Month: April 2010

Categories
books marriage and family

Parenting Pearls

I’m convicted by the following observations from someone history has proven to have been an excellent father:

How many parents there are … who are readier to provide playthings for their children than to share the delights of their children with those playthings; readier to set their children to knowledge-seeking, than to have a part in their children’s surprises and enjoyments of knowledge-attaining; readier to make good, as far as they can, all losses to their children, than to grieve with their children over those losses.  And what a loss of power to those parents as parents, is this lack of sympathy with their children as children.

Henry Clay Trumbull, Hints on Child Training (1890).  Mr. Trumbull was Elisabeth Elliott’s great-grandfather.  (Ms. Elliot was the wife of the martyr Jim Elliot, returned as a missionary to the tribe that murdered her husband, and authored numerous excellent books, to include Through Gates of Splendor. )

I have found it odd that while our children are young, impressionable, and living with us and looking up to us, it is so easy to focus on our careers, with a thought of how if we work hard, our senior years might be easier to enjoy.  But isn’t that backwards?  Shouldn’t we try to experience and enjoy the most while our children are with us (and while we’re still younger)?  Mark Twain’s advice seems relevant to this point:

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.  So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor.  Catch the tradewinds in your sails.  Explore.  Dream.  Discover.

Categories
culture

RU 486 “publicity”

Pro-life blogger Jill Stanek has two interesting articles on World Net Daily about recent live-Tweets by women sharing their RU486 experiences.  Stories here and here.  I don’t recommend reading prior to mealtime.  As described by these women, the experiences were not in any way without suffering. 

My immediate thought is “what were these woman thinking” by publicizing their abortions to the world.  After reading their tweets, that question looms even larger.  What did they accomplish or hope to accomplish?  Abortion providers purposefully avoid explaining exactly who and how the baby is dissected and suctioned out of the womb and what the mother will experience during and after her abortion, both physically and emotionally.  Certainly more woman “sharing” what it’s like to experience the bloody business of aborting the child from their womb will only further the pro-life cause.

Categories
Atheism, agnostic, evolution, etc.

Fred and Wilma’s Genes

According to some evolutionary and old-earth Christians, the so-called young earth, anti-scientific cave people, sometimes referred to as “Fred and Wilma,” discredit Christianity by believing the creation account as literally explained in the book of Genesis. For ease of reference, I’ll refer to these evolutionary apologists as Esau and Erasmus. They claim that a literal reading of Genesis’ young-earth, six-day creation account is scientifically indefensible and fuels the evolutionary biologist wing of militant atheism. Such argument suffers from both going too far and not far enough in its thinking, while at the same time selling its theological birthright for a bowl of common pottage.

Esau and Erasmus’ argument about biblical creationism does not go far enough. They suggest Christianity would appeal more to worldly rationale and defang militant atheists if only Fred and Wilma would shut-up already about a young earth. It would not, unless Christians compromised the truths of most the rest of our faith. Even without a literal biblical creation, Christianity remains unpalatable to the self-proclaimed intellectuals at the Los Angeles Times, militant atheists, and the rest of the worldly sophisticates.

The Bible repeatedly speaks of God ridiculing the wisdom of man. Paul explained to the Corinthians that if it sounded like he was out of his mind, it was because he was talking of the things of God. Elsewhere, Paul noted that while the Gospel was a stumbling block to the Jew, it was utter foolishness to the Greek. Christianity teaches that the omnipotent, infinite, omnipresent and eternal God of all that is seen and unseen, took the form of human flesh in His creation. Instead of the heraldry due the arrival of such an eternal King, he arrived as the apparent bastard son of a peasant woman in a semi-nomadic tribe somewhere in the west-Asian backwaters of the Roman Empire. To underscore the point, God was born amongst the squalor of livestock and his first visitors were sheep herders who were roughly the social equivalent of today’s garbage collectors. To further emphasize that God does not do it “our way,” he was born to a virgin. This promised deliverer grew up in obscurity. He befriended

Continue reading “Fred and Wilma’s Genes”
Categories
humor video

For lovers of vinyl … sleevefacing

Happy Monday.

Categories
politics, economy, etc. praise theology World etc.

Rights?! What Rights?!

We live in a world obsessed with personal rights.   The recent political manuverings in Washington highlight a popular worldview that everyone has extensive rights, including health care.   Many wonder, how far do personal rights extend?   However, it’s nothing new.  It’s been with us since the curse.

