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But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness Gal 5:22 |
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| Archived Manna: | |
Dear
Friend,
If you do not already have a habit of gathering daily manna the first thing in the morning (we can look at the example given to us in Exodus 16 and find the pattern for make it a habit. Establish your life and your schedule to allow you the necessary time to do your daily collection first thing every morning to give you the strength to make it through the day. And remember that today’s manna will not be sufficient for tomorrow; tomorrow’s manna must be collected tomorrow morning. Sunday, August 11, 2024
Today's Passage : Today's Passage :Morality Lite in Today’s World Bible Verse:2 Timothy 4:1-8 (ESV) "Icharge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry. For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing." Message:
This passage certainly rings true today. I love the line, “they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions [or desires].” There is nothing so ridiculous as some of the teachings that are made in the United States today and called “Christian.” There are churches where the primary message is that God meant for us to make a lot of money; in recent memory, there were a lot of churches that preached against civil rights for African-Americans, even though they might have been fellow Christians, not to mention the hatred that has been poured out from pulpits against non-Christians.
Cain and Abel by Titian
Cain and Abel
The most disheartening, to me, are the moral teachers who have adopted Christian values but rejected Christ. I don’t know where they think these values came from—the idea that a human life has intrinsic value was simply unknown until Christ revolutionized human morality. The Romans, notably, simply did not value human life. Murder was a crime only if the person being killed had some particular stature and genocide was not considered to have general moral implications.
I’m not saying that people calling themselves “Christians” have not committed murder or even genocide; what I am saying is that people knew it to be wrong. It is hard to conceive, for us, that there was a time when nobody thought killing another human being was wrong, in and of itself. But moral atheists have started to take it for granted.
Humanism devoid of Christianity is a boat with a broken anchor line. Unless our morality is rooted in the immutable words of the Bible, it is subject to drifting off in any direction with no fixed point of reference to guide it back.
Although I have alluded to this before, there is a video of Oprah Winfrey talking about heaven that makes my jaw drop. She—who calls herself a Christian—basically believes that good people go to heaven. She apparently has never stopped to ask herself where this concept of heaven, or the morality that enables us to reach it, originated. (You can see her talking about this, and the dumbfounded reaction from some of the audience, on YouTube).
Christ crucified
Her poorly-conceived philosophy boils down to this: we create our own salvation by leading good lives. She thus diametrically opposes the doctrine of salvation by grace.
The self-contradictions hidden in this concept are not very hard to see. She talks about people who lead lives under the “morals taught by Jesus” but who have never heard of Him and have never had the opportunity to hear of Him. She doesn’t explain, however, how such people are going to learn Christian values. Nor does she grasp the contradiction inherent in imagining someone “following Christian values” without following the most fundamental Christian belief, i.e., the absolute necessity of confessing our sins and asking God for forgiveness in Christ’s name.
This is morality lite. Without the Bible, there is no touchstone, no objective reference to which we can look and measure ideas we hear. Without it, we have no fixed basis to judge whether something somebody is saying or doing is right or wrong, or, for that matter, to straighten out our own crazy ideas about right and wrong. What Oprah is trying to do was to be “inclusive” of people who follow other religions—be they Muslims, Hindus, Wiccans, or toenail worshippers. What she accomplishes is to make God’s Word into a collection of suggestions, which one may accept or reject as one pleases, for how to lead a better life.
Meditation : Prayer : May God the Father bless us; may Christ take care of us; the Holy Ghost enlighten us all the days of our life. The Lord be our defender and keeper of body and soul, both now and for ever, to the ages of ages.........Amen |
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