Toking the Ghost: Why Christians Must Redeem Drug Culture, Part I
Ever since I first became a believer, I have had a constant addiction to the Presence of God. I do not know of any other way to live the Christian life, apart from a loving compulsion to continuously be near this God of Gladness. One of the primary things the Lord showed us years ago was that intoxication on Him is the very essence of “first love.” God is not interested in your dispassionate praise or disinterested service. He is going for the depths of your heart strings. The thing that intoxicates you to the core is the very thing you worship. There is a deep, inner craving that draws us outside ourselves and into the realms of divine ecstasy. This is our inheritance as children and lovers of God. The only kind of love that will lay down its life is a love that has transcended life itself.
Supernatural pleasure, inner raptures, ecstasies, trances and visionary encounters are our Biblical inheritance as believers. Sadly, the church culture of today has become far removed from true, joyful experiential Christianity. Instead, it has morphed into a mere classroom on ethics, while losing the true core of spirituality and encounter that are freely available to all believers who choose to access the open Heavens of the cross. The great revivalist John G. Lake explained it this way, when discussing trances:
“Now what is a trance? A trance is the Spirit taking predominance over the mind and body, and for the time being the control of the individual is by the Spirit; but our ignorance of the operations of God is such that even ministers of religion have been known to say it is the devil.”[i]
We are tired of seeing the church forfeit over inner trance experiences to drug culture, new age and the occult, which can only offer counterfeits at best and demonic counterparts at worst. As believers, we should be the most intoxicated people on the planet – blissed out on the God of ecstasy who has rivers of pleasure flowing at His right hand! We were never created for a dry, boring, sober religious existence. True spiritual “sobriety,” of which the apostle Paul speaks, is coming into a vivid awareness of the unseen realm of Heaven. In Acts 2 and elsewhere in the scriptures, this “spiritual sobriety” looked like complete drunkenness to the natural eye. The new wine of God’s Spirit is the daily fare of the believer. The church started in the heavy drunken Glory on Pentecost, and we are moving from Glory to Glory. God would never give us a lesser experience for a greater one. What the apostles tasted in part, we will overdose on in full!
Drink Your Fill
There is a supernatural bliss the world longs to see demonstrated in the people of God. To live by the rules and regulations of naturalistic religion, without encountering the Spirit of God Himself, is to already be drunk on the ways of the world.
The scriptures have long commended us to be inebriated without limit on God, as we are told to “… drink your fill, O lovers.” (Song Sol. 5:1). How thirsty are you? Theodoret of Cyrus, in the fifth century, comments on this single verse saying:
“He commands these persons not merely to drink, but to be drunken; for there is a drunkenness that works temperance and not delirium – one that does not enfeeble the limbs but lends them strength.” [ii]
We want to be those who partner with Heaven to see a redemption and restoration of true supernatural, mystical experience by finding our intoxication in the Holy Ghost! God will never put a limit on your joy levels. It will take all of eternity to explore the depths of God’s gladness.
Taking it to the Street
When I go out for evangelism these days, I rarely ever start with the “four spiritual laws” or try to convince people they are sinners. I say this not to criticize anyone else’s evangelism method. If it bears fruit for you, go for it. But most people already know they are sinners. Very often, I just ask them if they want to get high! And more often than not, they do. Use bait for fish, not repellant.
Presence evangelism is the most effective mode of making true converts, because people are not simply making intellectual decisions based on points of doctrine. Instead, they are truly encountering the Lord of Glory through a tangible experience, and the explanation follows. Yes – of course we must give a rational exposition of the gospel. But without tangible demonstration, the gospel will be all talk and no show. Everybody is looking for interior fulfillment at a heart level, and we are carriers of that to a broken world. We pray, and people get rocked. They feel. They taste. They see.
