Category: Book Reviews

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Revealing Clips of Einstein’s Life & Times

A few minutes ago, I was sent this blog post about Albert Einstein from my friend Wendell taken from Bill Federer’s AmericanMinute.com that I’d never seen. After submerged in the Metaxas book all day attempting chapter summaries, this Einstein clip came much as a delightful soothing dessert, after a hearty meal of Metaxas with too much to digest and ponder. Relax now, and breathe deeply. Some interesting dynamics here. Know God’s children have nothing to fear.

While a student at physics-mathematics section of the Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, Albert Einstein met Mileva Mariæ, whom he studied together with. She helped him with papers and articles, advancing his career. They eventually married in 1903. Albert and Mileva had a daughter, Lieserl, and two sons, Hans Albert and Eduard. Correspondence indicates she may have contributed materially to his early research, so much so, that after their divorce in 1919, he gave her the money from winning the Nobel Prize.

With a doctorate from the University of Zurich, Einstein wrote papers on electromagnetic energy, relativity, and statistical mechanics. Einstein predicted a ray of light from a distant star would appear to bend as it passed near the Sun. When an eclipse confirmed this, The London Times ran the headline, November 7, 1919, “Revolution in science – – New theory of the Universe — Newtonian ideas overthrown.”

In 1921, Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics, gaining international recognition. Einstein’s first visit to the United States was to raise funds for Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. On his 3rd visit, 1932, he took a post at Princeton University. When the National Socialist Workers Party (Nazi) took control of Germany, they barred Jews from holding official positions or teaching at universities. Einstein stayed in the United States, becoming a citizen in 1940.

Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels proclaimed “Jewish intellectualism is dead” and burned books by Jewish authors, including Einstein’s works. Jewish poet Heinrich Heine prophetically penned in 1822: “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.”

A current instance of this was reported in the Breitbart News article “ISIS Burns Books at Mosul Libraries” (February 5, 2015): “The Islamic State … raided the Central Library of Mosul to destroy all non-Islamic books. These books promote infidelity and call for disobeying Allah,’ announced a militant to the residents. ‘So they will be burned.’ Militants targeted the library at the University of Mosul. They burned science and culture textbooks in front of the students.”

Concern is growing over recent anti-Semitic comments made by politicians and radical campus groups, which forebode a resurgence of Jewish persecution. A FoxNews headline (3/8/19) read: “Failure to condemn anti-Semitic Rep. Omar by House Democrats is a profile in cowardice.”

Commenting on socialist redistribution of wealth, Albert Einstein stated: “I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the world can help humanity forward, even in the hands of the most devoted worker in this cause. The example of great and pure individuals is the only thing that can lead us to noble thoughts and deeds … Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi armed with the moneybags of Carnegie?”

Einstein’s theory of relativity, E=MC2, is “energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.” It is the basis for applying atomic energy. Berkeley Lab published the article (9/23/20) “CERN’s Large Hadron Collider Creates Matter From Light”:

“The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) plays with Albert Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc2, to transform matter into energy and then back into different forms of matter. But on rare occasions, it can skip the first step and collide pure energy – in the form of electromagnetic waves. Last year, the ATLAS experiment at CERN’s LHC observed two photons, particles of light, ricocheting off one another and producing two new photons.

This year, scientists have taken that research a step further and discovered photons merging and transforming into something even more interesting: W bosons, particles that carry the weak force, which governs nuclear decay….

The research doesn’t just illustrate the central concept governing processes inside the LHC: that energy and matter are two sides of the same coin.

It also confirms that at high enough energies, forces that seem separate in our everyday lives – electromagnetism and the weak force – are united.”

Describing the theory of relativity, that the closer one approaches the speed of light time slows down, Albert Einstein said:

“When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute — and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.”

 Albert was married to his cousin, Elsa, from 1921 till her death in 1936. His accountant, Leo Mattersdorf of New York, wrote (TIME Magazine, 1963): “One year while I was at his Princeton home preparing his return, Mrs. Elsa Einstein, who was then still living, asked me to stay for lunch. During the course of the meal, the professor (Einstein) turned to me and with his inimitable chuckle said: ‘The hardest thing in the world to understand is income taxes.'”

Einstein’s warning that Nazis could create the atom bomb led President Franklin D. Roosevelt to set up the Manhattan Project.

In November of 1952, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion asked Einstein to be Israel’s 2nd President, but he declined due to age, dying less than 3 years later. Being “deeply moved” by the offer, Einstein replied:

“My relationship with the Jewish people became my strongest human tie.”

The periodic table’s 99th element, discovered shortly after his death in 1955 was named “einsteinium.”

Albert Einstein was quoted in The New York Times, November 9, 1930, saying:

“I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and noblest driving force behind scientific research.” Paraphrasing Miguel de Cervantes’ quote “I do not believe that the Good Lord plays dice,” Einstein stated: 

“God Almighty does not throw dice.” He added: “Before God we are all equally wise — equally foolish.”

In Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man (1983), William Hermanns recorded Einstein’s 1943 statement:

“Creation may be spiritual in origin, but that doesn’t mean that everything created is spiritual … Let us accept the world is a mystery. Nature is neither solely material nor entirely spiritual. Man, too, is more than flesh and blood; otherwise, no religions would have been possible. Behind each cause is still another cause … Yet, only one thing must be remembered: there is no effect without a cause, and there is no lawlessness in creation.”

As recorded by Helen Dukas in Albert Einstein, The Human Side (Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 66), Einstein stated:

“My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality.

Morality is of the highest importance — but for us, not for God.”

Einstein stated in an interview published in G.S. Viereck’s book Glimpses of the Great, 1930:

“I’m absolutely not an atheist … The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.”

Walter Isaacson quoted Einstein in the article “Einstein and Faith,” Time 169, April 5, 2007, 47):

“The fanatical atheists … are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle.

They are creatures who — in their grudge against the traditional ‘opium of the people’ — cannot bear the ‘music of the spheres.'”

Einstein’s referenced to the “music of the spheres” is a religious concept used through the Medieval- Renaissance period to describe an orbital resonance of the planets.

Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, compared the eight planets in the solar system to the eight notes in music – an octave.

