#can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a reference to Paul from the Bible

[inkdragon1900]

Something about wether or not Paul is “keeping a piece of a dance card.” Or “Saving the last dance.” Something about how we have not begun to see the horrors of love.

[christian-perspectives]

God's Resources Are Unlimited And Will Empower You

I pray that from God's glorious, unlimited resources he will empower you with inner strength through his Spirit. Ephesians 3:16 I probably don't need to ask, but I'll ask anyhow. Do you want God's unlimited resources to empower you? Who wouldn't say yes to a question like that? To us, Gentiles, the Apostle Paul gave us some encouraging words. He let us know that until Jesus came onto the scene, only the Jews had access to God's resources. In those days you were living apart from Christ. You were excluded from citizenship among the people of Israel, and you did not know the covenant promises God had made to them. You lived in this world without God and without hope. But now you have been united with Christ Jesus. Once you were far away from God, but now you have been brought near to him through the blood of Christ. Ephesians 2:12-13 Free eBook Don't you find it hard to believe that, at one time, our ancestors didn't have access to God? The apostle let us know that through Christ, He grafted us into the family as if we always belonged.  So now you Gentiles are no longer strangers and foreigners. You are citizens along with all of God's holy people. You are members of God's family. Ephesians 2:9 Paul continued by saying that God himself revealed His mysterious plan to him. God did not reveal it to previous generations, but by his Spirit, he revealed it to his apostles and prophets. And this is God's plan: Both Gentiles and Jews who believe the Good News share equally in the riches inherited by God's children. Both are part of the same body, and both enjoy the promise of blessings because they belong to Christ Jesus. Ephesians 3:6

The Apostle Paul's Privilege

The apostle considered it a privilege to serve God by spreading this Good News. So, first, he revealed God's plan. Next, he laid out God's purpose, which involves the church. God's purpose in all this was to use the church to display his wisdom in its rich variety to all the unseen rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This was his eternal plan, which he carried out through Christ Jesus our Lord. Ephesians 3:10-11 At one time, God only extended His promises to the Jews and not the Gentiles. But now, through the saving work of Christ Jesus, we have access to all of God's resources. Paul then prayed in verse 16, this powerful prayer for the church. He asked that it receive God's glorious, unlimited resources with the empowerment of inner strength through his Spirit. The more we rely on God's resources, the more room we will have for God in our lives. Paul referred to it as letting the roots of God's love sprout and grow in us. Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. Your roots will grow down into God's love and keep you strong. Ephesians 3:17 We begin to take on more of God's nature when the roots grow deep into our hearts. I once read a phrase that I considered profound. "Love isn't what God does. Love is who God is." And may you have the power to understand, as all God's people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is. Ephesians 3:18

God's Resources and Love

We will always receive God's resources on a foundation of love. He wants us to go beyond just knowing about His love. God reveals it to us so we can experience His love. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Ephesians 3:19 Why can't we understand the love the Lord extends to us? I suppose the easy answer comes because of our finite thinking. We tend to put parameters around the amount of love we give out. Defining God's love will always fall short. What we recognize about His love includes the following. Unconditional, eternal, and freely given to everyone, regardless of their actions. The Bible gives us an idea of God's love in First Corinthians 13, the love chapter. That chapter tells us what love does and doesn't do, but our understanding of it doesn't go too deep. So, instead of trying to understand the Love of the Lord, the apostle says we should just experience it. Verse 19 continues by telling us what that experience will get us. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God. Ephesians 3:19 The fullness of life we receive from the Lord means that God's resources will flow from us. Then, the Lord can use us to effectively minister the love of Christ to others. Think for a moment where we Gentiles have come since Jesus died on the cross and rose again. He made a way for us to become heirs of God and joint heirs with Him. In other words, He made us a part of God's family. Therefore, because of the rights and privileges of family, we can go directly to God in Jesus' name. So, give God glory!

All Glory for God's Resources

Now all glory to God, who is able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think. Ephesians 3:20 God's glorious, unlimited resources have empowered us with inner strength through His Spirit. God's emphasis points to His unlimited resources, forever and ever. Glory to him in the church and in Christ Jesus through all generations forever and ever! Amen. Ephesians 3:21 Lord, thank you for making us complete with all the fullness of your love. You have provided us with spiritual strength through your unlimited resources. Check out these other related posts about the power of God - What is the Best Way To Experience God’s Power? - It’s Exciting To Believe God For The Unbelievable - He Gives Power To The Weak - The Lord Is My Strength And Shield Read the full article

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Okay, but if Jesus isn't real, why do historians believe he is real if the gospels are made up?

There are two things we need to be careful of: what we mean by "historians" and what we mean by "Jesus."

History is studied based on evidence. There are multiple lines of evidence for someone like Alexander the Great or even Pontius Pilate. For Jesus, there are zero. Jesus never wrote anything. People who supposedly knew him didn't write anything about him. No record keepers - or what we might regard today as journalists - traveled along with him to see what was up with this amazing man who definitely existed.

If a person existed today who could verifiably walk on water, wouldn't journalists and reporters follow that person around trying to get interviews and pictures and record everything they could about what this unique-in-all-of-history person said and did?

The bible says that people came from far and wide to have their illnesses cured. There aren't any records from doctors to indicate anything of the sort occurred. There aren't any records showing chronic leprosy outbreaks suddenly vanishing. We should be able to trace a pathway through the Middle East as he conducted his ministry, a route along which diseases were miraculously eliminated, with unusual levels of health and wellbeing. Even if we can’t find him, we should be able to see the effects of his activities.

Instead, what we have in the bible is stories written decades after by anonymous authors who weren't there, revised, expanded, rewritten and elaborated for 200 years before being canonized. There’s nothing anyone can tell us about Jesus that doesn’t come from the bible.

The only thing we can find in history is people who believed he existed. Even the bible admits this. But this doesn’t get us anywhere. We can also find people in history who believe Slenderman, Paul Bunyan and interstellar aliens existed.

None of the gospels were actually written by anyone named for the books. Believers often claim that they're eyewitness accounts, but we know they're not, and we know that the names given to them are by tradition, not by authorship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel

The four canonical gospels were probably written between AD 66 and 110. All four were anonymous (with the modern names added in the 2nd century), almost certainly none were by eyewitnesses, and all are the end-products of long oral and written transmission.

The word “pseudepigrapha“ is a deliberately obscurantist term referring to bible lies. Many of the non-gospel writings, such as the epistles have questionable authorship: a good half of Paul’s epistles are regarded as fraudulent (that is, pseudepigrapha), having been written by other people pretending to be Paul; while other epistles are anonymous, falsely attributed to people who didn’t write them, or ambiguous.

Mark was the first gospel, and wasn't written until at least 30 years after Jesus' death. Believers like to cite writers like Thallos, whose writings were sketchy at best, and Josephus and Tacitus, despite Josephus not even being born until at least four years after Jesus’ supposed death.

Thirty years ago, the Rodney King riots broke out in Los Angeles. Imagine if no record of this event existed until today. Imagine if we relied entirely upon the records of someone born four years after, in 1996, to understand what happened at that time. The problem with citing either Josephus or the gospels themselves is that we know they didn’t get it first-hand. If these writers had sources, we should be getting those sources instead. But we’re not.

We know that the Resurrection story from Mark 16:9 onwards was added on much later by someone else (i.e. it's fraudulent). This isn't even controversial. We also know that Matthew is an attempt to revise and redact Mark and was written even later. In many cases it copies word-for-word what Mark says. Luke is similar. When they're not copying each other verbatim, they're often saying completely contradictory things.

John makes things even worse. The Jesus of John might as well be a completely different person. He's doing different things for different reasons. He isn't the “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” Jesus of Mark, Matthew and Luke, he's bolder and unambiguously divine. Or as one writer put it: "John portrays Jesus as 'a God striding over the face of the earth.'" Just the kind of story you'd write if you were creating propaganda for a new cult.

We know that the nativity story was added at least a hundred years later. We know that the crucifixion story is ahistorical; crucifixions were not carried out that way or for those crimes, and bodies were left up to rot as a warning to others. He would not have been taken down and buried; the Romans would never have cared about Jewish custom. And there are no records of the other men who were supposedly crucified alongside him.

We also know that the depictions of characters such as Pontius Pilate contradict what we know of the real people. And nobody can actually find where Jesus supposedly was or did at any particular time.

We know the Cleansing of the Temple - where Jesus disrupted the moneychangers - is ahistorical. Despite most artwork showing a few dozen people being chased out of a church, the temple itself was multiple times larger than a sports stadium, taking multiple years to finish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Temple#Herod's_Temple

Reconstruction of the temple under Herod began with a massive expansion of the Temple Mount temenos. For example, the Temple Mount complex initially measured 7 hectares (17 acres) in size, but Herod expanded it to 14.4 hectares (36 acres) and so doubled its area.

A standard American football pitch is about 0.7 hectares (1.7 acres).

Because the moneychangers were a necessary part of Jewish worship - pilgrims were expected to bring an animal to sacrifice, but many traveling from afar would need to buy one locally and would only have their own currency - the act itself would have been regarded as an antisemitic scandal, comparable to plastering swastikas all over your local sports stadium, and reverberating throughout the Jewish community. It's written about nowhere in Jewish records. And considering it was supposedly perpetrated by a Jewish man, it’s clear the author had no idea of the significance of these practices.

None of this constitutes "history." It's not just that the gospels are explicitly not historical, it's that the history we do know about doesn't line up with what the bible says.

This is historical Neil Patrick Harris.

This is Harold and Kumar (H&K) Neil Patrick Harris.

Historical NPH is a gay man. H&K NPH is a drugged-out, heterosexual creep. It’s entirely possible that Historical NPH has gone to White Castle at some point in time. Does that make H&K NPH real? No. The existence of Historical NPH goes no way towards making H&K NPH real. 

Likewise, even if anyone could find a Historical Yeshua - and nobody can - we can concede the existence of some Jewish apocalypse preacher roaming around the countryside without any anxiety or pain. His existence goes nowhere towards substantiating the claims of the bible.

The Jesus of the bible was specific. He did specific acts, said specific things. Although even the bible itself is contradictory about what those things are. For example, the bible gives two contradictory genealogies leading from Adam - who we know to be fictional anyway - through to Jesus. As mentioned, we know that the Pilate of the bible is a fictional version of real-world Pilate, in the same way as H&K NPH.

Historical fiction is a genre of writing. “Gone With the Wind” is set against the backdrop of the American Civil War and Reconstruction. Didn’t happen. The film Contact depicts then-US President Bill Clinton telling us about alien contact. Didn’t happen.

We know that it’s only recently that writings in the “biography” genre are intended to be historically accurate. Prior to only a couple of hundred years ago, “biography” referred to a class of writings that were intended to be inspirational or to promote admiration for the subject, not tell an unbiased, accurate account of their life. In the case of Xianity, “hagiography” refers to this kind of propaganda intended to inspire people to convert.

The bible not being a historical document is even stated so at times by the authors. Paul openly states that he lies - he becomes like one of whomever he wants to convince. The author of John, in a section literally called “The Purpose of John’s Gospel,” claims to have written it so “that you may believe,” not to state reliably what happened. The author of Luke begins by saying that there are a lot of stories about what went on in those days, and that he’s going to provide the true account. And then proceeds to mostly regurgitate Mark.

The gospels aren’t even written like eyewitness accounts, being consistently in the third-person no matter who is around, including when Jesus is alone by himself, when Jesus is alone with Pilate, or alone with the Devil. Nor are they written like historical record, since they don’t provide the account of where this information came from, who told who, the records the author used to construct this history. They’re all written like fictional narratives. It’s weird believers don’t notice this.

The argument around a historical, real-world counterpart to the character in the bible is nothing but a distraction. Believers propose a divine, magical man, literally the son of a god, but when pressed on it instead try to justify it by the mere existence of some unremarkable Jewish man. It’s what’s called “playing tennis without a net.” When the net is imaginary, every ball you serve, no matter how weak, goes over it.

Any amount of historicity in the bible - and there isn’t as much as most believers think - is irrelevant.

Believers must find their magical, water-walking, water-to-wine-making, demons-in-pigs, fig-tree-cursing, flying-into-the-sky Jesus. The one the bible actually describes.

But first, they should actually try to write down a coherent sequence of events of his life using all the gospels, without leaving anything out. When they figure out that it’s not possible to form a coherent history of Jesus’ life, they should reconsider why they thought any of it was historical in the first place.

Until they can and do, we don’t need to put much thought into storybook characters. Much less worship them.

