I would like to announce that I have finally begun to update my personal website, http://www.BroCope.com. For the present it will be the repository for my journals, links to newspaper coverage, editorials, radio/TV interviews, and YouTube postings. It is still in a birthing state, so any suggestions would be appreciated.

Over the Christmas break, I am hoping to download several thousand posts that I have made over the last couple of decades, and to begin to organize them on my website. Hopefully I will produce a book.

A couple of weeks ago, Gary and I were on a talk radio show on WPSU. They were so kind as to send me an MP3 copy of the show. I have uploaded it to my website. You can click here, and it will download. However, depending on your browser, it might not start playing right away. Be patient.    Radio Show

I received the following letter from a very old friend, someone who knew me back in the beginning days of my ministry.

If anyone would like to discuss things from my journals, please feel free to call me, after 6:00 pm (after preaching time that is). I am always available to those who are getting to know me after all these years. My cell number is at the bottom of the journal.

This week is the last week of classes at Penn State. Next week is finals, then the Christmas break. The preaching really wound down this week, but surprisingly, each day had a high point.

On Monday, just as I was packing it in after preaching to the trees for most of the day, a student came up to me very excited.

"I am so glad I ran into you! I have something strange going on that I don't understand. Can you help me?"

"Sure, what is going on?'

The student then laid out a scenario with which I am very familiar. He had just very recently made a commitment to the Lord, and suddenly bad emotional things began to attack him. He described it as an "attack", and did not know where they came from.

"I keep having these really wicked thoughts that just suddenly pop into my mind - things like killing my mother. Then I feel so condemned and cast down. I don't know what to do nor how to stop these thoughts."

I began to tell him about how the enemy attacks us. "The first thing that happens is we begin to feel a strange unfocused anxiety. That is followed very closely with a clouding of your mind with confusion".

"Yes, Yes", he said, that's exactly how it starts.

Then on the heels of that sense of dread comes a wicked thought or a particularly graphic temptation, followed by a wave of condemnation.

"That's it exactly. What is it?"

First off, the initial anxiety is called discerning of spirits. It is the Holy Spirit warning you of the beginning of a spiritual assault. It is like a klaxon horn warning you that the enemy is about to attack. It is God's early warning system. The first weapon against you is confusion to cloud of your thinking. The purpose is to catch you off guard and to disarm you from the weapons of warfare that you have at your disposal. A confused or fearful soldier becomes ineffective in combat.

After the confusion comes the lie to deceive you. The confusion is supposed to mask the lie, so you don't recognize it as a lie. It turns your attention away from the faith needed to overcome. The lie may vary, but in your case, the lie was that you are thinking grossly evil things against your mother. The next step in the assault is the condemnation, a deep wave of nauseating condemnation. As it continues, you are assaulted by guilt, by anger, and by accusation.

"Yes, that is what happened, but why?"

I continued. The enemy knows that he can not come between you and the Lord. But he also knows that the only chance he has to overcome you is to get YOU to turn aside from God. So, he tempts you with a wicked thought and follows it up with condemnation, trying to deceive you that you have sinned against God in a really wicked way, and then trying to convince you that you can not go back to God because of the vile nature of the thought.

The embedded lie is that by being tempted, you have sinned. Just being tempted is not a sin. Jesus was tempted in every way that we are, yet without sin. The second level assault is the condemnation. There is no condemnation for those in the Lord. If the Lord is trying to correct us, He doesn't do it through condemnation, He uses CONVICTION - an entirely different experience altogether.

The nature of the attack is to get you off kilter, and separate you from God. If you fall for it, you become weak and confused. You fail to call upon the Lord, and your situation can get worse. Satan is the accuser of the brethren. That is His main tactic, and you just got a taste of His expertise.

The defense against the attack is to learn to discern the attack even before it starts. Your spiritual anxiety is the alarm. If you can head it off there, the attacks will be blunted. If you can identify the confusion stage, you can realize that it is to keep you from immediately drawing on the Lord's resources. If you get to that point and the attack continues, the defense is to submit to God, resist the devil, and he will flee from you. If you are slow to respond, you may have to hunker down to resist the condemnation and the accusation. But in submiting to God and resisting the enem, you are gauranteed success, even if the attack spans several days or even months (see the book of Job).

