Cockroaches Scattering for Cover

Most Signatories Are ‘Ignoring’ or ‘Abandoning’ Paris Climate Commitments

Thomas D. Williams
BreitbartLondon

Following President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, a number of other nations have quietly begun ignoring the Paris energy goals, according to a new report out of Canada.
According to Lawrence Solomon of Energy Probe, a Toronto-based environmental organization, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is one of the only signers of the Paris agreement who is actually abiding by the exacting demands of the accord.

Meanwhile, Solomon notes in an essay in Friday’s Financial Post, “most signatories are ignoring, if not altogether abandoning Paris commitments, undoubtedly because voters in large part put no stock in scary global warming scenarios.”

“Trudeau now stands almost alone in sincere support of Paris,” Solomon writes. “The populist backlash — a revulsion at top-down governments laden with jet-setting politicians landing in posh places to preach restraint to the masses — has swept America with Trump’s election, Great Britain with Brexit, much of Europe, and Australia.”

“In the process, global warming enthusiasts are being swept out,” he writes.

Last week, Australia rejected its Clean Energy Target (CET), a lengthy proposal that would have forced electricity utilities to rely on renewables and other low-emission sources for a substantial percentage of their production.

Daily Meditation

No Self-Awareness

C. S. Lewis

The Naturalists have been engaged in thinking about Nature. They have not attended to the fact that they were thinking. The moment one attends to this it is obvious that one’s own thinking cannot be merely a natural event, and that therefore something other than Nature exists. The Supernatural is not remote and abstruse: it is a matter of daily and hourly experience, as intimate as breathing.

From Miracles
Compiled in A Mind Awake Miracles: A Preliminary Study. Copyright 1947 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1947 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Revised 1960, restored 1996 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis. Copyright © 1968 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Religion and Violence

Cheap Propaganda

One never ceases to chuckle at the nonsense spouted about "religion" by the allegedly irreligious, or by those who should know better.  Here is a classic of the genre:

It is somewhat trite, but nevertheless sadly true, to say that more wars have been waged, more people killed, and these days more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in human history.  [Charles Kimball, When Religion Becomes Evil (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2002),  p.1.]

Ah, yes.  Trite indeed.  Why not make the following claim--equally true, and meaningless: "more wars have been waged under the influence of breathing than any other force in history"?  As Christians, we should never fall into the trap of such lazy, foolish generalisations.  Coincidence does not mean causality, as any student of Logic 101 would insist.  Kimball, being a professing Christian, should know better.

The Scriptures declare that all men are religious, and act with religious motivation of one kind or another.  It is the fool who says in his heart that there is no God  [Psalm 14:1; Psalm 53:1].  Moreover, every single human being knows the true God, according to Romans 1:21:

For although they knew God, they did not honour him as God or give thanks to him, but they [mankind] became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

The key issue is not whether a man is religiously motivated, or not--since all are to one extent or another--but what the particular doctrines and precepts are which that man's religion teaches.   Stalin, for example, was an intensely religious man.

Letter From America (About Europe, The Sick Man of the West)

Quo Vadis? The Philosophical, Spiritual Floundering of Europe in 2017

Where Christianity and cultural identity are declining in tandem

By Garland Tucker
National Review Online

During my recent vacation to Scotland, the National Centre for Social Research released a major new survey, which documented the continuing decline of Christianity in the U.K. The headline read: “Non-believers outnumber the faithful by widest margin yet.” This fall has been driven primarily by young people. Of those between 18 and 24 years old, 62 percent have no religion. The figures for the Church of England were devastating: The proportion of the population describing themselves as Anglican has dropped from 30 percent in 2000 to 15 percent today — with just 3 percent of 18- to-24-year-olds. In Scotland, church attendance has fallen by over half in the past 30 years.

As the import of this survey was sinking in, the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, weighed in with a sadly telling reaction. Noting the alarming decline in young believers, he blasted the inequities of Britain’s capitalistic system, which he perceives as “failing our children.” If warmed-over socialism is all the church can offer young people, it’s no wonder they are saying “no thanks” in record numbers. How sadly ironic that the ideas of Adam Smith are criticized by someone who should fully understand capitalism’s unmatched contributions to the improvement of mankind. No economic system in the history of man has done more to lift humans, all over the globe, from poverty.

Welby should also know that it was capitalism, born of competitive innovation and consumer choice, that rebuilt Europe after World War II. The freedom to pursue personal opportunity gave life to a European rebirth.

Daily Meditation

Four Faithful Sayings

It is a faithful saying.  2 Timothy 2:11

Charles H. Spurgeon

Paul has four of these "faithful sayings." The first occurs in 1 Timothy 1:15, "This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners." The next is in 1 Timothy 4:6, "Godliness is profitable unto all things, having the promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come. This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation." The third is in 2 Timothy 2:12, "It is a faithful saying--If we suffer with him we shall also reign with him"; and the fourth is in Titus 3:3, "This is a faithful saying, that they which have believed in God might be careful to maintain good works."

We may trace a connection between these faithful sayings. The first one lays the foundation of our eternal salvation in the free grace of God, as shown to us in the mission of the great Redeemer. The next affirms the double blessedness which we obtain through this salvation--the blessings of the upper and nether springs--of time and of eternity. The third shows one of the duties to which the chosen people are called; we are ordained to suffer for Christ with the promise that "if we suffer, we shall also reign with him." The last sets forth the active form of Christian service, bidding us diligently to maintain good works.

Thus we have the root of salvation in free grace; next, the privileges of that salvation in the life which now is, and in that which is to come; and we have also the two great branches of suffering with Christ and serving with Christ, loaded with the fruits of the Spirit. Treasure up these faithful sayings. Let them be the guides of our life, our comfort, and our instruction. The apostle of the Gentiles proved them to be faithful, they are faithful still, not one word shall fall to the ground; they are worthy of all acceptation, let us accept them now, and prove their faithfulness. Let these four faithful sayings be written on the four corners of my house.

The Nameless Dead

Backward Elements

The year is 1933.  Peasants in the Soviet Union were being re-located from the West into Siberia.  The Grand Chessmaster had decreed that they be sent East to populate the barren wastes of the frozen tundra.  They were being sent to the island of Nazino, in the Ob River.

The island of Nazino is a totally uninhabited place, devoid of any settlements . . . . There were no tools, no grain, and no food.  That is how their new life began.  The day after the arrival of the first convoy, on 19 May, snow began to fall again, and the wind picked up.  Starving, emaciated from months of insufficient food, without shelter and without tools . . . they were trapped.  They weren't even able to light fires to ward off the cold.  More and more of them began to die . . .