[michelles-garden-of-evil]

Episode 29 Review: The Missing Cyanide

{ YouTube: 1 | 2 }

{ Full Synopses/Recaps: Debby Graham | Bryan Gruszka }

{ Screencaps }

Welcome back to the isle of Maljardin, whose lush foliage and majestic château mask a deadly evil, one who has grown deadlier with the acquisition of a bottle of cyanide. SIx episodes ago, Jean Paul Desmond removed the bottle from the medicine poison cabinet in the former laboratory of the late Dr. Menkin, only for Jean Paul’s ancestor Jacques Eloi des Mondes to spirit it away shortly after and hide it the-Devil-knows-where. Now the inhabitants and detained guests of the island search for the bottle before its contents can spell their death.

We open with Alison searching for the vial of cyanide in the aforementioned poison cabinet. (Speaking of which, the fact that Dr. Menkin had a whole cabinet full of bottles labeled “POISON” makes him appear just as suspicious as Jean Paul. What kinds of experiments might he have performed that required the use of poison?) For those of you who love to make fun of YouTube’s automatic captions (I hope it’s not just yours truly), the opening scene is a treat, with a whole 30 seconds of subtitled background music:

The YouTube caption bots have officially gone mad.

She sees Quito and asks him if he has seen the bottle, even drawing a picture of it to make sure he knows which one she’s referring to. He tries to tell her using various gestures, but she doesn’t understand the meaning, and neither Raxl nor Jean Paul is around to interpret. During his first two attempts, he touches his head and then sweeps a hand either outward or upward: “Jacques possessed Jean Paul and swiped it,” perhaps? For his third attempt, he points at himself, then towards the doorway, then makes a “chatterbox” motion with his hand, then points below. I think that means, “I’m going to tell Raxl” (or “I,” “go,” “talk,” “down below”) if only because he goes to fetch her to interpret next.

THE DEVIL JACQUES ELOI DES MONDES, here playing the role of the Greek chorus. Colin Fox doesn’t appear in this episode[1], but he did record a voice-over for Jacques’ portrait in advance. Jacques is also looking especially rosy in this shot--very cute.

Back in the lab, Raxl interprets Quito’s signs, and it turns out I was close with my guess on the meaning of the first combination. According to Raxl, touching the forehead followed by the swiping motion means “the master took it.” Alison asks when he took the bottle, Quito signs some more, and Raxl translates: “Two days ago.” She adds that she doesn’t believe that Jean Paul intentionally took it, but that “I fear that he was under a spell of that accursed Jacques Eloi des Mondes.”

After Alison says that the bottle contained enough cyanide to kill everyone on the island, Raxl makes the Sign of the Great Serpent for the first time, albeit with only one hand instead of both.

This brings up the issue of who killed Dr. Menkin (obviously Jacques) and Erica (true cause of death still unknown), and is reminiscent of the mystery of where the conjure doll and silver pin was hidden. Alison begs her to search everywhere including Jean Paul’s room--which is normally off-limits to her--for the doll and pin, even though that will end her erotic dreams about dashing chevalier Jacques. I suppose we all need to make sacrifices.

In the Great Hall, Raxl tells Quito that she is going to contact the Conjure Woman aka Vangie Abbott. Quito shakes his head and grabs her as though pleading for her not to do it. This is reminiscent of the scene in Episode 13 when Quito freaked out over Raxl’s mention of Vangie’s father, the Conjure Man, and also begged her not to. Kurt Schiegl did an excellent job conveying Quito’s thoughts and feelings without speaking. He could have gone into silent films, if they were still a thing in the sixties.

Quito is undead. Does he even still have a heartbeat?

She descends to the crypt and then waits for Quito to join her before entering the Not-So-Hidden Temple (good, atmospheric scene).

Some favorite shots from the scene.

Meanwhile, Matt finds Alison calling for her in the Great Hall:

OK, Captain Obvious.

She tells him about the cyanide and convinces him to help her find it, but won’t tell him who she believes has it.

Meanwhile, Raxl lays out some Tarot cards in the Not-So-Hidden Temple. “The Tarot is as Evangeline Abbott said. Now with the help of the Great Serpent, I shall summon her.” She begins a ritual, bidding Quito beat the drums as she calls for the Conjure Woman to join her.

We cut back to the Great Hall and learn that Matt now considers Raxl’s beliefs superstition, because she believes in Jacques’ ghost and he does not. He doesn’t believe in witchcraft or possession either. Remember, this is a man who said nineteen episodes ago, “The Tarot is the soul’s way to God. Any path that leads to God should have a minister’s approval.” He’s far from anti-superstition when it comes to the Tarot--and besides, the Bible mentions witchcraft and possession, as Alison points out. But Matt denies that those two things exist and dismisses them as ancient, outdated beliefs. You know that his denial is making Jacques absolutely giddy and that somewhere in Hell (or wherever he goes when he’s not inside Jean Paul’s body) he is sitting on his throne grinning from ear to ear and polishing his ring.

Jacques, upon hearing that Reverend Dawson doesn’t believe in possession.

In the temple, Raxl lays some Tarot cards onto the altar. I have no idea if these cards were deliberately chosen to predict future events on Maljardin or if Cosette Lee just drew ten random cards, but I like writing these Tarot analyses, so I’m going to assume it’s the former. First, a photo of the cards, cropped, lightened, sharpened, flipped to show from Raxl’s perspective, and with the card names marked:

Because both the King of Swords and the Queen of Cups appear twice, these cards must be from two decks combined. (Normally, there is only one of each card in a Tarot deck, but some people choose to use multiple decks when doing readings. That's what I gather from a Googling "using multiple decks in tarot," anyway.)

Using  the meanings given to certain cards in previous episodes and the established interpretations on Tarot.com and The Tarot Guide for the others, here is my brief card-by-card interpretation:

Strikingly, two of these cards, the Ace of Swords and the World, have very positive meanings. The Ace of Swords can be about force (in the sense meaning power, not the sense of being forced to do things) or it can foretell a new beginning or the start of a new project, according to The Tarot Guide. The World denotes success and the fulfillment of dreams; some interpretations such as that on Tarot.com consider it to always be a positive card, even when reversed (although The Tarot Guide argues in favor of a negative interpretation of The World RX). The Tarot Guide says that the Four of Coins/Pentacles can mean "possessiveness,” but I'm thinking that it, if this spread of cards was intentional, Ian Martin may have meant for it to mean "possession" instead. I included both Elizabeth and Holly as posible Queens of Cups in my interpretation, because, although I am inclined to believe Raxl’s and Vangie’s interpretation of the Queen of Cups over Matt’s, either one may be correct.

When examined together, these cards suggest a “new beginning” for Jean Paul, Elizabeth and/or Holly, and Dan. Jacques will either possess them or have them become possessed, and this scheme of his will be a success. We know that Jacques foreshadows Elizabeth’s eventual possession (in his original outline for the plot) as early as Episode 12, and we also know from Episodes 6 and 19, respectively, that Dan and Holly both had counterparts on 17th century Maljardin. If Martin had been allowed to stick to his original outline, would Dan have ended up being possessed by d’Anton and Holly by the blonde girl in her dream? Was that his original intention?

But I digress. The Tarot is less significant to this scene than the fact that Raxl is trying to summon Vangie again to the island. Quito pounds on the ritual drum, Raxl prays in a trance while kneeling before the altar. Unbeknownst to them, the Reverend Matt Dawson sneaks into the temple to search for both the cyanide and Erica’s notes.

Raxl and Quito in the Temple of the Serpent.

Raxl: “COME, CONJURE WOMAN, TAKE YOUR PLACE ON THE ALTAR OF THE GREAT SERPENT...CONJURE WOMAN, TAKE WHAT STRENGTH IS LEFT FROM THE SOUL OF YOUR FATHER AND USE IT! USE HIS STRENGTH! USE HIM!”

Matt discovers that he’s not strong enough to force the door open and so gives up. “What doors are closed to me I suppose I have no right to open,” he tells Alison cryptically as the “sad Jean Paul” music plays in the background. (That’s what I call the cue at least, because it mostly plays during sad Jean Paul scenes.)

Raxl: “COME, CONJURE WOMAN!”

Vangie: “When I die, it will be here on Maljardin. Why did you call me?”

Vangie protests that “[she] must be brought [to Maljardin] some other way” instead of summoning, which is pretty pointless, because Raxl’s ability to summon her to Maljardin eliminates the need for an invite from Jean Paul or Jacques (or, in Holly’s case, skill with sneaking onto ships). She ends this episode with a cryptic line that could refer to one of several female characters on this show: “When the master of the house is no longer the master of his soul, the house needs a mistress."

Overall, a good but not very eventful episode--but then, at this point, you can’t really do much unless Jean Paul and Jacques are around to stir things up. They’re not the only interesting characters--I would be more than happy to watch this, too, if it were The Raxl Show--but Jean Paul and Jacques are the catalysts, the “movers and shakers” if you will. Fortunately, the handsome devil and his 20th-century descendant will be back next episode

Coming up next: Vangie tries to convince Jean Paul to bring her to Maljardin by boat and we try to determine if the Lost Episode summary for Episode 30 was truly for a lost episode.

{ <- Previous: Episode 28   ||   Next: Episode 30 -> }

Notes

[1] Steve (leafshimmer) sent me an article recently with behind-the-scenes information on the show, including the reason why Fox is absent from roughly one episode per week:

Last year [i. e. 1968], Fox broke his neck while taping the Stratford Festival company's Three Musketeers for CBC.  Although he doesn't have to wear a neck brace all the time, he still suffers pain. "Most of the early problems were cleared up, but it's much too exhausting doing this--working 12 hours a day," he said.  "My doctor has given me a letter which insists I get one working day off a week. I have less than 48 hours off, with rehearsals every night, including Sunday."

(Source: Sid Adilman, “TV’s Colin Fox and his Strange Paradise,” Toronto Telegram (Nov. 29 1969).)

[dailyaudiobible]

08/04/2020 DAB Transcript

2 Chronicles 35:1-36:23, 1 Corinthians 1:1-17, Psalms 27:1-6, Proverbs 20:20-21

Today is the 4th day of August welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I’m Brian it is great to be here with you today as it is every day, every day, day by day, step-by-step. And our steps will take us back into the book of second Chronicles today. We’ll actually conclude the book of second Chronicles today and move forward in the Old Testament tomorrow and then in the New Testament. We will begin a new letter, known as first Corinthians. And we’ll talk about that when we get there. But first, second Chronicles chapters 35 and 36 and we’re reading from the Christian Standard Bible this week.

Introduction to first Corinthians:

Okay. So, yesterday we concluded Paul's letter to the church at Rome. So, also known as Romans. And that leads us to the doorstep here of first Corinthians which is another letter from Paul to another church, the church in Corinth. Corinth was a city, a large city in the Roman Empire, an influential city in the Roman empire, cosmopolitan, a hotspot, a destination place, a huge hub of trade and commerce. This is…this is the fourth largest city in the entire Roman empire. So, lots of people, lots of ideas. Lots of spirituality, spiritual ideas of idolatry. Basically, everything that you would find in a large secularized society is in Corinth. And many biblical scholars think first Corinthians gives us like, bar none, the best glimpse into what early Christians in a urban area were thinking about or questioning or trying to live into or trying to understand and…and fundamentally, they’re having spiritual experiences by the power of the Holy Spirit. Like, this is what's drawing them together, right? So, like if Paul comes to Corinth, preaches the good news, people believe it, and then they start to worship together, but it’s just a dud, then they would just kind of fade away, right? Things were happening. The Holy Spirit was leading these people. It was drawing them together and pulling them together as a spiritual community, but they’re wondering like, “how does this translate to everyday life? Like how does these spiritual experiences…like how is this supposed to transform the way that life is lived?” And, so, some of these…some of these questions are asked of Paul, probably a letter sent to Paul. Like even in first Corinthians, Paul refers to a previous letter that he had written that to them. So, there’s correspondence going on among the Corinthians and Paul. So, he answers some of these questions, among other things. But fundamentally, you’ve got a bunch of people in an urban center following the leading of the Holy Spirit and they don't have a Bible, right? Like they could have the Torah, but they didn't have the New Testament as some sort of baseline for what's going on. They don’t have that. And, so, it's easy enough to come up with a number of ways of looking at things. We have a number of ways of looking at things even though we have the…the Bible, the New Testament now. And, so, Paul fundamentally is trying to look at everybody who's looking at things, and in a number of ways, and bring it all back around to unity. And again, not uniformity, but unity. And that makes his words in first Corinthians as poignant now is as they would've been then. And, of course there are portions in first Corinthians that are very, very famous, like, “seeing through a glass darkly.” “When I was a child, I spoke like a child.” And then very, very famous is first Corinthians chapter 13, which is known as the love chapter, which is…which is beautiful, and we’ll see that when we get there. But let's dive in and take a look into the early church, listen to what Paul’s…I mean we can kinda tell the questions that they're answering by the way Paul is answering the questions. And some of these are questions we have. And, so, let's enjoy as we enter this new territory. First Corinthians chapter 1 verse one through 17 today.

