#Provebers 29:2

[dwuerch-blog]

The Home Stretch

We closed out the first week of early voting with having had an incredible turnout of voters.  People from every walk of life have shown up with enthusiasm, casting their ballots with hope and purpose. And now, as we move into the final stretch, there’s an energy in the air, a hopeful anticipation that the path we’re on will lead us closer to God’s heart for our future. In moments like this, the…

[truthandlove]

You are the Swamp

The Bible is always proven right and fools mock it because they hate the author - the Author of Life:

"When the righteous are in authority and become great, the people rejoice; But when the wicked man rules, the people groan and sigh." - Provebs 29:2

"Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin condemns any people." - Proverbs 14:34

The sin a nation tolerates is the sin that destroys it. We've allowed debauchery to fill television and then pretend we don't know why kids are comitting more serious sexual and violent crimes. We treat our own babies as disposable! We exalt materialism and then pretend to not know why so many leaders are guilty of corruption. We treat people as disposable, spouses as disposable, relationships as disposable. We treat people at the safe distance of online and those serving us, like cashiers, as OK to dump our stress on and go off emotionally on. We are abusers pretending it is all justified. We are damn hypocrites.

We PRETEND to be against the deep state, but then proceed to entangle our lives with it in hundreds of ways, participating in its medicine and 'healthcare', its military industrial complex contracts, in big pharmacy, in big tobacco, in big OIL, in big porn, its drug narcotics industry, call that harmless fun, its education/indoctrination systems, in its industry of fake religion. We learn our bank LAUNDERS millions and millions for the globalist oligarchs, CIA drugs and STILL BANK THERE. In these and millions of other ways, we conveniently imagine are very small things, we are not the hands and feet of Jesus - His bodily expression on Earth; rather we are the complicit enablers of Satan's every agenda. We run to do every convenient thing Satan suggests! We have become the hands and feet of Satan - expressing his values through our actions.

We demonstrate with our lives that we LOVE sin - in thousands of big and small ways. We prove we love corruption. We pretend to be shocked and outraged when politicians have extramarital affairs or are caught skimming money or inside trading... whe the average American is FRANTICALLY WORKING HARD to do all the same things, just at the much smaller scales within their reach, but the greedy heart IS THE SAME. The lust IS THE SAME. The fake compassion IS THE SAME. The public posturing IS THE SAME. The phony respectability in church on Sunday IS THE SAME as the political posturing and strutting we read about in the daily news.

The wicked heart is actually the SAME in them and us; we just can't cheat on the same SCALE as our exalted leaders, but we APE their same drives and desires in countless ways, while pretending we condemn them when they get caught. We LOVE to displace and project our own wicked hearts onto them, because it helps us point the finger of hypocrisy and avoid our inner godlessness and lovelessness -- our enshrined and fiercely-protected distrust of Father God to provide for and love us -- being too busy diving in deep to the Vanity Fair of America Babylon.

We Americans are the "everyday hypocrites", the "run of the mill corrupt". We love to pretend to be against the things we are actually FOR. American culture is one big LIE. We love to pretend that GOD FAVORS US, when our lives are filled with breaking His very instructions. Worse, we pretend that WE LOVE GOD, while worshipping money, convenience, status, and our "Live for #1 culture". WHY do we engage in everyday blasphemy by calling God "Lord" when an objective analysis of how we spend our time clearly reveals we have no actual interest in doing what He says? In prioritizing what He values most? The problem is that actually following God requires something repugnant to us -- unselfishness. We love to think about ourselves and use our God-given minds to calculate how to best feather our nests, our temporary sandcastles -- packing them to the brim with creature comforts. So on judgement day when the records are opened, our lives reveal we actually lived with a satanic agenda - pampering ourselves - while our Lord was out in the streeets, weeping at how we treat each other. While heaven weeps that they cannot get into our churches because the self-righteous smug assurances have so filled every molecule of the church building that there is no room for the culture of heaven to get in sideways!

We have tolerated the sin of living for ourselves, when our Lord clearly told us to die to self. But that would require ACTUALLY TRUSTING God, and we live with a fierce independence that fights love right out of our lives everywhere we might encounter it - refusing to truly trust and thus truly die... to truly live. Thus, we choose death every day. We kill off love and relatedness; we kill off compassion. We choose godlessness, because our actions vote for it again and again throughout each day.