On the first day, 295 people were buried.  It was only on the fourth or fifth day after the convoy's arrival on the island that the authorities sent a bit of flour by boat, really no more than a few pounds per person.  Once they had received their meagre ration, people ran to the edge of the water and tried to mix some of the flour with water in their hats, their trousers or their jackets.  Most of them just tried to eat it straight off, and some of them even choked to death.  These tiny amounts of flour were the only food that the deportees received during the entire period of their stay on the island . . . . [Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (New York: Penguin Books, 2003),  p.88.]

When people are murdered, the Bible speaks of their blood crying out from the ground to the Living God.  [Genesis 4:10].  Two hundred and ninety five nameless, unknown-to-us people died that first day.  Unknown to us; known to God.  Their lifeblood still cries to Him.

But this black day was just the beginning.

Our World Class Education System At Work

Syntactical Morons

Spot the fundamental error in the piece below.  Clearly NZ Herald staff have graduated with honours from our world class public schools. 

ENTERTAINMENT
James Packer opens up on 'Mariah Carey mistake' 21 Oct, 2017 8:28am
The billionaire broke his silence on why Mariah Carey and him called off their wedding.

Daily Meditation

Hedonism for Husbands and Wives

Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. (Ephesians 5:24–25)

John Piper

There is a pattern of love in marriage ordained by God.

The roles of husband and wife are not the same. The husband is to take his special cues from Christ as the head of the church. The wife is to take her special cues from the church as submissive to Christ.

In doing this, the sinful and damaging results of the Fall begin to be reversed. The Fall twisted man’s loving headship into hostile domination in some men and lazy indifference in others. The Fall twisted woman’s intelligent, willing submission into manipulative obsequiousness in some women and brazen insubordination in others.

The redemption we anticipate at the coming of Christ is not the dismantling of the created order of loving headship and willing submission, but a recovery of it. Wives, redeem your fallen submission by modeling it after God’s intention for the church! Husbands, redeem your fallen headship by modeling it after God’s intention for Christ!

I find in Ephesians 5:21–33 these two things: (1) the display of Christian Hedonism in marriage and (2) the direction its impulses should take.

Wives, seek your joy in the joy of your husband by affirming and honoring his God-ordained role as leader in your relationship. Husbands, seek your joy in the joy of your wife by accepting the responsibility to lead as Christ led the church and gave himself for her.

I would like to bear witness to God’s goodness in my life. I discovered Christian Hedonism the same year I got married, in 1968. Since then, Noël and I, in obedience to Jesus Christ, have pursued as passionately as we can the deepest, most lasting joys possible. All too imperfectly, all too half-heartedly at times, we have stalked our own joy in the joy of each other.

And we can testify together: For those who marry, this is the path to the heart’s desire. For us, marriage has been a matrix for Christian Hedonism. As each pursues joy in the joy of the other and fulfills a God-ordained role, the mystery of marriage as a parable of Christ and the church becomes manifest for his great glory and for our great joy.

An Ancient Evil

Slavery is Growing in the West

We expect that "history" will record the early 21st century to be one which allowed international slavery to flourish.  Most of this new slavery manifested itself as people from less prosperous socio-economic regions and countries migrated illegally to more wealthy countries.  They were smuggled across national borders, or brought into countries under pretext, then forced to work as slaves.  

A recent headline in The Guardian claimed that slavery in the UK has increased by 300 percent.  It went on to clarify that this huge increase was due not to an explosion of slaving into the UK, but to better reporting.  In other words, this modern form of slavery has existed for some time, and is only now coming to be exposed.

"I Am A Worm, And Less Than a Man" [Psalm 22:6]

Welcome Everyone, Affirm No-One

Trevin Wax
The Gospel Coalition

The most well-known hymn in America, "Amazing Grace," by the former slaveholder John Newton, contains a line that many people stumble over.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me!

The hymn may be popular, but the sentiment is not. Few Americans consider themselves "wretches" of moral repugnance and debasement. We like to think of ourselves as basically good, with a few flaws; not fundamentally bad, with few virtues to save us.

Some Christians believe it would be good to remove unnecessary offense by downplaying human sinfulness, but such a move severs the root of what makes grace so powerful. It is precisely because we're bad, not good, that God's love in sending his Son to die for our sins is so significant.

The trouble is, grace is unimaginable in a world where everyone believes grace is deserved. And when grace is transformed into entitlement, the definitions change, for both those inside and outside the church.

New Definition of ‘Showing Grace’

In a culture that thrives on self-affirmation and self-determination, "showing grace" now means accepting someone else's definition of their own righteousness.

Daily Meditation

To Whom Else Shall We Go

Will ye also go away?  John 6:67

Charles H. Spurgeon

Many have forsaken Christ, and have walked no more with him; but what reason have you to make a change? Has there been any reason for it in the past? Has not Jesus proved himself all-sufficient? He appeals to you this morning--"Have I been a wilderness unto you?" When your soul has simply trusted Jesus, have you ever been confounded? Have you not up till now found your Lord to be a compassionate and generous friend to you, and has not simple faith in him given you all the peace your spirit could desire? Can you so much as dream of a better friend than he has been to you?   Then change not the old and tried for new and false.

As for the present, can that compel you to leave Christ? When we are hard beset with this world, or with the severer trials within the Church, we find it a most blessed thing to pillow our head upon the bosom of our Saviour. This is the joy we have today that we are saved in him; and if this joy be satisfying, wherefore should we think of changing? Who barters gold for dross?

We will not forswear the sun till we find a better light, nor leave our Lord until a brighter lover shall appear; and, since this can never be, we will hold him with a grasp immortal, and bind his name as a seal upon our arm. As for the future, can you suggest anything which can arise that shall render it necessary for you to mutiny, or desert the old flag to serve under another captain? We think not. If life be long--he changes not. If we are poor, what better than to have Christ who can make us rich? When we are sick, what more do we want than Jesus to make our bed in our sickness? When we die, is it not written that "neither death, nor life, nor things present, nor things to come, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord!"

We say with Peter, "Lord, to whom shall we go?"

Spiritually Repressed Memories

Betrayed By Words

The noun "hell" is of interest.  Millions of people, if asked, Do you believe in hell? would respond in the negative.  Nah.  Hell is just a name for something.  It does not really exist.  To reassure themselves that Hell is a figment it has become one of the most widely used words in the English language.  It  has even had usages added to facilitate further its deployment in everyday thought, speech and writing.  Take the adjective "helluva" for example, as in "We had a helluva great time."

When someone gets really wound up, they might use the word "hell" as an execration:  "Go to Hell, you son of a bitch!"  Why being the sire of a dog should result in one being cursed unto Hell is a bit of a mystery--but we get the general idea.  The cursor does not like the one he or she is execrating.