Commentary:

Okay. We just…we just talked about first Corinthians as we entered into it. And now that we have some verses under our belt here, we can kinda see this…this call to unity by the apostle Paul. And, so, it's…it's safe to point out here that this…this idea that the early church was a completely harmonious thing, it was like perfect and then it just got worse and worse and worse until we are here today trying to wrestle through all the stuff, that's not true. We’ve been wrestling through the stuff from the very, very beginning. So, like in this day and age there are some 40,000 Christian denominations of believers in the world that all have slightly different theological positions on different things that are very, very important to them. And we sort of see some of this evolving and being present in this letter to the Corinthian church. So, Paul says, “it’s been reported to me about you, my brothers and sisters, by members of Chloe's people that there is rivalry among you. And what I'm saying is this, one of you says, I belong to Paul or I belong to Apollos.” Now Apollos…Apollos was an early believer contemporary with the apostle Paul, whose reputation is that he was very, very educated in rhetoric and very, very good at communicating with words, a very good speaker. There are scholars that would argue that Apollos is the one who wrote the book of Hebrews. Of course, we’re not to the book of Hebrews yet and nobody knows that, but he just kind of like fits a certain profile. So, Apollos has been to the Corinthian community and spoken. And then there are others who say I belong to Cephas, which is the apostle Peter. So, it also seems that the apostle Peter has come through Corinth and visited with the church at Corinth. And, so, some of them are saying like, “well, I belong to him. He was a disciple of Jesus. He actually walked with Jesus. I'm going to follow what he has to say.” And then there are others who are like, “I belong to Christ”. I don't belong any of these people. I belong to Christ. The Holy Spirit is leading me. This is…this is who me and mine, this is who we belong to.” And, so, we can see even in the early church, this is an attempt to get an identity by who our leaders are, who we are following. And then by very nature then saying, “we are separate from those who are following this other teaching.” And, so, there's an “us and them” happening that Paul really, really doesn't like because it creates, as he said, “rivalry among you, divisions among you.” So, here in one of the earliest churches, like the earliest churches following Jesus that have been established this is going on. “I belong to Paul. “Well I am of the Apollos camp. I follow Peter. I follow Christ alone.” And Paul's response to that is, “is Christ divided then? Is that what’s going on here? Is Christ divided? Was I, Paul, crucified for you? Were you baptized in my name?” And then he kinda goes on to try to think it through everyone's he's baptized so that there's a very select few people that could ever claim to be baptized in Paul's name. We’ll get into this further as we get further into this letter and as we continue to move through the letters that are found in the New Testament and what we can learn about our brothers and sisters who were right at the beginning first, what they were thinking about and what they were going too because it helps us to realize, like most of the stuff that's going on that's like frustrating or that we can't quite figure out, this has always been going on. It’s not some kind of new phenomenon in our lifetime. And we’ll see Paul working toward unity even while acknowledging that people have different viewpoints on different things. What he will do though is invite us, invite his readers, which was them and now is us basically to think…to think…to raise the bar, to think hire, to understand that there’s a bigger thing going on than us just trying to find our camp. There’s a bigger thing going on that God is doing through Jesus and that bigger thing unites us.

Prayer:

Father, as we go through this letter and all of the different letters and all the different things that we have to talk about and all of the different things that Your word will illuminate inside of us, that will become a mirror into our own convictions and are our own postures, we invite You. We see that there was…that there was disunity or disharmony in the earlier church and that those things needed to be wrestled with and wrestled through and realize that is still today the same and we realize that our hearts, like our clothes may change and our technology may change, but our hearts, what we’re looking for, what we’re seeking, these things remain the same. And we are seeking You and we are asking the Holy Spirit, lead us into all truth as we continue our journey through the Scriptures. Come Holy Spirit into all of this we pray. In the name of Jesus, we ask. Amen.

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And that's it for today. I'm Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

[hak-7]

WALKING ON WATER AND ITS SYMBOLIC MEANING History tells us that the original- followers of Jesus differ in a great degree from Catholicism and Protestantism. In a great degree. History traces the Christian Church back to the "Essenes". The Essenes from what history can decipher believed in a religion very close to that of John the Baptist. Their religion was merely an awakening, a call to the people's consciousness to leave sin, leave corruption and come back to the essence of faith.That's why they're called "the Essenes". Come back to the essence of faith. This later Christianity shows the structure and the framework of Idolatry, Paganism. It represents an attempt to put Jesus and his teachings in the language and framework of paganism. That's all that it represents. Peter is suppose to be the head of Christianity. Protestantism came as a rebellion against the rule of Peter.They broke off from the Catholic Church and formed what is called now the Protestant Religion.You see! Let us see now what the Bible says about Peter, who represents the beginning of the Church. The Bible says that Jesus stood upon the water and he beckoned to Peter to stand upon the water. And Peter stood upon the water, but soon began to sink. So the Bible is saying something about Peter. What does this mean? Some will say "oh, it means Peter wasn't equal to the Lord, Christ. Standing on the water is a feat only for God. Only God in Jesus Christ could do a thing like that." It is saying that Peter wouldn't do miracles, but Jesus could. Let us go back again and read the Bible. Jesus said "and greater miracles you will do after me". All right. According to their New Testament Jesus says in the Bible to his Disciples, to Peter, Paul and others, "greater miracles will you do after me". So that can't apply then, it was not a miracle, it's something else that it refers to. You have to understand what water represents. Why is water so important to religion? You think it only means water? You're baptized in water, for what? To be reborn a Christian. Why? Because water is symbolic of Christian morals or Religious morals. Water is a term common to all the great Religions. It is a term meaning rel https://www.instagram.com/p/CDLUqrxHBpF/?igshid=yw0kiu41n7l6

[thebarefootking]

The Vessel

"I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me."

-- St. Paul of Tarsus, Galatians 2:20

"Holy fire burn away My desire for anything That is not of You, And is of me I want more of You And less of me, yeah

Empty me Empty me Empty me --"

-- William Murphy, "Empty Me"

---------------------------------------------------

I don't feel I'm overstating my case when I refer to my parents as "religious extremists" (though I will concede they are less extreme now than they were during my childhood, by a fair margin). I grew up in a series of denominations (or, in some cases, 'non' denominations, which were always a very specific sort of denomination in disguise) which almost invariably allowed for such things as female clergy, and who (at least theoretically, which is itself still rare in extremist circles) considered all those who "accepted Jesus" to be part of the Christian Church.

But they also, and my parents with them, believed that any Christian who was sick or injured (in body or mind) could simply pray or be prayed for, and "the infirmity would flee them, by the power of Christ Jesus". Incidentally, this particular view didn't vibe well when it came up against the anxiety disorder I have suffered from since childhood. No amount of prayer, sticky anointing oils, or exorcistic commands could send "the Spirit of Fear" from me. Which is not to say that it stopped my father trying. And trying.

And, eventually, implicitly, blaming it on my own lack of faith.

I suppose, after a while, I believed that, too.

So my faith wasn't strong enough to keep the Spirit of Fear out. I could live with that. I would just do my best in all other aspects of my faith life. After all, we all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. The important part was to do our best.

One's best, the church taught, should always be toward the goal of giving oneself entirely over to the will of God. The less there was of 'you', the more room there was for God to do good through you. To that end, our church practiced fasting, either as simple spiritual practice, or with an intent and request of God. Yes, even the children (though they were encouraged to give up something other than food). The message came through loud (though anything but clear, among the conflicting messages of 'be yourself!' and 'God has given you many unique gifts!'): Self was bad.

When I came to my teenage years, the message was reinforced. Unable to curb my personal oddity enough to cultivate many friendships outside of church, I decided that, if I couldn't figure out how to make God my identity, then making church my identity was the next best thing. I was the awkward, uncomfortable kid in Christian tee-shirts who invited everyone to special church events and called out their church fellows in front of everyone on their 'un-Christian' behavior.

It didn't prepare me for my self to fight back, this time with a new ally: puberty.

Not that I was too concerned with any lustful thoughts towards boys I might have had. I was an incredibly naive teenager, and was unfamiliar enough with sex that I hardly even knew how to fantasize about it. Boys made me giggly and overbearing, but nothing more.

Only… so did the girls.

Immediately, I knew: the Spirit of Fear had gone out, just like in the Gospels. It had found no rest, and decided to come back to me. I hadn't filled myself up with God, so it settled back in, this time with seven friends more wicked than itself!

I was oppressed by a Gay Demon!

I can't tell anyone about this! I thought. But the Bible said to confess your sins one to another in order to be healed! How was I going to un-gay myself without ruining my reputation? I knew for sure that anyone I told would never see me the same again, and most of them would spread the word, and not the Good Word, if you follow me.

They'll never let me teach a devotion at church again. I probably won't even get to go on the mission trip. Or camp! They'll never let me room with girls!

A proper misery set in. My identity was the weird church kid, and I didn't have anything else to fall back on. I was full up with a brainload of doctrine that couldn't help me at all in the face of actual, real-life people.

I hadn't filled myself with God. I hadn't filled myself with Me. I had filled myself with a rule book, and one that neither I nor anyone I knew could follow.

I did try for a few years. I struggled against my sexuality, all the while pushing the youth of my church to truly embrace the spirit of love and devotion that I felt underpinned the scripture. I drove them toward a passion for God, all as I suffered in His absence, an absence for which I believed myself to blame.

It seemed that I simply wasn't a proper vessel.

Adulthood joined the fray, throwing a few punches of its own: I had made it to the age of eighteen without forming any identity for myself outside of "weird church kid". No goals, no intentions. Those sorts of things were for people without God leading them; how could I say I had faith if I planned my own life instead of letting God take the reins? Surely he had some great plan for my life. That's what countless adults had been telling me since I was old enough to understand the words.

--------

At the last church I attended regularly, there was a woman we'll call Miss Lee. She has multiple sclerosis that, while I was attending there, was just then beginning to affect her mobility. She went from walking confidently on her own to needing to use a wheelchair most weeks. Nearly every week, we would pray for her, begging God to heal her, and demanding that the damage leave her body. And every week, nothing would happen. Well, not nothing. Sometimes the nerve pain in her toes would diminish slightly, or, more rarely, someone would say they'd had a dream or vision in the past week of her being healed. Once, she had a vision of her own that she would dance at the front of the church with one of her friends, someday.

That church dissolved some four or five years ago. Miss Lee's condition has progressed to the point where her mobility is severely impaired and she is often confused. She semi-frequently texts my mother asking for help because she's fallen and there's no one in the house to help her up.

---------

I gave up my birth religion gradually, over the course of a decade, and if you asked my what I believe now, I would not be able to tell you. I can tell you, though, that ten years has taught me that I cannot find healing in mea culpas, in prayer, or in waiting to see what God has planned. I have to acknowledge the makeshift self I have gathered together, and fill myself with it.

I might be late to the party. That's ok. I can still make something real.

[bishopkenneth]

A God Like Old Ben Weaver

“But nothing can be good in Him, Which evil is in me.” - John Greenleaf Whittier, The Eternal Goodness, 1865.

There was an aged man in town who reminded everyone of old Ben Weaver from the Andy Griffith Show. He always kept score and never let a slight against him slide. He was a stickler for doing things right, and the smallest deviation from doing things his way, the right way, was duly noted and registered in his little book that he might well have titled, The Misdeeds of Others. If anyone ever got on his wrong side - which was pretty easy to do - it wasn’t good enough to go have a talk with him, honestly tell him you were sorry, and ask for his forgiveness. He always demanded recompense, and a little extra in the payback. Did your child break his window with a baseball? Apologies be damned, you had to fix the window, which I suppose is understandable, but the way he figured, that wasn’t enough. I mean, the window was perfectly fine before your kid played Nolan Ryan with it and his life was disrupted with all the bother and the mess and the broken glass and the temporary patch job and the loss of peace of mind and house. Your boy saying he was sorry wasn’t enough. Your saying you were also sorry wasn’t enough. Your fixing the broken window wasn’t enough. That didn’t “even things up.” You still owed him because of the, what is it the lawsuits call it - “punitive damages.” And, I mean, he wasn’t wrong, but he wasn’t much loved by his neighbors either.

