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A video went viral recently showing Pope Leo with his hand outstretched over a block of ice, offering a blessing. The backlash was immediate and intense. Catholics and Protestants alike questioned what they'd just witnessed. Was this a legitimate spiritual act, or something else entirely?
What's in the Craw This Week
It's hard to see the Pope with his hand out on a block of ice and not feel down. This was happening at the Raising Hope for Climate Justice International Conference, held just south of Rome. Pope Leo presided over the event, using it to call people to put intense pressure—much more pressure—on governments to increase regulations and rules and more rigorous controls on climate change stuff. The political agenda was clear.
But here's what was so interesting. Pope Leo says: "These changes are of a social and political nature, but first and foremost of a spiritual nature, they call for conversion."
That's an interesting statement. What kind of conversion? It's like we want to control the people to justify this climate thing, and so the religious side gets used to try to control the people under their influence. It's a technique used by cults and false teachers—you take Bible speak or Christian speak and you apply that to whatever your personal agenda is.
When the story hit, there was a little bit of excitement when he first became pope because apparently his brother was conservative or a Trump supporter, something like that. People were talking, people were excited. But after this event, Matt Walsh—who's Catholic—said this was just absolutely horrific. He called it some kind of weird pagan earth worshipping hippie ritual. That's a good description of what was going on.
Every time you see that image, all you can think of is that 70s rock song "Cold as Ice." The Pope is cold as ice. Willing to sacrifice. But seriously—the pope put his hand on ice and blessed it in the name of climate change. If you were a Saturday Night Live writer, that would get rejected as unplausible. Yet here we have him blessing the waters of the earth or something like that.
Michael Knowles, another person who's Catholic, was having his podcast with a special guest talking about it. Michael Knowles is very disappointed as well. His guest made a point that was really poignant and really good: there's churches that are burning across the nation, children who are being shot, murders and increased persecution towards Christians around the globe. Blessing a block of ice is not a really good optic. Of all the issues on the globe today, is that really where you want to focus, Mr. Leo?
So he's coming under some intense criticism for participating in that, from within some of his serious practitioners from within the Catholic Church. That gives some credence to the skepticism when we look at it as Protestants and go, you know, something's off here.
Two Ditches, Same Road
When you look at the charismatic movement and where it's really leaning and leading, and then you look at Catholicism, you see that those two are very much so more closely related to each other rather than Protestantism. One's a ditch on one side of the road, one's a ditch on the other side of the road. They're both in the ditch. Without thinking themselves wise, they are not really coming through with what the scriptures actually say, who Jesus actually was, what he actually did.
There's a lot of commonalities between the two though as well on different sides of the ditch. You got charismatics on one side that are just lost and they think they're saved, and you've got some Catholics on the other side who are just out there and they think that that's the way to be. Bring it all back to the Bible and if you can reject it, reject it. If it's pablum, reject it. If it's peripheral, reject it. What is the narrow way? Is His grace sufficient for you? Is Jesus hanging on the cross—is that enough or do you got to add more to it like blessing a block of ice?
Standing Above the Rabbit Hole: What Is Blessing?
Let's not go down a rabbit trail. Let's stand above the rabbit hole with a flashlight and look down into the hole. If someone comes to you and asks, "What does it mean to bless someone?"—well, you could take it from seven different ways. Blessing someone is wishing them well. Blessing somebody is trying to ask God to do what only God can do to bring peace and joy and harmony.
When you go to Webster's dictionary, the first definition is God's favor and protection. That's what blessing is. The second side of that coin is asking in prayer for God's favor—God's blessing. It comes from Him. God is the one who ultimately blesses or doesn't bless. God's favor, man—that's a blessing.
Now, blessing or not blessing comes from God. We can ask God for blessing, but we don't give the blessing in and of ourselves through wishful thinking. But can we bless others? Yes, we can. How do we do that? We bless others by providing for them, encouraging them, praying for them, all these things. But you have to do something. You can't just lay your hand on a block of ice and bless the ice and think then that the waters of the world will be blessed. That's not how it works.
In fact, that's much more like what the pagans do where they try to send curses on people. All jokes aside, totally agree. That is what the pagans do. They think that they from within themselves can pass a curse on to someone else or they can pass on a blessing to someone else. And that is just not how it works. It doesn't originate from us.