Of course, the inflated use of the word and its cognates minimises their power, effectiveness; it dilutes their meaning.  Here we believe is the unconscious motivation for the ubiquitous, never ending use of the word "hell" in the English speaking world.  The Bible makes very clear that mankind--everyone--is God conscious.  Not, mind you, god conscious--that is, holding a vague, general idea of a deity out there somewhere. But God conscious.

Freud and Freudians speak about repressed memories.

Letter From the UK (On Crime in England)

England Policing Crisis

Crime Up 13 Per Cent, Rape up 22 Per Cent, Just One in Nine Burglaries Solved

Jack Montgomery
Breitbart London

Police recorded crimes for England and Wales surged to over five million over the last year, according to a new Office for National Statistics (ONS) bulletin.  Britain’s official statistical institute reports a 13 per cent increase in crime in the year ending June 2017, with the total number of offences surpassing five million for the first time a decade.

Violent crime appears to have increased even more sharply, with some of the headline figures including:

• 1,229,260 offences of violence against the person, an increase of 19 per cent on the previous year
• 129,700 sexual offences, an increase of 19 per cent on the previous year
• 45,100 rapes, an increase of 22 per cent on the previous year
• 36,998 offences involving a knife or sharp instrument, an increase of 26 per cent on the previous year
•  6,696 offences involving firearms, an increase of 27 per cent on the previous year — despite draconian controls on legal gun-ownership
• Non-violent crime also appears to be on the increase, with burglary up 6 per cent, theft from the person up 11 per cent,  shoplifting up 11 per cent, and vehicle-related crime up 17 per cent.

Clear-up rates are also extremely poor for some offences, with just one burglary in ten resulting in “a suspect being identified”.

Daily Meditation

So Much That's Past

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On being overconcerned about the past of others and of our own.

C. S. Lewis

5 June 1961

We must beware of the Past, mustn’t we? I mean that any fixing of the mind on old evils beyond what is absolutely necessary for repenting our own sins and forgiving those of others is certainly useless and usually bad for us.

Notice in Dante that the lost souls are entirely concerned with their past. Not so the saved. This is one of the dangers of being, like you and me, old. There’s so much past, now, isn’t there? And so little else. But we must try very hard not to keep on endlessly chewing the cud. We must look forward more eagerly to sloughing that old skin off forever—metaphors getting a bit mixed here, but you know what I mean.

From The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III
Compiled in Yours, Jack The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Yours, Jack: Spiritual Direction from C. S. Lewis. Copyright © 2008 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Criminal Nonfeasance

That Which Beggars Belief

There are aspects of the New Zealand penal system which are despicable.  We long ago abolished the death penalty for murder.  Life imprisonment without parole is the most severe judicial sentence available.  The penal authorities strenuously labour to ensure that no-one spends the rest of their natural life in prison. 

Here is a case which strains credulity to the limit:

Dunedin student killer George Charles Trounson paroled for seventh time

Hamish McNeilly
Stuff

A man who bashed his teen flatmate to death has been granted parole for the seventh time.

George Charles Trounson, 45, is serving a life sentence of imprisonment for the murder of Russell Neil, 17, in Dunedin in June 1990.  Trounson was 18 when he bashed Neil to death with a broken balustrade. He was sentenced on February 26, 1991.

The New Zealand Parole Board noted Trounson's "unsatisfactory history on parole" in a decision released this week.  Trounson was previously released six times and recalled to prison after breaching the terms of his parole.  He was first released in March 2001 and was recalled in February 2006 – the longest time he spent in the community in recent years.  Subsequent recalls varied between three-and-a-half months and nine months.

His first release resulted in the longest period of freedom--five years.  Since that time he has been paroled another five times, and the longest time out was only nine months.  But--and this is the class working definition of insanity--the Parole Board decided that he should once again be paroled.  This time, things will be different.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Lord of Karma

You Reap What You Sow

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

As the old saying goes, if they didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all.

We should begin by recognizing that the sinful heart of man is everywhere, and affects everything we do. No one gets a pass—conservatives, liberals, and all in-betweeners. The Church is not excluded because the Church is charged to welcome sinners, and part of the price of this is that sinners actually come.

No institution or movement should be charged on the basis of sinful or scandalous behavior that appears there. Were we to start doing that, everybody would be vulnerable to accusation. The issue is rather the problem of being two-faced—demanding that others deal with what you won’t deal with.

Contrary to popular misunderstanding, the Lord did not require us to “judge not.” His teaching on this was not to judge with unequal balances, not to judge with a double standard. The judgment you apply to others will be applied to you.

Daily Meditation

A New Kind of Man

C. S. Lewis

‘Niceness’—wholesome, integrated personality—is an excellent thing. We must try by every medical, educational, economic, and political means in our power to produce a world where as many people as possible grow up ‘nice’; just as we must try to produce a world where all have plenty to eat. But we must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world—and might even be more difficult to save.

For mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature. Of course, once it has got its wings, it will soar over fences which could never have been jumped and thus beat the natural horse at its own game. But there may be a period, while the wings are just beginning to grow, when it cannot do so: and at that stage the lumps on the shoulders—no one could tell by looking at them that they are going to be wings—may even give it an awkward appearance.

From Mere Christianity
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity. Copyright © 1952, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1980, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Repenting From Secular Capitalism

The Recovery of Christian Stewardship

The Christian Church in the West has in many ways lost its moorings.  It will not make progress again until it repents and returns to the fundamentals of faith.  Where can those fundamentals be found?  In Scripture, of course.  But there are also helpful doorways to Scripture available.  The most useful of these are the universal creeds (Apostles, Nicene, Athanasian).  

Many of the bulwarks of Western civilisation were built over time on these fundamentals of faith.  But the Unbelief of the West, commencing with the Enlightenment and eventually running at breakneck pace until our days, has effectively destroyed the foundations of Christian culture.  With the foundations gone, the superstructure cannot last.  If we are to avoid the inevitable calamity falling upon us--which is the judgement of God upon the apostate West--Christians and churches must return to our fundamentals--to the "once-for-all-delivered-to-the-saints faith [Jude 3].

We also need to discern what is happening in our generation and come to some understanding about what must needs be done.  It is well past the time when we could focus upon what "society" needs to do to reform and recapture the truths, conventions, and institutions of of Western Christendom which made the West so culturally potent.  Rather, we need to focus upon ourselves, our families, and our Christian communities.  We must also strive daily to conform our living (individual, familial, ecclesiastical, and communal) to the Scriptures and the fundamentals of faith revealed therein.

We Christians are now a remnant.

Letter From America (About Merkel's Unholy Zeal)

The Europe Merkel Made

Her legacy includes Brexit, the rise of far-right parties, and border walls.

