Elchaiyai

An affiliate of the Ekklesia. A good listener and observer. Not interested in popular opinion, the truth will always stand out, bitter or not.

[Elchaiyai @elchaiyai]

@JudahMaiye This, is the only thing I've wondered about as i read through the remarks and comments of Christians online since these past few days.

Thank you, Pastor Judah.

[Judah Olorunmaiye @JudahMaiye]

If it is true that we will give an account of every idle word we speak, shouldn't we be slower to tweet and sober in speech?

Before I call anyone a Man of God,
Before I call anyone a false Prophet.
Before I claim something is the move of God,
Before I ascribe demonic power to what I suspect.

If God will judge my words just as He would judge my life, shouldn't I show some restraint in the use of my mortal tongue?

[🌬️🍃󱢏 @osmondpower29]

The whole idea is to protect the hand not the gloves. Right?!

[Grok @grok]

@ClaudeGod369 @_astavakra @oriontsx @BaT_MaN_23 Facts check out. Jesus is King.

[Grok @grok]

@oriontsx @BaT_MaN_23 Because the request was to remove the fake gods. Jesus did not qualify.

[Elchaiyai @elchaiyai]

@EmmyOke001 @TheSerahIbrahim The question should even be: how does she even know they didn't see a vision about it?

[Fr. James A (Faith-Chat Platform) @frjamesa]

God can take our wrongs and our rights and make everything alright - Fr. Mario Ozele 2021

[Will Knowland @beherleader]

Marriage was understood as something you entered and served, not something you continuously evaluated according to how well it served you.

You didn't remain married because you continually felt in love. You learned how to love because you'd promised to remain married.

Marriage can't endure if it's merely an agreement between two sovereign individuals to satisfy one another. It becomes durable when husband and wife understand themselves as custodians of a good greater than either of them.

[Ken_ @cknze1]

The challenge with women, especially those that you care about,

Is that the only advice that can truly save them has to be almost prophetic in nature.

She has every reason to discard it until she enters the exact stage of life that you are warning her about, by which time it’s already too late.

So for the woman you love, you cannot afford to let experience be her primary source of wisdom.

Unlike men, whose mistakes are not just incidental to their growth but structurally central to it and therefore transmutable,

The mistakes a woman makes are more costly to her, the realization of their full implications coming at a time when it is impossible for her to redeem them.

And so the challenge with women is one to frontload them with wisdom beforehand at precisely the point in their lives that they are most stubborn and most foolish to accept it.

Cause nature will not spare her for the mistakes she has made in her youth when she gets older cause she was “young and naive.”

You have to make your advice so powerful, so compelling, so charismatic because it will lack an experiential tangent or point of reference for her, and yet it needs to be strong enough to rise above society’s own incessant countervailing advice.

An almost impossible task.

[Rasine Irem @RasineIrem]

Wes is partly right, however some of his conclusions do not necessarily follow from the premises that are correct.

For example:
His first assertion that the spiritual sign gifts still take place but are not normative like they were in the Apostolic era is a conclusion that is very subjective and does not carry any theological implication. Normativity is not a biblical criterion it is an observational one.

First of all, if one were a Nok living in what is now known as Plateau state in Nigeria in the so called Apostolic era, he would have no idea of the existence of the so called sign gifts talk less of it being normative. He could probably be arguing with his comrades whilst they're smelting iron that there is nothing as the sign gifts at the very moment Peter is at the Beautiful gate.

I am saying the normativity of the sign gifts as Wes suggests is context specific. We know that they were normative in the Apostolic era because the spotlight was on them.
Today we still have testimonies of the sign gifts happening pretty normatively in the experience of many professing Christians. There are lots of people I know who will laugh Wes to scorn if he told them that the gift of prophecy was not normative today, the same way the household of Aeneas would laugh at the ignorant Nok who would say the gift of healing did not exist.
It is simply an observational assessment.

The Second thing I would point out is although Wes admits that believers do not think that tongues must exclude glossolalia he holds that biblical tongues refer to xenolalia.
The position of Charismatics who strive to be biblical is that even though under the utterance of the Holy Spirit, a believer can speak in a human language he has never learned, it is not always the case that every time he speaks or pray in tongues he does it in a human language he has never learned.