It is amazing how drug culture and all manner of sedation are so prevalent in our society today. At best, everyone is addicted to television, food and materialism. But more common than you realize, even in the church today, people are addicted to worse mind-altering substances from Prozac, Xanex and alcohol to marijuana or hard street and party drugs. I cannot begin to count how many people we have seen set free when the liberating pleasures of the Holy Spirit are released. The anointing breaks the yoke (Isa. 10:27). How many thousands have we seen get rocked, who once suffered from depression that also led to physical ailments such as chronic fatigue, chronic pain and fibromyalgia? All because the joy of Jesus broke a spirit of heaviness from their lives!
Man is designed to live in an alternate state of reality. You were made to walk in the Spirit. If someone is not plugged into the ecstasies of Jesus, they are naturally going to look for their fix in a perverted form. Although the source of our intoxication is two worlds apart, secular people at least understand the principle of intoxication. There is an issue of relevance and reality here. Although religious spirits hate it, I have no problem drawing parallels between the ecstasies of God and a drug induced state of consciousness. The latter is only a counterfeit of the former. My goal is to bring the spiritual principles to street level language, where people need the revelation. Most non-believers think God wants to take away their fun. I encourage them to “Toke the Ghost” or take a trip with psychedelic Jesus. Not by using drugs of course, but by imbibing on the Spirit of God.
A Personal Testimony
Drug-induced trances are only shallow, deadly substitutes for Holy Spirit trances. We can convince people that they don’t need drugs by getting them high on the Most High. Then, and only then, freedom and deliverance are simple, if not instant. The best way to convince them is to give them a taste of what they are missing out on! This is the “one-step program” for deliverance.
I am living proof of this principle. I received an instant deliverance from drugs as a teenager, and I was the worst substance abuser of all my friends. The thing that finally broke my addiction was getting whacked by the thrilling pleasure of the infilling of the Holy Spirit! How could I ever choose a lesser substance after tasting Divine Bliss? Most of the strongest drug addicts consequently have the strongest call to raptures and the seer realm. Consider how every class of drug specifically imitates something produced in rapture. Sedatives only counterfeit the deep, supernatural peace of God. Stimulants, or uppers, only imitate the power and stamina of the breaker anointing when the Spirit of Might comes upon you. Hallucinogens only simulate the visionary realm. It is completely normal that people would want to experience peace, power and see things! These are God-given desires, but we should fulfill those desires in Him, rather than substances. Bono, from the rock band U2, makes a great point when he sings: there’s nothing better than the real thing!
We have taken it as a sort of personal mandate to influence the church toward the ecstasies and living a lifestyle of spiritual drinking. This is because the new wine all has to do with intimacy, and love is the highest way. God wants junkies, and I have resolved to be a Holy Ghost pusher. Pharisees often get offended when I talk about smoking “Jehovah-wanna,” popping a “taste and see pill” or drinking “Godka.” Of course we never have nor ever would encourage the partaking of drugs. But we strongly encourage the partaking of God! Hearing these sorts of analogies is like sweet water to the thirsty soul who was born to live an intoxicated lifestyle. I don’t give a rip about dancing a jig for a self-satisfied amen corner. Life is too short to try to force-feed a fat, religious cow. There are too many hungry, desperate people out there who are ready and willing to embrace a God who is tangible, loving, joyful and full of mystical surprises and intoxicating delight. This revelation of first-love intoxication drives young people through the roof. They know that this is what they were made for: to live more whacked than their friends who are on drugs.
The truth is that we are not really comparing God to drug use. The world has already done that! The very existence of a drug culture shows that the comparison has already been made. You do not need to inhale marijuana when you can inhale the ruah – the very life-breath of God’s Spirit! We are simply reversing idea that substances (or anything the world offers) can fill a void of pleasure and experience reserved for God alone.
Shock language
Imbibing on the pleasures of God is the most critical, key component for the preservation of society. Finding God as our holy “addiction” goes much further than a tactic for ministering to drug users. We must all learn to love God at the deepest, most compulsive levels of our existence. All of mankind is called to find its identity as lovers of God.
