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Jon Bilima

@jonbilima7

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Work.. by @jonbilima7

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2 months ago

It's my birthday, and I want to celebrate the way I was taught. By giving.

Tonight I'm giving away my life's work.

Twenty thousand hours. Of study. Of asking questions nobody wanted to answer. Of chasing what I saw as a child and couldn't name until I was almost fifty.

Before I published, I went looking for who had already said it. I read the people who have carried these conversations for decades.

Michael S. Heiser mapped the divine council and the unseen realm.

Jacques Ellul warned us what technology does to a society.

Neil Postman showed us how a medium forms the people who use it.

Andy Crouch put it in the home, at the kitchen table, with our kids.

James K.A. Smith taught us that we are formed by what we love before we are convinced by what we think.

Every one of them was right. Every one of them carried a strand.

What I could not find anywhere was the braid. The divine council and the seed war and the theology of technology and formation and the last days, tied into one frame.

That doesn't make me smarter than any of them. It means this particular thread had not been pulled yet, and I spent twenty thousand hours pulling it.

I believe the body of Christ needs a framework for this age. I've done my best to build one.

Tonight at 7:28 PM Pacific, when you buy The Image and the Algorithm, you get all of it:

The book. Kindle $7.28 for the date. Paperback $19.76 for the year I was born.

The Digital Babylon Study Guide. Every question in the book, chapter by chapter.

The Family Tech Covenant. A one page rule of life you fill in with your household and sign together.

The Ark Builder's Toolkit. Every resource from the back of the book, curated.

A live Q&A with me in August. Buyers only.

Early access to the app we built behind this book. Free.

Buy tonight, forward me your receipt, and I'll send you everything.

Fifty years ago tonight, around 7pm, nobody was there to welcome me.

Tonight at 7:28, I'd be honored if you showed up.

Live at 7:15.

Link in bio.

7:28 PM Pacific. 10:28 Eastern. by @jonbilima7

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2 months ago

I gave this book to my friend Jason.

He read the whole thing in about six hours and sent me this.

"The last page of chapter 15 is what brought tears."

That's the remnant chapter. The one about people who see what's happening and refuse to conform.

I wrote it for him and everybody like him.

It's live today.

Kindle $7.28, Paperback $19.76.

My birthday price.

Tonight, 7:28 PM Pacific, we all buy together.

Link in bio. by @jonbilima7

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2

2 months ago

I had already faced and fought demons by this age.

With my own physical eyes I had seen into spiritual realms and dimensions that are veiled for most.

My father, a revivalist so famous for his preaching that songs were sung about him, was serving in Northern Malawi after finishing his education in Zimbabwe. It was in that region that the encounters began.

My mother tells me the nights were filled with fright. She would wonder what I was seeing and hearing in air she couldn’t see. Finally a seer came and resolved the matter, and by his prophetic word we moved from that area. They were trying to kill me.

We landed in the south, and it was at Malamulo that I befriended these legends. My best friends, Obie and Kaliwaka. We would play all day.

We didn’t have iPads, Roblox, PS2 or TikTok. We had outside.

Outside was our only toy. Our only device.

That doesn’t mean we were protected from the same supernatural powers behind today’s formation.

I’m 7 in these pictures. By that age I had experienced horrors I won’t share here, to protect the guilty and shield the innocent.

The formation had already begun. And it would take the next 43 years for me to understand its impact. It would take 43 years to name the spirit behind it.

I spent most of my life blaming people and blaming myself. Not understanding that the fight isn’t with a person with skin. It is with an immaterial spirit.

An algorithm.

The same one at work now.

The same one after my 7 year old and his siblings, and after his whole generation.

The algorithm doesn’t care about you. It’s after the image you bear.

A few months after these photos were taken I moved to the USA. Far from the witchcraft and magic of Africa. Only to encounter a more sophisticated sorcery, one that shields itself in glass screens and runs on silicon chips.

The algorithm is only multiplied here. The supernatural gets defined and explained away here. Yet the spirit of antichrist is headquartered here.

Like I said. I made it 25 years past the average Negro’s burial.

I’m grateful to be here. I won’t waste the minutes I have left. I’ve got something to say.