Kepler wrote in The Harmonies of the World, 1619: “Holy Father, keep us safe in the concord of our love for one another, that we may be one just as Thou art with Thy Son, Our Lord, and with the Holy Ghost, just as through the sweetest bonds of harmonies Thou hast made all Thy works one, and that from the bringing of Thy people into concord, the body of Thy Church may be built up in the Earth, as Thou didst erect the heavens themselves out of harmonies.”

Yale professor Benjamin Silliman, who founded the American Journal of Science and Arts in 1818, stated:

“The relation of geology, as well as astronomy, to the Bible, when both are well understood, is that of perfect harmony … The Word and the works of God cannot conflict, and the more they are studied the more perfect will their harmony appear.”

According to Prince Hubertus (Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times, New York: World Publishing Company, 1971, p. 425), Einstein stated:

“In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views.”

Einstein wrote to M. Berkowitz, 1950, (William Hermanns, Einstein and the Poet. In Search of the Cosmic Man, Brookline Village MA: Branden Books, 1983, p. 60):

“‘God‘ is a mystery. But a comprehensible mystery. I have nothing but awe when I observe the laws of nature. There are not laws without a lawgiver, but how does this lawgiver look? Certainly not like a man magnified.”

 Though not believing in a personal God, The Saturday Evening Post, October 26, 1929, published George Sylvester Viereck’s interview with Albert Einstein.

When asked “To what extent are you influenced by Christianity,” Einstein answered: “As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.”

When asked “Have you read Emil Ludwig’s book on Jesus,” Einstein replied:

“Emil Ludwig’s Jesus is shallow. Jesus is too colossal for the pen of phrase mongers, however artful. No man can dispose of Christianity with a bon mot! (witty remark)”

When asked “You accept the historical existence of Jesus,” Einstein answered:

“Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.”

In 1931, astronomer Edwin Hubble invited Einstein to the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California. After viewing the “red shift” of distant stars revealing an expanding universe, Einstein remarked

“I now see the necessity of a beginning.”

Princeton University’s Fine Hall has inscribed Albert Einstein’s words above the fireplace:

“Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber Boshaft ist er nicht.” (God is clever, but not dishonest.)

​Download as PDF … Albert Einstein “I observe the Laws of Nature … There are not Laws without a Lawgiver”

Read as American Minute blog post.

Accept His Love. Share His Love. Live His Joy. Grow His Fruit. Embrace His Peace. Share His Hope. Refute Satan’s Evil. merlin

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SERIOUSLY NOW: Silence in the face of evil is evil itself!

Letter to the American Church

Not to speak is to speak.

Not to act is to act.

God will not hold us guiltless.

Can it really be God’s will that His children be silent at a time like this? Decrying the cowardice that masquerades as godly meekness, Eric Metaxas summons the Church to battle.

The author of a bestselling biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Metaxas reveals the haunting similarities between today’s American Church and the German Church of the 1930s. Echoing the German martyrs’ prophetic call, he exhorts his fellow Christians to repent of their silence in the face of evil.

An attenuated and unbiblical “faith” based on what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace” has sapped the spiritual vitality of millions of Americans. Paying lip service to an insipid “evangelism,” they shrink from combating the evils of our time. Metaxas refutes the pernicious lie that fighting evil politicizes Christianity. As Bonhoeffer and other heroes of the faith insisted, the Church has irreplaceable role in the culture of a nation. It is our duty to fight the powers of darkness, especially on behalf of the weak and vulnerable, well beyond the widow, orphan

            Silence is not an option. God calls us to defend the unborn, to confront the lies of cultural Marxism, and to battle the globalist tyranny that crushes human freedom. Confident that this is His fight, the Church must overcome fear and enter the fray, armed with the spiritual weapons of prayer, self-sacrifice, love, and focused on being the obedient, forgiven, transformed, empowered discipling Bond Servants of Jesus Christ until death permits retirement.

Eric Metaxas, author of fourteen books, including Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy; Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery; and If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty.

Introduction

I have written this book because I am convinced the American Church is at an impossibly – and almost unbearably – important inflection point. The parallels to where the German Church was in the 1930s are unavoidable and grim. So the only question – and what concerns us in this slim volume – is whether we might understand those parallels, and thereby avoid the fatal mistakes the German Church made during that time, and their superlatively catastrophic results. If we do not, I am convinced we will reap a whirlwind greater than the one they did.

            The German Church of the 1930s was silent in the face of evil; but can there be any question whether the American Church of our own time is guilty of the same silence? Because of this, I am compelled to speak out, and say what – only by God’s grace – I might say to make plain where we find ourselves at this moment, at our unavoidably crucial crossroads in history.

            It is for good or for ill that America plays an inescapably central role in the world. If you have not read Alexis de Tocqueville on this subject, you likely nonetheless understand that the extent to which that central role has been used for the good and God’s purposes has had everything to do with our churches, or with the American Church, as we may call her. So if America is in any way exceptional, it has nothing to do with the blood that runs through American veins and everything to do with the blood shed for us on Calvary, and the extent to which we have acknowledged this. America has led the world in making religious liberty paramount, knowing that this is only with a deep regard for it that we may speak of liberty at all. It was this that made Tocqueville marvel most: that while in other nations – and especially in his own nation of France – the Church was adamantly opposed to the idea of political liberty, in America it was the churches that helped, encourage, create, and sustain a culture of liberty.

            Because of the outsized role America plays in the world today, the importance of whether we learn the lesson of what happened to the German Church ninety years ago cannot be overstated. Though it may be a gruesome thing to consider, the monstrous evil that befell the civilized world precisely because of the German Church’s failure is likely a mere foretaste of what will befall the world if the American Church fails in a similar way at this hour.

            And at present we are failing.

            We should underscore the idea that the centrality of our nation in the world does not mean that we are intrinsically exceptional, but rather that God has sovereignly chosen us to hold the torch of liberty for all the world, and that the Church is central to our doing this. So the idea that He has charged us with this most solemn duty should make us tremble. Nonetheless, we must carry out that duty in a way that is the opposite of prideful and that is meant to be an invitation to all beyond our shores. If we should aspire – in the words of Jesus, as quoted by John Winthrop – to be a  ”shining city on a hill,” the idea is that we should exist and shine for the sake of others and not for ourselves alone.