The essence of true love goes far beyond our works or service. True love must find pleasure in the object of its affection. While Christianity is full of cliché terminology to describe love, joy, worship, adoration and the like, it is sometimes more effective to use shock language and wild demonstration to convey how extreme is the joyful possession He offers us!
We have many pastors ask us to “tone down” the vernacular when paralleling God encounters with drugs. But by the grace of God I will not tone down an ounce of what He is doing until the day I die. Jesus never toned it down, and he never held anything back. One of the very reasons we use this type of language is to dismantle the very religious strongholds that keep people from “going too far” in the Spirit. Heaven is all about a great party. Even the great evangelist Billy Graham has made the analogy between conversion to Jesus and drug use. Taking the stage at the request of rock concert promoters in the late 1960s, he encouraged young people coming to hear the Grateful Dead and Santana to “get high without hang-ups and hangovers” … on Jesus.[iii] Graham used to quote the testimony of pop star Cliff Richards in interviews saying, “When I accepted Christ as my Lord and Savior … this was 10,000 times more of a turned-on experience than any trip I took on LSD.”[iv]
It is also important to remember that God is not offended by our play! It is not blasphemous to enjoy God or crave Him for a fix. He is waiting for a people who are willing to come closer and play with Him more dangerously. Enjoying God in this way is the furthest thing from irreverence. It is time to show some irreverence toward those religious devils that prevent the people from drinking the Living Bliss of Christ. It is actually the “criticism” of such holy enjoyment that borders closest to blasphemy.
Next week we will share some radical testimonies from folks who learned to Toke the Ghost!
[i] John G. Lake: His Life, His Sermons, His Boldness of Faith (Fort Worth: Kenneth Copeland Publications, 1994), p. 505.
[ii] Robert Wilken and Richard Norris, ed., The Church’s Bible: The Song of Songs Interpreted by Early Christian and Medieval Commentators (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003), p. 190.
[iii] Chris Armstrong, “Christian History Corner: ‘Tell Billy Graham the Jesus People love him.’” Christianity Today (Vol. 46, Dec. 2002).
[iv] The Woody Allen Show (Interview of Rev. Billy Graham by Woody Allen, Sept. 21, 1969).
Supernatural pleasure, inner raptures, ecstasies, trances and visionary encounters are our Biblical inheritance as believers. Sadly, the church culture of today has become far removed from true, joyful experiential Christianity. Instead, it has morphed into a mere classroom on ethics, while losing the true core of spirituality and encounter that are freely available to all believers who choose to access the open Heavens of the cross. The great revivalist John G. Lake explained it this way, when discussing trances:
“Now what is a trance? A trance is the Spirit taking predominance over the mind and body, and for the time being the control of the individual is by the Spirit; but our ignorance of the operations of God is such that even ministers of religion have been known to say it is the devil.”[i]
We are tired of seeing the church forfeit over inner trance experiences to drug culture, new age and the occult, which can only offer counterfeits at best and demonic counterparts at worst. As believers, we should be the most intoxicated people on the planet – blissed out on the God of ecstasy who has rivers of pleasure flowing at His right hand! We were never created for a dry, boring, sober religious existence. True spiritual “sobriety,” of which the apostle Paul speaks, is coming into a vivid awareness of the unseen realm of Heaven. In Acts 2 and elsewhere in the scriptures, this “spiritual sobriety” looked like complete drunkenness to the natural eye. The new wine of God’s Spirit is the daily fare of the believer. The church started in the heavy drunken Glory on Pentecost, and we are moving from Glory to Glory. God would never give us a lesser experience for a greater one. What the apostles tasted in part, we will overdose on in full!
Drink Your Fill
There is a supernatural bliss the world longs to see demonstrated in the people of God. To live by the rules and regulations of naturalistic religion, without encountering the Spirit of God Himself, is to already be drunk on the ways of the world.
