Before there were cellphones and before General Motors invented OnStar…

Before there was 24 hour convenience stores, gas stations, and late-night breakfast houses; there was always this scenario that was always dealt with in pentecostalism…

It is 9 PM at night….

Your car breaks down….

All of the department stores, gas stations, and mom-and-pop businesses are closed and not a convenience store in sight…

You start walking to find the nearest payphone to call someone to pick you up and/or a tow-truck to carry your broken-down car to your mechanic. People drive by and no one stops to offer you a ride. No police officers in sight to waive down for assistance. Not a single one of your many ‘friends’ just happen to drive by by circumstance…

The first sign of an open establishment is……

A bar; a nightclub; a pool hall; a honky-tonk
(and to the ultra hard-liners, a pizza joint, a bowling alley, a roller rink)

You begin to think that there is a payphone either in the parking lot or inside the building. You have been walking for quite some time and you are starting to get tired and need to sit down and rest.

From the edge of the street, you look around the parking lot of that bar, nightclub, pool hall, etc. and you do not obviously see a pay phone. Your feet and legs are now more tired and achy and now that ‘life-altering’ decision must be made….

Do I go in that bar, nightclub, pool hall, etc. and explain my circumstances to an employee and ask them where the payphone is or do I walk past that bar and as soon as I have passed the property line of the bar, sit down on the ground long enough to rest my now achy legs and feet in order to keep walking and either find a payphone, a convenience store, or eventually make it home?

Yes ladies and gentlemen, that particular potential situation was always addressed at least annually by the pentecostal church I attended. As usual, the answer was always:

Keep walking!!! You will either make it home safely, find a payphone outside a local business, or a friend will always drive by.

always followed by…

Going into that bar for any reason is feeding the flesh and opens you up to succumb to the temptations of alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, or sleazy sexual one night stands!!!

Going into that bar to use that payphone will affect your witness

Going into that bar to use that payphone will hold back revival and the last-days end-time harvest

Going into that bar to use that payphone will make you a hypocrite to the sinner you are witnessing to at work

Going into that bar to use that payphone will cause demons to ‘latch’ on to you

Going into that bar to use that payphone will alter your salvation and life destiny and God can not effectively ‘use’ you for His service until you repent

“Real” Christians do not go to bars under any circumstance

Going into that bar because your legs are tired is “yielding to the flesh’. Man up because no pain in the physical is no gain in the Spiritual

However, walking past the bar is “Spirit”; overcoming temptation, giving the ole devil (debble or deb-bull) a black eye, and you will receive your blessing and jewel in your heavenly crown for doing so.

And it was that quest for the blessing and the jewel in your heavenly crown like that prominent family I talked about in a previous article that was driving us combined with the unhealthy fear that going into that bar just to use a pay-phone would either send us to hell, open the door for bad things to happen, or become the “Moses Moment” that would affect our eternal destiny and our ability to not receive the ‘promised land’….

But where would this crap stop… The word of faithers took it one step further to wonder why the car broke down to begin with because to them, consumer goods do not break down unless you have secret sins, lacking faith, disagreeing with a pastor, or ‘touch not mine anointed’ televangelist. It didn’t matter that the car was eight years old with 100,000 miles on the original parts. Something happened which either ‘unprotected your car and opened the devil to do stuff’ or ‘it was God showing you who was the boss’.

So if this was really true, does this mean that God would block the knowledge of the mechanic from fixing the car (I can’t remember what causes your problem) until you repented thereby ‘freeing up’ the mechanic to (‘now I remember what causes this problem’) activate his knowledge skill sets and fix the car? (but if it was a leader’s car, then it was every demonic hoarde of hell attacked that car…)

Evidentially, they believe it is true because if that car hadn’t broke down, you would have been focused on going home to the point where you would have quickly drove past that bar and not even consider going inside because the temptation would have automatically been non-existent. But secretly sinning opened the temptation to go into the bar….

Holy Hogwash!!!

And that was where the point was missed. It was not whether you were at the bar or not, it is what did you do while inside that bar? Coming out of that bar made you guilty by association, guilty until proven innocent (and non-Christian testimonies were always called ‘lies’), or guilty no matter what of ’sin’ to suffer the life-punishment of Moses, to suffer the family-feud like David, to raised undisciplined children like Eli, to fall into sexual sin like Samson by meeting Delilah the bar-hopper…

What you did or did not do while inside the bar was the real test that needed to be passed not to receive an extra ‘mega-blessing’ but to simply obey and not micro manage a macro God.