“Pragmatism has engulfed and swallowed up the professing church. Theology has been replaced by or subverted to styles of methodology. I think it is a strange phenomenon that throughout history denominations were established based around a common theology and now associations are established based around a common methodology. So much of current evangelical strategy is to identify what people desire and tell them Jesus will give it to them if they choose Him as their Savior. In fact, God is seen as sitting in heaven loving them so much that it’s almost irritating to Him that they won’t come to Him for the things that they desire. Few seem to be considering the fact that what the unconverted sinner desires is the last thing God wants to give him … until he desires righteousness and deliverance from sin and death and judgment.” – John MacArthur at T4G ’08 in this message (MP3)
It has been said of this parable by many teachers in our various camps that each of these instances are representative of different types of believers, the mature and immature, the unfruitful (yet saved) and the fruitful. Yet the text of Matthew 13:3-9 (the parable itself) and Matthew 13:18-23 (the explanation of the parable by Jesus Himself) negates this faulty understanding.
There is only one who is saved in the end: the one who springs up by God’s power and produces fruit, not on account of the fruit itself that is produced (for we are saved by faith alone as Paul clearly articulates in Romans 4:1-25), but on account of the real, effectual, supernatural change that is made in a persons’ life by God’s Spirit in creating faith where there was none, being evidenced by the fruit (that is, authentic God-wrought faith is never alone (Martin Luther), but by God’s grace, it always produces fruit out of the faith He grants us, though we are still imperfect to be sure).
If you have true saving faith, there will be a sure change and shift in your life, a true love for the things of God, His Words, His actions, loving what He loves, hating what He hates, repenting of wickedness and leaning on Christ alone for your salvation and nothing else. That doesn’t mean there will not be struggling and fighting for these things against our wicked hearts. But it does mean that God’s power working in you will be plain and made obvious.
(FYI, if you’re coming from a politically liberal-leaning point of view, please ignore the caption at the beginning and end of this video … that’s totally irrelevant to the main issue at hand: Oprah’s deceit. In addition, I realize there is a book mentioned apparently directly linking Obama to the occult and New Age movement at the end of the video. I have done no investigation of these claims or the book and would liken such a title to far-right fear mongering of some kind … though certainly the actual proposal of establishing a Department of Peace does sound eerily familiar to the Ministry of Love in Orwell’s classic 1984, a place in the story in which the main character, Winston, is tortured into submission to “love” for Big Brother, but I seriously digress from the real topic at hand 🙂 )
This is the absolute essence of false religion, the antithesis of Christianity, the antithesis of the Gospel. In this thinking, You are the starting point for all that is in your world and the world that is out there, as it were. How utterly vain. This kind of thinking, left unchecked, will eat our culture from the inside out, because the ultimate end, the ultimate goal of the type of person this creates is a sociopath. A society of sociopaths? Frightening prospect, just on a worldly level, let alone the abandonment and suppression of the Gospel.
(Excerpt taken from the PDF notes of R.W. Glenn’s MP3 audio lecture series on Church History found at www.solidfoodmedia.com in Minnetonka, MN)
A. Warrant for the Study of Church History
1. The Bible does not teach us everything about the outworking of God’s plan of redemption. Although this may sound like a controversial thing to say in a church that believes (rightly) in the sufficiency, infallibility, and inerrancy of Scripture, it is because of what Scripture teaches that I draw this conclusion cf. Matt 28:18-20; Rev 21:1-4. We learn from church history how God’s plan of redemption has been worked out from the time of the end of the first century until today. “The events of this world’s history set the stage upon which the drama of redemption is enacted.” (1)
2. The sovereignty of God over all of history cf. Isa 46:8-11. History is His story just as much as it is ours. Therefore we have an opportunity through the study of church history to see how God protected and preserved his people to the present day so as to bring about the sure accomplishment of his redemptive purposes in Jesus Christ.
3. The Christian faith is historical in character cf. Luke 2:1-2. Studying church history demonstrates concretely that the Christian faith is historical in character – it deals with real people in real places in real time.
As I have been reading through Genesis the past couple of weeks, something has become clear to me as the story line has progressed. We all know the story of Jacob and Esau, well, at least some of you reading might. As Paul says and properly interprets of this story in the latter part of Genesis, particularly as he says it in Romans 9:10-13, “When Rebekah had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac, though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad—in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls— she was told, ‘The older will serve the younger.’ As it is written, ‘Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.'”
