Monday, September 8
Isn’t griping about people’s griping itself a form of griping? Interesting when a pewfiller makes a negative observation the verbalization is condemned as “complaining”, “bickering”, or “murmuring.” However, when such pronouncements are enunciated from behind a pulpit, they are categorized as the “sharing of a concern” or “admonition”. Average Christians are told to keep their innermost thoughts and concerns to themselves unless they are confirmation about how peachy-keen everything is. They are then reamed a new one if they fail to articulate sufficiently incriminating confessions during the intelligence gathering exercise known as the taking of prayer requests.
Homeschool activist Kevin Swanson condemned as “traitors to the cause of freedom” World Magazine for publishing a story drawing attention to a number of homeschool students believing they were not served well by that pedagogical modality. Swanson is correct that those with a Christian worldview ought to expose the deficiencies and abuses of the secularist system. However, if one's loyalty is to God's truth and just not those claiming to be on your side, aren't those that were possibly mistreated in the name of religion also allowed to verbalize their concerns so as to better protect the movement from falling into Satan's snares? If entire ministries can be established to expose the dangers of the public system, what is wrong with someone doing the same regarding the underside of private and home education? True freedom must remain vigilant to protect against both the overly and areligious.
In a sermon on the purpose of the church, an Orthodox Presbyterian pastor remarked that the believer does not have the right to determine their own mission. It depends what is meant by that. One is not free to pursue a lifestyle in violation of the parameters of the “Thou shalt nots” of Scripture. However, within those boundaries one is free to “work out one's own salvation in fear and trembling”. If you zigged into one legitimate career instead of zagging into another, on what grounds can Jesus get ticked off at you unless He deliberately tells you what to do in the areas marked by considerable individual choice and preference?
Friday, September 5
Does Shimon Peres Advocate The Establishment Of Revelation's Harlot Church?
Contrary to a suggestion of what might be done to reform America, literal 24 hour around the clock prayer vigils are not required. Aren't such gestures more the worship of prayer rather than the One that prayer is supposed to be directed towards? Is God such an egomaniac that He is going to refuse to grant national revival or restoration unless he is constantly spoken to during those hours He has designed most to be sleeping through? Are around the clock prayer vigils so much about the God of Heaven or the finite human beings organizing such spectacles?
Homeschool activist Kevin Swanson in a 9/2014 broadcast suggested that Christian civilization might stand a better chance after America's collapse. But by that does he mean a generalized Christianity that respects economic liberty, private property, and individual theological conscience? Because often in environments characterized by profound social upheaval it is the most doctrinally strident expressions of a faith or creed that ends up imposing its peculiarities not through reasoned persuasion but rather through the force of violence.
Thursday, September 4
Is Chief Southern Baptist Missionary More Eager To Bash America Than Convert The Heathen?
The pastor is also author of “Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From The American Dream”.
A description of the tome at Amazon.com reads, “It's easy for the American Christian to forget how Jesus said how his followers would actually live...They would, he [Jesus] said , leave behind security, money, even family for him.”
Here we go with yet another attempt to use missions not so much as a methodology to bring those in other lands to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ but rather as a pretext to bash the American way of life.
For how are those things listed above: security, money, convenience, and family any different than what the inhabitants of nearly every other country on earth desire?
If one does not consider security all that important, perhaps one should be willing to exchange places with the persecuted and slaughtered Christian populations of Iraq and Syria.
Without money and security, it is doubtful that Rev. Platt would have wiggled his way into a megachurch pastorate nor American's rich enough to purchase his reflectively narcissistic manifestos.
God has indeed blessed America with an abundance of these things that have enabled Pastor Platt to become something of a celebrity in Evangelical Christian circles but which he begrudges the remainder of his fellow countrymen and coreligionists.
Is there a reason why we must flagellate ourselves in shame because of what God has given us?
For example, on the list it is insinuated that loyalty to family even when they are not tempting you towards things forbidden by God is not so much a strength but rather a weakness.
Yet the very same leftwing religionists that applaud the renunciation of bourgeoisie values insist that we must embrace nearly every illegal that pours across the border because these new arrivals are such family oriented people (even though the relationship arrangement being admired is not so much pro-child as it is the mother being afraid to cut off carnal access whenever daddy comes home sauced three sheets to the wind).
Interestingly, most of the migrants pour here for the same things we are supposed to be wracked with guilt over like Phil Donahue for possessing.
In his acceptance of the presidency of the Southern Baptist International Missions Board (a body found nowhere in Scripture if one is going to argue how we as Christians could lead more spiritually meritorious lives if we were more willing to embrace penury and destitution), “We talk all the time at Brook Hill [the church Platt pastors] about laying down a blank check with out lives, with no strings attached, willing to go wherever He leads, give whatever He asks, and do whatever He commands in order to make His glory known among the nations.”
And that is absolutely correct.
However, that blank check is to be written out to God, not so much the prelates and functionaries operating in His name through the organized church.
As Ann Coulter quipped, how come no one can serve God in America anymore?
It is about time religious leaders stop bashing those in America leading the perfectly ordinary lives that keep the mundane operations of a complex society functioning so robustly that there exists sufficient leisure time for a particular class to arise that enjoys nothing more than to wallow in this kind of existential criticism.
By Frederick Meekins