James Gets Real
Let's turn to God's word. James chapter 2, verse 16. James doesn't give you any wiggle room, you know what I mean? He's just very blunt, straightforward. Boom. Here it is.
James 2:16: "If one of you says to them, 'Go in peace, keep warm and well fed,' but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?"
What good is it? What good is it? It's like telling your wife to calm down, right? That's not helpful. Words can be very very empty unless you're doing something physical. It can be an encouraging word like we said before or it can be praying for that person. But there's a call to action if you're going to bless someone. It is not just putting your hands on something and wishful thinking. That is not what it means to bless water or bless people or anything like that.
Putting your hands on someone and praying over them is a biblical thing. But what you're asking for is God's will, God's sovereignty, not "listen to me, Lord, and do what I say cuz I'm so cool and I'm so faithful." You're asking for God's blessing. God is the one who ultimately blesses. That's what it is.
The Blessing Industrial Complex
Have you ever seen people who will have certain things, little chachkis and stuff around their house and say, "Oh, this was blessed by so and so. This was blessed by the pope. This was blessed by a rabbit"? And the flip side is "it's got demons on it, so I got to throw it away." Cuz demons are living on your spoon collection.
They're inanimate objects. They're wood and metal. There's nothing in them. "I bought this at a pagan temple when I visited China, so it's got demons on it. I got to throw it away now, right?" Cuz you were saved last year and you're going through your house and cleaning out.
Back in like the 70s and 80s, it was everywhere. The late 70s and early 80s. It was the music and they're like, "Burn your albums, burn your tapes." And people actually did it. Some of the evil in the music and you want to cleanse your life of that—that's not a bad thing. To make it that it's some sort of ritual though—"this thing isn't good for me, I'm going to throw it in the trash." It's like a rotten tomato in the fridge, but the rotten tomato isn't evil. You know what I mean? It doesn't have a living presence in it.
Throwing it away, getting rid of it, burning it, it's all the same. But there was that push that burning it was actually more of a spiritual renewal and cleansing, so to speak, which isn't true. There's nothing wrong with that in and of itself. But to think you're somehow going to purify yourself by going through your house and eliminating everything that you think might have a connotation to something is kind of a futile exercise.
Going through and having that new life in Christ and saying some of these things have to go is a very very righteous thing to do. Understand what you're doing. The fact that you're cleansing it is enough. Don't think that you're throwing demons out in the trash if you throw that old satanic heavy metal record in the trash. You don't have to burn it. You don't have to ask God to release you from it. I mean, he already has. If you have Jesus, you have a new life in Christ. Getting rid of some of that stuff is very, very wise. You just don't need to do it in a ritualistic fashion because it's not getting you any extra juice from the Lord.
Clay and Iron Cannot Mix
Let me share one thing. And I know this is taking the Bible slightly out of context, but in the Bible when it talks about the statue and it gets down to the feet that's mixed with clay and iron—clay and iron cannot mix. They won't hold together. I know that that passage does not refer to what I'm about to say. Get that out there right now.
But just think of the Catholic Church as like clay and iron together cuz they have a biblical worldview. They stand against abortion. They talk about Jesus as being the son of God. But then they spin it into the clay off the iron into what some have called the mother child cult where they put Mary too far up and they start doing all these other pagan things. That comes from the fact that they want church tradition. Back in the 900s, 1000s, 1500s—up until Luther did his thing—it was because they wanted to promote their own significance and that really becomes pagan. It becomes a counterfeit from God.
When you spin that to the charismatic, it's the same thing. They're always looking for their own juice. They're looking for their own significance. Jesus dying on the cross for your sins, hung there bleeding for your sins, and the scriptures just being plain is not good enough for some people, right? They got to add to it. That's where you get the pagan worship that has spin-offs into charismatics and spin-offs into the Catholicism.
But when you look at the pope with his hand on a block of ice like that, you can't help but (a) feel sorry for them and (b) hope that they would stick to the iron of their faith and not the clay.
We're not trying to demonize Catholics or anything, but to show where there's a departure. Just like you might look at conservatives and then look at conservative leadership, they might have two different things going on. Liberals versus liberal elitists, liberal leadership—might be two slightly different things going on there. You can't lump it all into one.
