The Revenge of Conscience is an article by Albert Mohler about current trends in abortion and is not for the faint of heart. I do recommed it to anyone who wants to get some interesting facts to share about the slippery slope that ‘physicians’ are finding themselves sliding down.
I believe it’s time for a new Silent Scream video (also not for the faint of heart).
For God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness (Gen 1:3),” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down but not destroyed.
II Corinthians 1:3-4
For the past few weeks I’ve been reading a book called Biblical Womanhood in the Home edited by Nancy Leigh DeMoss. It has wonderful insights into developing what it means to be feminine in the eyes of God, how to be truly beautiful, our responsibilities as women and how to pass on a biblical perspective of being female to the next generation. Each chapter of the book is written by a different author including Carolyn Mahaney, Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Barbara Hughes, P. Bunny Wilson, Mary A. Kassian, Susan Hunt and Dorothy Kelley Patterson.
Right now I’m reading a section by Nancy and it was so good that I just wanted to share an except:
When God puts challenging circumstances in our lives, we either worship or we whine. I’m ashamed to say I’ve done more than my share of whining – even about ministry. “Oh, Lord, I’m tired of traveling. Do I have to go there? This is so hard! Why do I have to deal with that person?” I am reminded of the children of Israel in the wilderness who murmured incessantly. “If only God had just let us die in the wilderness,” they whined. One day God finally said in essence, “You want to die in the wilderness? Okay, you’ll die in the wilderness!” (see Num. 14:2, 28-30). Be careful what you say when you murmur – God may take you up on it.
Lord, don’t let me be a murmurer, let me be a worshiper. You remind me daily of how good you are. Thank you for being you and showing me your love, provision, mercy and blessing in this time of decision making. It’s hard but you are greater than all things, you are bigger than all things and I will praise you wherever you place me.
As you may know, Valerie and I live in the only state in the USA in which a party of seven, by a majority of one, has elected to modify the human condition by changing the definition of a single word. Massachusetts has, for several years now, by court edict, granted to homosexual couples the right to “marry.” It doesn’t bother them at all that this is ontologically impossible, on the level of granting fish the right to breathe by changing the definition of the word “lung.” A homosexual union cannot be a marriage because marriage entails a commitment to become a family by raising together the children that come from the union. Nevertheless, Massachusetts now hands out marriage certificates to couples of the same sex and has been forced to remove the words “father” and “mother” from birth certificates, replacing them with the words “Parent A” and “Parent B.”
How long this kind of nonsense will continue is a anyone’s guess. But organizations like VoteOnMarriage.org have been steadily working on the only legal recourse available: to change the Massachusetts constitution to make explicit what was originally assumed: that a marriage can only exist between a man and a woman. The effort has been surprisingly difficult. The amendment process in Massachusetts is particularly complicated – it requires a referendum and two separate votes in congress. In addition, many people in the MA congress are unwilling to even consider putting the issue on the ballot, and are willing to violate their own constitutional procedures to avoid it.
In addition, I’m finding, there are a large number of people who are very interested in insulting both their creator and human intelligence with a single word. So there has begun a campaign to bring the amendment process to a halt. One such organization is MassEquality, which I’ve just discovered. Apparently they believe the best arguments should be self-contradictory. Continue reading ““It’s wrong to vote on rights””
Todd Seavey is a writer of apparently some standing in New York City. He calls himself a libertarian, which is a philosophical tradition I can only moderately agree with, but he has written a critique of Feminism (as opposed to something like “traditional conservatism”) that I think is well worth reading. An excerpt:
far from feminism being the opposite of chivalry, it should by this late juncture in history be obvious that both chivalry and feminism are just systems for getting men to treat women more gently than they treat other men. The difference is that under chivalry, both sexes admitted this was the arrangement and under feminism, we are supposed to pretend women are being held to the same standard even when they aren’t.
A caution though: he makes some arguments based on sexuality which, though apparently accurate, are pretty unseemly.
Kyle informs me that I must put up a blog about what happened this morning.
We were eating breakfast and Kyle decided to use his coffee press to make some coffee. Now let me preface this with the fact that we actually don’t drink much coffee in our house, mostly tea. So Kyle made a couple of cups of coffee and I decided to drink a bit with milk and sugar in it (have to mask that bitter taste right?)
I poured in my milk and added four lumps of sugar to the concotion and began to drink. Everything tasted great. I polished off the dregs and put my dishes in the kitchen.
A few minutes later, Kyle asked, “so how’d you like the coffee?”
“Great! It was perfect once I put my milk and sugar in it.”
“Um. Didn’t you know that I had put sugar in the pot?”
“Oh no! How much?”
