Daily Devotional

What Binds the Hands of Love

We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. (Colossians 1:3–5)

John Piper

The problem with the church today is not that there are too many people who are passionately in love with heaven. The problem is not that professing Christians are retreating from the world, spending half their days reading Scripture and the other half singing about their pleasures in God all the while indifferent to the needs of the world.

The problem is that professing Christians are spending ten minutes reading Scripture and then half their day making money and the other half enjoying and repairing what they spend it on.  It is not heavenly-mindedness that hinders love. It is worldly-mindedness that hinders love, even when it is disguised by a religious routine on the weekend.

Where is the person whose heart is so passionately in love with the promised glory of heaven that he feels like an exile and a sojourner on the earth? Where is the person who has so tasted the beauty of the age to come that the diamonds of the world look like marbles, and the entertainment of the world is empty, and the moral causes of the world are too small because they have no view to eternity? Where is this person?

Highest Second Strike Sentence

Law is Working Exactly as Intended

David Garrett
New Zealand

Left leaning pundits have reacted with glee to two recent cases in which Judges have invoked the “manifestly unjust” provision in the “three strikes” (3S) law to avoid what would otherwise have been a sentence of life without parole (LWOP) for two second strikers convicted of murder. I doubt they will say much about Hugh Hemi Tuatua Tareha, who yesterday received the longest “second strike” sentence yet – 12 years nine months –  for sexually assaulting an 87 year old woman.

Tareha is pretty much the epitome of the type of offender 3S was intended to take out of circulation – a violent offender with a lengthy history who has a propensity for sexually attacking elderly women. A propensity which – according to a psychiatric report – is “escalating”, a view which the Probation Service shares.

His most recent offence was not just committed while on parole, but the day after  he had appeared before the Parole Board, which wanted to monitor his progress. At that appearance he fooled the Parole Board a second time – the first was when he was released a year into a sentence of three years nine months for the robbery of an elderly woman because the Board believed he could be “managed in the community”.

At his appearance on  6 November last Tareha, according to media reports,  convinced the Parole Board that he was, “motivated to make changes”.

Child Abuse

Repentant Transsexual Crusades Against ‘Quick Fix’ Reassignment Surgery

by Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D.1 Apr 2015

Breitbart News

In an essay published April 1, Walt Heyer offers a chilling autobiographical account of abuse and gender confusion, sexual reassignment surgery, a short reprieve from anxiety and eventually deep regret at his decision. Heyer, now 74 years old and married to his wife for 18 years, spends his energy raising public awareness of the tragic consequences of gender reassignment.

“Changing genders is short-term gain with long-term pain,” writes Heyer. “Its consequences include early mortality, regret, mental illness, and suicide.”  Having been incorrectly diagnosed and pressured into a sex-change operation, Heyer is exceptionally sensitive to the plight of the many young people today who are confused about their own sexuality and receive mixed messages from a society very eager for them to take steps that can never be undone.

Daily Devotional

Sauron's Creed

Screwtape reveals the Enemy’s intentions:

C. S. Lewis

Now it may surprise you to learn that in His [God, the Enemy’s] efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing.

One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His.

We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

From The Screwtape Letters
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters. Copyright © 1942, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright restored © 1996 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.  Sourced from BibleGateway.

Oppression and Tyranny

Forced to Celebrate Evil

The spiral of Unbelief into the void is ineluctable.  Getting the "right" to do evil is no longer enough.  Now anyone who refuses to join in celebrating that evil must be punished.

Imagine the following moral monstrosity: the SS had been busy raiding a neighbourhood in down-town Warsaw.  They went from house to house, arresting Jews, then lining them up before putting them on the cattle trucks.  Then they force all the remaining (non-Jewish) householders out on the street, ordering them to dance a jig and chant "death to the Jewish scum".  Anyone who refuses is summarily shot.

The depravity has grown so extensive and so perverse that to do evil is not enough. Everyone else must join in celebrating that evil--or else. 

