If you wonder why I haven’t written in a while, it’s because I’ve been working on my new site www.westerfunk.net whenever I get the chance. In addition, I have been super busy at work which makes me dead tired most of the time. Anyway, I’ll be back soon to post something worth while.
http://www.nbc5i.com/slideshow/entertai … s&tn=b
It is really no surprise that Hollywood is increasingly becoming more and more corrupt and pushing as many boundaries as possible when you read this list of celebrities who openly and firmly deny the existence of God. What else would you do but pursue the depths of depravity if you didn’t have a relationship with the greatest treasure in all the universe, Jesus Christ? The One through whom the universe came to be? Thank you Lord for having mercy on my soul and inclining my heart toward you when I wanted nothing to do with you, and would have gone to the same lengths many in our culture do. Lord, it is You alone and your grace in the cross that has made me to differ, I am no better than any, I am a sinner saved by sheer grace. All credit to you Lord … I praise You.
“If we play down harsh doctrines, we will gut our pleasant and comfortable beliefs too.”
– Tim Keller, Preaching Hell in a Tolerant Age
“We must not suppose that if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world.”
– C.S. Lewis
“There is a sad irony in the seeming success of many Christian churches and schools. The irony is that the more you adjust obscure Biblical doctrines to make Christian reality more attractive to unbelievers, the less Christian reality there is when they arrive… If you adjust your doctrine to fit the world in order to attract the world, sooner or later the world realizes that they already have what the church offers. That was the story of much of mainline Protestantism in Europe and America in the 20th century. Adjust your doctrine – or just minimize doctrine – to attract the world, and in the very process of attracting them, lose the radical truth that alone can set them free.”
– John Piper, My Anguish, My Kinsmen Are Accursed
http://www.banneroftruth.org/pages/arti … il.php?654
Although this teaching can sound correct in appealing to the character of God as being so full of love that the Father couldn’t, and in fact did not, pour out His wrath on Jesus at the cross, it absolutely guts the heart of the Gospel, substitutionary atonement, and ultimately strips Christianity of all its unique meaning. Every heresy that has emerged in the history of the church is full of just enough truth to make it look palatable (this is the craftiness of the work of Satan), and yet it is the few drops of poison that are administered that make it spiritually deadly (in the eternal sense). Substitutionary atonement: that is on the cross, Jesus bore the guilt and blame (the wrath of God) for the sins of anyone who would believe in Him and are given the very righteousness Christ earned for them in His life and death, sealed with power in His historical resurrection.
Steve Chalke would have us believe the work of the cross was merely an expression of how far God was willing to go for us; now, it is that, and yet infinitely so much more! Of course it is that, but when the work of the cross is explained as we see it in Scripture, we see that it is redundant to even say that. This guy, Steve Chalke, is attacking the heart of the very divine act that has brought us peace with God, Christ actually and effectually bearing our eternal guilt, in our place, and giving us His perfect record so that we may stand before God and love Him for eternity. And this heresy is spreading like a wildfire among many who call themselves evangelicals even. He is quoted as saying in this article, how have we “‘come to believe that at the cross this God of love suddenly decides to vent his anger and wrath on his own Son?'” This is a blatant attack on the very Gospel itself. If Christ did not bear the wrath of God in our place (might I add, willingly), we would still be under eternal condemnation. This picture of God that emerges from theology like this is a picture simply of a God of love and not a God of justice. In addition, the picture of God he is painting is of a God who simply sweeps our sins under the rug and doesn’t deal with them. He is both fully a loving God and a just God, with all of His attributes reconciled in the work of the cross. O The Wonderful Cross!
This error has crept up once again as it has in the history of the church, just in our postmodern cultural context. We would all do well to pay very close attention to what we have seen and heard in the Scriptures, testified to us by the Holy Spirit.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/arti … article.do
This guy is claiming he has proved with DNA and excavation evidence, that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, had a son, and that they were all buried next to each other, thus allegedly proving Jesus never rose from the dead, in hopes that he can turn Christianity on its head. And as much as we as believers want to say, “What an idiot, how could he,” we must remember first that we are no better and the only reason we differ from this guy is the grace of Christ. In fact, the Scriptures have something to say concerning all of us. Psalm 14:1-3 says:
The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds, there is none who does good. The LORD looks down from heaven on the children of man, to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God. They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt; there is none who does good, not even one.
We are all in the same state apart from the inward work of regeneration by the Holy Spirit to turn our hearts from rebellion to seeing Christ as beautiful and embracing Him. Had God left us to our natural desires, we would run head first straight into hell. As the Scripture says, God looks down upon all of us, and from His perspective (the only one that counts), no one seeks after Him. Sure, they may seek after a god of their choosing, made in their likeness, thought up in their own minds, but in no way do they seek after Him, the true King of the universe. How offensive must that be? And this is all of us. Apart from the work of Christ to transform our dead hearts bent on destruction, we would be doing the exact same thing, rejecting God, bent on eternal destruction. By nature our hearts and our will are in bondage to sin and are predisposed to using all of our energy to reject Him. And so before any of us start getting so upset about how absurd this is, just remember that should be you had God not intervened in your will and cut you to the heart by revealing His glory as seen in Christ. Otherwise, you would have despised Christ just like everyone else. I absolutely think this is absurd, but not surprising. Man naturally hates and despises Christ and wants to reject and suppress the truth as much as they can. During this whole thing, remember this thought from Scripture:
“For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.”
– 1 Corinthians 15:16-17
There is no hope apart from the life, death, resurrection, ascension, work, and return of Christ to raise us from the dead, giving us life in Himself.
http://www.alliancenet.org/partner/Arti … 64,00.html
In the modern church in the West, there has been a large shift away from believing core, essential, orthodox truths and a turn to adopt the methods of the culture to try and reach the culture for Christ. In the process, Scripture and its divine authority gets put on the shelf, collecting dust. While this may seem wise on the face to try to reach the culture with modern cultural ideologies and techniques, what ends up happening is that the church becomes so indistinguishable from the world that it no longer possesses the doctrinal distinctiveness it needs to spread the Gospel with clarity that people may be saved. This is very dangerous, 1) because you begin coddling people into the church that may never be converted (because of the indistinguishable, worldly message being preached), all the while assuming they are converted because they take the name “Christian,” and 2) the light of the Gospel gets snuffed out because of worldly doctrine being taught, and 3) ultimately God’s glory is suppressed as a result (Romans 1:18-19).
The Cambridge Declaration is simply a modern reassertion of core, essential doctrines that must be affirmed by every believer. In fact, they are really not speaking of anything new, but reasserting the very doctrines the Reformers themselves recovered from the dead Roman Catholic church. This statement basically goes through the Five Solas of the Reformation, explains them, and then applies them to the modern crisis the evangelical church in the West is facing. And the crisis is that we are on the verge of becoming totally irrelevant to our culture (just as it has already happened in Europe to a great degree, what is it now, 2% confessing Christianity?)
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,253742,00.html
Oh wait, I know … let’s make another UN Security Council resolution and set another deadline :] seems to be working so effectively as it is.
There is a new version of NetworkActiv’s PIAFCTM out, version 2.2, (FREE network monitoring software) that allows you to view the data within raw network packets. It also lets you re-assimilate html pages that are transferred over a network interface (can be handy for people desiring to extract data out of html/javascript code that may not otherwise be viewable in the browser by viewing the source within the page). The awesome thing about this new version is the ability to do network connection performance monitoring, something that wasn’t available in the last version I had (which was 1.5). So check it out …
http://www.networkactiv.com/PIAFCTM.html