Americans live as ENEMIES of the Gospel. We will be numbered with the hypoctites who did their utmost to engineer the death of Jesus, the Pharisees in their eternal morality and internal lovelessness, who actually said "crucify him" while doing so in the name of following the Roman State as good little citizens. Heaven sees that our lives, just like theirs, are screaming "we have no king but Caesar!" We want to "win" IN THIS LIFE, taking the age-old bait of Satan, and want nothing to do with the actual "King of the Jews." He's far too shabby for polite society! And thus our hearts, just like those of the Pharisees, crucify the King of Glory through our practical satanism, daily.

Follow any given day in an American's life and see how many times their actions are motivated by "getting ahead", gaining an unfair advantage, selfish ambition, obtaining some status or perk, living to look good in the eyes of other humans we don't even actually respect or love. We are thus rabid worshippers of Satan, folling HIS self-justified and envious heart to the TEE, and calling it "normal"! Calling every relief-seeking sin, "warranted" given the stress or inner pain we experience. And we are so full of bullshit that we complain when our hired prosecutors do not actually condemn public injustice -- when our lives are screaming in millions of ways every single day that we actually ADORE injustice?

The fact is we CANNOT purge our leaders of sin or truly, follow through to condemn them, when we are envious of their lavish lifestyles, celeb status, or simply ape their lusts. We cannot divorce the sin we ourselves are sleeping with! The stream of corruption extends from the elites down through the workaday selfish American, the same godless mindset, committing similar hypocrisy and crimes against God, at the maximum, though smaller, scale our own limited social status permits. We will never truly "drain the swamp" when we are actually ACTIVELY STRIVING to be part of it -- to play our selfish roles within its systems.

All the while, Jesus Himself is busy healing hearts, giving of Himself with compassion, being shamefully humble, being outrageously unselfish, getting kicked out of churches for looking too much like a homeless person... and so forth. God is TOO MEEK to exist within American PRIDE. The stench has become too much. America loves compromise. America loves greed. America loves to insulate itself from every discomfort. America loves corruption and idolizes it in millions of ways, calling it "going along to get along", "playing ball", or "looking the other way", or simply "getting ahead."

Thus God will GRANT America the ACTUAL desires of its heart, not its sanitized desires meant for public display, but the desires and values our actions demonstrate we truly idolize -- Godlessness, rabid self-consumption and callous destruction. You asked for it; you got it. - by Marcus 2017

[dailybiblelessons]

Lessons for September 20 to 26

What's ahead in the Bible readings for this Week

September 20 to 27 The Eighteenth Week After Pentecost The Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time

This Week's Image

This week's image is Titian's Wisdom. This seems appropriate to the epistles for the week and the semi-continuous Hebrew Scriptures, which focus on wisdom.

Gospel Lessons

In our Sunday Gospel, Jesus continues his teaching about the passion to come. In the Saturday Gospel, Jesus tells the scribes and Pharisees that they are hypocrites for claiming that if the prophets were alive in their time, the religious leaders would not have stoned them. He specifically mentioned Abel and Zechariah. The Zechariah who was stoned in the temple courtyard was the son of the priest Jehoiada. The story is told in 2 Chronicles 24:20-22. Jehoiada plays a part in Tuesday's Comlementary Hebrew Scripture reading, discussed below. (Matthew, or a later editor, incorrectly identifies the martyred Zechariah as the son of Berachiah. That Zechariah is the prophet for whom a Bible book is named.)

Epistles

Three of our Epistle readings this week carry a theme of wisdom. Sunday's reading from James has this to say:

Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth. Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish.

Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, has some advice for us about relying on human wisdom. He wrote “My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.”

The Friday reading from Romans also has a warning about claiming to be wiser than we are.

Compementary Hebrew Scriptures

In the Sunday Hebrew Scripture, the prophet Jeremiah complains of the schemes against him, and asks God for retribution against the plotters, another confirmation of the difficulties the prophets faced.

The Hebrew Scriptures during our days of preparation concern Israel's turning away from God to worship other gods. In the Thursday Hebrew Scripture, another unnamed prophet (likely different than the one we had in two of last week's readings) told the Israelites that they had failed to heed God's voice. In the Friday Hebrew Scripture, King Ahab, ruler of Israel and a worshiper of Baal, is killed. Ahab's wife was Jezebel, whose daughter plays a part in the Tuesday Hebrew Scripture. In the Friday reading, Zedekiah, one of the four hundred prophets of Baal, strikes the prophet Micaiah, who predicted the death of Ahab. As Micaiah prophesied, Ahab—even though he disguised himself as an ordinary warrior—is killed in a battle, while the king of Judah survived. In the Saturday reading, it is the Assyrians who conquered Israel, because “they had worshiped other gods and walked in the customs of the nations whom the Lord drove out before the people of Israel, and in the customs that the kings of Israel had introduced.”

