The Stubborn Ones

During a conversation I had with my little brother some time ago, he pointed something out that I hadn't thought of, at least not in the way he framed it. We were discussing the lack of discernment when it comes to spiritual gifting in the Western church, as well as the lack of knowledge and understanding regarding the manifest power of God.

"You have to understand, we grew up with these things," my little brother said, "we see them as something ordinary, something that naturally occurs during one's spiritual journey, and we take them for granted, but many people in America have never experienced what we have.”

It is precisely this sentiment that keeps gnawing at me vis-à-vis something that occurred toward the tail end of the Hear the Watchmen conference, and since enough people asked me about it the next morning, I thought it a perfect opportunity to talk about deliverance for a bit.

To clarify, I have not been called to deliverance ministry, but I have prayed for people to be delivered. My grandfather before me likewise had not been called to deliverance ministry, but the devil knew his name, and every time a minion of darkness crossed paths with him, he had enough authority in Christ Jesus to cast them out. 

That said, after the service on Saturday evening, there was a call to the altars, and an offer to pray for anyone who needed prayer. Unfortunately, since I’d gotten maybe two hours of sleep total the night before, I had already left by this point. From what I’ve been able to piece together from the various people who approached me, a gentleman came up for prayer, and though the brother praying over him had both knowledge of the supernatural and of deliverance in particular, as well as authority to cast out the demon, it would not go. There was no deliverance, there was no breakthrough, and most of the folks who approached me the next morning wondered how this could be.

Thankfully, there is precedent in the Bible, as well as the means by which to excise one of the stubborn ones.

There was a man who had brought his son to Christ’s disciples, to cast out a demon, and though they had done it before, and they had used their authority in Christ, this one particular one refused to go. After the man brought the boy to Jesus and he cast out the evil spirit, His disciples asked why it was that they could not cast it out, and Jesus answered them saying, “this kind can come out by nothing but prayer and fasting.”

The reasons why some evil spirits are more difficult to cast out than others can vary. The most common cause is that the individual in question opened themselves up to the evil spirit, and actively courted it, inviting it in.

A squatter will defend the home he is squatting in far less vigorously than a homeowner will. The same principle applies when it comes to evil spirits. If the evil spirit thinks of the person as their habitation, their domicile, their home, they are reluctant to leave, and will often put up a fight.

Another reason why an evil spirit will not leave even though it is commanded is because there is still unconfessed sin in the life of the individual. As long as the sin is unconfessed, the spirit has a license to be there.

To be perfectly honest, there is so much to unpack it could probably be turned into a book, but the point I wanted to get to is what prayer and fasting do to an evil spirit, and why this kind, the stubborn kind, can come out by nothing but prayer and fasting.

Think of prayer and fasting as chemo, and the evil spirit as cancer. With each prayer lifted up for the individual in question, with each day of fasting fasted on their behalf, it's like the spirit gets hit with another round of radiation. Each round weakens it incrementally, until, in its weakened state, when commanded to leave it has no choice but to do so.

I hope some of you who came up to me during the conference and asked about this will find your way to this writing and understand why what happened, happened, and why it is not out of the ordinary. 

With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea Jr. 

The Human Side

Yesterday I arrived in Dallas for the Hear the Watchmen conference. Last night was the customary meet and greet of all the speakers and hosts, a small gathering of individuals who by all accounts seemed all too human.

For the longest time, within certain Christian circles, there are some who have fostered the mindset that those whom God chooses to speak to His servants through, those whom God chooses to be His ambassadors, are somehow otherworldly, more than mere mortals, men and women who are not only superior to the average Christian, but who deserve to live lives of luxury because of their other-worldliness.

As conversations ensued, and hands were shaken last night, the one thing that stood out more than any other, is that every single one of us was human. Ordinary men, ordinary women, whose only notable difference is that they chose to be servants. They chose to obey. That’s it. No mystery, no hidden meaning, no special birthdays or pedigrees. God called, they answered, and they made the conscious choice to prioritize the call of God above all else in their life.