Michael Brendan Dougherty
National Review Online

Angela Merkel really is the most consequential politician of modern Europe, but lately not in the way she hopes. Her 2015 decision to welcome over 1 million migrants into her country, and then her attempts to impose refugee quotas across the European Union, have altered the politics of Europe for a generation.

The latest of the run on-effects of this decision is now in Austria. The 31-year-old leader of the People’s Party, Sebastian Kurz, will soon be chancellor of Austria, after the smashing success of his insurgent campaign, which renovated the party. Kurz won by promising “something new” in politics. That something new includes a position on immigration that is arguably harder than the one offered by the far-right Freedom Party, a group with some roots in fascist politics and the likely coalition partner of Kurz’s party. Kurz talks openly of working with or joining the Visgrád Group, the four countries of central Europe that have rejected Merkel’s migration quotas.

The migration flow created after the 2015 “welcome” were used by terrorists involved in the Bataclan massacre in Paris and in the Brussels airport bombing.

Daily Devotional

Wait Upon God For the Music

God, my maker, who giveth songs in the night.  Job 35:10

Charles H. Spurgeon

Any man can sing in the day. When the cup is full, man draws inspiration from it. When wealth rolls in abundance around him, any man can praise the God who gives a plenteous harvest or sends home a loaded argosy. It is easy enough for an Aeolian harp to whisper music when the winds blow--the difficulty is for music to swell forth when no wind is stirring. It is easy to sing when we can read the notes by daylight; but he is skilful who sings when there is not a ray of light to read by--who sings from his heart.

No man can make a song in the night of himself; he may attempt it, but he will find that a song in the night must be divinely inspired. Let all things go well, I can weave songs, fashioning them wherever I go out of the flowers that grow upon my path; but put me in a desert, where no green thing grows, and wherewith shall I frame a hymn of praise to God? How shall a mortal man make a crown for the Lord where no jewels are? Let but this voice be clear, and this body full of health, and I can sing God's praise: silence my tongue, lay me upon the bed of languishing, and how shall I then chant God's high praises, unless he himself give me the song?

No, it is not in man's power to sing when all is adverse, unless an altar-coal shall touch his lip. It was a divine song, which Habakkuk sang, when in the night he said, "Although the fig-tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation." Then, since our Maker gives songs in the night, let us wait upon him for the music.

O thou chief musician, let us not remain songless because affliction is upon us, but tune thou our lips to the melody of thanksgiving.

A Couple of Predictions from Insiders

Tightening Beltway

For those of our readers who are Kiwis and who have more than a passing interest in politics in New Zealand, here are a couple of observations on the new government from folk that have, or do, operate within the Beltway.  

Firstly, from Audrey Young's column in the NZ Herald:

National will be unlike any opposition before - as the largest party in the Parliament by 10 seats, it will not be demoralised.  Its objective will be to make Ardern's honeymoon as Prime Minister as brief as possible and to discredit the new Government as early as possible.

Their numbers will be a powerful aid. In Question Time, for example, where oral questions are allocated in proportion to the number of non-executive members of the party, National will get to ask roughly eight out 12 questions every day, Labour three and the other parties will share the other question.  The National Opposition will sniff out any vulnerability and tension in the new Government and they will have the power to exploit it.

Of course, the earliest soft target presented by the government will be the weaknesses that arise from being a cobbled coalition of electoral losers.   Question Time will be a perfect opportunity to exploit the divisions between the motley government.

Secondly, from Richard Prebble:

The Spirit Blows Where He Wills

Solzhenitsyn and the Jewish Doctor

by Paul Sumner
Hebrew Streams
 

1918–2008

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was once acclaimed the greatest Russian author since Tolstoy. His novels about life inside the Soviet Union were at first smuggled out to the West. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but declined to accept the award in person, lest he not be allowed to return. Finally, in 1974 he was exiled to Zurich then to the U.S., where he spent 20 years. After the fall of communist control, he returned to Russia after 1989.

Born in 1918, Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics and physics at university. But when WWII began he entered the Soviet army and became a captain in the artillery. In the closing days of the war, he wrote critical remarks about Joseph Stalin and was imprisoned without trial. For eight years he survived the infamous "Gulag," a chain of forced labor camps where millions of criminals, dissidents, and enemies of the State were incarcerated and died.

Solzhenitsyn died in Moscow of heart failure on August 3, 2008, at the age of 89.

In his famous 3-volume The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitzyn tells a brief, life-changing story about a personal experience in a labor camp in 1953.

Daily Meditation

Love’s Greatest Happiness

No one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. (Ephesians 5:29–30)

John Piper

The union between Christ and his bride is so close (“one flesh”) that any good done to her is a good done to himself. The blatant assertion of this text is that this fact motivates the Lord to nourish, cherish, sanctify, and cleanse his bride.

By some definitions, this cannot be love. Love, they say, must be free of self-interest — especially Christlike love, especially Calvary love. I have never seen such a view of love made to square with this passage of Scripture.

Yet what Christ does for his bride, this text plainly calls love: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church . . . ” (5:25). Why not let the text define love for us, instead of bringing our definition from ethics or philosophy? According to this text, love is the pursuit of our joy in the holy joy of the beloved.

There is no way to exclude self-interest from love, for self-interest is not the same as selfishness. Selfishness seeks its own private happiness at the expense of others.

Love seeks its happiness in the happiness of the beloved. It will even suffer and die for the beloved in order that its joy might be full in the life and purity of the beloved.

This is how Christ loved us, and this is how he calls us to love one another.

A Bitter Legacy

The Suffering of Ukraine

Tensions between Russia and Ukraine remain high.  The animus goes back a long way--as is the case with many national rivalries in that part of the world.

A recent article in the Daily Mail details the horror of the years of famine caused by Stalin and his maniacal communism.  Ukraine used to be the bread-basket of Eastern Europe.  Under Stalin's tender embrace it turned into an agricultural desert.  Millions died.  In the West the story has never really been told.

The Daily Mail article is written by Dominic Sandbrook; it has been prompted by the publication of a new book by Anne Applebaum entitled Red Famine.  Sandbrook writes:

The famine that struck Ukraine in late 1932 and 1933 was one of the most lethal catastrophes in European history.  In the West, it is nowhere near as well-known as it should be.  In Ukraine itself, however, the Holodmor — literally, ‘hunger extermination’ — is often seen as the equivalent of the Holocaust, a gigantic, man-made operation to murder millions of people.

And behind it was not just one man — Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union from the mid-Twenties to 1953 — but an entire warped ideology which sought to remake a peasant society according to a Utopian Communist blueprint.  Even now, in an age when we are regularly assailed by images of horror and suffering, the details of the Holodmor are heartbreaking.  Starving children, mass graves, vigilantes, even cannibalism: the famine saw human nature stripped to the bone.