The student was essentially insatiable. We continued to talk outside as the temperature plummeted. Finally, when my ears began to tingle, I suggested we go into the Willard Building. We found an unused classroom, and talked for about 2 more hours, covering dozens of topics. The main one was the subject of Holiness. When I explained the way of holiness to him, he embraced it. I have great hope for this young man. We both left excited and uplifted.

As Gary puts it, we were preaching to the bricks. At the end of the day, as I was leaving, a coed stopped to talk to me. It seems I called her the "Spawn of Satan" early in the fall. She is a Catholic who fell away over the issue of abortion. We debated for about an hour and a half on the issue, and I detected by her pauses that I was making strong points. But alas, no repentance. She finally had to leave. I prayed for her after she left. She has what seems like a very meek spirit, not like her feminists "sisters". But she has followed into the deep murderous lies of justifying abortion. I think that she had one while in high school, and is wrestling with her conscience. Please pray with me that if that is the case, that she will be given a revelation of God's mercy and that she would come to repentance and new life.

Again, the preaching was pretty sparse. However, at Penn State, when no one else will stop to listen, we can always trust the atheists to show up. They are amazing, really. The head of the group, Nat, has stopped attending classes but spends every day out at the preaching. He spends more time in "church" than a pastor! They are truly the most faithful listeners. And no matter how hard we hammer them, they talk to us as if we are their best friends. Most of the atheists have requested to be friends on my FaceBook account (Bro Cope). I know that when and if they get saved, they are going to be great preachers, reaping many times back what they have sown.

Last night, as I meditated, the Lord began to expose the life of an atheist. I was inspired to lay into them. Let me try to recreate the exchange. Some things below may be enhanced by my memory. I am shooting for the gist of it.

Consider the poor atheists. Poor atheists. Poor poor atheists. What a worthless life they lead. How utterly useless their lives are. Imagine spending your life fighting against something you say does not exist. Every day fighting against a nonexistent foe. Hoe pathetic. They are like Don Quixote, tilting at windmills, are they not? Fighting vapors and ghosts, an enemy that does not exist. Such poor deluded atheists. To spend your life on a cause that does not exist?

By this time I had their attention and they came rolling down the steps like tumbleweeds on a windy day.

"We don't fight against God, but against those who believe in God!"

Aha! Again consider the worthlessness of the atheist's life. He spends his life playing the thought police, the belief Czar. Now they not only are fighting against something that does not exist, but they have obviously determined that it is their right to decide what all people can believe. How wasted an existence to be a thought Nazi. It is a wonder that atheists aren't dropping out of high rise apartment buildings like huge pink hailstones. Even Don Quixote, tilting against imaginary enemies thought that the enemies existed. But again, the atheist doesn't believe God exists, so therefore they are forced to be every man's enemy by fighting against what we think.

"No, no, no! We fight against what the people who believe in God do!"

Oh, that surely makes the pathetic atheist less pathetic. Let us determine what it is that the believers do that is so morally repugnant that they need thought police to keep them in line. Let's see now, let's start from the end. The damnable believers are refusing to covet. Is that the great evil that they are doing? Do the atheists contend that covetousness is such a worthy social good that it needs to be protected from those who refuse to do it? Poor atheists, poor, poor atheists for needing to fight against those who will not covet. Such emptiness of purpose to have to defend an emotion that results in so much misery.

No? That's not it? Then it must be the refusal to bear false witness that is the behavior outside the pale of civil discourse. Perjury being such a high social value, one that is the bedrock of our judicial system, the atheists must have a real sense of pride in defending perjury against it's detractors - those who believe in something that does not exist. Again, how empty of meaning are the lives of atheists. One can not build a meaningful sense of self worth around defending perjury.

No? That's not it? Of course then it must be refusing to steal, to murder, or to commit adultery on one's spouse that is the hallowed ground needing protection from those who believe in something that does not exist. The refusal to do those three is surely the windmill that Don Quixote thrust his lance through. Surely these three need to be defended.

