Khari > Recent Status Updates

"Leaving does not kill a dead system, it just makes it look as dead as it is."

"It is the process of the Christian life to reteach my mind and soul how to rest in the promise of Life itself."

"Whenever I become aware of a sin-a behavior resulting from looking to my own performance instead of to what Jesus did on the cross-there is no shame. It is no final 'proof' that I am unworthy of God's grace and empowerment because I have temptation or I have sinned. It simply means that for a time, I again attempted to draw 'life' out of wrong sources and actions."

"If I teach Sunday school, serve on a committee, or offer money in order to validate myself or earn approval from God or someone else, it's also a sin...The sin...is not that I didn't do behaviors on the 'good list', because I did...It's that I tried to draw life and significance from something that could not give it. Instead of trusting God I turned to a false god-positive looking, but false just the same."

"If I use drugs, steal, or commit adultery in an attempt to meet my needs it is sin. What makes it sin is not that I performed a behavior on the 'bad list'-although I did do that. The sin is that I tried to draw life or significance from something that could not give it. Instead of trusting God, I trusted a false god. That is missing the mark."

"We used to believe that the successful Christian life was about doing good, and not doing sins. But sin is more than a behavior issue; sin results when we forget to trust in the real God for our identity and spiritual strength, or when we place our trust in something other than our Source."

"Not everyone who goes to church is a Christian. A Christian is someone whose life is from God because of Christ. Adhering to a set of doctrines, or excluding those who don't does not make anyone a Christian."

"Spiritual abuse has the effect of making people extremely self-focused, preoccupied with doing things right and keeping happy those who are in places of authority. Recovery begins and continues with keeping our focus on God, what He has done and who we are because of that."

"God does not renovate, He innovates. We have not been rehabilitated. We have been re-created. This is our new state and identity in Christ. It is this mindset that we must adopt daily to keep from falling into old, entrapping behaviors, or coming under the dictates of spiritual leaders who do not know how to lad us to real life and freedom."

"Trying hard to change behaviors in order to correct a negative self-concept is the wrong response. It results from not understanding or believing that our sin and shame are completely erased and our new identity has already been created by the activity of God. It erodes the Christian life into the tired state of self-effort aimed at fixing a negative self-a self that God has already replaced with a new creation."

"Trying hard to change behaviors in order to have a positive self-concept is absolutely the wrong response. At best, it leads to more shame if we fail, or to self-righteousness if we succeed. At worst, it gives people who lack life the illusion of having life, and that we have earned God's approval."

"We devise strategies in order to meet our own needs. But with each and every one, we sin-we miss the mark...this is true whether our efforts are positive or negative. We may become capable at many endeavors, surround ourselves with many things, and acquire for ourselves the approval of many. But from day one we need a new identity, not just new behavior. And we are incapable of doing anything to accomplish that."

Transform in the Greek 'means something that is done to you, not by you."

There is not test to diagnose spiritual abuse. There are only spiritual clues: lack of joy in the Christian life; tiredness from trying hard to measure up; disillusionment about God and spiritual things; uneasiness, lack of trust, or even fear of those who care about 'God things' even legitimately; a profound sense of missing your best Friend; cynicism or grief over good news that turned out to be too good to be true

I just get so tired of the books that are "Here is this absolutely terrible thing, and I'm going to argue using the same tools and premises of this terrible thing, just from the opposite direction."

...group, then immediately treat men as such.

It's mind boggling.

She says she cannot know the inner beliefs of men who perpetuate the system of ignoring female data, but she is incorrect. A lot of men, on all sides, have clearly elucidated their motivations and thoughts, she quoted one of them: Aristotle. But this is a choice, cherry-picked to back up her narrative. Not representative of men in general.

As for belittling women's unpaid labor. That is a problem on the feminist side more than the chauvinist. Just read G.K. Chesterton or other men throughout the ages to see what they thought about it, he hardly took it for granted, instead he held it up as the glue of society and had great respect for the greatness and complexity of what women do.

You are angry about women being treated as a silent undifferentiated..

She could have just looked at places today where women do not have a political voice, access to education, sexual freedom, self-determination.

The difference about the West is that books like this get written, read, and debated on their merits, and what is good taken from them, instead of the book never being written at all.

Stop knocking the culture that gave you the ability to write this book decrying it.

Sigh.
I'm only 10 minutes in and I'm already banging my head against the wall.

1. It is not knowledge to claim "woman as gatherer" as mover of evolution, anymore than it is to claim that 'man as hunter' is the mover of evolution. Both of those are assumptions, hypotheses, theories, thought experiments, not facts.

2. Her premise that data missing as pertains to women is true, but why does she go back to Aristotle?

"We have forgotten that preoccupation with self in the name of God is still preoccupation with self."

"Paul says that false apostles 'disguise themselves as servants of righteousness.' The abusive system gives people an opportunity to earn God's approval with their own positive self-effort."

"Unfortunately, we realize that many spiritual leaders and systems are so ingrained in their thinking that an invitation to rest in the finished work of Christ will seem 'impossible', 'unrealistic', or even 'unscriptural'."

"I may encourage you to come and serve and give to the glory of God, but the real reason I'm encouraging you to do that is because I will look like a success if you do. I will use you to make me look good. At this point, my ego has begun to feed upon you."

"There is a significant problem lurking int he shadows of my soul. The problem is subtle and very dangerous. TI is this: Unless I stay rightly connected to God, my entire sense of value as a person will come from how perform as a person and how others reward and applaud my behavior."

"Rather than pointing to Jesus, what is really valued is how well we perform in church. Eventually, we realize that memorizing and spouting Scripture, witnessing and leading study groups are terribly inadequate sources of life, in and of themselves, leaving us empty and looking for more."

"If you are always frightened for yourself then you can't act, and then life loses its purpose."

"...that you're going to do what you have to because otherwise you're defeated and life doesn't have any real purpose left."

"Then you have a choice. You can either give in to what you're feeling, just say 'okay, enough is enough' and be done with it, or you can fight it. You can accept that every day you're alive you're going to have to fact it down, that you're going to have to say to yourself that you don't care what you feel, that it doesn't matter what happens to you because sooner or later it is going to happen anyway..."

"Almost without noticing, we begin to live the same way we did before we met Jesus, hoping that with all our effort we will someday, some way, measure up. But we never do measure up; we continue to carry the load and we call it 'the abundant life.'"