Gay daddy divorces wife for sodomy

This is a letter of rebuke and correction that I wrote to a married music pastor with 2 kids. He decided he was gay and separated from his wife to pursue a boyfriend. They were married for 18 years. He was approaching retirement. At the time of this letter they were starting divorce proceedings. Do not shy from rebuking evil my friends, "For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline" (2 Tim 1:7 NLT).

Atheist Angina - A Parable

Imagine.

His heart has stopped beating. He lies on the ground while you administer chest compressions. These compressions are pumping the blood through his body and keeping him alive. Each compression feeds his cells with renewed momentary life. He is conscience, on his back, staring up at you, surprisingly complacent, if not a little cheerful. He feels good … seemingly unaware that without you, he’d be dead.

That damned Rabbi

I was watching an apologetics debate between a Christian scholar and a high-ranking rabbi from New York City. During the discourse, the rabbi said something that startled me. He said, “I’ve never sinned”. He believed that he was absolutely righteous: whereas in truth, he was absolutely self-righteous. This rabbi actually thought that he was worthy of Heaven on his own merit. He thought that he had kept the law perfectly in all its nuance. It makes me wonder if he had actually ever read the Torah; As opposed to studying what other people said about it (in the Talmud).

His overestimation of himself belittles God. He trivializes the Almighty’s righteousness by having the chutzpah to assert that his sorry arse has been self-elevated to the heights of God’s holiness. He doesn’t think too highly of God’s perfection.

“But the people of Israel, who pursued the law as the way of righteousness, have not attained their goal. Why not? Because they pursued it not by faith but as if it were by works. They stumbled over the stumbling stone.  As it is written: "See, I lay in Zion a stone that causes people to stumble and a rock that makes them fall, and the one who believes in him will never be put to shame.” (Rom 9:31-33 NIV)

Without the recognition that we are sinners in need of God’s grace, we can never please God. And if we can never please God, then His salvation will never greet us when we take that final dirt nap. Instead of being welcomed into the pearly gates and seeing the streets of pure gold, the unremedied sinner will only find God’s wrath in the hereafter. God’s wrath must be satiated (for His wrath is Just), and it will be satiated either by our acceptance of His salvation through His Son Jesus Christ (before we die), or by the lake of burning sulphur (after we die). 

The Transgender’s transgression

I met a man that told me he was a woman. Yet his anatomy told me otherwise. He assured me that the phenotypic reality I was witnessing was nothing more than a cultural mirage and that beneath the surface, far deeper inside, he was truly a female. But anatomy isn't a mirage, and biologically you can dig no deeper than your innate instruction code; at our fundamental structural starting point, lying at a biochemical depth analogous to the Mariana Trench, we find our DNA. Yet, even this man’s DNA testifies against him (as does his anatomy).

It’s deeper than that he assured me.

But there is no deeper than that.

He tells me his soul is in the wrong body gender: That his soul is female, while his body is male.

With this, we have left objective science. We have left biological reality. And we have ventured into pseudo-metaphysics, and the philosophy of speculation.

Facebook as an indicator of Church rot

Have you ever scrolled through a Christian community on facebook, casually reading the posts, and using them as an indicator to assess the health of the Church? It’s a different tension than talking to someone at your local congregation, for on social media they lack conversational inhibitions and simply present tidbits of their theological makeup. It’s like reading someone's spiritual diary, in that you learn a lot about their foundation or lack thereof. 

 

What’s troubling is that many of the posts that garner the most unanimous applause are also the ones that are the most antithetical to Christianity. They present an alternative god to the Lord as revealed in Scripture, and they present a false Gospel. Sure, they may have truth sprinkled in their cocktail, but striking error poisons the drink.

 

Allow me to present one such post. I will not show the poster's name, or the community. What I want you to do is read it with this thought in mind, "Is this a good post reflective of my beliefs?", "Would I thumbs up it?", or "Do I agree with it?”

 

Here it is:

Pro-Choice "logic"

Imagine that you’re walking along the sidewalk and you notice a man piling firewood around the perimeter of a lone house on the street. You pause out of curiosity and observe him more closely. He has a jerry can of petrol and begins to remove the cap.

“Hey, what are you doing”?

