A Kingdom View of Economic Collapse

This is an excerpt from my latest book: A Kingdom View of Economic Collapse.

On June 30^th, 2015, after suffering years of financial trouble, Greece failed to make a required payment to the International Monetary Fund and entered into a default on its sovereign debt. In light of Greece's default and due to the proliferation of books predicting catastrophic judgments upon America (and the rest of the world) it seemed good to share what I’ve learned about economic collapse and how the kingdom of God responds to crisis.

You don’t need to look very far to find dire warnings of disaster being spoken by secular experts and religious leaders alike. Many financial experts have written books citing the reasons why they believe an economic collapse is quickly approaching. At the same time, many religious leaders have shared prophetic warnings that we’re entering a time a great difficulty; some even arguing that the end of the world is at hand.

While I believe (some) financial experts have given us an accurate assessment of the problems we face, what they lack is a divine perspective on the problem. What religious leaders usually lack is an understanding of how financial systems work. What is most concerning is that neither camp has put forth a clear plan to help us survive such a crisis, much less rebuild in its aftermath.

The approach financial advisers generally take is to sign you up for their investing programs. They warn you that your retirement savings are about to be wiped out and that if you pay them a fee, they’ll tell you where to invest your money. The main reason why many church leaders don’t offer a plan to survive or rebuild after a global crisis is that they don’t expect to be here. The popularity of the belief that the church will be taken into heaven in the rapture before a global crisis hits has prompted many theologians to abandon all thought of what the church’s responsibility might be in a post-crisis world. Their advice is to pray for sinners to repent and pray even harder for the return of Jesus. 

During the last century, hundreds of millions of believers have been certain they would see the return of Jesus during their lifetime. None of them have lived to see that day. At this moment, millions more are convinced that we’re living in the days just before His return, and indeed, we might be. But statistically speaking, the odds of that happening in anyone’s lifetime are extremely small.

After becoming a believer, I sat in a church pew and read my Bible. I learned all the reasons why the great tribulation was approaching, why the Antichrist was ready to be revealed, why the world was teetering on the brink of catastrophe, and most importantly, why we believers wouldn’t be around for all of that. Although I was told that God’s wrath was about to be poured out upon the earth, I was also assured that my King was going to appear and rescue me from it. During this time, I never witnessed a creative miracle, never saw anyone healed or set free of a demon, and although I learned a lot about the church, I learned virtually nothing about the kingdom of God.

Then one night I had a dream. In the dream, I met God, and He had a few things He wanted to share with me. He said He wanted me to heal the sick, cast out demons, raise the dead and proclaim His kingdom.

The nerve of Him.

If He weren’t the Almighty, I might have given Him a piece of my mind. He spoke not a word about waiting for the rapture, witnessing to sinners or handing out tracts, which were things my pastor told me were top priorities. Since that day, I’ve had hundreds (perhaps thousands) more dreams and the subject of our conversations hasn’t changed. Few, if any of them have portrayed the end of the world, the rise of a one-world government or world-ending disasters. Nearly all of them have to do with battling the kingdom of darkness, setting captives free, and using my time and energy to advance His kingdom.

I think we need to ask a few questions of those who predict catastrophic events:

If the coming events are believed to be because we’ve rebelled against God, what happens if we don’t repent?

And what if the coming events are not actually the result of God’s wrath, but instead, the natural outworking of our own poor choices?

What if a global crisis strikes and the church is not removed from the earth beforehand?

Is your pastor teaching you what to do if the church survives a global catastrophe, or are all your hopes pinned on Jesus rescuing you from it?

It’s certainly more pleasant to think that we won’t be here when things get ugly, but we have no guarantee of that. 

I don’t see any reason to fear the future. Whatever is coming, God can make us aware of it, and if He can make us aware of it, He can prepare us for it. I would encourage you to rest in the knowledge that God has a plan that He is working out in these events. If you're positioned in Him, and prepared mentally for the challenges that lie ahead, you may find all of this to be a liberating experience, and not a terrifying one.

My intent with this book is to examine the topic of economic collapse from various perspectives. The book can be divided roughly into four sections: The first is a primer on economics and finance. My goal with this section is to describe (in terms the average person can understand) how the financial systems of the world operate. In the second section, we’ll look at historic cases of economic collapse and the things that caused it. We’ll also identify which nations are at risk of experiencing economic collapse today. In the third section, I’ll share the dreams I’ve had that provide a prophetic overview of the days ahead and I’ll discuss what I believe to be God’s purpose for these events. In the last section, we'll look at how the  kingdom of God ought to respond to crisis.

This book is available only as an e-book. It can be found by clicking on this link or the image below.

God's Perspective on Excellence

 My wife and I were entertaining friends when we got on the subject of writing books. I told our guest I was not the best healer in the world. "If you want to see a really gifted healer," I said, "Go hang out with David Hogan."

I'm not the most knowledgeable or the most proficient healer, but with the little knowledge I do have, I was able to write a decent book on the subject, because in all honesty—I'm probably a better writer than I am a healer. There's still so much about healing I don't understand. Sometimes I feel unworthy of the questions people ask me. That night I had a dream:

 

In the dream, I was taking care of patients with a strange medical condition I didn't know anything about. They had this fluid in some kind of container that was somehow attached to their body. I was supposed to monitor this fluid. I didn't know what the fluid was and I didn't know how to monitor it. I felt very uncertain about how I was supposed to take care of these patients. So I did the best I could and tried to make sure nothing bad happened to them while they were in my care. At the end of the dream, I was given an award for providing excellent care for my patients. That was the end of the dream.

 

When I awoke, I was a little shocked. How could anyone give me an award for providing good patient care when I had no clue what was wrong with my patients, what that fluid was, or how I was supposed to monitor it?