Thus, it is not surprising that, overnight it seems, the people being targeted in the campaign of relentless homosexual hatred are those in the celebration industry--bakers, cake makers, photographers, and marriage celebrants.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

The After Deck of the Pirate Ship

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

Whenever I write on things like liberty and taxes, it is easy for some to try to stuff me into the wrong box. And upon my making this objection, some might expect me to go on to say that I hate labels. But actually I love labels, which are the precondition of all honest discourse. Con artists hate labels.

But the label should be accurate. I am no anarchist, and I actually am in favor of both liberty and taxes. I’m against parodies of either, and because these parodies are currently dominating the landscape, they are the problem which must be addressed.

The parody of liberty is found in the libertarian image of the fornicating pot smoker – but you can get high and get laid in a 6′ x 8′ prison cell. There is one who defiantly cries out that he wants more liberty – so that he can enslave himself ever more tightly in chains he has forged himself. But no tyrant has ever been successfully resisted by cluster of lotus eaters, however big the cluster might be. Virtuous people cannot be kept as slaves, and an effete and self indulgent people are made for slavery. It is their native habitat.

Daily Devotional

Two of Our Deepest Needs

To the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. (2 Thessalonians 1:1)

John Piper

We as a church are “in” a Father and “in” a Lord. What does that mean?

The word “Father” implies primarily care and sustaining and protection and provision and discipline. So to be “in” the Father would mean mainly to be in his care and under his protection.  The other designation is Lord: we are in the Lord Jesus Christ. The word “Lord” implies primarily authority and leadership and ownership. So to be “in” the Lord means mainly to be in his charge, under his authority and in his possession.

So Paul greets the Thessalonian church in such a way as to remind them that they are a family (in the care of a Father) and that they are servants (in the charge of a Lord). These two descriptions of God as Father and Lord, and thus of the church as family and servants, corresponds to two of our deepest needs.

The two needs that every one of us has are the need for rescue and help and the need for purpose and meaning.

1. We need a heavenly Father to pity us and rescue us from sin and misery. We need his help at every step of the way because we are so weak and vulnerable.


2. But we also need a heavenly Lord to guide us in life and tell us what is wise and give us a great and meaningful charge to fulfill. We don't just want to be safe in the care of a Father. We want a glorious cause to live for.

We want a merciful Father to be our Protector, and we want an omnipotent Lord to be our Champion and our Commander and our Leader. So when Paul says in verse 1, You are the church “in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,” we can take rest and help from one and take courage and meaning from the other.

For more about John Piper's ministry and writing, see DesiringGod.org.

Rumblings of Discontent

Treachery Afoot

The Washington Post has been a front for the Left in the United States for decades.  So, when this loyal ally of Democratic politicians lacerates the US government's recent agreement over nuclear development by Iran, one reasonably concludes that President Obama and Secretary of State, John Kerry are on translucently thin ice.

Here are the main points of a recent editorial on the "agreement":

1. The agreement is far less than Obama promised it would contain.  This comes as no surprise, as the President's vain rhetoric and bluster usually bears no relation to transpiring reality.

For So They Persecuted the Prophets Before You

Oppression Continues in the UK

Donna Rachel Edmunds  
BreitbartLondon

A Christian street preacher has been found guilty of using “threatening” language for quoting the Bible on the streets of Taunton, Somerset. The presiding judge advised Mike Overd, a former paratrooper, on which Bible verses he was and was not allowed to quote. But the National Secular Society has said that the ruling has grave implications for freedom of speech.

Mr Overd, who has been preaching on the streets of Taunton for about five years, was ordered to pay a fine of £200 and costs totaling a further £1,200 for quoting Leviticus 20:13 when engaged in conversation with a homosexual man, who is also a Christian. He was convicted under section 5 of the Public Order Act, which concerns causing harassment, alarm or distress by using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, Christian Today has reported.

