A smidgen of humility

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Along with distancing herself from her predecessor’s contribution to Alberta’s progress the premier of the province is drumming up dissension in Canada with talk about provincial sovereignty. Is she jealous of the treasonous Bloc Quebecoiss? Is she angry that Canada’s First Nations are enjoying a new season of sovereignty over their lands? Every Canadiwn should hear the word sovereignty and shudder because of what Canadian sovereignty, exercised from the birth of the nation, has done. Canadian approaches to exercising sovereignty must have a healthy dose of caution and humility.

Sovereigns of industry and business

If a Conservative party is going to drive in the lanes of grievance, empowerment of business and small government Canadians need to be very afraid. That combination of policy or plan does not end well for the party or the people it claims to want to govern.

He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

Micah 6:8

Unstoppable life? Kidding aside!

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I would venture to say that evangelicals will sell you a book about winning in all circumstances apart from faith in God, but they will not confess that such a victorious life happens in the soup of disaster,  discomfort, disease,  weakness, and loss.  Their children will grow up and mouth the same lies and fables.  The treasure of all God’s people in every age has been his presence.  Genuine Christians are not obsessed with winning.  Joseph was not revered because he won every battle or defeated every assault, but because God chose to be his companion.  David was comforted by God’s presence in the valley of death’s shadow.

The victorious, unlike the Lord who bought them, never weep. They will say that poverty is wealth, and that disability is on no-one’s ticket.

The life of gospel-lit people is going to show the imprint of the king.  The graphic display will be both embossed and engraved.  Eternal life, however, is primarily encrypted and out of sight, so the extent to which God puts the believer on the stage of public witness will depend on the believer’s private cooperation with the Holy Spirit.  People should not expect to be recognized as spiritual because of their food, drink or clothing. A person speaking in a public setting breaking into tongues is a truly puzzling phenomenon.  If a sentence in tongues does not get translated immediately then we can assume that the speaker is engaging in self-edification.  It is obviously a way for some people to affirm their spiritual status.

The forgotten flavours: prayer and help

It would be sheer madness to expect to find oneself decked out with greater works than Yeshua.  There are people whose imagination takes over when they see the word possible.  What disease is there which, like biblical leprosy, is incurable, is subject only to observation, and is practical death sentence? If we do not know what disease(s) meet those criteria we should know with certainty that amputees are not receiving their limbs back, and there is no miracle required to turn guns and ammo. A prayer life is perhaps the best spice for Christian life, and it is noit a public deal. Sadly we have forgotten how to pray. Instead of petitioning God we are decreeing and declaring. If Christ approached the business for whcih he came into the world with a request and tearful cries, we can do no better than to approach the same Fathetr and not seek the Father’s help through our daiily prayers. We have forgotten what it means to be spiritual. God allows us to miss the mark even when the best Helper is prresent, Many believers take no cue from the Spirit’s mission of helping us into our witness to the world. Salvation is hjelp, loving the ungodly is help, and the Holy Spirit is Help in name and mission. All thr miracles we have seen and can operate do not mean we have our ears perked to the voice of God, or that our hands and feet are bonded to work for others. It is love that never fails, never falls to the ground, is the infallible quality that identifies God and us as His.

Good mornings are amen-activated

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God’s morning to us could be spicy, bland,  any colour, hot, cold, unless we think, like the perverted 45th loser president that we can just think things into being.   Maybe we believe like Solomon that a person is whatever he thinks he is.  Well, pinch me!  People think all kinds of things that never see the light of day and for that I say thank God for staying in charge of every day and night.

Every day has its evil and divine love

“So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Matthew 6:34

The night when evil flies

If we could change a lock of our hair by thinking or feeling we would not age, and we know  like he just thinks about declassifying highly secret documents and they are the classified. Let’s live joyfully and with grateful hearts even when tears cloud our vision. We operate in the day as the night approaches, and the season of evil’s comfort is being welcomed. We are not afraid of the adversities of day or night.

“You will not be afraid of the terror by night, Or of the arrow that flies by day; Of the pestilence that stalks in darkness, Or of the destruction that lays waste at noon.”

Psalms 91:5-6, NASB

Votes for incoherence and money-numb jokers

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If the people of Georgia can make sense of the slurred speeches of Herschel Walker they deserve a Nobel Prize for humanity. Let us hope that before that completely unhinged choice of almost 2 million Georgians says another word to sink his own boat that a few courageous voters will tell the world how employers have been leaning on them to vote GOP. Georgia’s reputation as a place great musicians reject as a destination is not cooked up. What else can explain people voting for trumpettes?

If the people of the United States can see intelligence in the flip flops and criminal behavior of the super rich there is redemption in the world turning to a diet of locusts and honey. What kind of society survives turning a blind eye to rising abuses of labourers cheered on by prosperity seeking religious people? None. People’s lives are hanging in the balance, and difference between Rev. Warnock and Republican Georgia might well come down to the reputation for finding votes after the people have voted.

Say hello to your hollow fellow

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Leadership around the world is showing up as visionless, full of hype,  followers of spin, rejecters of facts, and inciters of  xenophobia and misogyny. Despicable they certainly are, but sinking to their level makes one just as despicable.  The vast majority are not like the Ukrainian president,  a hero for all with eyes to see.  We will not pass the others on the street without a “hello” because God would want us to wish them all a good day, just like He does.