President Abraham Lincoln said that we in America were God’s “almost chosen people,” and acknowledged this placed upon us an almost unbearable burden. It is certainty from the Scriptures and from our experience over the centuries that apart from God we can do nothing. So if God has chosen us for some task, we must do all we can to shoulder that task, and must know more than anything that unless we lean on Him and acknowledge Him in all our ways, we are guaranteed to fail.

            We must also remind ourselves that when God chooses anyone – whether the nation of Israel or a single person – to perform any role or any task, it is never to be celebrated, as though the one chosen has won a contest. So if the Lord Almighty has chosen America and the American Church to stand against the evils and deceptions of this present darkness, we had better be sure we understand what is required of us, and had better make sure we do all that is possible to fulfill our charge.

            Throughout this book I will touch on some issues we are facing, but let us say here that it is something almost unprecedented: the emergence of ideas and forces that ultimately are at war with God Himself. It’s easy to see this with regard to Germany in the 1930s, when we think of death camps and the murder of so many millions, but we need to understand that in the beginning they had no idea where it was leading, and had no idea they were facing nothing less than the forces of the anti-Christ. We are now facing those same forces in different guises. But the extent of it is even worse than it was ninety years ago, because these forces today do not have an agenda that is hyper-nationalistic, as in Germany, but that is actually anti-nationalistic – which is to say that is the globalist agenda.

            These ideas seemed to have emerged lately, but they have been growing quietly in our midst and we have not taken them seriously enough. Many have been fooled into thinking them essentially harmless. We are today like the proverbial frog in the saucepan, simmering along and never realizing that unless we see our situation and leap out now, we are very soon to be cooked and beyond all leaping. The ideas and forces we face have an atheistic Marxist ideology in common, although it never declares itself as such. It knows that doing this would wake up many people who are still asleep, and that would ruin everything.

            But what we must dare to see is that these many ideas share a bitter taproot that leads all the way to Hell. Critical Race Theory – which is atheistic and Marxist – and radical transgender and pro-abortion ideologies are all inescapably anti-God and anti-human. So they are dedicatedly at war with the ideas of family and marriage, and with the idea of America as a force for good – as a force for spreading the Gospel and Gospel values throughout the world. These atheistic  ideas have over many decades infiltrated our own culture in such a way that they touch everything, and part of what makes them so wicked is that they smilingly pretend to share the biblical values that champion the underdog against the oppressor. As Stalin and Hitler and Mao would butcher millions in the name of fighting for “the people,” so these forces do the same and are angling to do much, much more of the same – if we will allow them the time to strengthen themselves, if we do not fight with all our might against them right now.

            One of the principal ways in which they have gained strength is in persuading so many in the American Church that to fight them is to abandon the “Gospel” for pure culture warring or for politics. This is not just nonsense, but it is a supremely deceptive and satanic lie, designed only to silence those who would genuinely speak for truth. So those who behave as though there is nothing to worry about, who seem to think – as such prominent pastors as Andy Stanley and others do – that we ought to assiduously avoid fighting these threats and be “apolitical” are tragically mistaken, are burying their heads in the sand and exhorting others to do the same. Or to put it another way, they are in their churches singing more and more loudly to drown out the cries of those in the boxcars heading to their gruesome deaths. Sing with us, they say, and don’t worry about all of those other issues out there. They don’t concern us. Our job is to focus on God, and to pretend that we can do so without fighting for those He loves, whose lives and futures are being destroyed.

            So to restate our situation, this is not a task or duty we in the American Church have asked for. Nonetheless, just as the German Church had a painfully important task and did not rise to that occasion to perform it, so we have a painfully important task, whether we have asked for it or not. God calls us to do something, but the choice whether we do it is entirely ours. Because we are made in God’s image, we are perfectly free, and therefore cannot be compelled to do what is right. It is a chilling prospect, especially in light of the failure of the German Church.

            If anyone would feel that believing God has chosen the American Church for such a vital role somehow smacks of an egotistical nationalism, they have already bought into the Marxist and globalist lie that America is nothing special – or is probably a force for evil at this point. In any case, they miss the point and have only leapt away from one ditch to fall headlong into another. It is a fact that God in His sovereignty chose the German Church to stand against the evils of its day, but it shrank from acknowledging this and from standing. Germany has been living with deep shame over it unto this day. So for the American Church to say that God has not chosen us is as bad as saying He must choose because we deserve to be chosen. Both stances are equally guilty of the sin of pride. It is far easier to ignore God’s call than to acknowledge it and rise to fulfill it, but it is more difficult and painful than anything to live with the results of ignoring God’s call. Let the reader understand.

Table of Contents

Ch. 1  What Is the Church?

Ch. 2  Does God Ask Us to See the Future?

Ch. 3  “Unless You Repent”

Ch. 4  “The Church and the Jewish Question”

Ch. 5  12,000 Pastors

Ch. 6  The Spiral of Silence

Ch. 7  Two Errors of Faith

Ch. 8  The Church Paralyzed

Ch. 9  The Idol of Evangelism

Ch.10 Speaking the Truth in Love

Ch. 11 Be Ye Not Political

Ch. 12 Who Do You Say God Is?

Ch. 13 The Parable of the Talents

Ch. 14 Justifying Ourselves

Ch. 15 “Religionless Christianity”

Ch. 16 The Final Push

Accept His Love.  Live His Joy.  Grow His Fruit.  Embrace His Peace.  Share His Hope.  Refute Satan’s Evil.  merlin

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Short Cuts to Futility

Read Exodus 6:2-29

A Word to the Wiser Ones Yet Not Duped…

So often you and I miss the opportunity to watch the Lord work in mighty and miraculous ways. Why? Because instead of “standing still” and watching Him pull off our deliverance, we seek out the carnal alternative. We prefer the backdoor escape, a fleshy shortcut.

Notice how God handled His man, Moses. Without rebuke, the Lord gave Moses two pieces of counsel. One related to his person; the other related to his work. He told Moses who He was, and then He told him what He was going to do. And the order in the Lord’s response is as important as the facts themselves.

Right off the top, He repeated the message from the burning bush, saying, “I am” five different times in Exodus chapter six.