Millions died.  But what are few deaths when one is in the vanguard of a revolution that will bring a Marxist utopia to the world.  You cannot make an omelette without breaking the odd egg, eh.

Freedom of Religion Restored at Oxford

Oxford College Bans 'Harmful' Christian Union From Freshers' Fair

Camilla Turner/Tony Diver
The Telegraph
[H/T: Kiwiblog]

An Oxford College has banned the Christian Union from its freshers’ fair on the grounds that it would be “alienating” for students of other religions, and constitute a “micro-aggression”.  The organiser of Balliol’s fair argued Christianity’s historic use as “an excuse for homophobia and certain forms of neo-colonialism” meant that students might feel “unwelcome” in their new college if the Christian Union had a stall.

Freddy Potts, vice-president of Balliol’s Junior Common Room (JCR) committee, said that if a representative from the Christian Union (CU) attended the fair, it could cause "potential harm" to freshers.   Mr Potts, writing on behalf of the JCR's welfare committee, told the CU representative at Balliol, that their "sole concern is that the presence of the CU alone may alienate incoming students”.

Daily Meditation

"The Time for Being Never Departs"

TO Mrs. JESSUP, who seems to have written Lewis about the difficulties of being in a marriage in which one of the spouses is a Christian and one is not: On the slow process of being remade and how difficult we must be to live with after conversion as before; and on not concealing but not flaunting our conversion.

C. S. Lewis

15 October 1951

I agree with everything you say (except that I should publish anything on the subject: a bachelor is not the man to do it—there is such an obvious answer to anything he says!).

Our regeneration is a slow process. As Charles Williams says there are three stages: (1.) The Old Self on the Old Way. (2.) The Old Self on the New Way. (3.) The New Self on the New Way.

After conversion, the Old Self can of course be just as arrogant, importunate, and imperialistic about the Faith as it previously was about any other interest. I had almost said ‘Any other Fad’—for just as the loveliest complexion turns green in a green light, so the Faith itself may have at first all the characteristics of a Fad and we may be as ill to live with as if we had taken up Nudism or Psychoanalysis or Pure Wool Clothing. You and I, clearly, both know all about that: one makes blunders.

About obedience, the principle is clear. Obedience to man is limited by obedience to God and, when they really conflict, must go. But of course that gives one very little guidance about particulars. The converted party must pray: I suppose it is not often necessary to pray in the presence of the other! Especially if the converted party is the woman, who usually has the house to herself all day. Of course there must be no concealment, in the sense that if the question comes up one must say frankly that one does pray. But there is a difference between not concealing and flaunting. For the rest (did I quote this before?) MacDonald says ‘the time for speaking seldom arrives, the time for being never departs.’ Let you and me pray for each other.

From The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III
Compiled in Yours, Jack The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Yours, Jack: Spiritual Direction from C. S. Lewis. Copyright © 2008 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

The Grand Volte-Face

Suddenly It's Not the Gummint's Fault

The "new" New Zealand government is just a day or so old and already we are finding ourselves laughing at the coalition of losers.  (Actually, that's an apt phrase to represent the ersatz mob of cobblers now purporting to govern the country.)

Winston Peters has spoken in apocalyptic terms of the devastation under which our country allegedly labours.  He has presented himself as the Saviour.  He has tossed out a thousand policies (elsewhere known as whisky befuddled brainwaves) to prevent the alleged looming apocalypse.  He stood forth as the proud man with the mantle of "National Saviour".  He won seven percent of the vote in our recent general election.  Yes, you read that right. Just seven percent.

Now he will be the de facto Prime Minister, our Machiavelli behind the throne as it were.

Another Step Forward

Life Begins at Conception

Department of Health and Human Services

By Harvest Prude
The Federalist

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) just released their 2018-2022 plan, which unequivocally states that life begins at conception and deserves protection. In the introduction it says,

“HHS accomplishes its mission through programs and initiatives that cover a wide spectrum of activities, serving and protecting Americans at every stage of life, beginning at conception.”

The draft mentions conception five times total. The overwhelmingly pro-life stance in the draft is welcome news to many.



The debate over the personhood of unborn children has been a central issue of the abortion debate. Ever since Roe v. Wade in 1973, pro-life advocates have been trying to establish constitutionally protected rights for the unborn. In the ruling’s majority opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote that Roe v. Wade would collapse if “the fetus is a person.”

In support of the HHS’s draft, author and bioethics expert Wesley J. Smith wrote, “life ‘beginning at conception’ … is a fact of basic biological science.”

Daily Meditation

Plan for Prayer

If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.  (John 15:7)

John Piper

Prayer pursues joy in fellowship with Jesus and in the power to share his life with others.

And prayer pursues God’s glory by treating him as the inexhaustible reservoir of hope and help. In prayer, we admit our poverty and God’s prosperity, our bankruptcy and his bounty, our misery and his mercy.

Therefore, prayer highly exalts and glorifies God precisely by pursuing everything we long for in him, and not in ourselves. “Ask, and you will receive . . . that the Father may be glorified in the Son and . . . that your joy may be full.” Unless I’m badly mistaken, one of the main reasons so many of God’s children don’t have a significant life of prayer is not so much that we don’t want to, but that we don’t plan to.

If you want to take a four-week vacation, you don’t just get up one summer morning and say, “Hey, let’s go today!” You won’t have anything ready. You won’t know where to go. Nothing has been planned.

But that is how many of us treat prayer. We get up day after day and realize that significant times of prayer should be a part of our life, but nothing’s ever ready.

We don’t know where to go. Nothing has been planned. No time. No place. No procedure. And we all know that the opposite of planning is not a wonderful flow of deep, spontaneous experiences in prayer. The opposite of planning is the rut.

If you don’t plan a vacation, you will probably stay home and watch TV. The natural, unplanned flow of spiritual life sinks to the lowest ebb of vitality. There is a race to be run and a fight to be fought. If you want renewal in your life of prayer, you must plan to see it.

Therefore, my simple exhortation is this: Let us take time this very day to rethink our priorities and how prayer fits in. Make some new resolve. Try some new venture with God. Set a time. Set a place. Choose a portion of Scripture to guide you.

Don’t be tyrannized by the press of busy days. We all need mid-course corrections. Make this a day of turning to prayer — for the glory of God and for the fullness of your joy.

"Bless You, Prison, For Having Been My Life"

Authentic Voices Which Heal

Life in the Soviet Gulags was so divorced from ordinary human existence that those outside could not comprehend or even imagine the evils within.  Those within could not hope that any outsider would possibly understand, despite the many hundreds of Gulag memoirs which were written by prisoners.