The Judge at Bristol Crown Court, Judge Shamim Qureshi, told Mr Overd that use of that verse was unacceptable as it describes homosexual behaviour as “an abomination”. Bizarrely, Judge Qureshi advised Mr Overd that he ought to have used Leviticus 18:22 instead, even though that verse uses the same word to describe homosexuality.

Daily Devotional

How to Delight in God’s Word

How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth! (Psalm 119:103)

John Piper

Never reduce Christianity to a matter of demands and resolutions and willpower. It is a matter of what we love, what we delight in, what tastes good to us.

When Jesus came into the world humanity was split according to what they loved. “The light came into the world and men loved darkness rather than light” (John 3:19). The righteous and the wicked are separated by what they delight in — the revelation of God or the way of the world.

But someone may ask: How can I come to delight in the Word of God? My answer would be twofold:
pray for new taste buds on the tongue of your heart; meditate on the staggering promises of God to his people.

The same psalmist who said “How sweet are your words to my taste” (119:103), said earlier, “Open my eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law” (119:18). He prayed, because to have holy taste buds on the tongue of the heart is a gift of God. No man naturally hungers for and delights in God's wisdom.
But when you have prayed, indeed while you pray, meditate on the benefits God promises to his people and on the joy of having Almighty God as your helper now and eternal hope.

Who would not delight to read a book, the reading of which would change one from chaff to a cedar of Lebanon, from a Texas dust bowl to a Hawaiian orchard? Nobody deep down wants to be chaff — rootless, weightless, useless. All of us want to draw strength from some deep river of reality and become fruitful, useful people.

That river of reality is the Word of God and all the great saints have been made great by it.

For more about John Piper's ministry and writing, see DesiringGod.org.

Via Dolorosa, Part III

After the Apostasy, What Then?

Christian suffering at the hands of Unbelief generally takes two forms: persecution and apostasy.  When the Gospel of Jesus Christ first comes to a pagan society the powers-that-be are threatened, offended, and eventually incensed.  The interests and social privileges of the pagan powers react and strike back at Christ and His followers.  Persecution breaks out.

The initial form of persecution is usually sporadic, occasional, and opportunistic.  A classic example is found in Acts 19 where guild interests led a riot against the Apostle Paul and the Church.  The silversmiths in Ephesus found that their lucrative trade in selling silver shrines to the goddess Diana became threatened as more and more people in the region became Christians and stopped buying the superstitious trinkets.  The silversmiths, led by one Demetrius, provoked a riot and dragged some of the Christian leaders into the local stadium, calling for their deaths.

Eventually, the hostility to Christ can grow until it becomes official--a governing policy of the realm. 

A similar pattern emerges when apostasy occurs--that is, when a formerly Christianised culture turns away to a renewed paganism.

Crumbling Foundations

Britain May be an Islamic Nation Within 20 Years

 Speisa   

• 

Way back in 2003 an article in a British newspaper warned about a growing fear that the U.K. was on a fast track to becoming an Islamic nation. That was just ten years ago, and it seemed far fetched at the time. Now the British government has published a study with data that shows Islam will become the dominant religion within the next generation.

The concern in the 2003 article focused on the fact that Britain, and continental Europe for that matter, are becoming increasing secular while immigrant populations of devoted Muslims are growing.  The recent survey shows that while Christianity remains the dominant religion in the U.K. at over 50%, more than half the population if over the age of 50 and, for the first time, less than half the people under 25 consider themselves Christians.

Meanwhile, the Muslim population in Britain is growing so rapidly that Islam is predicted to overtake Christianity within the next 20 years. Combined with the growing secularization of native Britons, the Christian/Muslim ratio could tilt in favour of Islam even sooner than estimated.

Daily Devotional

Bad Archangels

On goodness

C. S. Lewis

There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him. And the higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels. It’s not out of bad mice or bad fleas you make demons, but out of bad archangels. The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.