There was no talk of whether or not we all got to park our private jets in hangars, there was no talk of how the Lord blessed us with million dollar cars, or million dollar yachts. Most of the speakers drove to the conference, those who flew did so flying coach, and everyone was happy to be there, to fellowship, and to see each other again.

Yes, this was a group of unabashed human beings, who did not try to put on airs, who did not pretend to be something they weren’t, and who did not shy away from speaking their hearts, and letting the rest know of their burdens and sorrows. Some shared about the fact that they’d had a trying year thus far, with family members passing on, with children being diagnosed with illnesses, other shared regarding their victories, and how they had overcome weaknesses, and there I was, understanding exactly what they were attempting to convey, limping along as though I’d had a run in with Dick Cheney in the woods.

These sort of conferences take a toll on everyone involved. I was having a conversation with a brother just last night, and I said my feet started hurting about a week ago, and I knew it would soon be time to go speak somewhere, because the devil knows, and he is petty, and if a little pain is the best he can do, then I’m okay with a little pain.

As I write this, I have yet to hear any of the speakers, or any of their presentations, but I know that it will be uplifting, challenging, and confirming of what God has been speaking to me of late. I know this, because it has been the case for the last few Hear the Watchmen conferences I’ve attended, and I don’t expect things to be any different this time around.

This is one of the things that sets this conference apart from others I’ve been invited to speak at, and why I keep accepting their invitation; the human side of everyone involved, and their unequivocal declaration that they are here doing this but for the grace of God. 

With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea Jr.

The New Moralists

I refuse to be browbeaten and pontificated to by lechers, clowns, human pustules, and cantankerous old windbags shouting their abortions and celebrating infanticide, and you should too. With each passing day I am perpetually in awe of how readily decent, law abiding, moral men and women in this country are made to feel shame by these new moralists, when they have no reason to feel shame.

This is doubly true when we start to dig a bit into the lives of these new moralists, these new paragons of all that is decent and wholesome, and see them for the absolute soulless ghouls that they are.

There are very few people in this world that make my stomach churn. Even if I disagree with someone politically, or even if they insist that Olive Garden is real Italian food, I can look past our differences, and still break bread with them, have a cordial conversation, and maybe even crack a joke or two.

I don’t go out of my way to be repulsed by people. Usually, I’ll find some redeeming quality, but there are always exceptions to the rule, and Barbara Streisand is one of those exceptions.

It’s not because her music is atrocious - which it is - that I am repulsed by Barbara Streisand. I am repulsed by this woman because not only is she morally bankrupt, she makes herself out to be morally superior to everyone else, and attempts to browbeat the little people whenever they disagree with her.

Well, Babs, the paragon of virtue and decency recently did an interview in which the topic of Michael Jackson and his proclivity to sodomize, rape, and otherwise sexually abuse minor children came up.

This, verbatim, was her reply: “His sexual needs were his sexual needs, coming from whatever childhood he has or whatever DNA he has. You can say ‘molested’ but those children, were thrilled to be there. They both married and they both have children, so it didn’t kill them.”

According to Saint Barbara, whatever Michael Jackson did to those boys didn’t kill them, so why dwell on it? You can say ‘molested’, you know, tomato, potato, but hey, they were thrilled to be there, so that made up for the nightmares and anal fissures.

This is who is attempting to talk down to you! This is who is attempting to get on a soapbox and belittle you for objecting to infanticide, or wholesale gun confiscation. These are the new moralists. Vapid, soulless, wretched pretend humans, who justify a pedophile and his having abused minor children simply because he invented the moonwalk, and because none of them committed suicide for having been abused.

So, Babs, would you have felt differently about it if one of these kids had hung themselves or slit their wrists? Would you have deemed it wrong then?

What’s the point of this little rant? Am I just trying to showcase the fact that Barbara Streisand is either wholly evil, or has lost her mind? No, the point of this rant is to get someone, anyone, to see these people for what they truly are, and to stop being cowed by them.

Stop falling for their false morality. Stop falling for their pearl clutching. Stop falling for their virtue signaling, and see them for what they are. Once you do, you may be disturbed, you may be horrified, you may be disgusted, but you will never again be cowed by their faux moralizing. 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.

Santa Did It!