Now of course everyone’s first immediate reaction to Romans 9 on election in particular is that this story of Jacob and Esau Paul cites is talking about God electing their temporal lots in life, not their eternal lots. And even then, the election spoken of, so goes the popular thought, is one of groups of people, not individual people, that is the election of Israel instead of Edom, as opposed to Jacob and Esau. That is at least how most people immediately interpret it nowadays, so as to lighten the hardness of the verses that come after these later in Romans 9.
(Archived): http://www.westerfunk.net/archives/science/Life%20on%20Mars/
So now, I suppose the implicit argument from NASA goes,”Let’s spend next to a trillion $’s of tax-payer money that we don’t have (maybe more) trying to find out if there MIGHT be any alien microbes on the red planet.”
Sounds reasonable. I mean after all, the only evidence they have of this is the gaseous by-product (something they have known was already there for quite some time now) of a supposed alien microbe, not any actual solid proof of its existence.
NASA has to try and keep us all intrigued somehow; so why not through marketing propaganda of a supposed alien microbe find? Then we can keep funding their multi-billion dollar adventures so we can get higher quality HD pictures back of red dust and rock. Hmmm, fascinating. Maybe next time the pictures will be in HHD and we’ll have a live streaming webcam showing us the latest rock movements on the ole’ Red Planet 🙂 I’m all for some great science and pushing into new frontiers of knowledge, but spending that much money on a little kids Star Trek dream, especially during this economy, does not seem very reasonable, or wise for that matter … that is if that’s what they are trying to implicitly say of course.
http://www.aomin.org/aoblog/index.php?itemid=3079
If you want to see a picture of the future of Europe, then read this and watch the video. It is disturbing to say the least and has some cursing and violence in it so proceed with caution … just warning you in advance.
I post this because the video is such a very clear portrayal, from Muslims themselves who shot it during some recent riots in London, of the threat we face in the short and long term, and the impotence of the West to deal with the threat brewing from within its own borders. It apparently does not take much for a Muslim to go from moderate to radical. This video makes that abundantly clear.
“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.” – Will Durant on the history of Rome
May we learn from history. Rome was great … and it fell
When we read Scripture and particularly the Old Testament, it is so easy to automatically view those heroes of the faith, those glowing golden embossed characters we have all read about as kids as if they did no wrong. Sadly, a lot of times, we carry those portrayals with us into adulthood. Sure they made “mistakes,” the thinking goes, but they are people who kept their act together 99% of the time and are worthy of imitation as a result. And unfortunately, this is where we think the teaching stops.
The natural result of this thinking and its resultant teaching is that the historical characters of the Scriptures merely become our models for how to live, people we should imitate in faith and good works. Now of course, to a certain extent that is true. Yet, is that all there is to these narratives? I thought the Bible was a book about God and His works? Does this not apply to every square inch of Scripture including every single narrative?
Yes, his mind was not changed toward theism (let alone the Gospel), yes, he’s still a confident atheist … yet this act of kindness from a believer very well could be the planting of a seed that the Holy Spirit will use to later bring him to faith. May we pray this happens. Sometimes the best apologetic for our faith are not air tight logical arguments (though those are necessary for removing stumbling blocks and giving clear testimony to the Gospel) but genuine kindness and care for the souls of others. Our hope for his salvation is not in his “decision” or will to believe, for they both are in bondage to the blindness of sin and the hardness of the wrath of God that rests on him even at this moment (John 3:36). Our hope in evangelizing and apologetically defending the faith lies in the power of the Holy Spirit to grant those we come into contact with the eyes to see Him, the ears to hear Him, and a new heart that is submissive and responsive to God. “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” – John 3:8 … and the reason this is so is because God is sovereign in salvation, not us.
(Thanks for sending this my way, Ryan McCarthy)
With permission, this is an email I received from a co-worker named Nathan Abbott, who sent me a quick run down of the improvements and drawbacks to Windows 7 Beta after testing it this morning. Sounds like there are still some things Microsoft needs to improve, like the TCP/IP network stack. But progress has surely been made from Vista.
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Well I have spent a few hours with Windows 7 and here are my initial thoughts and feelings.
1.) The network stack still needs work. M$ implemented an enhanced TCP/IP stack and they still have bugs they need to work out of it. File transfer times are still a bit sluggish. I tested 10 MEG, 100 MEG and 4.0 GIG file transfers and XP still beats Windows 7. I did notice that after turning off their IPV6 Helper service, files transferred a little faster.
2.) There are still too many services that start on startup or have a delayed startup. A base install starts with 38+ services on boot up. I trimmed it down to 28. I have attached screenshots [above].