From The Great Divorce
Compiled in Words to Live By
The Great Divorce. Copyright © 1946, C. S Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed 1973 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Words to Live By: A Guide for the Merely Christian. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.  Sourced from BibleGateway.

Via Dolorosa, Part II

Standing Together or Falling Apart

To suffer at the hands of Unbelievers is the ordinary, expected lot of the Church.  This does not mean that all Christians suffer at all times.  Rather we mean that suffering is never absent from the Church and that because we are all members of just one body, when one member suffers, we all share in the pain of persecution.  No Christian can be at rest while fellow Christians are dying in North Korean concentration camps.  When a thumb is crushed, the whole body is in pain.

The response of Christians to sufferings has varied--as expected amongst a people still undergoing a  process of sanctification and purification.  One response is fear.  Thus, our Lord commands us not to fear when we suffer: the antidote is to consider how valuable our lives are to our heavenly Father, and to contemplate our sufferings in the light of eternity.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Three Senators and a Leper

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

One of our great cultural problems today is that Christians do not understand civics. And by civics, I do not mean the “how a bill becomes a law” kind of civics, but rather I refer to our very common misunderstanding of the true nature of our appointed government. We have a particular form of government de jure, laid out for us in the Constitution, and we have another, very different, form of government, de facto, sitting atop Lady Liberty, strangling her to death.

Too many Christians, not wanting trouble, just blithely assume that whatever the Feds are doing is “more or less” in accord with the Constitution. There may be encroachments here or there, they think, but in the main things are okay. They further believe that our duty outlined for us in Romans 13 requires us not to look too closely at it.

Actually, it is the reverse. Our responsibility is found in Romans 13, but it requires us to look at this far more closely than we are accustomed to do.

It is not the case that the Federal government simply outranks local officials, the way (we think) a king outranks a duke. In a government of law, the king outranks all others in his appointed duties, and a duke outranks all others in his appointed duties. This is how separation of powers works.

“But when he was strong, his heart was lifted up to his destruction: for he transgressed against the Lord his God, and went into the temple of the Lord to burn incense upon the altar of incense. And Azariah the priest went in after him, and with him fourscore priests of the Lord, that were valiant men: And they withstood Uzziah the king, and said unto him, It appertaineth not unto thee, Uzziah, to burn incense unto the Lord, but to the priests the sons of Aaron, that are consecrated to burn incense: go out of the sanctuary; for thou hast trespassed; neither shall it be for thine honour from the Lord God” (2 Chron. 26:16–18).

So, simple question. Does a king outrank a priest?

Daily Devotional

He Answered Them Not

"He answered him to never a word."
Matthew 27:14

Charles H. Spurgeon

He had never been slow of speech when he could bless the sons of men, but he would not say a single word for himself. "Never man spake like this man," and never man was silent like him. Was this singular silence the index of his perfect self-sacrifice? Did it show that he would not utter a word to stay the slaughter of his sacred person, which he had dedicated as an offering for us? Had he so entirely surrendered himself that he would not interfere in his own behalf, even in the minutest degree, but be bound and slain an unstruggling, uncomplaining victim? Was this silence a type of the defencelessness of sin?

Nothing can be said in palliation or excuse of human guilt; and, therefore, he who bore its whole weight stood speechless before his judge. Is not patient silence the best reply to a gainsaying world? Calm endurance answers some questions infinitely more conclusively than the loftiest eloquence. The best apologists for Christianity in the early days were its martyrs. The anvil breaks a host of hammers by quietly bearing their blows. Did not the silent Lamb of God furnish us with a grand example of wisdom?

Where every word was occasion for new blasphemy, it was the line of duty to afford no fuel for the flame of sin. The ambiguous and the false, the unworthy and mean, will ere long overthrow and confute themselves, and therefore the true can afford to be quiet, and finds silence to be its wisdom.

