Rock Solid Living in A Quicksand World - Rewind: Stepping Stones for Victorious Christ-Centered Living

By Alfred McGowen

Rock-Solid Living in a Quicksand World is an extremely critical conversation Jesus is having with twenty-first century nations and people regarding the importance of looking back in order to actually have a future. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, we hear Him teaching us to look backward in Matthew's Gospel (chapters 7 through 5,) and He says, "Embrace these teachings of mine, and actually live by them. Then, when the CAT-5 hurricanes of life pummel you, you will bear up under them! Choose otherwise, and you will collapse in a melodramatic way!" The USA and Western culture are on the path of Rome and Greece. Our foundations are crumbling in much the same way the foundations of these ancient superpowers turned to dust and ruin. These once-great historical titans now stand as crumbling ruins, viewed by today's tourists. They are seen as once great mighty nations that once were but never more shall be. Likewise, our foundations are turning into quicksand. Within the pages of this book, Jesus is calling us back to his teachings, which served us so well. Yes, it is in these teachings that we find personal, national, and cultural salvation and hope for a future. Here in his teachings, we will find the rock-solid foundation for our ever-increasingly crumbling quicksand world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781641409766

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Rock Solid Living in A Quicksand World - Rewind

Alfred McGowen

Copyright © 2018 Alfred McGowen

All rights reserved

First Edition

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc

Meadville, PA

First originally published by Christian Faith Publishing, Inc 2018

ISBN 978-1-64140-975-9 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64140-995-7 (Hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-64140-976-6 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Why I Wrote This Book

Rock-Solid Living in a Quicksand World is an urgent request : People of God, and anyone who will listen, look back so we can have a future! We desperately need to examine our personal, cultural, and national critical underpinnings. We need to look back to have a future: Abraham Lincoln was correct when he said, The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next. The fulfillment of his unintentional prophecy has led us to a place where our foundations are crumbling in much the same way as the foundations of Greece and Rome were decimated. They disintegrated from within. Now these once great superpowers are merely crumbling ruins that tourists view today as what was but never more will be.

Likewise, the foundations of individuals, families, and our Western nations are turning into quicksand. Murder is a pandemic in our city streets. One shooter just injured well over five hundred people and killed almost sixty in nine minutes in Las Vegas, Nevada. Almost fifty-nine million babies’ lives have been taken. An inordinate number of them were murdered just seconds before they were to be born via partial birth abortion." Sexually transmitted diseases are occurring in epidemic proportions. Thirty percent of all little girls reportedly are molested before they are adults, as are a significant number of male children. What is wrong is considered right, and what is right is considered wrong.

This book is an appeal: Please consider Jesus and His teachings, which reveal the way back to a place of foundational salvation and hope. Please, people! Recognize that the storm clouds of judgment are forming, and they can topple your life, the United States of America, other Western cultures, and every other individual person living within each nation’s boundaries; meanwhile, Jesus is vigorously reaching out to us through twenty-one centuries, offering us the answers to our modern devolution.

This book expresses a longing: People of faith (or people who have no faith), please consider where our governmental, political, medical, educational, and ecclesiastical leaders are taking us! Please stop following the George Soros–type people of the world who are paying protagonists millions of dollars to protest, burn, riot, pillage, resist, and fundamentally transform our culture. They are actually deforming our culture. I cry out on behalf of We the people to our politicians and religious leaders alike. I am asking you to seriously consider where your actions are taking us!

This book is an invitation: Please accept my invitation to take a journey backward through the Sermon on the Mount, as you move toward a break through journey and future with Jesus. Please travel with me through this book so you can get a solid foothold on the rock-solid path that once led us to be endowed by our Creator with those unalienable rights—rights that cannot be removed.