Have you ever known someone like old Ben Weaver? Did you like them? Did you think they embodied goodness? Would you consider them Christlike? Honestly, would you even want to be around them?

I’m assuming by now you know where I’m taking this - why are these qualities considered less than good in old Ben, but perfectly fine and dandy when we speak of the person of God? Why are the qualities we find reprehensible in fellow humans somehow considered “good,” “just,” and “right” when applied to God? God keeps track of our misdoings - but that’s OK, he’s God. God demands payment for our wrongdoings - but that’s OK, he’s God. God has to be “satisfied,” not only with recompense, but even with punitive damages - but that’s OK, he’s God.

So many times when I bring up this incongruity, people respond with, “Well, the Bible says God’s ways are not our ways.” What does that even mean? Better yet, “What even does that mean?” We can’t throw that line out as some kind of defense of God every time we run across him being attributed qualities which are reprehensible in every other living thing. The truth of the matter is that when God says that of himself (in Isaiah 55.8 and surrounding verses), he is specifically referring to his extraordinary level of mercy, not his “just demands,” or his wrath.

In point of fact, in Amos 1.11, God condemns Edom for these very faults. Edom “cast off all pity,” his “anger tore perpetually,” and he, “kept his wrath forever.”

For the love of God, let’s all please stop saying that something is good when it is in God, but terrible when it is in creatures created in his image. God is not like the sins he condemns. Let me say that again in bold, God is not like the sins he condemns.

“But,” folk respond to me sometimes, “God is so majestic that even a slight sin against him demands justice. He is a great king, and a crime against a king is greater than a crime against a commoner.” Seriously, I’ve been told this, because this is kind of a classic argument from medieval days that has hung around till now. But I say hogwash. If a king has an orchard with 10,000 apples and I steal one, that isn’t a greater crime than me stealing an apple from my neighbor who has only one apple. In fact, the deed done against my neighbor is worse (remember Nathan’s parable to King David). God’s greater majesty doesn’t mean he is more exacting in dealing with offenses. It means precisely the opposite: “Let us fall into the hands of the Lord, but not into the hands of men; for as His majesty is, so also His mercy.” (Sirach 2.18)

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes, oftentimes when I teach or write about God’s love, his mercy, his forgiveness, I am met with, “Yes, but…” and what follows is a demand that I balance it out with focusing on his justice, and wrath, and righteous punishment. Laying aside for a moment (actually for this whole article) that I believe good, solid, orthodox theology does deal with these issues without abrogating the mercy and love of God, what I find intriguing is that these very same folk, when they hear a sermon or read an article about God’s just demands, his wrath, his punishments, never bring up the, “Yes, but” remark then!

It is almost as if something within our spiritual framework can’t handle the idea of a God who really and truly forgives without demanding payment; that there is something in our spiritual condition that can’t abide a God who acts toward others the way he teaches us to act toward others. I suspect that maybe way down at the bottom of our hearts the reason we don’t want to see God in this light is because it would demand that we who follow him also really and truly live the same way. That “something” in our spiritual framework, that certain je ne sais quoi as the French say with such flair, is what St. Paul would call, “the flesh,” and it isn’t from God, and it isn’t like God.

John Greenleaf Whittier, whom I quoted at the beginning of this article, was a 19th century American poet, and a devout Quaker. When you read the whole of his poem, The Eternal Goodness, you discover that it is a conversation between Whittier and a friend who keeps bringing up the, “Yes, but.”

I walk with bare, hushed feet the ground Ye tread with boldness shod; I dare not fix with mete and bound The love and power of God.

Ye praise His justice; even such His pitying love I deem: Ye seek a king; I fain would touch The robe that hath no seam.

Ye see the curse which overbroods A world of pain and loss; I hear our Lord's beatitudes And prayer upon the cross.

I have a dear pastor friend who was discussing theology and the Bible with me one day, and jokingly said, “I’m going to go home and look it up in Greek, and make it say what I want it to say!” We both laughed, because he wasn’t serious, but he was onto something. Folk can make the Bible say whatever they want it to say. They can find verses here and connect them with verses there, and paint a very Ben Weaver portrait of God. I would suggest, instead, that we look at Jesus. “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father,” he told Philip (John 14.9). The Old Testament saw God, but only in shadows (Colossians 2.17), “but the substance is of Christ.” Abraham, Moses, David, the prophets - they saw God, “in many parts and in many ways…,” the writer of Hebrews tells us (1.1), “in bits and pieces” (Phillips), BUT, “…but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son…He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (1.2). If you really want to know what God is like, he is like Jesus.

I really wrote this whole long article to make a single point, which I guess I could have just come right out and said and saved everyone a lot of time and trouble: enough of this seeing something as good in God, but as evil in others. If it isn’t good in old Ben Weaver, it isn’t good in the Almighty either.

Not mine to look where cherubim And seraphs may not see, But nothing can be good in Him Which evil is in me.

The wrong that pains my soul below I dare not throne above, I know not of his hate - I know His goodness and His love.

[theritualofourexistence]

I know every mile will be worth my while.

This is a post about faith and mental illness.

I came up with the idea for this a good while ago when I was still using the word “Christian” to identify my faith. In my spiritual journey, however, I have found that the closer I feel to God, the further I feel from the Christian church. 

My faith began with Christianity, though, so for the sake of this post, that will be the primary faith-related focus. 

My best friend recently started a blog where she tackles LGBT issues in and with the Christian church (https://queerlychristian.home.blog/). Her last post emphasizes the need to read the Bible in the proper context and with the proper analytical awareness and she references a specific well-known verse in one of her illustrations. 

Paul calls the followers of God to “rejoice in the Lord always” in Philippians 4:4. 

When you incorporate the context, it’s clear Paul isn’t saying that lightly. 

He’s writing from prison, at perhaps one of the darkest times in his life. 

Paul tells us to, even in the darkest chapters of our lives, find a way to rejoice in the Lord. 

I grew up in a small town with a heavy Christian influence. It is only with time and distance that I have learned that many of the communities in that town would use verses like this to add pressure to already suffering individuals. 

“Rely on God in the hard times; God is all you need.”

“God is the answer to your problems, just have faith that He will guide you.” 

“Lift your worries and your problems up to God, only He can save us.” 

How dare you wallow in your grief and anger when you should be rejoicing in the Lord?

In 2009, exactly ten years ago, my abuser used my faith to manipulate me. He told me God wanted me to do the things I did and that God would punish me if I refused. At that time in my life, I was so afraid that I felt I had no choice. I did things that I cannot undo, things that I will carry with me forever. 

When I finally began the healing process, it demanded a pretty thorough re-evaluation of my faith. 

I spent a lot of time re-learning my God and his ways. I ultimately spent years exploring and defining my faith but none of that... and I mean none of it, could’ve happened if I hadn’t taken the steps to begin to heal.

My abuser left my faith in tatters. He left my heart in tatters. He left my soul in tatters. And I wasn’t able to devote energy to working through that until years later. When the time came, however... when I felt ready, I knew that before I could have a relationship with God, I needed to patch some of the holes in my heart.

I have friends with anxiety and depression who have been told by church elders and even their parents that they have nothing to worry about and that they should just give those feelings up to God.

Science shows that faith can be an important part of managing mental illness.

But “just give your worries up to God” is not what the science means.

When I was at my lowest points, and yes, there have been a few, I could barely sort out right and left and up and down let alone a relationship with an invisible, omnipotent, mass-Creator. 

When you can’t eat.

And you can’t sleep.

And you can’t take a breath that fills your lungs because your chest is too tight and too full of fire...

You need to help you before God can help you. 

It’s like being in a basement with no lights. I mean black darkness, true darkness. And you know somewhere in that basement is a flight of stairs to the light. In this metaphor, the flight of stairs is God or faith or whatever word you’d like to use. The problem, though, is that you are terrified and confused and you can’t find the stairs at all in the utter blackness that surrounds you and chokes you and pins your arms to your sides.

You are desperate for any hint of a light because you know there are stairs, you just can’t find them.

In my path towards healing my first candle in that darkness was therapy. 

Therapy was enough of a light that it helped me start to map out the basement in my mind. It soothed some of the fear and tension so I could start to look for the stairs. But, try as I might, I still couldn’t find them. 

My flashlight was anti-depressants. 

It wasn’t an easy choice for me. I would so much rather believe my body could do what it was supposed to do without help. Without... synthetic help. But no matter how much energy I put into looking for those stairs out of that basement, I could not find them.

It took a few weeks to get used to the medicine. It took a few months before I felt like I’d established stability. But then I found the stairs and I started to climb.

Once I’d put enough of my pieces back together, I learned something pretty incredible about faith. It is significantly easier to focus on praising God when you have a therapist to help you talk through the bad stuff.

When I was younger I prayed to God, sure. But my prayers were often begging for solutions to problems that seemed monumental at the time. 

“God, help me do this.” 

“God, can you please fix this.”

“God, I know you love me, why is this so hard?”

My therapist showed me how to start managing my problems and it changed my communication with God. I began rejoicing in the Lord in a way that I hadn’t really done ever before. I thanked God for my therapist, certainly, and for the medication that gave me back the power of rationality. More than that, though, I thanked God for the strength to challenge my distorted thinking... the strength to learn enough about my brain that I could manage my symptoms. I thanked God for the good days and I thanked God for giving me the tools to carry myself through the bad days. I thanked God for my support system, for the sunshine on crashing waves, for a cool breeze through rustling branches. I thanked God for the songs of the birds and for the love that I could feel flowing through me and the earth and the sky.

I feel very comfortable in my faith. I feel like I’m anchored in a force of light that ties me to every living and natural thing on earth. I feel like I am one string woven with billions of others to create a beautiful tapestry. 

After over six years of therapy and three years of anti-depressants, my faith is a very important part of my mental health.

But I would not have reforged my relationship with God without therapy.

I would not have reforged my relationship with God without anti-depressants.

I believe God led me to those things, in fact, because they brought me back to Her.

So, Christians, I beg you to challenge your understanding of God’s ways and to recognize that science is just another one of God’s remarkable tools. 

God wants us to be close to Him. He doesn’t want us to pressure our loved ones to follow scripture when we don’t even have the power to sustain a healthy lifestyle. God gave us tools to help us along the way and you may not know the harm you’re doing when you tell someone battling mental illness to simply give their fears to God. 

The route from A to B is never what we picture and never direct.

We don’t ask God to heal kidney disease all on Her own. We get that person medical attention and we pray for healing and we pray that the professionals providing treatment do everything in their power to start that person on a healing journey.

There is no reason that we should handle anxiety or depression any differently. 

Never discourage a loved one from seeking care that may give them a chance to reforge their faith. Never discourage a loved one from seeking care that may save their life.

God used therapy and anti-depressants to guide me back to Him and I am so grateful for that.

Note: my use of mixed pronouns was intentional. In the original language of the Bible, the pronoun used to describe God was non-gendered. My God is Love, and love is non-gendered.