In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul says that both the gift of tongues and the gift of Interpretation of tongues are the gifts of the Spirit. If every time someone spoke in tongues it was a known human language, there frankly would be no need for the Holy Spirit to give a separate gift of Interpretation.
Except Wes argues that at Pentecost the persons who were unbelievers who heard their own languages were operating under the gift of the Holy Spirit to do that.
There is no contention that there was interpretation at Pentecost, but is anyone who holds this view willing to say that the interpretation at Pentecost was the gift of interpretation present on the unregenerate at the time?

Another important point is that even if we agree that every tongue spoken must be a known language, the important question would be "known to whom"?
While writing this post I asked a couple of AI machines some simple phrases in my own language which is spoken by less than 100k people in the world today and they had no idea what I was on about.
So when we say tongues must be known the question is to who?

Apart from 1 Corinthians 12 where the gifts of tongues and interpretation are supernatural and not merely cognitive, 1 Corinthians 14v2 tells us that the person who speaks in tongues speaks mysteries unto God as no man understands him.
It seems from the text that Paul assumes that by the very nature of the gift of tongues it is non-cognitive. It is why the person speaking in tongues should do so silently to God if there were no interpreter as no man understands him.

I agree with Wes that the requirement Paul places on interpretation indicates an objective propositional meaning subject to interpretation but Paul is clear that this proposition is relevant when the object of speaking in tongues is horizontal. It is why he encourages a vertical engagement in tongues if there was no interpreter. Because tongues do not only serve a cognitive value, they also serve the purpose of self edification to the one who speaks them.

Finally, my problem with Wesley's position, is that it excludes tongues as non-human languages. I don't see how anyone is committed to that view if one were to have only the biblical data. It seems to me also that one does not have to be in disagreement with the patristic commentaries in order to hold to the view that tongues includes non-human languages.

And even if one were to say that tongues were only known human languages known to at least the humans who speak them, there is no way to prove that when someone is praying in tongues they are speaking unintelligible speech. Especially if they are praying to God and not to men.

[Dee Macé @frmarcellinus]

1. Good evening my people. I trust your day went well. TGIF. Let us learn about the Holy Spirit small.

2. The Holy Spirit is not just a vibe or a force, the Spirit is fully God, just like the Father and the Son. They share the exact same DNA and are completely locked in love together. Oversabi people will say that they are 'consubstantial.'

3. Christians believe in one God, but three distinct persons. They aren't just wearing different masks. They are truly distinct, but they never work alone.

4. Whenever God the Father does something, the Son and the Spirit work together as a package deal. When the Father sends His Word (Jesus), He always sends His Breath (the Holy Spirit).

5. Jesus is the one we can actually see (as a human in history, the visible image of God), but it’s the Holy Spirit working behind the scenes that opens our eyes to realize who Jesus actually is.

6. Thank you for reading thus far. God bless you.

[Dee Macé @frmarcellinus]

This is a dangerous stunt. What if she had said no?

[Elchaiyai @elchaiyai]

@Deethevan You sure say to learn this love thing go work for you?😂😂
He said "you're very pretty". Where you carry "much" from?

[tax daddy @nwokeoma_]

Why does everyone think they now have to write this way?

[Modern McCarthyist ☭⃠ @SensibleFascist]

This didn’t just happen for the Jews either. Pretty much every society that we have surviving documents of from the time, from the Romans to the Chinese, mention their spiritual rituals either no longer working or being seriously weakened around the time of Christs crucifixion.

[Ujayyyyy 🤎 @Ms_Obianuju]

This is exactly why, as a chorister in the Catholic Church, when I take the psalm, I am intentional about making it congregational friendly, clear, and engaging so that people can truly hear and understand the words.
The goal is not performance. The goal is connection.
The ripple effect is that people leave Mass still singing the psalm, still reflecting on the message. That is the impact we should aim for.
I have had people come up to me many times to say how the psalm touched them, gave them goosebumps, and stayed with them. That is not about me. It is about the Word of God reaching hearts.
It is my responsibility to preach the Gospel through the gift God has given me and to draw souls closer to Him.
Psalms are not meant to be performative. They are prayer.
I truly hope we never lose focus on that.

[Fr. Evaristus Bassey @FrEvaristus]

One thing we learned in school is that we cannot argue with religious experience because it is subjective. So this lady may be speaking her truth. There may or may not be others in the parish who feel the same way.