Those offenders who obstinately refuse to stop believing in that which does not exist ought to be required to STOP their resistance to stealing, murdering, and adulterating FOR THE GOOD OF THE NATION! Yes, that will certainly put substance into an atheists life. Ah the warm glow of knowing your life was spent in making society safe for stealing, murdering, and adultery. Yes, that surely will add some value to an atheists empty pathetic life.

No?? Are even grater principles necessary to the health of our nation at stake? The great evil of honoring your parents, and the insurmountable grotesqueness of taking one day off a week? It is absurd to think that overcoming the perversity of honoring your parents could do anything less than earn an atheist a Nobel prize at the very least.

No???? Still nothing of substance for the atheist to look at and see meaning? Come on now we are running out of options. What else could it be that gives an atheist's life substance. I got it! Eureka!!! It is that pernicious practice of loving one another and not doing evil to anyone for any reason. Surely that is the solvent dissolving the glue of our society that must be fought at all cost.

TO THE RAMPARTS MEN, FIGHT TO THE LAST MAN!!! That is surely the behavior that the atheists hate and oppose so much that they are willing to spend their lives "anti-evangelizing" the wayward souls. Meaning is always enhanced by a principled life of total selfishness and unrestrained, debauched evil doing to all those around you. It also makes for such simple burials. No one to invite, no traffic jams, just the undertaker and a back hoe operator stuffing a worthless husk into the ground.

"No, you idiot, we oppose the hypocrisy, those who believe in God and do bad things."

Okay, now we are getting somewhere. You don't oppose believers for believing in God, you oppose those who say they believe but behave differently. It that what you are telling me, now?

"Yes"

So you are telling me that you are fighting against people for failing to do the things that a being that does not exist has mandated? Are they not behaving exactly as an atheist wants? An atheist would not allow himself to be controlled by a being that does not exist. So his behavior would be unfettered by the commandments of He who does not exist.

Is that not what the hypocrites are doing?

They are behaving as if the one they claim to believe in does not exist, are they not? So in effect, the atheists are fighting against those whose behavior is exactly what the atheist say they want. Why should it matter to the atheist if one says he believes that God exists, if his behavior reflects the belief that God does not exist?.

After all, to the atheist, belief is immaterial and inconsequential, but behavior is material and substantive. Since God does not exist, belief or nonbelief in Him is an immaterial thing. If a hypocrite's behavior is as if God does not exist, why would the atheist care what the hypocrite believes. He is DOING as the atheist mandates.

Again see the barrenness of an atheist's life. He is opposed to those who do not obey the God that they say does not exist. Their struggle is to condemn those who fail to submit their wills to a nonexistent almighty. So in essence their life energy is spent condemning exactly what they themselves do. In order to fight against hypocrites, they first have to make the assumption that God exists and places behavior requirements on us in order to condemn them. They are condemning the hypocrites for behaving as atheists.

If God does not exist, then belief in Him is completely inconsequential. The only consequential thing is behavior. In condemning hypocrisy, the atheist first must presuppose the existence of God in order for hypocrisy to even exist. Without God there is no hypocrisy, and again, the atheists are tilting at windmills

Poor atheists, poor, poor atheists, whose lives contain no meaning, who when they come upon those behaving as the atheist say they ought, they expend their life's energy to oppose them. What pathetic confusion, what utter folly, what impenetrable meaninglessness. Lives of empty meaningless fighting against and condemning that which they themselves continually advocate and do.

I look forward to going back at them in the spring.

Preaching to the bricks again. Even the atheists are missing today. They had their own event over in front of Old Main. Any student could get a free slice of pizza if they would blaspheme God or in the case of Christians, deny He exists. Our God is very patient. The death toll from food poisoning was zero.

Last day of classes - behold the crowds.

At the end of the day, again I was able to talk to a recent convert about the issues of the Gospel:

What are we saved from,
What are the promises of the Gospel,
How can we attain unto those promises.

There are always more things to talk about than time to talk. In the spring I am hoping for more late evening preaching session.