[lesfeldickbiblestudy]

  Through the Bible with Les Feldick LESSON 1 * PART 1 * BOOK 54 James Prepares His Flock James 3:7 - 5:20 Let’s get right back into the Book of James, chapter, 3 and we ended with verse 6 the last time we were together, so let’s just go back and take a run at verse 7 by starting with verse 6. James 3:6 "And the tongue (the physical tongue) is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; it is set on fire of hell." The tongue is pretty much the beginning of a lot of wickedness, and James is emphasizing that. All right, in the next verse he speaks of everything in nature. James 3:7 "For every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and of things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed of mankind:" Now you know what that tells you? I was just thinking about that on the way up here to our taping. I suppose Iris wonders why I’m so quiet, but I’m thinking, thinking, thinking. You know, I just thought of a little cliché in light of this very verse and I think it may come out of the evolutionists - that "the more things change, the more they stay the same." And isn’t that true? Here we think, that in our modern era, this is the first time that people have been able to tame the wild animals and do all the various things. No. They’ve done it from time immemorial. And so, even James could write that, even at that time already, men were training all of these wild animals for their various circus acts or whatever you want to call it. See, men have always needed to be entertained. That’s what the Coliseums were for, to keep people entertained. So everything is tamed. Now verse 8: James 3:8 "But the tongue can no man tame; (no one can tame the tongue) it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison." Now again, I’d better stop right here and remind all of us that James is writing first and foremost, not exclusively, but first and foremost, to Jewish believers, who I feel had been scattered out of Jerusalem and the Jerusalem congregation, by virtue of Saul of Tarsus’ persecution, as we see in Acts chapter 1. I don’t think these are part and parcel of Paul’s congregations whatsoever. I think these are strictly Jews. In fact, remember the last program? It wasn’t the church where these Jewish believers were meeting, it was a Synagogue. And so there’s no Church language in the letters of James and Peter and John - not a word. I went through it all again last night to make sure I was on solid ground when I say this. You cannot find one word of Church or what we call Church – the Age of Grace – language. In other words, there’s no reference to the Body of Christ. There’s no reference to the working and the controlling of the Holy Spirit - as over against the keeping of the Law - and it’s ‘legal.’ It’s like we’re seeing here. It’s not that the Spirit is going to control us, but that they have to go by what James is telling them. So, as you read these little Jewish epistles, remember there is no Grace-Age language in here. You also won’t find the plan of salvation in these Jewish epistles. Now, just like I said about Hebrews - you can’t go through the Book of Hebrews and find the plan of salvation like you do in Romans or I Corinthians, because it’s just not in there. Because, evidently, these little epistles were written before Paul’s revelations had even become known, and I think that’s the reason for it. But, don’t forget, it’s still Spirit inspired. Of course it is! It’s the Word of God. It’s Scripture. And we can take profit from it, but you don’t come back to these little epistles to find doctrine for us today. It’s merely, like I said the last taping, a lot like Proverbs. See, Proverbs just gives us a lot of tidbits of good things, well that’s exactly what James is doing. So, he says, "The tongue is on fire from hell." It’s something that mankind cannot contain. Now, then, we move on into verse 9: James 3:9a "Therewith bless we God, even the Father; and therewith curse we men,….

" Now that doesn’t sound like Christian living to me. But here we have in one verse the tongue that is capable of blessing God; but on the other hand, cursing men. Now Paul would never teach something like that. That’s anathema to us as believers, but here was a problem that evidently was common amongst these Jewish congregations. Remember, for their salvation, they had to believe that Jesus was the Christ, and they’re still under the Law of Moses. They know nothing of Paul’s Gospel of Grace, or of faith in the death, burial, and resurrection of our Lord for salvation. And so, consequently, there are some things in here that almost seem contradictory, but they’re not. They’re not contradictory if you realize the circumstances in which James is dealing or writing. So, he says this to these Jewish people, I think, primarily, in the area of what’s today Turkey - Asia Minor - rather small Jewish congregations, no doubt, and this is one of their problems. They weren’t controlling the tongue. On the one hand, they could bless God, but on the other hand, they could curse fellow men. He said, these men that you’re cursing are just as much created after the likeness of God as anybody else. Well, what’s he referring to? Genesis 1:26 where God said, "Let us make man in our image." And that’s what James is alluding to - that even these people that they were bad-mouthing - they’re God’s creatures just as well as you are. And I think this is what we have to realize in light of our global situation today; regardless of who these people are, regardless of the religion they may be practicing, they’re still God’s created beings. And you see, that’s where we, in the Christian community, have a higher regard for life because we realize that mankind is the crowning act of creation. And that’s why mankind is in a special role in God’s eyes. Whether they’re lost or saved, in that regard, makes no difference, they’re still created beings from the Creator Himself. And so this is what James is alluding to. James 3:9b "…which are made after the similitude of God." Whether you curse men, remember, they are still made after the similitude of God. Now verse 10. James 3:10 "Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be." These people who were blessing God, but on the same hand, could proceed blessing and cursing, these things ought not to be. Granted - any of us know that much, that something’s wrong if you can curse and bless out of the same mouth. All right, read on in verse 11. Here he’s using a comparison from the physical world. James 3:11-12 "Doth a fountain (a water fountain) send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter? (out of the same fountain? Impossible.) 12. Can the fig tree, my brethren, bear olive berries? either a vine, figs? So can no fountain both yield salt water and fresh." It’s impossible. So now the analogy he’s drawing is this - it’s just as ridiculous to try to bless God out of one side of your mouth and curse fellow man on the other. James 3:13 "Who is a wise man and endued with knowledge among you? Let him shew out of a good conversation his (what?) works with meekness of wisdom." Now you see, James is a legalist. And he’s going to come back to this idea of good works over and over and over. And it’s almost like a man’s attempt to please God - whereas Paul will just simply say that it’s not of works. We’d better keep comparing. All right, let’s go back to Ephesians because that’s when you can see it most graphically. Ephesians chapter 2 and drop down to verses 8 through 10 - these are all verses I imagine most of you know from memory. And I just want you to see the comparison. Now it’s not a contradiction. It isn’t like people say, "Well the Bible is just a whole set of contradictions." No. It’s two sets of circumstances. James is writing from a totally different perspective than Paul is. James knows nothing of the Grace Age, and so it’s not contradictory. You just have to separate it. Look what Paul says here in Ephesians.

Ephesians 2:8 "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:" Salvation is not something you earn, it’s something you take as a free gift. Now verse 9: Ephesians 2:9-10a "Not of works, lest any man should boast. 10. For we (now as believers) are his (God’s) workmanship,.…" God works a work in us that literally makes us, now, what we are to be as believers - whereas James almost leaves it in the ability of the individual. So verse 10 again: Ephesians 2:10 "For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them." We are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus unto good works. That ‘created’ did not happen until we were saved and enjoyed salvation - then God works a work in us that brings us, as a result of our salvation experience, to practice the good works, "...which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them." And over and over throughout Paul’s writings you have that connotation - that works are a result of our salvation and not a part of it. Okay, back to James once again. Verse 13: James 3:13 "Who is a wise man and endued with knowledge among you? Let him shew out of a good conversation (or manner of living, a lifestyle) his works with meekness of wisdom." Now maybe I’m getting overly picky, but I don’t think so. Do you see any reference here to the work of the Holy Spirit? He doesn’t say "Let the Holy Spirit accomplish this in you." See, now Paul would say that. Let me show you what I mean by comparison. Turn to Galatians chapter 5 verses 16 through 18, and we’ll probably use it again before we get out of James because this is just a whole different perspective than what James was talking about. Now remember what James just said. "Let him show out of a good manner of life, his works, with meekness of wisdom." Not a word about the Spirit. Now look what Paul says here in Galatians. Galatians 5:16-18 "This I say then, walk in the Spirit, (Holy Spirit. It’s capital ‘S’) and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. 17. For the flesh (that old sin nature) lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would. 18. But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law." Now, James doesn’t use language like that. See the difference? But now Paul says, "If you’re led of the Spirit, you’re not under the Law, because the work of the Spirit has taken the place of the Law." And then he shows the vast differences between the life of the flesh and the life of the Spirit in these verses. Well, we’ll probably be coming back to it yet a little later today, so we’ll come back to James. But I just like to show these comparisons. What a vast difference in the language in James, the legalist writing to legalistic Jewish congregations, compared to Paul, writing to us in this Age of Grace! James 3:14 "But if ye have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, glory not, and lie not against the truth." I think the truth he’s really referring to here is how to live a godly life under the Law. The Law gave them all the instructions they needed to avoid these pitfalls. James 3:15 "This wisdom (that is of bitter envying and strife) descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish." See? This wisdom is fleshly, it’s sensual - it feeds on the natural part of man and it’s devilish. James 3:16 "For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work." Isn’t it amazing how sin breeds sin. Families in the world, with all of their alcoholism and their immorality - well, what is the next generation? At least that much or more. And that’s the process - sin breeds more sin. And that’s what the Scripture is saying. Envying and strife will bring confusion and every evil work. Now verse 17, and we see the flipside. James 3:17a "But the wisdom that is from above.…" Now James doesn’t say, "The wisdom that comes

from the leading of the Spirit" - he merely is showing that God is still in His place of power and influence. But, it’s in a whole different set of circumstances than what Paul gives us in this Age of Grace and the working of the Holy Spirit. James 3:17 "But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy." Well, that’s the two opposites. Either envying, strife, hatred and sensuality; or it can be peace, gentleness, mercy and good works. James 3:18 "And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that make peace." You want to remember - back when we were earlier in the book of James, I think it was, that he spoke of "religion." And of course, that’s what his adherents were steeped in. They were steeped in the religion of Judaism and all these things, and he hasn’t departed from that. And, therefore, you see none of the language of this Age of Grace. All right, let’s just move on into chapter 4. The language doesn’t change much. James 4:1-2a "From whence come wars and fighting among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? 2. Ye lust,.…" Doesn’t sound very nice, does it? That’s the life of the person still under the Law. He can’t have victory because he’s not controlled by the Holy Spirit. He’s still trying to do all these good things in the energy of the flesh. So it’s a warfare in the members. Now let’s go back again to Paul’s letters - let’s go back to Romans chapter 7 and see how Paul treats this very set of circumstances. The same set of circumstances, only Paul’s going to deal with it in a totally different way. Remember, now, James says "that these things are coming from the desires of the old nature that are warring in your members," - and then verse 2 in James he goes on to remind them that they "lust or they covet." All right, now then, Romans chapter 7 verses 21 through 24. Paul is now writing to us Gentiles under this Age of Grace: Romans 7:21-22 "I find then a law, (not the Ten, but a fact of life) that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. 22. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man:" In other words, he knew that the Mosaic Law was perfect. Now verse 23. Romans 7:23a "But (here’s the verse I came here for) I see another law in my members, (and what’s the word?) warring.…" Just exactly what it means. Conflict. And where there’s conflict, there’s no peace. So here he is in conflict, the old nature trying to keep the Mosaic Law - but on the other hand, he had this law of the Spirit that is attempting to bring him into a life of peace. Romans 7:23b-24a "…against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. 24. O wretched man that I am!…." Oh, he said, "Wretched man that I am."All right, now we’re going to go back to those verses we just saw in Galatians, and I told you I’d be back in a minute and here we are. Back to Galatians chapter 5, and now we’ve got the same picture. And here I guess is where I picked up the term ‘war’ here in this verse in Romans. For years and years I often wondered where I got it because the word in Galatians is lusteth. But I’ve always, for some reason or other, used the term ‘war,’ and I know it’s because it’s out of Romans 7. Galatians 5:17 "For the flesh (the Old Adam, the old sin nature) lusteth (warreth) against the Spirit, (the new nature under the control of the Spirit) and the Spirit (warreth) against the flesh: (the Old Adam.) and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would." In other words, you can’t just drift. It’s warfare. And warfare takes an expending of energy. And so it’s a daily fight to maintain the directing power of the Holy Spirit as over against the Old Adam. And then again, let me read what we just read a few moments ago in verse 18. Galatians 5:18 "But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law.

" The Law has been crucified. It’s dead. It is no longer a controlling fact in our lives. The Spirit takes over. And then he shows in these following verses all of the things that pertain to the lusts of the flesh. And if anybody ever asks you, "How am I to judge the lifestyle of people?" Line them up with the Scripture. In fact, we again just talked about that the other night in one of my classes. When you go down the fruit and vegetable aisle in your supermarket, do you just grab the first head of lettuce that comes and say, "Well, I can’t judge?" Of course not. You go through that bin and pick out the very best, and if there were some bad ones, you’d leave them. That’s not judging, that’s just being discerning. Well, you do the same thing with ungodly people. If they’re out there living in immorality and if they’re living in drunkenness and if they’re living in lasciviousness and all the things that are mentioned here - then you have every right in the world to discern - they’re not living godly lives. They’re living the flesh. All right, now you’ve come all the way through that horrible list of activities that is part and parcel of the ungodly person. They can’t be a believer and live like this. And then you come down to verse 22 and you see the discerning of the believer. Now when you see a person who can practice these things and you see the fruit of it, then you have every right in the world, just by simple discernment. Now I grant you, you can’t judge who’s saved and lost. That goes beyond the human element. But, when you see a person’s lifestyle, you can pretty much line him up with the Scripture and determine what kind of a person he is. Now verse 22 of Galatians 5. And here’s the flipside again. Galatians 5:22 "But the fruit of the Spirit (The result of the Holy Spirit coming into the life of a believer) is love, …" Look the opposite of love up in verse 21. "Envy." Love and envy are as opposite as you can get. Galatians 5:22b "…joy, peace…" Well, there’s no peace in those actions in verses 19, 20 and 21. It’s anything but peace. Galatians 5:22c-23 "…longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, (trusting God and His Word). 23. Meekness. temperance: against such there is no law." You can’t find any of that in verses 18, 19 and 20. It’s just two totally difference lifestyles. And then people say that you can’t judge? Well you’d better, or you don’t know the Word of God. And it’s up to us as believers to, if someone is living in that wicked lifestyle, show them the Book! You don’t have to say it in your own language, just show them the Word. "Hey, this is what you’re doing and this is going to be your end." What does the last part of verse 21 say? Galatians 5:21b "…they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God." That’s what the Book says - not what Les Feldick says. So always be prepared to use the Scriptures. Let the Word of God speak for itself.