            “I am the Lord…” (v, 2).

            “I am the Lord…” (v. 6).

            “I am the Lord…” (v. 7).

            “I am the Lord…” (v. 8).

            “I am the Lord…” (v. 29).

Time after time, He punctuated His message to Moses by saying, “Look, Moses, your eyes are in the wrong place (again). Get your eyes back on me (again). Remember, who I am (again),” (Perhaps today we should also include our ears! Actually, all of our senses, or, how will we ever even experience His goodness, not to mention, remembering in the future!)

Who is the Lord? Ask the prophet Isaiah. Troubled and sick at heart over the moral condition of his nation, Isaiah glanced toward the sky one day and “saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up” (Isaiah 6:1NKJV). That’s all he needed to see. He fixed his eyes on the Lord, and, suddenly his perspective changed.

If you have been a believer for any length of time, you will have heard these over and over. But that’s all right; here they are again. Think you’ll get it? Until your eyes are fixed on the Lord, you will not be able to endure those days that go from bad to worse. The abovetaken from Chuck Swindoll’s Great Days With the Great Lives pg. 77.

FYI, understandably, I struggle with choosing pertinent worthy material insuring we’re each prepared to transition well spiritually in the coming days, which may well not be pretty or pleasant. I am not nearly as concerned for how we fare physically, financially, emotionally, materially, etc. for I believe if our identity, faith and hope is in Christ, what can we suffer or can really be done to us, to separate us from His love and our eternal inheritance?

Since early ’23, I depend solely on God to nudge me to select what I post from my daily readings of scripture, the dozen or so books I’m processing at any given time, and what is sent me by friends. No nudges, no posts. Recently, God has given me a sense of urgency that sometimes is overwhelming. As you, I too encounter distinct Spirit nudges to move out, and when I obey, what joy, not only for me but also for the recipient, often even greater!

I think frequently back when the Henry Blackaby book “Experiencing God” flowed through the church in the late 80’s admonishing us to find where God was at work and join in that work rather than being lone rangers. Similarly, of late, Jamie Winship’s two questions that encourage we seekers and ambassadors to ask, whenever we are faced with either the mundane, or the overwhelming trials and tribulations of life’s messes, that nearly take our breath away, and they are: 1.) Lord, what do you want me to know about this situation; and 2.)  Lord, what do you want me to do about this situation? And then wait for his wisdom. Of course, as the Good Samaritan, you arise to the occasion and administer first aid, CPR, stop the bleeding, transport to safety, etc., all the while praying for His divine intervention in knowing and doing!

At any rate, Chuck Swindoll was the inspiration yesterday that begat this: “I am the Lord. Your eyes are in the wrong place! Until your eyes are fixed on the Lord, you will not be able to endure those days that will go from bad to worse.”  

Next, I read Day 9 in What On Earth Am I Here For that instilled a new appreciation for Noah, and I don’t think I’m alone among today’s seeker and ambassador crowd. I can think of a few similarities we may share, all except for his timeline of 120 years to endure ridicule is beyond possibility, yet for today’s humanity, but even 120 days seems preposterous. We are told “by faith, Noah built a ship in the middle of dry land. He was warned about something he couldn’t see, and he acted on what he was told…. As a result, Noah became intimate with God.” Hebrews 11:7.  

Noah had three major reasons to think this assignment ridiculous. First, Noah had never seen rain, because prior to the flood, the earth was irrigated from the ground up. Second, since Noah lived hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean, did his building permit declare his boat to be a novel home, or did it only appear to be designed for water travel? Perhaps, it was a precursor to an RV for a subconscious retirement desire to travel offering others mission trip experiences? Such excuses we might have concocted for our neighbors. And third, what about the animals; the rounding them up and caring for them? With no sign of rain year after year, he was ruthlessly criticized as a “crazy man who thinks God speaks to him.” Can you just hear the media today?

In what areas of our lives, or for me with this blog, do we need to trust God completely, if we are to see and hear the “I am the Lord today? Is trusting a preliminary to worship? Just as parents are pleased when children trust their love and wisdom, so does our faith make God happy. The Bible says “without faith it is impossible to please God.” Hebrews 11:6. God smiles when we obey Him wholeheartedly. Noah was given very specific instructions as to the size, shape, and materials of the ark as well as the different numbers of animals to be brought on board. The Bible tells us Noah’s response: “So Noah did everything exactly as God had commanded Him.” Gen 6:22 NLT, Heb 11:7b NCV. Notice that Noah obeyed completely, no instruction was overlooked; and he obeyed exactly in the way and time God wanted it done. It is no wonder God smiled on Noah. So the question is, am I being faithful to my instructions to declare truth, or, am I hiding out in my fabricated excuses?

Even former President John F Kennedy quoted the heart of the Luke 12:48. Perhaps for the big picture, we should begin in verse 47 “And this servant, which knew his lord’s will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. (48) But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.”

The Message offers 47-48 as “The servant who knows what his master wants and ignores it, or insolently does whatever he pleases, will be thoroughly thrashed. But if he does a poor job through ignorance, he’ll get off with a slap on the hand. Great gifts mean great responsibilities; greater gifts, greater responsibilities!” Consider this: if we’re soon without shoes, and the shoe fits, will we even wear them? More questions than answers today!

Accept His Love.    Live His Joy.   Embrace His Peace.   Share His Hope.   Refute Evil.      merlin

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Does History Repeat Itself?

Some of you indeed have lived long enough to see what does appear to be, history repeating itself. Take a look!

Author Eric Metaxis’s interview from last fall, replayed today, March 13, 2023 on LIFEToday,where Eric introduced his recent book Letters to the American Church, which he nearly named Faith Without Works is Dead. Eric earlier wrote Amazing Grace and Bonhoeffer. As the title reveals, Letters to the American Church is comparable to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship, written in 1933 after only 5000-6000 of Germany’s 18000 protestant pastors signed the Barnam Declaration in opposition to the Nazi German Christian movement. By 1935 only 3000 remained standing. Do realize these German pastors were all supposedly paid German government positions, perhaps a distant cousin of our 501c3 as granted to American churches and a multitude of not-for-profits. Click on the link below to view the 19 minute interview.