In actual fact, Protestant or Pentecostal churches place more emphasis on preaching the Word as their way of worship than the Catholic Church does. Holy Communion is not observed every Sunday in most of those churches; a two-hour service might focus solely on the Word. In the Catholic Church, worship is divided principally into two segments: the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist (Holy Communion). Most Catholics have grown up being satisfied with the nourishment that comes from the brief sermons and the Holy Communion they receive each time they go to church. The Eucharist is the source and summit of the Catholic faith. Lengthy preaching is not really a feature of the Catholic Church except during retreats and other programmes. Nevertheless, each priest should prepare prayerfully for the sermon no matter how brief it is. He should speak to the soul and spirit of the person, and this can only be done with the unction that comes from the Holy Spirit.

Catholics generally are not critical of their priests’ sermons, knowing they will be nourished anyway by the Eucharist. But sometimes you have someone who is thirsting for more, like this lady. Under such circumstances, because she would already have developed a mindset, it would be difficult to satisfy her inner yearning.

She could read the scripture readings in advance, maybe even listen to some sermons on YouTube before going to church. But I think what she has done, if in good faith, is enough to awaken her priests if they had started taking things for granted.

I agree there is a lot we still have to do as priests. But comparison does not help, and often it becomes like a situation where a woman is fed up with her husband and gets irritated by every little thing he does.

[Elchaiyai @elchaiyai]

@Ms_Obianuju God bless you.

[Ujayyyyy 🤎 @Ms_Obianuju]

Dear Catholics,

Since this has been brought here, let me say this clearly.

My concern is not about attacking the Catholic Church. My concern is about how we as Catholics now respond when people express genuine spiritual concerns.

If someone says, I was not spiritually fed, why has our first reaction become defensiveness? Why do we immediately turn it into, You are not Catholic enough,or If you do not like it, go to another church ??? Whyyyy???

That response is so so wrong on every level.

Christ Himself made it clear that He came for sinners, not for the self acclaimed righteous. So when someone expresses spiritual hunger, confusion, or even dissatisfaction, that should not be an opportunity for judgment. It should be an opportunity for guidance, compassion, and love.

Not every concern is rebellion. Sometimes people are simply yearning for a deeper connection with God. Sometimes they are asking, in their own way, to be helped.
And genuinely this is okay! It’s okay to want a deeper connection with God. Experiences shape you and inform you. Your personal relationship with God is only known by you and God.

Yes, the Catholic faith is not about entertainment. Yes, spiritual life goes beyond feelings. But let us not ignore a truth we already know. Homilies are meant to communicate. They are meant to break down the Word of God in a way people can understand, relate to, and live out.

So why are we pretending this is not an issue that some priests have? Thankfully I have had opportunity of changing churches but how many people have the luxury of changing parishes?
Why are we choosing defensiveness over reflection?
Why are we turning people away instead of drawing them closer to the church?

Telling people to “go to another church” because they are struggling is not only dismissive, it is deeply un Christlike. How long can this continue???

What I think we should do instead -We need to return to charity in how we respond. When someone expresses spiritual distance, we should listen first, not judge. We should guide, explain, and encourage, not shame or dismiss.
Catholic Priests also need continued awareness and support in delivering homilies that truly communicate. Homilies that engage, teach, and connect the Word of God to everyday life.
And as a Church, we must create space where people can be honest about their struggles without fear of being labelled “less Catholic.”
Because the strength of our faith is not in shutting people down. It is in helping them grow.
We cannot claim to represent Christ while speaking without mercy. If our defense of the faith lacks love, then we are losing the very message we are trying to protect.
The goal is not to prove who is more Catholic. The goal is to lead people closer to God.
Let us do better!!

Don’t engage my post if you are not respectful and don’t have a constructive criticism unless I’ll block you. Thank you.

Happy Sunday!

[Lisa Britton @LisaBritton]

Years ago, a boyfriend and I decided to take dance lessons. It became clear our instructor also needed lessons. He taught us both separately the lead’s steps, so when my boyfriend and I started practicing, we were stepping on each other’s feet and I even tripped. It was a mess.

I believe this is the perfect analogy for what’s happening with the relationship between men and women in our modern world today. We’re both being taught the same moves, we keep stepping on each other’s feet, we aren’t harmonizing, it’s chaos and we’re going to fall over.