The man ignores you and begins pouring the gasoline on the flammables around the house.

More urgently, you call out again, “Hey, what are you doing?”

He turns acknowledging your query.

“I’m burning down my house”. He pulls out the deed and shows it to you. It is his house.

I mention that he could sell it instead. He doesn’t care. I mention he could give it away to someone that needs it, or who would love to have it. He doesn’t care. I don’t know him and its none of my business what he chooses to do with his personal property, but it is curious, so I watch.

Now the man begins to carry 2x4 boards to the front door. He has a hammer and nails and fastens them across the door so it can’t be opened. I notice that the ground-level windows are already boarded up. I look up at the upper-level windows to see if they are boarded as well and I see a woman in the window crying and banging on the window with her fists, trying to break it. She seems to be screaming. The sound is muffled from the closed window, but I think I can hear her.

“Help me, help me, help me!”

At this realization that the house has a woman inside, I start yelling at the man.

The `Believe in yourself’ Lie

I am perplexed at an odd mantra that the millennials seem to have latched onto; that the prima facto ingredient to accomplishment and success is pride, or as they like to express it, to “believe in yourself”. Oprah Winfrey opines on this topic with a religious fervour, as do so many other motivational thinkers. The truth is, they are not really motivational thinkers, they are motivational feelers and exploiters. And they teach that narcissism is a means to the end. 

The Bible and the Bachelorette

Progressive christianity has made a caricature of Jesus. They have replaced the Biblical Lion of the tribe of Judah with a BFF hippy that loves them just the way they are. They dislike the real Jesus, so they subjectively alter Him into a fictitious Jesus, by making a mental construct of Him to suite their sinful lifestyle. They psychotically craft a phantasm in their head and worship the work of their imagination. This is the pathway of the damned. This is the lie of the serpent: that you can have all the benefits of heaven while simultaneously spurning heaven’s Creator. The truth is, what you do and who you are still matters.  

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. (Galatians 6:7 KJV)

I came across an article that epitomized this cheap grace gospel. Here is an excerpt from “The Bachelorette”:

“Let’s say you have had sex with one or multiple of these guys, I would be wanting to go home,” Luke P admitted. 

Hannah B, also a professing Christian, immediately took offense to Luke P’s comments and confessed that she has had “physical relations” with some of the other contestants but “Jesus stills loves her.” 

“Regardless of anything that I've done, I can do whatever, I sin daily and Jesus still loves me. It's all washed and if the Lord doesn't judge me and it's all forgiven, then no other man, woman ... anything can judge me,” Hannah B told Entertainment Weekly after the promo aired.   

“Nobody's gonna judge me, I won't stand for it,” she continued.(1)

Jesus black belts

I was listening to a guy in his 50s talking about mixed martial arts. He had studied fighting for 40 years. He was a martial arts enthusiast and held a black belt. Everyday he put himself through a grueling routine of stretching and punching bag work. His body was conditioned to be as hard as a rock and his mind contained untold numbers of strikes and submission holds. Wherever he went he wore stretch jeans so he could kick someone in the head. Another fighter was with him, and they both started laughing that, outside the ring, they had never been in a fight. They had trained their entire lives for something they never used.

Many Christians are like this. They attend Church and pray to God daily. They study His Word and read devotionals. They are Jesus black belts. Yet they never use it. There comes a point when you stop studying to go to the mission field and you actually go. Many should be teachers yet they act like students. They are feeding themselves instead of feeding others.

When you join the army you go through basic training. You are trained to be a soldier and how to shoot a gun. When your training is complete you are sent to combat. Many people join a Church and are given a sword (the Bible). They are trained on sword play and are formidable. Yet that’s all they do: train with their sword and polish it inside the Church. The enemies of God are devouring people outside their Church walls, yet they are inside, training and training but never engaging the enemy. Such soldiers are useless to their General.

There is a bloody battle raging the streets all around us. And given the direction society is going, it appears we are giving up sacred ground. Given this fact, allow me to ask you 2 questions:

1. Do you read your Bible everyday?

You better! Your bible is your weapon. Can you defend yourself and defend those weaker than you? When Jesus Christ was tempted by Satan, He refuted Satan with Scripture. A Christian without a sword is useless. Step towards maturity. If you've done this, you're the one I wrote this for, proceed to question number 2.