[urfavmurtad]

PLEASE EXPLAIN THAT HADEETH ABOUT THE ROCK I’M IN TEARS 🤣🤣🤣

Aight listen. I am aware that this is extraordinarily fucking stupid, even by Mo’s standards, to the point that my young self actually laughed in the middle of class when we were taught about it before I realized my teacher was serious. But this isn’t just a random hadith. It’s supposed to be the incident of the Jews bothering Moses referenced in Al-Ahzab:

O ye who believe! Be not as those who slandered Moses, but Allah proved his innocence of that which they alleged, and he was well esteemed in Allah’s sight.

Meaning they accused him of having deformed balls and Allah made him get naked in front of them to prove otherwise. Because it is tied into the Quran, I regret to inform everyone that we must treat this story seriously, theologically speaking.

I remembered this hadith a couple of years ago and thought 2 myself “truly, what in the name of fuck”, so I looked up where it came from and I think I have an answer. I mean this is just a theory, I can’t prove that this is where Mohammed got it from but I really suspect that it is!

In the letters of Paul in the Bible, there’s this reference to a water-producing “rock that followed“ Moses’ people, which he turns into a metaphor for Jesus or something. If you look up what this is referring to, you’ll find that Jewish people at the time had the belief that a water source was literally following Moses and the Hebrews through the desert. As in… it moved. I dunno if it had legs or just dragged its rock ass across the ground, don’t ask me these questions. There’s a first-century Jewish book called Biblical Antiquities that says of Moses’ people that there was a “well of water following them”. So the question is, uh, how this thought came to be.

The answer seems to be that Jewish rabbinical writers noticed a continuity error and, as always, sought to fix it. See according to the Bible, YHWH sends mana to keep the Jews fed throughout their 40 years in the desert. But nothing is said of how they and their livestock didn’t die of thirst. The only time water is mentioned is once in Exodus 17, in which Moses strikes a rock and makes water come out of it (and that is also in the Quran), and then in Numbers 20, where he does the same thing decades later. The question is, what were they drinking in between? You’d think “rain”, but it never actually says that YHWH sent rain to them. So the answer the rabbis devised is that this one rock that makes water was following them the whole time, and every now and then Moses would hit it to make water come out of it. (The justification for this was apparently based on a mistranslation of the Aramaic version of a passage in Numbers 21.)

So the rock that makes water is literally following them, like… it moves. And in the hadith, the rock is right next to where Moses is taking a bath. I figure the rock made the water he is taking a bath in, right?! It must be this magic traveling rock that was part of Jewish and also early Christian tradition. Bc they’re just… wandering the desert there isn’t any other water besides the water in the rock. The thing that makes me 99% sure that this is related to the story in the hadith is this:

The Prophet (ﷺ) said, ‘The (people of) Bani Israel used to take bath naked (all together) looking at each other. The Prophet (ﷺ) Moses used to take a bath alone. They said, ‘By Allah! Nothing prevents Moses from taking a bath with us except that he has a scrotal hernia.’ So once Moses went out to take a bath and put his clothes over a stone and then that stone ran away with his clothes. Moses followed that stone saying, “My clothes, O stone! My clothes, O stone!” till the people of Bani Israel saw him and said, ‘By Allah, Moses has got no defect in his body. Moses took his clothes and began to beat the stone.” Abu Huraira added, “By Allah! There are still six or seven marks present on the stone from that excessive beating.”

The Jews do not give a shit about this moving rock that Moses is assaulting. They are not even somewhat concerned by this. They’re too busy inspecting Moses’ nutsack, actually. The fact that this magic rock moves and Moses hits its sometimes isn’t alarming to the Jews because A) they all have PTSD at this point and are like “yeah I seen ten times weirder shit in the past month this is nothing bruh lmao” and B) this has been happening the whole time!!

As for where the part about Moses preferring to take baths alone and the Jews making fun of him for it came from, I cannot tell you. I suspect that it was part of Arab Jewish oral tradition, which is now lost to us… maybe they had a whole miniseries about the wacky adventures of Moses & The Rock. Or else Mohammed came up with that detail himself and projected his personal issues onto Moses, as he sometimes did. Mohammed himself didn’t allow other men to see him naked, even while bathing, so maybe someone in Medina accused him of having deformed balls and he made up this story to defend himself. Idk.

But still… the mental image of a rock growing little rock legs and running away with Moses’ clothes while going “JAJAJAJA”, then he catches up to it and starts beating it with his underwear in front of all the other Jews, who are looking at his testicles swaying back and forth in order to inspect them is just… y’all…

[high-fructose-lesbianism]

The 5 Best and 5 Worst songs from 1959’s Billboard Top 100 Singles

The 5 Best Singles

5. Along Came Jones- The Coasters  (#80)

This is a fun, upbeat, catchy song about the narrator watching TV. I’m about that. The narrator’s watching some sort of Western where Jones saves women from horrible fates. The bridge to the chorus are variations of women about to be murdered before Jones saves them. What an excellent concept for a song plus the saxophone is great.

4. Three Stars- Tommy Dee and Carol Kay (#81)

1959 was infamously the year featuring “the day the music died,” which refers to a plane crash that killed Ritchie Valens, The Big Bopper and Buddy Holly. This song plays tribute to it. It basically talks about how talented these three individuals were and how they’re in heaven. Personally, I find it a very sweet and honest tribute. Tommy Dee was not a musician but a disc jockey who released this song weeks after it happened. I don’t think he expected it to chart, he just wanted to pay tribute and I think that’s why the song works. There’s actual personal touches to each tribute. They talk about Buddy Holly’s classic look and how nobody knew him particularly well though his music brought everyone together. Ritchie Valens’ section focuses on how young he was and Tommy Dee does sort of struggle with the fact that he was so young when he died and I think that’s a sad, honest touch. The Big Bopper’s is maybe a little half-assed. It’s pretty clear the writers and performers knew him the least because basically all they said was he was large and talented. Overall, i’m okay with this tribute. It feels genuine as opposed to cynically cashing in on a tragedy.

3. What’d I Say (Parts 1 and 2)- Ray Charles (#50)

More than most songs that charted this year, this song feels like it predicts the future of musical trends. It has a swinging 60′s feel to it. It’s also very danceable. I can see the youth of yesteryear doing the twist and whatever else to this song at a house party. Ray Charles is also of course a great vocalist. He’s got more personality and talent than his bland, white contemporaries. I think you can tell this song is great because there isn’t a white cover of it. Even the professionals back then knew that some cookie-cutter white version of this wouldn’t work

2. I Only Have Eyes For You- The Flamingos (#73)

This is a proper romantic standard. The feeling around this song is great and you just know so many teenagers made out listening to this song. My main problem with so many of songs that charted in this entire decade is that they’re too watered down to properly express the emotion they’re supposed to be singing about. This song avoids that. It sounds properly romantic and longing.

1. Mack the Knife- Bobby Darin (#2)

This song is catchy and about a serial killer. I need nothing else. I seriously want to foxtrot around a dance floor to this song about murder and I don’t even know how to foxtrot. This is a classic of the “oldies” genre that deserves to be remembered 60 years later where so many songs that charted this decade are forgotten. I can’t say that it’s a snapshot of music of the time because it’s much better than its contemporaries. 

The 5 Worst Singles

5. (Seven Little Girls) Sitting in the Back- Paul Evans and the Curls (#100)

 Oh man I hoped this one would make my worst list because I have THOUGHTS. I know that the use of “little girls” was probably not to meant to refer to actual children but aside from the difference in meaning that phrase has 60 years on, I have questions about how seven adult or teenage females could actually fit in a back seat. I dunno, I can’t see this as anything other than seven children “kissing and a’huggin with Fred.” Meanwhile, the narrator drives and complains about how he’s not getting any action only for all seven girls to speak with seven mouths but one voice that he needs to keep his eyes on the road and his mind on his driving. It’s creepy in multiple ways and aside from my taking the lyrics too literally, it doesn’t sound good. The tune is bland and the girl voices they use for the chorus are creepy. 

4. Deck of Cards- Wink Martindale (#71)

This isn’t even a fucking song. It’s Wink Martindale telling a very boring story set to tedious music about how some guy managed to sneak cards into the army by explaining how they relate to the bible. Every single number card, the number of picture cards, the number of dots on a card, the four suits etc is related back to the bible. I respect this guy’s ability to bullshit the army but I didn’t need this as a charting hit. What makes it worse too is that it’s played earnestly. I don’t think you’re supposed to think that this dude is some brilliant liar but actually just a nice, Christian boy who sees god in everything. Oh and plot twist- Wink Martindale was that soldier all along! I have no use for this not-song.

3. Alvin’s Harmonica- David Seville (#48)

Alvin and the Chipmunks can burn in hell. On top of being obnoxious, something I didn’t realize about Alvin and the Chipmunks is that David Seville (or whoever the human voice in this is supposed to be) is basically abusive to Alvin, always yelling at him and singling him out. Alvin’s annoying as fuck but also seems to be a child so it’s rather uncomfortable.

2. Quiet Village- Martin Denny (#18)

This is just really basic, borderline discordant piano music with animal noises in the background. I hate it. There’s no chorus, no bridge, no way of knowing how long the song is. It just meanders from tune to tune and also completely fails to evoke the concept of a quiet village. At least with something like Alvin and the Chipmunks I see the appeal even if I don’t agree. With this song, I just don’t see at all how it became a hit. It’s not even elevator music because it’s too grating to be elevator music. Just fucking awful.

1. The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t be Late)- David Seville (#67)

Another fucking chipmunk song with a tune more likely to get stuck in your head AND it’s a Christmas song. Absolutely not. Also that abuse aspect I talked about in the last Chipmunks song? Still very present and with less antics on the track from Alvin, it’s less justified (if it ever was). Like the human guy pays compliments to the other chipmunks and then always critiques or blames Alvin. I don’t like it.

Other Observations on this List

I listened to this list over a year ago so I don’t really remember many songs worth mentioning or trends worth touching on. My bad.  

There’s a song called Baby Talk in which the narrator’s girlfriend only ever apparently speaks in a spew of gibberish which the narrator then translates. Also then, at the end of the song, it’s mentioned that the narrator is 5 and his love interest is 3. A bad concept for a song.

As mentioned before, this year was impacted by the day the music died. I’m so curious as to what music would have been like had that not happened.

Music trends from 1955 to 1959 have hardly changed at all. There’s a steady evolution but the popular genres remained more or less the same through this half decade. That’s very different from the charts in 2005 to 2009 in which multiple trends in music rose and fell within those years.

[skystonedclouds]

I’ve always been afraid of jesus coming back and I wonder if I’m not a Christian because of it??? I can’t tell if it’s just selfish fear or actual fear some days because it’s almost like denial, like I’ve heard dozens of predictions and I don’t know what to believe now? Doesn’t that make me a scoffer?

Dear Anon,

The scoffers refer to people who think he will never come back so believers are in a sense “holding their breathe in vain”. I encounter this when I meet atheists who say “It has been 2000+ years he is not coming back!”.

2 Peter 3:4 And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.

You could be afraid of the second coming for many reasons even though it is not meant to. It is because we are supposed to miss our savior as we would a spouse or close friend. In the bible it even mentions that our intense mournful longing for his return should be the very reason we fast. Ever heard someone say “I miss them so much I have no desire to even eat” ?

Matthew 9:14-15 Then came to him the disciples of John, saying, Why do we and the Pharisees fast oft, but thy disciples fast not? And Jesus said unto them, Can the children of the bridechamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them? but the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast.

I was formerly worried too at one point about the return of Jesus Christ. I guess you could call it “cold feet” for the wedding of church and God. I thought “I don’t even know God. I will not even know anyone in heaven since everyone I know is an unbeliever. I will lose all my possessions not that I need them just that nothing will feel like home. I will lose all my daily habits suddenly be commissioned to an entirely different style of living. I am not sure I want to go to heaven…”.