Yet there was One Man who lived very differently.  We read in Philippians 2:6-8 that when Christ came to our world from the Father, he set aside his rights as God to fully incarnate into humanity.  The Apostle Paul tells us that Christ, though God Himself, gave up his rights to live like, look like and be treated like God.

Imagine a king leaving the glorious and lavish environs of his palace to live among the poorest of the poor in his kingdom.  But not just for a night (as if a publicity stunt), rather for years.  Regardless of the squallor in which he lives, where he lays his head or stale bread he feasts upon, the fact remains he is still king.  Christ, the King of Kings, did just that – He left his glorious, righteous throne and laid aside his rights to live as God.

What if you were to wake up tomorrow and be summoned to court only to learn that due to enormous debt you are now a slave of your creditors – for the rest of your life!  You no longer have personal rights – where to live, what to do for a career, ownership of personal property, access to a bank account, or anything that is yours.  You are now the one that is owned.  A bit frightening isn’t it?  The prophet Isaiah foretold the Christ would not have any form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.  Christ stepped in humanity not as a nobleman or into a well to do family, but as a lowly slave.  He gave up his rights to look like God.

To leave your rightful throne and live like a common slave is one thing .  To do so to sacrifice your life for wretched lost mankind is completely something different.  Scripture tells us that he humbled himself to the point of death on a cross.  The final hours of Christ leading up to the crucifixion was perhaps that most humiliating and excruciating experience anyone could ever face.  The betrayal, false trials, cruel beatings, mockings and jeerings would crush any man.  Yet Christ endured them all to rescue you and me.  He gave up his rights to be treated like God. 

What’s more amazing is that Christ gave up his these rights so that you and I would gain one of the greatest rights known to man.  In John 1:12, we read these priceless words, “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.”

He gave up his rights so we could have the right to call heaven our eternal home. 

Thank God for the cross! 

Thank God for the empty tomb! 

Thank God he gave up his rights to rescue us.

Categories
encouragement praise Uncategorized

He’s Alive!

Thanks to Don Francisco:

The gates and doors were barred
And all the windows fastened down
I spent the night in sleeplessness
And rose at every sound
Half in hopeless sorrow
And half in fears that day
Would find the soldiers breaking through
To drag us all away

And just before the sunrise
I heard something at the wall
The gate began to rattle
And a voice began to call

Continue reading “He’s Alive!”

Categories
praise

All power, honor, and glory, forever and ever …

11Then I looked and heard the voice of many angels, numbering thousands upon thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand. They encircled the throne and the living creatures and the elders. 12In a loud voice they sang:

   “Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain,
   to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength
   and honor and glory and praise!” 

 13Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, singing:
   “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!”

Revelation 5

Categories
encouragement praise

Alive!

Must-see link: Alive!, by Max Lucado

Categories
politics, economy, etc.

Allied Abuse

While the Obama administration has been putting most of its public efforts behind promoting the federal overhaul/ownership of domestic healthcare, the affairs of the world and our place in it press on.  There appears a disturbing pattern of the current administration attempting to placate our enemies and mistreating key allies.

Mary O’Grady has an important article in the WSJ on US foreign policy toward one of our regional allies:  The U.S. vs. Honduran Democracy .  With the crumbling and strains suffered by market democracies over the past decade in this region, we should be doing everything we can to encourage Honduras to stay the course.  Trying to placate Chavez instead is a bad move.

The Obama administration has treated Britain, our closest European ally, with disrespect, see here and here  and here. 

While trying to carry through on the campaign promise to open and strengthen diplomatic ties with Iran, the Administration has taken a hard-line with Israel, our closest and perhaps only ally in the mideast. See here and here. Gary Bauer recently commented,

“What is particularly telling is that this is a president who has bowed to a Saudi king, who has repeatedly held his hand out to Iran only to have his face slapped in response and who has regularly suffered the slings and arrows of insults from Russia, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, to name a few. For whom does he reserve his anger, toughness and vehemence? For Israel, the only reliable ally we have in the Middle East.”

The Obama administration stunned Poland, our closest East European ally, as the administration attempted to court favor with the Russians, an attempt that utterly failed.  See here . 

John Bolton’s comments on this same topic here.

While critics of the administration focus efforts on rolling back the President’s aggressive, statist domestic policies, they should keep a close eye as well on how well we’re promoting and supporting our ideological and political allies worldwide.

Categories
encouragement theology

Happy Good Friday!