Evidently our Lord, by his silence, furnished a remarkable fulfilment of prophecy. A long defence of himself would have been contrary to Isaiah's prediction: "He is led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth." By his quiet he conclusively proved himself to be the true Lamb of God. As such we salute him this morning. Be with us, Jesus, and in the silence of our heart, let us hear the voice of thy love.

Human and Racial Integration

No Scythians Here

Do races represent hard-coded divisions in the human race, such that two or more races can never cohere in a common culture or society?  Clearly racial ethnicity is hard coded, genetically speaking.  But does race mean cultural hard coding in an ethnic or genetic sense?  Clearly not.  If a white child is adopted and raised in a black family, the adopted child will inevitably adopt the family cultural patterns, mores, and behaviours.   And vice versa. 

When people speak of a "black culture" or an "Asian culture" the terms may well be descriptive.  However, they are definitely not prescriptive.  Some years back we used to hear references to the blues being "black music"; whites could not play the blues nor sing them.  That was until whites broke barriers and some became premier blues musicians.

A True Martyr

In Death, a Witness to Life: Kara Tippetts (1976-2015)

Mar 23, 2015

Justin Taylor

Kara Tippetts went to be with her Lord on Sunday, March 22, 2015.  You can read her obituary here.

She recently wrote on her blog:

My little body has grown tired of battle, and treatment is no longer helping.
But what I see, what I know, what I have is Jesus.
He has still given me breath, and with it I pray I would live well and fade well. By degrees doing both, living and dying, as I have moments left to live.
I get to draw my people close, kiss them and tenderly speak love over their lives.
I get to pray into eternity my hopes and fears for the moments of my loves.
I get to laugh and cry and wonder over Heaven.
I do not feel like I have the courage for this journey, but I have Jesus—and He will provide.
He has given me so much to be grateful for, and that gratitude, that wondering over His love, will cover us all.
And it will carry us—carry us in ways we cannot comprehend.

Kara was the author of the book The Hardest Peace, and also the author of an open letter to suicide advocate and victim Brittany Maynard.

Psalm 145:17-19
The LORD is righteous in all his ways and kind in all his works.
The LORD is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.
He fulfills the desire of those who fear him He also hears their cry and saves them

Psalm 16:11
You make known to me the path of life;
in your presence there is fullness of joy;
at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

1 Thessalonians 4:13-14, 16, 18
13 We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.
14 For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. 16 For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first.
18 Therefore encourage one another with these words.

Revelation 22:20
He who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!

Daily Devotional

Making the Coward Brave

"Then all the disciples forsook him and fled."
Matthew 26:56

Charles H. Spurgeon

He never deserted them, but they in cowardly fear of their lives, fled from him in the very beginning of his sufferings. This is but one instructive instance of the frailty of all believers if left to themselves; they are but sheep at the best, and they flee when the wolf cometh.

They had all been warned of the danger, and had promised to die rather than leave their Master; and yet they were seized with sudden panic, and took to their heels. It may be, that I, at the opening of this day, have braced up my mind to bear a trial for the Lord's sake, and I imagine myself to be certain to exhibit perfect fidelity; but let me be very jealous of myself, lest having the same evil heart of unbelief, I should depart from my Lord as the apostles did. It is one thing to promise, and quite another to perform.

It would have been to their eternal honour to have stood at Jesus' side right manfully; they fled from honour; may I be kept from imitating them! Where else could they have been so safe as near their Master, who could presently call for twelve legions of angels? They fled from their true safety. O God, let me not play the fool also. Divine grace can make the coward brave. The smoking flax can flame forth like fire on the altar when the Lord wills it. These very apostles who were timid as hares, grew to be bold as lions after the Spirit had descended upon them, and even so the Holy Spirit can make my recreant spirit brave to confess my Lord and witness for his truth.