Then remembered that I do know God. I pray to him every day following after his heart. I have seen his love for me and others radiate. I have seen he never failed me only wanting to best for me. I will be with my best friend who never gave up on me even at my worst moments. I will be in a house he specifically designed for me with possessions he knows I would love. I will feel more at home than I have ever felt in his presence. Is it so scary to finally be next to the one you have prayed to all your life? Is it so scary to be with the one who showed you love every day? Is it so scary to finally be with the one who loved you so much they died for you?

So you mention a concern that you may not be a Christian. That really depends on the reason for the fear and many other factors.

1. Is it cold feet?2. Are you worried about loved ones? Are you worried they will not be saved in time? 3. Are you afraid because you are afraid of judgment day? Are you afraid he “might” say “I never knew you?”.

1 John 4:18-19 There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love. He that feareth is not made perfect in love. 19We love him, because he first loved us.

I mean if you feel unsaved because you think you are not a Christian or fear you may have faith in your own salvation (#3) this would not just apply to the return it would also apply to dying as well. It would mean you were afraid of both dying and the return of the savior. In that case you may lack faith (only you know). Are you afraid of death and judgment just the same? Is it just the second coming?

When you find out even if you find you are not saved you are not without a mighty hope. Salvation is through faith alone so you have to trust Jesus Christ. Trust that He loves you that he paid the penalty for all your sins. He died for the removal of the penalty and power of sin. Repentance does not mean “fix yourself” to be worthy of God. It means “forget every idea of fixing yourself and just trust God”. Repent even from self righteousness. In the moment he was hanging on the cross He said “It is finished”.

Being good is a product of actually believing and following Christ. It is the difference between salvation and sanctification. In life when you trust someone or have faith you trust their advice? It is the same with God except He is perfect giving us commands as a guard rail not a fence. He wants full surrender of your faith and trust in Him. Jesus Christ gives us a new heart and spirit when we have faith that can obey Him.

As it is said “Nothing in my hands I bring simply to the cross I cling”.

Resources about faith.

Faith fight.

Doubting salvation.

A study on repentance.

Justification.

Paul washer story.

Woman faith story.

[woodworkingpastor]

Say What?! Money is the root of evil? -- 1 Timothy 6:3-10, 17-19 -- Sunday, August 29, 2021

In his Confessions, one of St. Augustine of Hippo’s reflections is of an event when he was sixteen years old: he and a group of boys stole some pears from a neighbor’s tree. I would imagine that this is the kind of misbehavior that most of us can relate to—what we might call, “not real trouble,” but still something that need swift discipline from our parents. Reflecting on this experience, Augustine notes that there was nothing desirable about these pears; they were ugly, they tasted bad, and he had access to good pears. All the boys did was steal them and throw them to the pigs. But what Augustine came to realize was that there was something depraved about their hearts that made them not desire the pears but made them desire stealing the pears. It was the desiring to sin that was attractive.

That’s probably a harder take on this event that we might take. For Augustine, it was the sign of a heart in desperate need of a Savior.

The love of money

That might seem an unexpected introduction to our last Say What?! sermon, this one on the phrase “money is the root of all evil.” This misquotation of Scripture is one that gets repeated a lot—it’s especially popular on social media; there is even a way to fold a $1 bill so that the words on the bill are rearranged to say this! For all of the sermons in this series, though, this one might be the simplest illustration of the point of the sermons. If you were listening carefully when Eli read the Scripture, you might have heard the correct reference in 1 Timothy 6:10:

For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil…

As with many things, it’s the subtle differences that are significant. As we will see when we go along, money itself is not the issue. There is a God-honoring way to be in relationship with our money, and Paul will talk about that with Timothy. Before we get to that, however, let’s look at the real focus of this portion of Scripture. It’s found just two verses prior, where Paul says,

if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these (1 Timothy 6:8).

My question to us is, “Do we believe this?” Don’t give me the “church answer”—the “If the Bible says it, then I believe it!” answer that we’re supposed to give. Tell yourself the truth: do our lives validate the truth of this verse? Are we content with food and clothes—essentially the necessities for living? Or do we find ourselves desiring other things, not fully aware that our desires lead us to dangerous spiritual places?

The occasion of Paul’s letter

The Pastoral Epistles represent a development in Christian thought and writing. When we get to the letters to Timothy and Titus, enough time and space have passed since the era of Jesus and the apostles, that first-generation church leaders are beginning to write guides to second-generation church leaders, instructing them on right belief and practice. As Christianity spread beyond Jerusalem and began to incorporate non-Jewish persons into their life, church leaders not only had to teach people about God’s activity to reconcile all things in Jesus, they also had to provide a whole new ethical framework based on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

One of the areas of instruction involved attitudes towards money and possessions. There are some members of Timothy’s church who feel that the Gospel is a pathway to wealth, that “godliness is a means to gain.” The idea is that being a faithful Christian will provide material blessings recognizable by the standards of living of our times. It’s an idea that remains with us to this very day. What we are told is that this idea ultimately comes from those whose lives aren’t being shaped by the Gospel and are instead characterized by

envy, dissension, slander, base suspicions, and wrangling among those who are depraved in mind and bereft of the truth (1 Timothy 6:4-5).

Doesn’t that sound like the world we are living in? I’m particularly curious about the word “wrangling.” It turns out that this word is unknown in Greek literature other than here—apparently, it’s a word Paul made up and it means something like “constant friction” or “constant disputation.” It always interests me when a Biblical writer makes up a word to describe something; how much controversy and trouble were these teachers stirring up that the words that existed were insufficient to describe?

This is when Paul makes the pivot in his argument to describe the situation at hand. Actually, he says, godliness does bring gain, but only if it is combined with contentment for what we have, not a drive to accumulate more wealth or possessions. Godliness and the love of money are competing values. It’s an idea that’s seen throughout the Scripture. From the Old Testament, Proverbs 30:7-9 reads:

Two things I ask of you; do not deny them to me before I die: Remove far from me falsehood and lying; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that I need, or I shall be full, and deny you, and say, “Who is the LORD?” or I shall be poor, and steal, and profane the name of my God.

What a prayer! This is someone who has come to terms with their heart, isn’t it? We pray the Lord’s Prayer each Sunday—perhaps we add this to our liturgy every so often!

From the New Testament, we hear Jesus say something similar to us:

But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well (Matthew 6:33).

This brings us back to the question I posed a few minutes ago: “Are we content with having enough food and clothing—having our basic needs met?” Do our lives proclaim the truth of 1 Timothy 6:8? Last Sunday we met with a few the persons who have been attending our congregation for a short while. One of the things I told them was that we really work hard at building connections among our members. Each of these persons has already been assigned a deacon, and that deacon was present for our gathering.

Should I also have told these persons, “If you follow Jesus with us, your finances will get rearranged, because we are a congregation who loves to be generous, and we invest in outreach all the time through our regular offerings and lots of special offerings. We are a congregation of deep pockets and long arms that reach all the way to the bottom. Hang out with us long enough, and you’ll be just like us!”

Should I have told them that? For those of you who are new-ish, would you have stayed away today if I had? Has our association with Jesus (our discipleship) and our connection with this congregation (our fellowship) led us to be more financially generous?

I believe it has. But the other temptation exists as well; it’s a temptation described by country music singer Chris Jenson in his song, Buy me a boat:

I know everybody says money can’t buy happiness, but it could buy me a boat; It could buy me a truck to pull it; It could buy me a Yeti 110 iced down with some silver bullets; Yeah, and I know what they say, money can't buy everything; Well, maybe so but it could buy me a boat.

Money can’t buy you happiness, but if I’m going to be unhappy, I’d rather be fishing! Or so the song suggests….

“Sermons about money make me uncomfortable!”

Why is it that sermons on money make us uncomfortable? Could it be because it’s one place—perhaps the first place—where our commitment to Jesus begins to cost us something (pun intended).

The thing is, a significant aspect of the Bible’s instruction on wealth and possessions really isn’t focused on our attitudes about money; it’s focused on our attitudes about God. Do we believe that God is who Jesus said he is, and are we willing to trust God in the places where our commitment to our faith is measured by sacrifice? Perhaps not, if our image of God is a Lincoln Memorial-type of figure, high and immovable, cold and distant. But this isn’t the picture of God that Jesus gives us; Jesus tells us that God is “Abba,” someone we can approach with confidence. Jesus tells us that God is like a woman who loses a coin and searches her house until it is found; God is like a shepherd who leaves 99 sheep to go in search of the one that is lost; God is like a father who welcomes a wayward son back home, in spite of what anyone else thinks of him.

We measure our beliefs about God and money and the temptation to desire wealth and riches in relation to very real challenges: mortgages, college tuition, economic challenges, job insecurity, health insurance, nursing care—and our own temptations to maintain a certain status of living.

When we come to believe in this God; when our lives validate that yes, we can be content with clothes and food, we will know how to properly handle money—we will be generous, ready to share, seeking the good of the kingdom. Then we will have “taken hold of the life that is really life,” instead of having handfuls of ugly, sour pears that are only worth throwing to the pigs.

[dailyaudiobible]

05/11/2018 DAB Transcript

1 Samuel 10:1-11:15, John 6:43-71, Psalms 107:1-43, Proverbs 15:1-3

Today is the 11th day of May. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian. It is my honor and pleasure to have these minutes together as we take the next step forward, moving our way through the Scriptures. So, we've been reading from 1 Samuel in our Old Testament reading and we are entering the territory that will lead us into a new era with the Israelites as kingship is about to be introduced into their culture. And Samuel plays a pivotal role in that story. So we'll pick up where we left off yesterday. This week were reading from the New International Version. We'll read 1 Samuel chapters 10 and 11 today.

Commentary:

Okay. So, we covered a bunch of territory in our reading today. In the Old Testament, we now have a king. Israel has its first king, Saul. So, we have entered a new era and we need to watch as this unfolds. We're gonna learn a lot about ourselves from King Saul, or for that matter, from many of the kings. But this next patch that we're gonna move through in the Scriptures, we're (getting) an intimate look at King Saul and then we're gonna meet this guy named David. And we're gonna learn a lot about ourselves from him as well because he's gonna grow up to be king, too. And they are starkly contrasted, Saul and David. But their stories are deeply intertwined. And one of the first clues that we get about Saul, we see today in his coronation when God is selecting the person to be king from the different tribes and the different family clans. And once Saul is selected, he's nowhere to be found. He's hiding. In the New International Version that we're reading from this week, he's hiding in the supplies. Other translations have him hiding in the baggage. They essentially mean the same thing. They're the things that everyone who has come to this coronation have brought. But it gives us the opportunity to consider what baggage exactly it is that we are hiding in and are we able to rise up and be who we are created to be if we're gonna continue to hide in the baggage?

And then we get into the book of John. And we encounter what some would call the bread of life discourse. I always smile when we come through this territory cause to me, it's kind of like Jesus vampire monologue, where he tells everybody who's listening that they can't have hope in eternal life if they don't eat his flesh and drink his blood. And we see the people's reaction. They're a little freaked out about it, a little agitated about it. A lot of the people who had been following Jesus deserted him after that. So, he's willing to not grandstand. We see that in Jesus constantly. He's not trying to build an empire for himself by saying the things that people wanna hear. But it is curious enough for us to go, like what is he talking about? How can we eat his flesh and drink his blood? And are we talking about cannibalism here? Are we talking about...what are we dealing with? But because you'd think that some disturbed person, and there were plenty of disturbed people around Jesus. He set a lot of disturbed people free. But if you think about it in those terms, some disturbed person who would believe that literally would try to kill Jesus and eat him. And you can only imagine how he would defend himself in court and how that would play out on national television if it were in this day and age, right? So, if something like that were spoken in this day and age it would seem bizarre at best, which is how it appeared to the people Jesus was talking to. He was speaking primarily to a Jewish audience who had been taught by the Mosaic law not to drink blood and not to eat meat with blood in it, right? And, so, it's like Jesus is telling them to do exactly that, only to a human body. So, you can imagine why they're a little freaked out. But interpreting what Jesus actually means leads us to divergent theological schools of thought. And I have worked tirelessly, really really hard over the years, to not try to tell you what you are supposed to believe and do.  I believe that is the work of the Holy Spirit.  But when we do come to historically divergent things in the faith, we talk about them. So, for many over the centuries, this has referred to the Lord's table, to the eucharist or communion. And billions of people over thousands of years have held to that idea that in taking the eucharist, the elements become the flesh and blood of Jesus. They go inside and transform us spiritually and make us have eternal life. Other schools of thought equally as old, just as longstanding, have said, essentially, Jesus is not talking about the Lord's table or communion here. It hasn't even been instituted yet in the book of John. Jesus hasn't had his last supper yet. He hasn't passed the cup or the bread. He is speaking metaphorically about a spiritual reality in the same way with the woman at the well he talked about eternal water flowing from within to eternal life. And in the same passage that we read, Jesus seems to illuminate that by saying, the spirit gives life, the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you they are full of the spirit and life. So, this has been wrestled with for a long time, going all the way back to the early church fathers. So, for example, St. Augustin of Hippo was very influential in some of the doctrines that we believe as Christians. Things like original sin, things like the doctrine of the trinity, he had a voice in all of that. Regarding this passage he summed it up by saying Believe and you have eaten. And this is because when we believe in Jesus, we enter into life with Jesus. And the apostle Paul would say it's no longer me who's living, it's Christ who lives in me, which would parallel what Jesus said.  Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. So, there's a couple of ways of looking at this passage. And I think we would pretty much agree that Jesus isn't inviting us to become cannibals or vampires. Although, this is exactly what the early church got accused of. And what brought a lot of marginalization to early Christians in the societies that they lived in and what brought on persecution.