The irony and twists of God … a happy day because the innocent Christ was brutally slaughtered.  By the grace of God through his blood, we are saved if we will only place our faith and our trust in him.  We celebrate the price and fact of our redemption today, our eternal purchase, and at such cost.

Excerpts from Spurgeon’s sermon The Tomb of Jesus: 

 [W]e will stand at that tomb; we will examine it, and we trust we shall hear some truth-speaking voice coming from its hollow bosom which will comfort and instruct us, so that we may say of the grave of Jesus when we go away, “It was none other than the gate of heaven”—a sacred place, deeply solemn, and sanctified by the slain body of our precious Saviour. … 

 Away, ye profane—ye souls whose life is laughter, folly, and mirth! Away, ye sordid and carnal minds who have no taste for the spiritual, no delight in the celestial. We ask not your company; we speak to God’s beloved, to the heirs of heaven, to the sanctified, the redeemed, the pure in heart—and we say to them, “Come, see the place where the Lord lay.” Surely ye need no argument to move your feet in the direction of the holy sepulchre; but still we will use the utmost power to draw your spirit thither. Come, then, for ’tis the shrine of greatness, ’tis the resting-place of the man, the Restorer of our race, the Conqueror of death and hell. … 

  First, I would bid you stand and see the place where the Lord lay with emotions of deep sorrow. Oh cone, my beloved brother, thy Jesus once lay there. He was a murdered man, my soul, and thou the murderer.

  “Ah, you my sins, my cruel sins,
His chief tormentors were,
Each of my crimes became a nail,
And unbelief the spear.”

“Alas! and did my Saviour bleed?
And did my Sov’reign die?”

 I slew him—this right hand struck the dagger to his heart. My deeds slew Christ. Alas! I slew my best beloved; I killed him who loved me with an everlasting love. Ye eyes, why do you refuse to weep when ye see Jesus’ body mangled and torn? …

Come, view the place then, with all hallowed meditation, where the Lord lay. Spend this afternoon, my beloved brethren, in meditating upon it, and very often go to Christ’s grave, both to weep and to rejoice. Ye timid ones, do not be afraid to approach, for ’tis no vain thing to remember that timidity buried Christ. Faith would not have given him a funeral at all; faith would have kept him above ground, and would never have let him be buried; for it would have said, it would be useless to bury Christ if he were to rise. Fear buried him. Nicodemus, the night disciple, and Joseph of Arimathea, secretly, for fear of the Jews, went and buried him. Therefore, ye timid ones, ye may go too. Ready-to-halt, poor Fearing, and thou, Mrs. Despondency, and Much-afraid, go often there; let it be your favorite haunt, there build a tabernacle, there abide. And often say to your heart, when you are in distress and sorrow, “Come, see the place where the Lord lay.”

Complete sermon here.

Categories
theology

Is there anything more terrifying than the prospect of …

God’s judgment?

We like God’s love.  Is there anything more wonderful than it?

Polite company does not, however, talk about God’s judgment. It seems so out of touch with how nice things are.  The idea of an eternal Hell, wrath filled God, etc. is so entirely incongruous with Disney, Starbucks, and prime time entertainment.  I mean, Hell is passe. It’s also horribly uncomfortable to think about.  Kinda like thinking about the death of a child of someone you didn’t know very well.  Easier to just not think about it. 

Unfortunately, Hell is so entirely probable if God is perfect and/or the Bible is in any way true.  And if it’s a probable event and we know about it, it’s practically criminal to be silent about Hell.  Yet, silent we largely remain, myself included.

But who would go?  Certainly the unrepentant bad guys, Stalin, Hitler, and the criminals, especially those we hate the most, like people who do mean things to children. Most people can live with that idea.  But what about the idea of a much higher standard?  A standard of perfection?  The Adam and Eve standard.  They were cast from God’s presence and condemned to death for … eating an apple.  Disobeying God.  Departing from his will.  We depart from his will frequently if not continually.  When the foundation of God’s law is an affirmative and absolute standard of love, and it is, we typically live in a state of perpetual sin.

The Old Testament features a recurring pattern of God’s judging rebellion, e.g. Sodom, Gomorrah, Noah’s flood, and warning of a final judgment and eternal punishment, e.g. Isaiah 13; Dan. 12.  Some have suggested that the New Testament changes things, that somehow God is different or we know him more now that we know Jesus.  I find that sentiment most odd — that the God of the NT is somehow “new” or different or more “love” and less “wrath” than what we see in the OT — on at least two counts.  First,

Continue reading “Is there anything more terrifying than the prospect of …”