When he was eventually released, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn taught for a time in a school--and, more importantly, he began to write about the camps.  What was most unusual, however, is that his early novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published and printed in the Soviet Union in 1962 whilst Khrushchev was in dictator (for reasons which are not clear).  Its plot was simple: it recorded an ordinary day in the life of an ordinary prisoner in the Gulag.

Applebaum explains what was so different about Ivan Denisovich:

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow (About Catechisms)

The Rats of Moria

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

You cannot successfully deny in real time what you robustly affirm in the catechism.

For the Christian, because his basic catechetical truths are noble and upright (about how we are supposed to live), the gap between his profession and experience is uphill. Hypocrisy is naturally an embarrassment because it represents a failure to attain.

But because the catechetical truths affirmed by the sexual revolution are suspended over a great abyss, like Wil E Coyote holding an anvil, their hypocrisy problem is entirely different. Their catechism affirms that obedience to every random sexual impulse will be totally great, self-actualizing, fulfilling, natural, life-affirming, and helpful in the process of self-discovery. You know—as the eager ego goes spelunking down in the caverns of chthonic desire, in order to search out the wonders and complexities of orgasmic genderlusts. But it turns out the Rats of Moria live down there.

And so this explains the reaction to the revelations about Harvey Weinstein. Anybody who knows anything about the septic system of Hollywood knows that he was living in fulfillment of the catechism. They have these great massive pumps so that they can have the septic tanks installed at the very highest levels, up where the top talents and power producers live.

So the problem was not that he failed to live up to a high and lofty standard. The problem was that obedience to the catechism is a lot creepier in real life than was promised by the catechism.

Daily Meditation

We Are Complete in Him

With thee is the fountain of life.  Psalm 36:9

Charles H. Spurgeon

There are times in our spiritual experience when human counsel or sympathy, or religious ordinances, fail to comfort or help us. Why does our gracious God permit this?

Perhaps it is because we have been living too much without him, and he therefore takes away everything upon which we have been in the habit of depending, that he may drive us to himself. It is a blessed thing to live at the fountain head. While our skin- bottles are full, we are content, like Hagar and Ishmael, to go into the wilderness; but when those are dry, nothing will serve us but "Thou God seest me."

We are like the prodigal, we love the swine-troughs and forget our Father's house. Remember, we can make swine-troughs and husks even out of the forms of religion; they are blessed things, but we may put them in God's place, and then they are of no value. Anything becomes an idol when it keeps us away from God: even the brazen serpent is to be despised as "Nehushtan," if we worship it instead of God.

The prodigal was never safer than when he was driven to his father's bosom, because he could find sustenance nowhere else. Our Lord favours us with a famine in the land that it may make us seek after himself the more. The best position for a Christian is living wholly and directly on God's grace--still abiding where he stood at first--"Having nothing, and yet possessing all things." Let us never for a moment think that our standing is in our sanctification, our mortification, our graces, or our feelings, but know that because Christ offered a full atonement, therefore we are saved; for we are complete in him.

Having nothing of our own to trust to, but resting upon the merits of Jesus--his passion and holy life furnish us with the only sure ground of confidence. Beloved, when we are brought to a thirsting condition, we are sure to turn to the fountain of life with eagerness.

Deja-Vu All Over Again

The A-Listers' Ball

Harvey Weinstein is Hollywood's newest blockbuster production.  It garners breathless shock and horror headlines every day.  The rating agencies are claiming that this particular soap opera has metrics which are off the scale. 

Forgive us if we stifle yawns.  This is a rerun of an old B-grade soapie we have seen countless times.  In one corner is a cluster of Hollywood A-listers surrounded by a gaggle of wannabes.  In the other corner are ordinary rubes.  The celebs, surrounded by their corner attendants who fawn, adulate, and hang on every word, proclaim the evils of every kind of pop cause: sexism, Trumpism, anti-abortionism, along with really serious, momentous evils like Global Warming.  They point the finger.  They hector.  They lecture.  They pontificate and declaim from the heights of Mount Sinai.  They are the high priests and priestesses of Baal worship.  The media ooh and aaah at every rehearsed word and gestured artifice.

The lesser mortals in the other corner weave with the jibes and duck with the haymakers.  The arrogant energy of the A-listers is relentless.  We start to feel our shame.  We hang our heads.  We are on the verge of capitulation, throwing in the towel.  Maybe we really are dumb rubes.  Maybe that dumb blond A-lister really is an authority on climate change and nuclear war. 

Well, yes she is.  But not as we were led to expect.

Letter From America (About the Slow-Suicide of Liberalism)

Death Rattles

Campus protests against the ACLU are a sign that American 'liberalism' is being destroyed by the forces it unleashed and its own inherent contradictions.

Robert Tracinski
The Federalist


The far left, under the banner of Black Lives Matter, is protesting a campus speaker again. Who is it this time? Some neo-Nazi like Richard Spencer? An unscrupulous provocateur like Milo Yiannopoulos? Just a garden-variety scary conservative like Ben Shapiro? Nope, it’s the American Civil Liberties Union as represented by Claire Gastañaga, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia.

Students took to the stage just a few moments after Gastañaga began her remarks. At first, she attempted to spin the demonstration as a welcome example of the kind of thing she had come to campus to discuss, commenting ‘Good, I like this,’ as they lined up and raised their signs. ‘I’m going to talk to you about knowing your rights, and protests and demonstrations, which this illustrates very well. Then I’m going to respond to questions from the moderators, and then questions from the audience.’

It was the last remark she was able to make before protesters drowned her out with cries of, ‘ACLU, you protect Hitler, too.’ They also chanted, ‘the oppressed are not impressed,’ ‘shame, shame, shame, shame’… ‘blood on your hands,’ ‘the revolution will not uphold the Constitution,’ and, uh, ‘liberalism is white supremacy.’

The moderate left has spent the past few years running interference for Black Lives Matter and Antifa, and some of us have been warning them that the far left hates the liberals, too. They’re now finding that out up close and personal, and I hope it terrifies them.

This, along with similar incidents at other universities, is a sign of the final death of American “liberalism.” It is death by suicide, because liberalism is being destroyed by the forces it unleashed and by its own inherent contradictions.

Daily Meditation

Inward Digestion of the Truth 

I will meditate in thy precepts.Psalm 119:15 

Charles H. Spurgeon

There are times when solitude is better than society, and silence is wiser than speech. We should be better Christians if we were more alone, waiting upon God, and gathering through meditation on his Word spiritual strength for labour in his service. 