The Sports Team Problem
On the same token, we look at religions almost like the way we look at sports teams. You're a Viking fan, so the purple is your thing. The fact that someone's a Packer fan or a Bears fan means they're kind of wrong and you feel sorry for them. We look at religion in the same light and following Christ in the same light and we shouldn't.
Or the argument whether football or baseball is better or hockey is better—we get into that. That is broad religion. That is broad road Christianity. Jesus calls us to more of a narrow path. When you're seeking signs and wonders, when you're seeking blessings from the Pope, or you're seeking man-made ridiculous stuff like speaking in tongues that's not biblical, and all of those mumbo jumbo things, what you're doing is you're going directly against what Jesus said.
Jesus said, "This adulterous and wicked generation, no sign will be given to you except for the sign of Jonah." What does that mean? That means it's three days in the grave and then the resurrection. So the cross and the resurrection is everything and you don't need to add anything to it. It's a simple faith and the joy and the peace that you get is astounding but it's kind of boring in American terms.
If you need that extra juice—whether it be going to have a priest give you five Hail Marys or whatever the Catholics do, or on the charismatic side you think that there's new apostles or new prophets (there's not—please stop the madness)—all of these other things. Another one is "God wants to heal everybody. It's his will to heal everybody if only you have enough faith." So in other words, God's sovereignty now is put into my hands and I'm not healed because I don't have enough faith. Is there sin in my life? I mean, come on. God's sovereignty is what's at stake here.
That's where you see the paganism come in. It's not bad to call it out. It's how we call it out is the key. You see what's kind of going on here—it's human beings' fallen nature to want to steal a little bit of God's glory. We all struggle with that. That is just the reality. When we see it in religious circles, that's where it's like, "I'm going to speak truth into your life" or "I'm going to give the blessing"—there's some sort of human action that God's sovereignty is somehow dependent on. That is just not reality.
The Twisted Teachings
Some of the biggest problems with pagan worship stuff is that it's very sound biblical teaching that gets twisted. For example, you can take the blessings that God has for you and you can toss them aside. You want to know how you do it? Through complaining and murmuring. God is clear. We can speak truth into our life. That is a biblical principle. But then to just say, "I'm going to name it and claim it and positively speak these things and God has to now obey because of my faith" is an affront to a holy sovereign God over your life.
Some of God's blessings are actually bad things happening to you—bad things you would never pray for, but you come out the other side and you see his sovereignty.
Another biblical principle is seed time and harvest. Seed time and harvest is a very biblical principle. But when the false teacher stands up and says, "We're going to take up our offering and give you a chance to increase your income"—that is not seed time and harvest. That is not planting a seed expecting a financial harvest in return. It's out of obedience that we share of our first fruits. And that is almost always the local church body that you're a part of.
If you give to an outreach broadcast that you want to see reach more people, that's an offering, not a tithe. To tell you that the principle of seed time and harvest is that if you give to our ministry, God's going to bless you financially—no. Seed time and harvest is if you joyfully give of your first fruit, God's going to bless you. And many times it's not financial. Many times it's very many other things.
Finding that right balance always comes down to one thing: Who gets the glory? If it's you, it's not from God. It's a counterfeit that's not from God. If Jesus is continually getting the glory—"You must increase, I must decrease"—that's the attitude behind speaking truth into your life and seed time and harvest and the blessings coming out of that. Some of those blessings, I'm convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt, we will not see till we get to the other side.
Made-Up Mumbo Jumbo: The Ambivert
Let's talk about some other lighthearted nonsense. There's a new thing out there. Have you heard of this—the "ambivert"? You've heard of the introvert. You've heard of the extrovert. Now there's the ambivert.
Psychologists and mind people want to keep dividing people into categories. We had the extroverts—we know who those people are. We had the introverts—we know who those people are as well. There's some crossover definitely. There's times when you don't want to be around people. There's times where you're like, "I really need to go and be with these people over here."
You're not a full-on introvert, but you are introvert basic. And I'm not a full-on extrovert, but I'm extrovert basic. What I mean by that is we'll be out somewhere and there's a phrase that means we got to get out of there: "It's too peopley here." It's not that you dislike people. It's just like sensory overload.