What anguish must have filled the Saviour as he saw his friends so faithless! This was one bitter ingredient in his cup; but that cup is drained dry; let me not put another drop in it. If I forsake my Lord, I shall crucify him afresh, and put him to an open shame. Keep me, O blessed Spirit, from an end so shameful.

Via Dolorosa

Inheriting All of Christ

The Bible is clear and unambiguous on the issue of Christian suffering.  From the very beginning our Lord declared that He would place enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent (Genesis 3:15).  The serpent is after all the Serpent.  The Satan, although a creature, is implacably hateful of all men, for men bear the image of God.  Thus, those who remain under his hegemony are ruled by one who despises them, even as he deploys them as "useful idiots" in his unwinnable war against the Living God. 

But God's magic is deeper.  It was the Satan's implacable hatred of Christ that resulted in His tyrannical execution;  the deeper magic was that He was thereby made a sin offering for the transgressions of all His people (past, present, and future) so that all whom the Father had given Him might be cleansed and all guilt removed from them.  In striking the heel of the Christ, the Liar from the beginning was himself fatally struck upon the head.

In this world, Christ suffered and was persecuted.  Upon His resurrection and Ascension, the fury turned upon His followers, the people left as His servants in the world.  The Church has, therefore, forever been a suffering church.  Jesus was forthrightly candid about the reality of Satanic hatred being unleashed upon His own.

An Honest Man

Why I Am a Climate Change Skeptic

Patrick Moore

March 20, 2015

Dr. Patrick Moore is the co-founder, chair, and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies.

[Editor’s Note: Patrick Moore, Ph.D., has been a leader in international environmentalism for more than 40 years. He cofounded Greenpeace and currently serves as chair of Allow Golden Rice. Moore received the 2014 Speaks Truth to Power Award at the Ninth International Conference on Climate Change, July 8, in Las Vegas.]

I am skeptical humans are the main cause of climate change and that it will be catastrophic in the near future. There is no scientific proof of this hypothesis, yet we are told “the debate is over” and “the science is settled.”

My skepticism begins with the believers’ certainty they can predict the global climate with a computer model. The entire basis for the doomsday climate change scenario is the hypothesis increased atmospheric carbon dioxide due to fossil fuel emissions will heat the Earth to unlivable temperatures.  In fact, the Earth has been warming very gradually for 300 years, since the Little Ice Age ended, long before heavy use of fossil fuels.

Prior to the Little Ice Age, during the Medieval Warm Period, Vikings colonized Greenland and Newfoundland, when it was warmer there than today. And during Roman times, it was warmer, long before fossil fuels revolutionized civilization.  The idea it would be catastrophic if carbon dioxide were to increase and average global temperature were to rise a few degrees is preposterous.

By its constitution, the IPCC has a hopeless conflict of interest. Its mandate is to consider only the human causes of global warming, not the many natural causes changing the climate for billions of years.

Recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced for the umpteenth time we are doomed unless we reduce carbon-dioxide emissions to zero. Effectively this means either reducing the population to zero, or going back 10,000 years before humans began clearing forests for agriculture. This proposed cure is far worse than adapting to a warmer world, if it actually comes about.

Daily Devotional

The Competitive Drive to Sin

C. S. Lewis

If you want to find out how proud you are the easiest way is to ask yourself, ‘How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or shove their oar in, or patronise me, or show off?’ The point is that each person’s pride is in competition with every one else’s pride. It is because I wanted to be the big noise at the party that I am so annoyed at someone else being the big noise. Two of a trade never agree.

Now what you want to get clear is that Pride is essentially competitive—is competitive by its very nature— while the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If everyone else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest.

Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone.

Diabolical Advice

Fashionable Idolatry

Patriotism is a dangerous narcotic.  So is nationalism.  As are all the fashionable causes of our day.  

C. S. Lewis’s diabolical advice in Screwtape Letters, chapter 7 (emphasis added) explains how and why:

Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion.
Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part.

Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the “cause”, in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war-effort or of Pacifism.

The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience.

Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing.

Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours—and the more “religious” (on those terms) the more securely ours. I could show you a pretty cageful down here.

Justin Taylor
HT: Warren Throckmorten

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Ukraine #5

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

March 20, 2015

So as I wrap up my discussion of issues surrounding Ukraine, I want to do three things, which I will take in the standard order of 1,2,and 3.

First I want to provide a handful of links (from various sane perspectives) to help illustrate how much this is like trying to unscramble a pan full of eggs. My paramount concern, as I have already mentioned, has to do with the plight of fellow Protestants in Ukraine — as this short piece illustrates well. Crimea presents some unique tangles, as my friend Peter Hitchens points out.

Alexander Motyl gives a critique of the “realist” understanding of Russian/Ukrainian geopolitics here. And Timothy Snyder takes the discussion way back. 

Second, the question that many have wanted me to get to is what I think we should do about all this. How does this cash out? The simple part concerns what I would not do. I do not believe that we should commit American troops to any conflict like this. I am not an isolationist, but I believe that any constitutional foreign policy will generally be accused of isolationism. We are not the world’s policeman, and we ought not to commit troops anywhere unless our national security is directly threatened. And where it is arguably threatened, but by an inchoate threat like ISIS, I believe we ought to use letters of marque and reprisal instead of regular troops. In short, I am in favor of a strong military defense, and am no fan at all of things like neo-con nation-building.

Daily Devotional

Prayer’s Exclamation Point

All the promises of God find their Yes in him. That is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory. (2 Corinthians 1:20)

John Piper

Prayer is a response to promises, that is, to the assurances of God’s future grace.

Prayer is drawing on the account where God has deposited all his promises of future grace.
Prayer is not hoping in the dark that there might be a God of good intentions out there. Prayer goes to the bank every day and draws on promises for the future grace needed for that day.

Don’t miss the connection between the two halves of this great verse. Notice the “that is why”: “All the promises of God are Yes in Christ. That is why (therefore) we pray Amen through him, to God’s glory.”
To make sure we see it, let’s turn the two halves around: When we pray, we say Amen to God through Christ, because God has said Amen to all his promises in Christ. Prayer is the confident plea for God to make good on his promises of future grace for Christ’s sake. Prayer links our faith in future grace with the foundation of it all, Jesus Christ.

Which leads to the final point: “Amen” is a full and precious word in times of prayer. It doesn’t mean primarily, “Yes, I have now said all this prayer.” It means primarily, “Yes, God has made all these promises.”
Amen means, “Yes, Lord, you can do it.” It means, “Yes, Lord, you are powerful. Yes, Lord, you are wise. Yes, Lord, you are merciful. Yes, Lord, all future grace comes from you and has been confirmed in Christ.”
“Amen” is an exclamation point of hope after a prayer for help.

For more about John Piper's ministry and writing, see DesiringGod.org.

Merry Warriors and Paper Tigers

Enjoying the Battle

Psy-ops has a long and ignoble history in warfare.  In poker it's called bluffing.  In commerce, it's called marketing.  Getting into the mind of your opponent or target can pay great dividends.  Consequently, it is not surprising that in the Great Battle between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Man the latter would engage in psy-ops as often as possible.

One of the most effective psy-ops weapon is within your grasp when you have a chance to convince your enemies that their defeat is inevitable.  There have been many deployments of this stratagem in our generations.  Jesus Christ is passée.  The Age of Science has replaced the former ages of ignorant myths.  The real is the material; anything else is either fabrication or imagination.  Only fools and horses still believe in the Bible.  Nothing will be able to withstand the forces of reason and the science.  And so on.

It is true that there is much that might discourage the Christian.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Ukraine #4

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

March 18, 2015

Please allow me just one more set of background observations before I say what I think ought to be done in Ukraine.

When we teach math to kids, we are not training future mathematicians, although some will wind up there. We are training future grocers, carpenters, housewives, etc. We want what they learn about math to be consistent with what the future mathematicians will eventually learn, but it need not be anything like so complicated.