There is a very real chance that if things go unchanged in Venezuela, come next winter, you will hear stories of cannibalism and people eating their dead. I know, I know, sounds farfetched, but that’s because you’ve never lived in a place where try as you might there was nothing to buy with which to feed your children, no matter how much worthless paper you had in your possession.

Within a two-year span, after well to do farmers were labeled Bolsheviks, and all the farmland was collectivized, you know, for the people and for the sake of equality, conservative estimates say 4 million people starved to death in Russia. Others put the estimate as high as 7.5 million.

It wasn’t because it was a bad year for farming, it wasn’t because there was some plague of locusts that decimated the crop, the farmland was taken from capable, hardworking, knowledgeable people, who understood farming and were able to actually grow something, and handed over to naves, buffoons, idiots, and knuckle draggers whose only mantra was that the rich didn’t pay their fair share, and so, they had to be stripped of all that they’d earned for the sake of equity.

It is an easy thing to live in the present, without fully fleshing out the context of the past, and understanding just how monstrous the descent of a country like Venezuela has been.

There was a point, not so long ago in the great scheme of things, that Venezuela was the richest country in South America. As far as geographical locations go, Venezuela won the lottery. Having the world’s largest proven oil reserves, enough beachfront to make Hawaii envious, and beautiful weather, Venezuela had everything going for it, and its future looked bright enough to require blackout glasses.

Then Santa came along. This particular Santa came in the form of Hugo Chavez, a less crazy looking version of Bernard Sanders, but with the same well-worn bag of goodies that he presented to the masses as some fresh and new idea of utopia.

It’s an easy process, really. First, you must manufacture the wedge: Why do some people have more than others?

The wedge is almost always class envy. That appeals to the vast majority who have not succeeded, who still struggle, or who suffer from greener grass syndrome. I know a few people like that. No matter how much they have, no matter how much the amass, the grass is always greener somewhere else, and they always find someone to compare themselves to that has more than them.

What an utter waste of time and energy. But see, Communism works because it appeals to base human nature. Communism works because it awakens the envy monster that lies dormant in most folk.

Once the wedge has been firmly established, then you start playing the what if game. What if we had free healthcare for all? What if we expunged all student debt? What if there was a universal basic income? What if you could stay home in your underwear and play video games all day, and somebody delivered your meals ready made, and warm?

Nobody ever asks Santa the most important question of all: Who are you planning on taking these things away from in order to give them to someone else?

Truthfully, most people don’t care. There’s a present under the Christmas tree, and that’s all that really matters. Nobody ever really looks into where it came from, who paid for it, how it got there, or who wrapped it. It’s there! Everything else is irrelevant.

But see, just as is the present case with Venezuela, and as has been the case for every nation that made a suicide pact with Communism, eventually Santa runs out of goodies, his bag is empty, and the nation, at that point, is so utterly decimated and stripped of opportunity, the infrastructure has so crumbled, and desperation has so overwhelmed the population, that there no longer remains hope for a redress or rehabilitation.

Sooner or later everyone discovers that there is no Santa Clause. My only hope is that America discovers it sooner rather than later. 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.

Fallen Man

Murderous hearts will always find a way to achieve their ends. Take away the gun, and they will use a truck. Take away the truck, and they will use a car. Take away the car, and they will use a knife. Take away the knife, and they will use a fork, their teeth, their fists, a brick, a sharpened stick, or whatever happens to be laying around.

There have been enough mass shootings and mass murders over the past few years, wherein anything substantive that would have been said about them has been said already. It is tragic, heartbreaking, stomach churning, and altogether inhuman, regardless of the religious ideology of those whose lives were taken.

Yes, I believe Islam is a false religion. Yes, I believe Muhamad is a false prophet. No, I do not want to see anyone slaughtered for it. As believers we are to love even our enemies. We are to love even those who would wish us harm and ill will.

No rational human being can take pleasure in carnage. No rational human being can take pleasure in slaughter, even if it happened half a world away. That said, the number of Christians being slaughtered throughout the world is disproportionately higher than any other religion, but for some unexplained reason this fact gets overlooked time and again by every media outlet.