PS. I find it interesting how Eric’s last book so closely follows in the theological footsteps of Francis Chan and his book, Letters to the Church, lacking only the word American, being another must read revealing snapshot of the spirituality of American megachurches and Chan’s personal revitalization after deliberately downsizing his surroundings but upgrading his vital connections in community with truth tellers!

https://lifetoday.org/video/deadly-silence-2/

I apologize for the weird script format. You can print your own copy off the link.

JAMES: Welcome to LIFE Today! I am right here in the studio, rushed up here
to talk to Eric Metaxas. He wrote Amazing Grace, how slavery was basically overthrown by
the grace of God; Amazing Grace, John Newton, as much as Wilberforce, I think more.
And the author of the book I’m holding, who wrote Amazing Grace, and also wrote
Bonhoeffer. And boy, did we see the miracle that could have saved the horrors
t hatoccurred in Germany under Hitler if the church had heard what God revealed to
and ultimately through Bonhoeffer. It was written by Eric Metaxas. Well, here is
Eric Metaxas’ new book, Letter to the American Church. He is sitting here with me.

And Eric, I love you. And I want to thank you for Amazing Grace, I want to
thank you for the miracle that you revealed so clearly. It wasn’t just Wilberforce, but
it was John Newton keeping Amazing Grace, keeping him in the fire. Then you wrote
Bonhoeffer. You said to me when I talked to you, right before you came here and we talked
yesterday, you said, “James, this is the Bonhoeffer message to America today.”
Do you believe that?

ERIC: You know when you say things like that you have to understand how it sounds.
So I have to be very, very clear—crystal clear. There is no hyperbole in what
I’m saying. The thesis of this book, the reason I know the Lord made me write this short
book is because the silence of the church in Germany that led to the satanic evil of
the Nazis in the holocaust is exactly the same as the silence of the church in America
today, which will, without question, lead us to horrors unimaginable unless we repent,
unless we cease being silent. I cannot think of a more urgent message. I beg people—I beg
people to take what I’m saying in this book seriously because of course, it is not me talking.
When you title a book Letter to the American Church, I’m not arrogant enough to think
that this is a letter from Eric Metaxas. This is in the tradition of the letter to the
Philippians. You know? You want to write exactly what you think the Lord is
saying.

So I’ve never been more humbled in writing something because I thought this is
so important and this has to be what God is trying to say. But what I believe the
Lord is trying to say in this book is exactly what he said through Bonhoeffer to the
German church, which they did not listen to. It was the prophet, the Lord always sends
his prophets. And many years later we go wow, wasn’t that prophet great! Jeremiah,
Isaiah, they’re so great! In their day they were not listened to, they were murdered.
Bonhoeffer’s message which was from God to the German church was ignored. And we saw what happened. I believe that the Lord called me to write the Bonhoeffer book, which
we’ve talked about on this program years ago, to help America see that is what
happens when a church is silent.

So in this book, I’m basically taking what Bonhoeffer said and speaking it to
the church in America today; and saying unless you repent of your silence, unless you
repent of playing this game that you think you can be neutral when evil rises and you say
nothing, God will judge you. There is no neutral ground. The German church tried to take
that neutral ground and the enemy destroyed that nation and destroyed millions of
lives.

I believe we’re facing something extremely similar, and the church, most of the church
right now is using the same excuses for their silence. They say things like well, we don’t
want to be political. They have all kinds of reasons. The same reasons the German church
had in that day. When you see the similarity, I think most people would be shocked.

JAMES: You illustrate and give clarity to the understanding of the reality that there is
only one force on God’s planet, heaven and the earth is the Lord’s. We were left here as
overseers of this planet. The king is here; his kingdom is established in us. We can make
an impact in this world and the only force that can overpower the deception and destruction of the gates of hell is what? The church of Jesus Christ.

That’s what you’re writing. You start, “What is the church? Does God ask us to see the future?” Of course, his will being done now, which is future too because we have nothing
to do with the next kingdom; we have everything to do with this one. And we are
not left here to get out of here, we’re left here to see his will done on his earth.

ERIC: That’s the amazing thing. People act like well, it is all about getting saved. Well,
you’re saved, now what? Now, you’re part of the church and the Lord expects you
to live out your faith that you claim to have totally, fearlessly and self-sacrificially until he calls you to be with him. And I think that we’ve been so blessed in America, just as
Germans were blessed, that they thought, well, that doesn’t apply to me. I can have a
nice life and I’ll go to church. Oh, I believe these things—I believe these things.

When the Lord requires something of you and you don’t do it, the Lord knows you don’t
believe what you say you believe. So I talk about the deception of when we talk
about faith. Luther, I wrote a biography of Luther, about the idea of faith. It is
all about faith—it is all about faith. Yeah, it is all about faith if it’s real faith; not fake
faith where I say I believe stuff.

And faith, I was going to—this book, Letter to the American Church, I was going to title
the book, not kidding, Faith Without Works is Dead. Because we have a lot of people
who claim they have faith and the Lord says, well, I see your fruit, I see your heart. If you
believed that I defeated death on the cross, you would live differently. And it is exactly
what Bonhoeffer writes about, he talks about cheap grace. And it is a prophetic word that
the Lord gave him. And I believe that it didn’t work on the German church. They
did not hear it.

But my prayer, my hope, is that exactly what the Lord spoke through Bonhoeffer would
be heard and heeded by the American church. And I will say again, if not, we
are going down precisely the same path. And people say I can’t believe it, I can’t
believe it. Trust me when I tell you the Germans did not believe that that future was even
possible. But it happened and we are no different than the Germans.

JAMES: Erwin Lutzer, one of my good friends, a guest here frequently, told
the story about the church singing louder in Germany when the trains came by with the
Jewish people headed to be annihilated, even with their families; and the church sang
louder so they didn’t hear their cries. Today it seems like we just continue to persist
in singing louder while we’re headed right over the cliff under demonic control and a
greater force coming to destroy the freedom that we have known because of the way our nation was birthed with truth and biblical principles.

We are right now under a power that can totally overthrow us and put us in the
dark and take away every freedom we have ever known; the stage is set for that. And the
only forces, as I said a moment ago, that can stop this overthrowing power is the
church of Jesus Christ, the body of Christ supernaturally united with one head leading.
You write this chapter about 12,000 pastors. Tell us the significance.