2 How many people did you bring to the Lord this year?

Doesn’t that question make you feel naked? Many of us spend more time doing our hair and makeup than spreading the gospel.

That damned catholic

I spend a lot of time defending Catholicism. I feel that the secular forces that wish to destroy Christianity realize that the Catholic Church is the big-kid-on-the-block, and that if they can manage to break it's sizable influence, that the smaller less significant denominations would quickly succumb as well. So while I am critical of the Catholics, I recognize that the Vatican’s influence is one of the few remaining forces pushing back against secularism’s anti-Christian tsunami. Yet I was talking to a Pentecostal pastor, a high profile one that was a district head (a bishop of sorts) overlooking many churches, and he saw nothing wrong with Catholicism. His ignorance was astounding. It makes me wonder what seminaries are teaching now? This is disconcerting to me, because catholic doctrine is in stark contrast to biblical truth: they teach different things. What this pastor was saying, wasn’t that he didn’t understand Catholicism, it was that he didn’t seem to understand the New Covenant or God. I think I can trace where Protestantism's new found open-armed policy of accepting conflicting theological viewpoints came from.

When I was younger, I remember the Church sounding a warning of the New Age bogeyman (religious relativism). As I aged, I watched this “New Age movement” infiltrate society. Many Christians thought it simply burnt out and disappeared, but it didn’t. As a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough, this fringe boggart adapted and expanded and assumed new monikers: moral relativism and cultural relativism. These further progressed into post modernism.

What happens when large segments of society adopt this spiritual poison? Well, the members of your Church are made up of that society, and their children are steeped in this satanic philosophy. It infects these kids, which as they age backwards infects the Church from within.

And what is it called when the New Age movement infects the Church? Ecumenism.

The fruit of this progressive anti-God movement was the stupification of the Church. Ecumenism is not possible if Christians are educated and Biblically literate. But the embracement of moral relativism has lead to a quenching of the Spirit’s guiding voice, as the Church stumbles over itself to appease Satan and spite God; embracing lifestyles that God has told us He hates. Yes, hates. The Churches new Golden Rule is “to be nice”. And nice apparently includes accepting and loving that which is detestable to God.

So I will redefine ecumenism as theological relativism (or denominational relativism). And this takes us back to our confused Pentecostal pastor and his mistaken views on the Catholic Church.

I did mention there are things I admire about the Catholic Church. One such thing is their stead fast adherence to Catholic doctrine. Ecumenism doesn’t affect them. It is affecting the Protestant churches. The Catholics have taken more care and due diligence in maintaining their aberrant religiosity than the Protestants have at maintaining Biblical truth. But this article is not to sieve Catholicism to find specks of gold, it is to look at all the filthy dirt that those specks are buried in. Today we will look at the elephant in the middle of the living room, the pachyderm the Pentecostal couldn’t see.

Spiritual Prioritization - Learning from Mary

He was in his early 70’s and his body was almost done. He had congestive heart failure and a crippling neurological disease. He was feeling a bit down.

A mixture of frustration and phlegm tainted his words.

“You spend all of your life learning how to do something, and being able to afford to do something, and then you can’t do it anymore”.

He was a skilled trumpeter and an avid outdoor’s man. Yet he could no longer control his fingers to play any music. And he could barely walk let alone hike the outdoors.

Life is made up of windows of time. A window of a couple decades is all you have, to enjoy the skills it took decades to develop. And it takes many decades to accrue the wealth to do the things you want. But age quickly detracts from your ability to live life as you once did as a young man. That which was once taken for granted quickly extends beyond our ability to grasp.

Much of life’s enduring endeavors are meaningless and of little lasting value. It took him 20 years to get the tools and know-how to rebuild a car engine. “All that time spent, and for what”? He wondered, as he sat on a recliner.

Honing in on holiness - How an unbelieving husband is sanctified through his wife (1Cor 7:14)

Who you hang with will sharpen or dullen you.

