into my vocabulary and into my actions.
And then because of the face mask, because of the mandates, because of the lockdowns, I wandered into a church far away culturally and geographically from anything I had known. It was the only open church I could find. And the preacher gave a sermon on how to have stronger faith. It was the sermon I needed for two decades. I was desperately receptive. One of the pointers of his sermon was to spend more time reading the Bible.
I looked down at the Bible in my hand as he gave that sermon. It was a new Bible. It had a checklist in the back. It listed a short 15 minute reading to do each day in order to read the Bible in a year.
I had set out a number of times to read the Bible previously and had always pooped out before making it to the end of the first book.
It was just too much.
Checklists however, and a year long goal, with daily readings of about 15 minutes — that I could do. Because of that checklist and because that sermon, that day in November 2020, I began to read the Bible.
Each day, I diligently checked through the list and read a this book which I enjoyed and which I found to be wise but which I did not believe to be factual or true.
Author Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote once upon a time: that all good literature motivates in the reader a temporary suspension of disbelief. This occurred to me one day that when I read a novel, I temporarily suspend my disbelief so that can get into the book. This is something that I do also with Hollywood films.
For two hours of watching a movie, I let the most evil Hollywood directors and producers run through my head unchecked, doing who knows what.
I wonder what would happen if I just did the same, if I suspended my disbelief while reading the Bible and I said to myself “I believe the Bible is accurate.” What if I suspended my disbelief by doing that?
Well, I did that.
I didn’t nothing different than I did when watching a Hollywood film, or a novel — suspending disbelief and getting into the story.
It wasn’t long before I saw myself understand the Bible to be true. It wasn’t long before I started to understand faith differently, to actually feel it in me, by practicing it, by faking it, I suddenly began to feel what it was like.
And soon, I liked it. Soon I believed the Bible. I read through it all the way that year. Then I read through it again in just a month. Then I started reading another version to see how I liked that.
In this upcoming year, I would like to invite you to join me in reading the Bible. It will be about 15 minutes a day. By the end of the year we will read through it. If you want to be part of a group there will be some neat benefits. If you want to simply sign up for a free email list, I will send you the readings each day. Either way, this is a special offer open to my readers for the next week or so. Then I will open it to others. Then it will get more expensive.
“What does the Bible have to do with anything?” some of you may ask.
I was there too.
You can only open your eyes up so many times to see people openly praising Satan before you recognize that it is so much more than flesh and blood that we are fighting with. The flesh and blood is a distraction.
The spiritual battle is the real battle.
The Bible is a book about many things. Such an important thing for our time is the spiritual battle that the Bible tells the story of.
My south side of Chicago upbringing brought me into contact with all kinds of ideas in politics. Barack Obama was a community organizer from one district north of me. We had the same congressman: a former Black Panther named Bobby Rush. We had Jesse Jackson Jr. in the next district over. People in that fight understood the cut throat. We understood the way things really worked better and better each day. Every day growing up in Chicago is more eye opening than the last. You never run out of stories of how brutal life can be. And some Jewish guy from somewhere else came along one day and described that environment and wrote a book called Rules for Radicals. His name was Saul Alinksy.
He preceded me or Obama or Jesse Jackson, but all three of us studied in the environment he described. There were many others far more successful in that environment than those two household names. Alinksy didn’t make Chicago politics what it was. He stepped into it and borrowed heavily from it.
In that book, he starts with the following dedication.
“Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins — or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”
Perhaps it is presented in a cute way, some may say.
But the truth is, that there is something so very evil to how some people interact with the world. And there is something so very good to the way others do. Sometimes the difference between the two is hard to tell. I do not mean to say otherwise in most situations. It can take a great deal of effort to know good from evil.
(And yes, I have read Nietzche extensively on the topic and find him not relevant. )
At a very different extreme I will depict something graphic that is somewhat standard in my current west coast city.
It’s graphic. Be careful.
When you walk down the street of the city I live in and you see a parade or street festival ahead. You think little of it and keep moving on your way to where you are headed. Continuing on your way through the people on the street, you glance over to see a man dressed, as a woman, dressed as a demon, making sexualizing gestures toward a child, while that child’s parents look on cheering. When you see that, you are a fool if you cannot tell that you are looking into the face of people praising the demonic.
It is a spiritual battle we face.
It is all around you for those who will allow their eyes to see it.
In reading the Bible you are given the most truthful text man has known on that battle.
Under everything I write is the realization that this is a spiritual battle.
Christian or not, I invite you to join me in reading the Bible this next year. Any version you want. No matter where you are on your faith walk, it will be a daily reading that will enrich your life and edify you, much as it has enriched my life and edifies me.
You are not likely to hear from me again on this topic until after the election.
The offer I am presently making is one intended to make sure not a single person is left out.
Tap here to join me in reading the Bible.
Allan Stevo
Allen, I wanted to tell you that most churches and their leaders are encouraging people to take the jab, and this includes some verry well known as in Jimmy Carter, Franklin Graham, and on and on. These are supposed to be the leading Godly people to include the Vatican. The televangelists included. I remember when Charles Stanley was encouraging people on his program to support the war in Iraq?? Something is verry wrong with this, and I guess what I am saying is follow the book and not the man, and this is dangerous misconception for many people who put their faith in the teacher so be warry of what comes out of the preacher's mouth. If he is encouraging, you to vote for or support something that has nothing to do with teaching scripture then they are not men or women of God.
I think that just relying on faith to overcome the evil that is being perpetrated against humanity is not going to be enough. God gave us a brain to reason with, but we have been brainwashed for so long that evil has prevailed, so it takes action with faith to overcome these evil people. If Satan is the ruler of this world, then it stands to reason that the leaders of this world are his minions, and the truth tellers that get vilified and jailed because they expose the fact that they are his and not Gods so do not believe what the news and politicians say, believe what the dissidents say, and they are in prison or DE platformed from all social media in order to stop them. Many are on the Ukrainian hit list so be wary of the so-called news, they are not to be trusted. All in New York should listen to Dane Sare who is running against Schumer. She is on the ballot but excluded from the debates???? Schumer is owned by Saten, and this is why he refuses to debate her. He could not answer the tuff questions.