Finally, if I were to put this in a nutshell, Rock-Solid Living in a Quicksand World – Rewind is a call. Please listen! I really do want to help you experience wholeness, holiness, and a hope for a much brighter day every day of your life. Or, to say this another way, this book is a call to make a choice for life, not only for yourself, but also for the children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren. Yes, it’s a call to give the present and future generations the ability to choose life individually, collectively, and eternally; therefore, in obedience to Jesus, I am sharing the teachings of our Lord, from the back to the front, to those who have ears to hear whatever Jesus teaches us. I am sharing this so that he will give us a rock-solid foundation that will sustain us, even unto the end of the age.

Acknowedgment

This book is dedicated to the glory of the true and living God. It is written for the glory of the

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who imparts His wonderful life transformational grace to all those who would bow their knees and confess from their hearts that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father. It is further dedicated to the love of my life, Vicki Jinks McGowen, who has been and still is walking with me through the ups and downs of our journey together—for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. It makes little difference if we lived in a shack, in interesting military housing in San Vito, Italy, or our present-day home. She has always been here with me and for me even to this very day. Thank you, Vicki, for walking with me through these many years of rock-solid living in this quicksand world. Thank you for learning with me that life is an adventure. Finally, it is dedicated to all the women and men who suffered trauma, especially those who were traumatized in childhood, and then were retraumatized while serving in the US military and are finding their solid path to life through faith in Jesus who was himself severely traumatized.

Chapter 1

Looking Back to See the Way Forward

Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.

—Jesus (Matthew 7:24–27)

Storms

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Storms seem to come into everyone’s life. The winds of adversity howl like a category-five hurricane! Day in and day out, many poor souls are pounded by the challenges they face. Every day it seems that this beating will never end, and some have experienced this for years. Perhaps they have been soaked by the deluge of abuse or trauma. The toxicity of their homes flooded over them every day of their growing-up years, and they were in danger of sinking in the quicksand of their lives. Some people miraculously have a foundation that keeps them living in a rock-solid footing despite the past or present storms; however, others have only a sandy foundation that brings them to a state of collapse.

For decades, I have served as a medic and an enlisted man in the United States Air Force (USAF), then as a pastor, and later a senior pastor. In time, I served as a military chaplain and a VA mental health chaplain. I have weathered many storms myself; yet, I have served people who have really suffered—people who have been abused in many ways. These young men and young women have experienced some of the most heinous, ugly crimes imaginable by people who should have loved them. Abandonment has permeated our society then as it does now. All too many dads simply were and are unavailable to their children. Verbal abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, passive abuse, and even spiritual abuse plagued virtually every person who came to see me. Their lives seemed to be on a quicksand foundation. Key people had sinned against them.

Elder abuse is also a reality: Like all other forms of abuse at other age levels, it can be spiritual, emotional, relational, financial and or physical. One of the most malevolent forms of elder abuse is manifest in what is now being called Grandparents Alienation Syndrome. This is abusive to both the grandparents and grandchildren. This is a form of abuse where one of the parents of the grandchildren so dominates the other parent that she or he eventually completes a form of brain washing of her or his spouse. Though he once thought of parents respectfully and adoringly, this parent now views them in some very negative ways. Time does not permit all the details of how this occurs; however, the end result is that the grandparents have their beloved grandchildren ripped from their hearts and lives. They are forbidden to ever see the grandchildren. Neither are they allowed to send them cards, letters, emails nor any gifts. Grandparents are blocked by the dominant parent on Facebook and other social media, and the dominant spouse even gets the entire family, on her side of the family, to block these former friends as well. This is devastating to both grandchildren and grandparents until the child’s mind is sufficiently programmed against the grandparents. For further detailed information, google Alienated Grandparents Anonymous. This is an international group with support groups in all fifty states and numerous other countries.

Others have not suffered in the ways I have mentioned, but each person still faces life’s challenges: spiritual challenges, emotional challenges, relational challenges, financial challenges, physical challenges, and especially cultural challenges. Each trial begins as a gentle breeze that sometimes erupts into an overwhelming tornado.

Amid these hardships, there are those who are fundamentally changing the foundations that once served us well. They are setting us up culturally and individually for a crash that will surely come if we do not get our footing upon the Rock. Will we choose to stand on the Rock, or will we choose another way? Will we choose life? Or will we choose destruction?

