seaspray

Oops, sorry, Spray. Try this.

http://www.lmci.org/about.cfm

NKA, thanks very much!

Just want to add that Mike & Nancy were very, very kind to my wife and me many years ago. It's something I will never forget. Certainly was a joy to see Nancy's smiling face again at the link you provided. Thanks again!

Seaspray, I just sent you a PM.

Thanks NKA, but no message in the PM.

No it makes it a statement that there is crap from Groucho's dog on a lawn some where a fact.

Whatever.

This morning my dog took a crap on the lawn...it wasn't proven in a court of law but I still state it as fact...is that ok with you WD?

You Groucho, like most of the folks here, just don't get it. Your statement, 'my dog took a crap on the lawn', does not make 'crap on the lawn' a fact.

Ok thanks.

Rocky, do mean he posted something here at GSC?

If anyone has an address or phone number, if you would be so kind, contact me via the PM service or email.

Thanks, Jim.

Just wondering, anyone know or heard anything about Mike & Nancy Blatnik?

During the Gospel Period, people had no spirit so the body-and-soul believers could only observe life from a senses point of view. Men in the gospels asked Jesus as recorded in John 6:30, “What sign shewest thou then, that we may see, and believe thee?” Time and time again inquirers asked for tangible proof. Thomas insisted, “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails...I will not believe.” In the gospels, people had to see in order to believe. But the Church epistles establish the order that a person first believes and then he sees. Thus you and I do not first see and then believe; we first believe God’s Word and then we see the truth of it bear fruit in our lives as we walk on it. GMWD pg141 & 142

God’s Strength in Us

Victor Paul Wierwille

Steve, I was just wondering if you could show us the error in the objective reality cited above?

Love,

Jim

Not long ago I paid a visit to Payne, Ohio. It was a Saturday morning in late July or early August and I ate breakfast at a little joint that did double duty. By day it was a short order hash house and it would transition to gin mill by the time happy hour rolled around. I took my chow at the bar which was kind of neat in and of it's self. After I paid the check and tipped the waitress handsomely, I walked south a couple blocks and found myself on the the sidewalk in front of the dentist's office. Looking west I saw the gas station Dr told us about. The pumps were long gone. The building was boarded up and vacant. It is, as Dr. Wierwille said, less than thirty paces from the office to where the pumps were once located. To that I can attest.

Oh, and by the way, 'snowstorm' is a misnomer. It would more accurately be described as a squall; a short, isolated snow squall. Little noted nor long remembered by anyone except Dr. Wierwille himself and we who believe in his ministry. It's not Dr. Wierwille's life that hangs in the balance. It is ours.

You are the one to now decide

Whether to believe Him or toss Him aside.

You are the one to make up your minds

Whether to accept Him or linger behind.

Take Him or leave Him, which will you do,

Believing is assurance of no failure for you.

Freedom From Bondage

Victor Paul Wierwille

The heart's cry of the common man is for help. Man's help truly has to come from the Lord. We must learn to go to God's Word, the fountainhead of all truth, for that help. WM 07-08/85

So Mike, the period concluding this paragraph is the final period?

it was in Van Wert yes? Lima? New Knoxville?

It was Payne, Ohio.

If we believe that throughout the Scriptures we have the words of God and not of man, many difficulties will disappear. We must allow the Divine Author the rights and privileges claimed and operated by every human author, namely, that He may quote, readapt or repeat in varied forms His own previously written or spoken words. God could have used other forms had He chosen to do so, but it has pleased Him to repeat His own word or words, introducing them in different contexts, with new applications and connotations. Thus it obligates us to study the context, the paragraph and the section where the same word appears and where it was used previously, to see if its usage is in a new sense or not. RHST pg 223

Mike, doesn't this paragraph from Receiving the Holy Spirit Today essentially sum up, or describe, what we have in book and magazine form from the Way Ministry?

It is God, not TWI or PFAL that provides us with what we need.

Hey Mark Clarke, it's good to have an opportunity talk with you here at GSC. I'm going to quote a section of text here and maybe it'll help us. Here goes.

Psalms 138:2:

I will worship toward thy holy temple, and praise thy name for thy loving kindness and for thy truth: for thou has magnified thy word above all thy name.