We ought to muse upon the things of God, because we thus get the real nutriment out of them. Truth is something like the cluster of the vine: if we would have wine from it, we must bruise it; we must press and squeeze it many times. The bruiser's feet must come down joyfully upon the bunches, or else the juice will not flow; and they must well tread the grapes, or else much of the precious liquid will be wasted. So we must, by meditation, tread the clusters of truth, if we would get the wine of consolation therefrom. 

Our bodies are not supported by merely taking food into the mouth, but the process which really supplies the muscle, and the nerve, and the sinew, and the bone, is the process of digestion. It is by digestion that the outward food becomes assimilated with the inner life. Our souls are not nourished merely by listening awhile to this, and then to that, and then to the other part of divine truth. Hearing, reading, marking, and learning, all require inwardly digesting to complete their usefulness, and the inward digesting of the truth lies for the most part in meditating upon it. 

Why is it that some Christians, although they hear many sermons, make but slow advances in the divine life? Because they neglect their closets, and do not thoughtfully meditate on God's Word. They love the wheat, but they do not grind it; they would have the corn, but they will not go forth into the fields to gather it; the fruit hangs upon the tree, but they will not pluck it; the water flows at their feet, but they will not stoop to drink it.  From such folly deliver us, O Lord, and be this our resolve: "I will meditate in thy precepts."

Tricks and Juggleries

Cautionary Notes On the Study of History

There are those who think that history is the ultimate arbiter of all truth and debates.  "History shows us . . . " or  "History says . . . " are phrases not uncommonly heard.  Such claims, while appearing both august and wise, are usually false.  History does not give up her secrets easily.  The past (like the present) is inordinately complex.  The more historians research, the more questions and complexities they find--at least this is the case for the serious professional historian.  

Herbert Butterfield concludes his essay, The Whig Interpretation of History with this cautionary note:

Perhaps all history-books hold a danger for those who do not know a great deal of history already.  In any case, it is never safe to forget the truth which really underlies historical research: the truth that all history perpetually requires to be corrected by more history.  . . . She is at the service of good causes and bad.  In other words she is a harlot and a hireling, and for this reason she best serves those who suspect her most.

Therefore, we must beware even of saying, "History says . . . " or "History proves . . . " as though she herself were the oracle; as though indeed history, once she has spoken, had put the matter beyond the range of mere human enquiry.  Rather we must say to ourselves: "She will lie to us till the very end of the last cross-examination." [The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1965), p. 131f.]

As we contemplate the present world--and even our own country--we can readily agree that we are faced with a whirling, complex mess.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow (On Anti-Abortion Tactics)

Smashmouth Incrementalism

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

A recent development within the pro-life movement has both a heartening and disheartening aspect. I am talking about the rise of the “abolish human abortion now” sentiment. This in one sense is the whole point of being pro-life, and so a clear reaffirmation of the entire raison d’être is always welcome. The other side of it, the disheartening part, is the tendency among some of these “abolitionists” to denounce any pro-life incrementalists as being, by definition, temporizers, vacillators, or compromisers.

So let me begin by granting part of the point, and then offering for your consideration a scenario that is going to upon us relatively soon—a scenario that will identify the plain difference between principled incrementalists and those who are simply using pro-life language as a shield to hide behind. 

Daily Meditation

Best Passage Ever

God put [Jesus] forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. 

John Piper

(Romans 3:25–26) Romans 3:25–26 may be the most important verses in the Bible.
God is wholly just! And He justifies the ungodly!  Not either/or! Both! He acquits the guilty, but is not guilty in doing so. This is the greatest news in the world!

“[God] made [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21)

“By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh.” (Romans 8:3)

“[Christ] bore our sins in his body on the tree.” (1 Peter 2:24)

“Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.” (1 Peter 3:18)

“If we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” (Romans 6:5)

If the most terrifying news in the world is that we have fallen under the condemnation of our Creator and that he is bound by his own righteous character to preserve the worth of his glory by pouring out his wrath on our sin . . .

. . . Then the best news in all the world (the gospel!) is that God has decreed a way of salvation that also upholds the worth of his glory, the honor of his Son, and the eternal salvation of his elect. He has given his Son to die for sinners and to conquer their death by his own resurrection.

Mad Max in New Zealand

The Inter-Generational Tsunami of Violence and Dysfunction

We often hear claims about the breakdown of the nuclear family and the allegedly devastating effect it is having upon society.  No fault divorce has meant that husband and wife, father and mother are fluid relationships.  The state has intruded more and more upon families and family structures.  Parents have been told that if they discipline their children with an open-handed smack on  the child's hand or bottom they will be prosecuted by the State and have their children removed.  

This extremist measure--known as the Anti-Smacking Act--was passed with the objective of reducing family violence.  What it has actually done is help build a tsunami of violence that will roll over and engulf New Zealand society in about fifteen years time.  The problem is now inter-generational and self-perpetuating.  The state is incompetent to parent children for the simple reason that the state and its organs are not parents--a rather obvious reality which the state refuses to acknowledge.  Politicians and organs of state still assert with religious fervour that the government is indeed competent--all it needs is more taxpayers' money and it will morph into a genuine uber-parent.

What's it like on the front line?  The truth is starting to emerge in state schools.

We Will Be Seeing Lots More of This . . .

Sex-change Surgery Regret is on the Rise, Leading Surgeon Says

Aaron Colen
TheBlaze

A concerning number of transgender people who have undergone sex change surgeries go on to express regrets and experience crippling depression and suicidal thoughts, according to an experienced genital reconstruction surgeon.

According to a report in The Telegraph, world-leading genital reconstruction surgeon Professor Miroslav Djordjevic has seen a rise in his patients coming back to him after sex change surgery seeking reversals of the procedure, which are complex and expensive, and can take more than a year to complete.

Djordjevic cites two issues causing the increase in patients getting a sex change surgery and subsequently regretting it: a lack of robust research on the topic, and a lack of psychiatric evaluation and counseling before the surgeries.

While Djordjevic requires his patients to undergo a year or more of psychiatric evaluation followed by hormone evaluation and therapy, some patients seeking reversals have told him that they were only asked if they had the money for the surgery beforehand.

Daily Meditation

A World Starved For Solitude and Privacy 

 C. S. Lewis 

No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as “what a man does with his solitude.” It was one of the Wesleys, I think, who said that the New Testament knows nothing of solitary religion. We are forbidden to neglect the assembling of our- selves together. Christianity is already institutional in the earliest of its documents. The Church is the Bride of Christ. We are members of one another.

In our own age the idea that religion belongs to our private life— that it is, in fact, an occupation for the individual’s hour of leisure—is at once paradoxical, dangerous, and natural. It is paradoxical because this exaltation of the individual in the religious field springs up in an age when collectivism is ruthlessly defeating the individual in every other field. . . . . There is a crowd of busybodies, self-appointed masters of ceremonies, whose life is devoted to destroying solitude wherever solitude still exists. They call it “taking the young people out of themselves,” or “waking them up,” or “overcoming their apathy.” 