When we're sitting on airplanes and somebody's sitting in our row or whatever, there's always talking to people going on. But they would have to initiate the interest with an introvert—you got to draw them out of their introvert basic.
So what is an ambivert? This is a personality type, a new apparently personality type that doesn't fit neatly into either the introvert or the extrovert box. There's a third box now. It's just more made-up junk.
Here's how they describe it: These ambiverts don't need to recharge by jumping into the next social plan. Instead, they retreat into solitude, quiet moments, personal space, and a time alone where they can truly recover their energy. They also crave connection, laughter, stimulation, but they also need the calm of solitude to reset. Too much socializing leaves them drained, while too much isolation leaves them restless.
AKA every human being. No, it's just more stupidity. Blurring the lines and it's psycho babble. Thinking of a new word to make yourself feel smart.
Everybody is extroverted to a certain degree and everybody is introverted to a certain degree and we can see those differences, but those are polar opposite ends of the spectrum. You've got some people that cannot shut up at all. They just talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk. Then you've got some people that they're just terrified somebody might look at them, and they keep their head down on the bus. Don't make eye contact. Don't make eye contact. There's levels of everything.
But the problem is that we continue to make stuff up.
Therapy's Legacy
Hear me out. Therapy is invented. 120 years pass and now everyone's more anxious, neurotic, and depressed than ever before. Let me just say that again. Therapy is invented and then 120 years pass and everyone's more anxious, neurotic, and depressed than ever before.
What did therapy replace? Oh, it replaced biblical discipleship from the pastor and elders of the church, the strong women of the church who were strong in Jesus mentoring other people. Therapy replaced that.
We graduated in the early 80s, grew up in the 70s, we were born in the 60s. How many people had gender dysphoria in our life as kids? We had feminine boys that were boys. We had tomboys. But now? Our society with this kind of mumbo jumbo constantly coming at us creates narratives that are false in nature that are then sold as being true. Satan has enough counterfeit going on that we can sometimes get emotional, we can sometimes have feelings, we can sometimes get experiences that seem real that justify whatever it is you're talking about.
If you go to a therapist, you can find a lot of success. It's not a completely bad thing, don't get me wrong. But on the other hand, it will never be what biblical counseling, pastoral discipleship would be for the human being. That's the disconnect—we try to make our human efforts righteous. We try to make our human efforts godly and we're just not. The Bible says our best we can do, our best righteousness is as filthy rags before holy God. And that's why therapy is creating more problems in the modern world than it's solving.
The Payment Problem
One of the difficulties is that when you pay somebody to walk in and sit in their office and tell them your problems, you're not paying them to criticize you. You're not paying them to call you out. You're not paying them to point you in a different direction. Because if they do, you're not going to pay them very long.
When you walk into your pastor's office who doesn't require that you pay them, they will open up God's word and God's word might just convict you to start moving in a different direction. That's a really hard thing for people to do—to just flat out realize and acknowledge "I have been wrong this whole time."
You can do it, but it's hard. You're deceived until the moment you're not deceived anymore. A lot of times you won't walk completely into that light because of the embarrassment that you have that you were deceived for so long. There's been times where thinking the Bible said something and it didn't and realizing being wrong—it was difficult.
If you're watching or listening, Jesus will heal that, too. The more you can just say, "Man, I had it wrong. I had it wrong for decades, and I'm just going to turn from that right now, and I want to go in a different direction on some of these things"—that's going to be a difficult road to walk, but it's a worthy road to walk because there's freedom in that. There's freedom in knowing that you've given it all over to Jesus. He has opened your eyes in certain areas, and now you know what you know because you know it and you can't go back.
The Ambivert's "Traits"
The term ambivert was coined by Dr. Ramy Kaminski. The description of it is that they don't fit into the extrovert or introvert boxes. But here's the point: Who fits into a box anyway? No person fits in a box and that's the problem. People are way more complex than that. They never fit in a box.
Let me give you just a few of the descriptives, the key characteristics of an ambivert:
You cannot fathom how a group collectively thinks. How are you not able to fathom how a group collectively thinks? That's a little weird.