For the unbelieving husband has been sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife has been sanctified through her believing husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy. (1Cor 7:14 NIV)

So how does this work? How is it that an unbelieving man can be sanctified through a Christian woman? The bi-product of sanctification is to sin less. It is to become increasingly Christ-like in one’s deeds and actions. It is holy living. So now presume we have a very carnal man, which loves over-drinking, is a brawler, and loves to steal things. These are sinful activities. Yet, by living with this Godly woman, the very nature of her presence will have a positive influence on him. Her light will bother his darkness. He might even occasionally go to Church. And he will moderate his wicked conduct to appease her sensitivities. If he is going to over-drink, but remembers it upsets her (and that she will cry) he will be more inclined to avoid inebriation (or have the shame to at least hide it). If he is tempestuous and wants to punch some bloke’s nose, she might encourage him to walk away and be the better man. Her influence will calm his evil inclinations. Her love will calm his hate. If he is going to steal something from a store, he will be discouraged by remembering that his wife will think less of him if he did. Her influence has a braking effect on his evil tendencies and inevitably draws him into a holier lifestyle (against his nature). The believer sanctifies the unbeliever. This is not to say that the unbeliever’s heart moves closer to God, but that their conduct is swayed by the believer’s influence. (Side note: please remember, we are not to marry unbelievers. This verse in question speaks of a conversion within an existing marriage).

The grey chest hair - an eternal reminder

The other day as I was shaving, I noticed I had a single wiley grey hair on my chest that shone like a beacon amongst its darker brethren. The song, “one of these things is not like the other” played for a moment in the back of my head, until I noticed the tune and smote it violently. These children songs from my kid's DVDs will haunt me till the end of my days

Yet this hair deviled into the germane. Despite a fleeting thought to fetch a black giffy marker to color it, I could not help but see that that hair represented time.Or more specifically, an approaching end to my time.

“Our days on earth are like grass; like wildflowers, we bloom and die.The wind blows, and we are gone— as though we had never been here”. (Psalm 103: 15-16 NLT)

This Scripture when plucked out of the Bible and portrayed individually doesn't give us the most cheerful disposition. Yet that is how it gives us such a profound perspective: on how we should be living in the here-and-now. Our first phase of existence is fleeting, but in the following verse we see a foreshadowing of our second phase. We see an introduction of eternal life, and this is what gives us hope.

“But the love of the LORD remains forever with those who fear him”. (v17)

We only have a small allotted amount of time here on this big blue sphere. And that grey hair proclaimed that over half of my time was up. And I could not help but wonder, “What have I accomplished for my LORD”? He has given me talents and abilities. He has entrusted me with resources and friends. He has touched me with health and situated me in a first world nation. He has blest me in so many ways. I was once darkness but was born again into light. He plucked me up out of the mud, and cleaned me up, and loved me at a great expense to Himself. I know my purpose in creation is to glorify Him: To please Him. Yet so much of my time is spent on myself:  Which eternally, is spent on nothing.

Travel the Highway of Holiness: A call to Holy living

A highway will be there, a roadway, And it will be called the Highway of Holiness. The unclean will not travel on it, But it will be for him who walks that way, And fools will not wander on it. (Isaiah 35:8 NASB) 

Is belief in Jesus all it takes to have eternal life?

 NO.

You say you have faith, for you believe that there is one God. Good for you! Even the demons believe this, and they tremble in terror. (James 2:19 NLT) 

Demons know who Jesus is. They believe in Him. But they do not serve Him.

Lamentation of a God nerd

I’m a God nerd.  I like talking about God and I enjoy the company of people that like talking about God. Some people will talk sports, others about popular culture, and still others video games. But my mind is consumed with Scripture. If you are to accept that God is there, how could you not want to know everything about Him that is humanly possible? Wouldn’t you want to know what He told us about Himself? When your eyes see something that wondrous, that beautiful, they seldom wish to look away. That is the perspective of a God nerd.