When we teach history to kids, we are not training up future historians. We are educating Christian kids to be faithful citizens in the country where God has placed them. God wants them here, and God wants them to honor their father and mother. As a third grader honors his fathers and mothers, there is no way to keep this from being “simplified” and coming across to academic historians as yet another instance of “monocausality.”
Fine, but monocausality shows up in biblical histories. Why did Herod get eaten by worms?

And at the same time, there are standard monocausal explanations that are simply anachronistic or wrong.

Daily Devotional

Prayer in Gethsemane

"And he went a little farther, and fell on his face, and prayed."
Matthew 26:39

Charles H. Spurgeon

There are several instructive features in our Saviour's prayer in his hour of trial. It was lonely prayer. He withdrew even from his three favoured disciples. Believer, be much in solitary prayer, especially in times of trial. Family prayer, social prayer, prayer in the Church, will not suffice, these are very precious, but the best beaten spice will smoke in your censer in your private devotions, where no ear hears but God's.

It was humble prayer. Luke says he knelt, but another evangelist says he "fell on his face." Where, then, must be thy place, thou humble servant of the great Master? What dust and ashes should cover thy head! Humility gives us good foot-hold in prayer. There is no hope of prevalence with God unless we abase ourselves that he may exalt us in due time.

It was filial prayer. "Abba, Father." You will find it a stronghold in the day of trial to plead your adoption. You have no rights as a subject, you have forfeited them by your treason; but nothing can forfeit a child's right to a father's protection. Be not afraid to say, "My Father, hear my cry."

Observe that it was persevering prayer. He prayed three times. Cease not until you prevail. Be as the importunate widow, whose continual coming earned what her first supplication could not win. Continue in prayer, and watch in the same with thanksgiving.

Lastly, it was the prayer of resignation. "Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt." Yield, and God yields. Let it be as God wills, and God will determine for the best. Be thou content to leave thy prayer in his hands, who knows when to give, and how to give, and what to give, and what to withhold. So pleading, earnestly, importunately, yet with humility and resignation, thou shalt surely prevail.

NZ: Increasingly A Closed, Controlled Economy

The Objection Industry

The benighted Resource Management Act ("RMA") was sold to the electorate as a way to achieve economic growth in a manner consistent with responsible resource management.  It has proved to be nothing of the kind.  As so many legislative overreaches demonstrate, the RMA does the exact opposite to its stated intent.  It has been used to stop development in its tracks while a very expensive, litigious court process inches forward, adding costs by the day.

At root, the RMA undermines property rights.  What is mine is no longer mine; it is owned substantially not by the legal owner, but the "community".  Others now have a property right that warrants them (via the courts) deciding when and how one's property may be deployed, exploited, and used. 

Duncan Garner, writing in Stuff, excoriates the RMA, writing up just one case.  It involves an RMA-meddling local council.  The council is unnamed.  That's deliberately done (see below).  One presumes the reporting is accurate.

Letter From America (Tracing Immanuel's Footsteps)

An Arrested Abortion

Billy Hallowell
TheBlaze
March 18, 2015

A woman who was featured tenderly serenading her baby girl in a now-viral YouTube video posted a very personal Facebook message on Sunday, revealing that she almost had an abortion two years ago — until a popular Bible verse stopped her in her tracks.

Kimberly Henderson, a 26-year-old aspiring singer who was rejected three times by “American Idol,” published her testimony on the social media platform, noting that March 15 was the two-year anniversary of her visit to the clinic, where she prepared to end her pregnancy.

“People remember dates for birthdays, and anniversaries. Well this date is forever burned in my brain. It’s a day that I will remember and I remember every single detail of that day,” Henderson wrote. “I think that is [sic] Gods way of showing me that HIS plan is and will always be greater and bigger than anything and everything I’ve ever known.”