A Journey Backward

In this book, we are going to look at how Jesus’s teachings have transformed lives—and how they can do so today. We are going to see how He gives us the tools to put our lives on a solid foundation instead of a foundation of quicksand. No matter what has happened to us, we are going to examine the skills—presented by the Son of God Himself—that make such solid living possible. And we are going to approach this by going backward through the Holy Scriptures.

Please let me explain. Most people, when they look at the ancient wisdom in the Bible, start at the beginning of a passage and read through to the end; however, one day when I was reflecting on Matthew 7:24–28, it came to me that Jesus was looking backward through what we call the Sermon on the Mount. For example, a brief look backward from His teaching demonstrates that Jesus wants us to go outside the storm-battered house, which represents each of our lives, into the yard to look at the trees and assess the fruit that they bear (see Matthew 7:15). He’s talking about leaders here, and He gives rock-solid guidance on how to choose leaders if we want to truly live. He then takes us farther into the yard, past the trees, to look at a wall that has two gates. Choosing the correct gate will add a stepping-stone on the path of rock-solid living. Choosing the wrong gate only leads to sand traps and quicksand. As we continue the journey backward through this wonderful teaching, we will discover many stepping-stones, until we come to the end of our path together where we will find the stepping-stones to a life that is blessed both here and in eternity.

To Hear or Not to Hear? That Is the Question

Hearing and applying what is heard seems to be extremely important to Jesus. So, it should be important to us too if we are going to experience rock-solid living in this quicksand world. Whether or not we are victorious and overcome, our wounds, injuries, abuse, trauma, or sin are related to how we hear Jesus. This concept is so important that Jesus taught a parable about it, and then He explained the parable in great detail to be sure we would get it. How we hear Jesus will greatly impact whether or not we will put into practice what we hear.

Four Ways to Hear… or Not

(Based on Matthew 13:1–9, 18–23)

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Back in the days when Jesus was teaching among humanity, He made it clear that He wanted rock-solid living to be a part of daily living. He also wanted you and me to experience this kind of living in the twenty-first century. Folks back then were not very different from us, and He knew that. Even though He was teaching some powerful stuff, people had to have ears to hear what He was saying; therefore, He pointed out four kinds of people who would encounter His kingdom’s teaching. Sadly, only one out of four would get it. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect the results are about the same today.

First group. I hope I am not speaking to you when I say that this group will miss the eternal lifeboat entirely. Why? Because people in this group let the devil into the details, literally. In this passage, God speaks loud and clear, and the physical ears are working just fine. The hearers simply don’t understand. They are not listening. They let the Word of God evaporate in their hearing. Each has eyes but does not see. Each has ears but does not hear. Each has a heart, but the heart is simply not receptive. I suspect this is largely because this person believes only what can be actually seen. Even though God has given us all what He calls the measure of faith, some misunderstand because they are trying to hear the supernatural with the natural. This gives the devil an open door to snatch the Word away—not a good thing. This person’s heart never gets it and has no time for such things. In this case, God’s rock-solid stepping-stones might seem like stumbling blocks.

Second group. The second group’s motto seems to be I can feel it. Don’t get me wrong, emotions are neither bad nor good. It’s what you do with them that matters. The big mistake people make is when they let their emotions be their guide. Emotions are not reality. They are simply feelings, and feelings (among other things) are based on thought. You can count on it: there is a thought that corresponds to every feeling and a feeling for every thought. Do a little stinking thinking, and you will do some stinking feeling as well.

The second group receives God’s Word, but these people seem to base their relationship with the Word on feeling good. The problem is that when believers are persecuted, and when they feel pain, a problem arises. Suffering is a fact of life for most people. When pain becomes a part of the mix, this kind of person simply lets it all go.

I once heard of a preacher who was asked to preach at a revival. He started out saying, Now that I’ve met Jesus, I don’t have any problems. That is not the truth, and he will know that when he gets hit with daily living. Problems are a fact of life. When I met Jesus, I wound up with a whole new batch of problems. What do