The Journal of James Hartline
Preparing For My Departure
But Running My Race Until I Leave!
My Journey From The Gutter To God
A Chapter From The Journal of James Hartline:
Gaining Life By Overcoming Death Through Jesus Christ
"It is better to be a poor but wise young man than to be an old and foolish king who refuses all advice. For that young man has come out of prison to become king, even though he was born poor in his kingdom." Ecclesiastes 4:13-14
God has granted me the privilege of prophetically looking into the mighty vision that He is in the process of establishing for this generation. In this vision for our nation, I have seen the coming glory of God which shall envelope and transform America. Ironically, this vision shall be carried forth by those who are deemed to be the least desirable citizens in our nation. Vindication is coming swiftly for those who have been judged as unimportant and socially defective by those who are considered important because of their wealth, their social standing and their ability to show disdain for the things of God.
Indeed, the Lord presents us a prophetic revelation in the fourth chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes which confirms His intention of reversing America's social order during this coming move of God. The writer in Ecclesiastes declares, "Out of the prison shall come a young man who will be king." This nation shall soon find itself in its darkest hour, an hour when money cannot buy a calming of the mind or a healing balm for the terrified heart. When the rich and greedy least expect it, God will release a new kind of leadership upon this great and burdened country. Out of the prison shall come a king. Out of the wasteland shall come the warrior. Out of the abused shall come royalty. Out of the raped shall come the beautiful. Out of the fires of affliction shall come forth the purified servants of the Most High God. This is the way of the Lord.
I have been told by those in power within our morally-neutered southern California society, that I have no value and that I don't qualify to speak on behalf of my generation. However, according to my own experiences as a determined soldier in this culture war, the powerful ruling bureaucrats in this society have no say in the matter of my involvement in this culture war that God has asked me to wage. I did not seek permission from the powerful when I began my campaign that has now successfully closed ten pornographic businesses in the city of San Diego. One of those evil businesses that I fought a four year battle to close, was a gay bathhouse located in the heart of San Diego's homosexual community where many men used illegal drugs and were infected with the AIDS virus. During that long and trying battle, I received many threats against my life. Still, I did not give up and now that business has been permanently shut down.
Nor did I wait for a permission slip to be granted me from some city council when I motivated hundreds of my fellow citizens to go to war to keep the giant public cross that sits atop the Mt. Soledad Veterans War Memorial from being torn down. For two decades, atheists with the help of their discriminatory attorneys sought to tear down that cross. Any observer who was present during those long and exhausting city council meetings, will tell you that my passionate pleas to uphold our religious rights were among the most vocal and sincere of any that were sounded in the city council chambers. You can watch my life and death speech to preserve the Mt. Soledad Cross by going to the city council video archives for March 8, 2005. First click Video for that date and then click on the segment "Break Return" and slide the time ruler to 44:00.
I also did not seek affirmation from the homosexual power brokers in San Diego when I began seeking justice in our city during my battle over the multitude of sex offenders and pedophiles who were working for the San Diego Gay Pride organization in 2005. After a lengthy investigation that year, I discovered that the San Diego Gay Pride organization was allowing dangerous sex offenders to work in their annual festival and parade, events that lure in hundreds of young minors each year. Despite many threats against me because of my investigation on this matter, I stayed the course and the sex offenders were subsequently forced out of the events where they had the potential to harm the youth of my city.
When history is recorded and our generation is chronicled, it is my greatest hope that I will be listed among those who fought bravely and died courageously for the children of my generation.
There is no day upon which the sun arises, that I do not scheme or plot to make my community safer for the little boys and little girls who will rise from their beds to face their many scandalous enemies. I know what it is like to grow up and to be held captive by an abuser. As a young boy, I was all too familiar with the dreary days that turned into neverending months, and those neverending months that turned into hopeless years, and no one, absolutely no one, came to my rescue. I have known a time as a small, four year-old boy, when I was beaten so badly that I needed stitches in my skull. I also know of a day, just six years after that earlier violent and physically damaging episode, when I, as a ten year-old terrified little boy, received so many punches to my head that I was taken back to the hospital to get more stitches.
I know the fear and pain of not having a single friend to run to when I was under the care of a mother who I trusted with all of my youthful innocence, only to find out that the one I trusted ended up being my greatest enemy. Let there be no doubt among those in our culture who are bent on contaminating and corrupting the youth of America, that I have made a vow to the children of my generation, a vow which declares that as long as there is breath in my body, I will fight for America's children. I will be their best friend.
Let America also understand that I will be a deliverer for the abused children of this nation. At every turn when I become aware that adults are attempting to hurt the kids of San Diego, I rise up to stand in the way. In 2005, when I found out that adult nudists were exposing young kids to their perversions at nudist parties in San Diego, I created a national outcry which culminated in the elimination of their use of the public venues which they had been using to hold their filthy parties.