The sad truth though, is that my type seems far and in between. Sure you can find Christians that like an odd conversation. But I find it hard to find people that really want to consistently dig in deeply (or even shallowly). God’s there, but they almost have Him compartmentalized off to the side. It’s like He’s in a cage and they let Him out once in a while to play with Him. Then they return Him into the cage and carry on with their life,

I don’t generally care to discuss how my work day was. I want to talk about those moments when God’s light broke through. I want to discuss insights from Scripture. And I love expounding my study for those that haven’t the desire or will to study.  I don’t mean to suggest that everyone should be a theologian. Or maybe I do. It’s just the way I’m hardwired and I don’t understand how God can’t be the central point by which every conversation orbits. This is likely a reflection of the body and its many different parts, each complimenting the other and doing a different thing. There is a degree by which we should all seek God out, but even in the OT everyone wasn’t a Levite. If David spent all his time studying Torah he wouldn’t have been able to run the Kingdom. Those that studied Torah informed him of God’s will so he could rule justly. I’m talking about the depth and breadth of study; everyone should grow in knowledge of God. If you’re not growing you’re standing still. And when you’re standing still it’s easier to walk backwards.

I noticed this theological loneliness decades ago. And the unfortunate consequence of it is you learn to blend in with those around you. It’s like in the movie “The Body Snatchers”, where a couple of humans had learnt that they could pass undetected in amongst the aliens by not expressing any emotion. You learn to never talk about God. And it seems to me that when you don’t talk about Him you start to forget about Him.

Couple remediation

Couples need to find an equilibrium, and they need to work out tensions. But in the midst of an escalating discussion, with passion growing, you may note that the elements of the discussion have been lost and both parties are speaking hurtful nonsense (fool-talking). Arguing for the sake of arguing, and this is a very destructive place to be. When anger has entered into the discussion and throttles it like the space shuttle challenger, it is going to explode. Wherever the disagreement may have begun, if you find it is moving into verbal jabs for the sake of harm, it is time to take a break. The devil works within the confines of your anger. He eggs you on to try and destroy for the sake of destruction. He particularly wants to break godly fellowship.

“Do not give the Devil a foothold” (Eph 4:27)

Break away from the inferno and allow yourself and your combatant a period of calm. It is in the quiet time away from the maddening heat that the Spirit will offer refreshing water again. But you must seek His water; Talk to the Father. Take a walk and pray, and the devil’s lies will start to unwind.  Even if you are the only one that does this, you will be in a better place to diffuse the bomb that still awaits you when you return. The devil destroys. God builds. And with the Spirits light your pride will diminish and that which angered you will seem so much smaller than it did previously.

The so called hypocrite

The so called hypocrite

Ad hominem

I am going to say several things here that fly in the face of main stream Christianity’s new found tentative character. What we’ll see is that it’s been hoodwinked. Thesis statement: The predominant charge of hypocrisy against Christians is a bludgeon to silence evangelism or moral correction. 

We live in a politically correct world. People are terrified of misspeaking and being called a homophobe or a racist or a misogynist. The label and culture was purposely created to silence you from speaking light into darkness. I am going to make a strong corollary from the political world that illustrates one in the spiritual. When a person doesn’t have an argument they resort to ad hominem attacks (personal name calling). It is a tactic used to silence those that think differently than you. This is a common stratagem of the political left. But what many Christians have failed to realize is that this is also used to silence spiritual correction/direction as well. I’d say that 99% of the time when someone calls a Christian a hypocrite it is an ad hominem attack. This article is not dealing with the other 1%. 

When someone calls you a hypocrite, what really shows that something is amiss is when the validity or falsity of the charge that prompted the name calling isn’t being discussed. From this, it can be seen to be a deflection away from the topic of their sinful activity or proclivity. In essence the name callers are saying:

 “Shut up because you’re a sinner too”.

You become who you hang out with

"Do not be deceived: `Bad company corrupts good morals.'" (1Cor15:33 NASV)

deceived = πλανάω = seduced. to wander away.
corrupts = φθείρω = withers or shrivels. to spoil (as in food)

the CEV puts it this way:

"Don't fool yourselves. Bad friends will destroy you".

Paul was an intellectual and can be seen here quoting a common phrase of the day from Menander (a Greek dramatist) who in turn had quoted it in one of Euripides' earlier plays. The Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Commentary tells us the meaning from the play indicates communion with "those who deny the resurrection". The Church at Corinth had fallen back into a sinful state since Paul had left them. And Paul puts some emphasis on the company they keep for this slippage. Your morality is strongly influenced by the company you keep. Those who deny the resurrection are bad company for close friendships.

Friendship with unbelievers

Friendship with unbelievers

Psalm 1: devotional mullings.