 

It didn't make sense.

 

Later that day, as I thought about the dream, I also thought about the book I wrote and how I still don't have all the answers to the questions people have about healing. And then it dawned on me what the Lord was saying in the dream. (This is a word of instruction for all of us):

 

It doesn't matter to God if you have things all figured out. It doesn't matter if you can answer people's questions correctly. It doesn't matter if you feel pretty clueless about healing or deliverance, or anything else He's asked you to do. It doesn't matter if you feel incompetent or incapable. What matters to God is that you do the best you can with the little information and talent you have.

 

Be a good steward of what resources and knowledge He's given you and He'll fill in the gaps of your knowledge and skill. Excellence doesn't require complete understanding. All it requires is diligence and a sincere desire to serve in whatever way you can.

American Sniper: Lessons in Spiritual Warfare

This is an except from my latest book American Sniper: Lessons in Spiritual Warfare.

The main character of American Sniper is a Texas-born redneck named Chris Kyle. The film opens with a scene of Kyle perched on a rooftop in the city of Fallujah, Iraq. U.S. troops have been told that the city was ordered to be evacuated and any military-aged men they find are assumed to be enemy combatants, until proven otherwise. Kyle is checking out the path of a U.S. military convoy through the scope of his sniper rifle. He sees a man on a rooftop in the distance talking on a cell phone. The man appears to be watching the convoy, which Kyle reports to his command through his headset. The man then disappears from the rooftop and a few moments later, a woman and a young boy exit the doorway of the same building and begin walking toward the convoy. Kyle reports the woman and boy to command, and notes that the woman is not swinging her arms as she walks and that she appears to be carrying something. Kyle watches through the scope as the woman removes something from her cloak and hands it to the boy and he realizes it’s a grenade. He reports what he sees and again gets the green light to shoot, but his marine guard warns him that he’ll be sent to prison for shooting a child if he's wrong. The film then cuts away and the next 20 minutes are vignettes of Kyle growing up as the son of a religious father who stressed the ever-present threat of evil, the virtues of aggression, and the supremacy of the hunt.

As a child, Chris learned to watch over his younger brother, Jeff. When someone picked on him, Chris came to his defense and in one scene, he gave the bully a beating he wouldn’t forget. As an adult, he spent most of his time riding bulls, drinking beer, chasing pretty girls and getting into fights.  In the same way that Chris drifted from one misadventure to another, many Christians find themselves drifting, spiritually. We go to church on Sunday, read our Bibles, and try to avoid getting into trouble, but inevitably, trouble seems to find us. We wrestle with various problems and seem to make little progress, no matter what measures we try.

The first seven years of my life as a Christian I traveled down a dozen different paths leading nowhere. Though I felt at the time I was a passionate believer, I had very few victories over the enemy. I lost more spiritual battles than I won. And perhaps more importantly, I never felt a great sense of significance; I felt like I was just another believer. In many ways I was drifting spiritually, with no real course or destination in mind, other than getting into heaven when I died.

No child dreams of growing up to be insignificant. We all want to do something great. God doesn’t create us to be ordinary. He’s placed a desire for significance in our hearts—a desire to do something to change the world for the better. It’s apparent early in the film that Chris Kyle knew he was destined to do something extraordinary.

The film cuts away to a scene of Chris and his brother watching TV. They saw the news of the terrorist attacks on the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Chris was infuriated that U.S. citizens were being attacked and felt compelled to do something about it. His anger over the attacks compelled him to visit a Navy recruiter’s office. The recruiter suggested he might be interested in the SEAL program and handed him a pamphlet, but Kyle remarked that he wasn’t much of a swimmer. The recruiter took the pamphlet out of his hand and said it wasn’t for most men. Kyle grabbed the pamphlet back and proudly replied “I’m not most men.” He didn’t envision himself in a routine job as a sailor. That would be too safe. He set his aim high and endured the brutality of Navy SEAL training.

A new Christian has very little that they bring to the spiritual battlefield from the world. We learn all kinds of ways to defend ourselves and attack our enemies as we go through life, but the Apostle Paul taught that the weapons of the believer’s warfare are not like the weapons and tactics of the physical world. Spiritual weapons are spiritual in nature and it’s only these weapons that can be used effectively against spiritual strongholds. Because spiritual weapons are so different from the weapons we’re familiar with, they require special training and practice before they can be used effectively. My introduction to spiritual weapons was illustrated by the following dream:

Dream
In the dream, I drove my car to a pawn shop with my children. I took some old things that I owned into the pawn shop and traded them in for a strange type of handgun. My kids waited a long time for me to come out. I left the shop with my new gun, but didn’t want my kids to see it, so I walked around behind my car, then took it out and examined it. The gun had a laser sight built into it. It was wide, with a round bulge that seemed to be for the ammunition, though it wasn’t a revolver and it didn’t have a magazine. I didn’t know how the ammunition was loaded. I began trying to figure out how it worked and decided to aim it across the street at a vacant lot. The gun fired two rounds, which I wouldn’t have known, except that I saw puffs of dust rise from the ground where I pointed the gun. It made no sound and didn’t seem to have a trigger, but seemed to fire by my thoughts. I put it in the trunk of my car and that was the end of the dream.

InterpretationIn the dream, I traded in a bunch of things I had obtained from the world for a new, spiritual weapon. I believe this speaks of acquiring a new way of thinking and living. I had to leave behind the way of thinking I had acquired from the world and learn the way of thinking used in the kingdom of God. I also had to learn how to defend myself and wage an offensive attack differently. I had no idea how my new gun fired. I didn’t yet understand how spiritual weapons operate, though I had obtained one that could be used effectively, once I was trained to use it.

You can read more by clicking the link to American Sniper: Lessons in Spiritual Warfare, or click on the image below.