In June of 2007, I learned that the the San Diego Gay Pride organization was scheduled to hold a gay pride celebration in July at Petco Park, home of the San Diego Padres, at the same time that the Padres had scheduled a children's free floppy cap giveaway. With a history of hiring pedophiles and promoting pornography, the San Diego Gay Pride organization is one of the most dangerous groups when it comes to the issue of involving children in their events. One month after I released a nationally-recognized article on the controversy, over 100 Christians showed up to stand with me at the baseball park as we alerted parents about the dark history of the San Diego Gay Pride organization.
In 2005, my nationally-recognized investigation of the San Diego Gay Pride organization led to shocking revelations that the group was hiring sex offenders to work in events that involved scores of very young children and teenagers. The citizens of San Diego were particularly outraged when it was discovered that the group had also hired a registered pedophile named "Marty the Clown" to entertain children in the gay pride children's garden.
Incensed at the San Diego Gay Pride organization's depth of corruption towards impressionable minors, I refused back down from the war that I intended to wage in the city of San Diego unless justice was brought to bear on this abominable situation. When the smoke had cleared, and I had waged my war, all of the sex offenders had been removed from the organization despite weeks of refusal by the Gay Pride organization to remove them. Additionally, as a result of my stand against the gay pride organization and its hiring of sex offenders, the City of San Diego, for the first time in eleven years, refused to issue an annual proclamation honoring the San Diego Gay Pride celebration. Nowhere in America have Christian Evangelicals achieved such a victory as that which was won by our side in 2005. This is evidence which confirms the Bible's declaration that when a man or woman commits themselves to the Lord Jesus Christ, there will be heaven-sent signs to follow. This again, is the way of the Lord.
There is a price to pay for the stand I am making on behalf of the youth of my generation. I have been the target of many death threats by atheists and homosexual activists who despise my work of exposing those who seek to harm our little boys and our little girls.
Before we enter into a permanent agreement to serve God for the rest of our lives, Jesus presents all of us with the full consequences for following Him and the mandate He has for this generation. I fully understood what Jesus was declaring when He said, "And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after Me, cannot be My disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down, and count the cost, as to whether you will be able to finish it?" I was fearful, and apprehensive as well, when I considered what Jesus said about the life ahead for the Apostle Paul once he had been subjected to the transforming power of the Holy Spirit: "For I will shew him how great things he must suffer for My name's sake."
Knowing that I would be hated by homosexual activists for standing up to the terrible things they were doing to the kids of my city, I made a sober decision that the lives of the children of San Diego far outweighed the concern I might have felt for my own personal comfort. As long as God grants me life, the children of my generation will not be abandoned in the same horrible fashion that I was as a young boy.
This nation and the children that live in it are in need of a precedent-setting miracle. According to the prophetic visions which I have received from the Lord, God is about to bring about a comprehensive and consuming change in the leadership of this nation. It will be the kind of change that creates a nation which honors the presence of our youth. However, this kind of monumental change will not come about by the same broken means which have produced such dangerous times for my generation.
As we have seen by the Biblical examples of Joseph, who God rescued from the dungeon to lead the entire nation of Egypt, and by the beautiful sacrifice of Queen Esther, who came from slavery and obscurity to rescue the lives of the entire Jewish race, God raises up royalty out of life's most unbearable circumstances.
Then Pharaoh sent and called for Joseph, and they hurriedly brought him out of the dungeon; and when he had shaved himself and changed his clothes, he came to Pharaoh. So Pharaoh said to Joseph, "Since God has informed you of all this, there is no one so discerning and wise as you are. You shall be over my house. See, I have set you over all the land of Egypt." Genesis Chapter 41
"And the king loved Esther above all the women, and she obtained grace and favour in his sight more than all the virgins; so that he set the royal crown upon her head, and made her queen. However, the King did not know that Esther was a Jew. Mordecai, who adopted the orphan Esther, said to her, "And who knows whether you have not attained royalty for such a time as this?" Book of Esther
One significant thing that I have learned during this long and dangerous journey of mine, is that God's ways of dealing with the affairs of mankind are nearly always opposite to that of the way that men in their fallen state deal with each other. God's priorities are not man's priorities. Men will rarely ever make God's desires a part of their human agenda until men learn to subject themselves to a spiritual metamorphosis.
The Bible teaches us that the farther down a man has fallen in this life, the more likely it is when that man repents and is forgiven of his many sins, that he will go on to become a leader who God can raise up to influence his generation towards greatness. When reflecting upon the gratitude demonstrated by the prostitute whom He had forgiven, Jesus told His disciples, "Therefore I say to you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much. But to whom little is forgiven, the same loves little." Like the prostitute that Jesus helped, I have been a deplorable sinner in need of God's forgiveneness. Because Christ has loved me and forgiven me much, just as He did that prostitute 2,000 years ago, I owe Him everything. This is why I am so obedient to His every demand. This is why I am so dedicated to His concern for the children of my generation.