God has magnified His Word above His Name. It does not say that about the stars or the planets. He set His Word above His Name for He underwrote it, He put His name underneath it. He guaranteed it. It is just like a check. When I write a check for a thousand dollars and I sign my name, the check is only as good as the signature. How good is The Word? The Word of God declares that it is as good as God for God signed His Name to it. The Word is as much God as God is God. What God said was, was, what God has said is, is, what God says will be, will be. Do you see why we must come back to the integrity and accuracy of God’s wonderful Word? We cannot trust man’s word because man blows about, being here today and gone tomorrow; but the Word of God “liveth and abideth for ever.” That Word endures.

The text is taken from a magazine article Dr. Wierwille published back in late '75 entitled God's Word Endures Forever.

You see Mark, many people are very intent on trashing Dr. Wierwille's name. Then ergo, what he wrote is no good. The trashing of Dr. Wierwille's name does a huge disservice to God's people and the ministry of reconciliation of Jesus Christ. It's not much unlike the day Jesus went to his home town and declared the Word to his own hometown folks. They just weren't having any. This is the apistia type of unbelief that we learned about. They thought they knew him but they really didn't. They wouldn't sit still long enough for the Lord to teach them.

That's one of the reasons the Word Over the World Ambassadors were so successful on the field. How did they know what they were taught and were teaching was true? We just saw it in God's Word, believed it and walked out on it. It worked.

It's a little bit like ice skating. You just lace up the skates and get out on the ice. At first you look like a jerk and fall down a lot. But you're determined and you stay with it. Pretty soon you're gliding around the rink with greatest of ease. You're feeling pretty good and it's fun.

Just some food for thought.

Not even for me?

Good one, Mike.

Interesting. See how easy it is to talk about Jesus Christ when you focus on the Bible rather than PFAL?

I'm just saying.

(and yes, I'm just kidding).

Honestly, I think there's a difference between being a sinner, which everyone is, and being sinister. Of necessity, God works with sinners (not a lot of options on that front). But to expect me to believe Wierwille is what you claim him to be, God would have to work not with a sinner, but with the sinister; not with a man who occasionally succumbed to evil, but with a man who occasionally rose above it; not with a man who failed to be what he knew to be, but a man who knew what he was and reveled in it.

You compare Wierwille to Saul the apostle, I to Saul the king. You compare Wierwille to the penitent sinner David, I to the unpenitent and ultimately disgraced Solomon. And that's being gracious, for it assumes that at some point there truly was a desire to serve God. Unfortunately, Wierwille ended up serving man, not in any noble sense, but he served man up to the altar of his own greed, his own lusts.

Do his misdeeds mark his entire life? No. Of course not. Most of the people he met, he did not hurt. Most of the people who heard him preach were inspired by it, I dare say. And bravo for that.

But he didn't need to prey upon more than a handful of God's people to earn the mark of predator. He didn't have to manipulate everyone he met to be a manipulator. As I've mentioned over and over: Jeffrey Dahmer only ate a miniscule fraction of the people he met over his lifetime. A teensy weensy... almost immeasurable percentage. Defend what you want of the cult leader Victor Paul Wierwille. He preyed upon God's people, in Christ's name. It wasn't merely sin. It was a calculated lifestyle of manipulation of Scripture and people for his own lustful ends.

Sad, yes. Tragic? Depends on his motives to begin with. A legacy? Maybe. He'll have the legacy of L. Ron Hubbard, Charles Taze Russell, Mary Baker Eddy... when the final history of Victor Paul Wierwille is written, he will take his place among the second or third tier of those who traded in money and lives in Christ's name. He will be, perhaps, a footnote at best (ironic, considering his own failure to use such inconveniences).

And Christianity will move on.

There you go again, trying to think. Raf, take a break.

Jeff put it well, as usual.

It's true, seaspray, but once you come to that realization, your recovery can begin.

The belief system you cling to was, to a large extent, concocted by a predator of God's people for the purpose of satisfying his lust for money, sex and power. Oh, his legacy includes many fond memories for you, and I won't begrudge you that. I had some good memories too. But I'd trade those good memories in a heartbeat if it would take away the pain and anguish suffered at Wierwille's hands by people whose only crime was a desire to get to know God better.