The scriptures have long commended us to be inebriated without limit on God, as we are told to “… drink your fill, O lovers.” (Song Sol. 5:1). How thirsty are you? Theodoret of Cyrus, in the fifth century, comments on this single verse saying:
“He commands these persons not merely to drink, but to be drunken; for there is a drunkenness that works temperance and not delirium – one that does not enfeeble the limbs but lends them strength.” [ii]
We want to be those who partner with Heaven to see a redemption and restoration of true supernatural, mystical experience by finding our intoxication in the Holy Ghost! God will never put a limit on your joy levels. It will take all of eternity to explore the depths of God’s gladness.
Taking it to the Street
When I go out for evangelism these days, I rarely ever start with the “four spiritual laws” or try to convince people they are sinners. I say this not to criticize anyone else’s evangelism method. If it bears fruit for you, go for it. But most people already know they are sinners. Very often, I just ask them if they want to get high! And more often than not, they do. Use bait for fish, not repellant.
Presence evangelism is the most effective mode of making true converts, because people are not simply making intellectual decisions based on points of doctrine. Instead, they are truly encountering the Lord of Glory through a tangible experience, and the explanation follows. Yes – of course we must give a rational exposition of the gospel. But without tangible demonstration, the gospel will be all talk and no show. Everybody is looking for interior fulfillment at a heart level, and we are carriers of that to a broken world. We pray, and people get rocked. They feel. They taste. They see.
It is amazing how drug culture and all manner of sedation are so prevalent in our society today. At best, everyone is addicted to television, food and materialism. But more common than you realize, even in the church today, people are addicted to worse mind-altering substances from Prozac, Xanex and alcohol to marijuana or hard street and party drugs. I cannot begin to count how many people we have seen set free when the liberating pleasures of the Holy Spirit are released. The anointing breaks the yoke (Isa. 10:27). How many thousands have we seen get rocked, who once suffered from depression that also led to physical ailments such as chronic fatigue, chronic pain and fibromyalgia? All because the joy of Jesus broke a spirit of heaviness from their lives!
Man is designed to live in an alternate state of reality. You were made to walk in the Spirit. If someone is not plugged into the ecstasies of Jesus, they are naturally going to look for their fix in a perverted form. Although the source of our intoxication is two worlds apart, secular people at least understand the principle of intoxication. There is an issue of relevance and reality here. Although religious spirits hate it, I have no problem drawing parallels between the ecstasies of God and a drug induced state of consciousness. The latter is only a counterfeit of the former. My goal is to bring the spiritual principles to street level language, where people need the revelation. Most non-believers think God wants to take away their fun. I encourage them to “Toke the Ghost” or take a trip with psychedelic Jesus. Not by using drugs of course, but by imbibing on the Spirit of God.
A Personal Testimony
Drug-induced trances are only shallow, deadly substitutes for Holy Spirit trances. We can convince people that they don’t need drugs by getting them high on the Most High. Then, and only then, freedom and deliverance are simple, if not instant. The best way to convince them is to give them a taste of what they are missing out on! This is the “one-step program” for deliverance.
I am living proof of this principle. I received an instant deliverance from drugs as a teenager, and I was the worst substance abuser of all my friends. The thing that finally broke my addiction was getting whacked by the thrilling pleasure of the infilling of the Holy Spirit! How could I ever choose a lesser substance after tasting Divine Bliss? Most of the strongest drug addicts consequently have the strongest call to raptures and the seer realm. Consider how every class of drug specifically imitates something produced in rapture. Sedatives only counterfeit the deep, supernatural peace of God. Stimulants, or uppers, only imitate the power and stamina of the breaker anointing when the Spirit of Might comes upon you. Hallucinogens only simulate the visionary realm. It is completely normal that people would want to experience peace, power and see things! These are God-given desires, but we should fulfill those desires in Him, rather than substances. Bono, from the rock band U2, makes a great point when he sings: there’s nothing better than the real thing!