As He was moving ever closer to His voluntary execution for the sins of all humanity, Jesus declared to His followers the significant responsibilities that will be given to the man who has been faithful with the graceful new life granted to him by the Lord, "Blessed is that servant whom his master finds so doing when he comes. Truly I say to you that he will put him in charge of all his possessions."
The man who has learned life's most difficult lessons through hardships and trials will be a humble man who knows passionately the Biblical passage which declares, "I know that nothing good lives in my flesh, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out." Yet, when filled with the very Spirit of the living God, that same man can state with a peculiar and profound confidence, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me."
There are no losses or defeats for the citizen who resides in the Kingdom of God. Only in this carnal world are the rich and powerful allowed to judge men and women as losers based upon the amount of money they possess or the scholastic degrees which have been granted them by a college where the existence of God is quite likely to be denied. The great irony in all of this is the fact that the rich and famous are empowering a world that seeks to sexualize and harm our children, while a person like myself, empowered with only a high school diploma, is doing everything possible to protect the children of my generation from the exploitations of the rich and famous.
Throughout history, there are some men and women who are born with lives that grant them great suffering from the very moment they draw their first breaths. There is a scheme of God in His allowing these individuals to suffer in such a manner. I am one who has been chosen by God to be a part of this suffering breed. I have always known suffering. It is as familiar to me as the moon is to the night. For those who have been chosen by God to lead the way during humanity's darkest hours, the human experience often begins in rancid poverty and eventually ends with hushed groanings among the underprivileged.
Joseph was our forerunner for establishing God's pattern of taking a young man plagued all of his life by injustices and discrimination, and then transforming that young man into the leader of a very desperate nation. In every generation, there is a Joseph who is being groomed by God for a season when fear and catastrophe come together to create a national crisis. This tried and tested servant of humanity will always be an independent flame, a flame fueled by the very fires of God Himself.
In the hours of my greatest despondency, I always felt this unshakable kinship with Joseph. It is the many years of great suffering that I endured which drew me to learn of Joseph's godly way of dealing with his own horrific tribulations. It has been my apprehending of how God uses suffering to mold a man into the image of Christ, that finally allowed me to come to a place of comprehending what Jesus meant when He said, "For many are called, but few are chosen."
Many years ago, in what seemed to be another lifetime altogether, I came to my senses and realized that I was rotting away in a gutter. Lost in a life that homosexual leaders had promised me would be a gay life full of happiness and acceptance, I now found myself strung out on crystal meth. Covered in my own fecal matter and vomit, the gay life had brought me to such a shameful place that I was using my own dirty garments as a covering from the probing eyes of a God who was desperately searching for me, His lost little lamb, before it was too late.
It was during the latter years of my dreadful thirty-year experiment called the gay lifestyle, that I finally came to a permanent realization that homosexuality and God just do not mix. They never have and they never will. It is so clear to me now, why God put His warnings in the Old Testament about homosexuality. He did so because He loves us and doesn't want us to suffer the damnable consequences that will ultimately come with such evil practices. The New Testament reiterates God's warnings from the Old Testament as the Apostle Paul reminds humanity, "The wages of sin is death."
The Apostle Paul also warned those who are hurting God by their involvement in sins, "Do not grieve the Holy Spirit." God, Who created us in His image, has feelings just like He put in our own human personalities. His Spirit grieves over the offenses of His created beings. One day among the many days when my spirit battled with my flesh over the terrible grief I had caused God because of my involvement in homosexuality, I came to a fresh reality that sharply pierced through my own corrupted reasoning. It was an awakening of sorts, a reality that became a revelation.
This newly found revelation gave strength to my exhausted mind, a mind that had been desperately searching for a path out of those dark and hopeless days. It was the dawning of a new day for me as I now understood this: God was extending mercy to me, but not because I had had such a dreadful and abusive past and thus, I was a victim deserving of His mercy.
Thinking that I deserved God's mercy because He had to make up to me all of the years that He had allowed me to be abused by my mother was a fatal and immoral flaw in my thinking. That degenerate way of thinking had kept me, for years and years, repeating a vicious cycle of victimization where I demanded that God give me compensation for my suffering. I simply could not move into the new life that God had for me because I had been stuck reliving the past, waiting for God to resolve the terrible crimes that had been committed against me as a child.
The cycle of victimization was being broken as I realized that God's grace was appropriated to me, not as recompense for the abuses committed against me, but because He is merciful to everyone regardless of their upbringing. All are in need of mercy, the rich and the poor, the undeserving and the desperate. I could have had a magnificent start in life, and I still would have needed God's mercy and forgiveness. This is why the Apostle Paul declares to every man and woman in the Book of Romans, "For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God."