ERIC: It’s a chilling—this is really—I didn’t even know this when I was writing my
Bonhoeffer book. When I started writing this book and I dipped back into my
Bonhoeffer book and into that period I realized something, and I said this is chilling
because this isexactly where we are today—exactly!

In Germany, in the ’30s, there were about 18,000 protestant pastors roughly. In
1933, when Hitler took power and began to instantly try to transform that whole
culture in every way along Nazi lines, he included the church. He said well, the church is
part of the state. We pay the pastors. We don’t have separation of church and state. So
that’s when folks like Bonhoeffer said wait a minute! No. We must stand against this. We
cannot have the government dictating to the church. We answer to Jesus Christ.

So they wrote this thing called the Barmen Declaration; maybe 5,000-6,000 pastors
signed it, very brave. By 1935, only 3,000 were standing strong. In other words, the Nazis persecuted the church and bullied and threatened the whole
culture in such a way which we’re seeing today, that if you don’t play the game, you’re going to get it. You’ll get canceled, you’ll get sent to a concentration camp, you’ll lose this,
you’ll lose that—brutal persecution, cultural persecution. But by 1935, only
3,000 who had signed the Barmen Declaration were standing firm. So of the 18,000 pastors, by 1935 you have 3,000 standing firm. On the other end of the spectrum, you have about 3,000 standing strongly with Hitler happy to crush the church, or happy to give the church over to the devil or whatever it is.

But in the middle, there were 12,000 pastors that basically would not commit one way or
the other. That is the nightmare that they thought it would be safe. We won’t take a
position. We don’t want to be “political.” We don’t want to confuse the gospel and
politics. We’re just going to keep our nose down, preach our little stuff on Sunday
mornings, and when we leave this building, we’re going to bow to the authority of the
state. That lie which you hear over and over, you’re hearing it again today, they bought it
because it was the safe path.

Many of them, there are all kinds of reasons people bought into it but the point of that
chapter and in many ways the point of the book is that it was the silence of those 12,000 that enabled the Nazis to crush the 3,000 heroes, to marginalize them and put them in concentration camps and do whatever. It was the silence of that 12,000—their failure to
stand with the heroic 3,000—because many of those 12,000 kind of knew what was
right; but they said we’re just going to be quiet. We’re pastors, we don’t want to be
involved in anything political because people will criticize us as being political. And
Romans 13, oh that’s so clear!

Well, it is not so clear. Bonhoeffer understood that it was not so clear. Bonhoeffer in fact
in his book Cost of Discipleship says he was disgusted with what he called the
theologically based restraint of all these pastors, he said, which is nothing but fear.
They’re using these excuses to stay out of trouble. They’re playing this little religious
game.

And so one of the things I write about in here is like, so, if the Gestapo comes to the door
and asks are you hiding a Jew in your basement? If you’re a religious Christian who doesn’t want to get in trouble, religious in the negative sense, you’d say, oh, yeah, I’m hiding a Jew in my basement. Help yourself to the Jew; torture and kill the Jew, but I don’t lie. I’m justified before God. It is the most religious in the negative sense, legalistic response which breaks God’s heart. And many in Germany said we’re going to take that path. We’re just going to “preach the gospel,” we’re going to stick to our little sermons.

But anybody who knows the Lord knows that’s not what God calls you to do. God calls
you to speak his truth wherever you go, fearlessly. And the German church did not do
that. They hesitated, they had their reasons. By the time they realized what the Nazis
were doing it was too late. It was game over.

And so what I’m saying is that today in America we are in the early ’30s and anybody
who would say I’m exaggerating, I beg them to consider the details because I know that
this true. This is not like well, I have some interpretation. We are hearing the same
silence from pastors around this country who are saying that I don’t want to offend
anyone in my congregation. I’m going to keep my nose out of that. There is a time in a
culture when you can do that. If it was 1985, and you say well, listen, we’ve got some
Democrats in our audience. We’re just preaching the gospel. But when you have
cultural Marxism coming into schools and into the culture, which many churches are
allowing in, critical race theory, you can look in any direction, transgender madness, a
government demonizing half of the population publicly, there are things that if you do not
speak now God will hold you responsible for your silence.

And the reason I wrote this is because I believe that there are still people that can be
reached, there are still some among the 12,000 who could be awakened. And it is
my prayer and my hope that they will, that they will repent. Because you know if
somebody came to you in 1840 and said, don’t mention slavery. Just stick to
gospel-related issues because we’ve got some slaveholders in our audience and our congregation making—you say wait a second, I have an obligation before God to speak on that issue. And if it on offends someone, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. God will judge me if I’m silent on that issue. If I’m silent on the sanctity of the unborn, God will hold me to account.Where do you get this idea that I’m just supposed to stick to John 3:16
for every sermon? But that’s the lie and it is a diabolical lie that has been pushed on the
church. And many in the church have said, oh okay. Now I have my reason I can be quiet. I don’t have to take that on.

I say, James, it is precisely because of that, that we are where we are. If somebody says to
me today, why is America in free fall, falling apart in any direction? We’ve never seen anything like it. I would say frankly because of the silence of the church. God will judge
the church for its silence. We’re the ones who are supposed to know better. We are the
ones that know  difference between a man and a woman. We’re the ones that are
supposed to believe that Jesus defeated death on the cross. So we say these things with no
fear. We say these things with joy, that innumerable lives will be affected.

So the idea that we’re supposed to avoid politics or that we’re supposed to—this is not
wisdom and that’s why I wrote the book. You can tell, there’s deep sobriety and humility
that I have in writing something like this because I thought, people in Germany
didn’t believe that this hell could happen to them. They were convinced this can’t
happen. I think that there are many Americans that believe the same thing. That if I just
keep quiet it will all be okay. That’s not what history shows us, and I don’t think that’s
what the Lord says.

JAMES: Let me try to summarize and I want you to listen closely. Bonhoeffer is a long book. Amazing Grace is a long book. I was amazed, this is a very brief book, but it is a powerful book. It is like a letter from our Lord to us in America at this moment in history.
And the future of freedom here and around the world depends upon the church’s
response right now. The one force, the gates of hell, Jesus said, cannot prevail against
is the body of Christ, the church. But that’s the body of Christ born from above, connected
to one another in supernatural unity like body parts submitted to the one head Christ
standing against the forces, against all the forces of deception, dissension, division,
and destruction.