We’re not talking about isolated incidents of violence here or there, we’re talking about entire countries intent in exterminating Christians and Christianity from within their borders. Syria, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Sudan, China, do I need to go on, or have I made my point?

There is one other overlooked discrepancy that is worth noting, and that is while the Christians being tortured, crucified, thrown off buildings, drowned, burned alive, and decapitated, are being murdered by professing Muslims, none of the attacks on Muslims were carried out by professing Christians. This is not a meaningless distinction. This is not splitting hairs. It is the crux of the entire matter, and the prism through which it must be viewed if we are to be intellectually honest.

Somehow it still amazes us the depths to which the nature of fallen man will go. Somehow it still amazes us the cruelty men are capable of visiting upon their fellow man, and it shouldn’t. This is fallen man in all his grotesque, disfigured glory. This is what the heart of fallen man is capable of, without remorse, shame, or the rational awareness that they are ending something they have no right to end, a human life.

Rather than lament the situation for what it was, however, some have taken to connecting issues that have no correlation or relationship, simply because it fits their narrative. Somehow, in their diluted minds, American gun owners, and the President of the United States are directly responsible for the fact that some nihilist in New Zealand had a mental break and went on a killing spree.

It just goes to show that these individuals care not a whit about 50 dead people in New Zealand. All they care about is driving their narrative, and continuing to chip away at the fabric of this nation by any means necessary. 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.

The Brightest Bulbs

Before acquiring power, and running what was once known as the breadbasket of Europe into the ground, Nicolae Ceausescu’s dream, the pinnacle of his aspirations on this earth, was to be a shoemaker. 

He never succeeded at becoming a shoemaker, he just dreamed of being one.

Although there is nothing wrong with being a shoemaker, the fact that this was the heights to which he dreamed to ascend is very telling about the man and his mindset. He did not dream of being a doctor, a surgeon, a mathematician, or even a lawyer. He dreamed of being a shoemaker.

Besides being an aspiring shoemaker, the only other notable thing about the man who would come to be known as the dictator of Romania, was that up until 1965 when he took over, he was first secretary of the Romanian workers’ party. Basically, he was an errand boy, a lickspittle, someone who could take orders, and do what he was told. That’s it. Nothing more. And yet, over twenty million people lived a waking nightmare for close to a quarter century because of this man and his devotion to Communism.

One of the first things the Communists did when they took over was to do away with anyone they deemed a threat to their acquisition of power. Intellectuals, philosophers, thinking men and women were summarily arrested, sent to labor camps, or made to live out the rest of their days in dark dungeons.

It is a demonstrable fact that individuals of inferior intellect have a chip on their shoulder regarding their own inferiority, and they will lash out at anyone they deem to be of superior intellect. The first thing they do when they gain power, is to do away with everyone they deem their intellectual superior.

The second thing they do immediately after the first, is amass wealth for themselves and their inner circle. Once you get past all the flowery speeches, and the promises of a better tomorrow, the insistence on equity and equality, in the end it’s all about the money, and the acquisition thereof.

Every one of these slobbering buffoons who are all in for Socialism don’t yet realize they are simply useful idiots, pawns to be used and discarded when they are no longer useful. The overarching truism is this: Socialism is for the people, not for the socialists!

Ever wonder how every Socialist hero turned dictator ended up a multi-millionaire, if not a billionaire even though their nations descended into ruin, and their people starved to death? Might be something worth looking into before we embrace the lunacy that is Socialism and make it our own, don’t you think?

There are dozens of examples to choose from throughout the world as to the failure of Socialism, or Communism. I picked Nicolae Ceausescu because he was the bane of my homeland’s existence, but everywhere you look, throughout the history of Marxism, Socialism, or Communism, all three interchangeable in my opinion, you see that those who tout them and rise to power because of them, are not what one might call the brightest bulbs.

Even leading up to our modern day Socialist luminaries, we see the selfsame pattern emerging, wherein those pushing for it and stirring others to embrace it are individuals of little to no accomplishment.