We have taken it as a sort of personal mandate to influence the church toward the ecstasies and living a lifestyle of spiritual drinking. This is because the new wine all has to do with intimacy, and love is the highest way. God wants junkies, and I have resolved to be a Holy Ghost pusher. Pharisees often get offended when I talk about smoking “Jehovah-wanna,” popping a “taste and see pill” or drinking “Godka.” Of course we never have nor ever would encourage the partaking of drugs. But we strongly encourage the partaking of God! Hearing these sorts of analogies is like sweet water to the thirsty soul who was born to live an intoxicated lifestyle. I don’t give a rip about dancing a jig for a self-satisfied amen corner. Life is too short to try to force-feed a fat, religious cow. There are too many hungry, desperate people out there who are ready and willing to embrace a God who is tangible, loving, joyful and full of mystical surprises and intoxicating delight. This revelation of first-love intoxication drives young people through the roof. They know that this is what they were made for: to live more whacked than their friends who are on drugs.
The truth is that we are not really comparing God to drug use. The world has already done that! The very existence of a drug culture shows that the comparison has already been made. You do not need to inhale marijuana when you can inhale the ruah – the very life-breath of God’s Spirit! We are simply reversing idea that substances (or anything the world offers) can fill a void of pleasure and experience reserved for God alone.
Shock language
Imbibing on the pleasures of God is the most critical, key component for the preservation of society. Finding God as our holy “addiction” goes much further than a tactic for ministering to drug users. We must all learn to love God at the deepest, most compulsive levels of our existence. All of mankind is called to find its identity as lovers of God.
The essence of true love goes far beyond our works or service. True love must find pleasure in the object of its affection. While Christianity is full of cliché terminology to describe love, joy, worship, adoration and the like, it is sometimes more effective to use shock language and wild demonstration to convey how extreme is the joyful possession He offers us!
We have many pastors ask us to “tone down” the vernacular when paralleling God encounters with drugs. But by the grace of God I will not tone down an ounce of what He is doing until the day I die. Jesus never toned it down, and he never held anything back. One of the very reasons we use this type of language is to dismantle the very religious strongholds that keep people from “going too far” in the Spirit. Heaven is all about a great party. Even the great evangelist Billy Graham has made the analogy between conversion to Jesus and drug use. Taking the stage at the request of rock concert promoters in the late 1960s, he encouraged young people coming to hear the Grateful Dead and Santana to “get high without hang-ups and hangovers” … on Jesus.[iii] Graham used to quote the testimony of pop star Cliff Richards in interviews saying, “When I accepted Christ as my Lord and Savior … this was 10,000 times more of a turned-on experience than any trip I took on LSD.”[iv]
It is also important to remember that God is not offended by our play! It is not blasphemous to enjoy God or crave Him for a fix. He is waiting for a people who are willing to come closer and play with Him more dangerously. Enjoying God in this way is the furthest thing from irreverence. It is time to show some irreverence toward those religious devils that prevent the people from drinking the Living Bliss of Christ. It is actually the “criticism” of such holy enjoyment that borders closest to blasphemy.
Next week we will share some radical testimonies from folks who learned to Toke the Ghost!
[i] John G. Lake: His Life, His Sermons, His Boldness of Faith (Fort Worth: Kenneth Copeland Publications, 1994), p. 505.
[ii] Robert Wilken and Richard Norris, ed., The Church’s Bible: The Song of Songs Interpreted by Early Christian and Medieval Commentators (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003), p. 190.
[iii] Chris Armstrong, “Christian History Corner: ‘Tell Billy Graham the Jesus People love him.’” Christianity Today (Vol. 46, Dec. 2002).
[iv] The Woody Allen Show (Interview of Rev. Billy Graham by Woody Allen, Sept. 21, 1969).
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