The backstory for Tuesday's Hebrew Scripture is interesting. Athaliah, who was Jezebel's daughter, was married to Jehoram, the king of Judah, in order to strengthen the ties between the two kingdoms. Jehoram was succeeded by Ahaziah, his only surviving son. Ahaziah was killed in a military coup. Athaliah then had all her grandchildren killed and seized the throne. She did not know that Jehoash, one of Ahaziah's sons, wasn't killed. Athaliah's sister took him to Jehoiada, who kept him safe, then had him crowned under the protection of the palace guard when he was seven.

Semi-continuous Hebrew Scriptures

We continue to read from the wisdom literature, this week with sayings attributed to Agur in Provebs and from Ecclesiastes. Agur in Hebrew means gatherer. The author of Ecclesiastes, often referred to as The Preacher, also has a name derived from gatherer, in this case the Hebrew Qohelet. “All is vanity” is a phrase that repeats in the book. The introduction to Ecclesiastes in The New Interpreter's Study Bible, says that the Hebrew word translated as vanity literally means breath or vapor, which reflects the idea that life is ephemeral, short, and sometimes incomprehensible. The introduction also says that many consider The Preacher a pessimist, while others find a consistent countering of pessimism with joy. As always, you can decide for yourself. There is other interesting reading this week, including the story of Naaman on Monday and Jeremiah's call on Wednesday.

May these readings bring a blessing into your life. Thank you for all that you do to bring God's reign into being. Mike Gilbertson

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Links for the week ahead

Thursday to Sunday Psalms Complementary Psalm 54 God is my helper. Semi-continuous Psalm 1 God watches over the way of the righteous, but the wicked will perish.

Thursday: Preparation for the Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time Complementary Judges 6:1-10 The Israelites are oppressed by the Midianites because they did not heed God's voice. Semi-continuous Proverbs 30:1-10 Every word of God proves true; they shield those who take refuge in God. Both 1 Corinthians 2:1-5 Let your faith rest not on human wisdom, but the power of God.

Friday: Preparation for the Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time Complementary 1 Kings 22:24-40 The prophet Micaiah is imprisoned. Semi-continuous Proverbs 30:18-33 If you stir up anger, you get strife. Both Romans 11:25-32 The elect include Gentile believers in Christ and the Jews.

Saturday: Preparation for the Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time Complementary 2 Kings 17:5-18 Israel ignores the warnings of every prophet and seer and so is carried captive into Assyria. Semi-continuous Ecclesiastes 1:1-18 In much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow. Both Matthew 23:29-39 Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and those who are sent to it.

The Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time Complementary Jeremiah 11:18-20 Jeremiah commits his cause to God. Semi-continuous Proverbs 31:10-31 Ode to a capable wife Both James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a Draw near to God, and God will draw near to you. Both Mark 9:30-37 Jesus says, "Whoever welcomes on of these little children in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me, but the One who sent me."

Monday to Wednesday Psalms Complementary Psalm 139:1-18 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Semi-continuous Psalm 128 The happy home of the faithful

Monday: Reflection on the Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time Complementary 2 Kings 5:1-14 A captive Israelite girl tells Naaman's wife to send him to Elisha, who tells him how to cure his leprosy. Semi-continuous Proverbs 27:1-27 Don't boast about tomorrow, because you do not know what it will bring. Both James 4:8-17 You are a mist that appears for a little while then vanishes.

Tuesday: Reflection on the Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time Complementary 2 Kings 11:21-12:16 Jehoash, the boy king, has the temple rebuilt. Semi-continuous Ecclesiastes 4:9-16 A friend is valuable. Both James 5:1-6 You rich people, weep for the miseries that are coming to you.

Wednesday: Reflection on the Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time Complementary Jeremiah 1:4-10 God calls Jeremiah Semi-continuous Ecclesiastes 5:1-20 A fool's voice comes with many words. Both John 8:21-38 Everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.

*Denominations have different ways of designating the weeks during the year, so your church may refer to this week by a different name. Regardless of the name, the readings are the same. Here is an explanation: Calendar Explanation

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The Holy Bible: New International Version (NIV) Hardcover

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Complete Jewish Bible Softcover (Updated)

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Selections from Revised Common Lectionary Daily Readings, copyright © 1995 by the Consultation on Common Texts. Unless otherwise indicated, Bible text is from The New Revised Standard Version, (NRSV) copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All right reserved. Image credit: Wisdom by Titian, via Wikimedia Commons. Black corners replaced by white by Michael Gilbertson using Photoshop 13 May 2016. This is a public domain image.