If an Augustine, a Vaughan, a Traherne, or a Wordsworth should be born in the modern world, the leaders of a youth organization would soon cure him. If a really good home, such as the home of Alcinous and Arete in the Odyssey or the Rostovs in War and Peace or any of Charlotte M. Yonge’s families, existed today, it would be denounced as bourgeois and every engine of destruction would be levelled against it.
 
And even where the planners fail and someone is left physically by himself, the wire- less has seen to it that he will be—in a sense not intended by Scipio— never less alone than when alone. We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy, and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

From The Weight of Glory
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses. Copyright © 1949, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1976, revised 1980 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

The Second Christendom

Returning From Babylon: Rebuilding Jerusalem

We have completed a second reading of Anthony Esolen's Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture [Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 2017].  Doubtless we will end up perusing it again.  

It is somewhat distracting that the title a pre-occupation with American culture and its reconstruction.  Most of the discussion in the book arises from recent cultural history in the US, as well as commentary upon the present discontent.  Yet we venture to say that most Christians scattered throughout the West--the UK, Europe, Australia and NZ--will immediately identify with the deeper context.  The focus and intent is to recover and rebuild Christendom--or be engaged in building the Second Christendom.

For that reason we wish Out of the Ashes would enjoy a broad, sustained international readership.  In the hope that we will help stimulate an even wider group of readers, we endeavour to entice folk by pointing them to a couple of paragraphs towards the end of the book.

And Now--Some Good News

Current Events / Mark Howard

The Story of Iran’s Church in Two Sentences

July 30, 2016

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• 115K

Everyone loves a good story. As Christians, we especially love stories that tell us how, when all seems lost, God makes a way.

One such story is about the church in Iran—and it’s one of the greatest stories in the world today. 

It’s a simple story that can be summarized in just two sentences: Persecution threatened to wipe out Iran’s tiny church. Instead, the church in Iran has become the fastest growing in the world, and it is influencing the region for Christ.

As simple as it is, such an amazing story is worth examining deeper.

Growth Amid Persecution

The Iranian revolution of 1979 established a hard-line Islamic regime. Over the next two decades, Christians faced increasing opposition and persecution: All missionaries were kicked out, evangelism was outlawed, Bibles in Persian were banned and soon became scarce, and several pastors were killed. The church came under tremendous pressure. Many feared the small Iranian church would soon wither away and die.

But the exact opposite has happened. Despite continued hostility from the late 1970s until now, Iranians have become the Muslim people most open to the gospel in the Middle East.

Despite continued hostility from the late 1970s until now, Iranians have become the Muslim people most open to the gospel in the Middle East.

How did this happen? Two factors have contributed to this openness. First, violence in the name of Islam has caused widespread disillusionment with the regime and led many Iranians to question their beliefs. Second, many Iranian Christians have continued to boldly and faithfully tell others about Christ, in the face of persecution. 

As a result, more Iranians have become Christians in the last 20 years than in the previous 13 centuries put together since Islam came to Iran. In 1979, there were an estimated 500 Christians from a Muslim background in Iran. Today, there are hundreds of thousands—some say more than 1 million. Whatever the exact number, many Iranians are turning to Jesus as Lord and Savior.

More Iranians have become Christians in the last 20 years than in the previous 13 centuries put together.

In fact, last year the mission research organization Operation World named Iran as having the fastest-growing evangelical church in the world. According to the same organization, the second-fastest growing church is in Afghanistan—and Afghans are being reached in part by Iranians, since their languages are similar.

Three Changed Lives

The testimonies of Iranian men and women who’ve come to Christ are powerful.

Kamran was a violent man who used to sell drugs and weapons. One day, a friend gave him a New Testament. After reading for five consecutive days, Kamran gave his life to Jesus. When his family and friends saw his transformed life over the ensuing months, many of them also came to faith. A church now meets in Kamran’s house. 

Reza was a mullah (a Muslim scholar) who hoped to become an ayatollah (a Shiite leader). One day, while studying at an Islamic seminary in Iran, he found a New Testament that had been boldly left in the library. Out of curiosity, he picked it up and was deeply shaken. Over time, he fell in love with Jesus. Today Reza is a trained church planter serving in the Iran region.

Fatemah’s earliest memories were of being raped by her brothers. At age 11, she was sold in marriage to a young drug addict who abused her and then divorced her when she was 17. Upon returning home she was raped again, until she decided to leave. On the streets she heard the gospel preached, and she trusted Jesus. In time, she married a Christian man. As they were receiving training in evangelism and church planting, Fatemah felt called to go back home and witness to her family. Her entire family repented and gave their lives to the Lord. The first church Fatemah and her husband planted was in her childhood home. 

Fatemah felt called to go back home and witness to her family. Her entire family repented and gave their lives to the Lord.

I’ve had the privilege of hearing Kamran, Reza, and Fatemah share their stories. I’ve heard countless other testimonies that are equally remarkable. Each one is a painful and yet marvelous celebration of the gospel’s beauty. Each one is a powerful reminder that despite trials and persecution—perhaps because of the suffering—the gospel of Jesus shines and the church of Jesus grows. 

Story God Is Writing

We’re living in a time when many Christians are suffering for their faith, particularly in Islamic contexts. People often react by preaching fear and hatred of the Muslim world. Yet the apostle Paul reminds us that we are to “rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer” (Rom. 12:12). This is our call. 

And the story God is writing for Iran reminds us that we have every reason to rejoice and remain confident in our sovereign Lord and the power of his gospel. Jesus will build his church. It’s a promise (Matt. 16:18).

I ask that you would keep the people and nation of Iran in your prayers. Please pray for:

• Many more Iranians to give their lives to Christ.
• Endurance and joy for Iranian Christians suffering in prison for their ministry—many have testified to sensing the prayers of the global church while imprisoned.
• More trained leaders to serve as evangelists, church planters, and pastors to disciple the many new Iranian believers.

Persecution threatened to wipe out Iran’s tiny church. Instead, by God’s mighty hand, his church is growing rapidly. Praise him!

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Editors’ note: In light of the growth of the Iranian church, TGC has recently launched this Farsi-language micro site including translations of sermons and books by Mark Dever, Kevin DeYoung, John Piper, David Platt, R. C. Sproul and others. Help spread these resources to Farsi-speaking believers you know.

Mark Howard works with Elam Ministries, an organization founded in 1990 by Iranian church leaders with a mission to strengthen and expand the church in the Iran region and beyond. Mark also serves on the advisory board of Rooted and has a chapter in Gospel-Centered Youth Ministry (Crossway, 2016).