For nearly ten years now, I have been completely liberated from the homosexual life. I have truly become a free man, having encountered the great gift of God's mercy that He extended to me in my darkest days. Yet, in today's world of the self-confident, the carnally minded and society elites, people like myself are judged as unimportant and disfigurements upon the landscape of wealth, privilege and higher education. They mock and ridicule my Christian values. Their hatred for people like me is of such an intense nature because they cannot put into a comfortable little box, the fact that I have overcome such a deplorable life -- without their professional help. No secular twelve step programs or books about "the 7 Steps to Victory" have been the tools of my liberation. Indeed, it has been the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ which has granted me total freedom from my past.
The sophisticated secularists cannot fathom the existence of a man they deem to be a misfit -- and an undesirable Bible thumper -- who has actually closed down ten pornographic businesses in the city of San Diego. They cannot comprehend how a man who spent 19 years in prison for being a convicted thief is now a totally transformed human being with a life story that has been broadcast on international television.
These elitist homosexual leaders and their secular intellectual partners cannot understand how a former prisoner and drug addict, and particularly an ex-gay Christian, could possibly get done the remarkable things that I have gotten done. After all, I live in poverty, sometimes barely able to put food on the table. I don't own a car and don't even know how to drive one. My suits all come from thrift stores. And all I possess is a high school education. In reality, according to the standard of success established by the homosexual elites in America, I am a real loser.
I may not have much money and I may not look that good in my thrift store suits, but I have something far more precious in the sight of God than all the power and all the money that people like anti-christian homosexual musician Elton John and anti-christian lesbian entertainer Ellen Degeneres could ever buy. For I possess the willingness to give my life to the Lord Jesus Christ so that He will surely have a man in this nation who is willing to lay down his life for the saving of the children of this generation. God has molded my spirit through many years of being in the fiery furnaces of affliction. Now, out of the furnace and its fires, I have come forth as a refined vessel willing to serve Him in every uncomfortable situation that life might present.
My willingness to serve God with such passion stems from God's love which now consumes my internal being. His love for the children of my generation has now become my love for the children of this generation. I have come to a deeper comprehension of the standard of love that Christ was proclaiming when He told His disciples, "Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."
Jesus also let His disciples know that it is a very precious thing for Him to have the assurance that there will be faithful servants of the Lord who are serving Him in the last days prior to His return to the earth to establish His eternal kingdom. He said to His disciples, "Nevertheless, when the Son of man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?" The one thing that Jesus desired, and the one thing that I have the capacity to give Him, is my life. To have faith in God is the greatest act of gratitude that I can express to the Lord for all of the wonderful things that He did for me when He rescued me out of that damnable gutter. How could I resist the desires of the Darling of Heaven? I cannot. My life now belongs forever to God.
When we find ourselves in love with our God, we begin to separate ourselves from those people who are not seeking to walk a similar path. It can be a lonely life at times. In many respects we are social outcasts. Yet, God is a comfort to the lonely and to the outcasts.
The Bible gives outcasts some very clear and prophetic directions for the last days. The Bible declares in Isaiah 27:13: "So it shall be in that day: The great trumpet will be blown; They will come, who are about to perish in the land of Assyria; And they who are outcasts in the land of Egypt, shall worship the LORD in the holy mount at Jerusalem."
God is calling the outcasts of the earth to come back home to Him. The outcasts, the rejected, the so-called losers of this world, are being recalled back to the Lord where He can assemble them into His mighty Last Days army. It is why He reached down into the very depths of deepest depravity to redeem me. I can only imagine the amazing tales that shall soon be told from the lips of the other outcasts that I shall meet in the days ahead.
I was born an outcast. I resided for so many years in the gutter, a place where outcasts usually dwell and die. Yet, isn't that the way of the Lord, that He looked even in the gutter to find me? As we look to the example of Lazarus, covered in his funeral garments, placed away in the tomb of final darkness, we hear the Lord shouting, "Lazarus! Lazarus! Come forth." After being dead for four days and stinking from the stench of death and decay, Lazarus awoke and emerged from the tomb. Like Lazarus, I too was dead, dead in the land of the living, floundering in the gutter. But God said to me, as He said 2,000 years ago to Lazarus, "James! James! Come forth."
I have surely kissed the grave. And now, I have kissed the hand of the Lord who reached down into the gutter and pulled up my wasted existence so that I might stand as His redeemed servant in the land of the living. My eyes are straining from the newness of my brand new day. I can see the sunlight. I can feel the living breath of the eternal God upon my face. I am alive! I am alive!
This has been a published article from The Journal of James Hartline.
"Preparing For My Departure - But Running My Race Until I Leave!"