And then we get to Proverbs. A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. And that would submit that that's pretty self-explanatory, but pretty deeply penetrating into the ways that we interact. That proverb is worth committing to memory. It's worth remembering and calling to mind before any conversation is going to take place. Because knowing this verse after the fact, right? After things have already blown up and world war 3 is raging, well, it's a little late.  But walking into a situation knowing a gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.  Knowing that going in changes how you communicate.  So we've covered some serious ground today.

Prayer:

And, Father, we invite you into it. It touches on a lot of different things.  It touches us theologically, it touches us practically, it touches us historically. All these things that they keep churning as we continue to move through your Word and you keep touching every part of our lives.  And that's what we want.  We want all of you, all that you have for us. And in return we give all that we are to you, which is such a lopsided trade. But it's what we have. We give our hearts, our minds our wills, our bodies, our spirits to you and invite your Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth. And we ask expectantly, knowing that you will. We ask in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website, it's home base, it's certainly where you find out what's going on around here, so be sure to check in and check it out.

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And that's it for today. I'm Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Hi everyone, it’s Karen in St. Louis. Hey, I just wanted to celebrate with Terry. It was so great to hear you calling him and also hearing all the others who have called in. And we have all been praying for you brother. And I totally agree with what Bob from Michigan said today and loved how we talked about doing the kill and fill. I try to pray for the Holy Spirit to fill me each day before I get out of bed but I never thought about killing that flesh. And, so, I just wanted to say thank you for that. And also, I want to lift up Hopeful. I heard your prayer request for a child and I will be praying for you. And God can do it. My best friend got pregnant when she was 42 years old after many years trying. And, so, I pray that you will just have peace in the waiting. And, oh gosh Brian, once again your commentary on Proverbs 14:30-31. I unplug from social media from time to time and as you all know the desire in my heart for having a husband and a family has never happened. And, so, as the years have gone on, I mean, I’ve celebrated with friends and family who’ve gotten married and had kids but, gosh, I just find it harder and harder. And envy has been an issue that I continually have to write down even had at our Good Friday service at church. We had to give a funeral and pick up flowers for one besetting sin. The one that I picked out was envy. And, so, I would just ask that you would all pray that the peace that surpasses all understanding would just fill my heart, every square inch of it, and that the Lord would take away this desire if it’s not his. But, anyway, thanks again Brian and I love you all. Bye-bye.

Hey, this is Blessed Like Me coming to you with a message of knowing who God is. Now, we all have our own idea who God is but one thing we can all agree on - denomination to denomination, reverend to layman - we can all agree that God is sovereign but sometimes we forget this and sometimes we try to play the position of God. We try to pull the strings that God does. We try to do the things that God does. That’s not the thing that we are to do. God has given us, gave us commandments and things to do. We are to love God with all our heart all our soul all our mind, but we are to know that God is sovereign. And when we know that God is sovereign there are certain things we don’t do, there are certain things we don’t do. And we don’t try to manipulate or try to change things that God has already ordained and put into place. Now, one thing He has placed for us to do is to go. And don’t want us to sit on our hands and be Christians that can’t do anything, but He also wants us to know that God is in control. He is in control. Our God is in control. Somebody needed this today. Somebody needed to know that God is in control. No matter how much you worry. No matter how much you contemplate. No matter how much you try to design and change things, God is in control, and know that your life will go so much easier in your Christian walk with Him. Remember you’re not walking in front of Him you’re walking with Him. And God wants us to be his children. And one thing children do is they know their father, they know their parents. So, He wants us to know Him and to know what He wants from us. Blessed Like Me coming to you from __ knowing God’s sovereignty. God is sovereign. He’s all sovereign. Love you guys. Miss you DAB family. I Love you so much. Thank you, Jill, and Brian for this ministry. Love you guys.

Hey DAB family. This is Jordan from Texas, first time caller. Been listening since the end of Deuteronomy. Anyways, just wanted to introduce myself and let you guys know how blessed I am by this ministry and all of you guys prayers, poems, singing, it’s awesome. I just wanted to encourage a couple people that I’ve heard lately. Terry the truck driver, a lot of people been praying for you and giving you words of encouragement. Just wanted to say, aw man, you mentioned that you feel like God has given up on you and I just want to remind you about Jesus saying, you know, I want you…to His disciples saying...saying, you know, forgive those who sin against you 70×7 times in a day. And, you know, He did mean 490. He meant however many it took. And, so, if He required that of us, how much more is God willing to forgive you then. And, you know, it’s just a big fat lie that He has given up on you. So, be encouraged brother. I hope you are. I’m praying for you. Last person, if I have time here, Hopeful, just listened to yours, May 8th, desperately wanting children and the doctors saying you’re too old, 40, turning this year. I met a woman last year, she’s on her 12th child and she’s 50. So, it’s not too late for you and I just want to encourage you and let you know that I’m praying for you daily. So, all right, love you guys. It’s a blessing. So, have a good day.

Hi Fam. My name is Leah E. This is my second call. My first call was spoke so quickly and nervously I don’t think it was understandable. That was about a year ago. I’m calling today because 14 years ago the Lord found it fitting for me to leave a life of substance abuse and isolation. And over the last six years things got kind of rough. I lost my mother, my father, two close friends and my brother all in separate tragic incidents, incidents most of which I witnessed firsthand. Despite this, I stayed the course of sobriety. And I know now that’s because of prayers that begotten more prayers that begotten more prayers all started by a friend of mine who I love very dearly. Now that friend is struggling with substance abuse and depression and terrible seizures and that often terrify her children. Of course, she’s decided to call herself an atheist. The prayer chain she began reached thousands of people and blessed me with comfort and healing when I needed it the most. Also, another dear friend checked herself into the hospital today to keep from committing suicide. It’s a regular pattern that she can’t break alone. I know what that feels like and I know that God lifted these feelings from me as easily as He did the substance abuse, like peeling a glove off and exposing a clean hand. I know that with all of you out there praying my friend’s illnesses don’t stand a chance. Prayers are miracles and I can’t wait to see the miracles that He puts in place through you all. My friend’s names are Stacey M. and Mayly L. Thank you, family. Also, shout out to Slave of Jesus. Everything you do inspires me man. Thank you, guys. Bye.

[alli-howard]

“Christianity Will Have Power”: Thoughts on Christian Nationalism

A few days after the attack on the Capitol building, I was talking to one of my friends about what happened. I mentioned how bothered I was by the Christian imagery that was present, from crosses to Jesus Saves flags. “Do you think they were trying to be ironic?” she asked. “Was that supposed to be a joke?” While we can’t know their intentions, I don’t think the people holding these symbols meant to be ironic. Despite Donald Trump’s failure to exemplify Christian values, he has drummed up a significant amount of enthusiasm from white Christian faith communities over the years. This blog post is my attempt to explain why that is the case.

For years, many white Christian churches have aligned themselves with the Republican Party. I have often found myself concerned about that alignment, not because of policy, but because I believe that coupling faith with a political party is damaging to our witness for Christ in the world. Sometimes the alliance is implied in a way that makes others feel like they do not belong in a particular church if they are not a Republican. Other times the connection is made more explicitly, by a pastor from the pulpit or in church-wide communications. Either way, Christians with different political views can often feel like they don’t belong.

Rather than going back through history to explain where and when this phenomenon started, I am going to start instead with the way it escalated during Trump’s 2016 campaign. On a campaign stop at a Christian college, Trump gave a speech in which he said, “Christianity is under tremendous siege, whether we want to talk about it or we don’t want to talk about it… Christianity will have power. If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power, you don’t need anybody else. You’re going to have somebody representing you very, very well. Remember that.”

Of course, as Christians we know that Christianity already has power. Paul says in Romans that “I am not ashamed of the Gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to anyone who believes.” 2 Corinthians says “[Jesus] was crucified in weakness, but lives by the power of God,” and the Bible says in Acts, “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses.”

Clearly, that isn’t the kind of power Trump was referring to in his speech. Instead, he was referring to political power – he was telling Christians that he would treat them favorably and enact policies that they like while he is in office. The idea that Christian faith should seek political power to achieve its goals is called Christian nationalism.

It can be easy to confuse Christian nationalism with patriotism, so I want to pause here to say that loving your country is not a bad thing. We need to keep in mind, though, that this is not ultimately our home. We are called to live as aliens and strangers (1 Peter 2:11), and in America, that is hardly the case. White Christians enjoy benefits that people of other races, ethnicities, and faiths do not. Some even try to maintain those benefits by standing in the way of others who seek to pursue equal rights. Let me be clear: that is not the way of the cross.

Jesus came to Earth, lived, died, and rose again to free us from our sin and selfishness. Rather than holding on to His own power and status, Philippians 2 reminds us how what Jesus did:

“[Jesus], being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to His own advantage; rather, He made Himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to death – even death on a cross!”

Our Savior, whom we seek to emulate, willingly gave up His power to be with us. Then, He allowed Himself to suffer for our benefit. While we were still our enemies, He died for us.

Let me ask you an easy question: does this sound like something Trump would do? No, it does not. Although Trump has at times presented himself as the saving figure that white Christians have been waiting for, he bears no resemblance to our Savior.

By now we all know that 81% of white Christians voted for Trump in 2016, and the number was similar in the last election. I am concerned that some white Christians who were moderate Republicans before are now following Trump towards political extremism, in the form of conspiracy theories or the alt-right. If four out of five white Christians believed him enough to vote for him, will they believe him when he says that the election was rigged? Will they believe him when he says “you have to fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore?” I am afraid that some will, and many of them will be in our churches.

So how can we live as faithful, American Christians without adopting the beliefs of Christian nationalism? And how can we help our brothers and sisters in Christ from drifting into political extremism? Here are a few of my suggestions:

1. Learn what is true. The world is a lot less scary when we’re centered in Scripture. Similarly, politics is a lot less overwhelming when we understand how government works (@sharonsaysso is currently my favorite resource for understanding how government operates). For example, I imagine that January 6th might have played out differently if the people who wanted Mike Pence to overturn the election results knew that the Constitution didn’t allow him to do so.

2. Ask yourself: who is discipling me? Are you being formed in the image of God through His word and other Christians, or are you being shaped by news outlets and political commentary? Bible studies, mentoring relationships, Christianity Today, and the Quick to Listen podcast are great ways to make sure your heart is being shaped in ways that are spiritually healthy.

3. If you think Christian nationalism is a problem, say so. Being white and a Christian doesn’t mean that you need to defend everything that white Christians do. Similarly, being an American doesn’t mean you have to defend everything about America. James Baldwin once said, “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, for that reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” We can only build a more perfect union if we are honest about our faults.

4. Check on your brothers and sisters in Christ. I recently heard a quote that said, “Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable.” Many people are feeling like they aren’t being heard right now, and that is causing their fears and anxieties to skyrocket. Ask people in your faith community how they are doing and listen to understand what they are going through.

5. Pray for your “enemies.” Our neighbors are not our enemies. Our political opponents are not our enemies. We are all Americans, but one good way to start reminding ourselves of that is to pray for people we disagree with.

As our country increases in diversity of faith, race, and ethnicity, we have the opportunity to ask ourselves a few questions. Do we want to be people who hold on to Christian nationalism, with its talk of God, guns, and freedom, or do we want to follow the way of the Jesus, and sacrifice ourselves for the good of others? Will we be people who seek to hear what we want to hear, or people who cling to the truth? In other words, given the choice, will we cling to Old Glory or the cross?