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Friday, February 22, 2013

A Sober Reminder

This sobering quote surfaces from time to time, usually around election season. But it certainly bears repeating as it is becoming more and more the stark reality that stares us right in the face.

Alexander Fraser Tytler, a Scottish historian/professor who wrote several books in the late 1700s and early 1800s at some point in his career supposedly penned these prophetic words:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."

"The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

From Bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage."


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Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.
- Hebrews 12:28-29

Monday, February 18, 2013

Eternal Irony! Our "ho-hum" Toward Jesus

"Then I looked, and I heard around the throne and the living creatures and the elders the voice of many angels, numbering myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice, “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain...!" - Revelation 5:11-12

To our shame, we are bored of Jesus! Overlay a Revelation 5 moment on top of our own feelings, attitudes toward the eternally significant Jesus. Revelation 5 pulses like a transcendent heart-beat with the preeminent significance of the Lamb who is unveiled as absolute Sovereign over all things in the eternal purposes of God.

There the curtain is pulled back and the focus is magnificently and magnetically drawn toward the true, living center - the Lamb and His great glory! Contrast this with our smallness and fleetingness of thought toward Him. We are all about religion and little about Jesus. Only when we awaken from this delusion will we see what the eternal story was truly about.

Until then, we will play our games, toying about and being enamored with our cause, our dogma, our achievements, our "ministry" - our distractions.

It is truly all about Jesus - His glory, His eternal narrative. His supreme story.

That's why Paul says, (my paraphrase), "philosophy, wisdom, knowledge, religion...it's all bunk if it does not radiate from, find it's identity out of, mark it's definition from the Center" (Col. 2:8-10). As the spokes of a wheel relate to the hub, the center, so all reality finds it's defining point in Jesus, the true Center of the universe.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7HUUxLSFQg&sns=em




Sunday, February 17, 2013

Sometimes I Wish Reincarnation Were True

Sometimes I wish reincarnation were true. At least if I could select those who were reincarnated and why.

* Stonewall Jackson, so he could fight at Gettysburg.

* Dietrich Bonhoffer, so he could see he did not die in vain.

* C. S. Lewis, because we need something to counter the effects of Joel Osteen.

* R. J. Rushdoony, who was like a father to us all. (Like our earthly fathers, we did not always agree with him. But there was just something about the way he said it, and the wisdom...)

* Greg Bahnsen, because it would be so cool to see Richard Dawkins and Samuel Harris cower away to some silent, withering little corner.

* Harold Camping, (without a mic) just so he could see how wrong he was and how much folly the Church suffered at his apparently oh-so-gentle hands.

* Karl Marx, so that he could see what he and his brutal ideologies led to in Russia, southeast Asia, China, Germany, eastern Europe....then you'd want him dead again before he got a glimpse of Obama's America. It would be too nauseating to watch him gloat over seeing his ideologies conquer a mighty freedom-loving nation such as ours.

* Michael Spencer. We need to keep going down the path you were pointing to. We sorely miss you brother.

Guess I'll have to wait for the resurrection.