This book honors them by @jonbilima7

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2 months ago

My beginning was intense.
I was born in Bulawayo in July of 1976, in what was then Rhodesia, in the middle of the Bush War. Yet life hadn't stopped. My parents had come from Malawi for college, believing there was a future worth building.
On the morning of July 28, my mom hitched a ride on the college truck into town for a routine doctor visit. There were no phones. My father had no idea he was about to become a dad, and no way to be reached. Before the day was over, around 7pm, I arrived. Prematurely, but on time.
I called her this morning and asked her to tell it again. She said a line I can't get out of my head.
"Nobody was there to welcome you."
She had not eaten all day. That night, alone in the hospital, she fell trying to get out of bed to check on me. She said, "Lord have mercy. Nobody is here to help me."
That's me in the picture. Look at the shoes. They didn't fit. Somebody lent them just for the photo. My mother put them on my feet and sat me in the sun.
For years I thought I had just been stubborn and kicked them off. That's the story of my life. If the shoe don't fit, look for a bigger size.
But that is what faith looks like before you can afford it. You dress the child for a future you cannot prove is coming.
I believe we're in another season of labor now. And there is a war inside it most people never see.
Not a war over territory. A war over formation. A war for your soul.
It doesn't feel like an attack. It feels like a feed. You scroll and think you're choosing, but most of what appeals to you was handed to you. The formation around you pulled you toward it. Then it started to feel normal.
That is how you lose a war you never knew you were in.
I called it The Image and the Algorithm because the algorithm has always tried to do one thing. Supersede the image. Not the one on your screen. The one you were created in.
You were not born just to exist. You were born to birth something.
And what you birth is decided by what formed you.
The question isn't whether we're in labor. The question is what you're giving birth to.
Tomorrow I turn fifty. And I'm releasing the book I've been carrying nearly that whole time.
Come and welcome what I'm birthing. by @jonbilima7

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2 months ago

In a couple of days, I’ll have lived 25 years past the average Negro’s burial.

If you know what I’m talking about, you know what I’m talking about. Shout out to @yepneezy for that line.

Fifty years. And it took me almost every one of them to write the book I’m releasing on my birthday.

This is not an ordinary book. It came out of years of asking questions that nobody wanted to answer. It’s the first of seven, and the rest are already in manuscript form. Things I’ve been carrying most of my life.

I remember being a young man reading the Bible and hitting passages that simply did not make sense. So I’d go to my pastor. Or I’d go to my dad, who was also a pastor. “What does this mean?”

Brushed off. Every time.

“We don’t really get into that stuff.”

The first time I read about the Nephilim in Genesis 6, I asked everybody I could find. Nobody had an answer. Not one.

I never stopped asking.

This book is the answer I never got.

Tuesday. July 28. My birthday. by @jonbilima7

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2 months ago

A BIG “Thank you” to Pastor Jon Bilima for sharing his word with us yesterday!

Encourage somebody by dropping👇what part of the message most spoke to you

#loveunltd #godlovesmiami #godloveshialeah by @jonbilima7

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6 months ago

My brothers. My crew. My team.
I wouldn’t be here without you guys.

Love y’all. ❤️

@iamanthonyrudolph
@matthagberg
@jonbilima7
@haroldiwalters
@kevininspiredme taken in Riverside, California by @jonbilima7

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7 months ago

What will you worship?

This past Sunday we had Ps. @jonbilima7 in the house and he preached a word 🔥

He reminded us of what transformation takes.

Miss this message? Catch the replay on YouTube - Relevant Church Niles - Made In God’s Image But Formed By Culture And Algorithms taken in Relevant Church, Niles by @jonbilima7

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7 months ago

You can’t rebrand God

This weekend we had the honor to have Ps. @jonbilima7 in the house and preach a powerful reminder of the algorithm of this world

Miss this message? Catch the replay on YouTube - Relevant Church Niles - Made In God’s Image But Formed By Culture And Algorithms taken in Relevant Church, Niles by @jonbilima7

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7 months ago

by @jonbilima7

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7 months ago

Caught a red eye jet with my girly girl. by @jonbilima7

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7 months ago