I believe that right now we begin to correct course or we’re over the cliff—freedom’s gone! Now I think it is going to happen very rapidly too. But I also believe if the church would come together in supernatural unity that Jesus prayed for, submit to the one head,
and speak the truth not only in love but that New Testament group of Christians, those
apostles, they turned the world upside down because they proclaimed another king than
the government or any other power on this earth than Caesar. There is only one king, the
church is the only one that can present that.

This is a letter, I’m telling you, you can read this fast. We’ll send it to you. You can go
online right now and get it. They probably can get it in print online, but you can order the
book right now. You can get it normally in a day. But we’ll send it to you if you simply
help us do what we give you an opportunity to do, to put your arms around the broken
and the suffering and see them free, we’ll send it to you. I want you to read this. You can
read it. This is the kind of book you can read in one day. And he wrote it that way
deliberately. I believe that it is not just a draft from Eric Metaxas, I believe it is from God
and used somebody gifted to write who recognized the greatness of God in a man that
could have saved the horrible holocaust.

Refute the Evil. Live & Share the Joy! Share this message TODAY! merlin


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Homeland Security (Anabaptist Variety)

“Does it make you a king to have more and more cedar? Did not your father have food and drink? He did what was right and just, so all went well with him. He defended the cause of the poor and the needy, and so all went well. Is that that not what it means to know me?” declares the Lord. “But your eyes and your heart are set only on dishonest gain, on shedding innocent blood and on oppression and extortion.” ….

“I warned you when you felt secure, but you said, “I will not listen!” This has been your way from your youth; you have not obeyed me. The wind will drive all your shepherds away, and your allies will go into exile …. How you will groan when pangs come upon you, pain like that of a woman in labor.” Jeremiah 22: 15-17, 21-23.

Jeremiah’s questions sting us still: Does it make us better parents if we build bigger houses for our children? Does it make us wiser to have more education? Does it make us secure to hoard our wealth in stocks and bonds? Are we happier for spending excessive amounts of money in leisure and recreation? Are we safer by living in gated communities and homes with security systems? Are we smarter by owning the latest high-tech gadgets?

Lessons from Jeremiah about Idolatry

While we may not bow down to idols of stone or wood today, it is clear that we dilute our allegiance to God as much as did the people of God in Jeremiah’s day. Anything that weakens our commitment to God and God’s agenda is idolatry, and Jeremiah makes several points about idolatrous lifestyles.

1st, abandoning Yahweh always leads to idolatry. We were born to worship something or someone, and when it is no longer Yahweh, it will be almost anything.

2nd, we become what we worship. If we worship God, we become like God – holy, righteous, compassionate, and more. When we worship anything else we take on its qualities and characteristics as well.

3rd, when we abandon God, we forsake the very source of our life. All our work and effort will gain us nothing without God. While digging for water we will find only dry wells.

4th, when we leave God, we will always create alliances that oppose God and that compromise our identity as God’s people.

5th, when we worship anything besides God, we inevitably abandon those on the margins of society. We begin to accumulate wealth, status, and power without concern for justice. Jeremiah, as did OT prophets before and after him, consistently connected obedience and faithfulness to Yahweh with justice and equity for people on the margins of society – those disregarded and discriminating against by others. Our willingness “to do justice and to love to mercy” is a barometer of the quality of our relationship with God. Failing to care for those on the margins is a sign that we no longer care for Yahweh.

In Jeremiah’s day, God’s people had abandoned God’s policy of jubilee, in which economic equity and justice were to regularly characterize relationships and commercial enterprise. While proclaiming “Peace, peace,” they denied their own wounds and sickness (Jeremiah 8:11). Jeremiah described it this way:

“Like cages full of birds, their houses are full of deceit; they have become rich and powerful and have grown fit and sleek… They do not defend the case of the fatherless to win it, they do not defend the rights of the poor.” (5:27-28)

Preoccupied with Homeland Security

In moving further from God, the people of Judah became increasingly concerned about their own safety, security, and comfort. In language that rings true of Americans since 911, they became increasingly focused on “homeland security.” American anxieties about security are strikingly similar to the concerns of God’s people in Jeremiah’s day.

The Home We Have Forgotten

Some have observed that Christians talk less about heaven today than in the past. While this may be true, 95% of Menno’s still believe that there “is life after death” and 90% that “there is a real heaven where some people are eternally rewarded.” Menno’s are less certain about hell, with 78% believing there is a “real hell where people are eternally punished.” But when asked about their views of Jesus, only 43% noted they were “eagerly anticipated Jesus return to earth.

Conclusion

A focus on homeland security is antithetical to all that Jesus taught his disciples about the cost of following him. When Jesus sent out the seventy-two disciples in Luke 10, he instructed them to carry neither purse nor bag nor sandals – nothing that they needed to do what Jesus had commanded. But giving up our purses, bags, sandals is going to a big problem for many Menno’s, if we are going to respond faithfully to Jesus’ call, because for many of us, there will be a lot to give up.

There is ample discussion among Menno’s today about Anabaptist identity. While I affirm the discussion, I think the chatter has less to do with our failure to understand what Jesus requires than our failure to be obedient what Jesus requires of us as Christ- Followers. I suspect if we were more obedient in going forth into the world, the problem of our personal and corporate identity in Christ would take care of itself. You think it possible we Menno’s could ever become known as those with no purse, no bag, and no shoes and those who willingly embraced the alien and the orphan? While it did not take long for the European ancestors to develop an identity as pilgrims and strangers, it has been harder for their descendants in North America to live back into that identity.

Mennonites need once more to embrace a theology that we are strangers and foreigners and that accepts our alien status, not by being the “quiet in the land” but by boldly and willingly being sent into a dying world in the name of our Lord. As we pitch our tents along side other strangers and aliens, we will eliminate the boundaries that exist between liberals and conservatives, evangelicals and Anabaptists, as well as those in or out of MCUSA, and others. Such boundaries are artificial and have little to do with being the church of Christ. These boundaries have been established by those of us with too much time on our hands – too much time at home trying to keep things neat and secure, guarding the gates of our homeland.