“Well, I figured that there was about two cups there so I put in eight cubes….maybe ten.”
By this point I was hiding my head and laughing. No wonder I couldn’t taste the coffee, I pretty much drank sugared milk with a bit of coffee flavor. Good thing I don’t drink it very often; better luck next time I guess.
[Rich Tatum](http://www.tatumweb.com/blog/), formerly a web designer at Christianity Today, has a penchant for organizing things. And being a Pentecostal blogger, he’s been organizing the “pneumasphere” for a while now, and providing a valuable service in the process. He’s got the most comprehensive list of quality charismatic bloggers available, and [any number of tools]( http://tatumweb.com/blog/2007/04/06/pneuma-stuff/) to filter through them. Most recently, he’s come up with a list of the [top 20 most influential pneumabloggers]( http://tatumweb.com/blog/2007/04/10/top-twenty/#top-20), based on [Technorati]( http://technorati.com/) rankings. No, I’m not in the top 20. But I was shocked to discover that I didn’t even *recognize* most of the people who are.
So I scanned through some of them, and found some interesting posts I thought I’d share:
**[The Gospel is Their Home](http://mymiscellanies.blogspot.com/2007/03/gospel-marriage-of-theology-and.html)**
Rob Wilkerson on Theology and Experience
**[One More Added to the Kingdom](http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/revivalblog/~3/101940453/)**
A story of the Holy Spirit working in a way that I really miss.
**[Dramatic Drop in Murder after Prayer](http://sprucegoose.blogspot.com/2007/01/dramatic-drop-in-murder-after-dc-prayer.html)**
In July of last year, the Christian Defense Coalition held a 24-hour prayer meeting in Washington, DC. Six months later, the murder rate is down 27%. Coincidence?
**[God of Bartlets](http://pen-of-the-wayfarer.blogspot.com/2007/03/have-you-heard-voice-of-god.html)**
If a human author wrote a book explaining, perhaps, his life, and then I were to call up this author and want to talk further with him about what he wrote, I would think it very bizarre if the author only answered me with quotes from his book,
never saying anything else, but finding little snippets to reply to me from the
published work. It would be very awkward and not very personal. I would wonder
about the author and how much he really wanted to interact with me.
I remember when some Russian believers emigrated to our neighborhood
from the old Soviet Union where they were persecuted. We “adopted” them but
when we first met we had no means of communicating with each other. The only way we figured out to communicate was to use each other’s bibles (theirs in Russian and ours in English) to point out our general intents and feelings. It was well-meaning, but limited. (We put a scripture citation on their birthday cake and they read it and cried!)
For the past couple of days I’ve been listening to a teaching on Jeremiah 9:17–19:
This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘Consider now. Call for the wailing women to come. Send for the most skillful of them. Let them come quickly and wail over us until our eyes overflow with tears and water streams from our eyelids.’ The sound of wailing is heard in Zion. ‘How ruined we are! How great is our shame.’
…and this morning was really good. Continue reading “Do You Weep?”
This morning on the drive in I was listening to a sermon on the radio that was talking about apostasy. Continue reading “Thoughts to Ponder”
My CMA pastor friend from Gordon-Conwell is telling his troubles with Daylight Savings Time this weekend:
[I] woke up with a start at (what I thought was) 4:00 a.m. “I forgot to reset the clocks!” I breathed. I reset my watch and alarm clock, depressed to note that I now had to wake up in less than an hour. Sigh.
At church Sunday morning, I was exhausted, and so was the congregation. I had a good sermon that I could barely get through, and seeing all the sleepy eyes was no help.
I had something of an inverse experience: We had bought a new clock after Christmas, and I remembered something about it being able to keep track of Daylight Savings. But people had been telling us for over a week how things were all messed up this year because Congress had moved the dates for daylight savings time and that all automatically updating clocks would be all messed up (my laptop is still wrong). So we set the bedroom clock forward an hour, but I left the alarm off. Instead, I set an alarm on my phone, hoping that at least the phone would properly update, since phones re-sync whenever you replace the battery.
Suddenly, I awoke to what sounded like the ringing of an old Bell phone, and desperately ran to answer my phone. As I realized that it was just the alarm, I looked up at our bedroom clock to see that it was 8:00. The phone hadn’t updated! With only half an hour left to get ready and still get to church on time, I hurried to the shower. Only after I had turned the water off did Valerie inform me that every other clock in the house (the unadjusted ones) said that it was only just after 6:00.
Our bedroom phone had been moved forward twice: once by me as we were going to bed, and once by itself, at 2:00, as scheduled. Everything else was normal, though my wife was given some extra entertainment by observing the fastest shower her husband has ever taken: a laggardly 15 minutes.
neumatikos 