What's your point?

Followers of The Way International are pure evil. That's all there is to it.

Are followers of the Way pure evil? Who is the Way?

Do you remember?

My skin's a little thicker than that, Bolshevik. :)

Glad to know where you stand, seaspray. My prayers are with you.

Be well.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Where, oh where, have all the flowers gone? Maybe they're blowin' in the wind someplace and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard rain falling down there. (Did I get all the hards?) Anyhoo, one thing I know for sure. If we can come up with a way to stop the rain it'll be strawberry fields forever and ever. Amen. That's all I have to say about that.

One more thing, people are strange when you're a nowhere man and you got to learn how to live out on the street. And you're uptight about scrounging for your next meal. And someone busted your banjo. And Martha says you're a slob and don't know how to cook. And we're caught in a trap and we can't get out. And...

You're still in?

In Christ? Yeah, you bet!

There, I said it.

I love the Lord Jesus Christ (doesn't everyone?). I said it again.

Can you say peanut butter?

P.S. Raf, are you tappin' the acid again, or did you just fall down and hit your head on the sidewalk?

Air, water, food and shelter. These are the reasons that you believe Wierwille's words are true?

How do you determine what is true and what is not?

What do you breathe? What do you eat and drink? Do you have a home that provides comfort?

Don't be discouraged in your quest for truth and life by naysayers and critics.

Wierwille's character aside, you seem to imply that you believe Wierwille's writings hold water. Is that so? If so why?

Hey Bolshevik, howdy.

There's two question marks here so there must be two questions. Let's see if I've got them right.

Q) Do you believe Dr. Wierwille's writings hold water?

A) Yes.

Q) Why?

A) It's because I've discovered, in coming back to what Dr. Wierwille wrote, that it is very easy and simple and pleasant to live in. There is fresh air to breathe and clean, clear water to drink. There is good food to eat and shelter.

Your phrase, 'hold water', takes me back to the first chapter of Power for Abundant Living. It tells us that God's people have screwed up in two ways. One, they have forsaken the one true God and two, they've built their own personal cisterns and these cisterns can 'hold no water'. This describes our situation perfectly.

You know, it's a hard thing when people realize the cisterns they have spent so much time and effort constructing hold no water. No matter how elaborate or plain, no matter how big or small, none will hold any water. That's the bad news. The good news is power for abundant living makes the way to the limitless supply of living water. It is the way back to the fountainhead of truth, God Almighty Himself.

That's why Dr. Wierwille, with almost his last breath, instructed us to master the class and the writing that came with it. This sets forth the accuracy of God's Word, is available to us today through The Way Ministry and it is really something wonderful!

Thanks waysider for the GSC welcome.

No need to worry about bustin' my chops. If it gets too rough, I'll just say 'uncle'.

Certainly I am aware of the accusations that have been made against Dr. Wierwille. What I don't understand is how, in a biblical sense, this disqualifies him from simply writing down what God revealed to him. Even if (and it's very unlikely) all the accusations are fact. Truthfully, all this jibber-jabber on GSC about Dr. Wierwille's alledged misdeeds is very reminiscent of the fake trials guys like Stephen, Paul and even the Lord himself endured before they were executed.

You know, I've always been perturbed with VPW's contention that we can follow his rules and get back to "the God-breathed Word". Knowing a tiny bit about information theory, I know that once information is lost, it's lost. And no amount of fiddling will bring it back. He give us no reasoned argument why his method should be considered reliable, which I find somewhat incredible given his non-stop rants about upholding "the accuracy of God's Word".

Jim, this is interesting. Try this for size.

God Almighty, in His omniscience, simply revealed the same information & instruction (the Mystery) to Dr. Wierwile that He had revealed to the apostle Paul (or vice versa). Both had scripture to work with (fiddling?) and both had the necessary help from the heavenly Father.

Rocky,

Re:"The music he has playing at his web site is VERY good!"

If you like that sort of thing, I guess.

sudo

Yeah Sudo, I can dig it. Sorta sounds like Ozzy Osborne (lite) meets the guys on the road to Emmaus before the Lord.