Who pilots this ship?

Ferocious, ravenous, tricksters all: arming themselves for a battle they will most certainly lose. Russia and her hordes are not fooling me about the presence of substantial bones underneath their drive for global domination.  When the helmsman is willing to slaughter both crew and passengers the ship is doomed. Many of us are willing to see humanity wrestle with its future in the institutions that have proven to be reliable vessels for the passage of.  I will tell you who does not care about the mass of humanity’s security.  It is those who will use the veto when the dignity and the safety of any group of us is at stake.

There is not enough medication in the world to help these guys sleep

It is not only leaders playing the hollow game.  One in four neighbours is likely to be a thieving, lying neer-do-well, a parent-hating, entitled person.  Every single one of us on the planet is at least tempted to call ourselves “good guys” even when the facts tell a different story. No matter what stories they tell or what fantastic fables they spin to explain their homicidal and territorial aggressions. Their lies stand out, and they cannot ignore the messages and the warnings they have been receiving from God’s angels.

The age of the hollow fellow has come

Hollow fellows will believe and support any lie, stay in the race to be rich, incite a race war, and race to the bottom by electing the flimsiest people to public office where they hope the officials will shock the population with immorality and phony heroes and not serve the people. All across the globe, communities are saturated with hollow leaders, elected or not.

… whoever says to his brother, ‘You good-for-nothing,’ shall be guilty before the supreme court; and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell.

Matthew 5:22b, NASB

There are public servants who do not serve, teachers who have no learning, dogs who do not bark, physicians who have no cure, and there are people who, for example, graduated from brazenly lying as press secretaries in the White House to hold the pen of state governor. There are ruthless and crime-prone citizens running for power – not public service. Let’s resist the temptation to say “Dumpkopf”. 

Insidious Antisemitism’s Inside Angels

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One of the truly strange phenomena about Jewish conventions has to do with people chasing down the symbols without understanding the substance. This is not an unprecedented predicament. In New Testament times there were people who wanted to be teachers of the law without having a clue as to what they were talking about, and such people were in the church. We are noticing the rise of a number of programs and articles about the ark of the covenant for example. People are interested in finding out where the arc is and there is huge speculation about what the ark was meant to do. In addition, there are some researchers who think that every people has an ark of some kind, and that these arks authenticate the culture of the people who claim to have had a version of the ark of the covenant. That is a patent and latent jab at the unique endowment of the Jewish people.

Ark is not a hot topic

I suppose we should all be expecting the discovery of the “lost” ark, because like the finding of the remains of a ship wrecked in one of the many wars, the outcome is reverence for the graveyard. We inadvertently justify war and violence. Without faith, much of what people treasure as their spiritual distinction is laughable foolishness. The elephant in the room is the treatment of migrants, foreigners, and servants. Spirituality is that simple.

Who is laughing?

  • American exceptionalism in the face of the treatment of First Nations and Black people. Yeah! Right.
  • Christians and Jews as people in perfect compliance with God’s laws. Yeah! Right.
  • Russians fighting Nazism in Ukraine. Yeah! Right.
  • The government can legislate acceptance of LGBTQ people. Yeah! Right.
  • Adorable extreme right wing governments in Italy and Israel. Yeah! Right.

The most destructive manifestation of Antisemitism is the adoption of Judaism’s historic and exclusive markers. It is right there in plain sight: Americans, Australians and Europeans and Africans (1) talking about their countries as “promised lands”, (2) people believing that they have the equivalent of the ark of the covenant, (3) anyone believing that they are in possession of promises of being higher than other nations, and (4) especially people refusing to learn biblical Hebrew or treating the language component of Bible study as an attempt to learn to speak the language. You cannot be so jealous of the Jewish people that you idolize them and try to submerge their contribution to the world’s spiritual environmentals. Can you?

Public reading sham

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“Until I come, give attention to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation and teaching.” (1 Timothy 4:13, NASB)

You may not have noticed, but the vast majority of Christians are woefully unfamiliar with the Bible’s narratives and speeches

Note how many times “read” is paired with NOT or NEVER

If people are not even engaging in the public reading of scripture in their own languag, dare we imagine that they understand what the Hebrew and Greek originals actually say? Some basics are not basic at all.

QOTD

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If God came into the world to make winners of humans should humans not confess to losing?

Christ came to save sinners.  “Yet for this reason I found mercy, so that in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might demonstrate His perfect patience as an example for those who would believe in Him for eternal life.”

1 Timothy 1:16, NASB
  • God is not interested in your edenic dining
  • God is not moved by you sinaitic drinking
  • God needs your mortal and decrepit bodies
  • God has been giving his Spirit to people he knows to be prone to fatigue and forgetfulness, subject to change and growth

Yeah but no

Only the people who admit that they are ruined can hope to be registered among Gods people. The genuine vision of God can have only one response and one remedy.

“In the year of King Uzziah’s death I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted, with the train of His robe filling the temple.” (Isaiah 6:1, NASB)

Then I said, “Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I live among a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.” (Isaiah 6:5, NASB)

Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a burning coal in his hand, which he had taken from the altar with tongs. He touched my mouth with it and said, “Behold, this has touched your lips; and your iniquity is taken away and your sin is forgiven.” (Isaiah 6:6-7, NASB)

Only the blind have the deepest appreciation of eyesight.