You're comfortable being alone and feel lonely in group settings. That's introvert. Though that can happen to anyone. Many times it's like, "I'm going to go out on the deck and I'm just going to enjoy the sunset." Being out there alone is great reflective time. Everybody does that. You can pull up to a strange church and your name is on the marquee as the guest speaker and sit in the parking lot going, "I don't want to go in there. I don't want to go in there." That's not an extrovert tendency, but it happens.
You fear being outed as a perpetual outsider. Now you're talking about narcissistic behavior. You're talking about other psychosis that has nothing to do with your "vert," whether you're intro or extrovert. What happens in your head where you consider yourself that most people are looking at you as if you're an outsider. A lot of times people can just get that twisted in their head. It's the cross that I bear. It's my journey. People don't like me.
Everybody feels that. Being a pastor and moving to a strange town where you don't know a soul and getting up every Sunday and saying, "All right, take your best shot"—everybody feels that at some time or another that they just don't fit in certain places.
You are a person of habit. You do not like transitions. Humans don't like change. Some people do embrace change more readily than other people do. There are some people who have a deeper aversion to change. But as far as being a person of habit, people are creatures of habit. They create habits they don't even want.
Here's just another example of the modern day psycho babble trying to put people in boxes. When you get into God's word, you realize no—humans are humans and we're all kind of in the same boat and we're all battling the same things that is called self. We have to die to self. That's the problem when introverts are telling extroverts, "Calm down, calm down" and extroverts are telling introverts, "Come out of your shell. Come out of your shell. Don't be shy."
We are normal people. We all struggle in the same realm. It's a spectrum and we all fall in different places on that spectrum at different times and in different situations. To start putting people in boxes is just really kind of offensive. It's not understanding the human condition while you're saying that you are an expert in the human condition. That's the stuff we have to deal with in 2025.
Final Thoughts
If you really want to know who you are, when you get into God's word, he shows you who you are through his own eyes. And that is a view that is trustworthy. You can believe it and you can depend on it. Know who you are in the Lord Jesus Christ. We want to be sold on that.
We all fall in the same box. We want to believe that we are the center of the universe. In fact, we have been just browbeat—post our high school, it's just become where everybody is the center of their own universe. The narcissism is what has led us to almost all of our social ills right now.
Let me give you some hard truth. Jesus is not thinking about you and pursuing you with everything in the universe. He looks at you as his creation whom he loves and so he died for you and he is extending grace and an offer to you. We want to turn Jesus into this little weak-wristed "oh he's just got a heart for me. Oh, he loves me. He'd run down the world for me. He gets me" and all of these other things when you don't realize we're talking about the God of the universe that created everything. Came to live as a human being because we couldn't do it ourselves. We were so fallen in such a sinful state that he had to then become the sacrificial death.
When you see Jesus spiked to a cross and he's bleeding out and he's literally giving up his life for you, then he has victory over death, hell, and the grave so that you can live forever with him as a co-heir—the one who's going to rule and reign alongside him—and he gives you this new life, to reduce it down to this stuff that we do here on this planet is obnoxious.
Understand: I feel lucky that Jesus has saved me when he shouldn't have saved me and yet he did. But we make it out to be that little Johnny is raised to just feel like everything revolves around him and so then when he has to get a job and has to deal with hard things in life it's not working and our society is falling down and everything is about feelings instead of about facts. The reality is that you are sinful, you're headed for hell, and God is going to be the one to send you there. That's how much he loves his own glory and his own righteousness. He will send you to hell.
But he's provided a way. He's provided a way of escape, they call it. And he did it himself cuz none of us could even possibly do it. When you walk into the throne room of God in Revelation chapter 4 and chapter 5, and you see what's really there—when you see what it's all about—you realize you are so insignificant. Just the fact that you get to be allowed in the room is a huge blessing where you praise his name because you know it has nothing to do with you.
It is kind of amazing that we, as sinful as we are, as insignificant as we are, God would be mindful of each and every individual and pay our penalty, stand in our stead and take on himself what we really truly deserve. That right there and that alone is worth knowing him, loving him, praising him, and just living for him.
Do not grow weary of doing good. Go out and bless others and bless the Lord by giving him thanks for who he is.