Bernard Sanders, the famed Vermont Socialist who wants you to have everything for free by taking it from someone else, didn’t have a real job until his late thirties, and even then his job was to get people to sign up for welfare. Then, by some stroke of cosmic tomfoolery, he was elected mayor of Burlington Vermont in 1981 by a margin of ten votes. Ever since, without fail, Bernard has been suckling at the teat of government.

The man never built a thing, he never employed anyone, he never started a business, or bought a franchise, or tried to make it on his own. For thirty-eight years and counting, he has been living off the taxpayers he despises and wants to confiscate even more from.

If a man has no proven track record of accomplishing anything of value or permanence, if he has not proven that he can run something as paltry as a lemonade stand, what makes you think that he can run the biggest economy in the world successfully, while transforming it into something it was never intended or designed to be?

Chew on this: The aforementioned aspiring shoemaker was worth nearly $2 Billion Dollars at the time of his execution in 1989. Not bad for a guy who had to sound out the words when he read. 

With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea Jr. 

Hope's Boneyard

When I was young I thought I wanted to be an archeologist. As I grew older, it became crystal clear that I just wanted to dig in the dirt and unearth what had been lost or otherwise forgotten. It wasn’t so much the studious library hours that appealed to me, it was the excitement of potentially finding something that would have otherwise gone undiscovered. As such I worked, and saved my money, bought the best metal detector on the market at the time, and whenever I would visit my homeland, I would spend countless hours in the neighboring forests, around castle moats, just swinging my detector, hearing a ping, and digging up what had been lying dormant for so long.

Romania is rich in history, and due to its historical richness, I found all manner of things, from arrow heads used in medieval battles, to sword tips, to sword hilts, to hand forged nails used to hold together medieval boots. No, I never found any gold or silver, but that was never the desire to begin with. The very idea of holding an arrow head in my hand and imagining who might have forged it, and used it, and what became of the individual was thrilling enough for me.

One day I was in the middle of a forest, high atop a hill, just swinging my detector back and forth, when I got a ping. I knelt down, and dug around the area, and to my surprise I found a shell casing. I’d found them before, but oddly enough, I tended to find more arrow heads than bullet casings.

Two feet further, and I found another casing, two feet after that another, and as I started kicking at the dirt around me, I made contact with something hard. I brushed away some dead leaves and dirt, and was confronted with a skull. By the look of it, it was a pig skull. A few feet further, I noticed bones peeking out the ground, and further still, more skull fragments, and full skulls of everything from cows, to pigs, to goats.

It was a veritable boneyard, and being all alone up on that hill, with all those animal remains sort of gave me the creeps. I packed up my gear, and made my way down the hill, still wondering about all the bones I’d found, when I ran across an older man carrying a water bucket.

I said hello, he returned the greeting, and since he looked like a local I asked him if he had a moment. “At my age, moments are all I have,” he answered smiling.

I explained to him what I’d found on top of the hill, but before I could even get the whole story out, he started nodding, and said, “that’s hope hill. My guess is you found the killing ground. Back during communism, people used to take their livestock up there in the dead of night, butcher it, and haul the meat back down in sacks. If the police came to inspect and they found animal remains on your property, you could go to jail for refusing to contribute to the general welfare of the people. Let’s say I had a cow I wanted to butcher. Well, I didn’t get to make the choice of when to butcher it, nor did I get to keep the meat. Even though I raised it, fed it, cared for it, it didn’t belong to me in their view. It belonged to the collective, and it was my duty as a good citizen to surrender it to the collective. As a means of getting around that, people would just take their animals up on the hill, butcher them, and walk out with just the meat.”

I thanked the old man for his time, and went on my way. It is only recently, with the new talk of Socialism and how wonderful a model it is that I started thinking back on that day, and what it really meant.

What socialism is, and make no mistake, it is, at its core communism, is the abdicating of all your rights to make decision for yourself, for the promise that some inept, illiterate, functionary of the newly minted government will make all the decisions for you.

Yes, it came to the point that if you had two chickens and you refused to give one to government you were refusing to pay your fair share. Yes, it did come to the point that people would butcher their livestock in the middle of the night just to keep from being discovered.

It is only people who have never had to live it that find socialism so attractive. All others know the truth of it, and abhor its very notion. 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.