I fear as parents and grandparents we have burdened our children with our homeland/homestead worries rather than encouraging them to hear the voice of God sending them into the world, especially so if they’ve not seen us step out in faith. While encouraging them to be respectable, professional, honorable, and wise, we have given them the same message and its perimeters that the world gives about success. What about all of us being the obedient, forgiven, transformed, empowered discipling Bond Servants of Jesus Christ until death permits retirement? Too rarely do we challenge them or ourselves to consider the rewards of being sent into the world for the sake of His kingdom.

Many of us want our children at home, especially since we’re having fewer of them. While we look at disgust at the way people of Israel sometimes sacrificed their own children to idols, (if we’re even aware of it) I wonder if we’ve not done the same at times. We may not sacrifice our children to Molech, but what about to academia, Main Street, or Wall Street? We may not send our young men and women to war in Iraq but would we allow them to go to similar areas such as Sudan or Turkey or Somalia in the name of Christ? Would we bless them in going and celebrate their answer to God’s call?  Or if they began a Bible study in your community, using your home? Or if they began to develop new ideas for evangelism and social action in our congregations? Would we support them? Would we allow them to try? Could the adults get out of the way long enough to see if they could pull it off?

The following paragraphs are my response and interpretation of the above:

If we are ever going o be obedient to God’s missional call, first in our personal lives, congregations, and communities, we must come to terms with our insecurities, and frankly, the grip of our idols, in order to give everything and everyone we hold dear. Total absolute surrender! But that shouldn’t surprise us, given Jesus’ words about gaining the whole world and losing our souls? It is only in relationship with God being obedient, forgiven, transformed, empowered discipling Bond Servants of Jesus Christ until death permits retirement, that God’s people ever reach out to the marginalized in and beyond our spheres of influence; first casting out the plank in own eye before we attempt to the irritating speck in another’s eye.

Can Mennonites find unity in Christ’s simple mandates, always invitational, never forced, attracting us all, first and foremost, into an intimate personal transformation with Jesus Christ aided by His  truth tellers in community fueled by  divine relationships, both vertically with the Trinity, and horizontally, with all of humanity present, first ourselves, then family, congregation, community, nation and the entire world in our midst. Will we then offer Christ’s love and healing while we mature gaining the fruits of the spirit exhibited ultimately by offering his peace and healing to everyone we meet?  

Will homeland security become a vestige of the past? Notice the above words italicized are mine as I’m taking license to update the book in the nearly 16 years since it was printed in 2007. A landmark book based on the Church Member Profile 2006, was composed of three denominations – MCUSA, the Church of the Brethren, and the Brethren in Christ. Now in 2023, I find it difficult to envision the member profile ever being repeated as I frankly fear the eminent breakdown or restructuring of  western civilization will preempt such an occurrence.

The book’s last three chapters are titled; 587 BC – the Fall, Exiled in Babylon, and Journeying Toward God’s Reign. All three chapters are historical reads but I feel are not now as practically pertinent as when printed. I predict if one could lump’s all the statistician’s indicators and benchmarks into one tank for just America, I believe their experts would agree the America has changed more since 2020 than in the previous 100 years. I only offer that because I believe too many of the readers that read Road Signs for the Journey as I, whom were so enthralled with its honesty in 2007, today would value the undergirding perspective of sharing truths now  for the survival of humanity from the globalists genocide agenda increasingly publicized playbook.

This is possible because in the past year there has been a proliferation of independent news outlets that herald the “truth be told at all costs.” Such truths being publicized broadly on these free speech platforms in turn attract other truth tellers from all professions, vocations, walks of life, interests, skill sets, life styles, faith walks, etc. Therefore, this phenomena of the meshing of minds, souls, and spirits in the commonality of zeal in face of the coming piercingly dark destructive forces as forecast in Scripture during the last days, is simply flourishing, for reasons, not unlike the growth the early church experienced as recorded in Acts of the Apostles, or today, as in the recent Asbury revival.

Earlier this evening I spent several hours going through my April issue of Sojourners magazine and virtually every article has a climate change under-girding its theme with interesting “tie-ins” to scripture. Reminded me instantly of Conrad’s fourth point that when we leave God, we always create alliances that oppose God and that compromise our identity as God’s people. Whence cometh then the obsession for redeeming/restoring the lost souls for His kingdom? Yes Indeed, man has created a mess for all the wrong reasons. But I humbly offer that the “assumed traumatizing planetary mess” that is being given us as the excuse for today’s current solutions, absolutely pales or for sure, is trifling, alongside the real tragedy in the institutional Church, which is far more serious for the future of humanity, than merely an aging planet that will be destroyed. Eternal destiny for persons we know is at stake.

I have no authority to address what has happened in the Mennonite Church. But I do know what happened in my 74 years of life, as well as for many of my friends, in that we allowed ourselves to be deceived much as Conrad Kanagy described above in his five points about idolatrous lifestyles. We lost His redeeming focus, deliberately allowed waffling and dissenting voices to drive our itchy ears into spiritual oblivion, not realizing how adept our children would be at both hearing and understanding Scripture as being read and preached, but their foundations were rendered useless to them when they watched us parents too often glibly ignore and disobey the same teaching, while offering some excuse in the car or around the table later, exempting us in our circumstances. Such actions by us parents destroyed any relational spiritual equity we had opportunity to deposit during their early years for future withdrawals later in times of crisis or guiding their maturing spiritually.

In summary, as I need to send this out because I believe in the urgency of this message reaching my readers so they have time to prepare for the yet unknown. I am not skilled in writing succinctly. Strange, I wonder if Guttenberg laid awake at night distressed at what he’d created. Today’s technology has proliferated beyond comprehension since John Lapp in October 1968  quoted to us in EMC’s Gen Ed 301 class Marshall McLuhan’s (1911-1980) quote that “the medium is the message.” Now, we’re all lying awake in the media’s wake that continually perilously rocks our boats.

I’ll simply remind you it doesn’t need to be that way. If Christ is sleeping on a pillow in the back of your boat, arise immediately and avail yourself of His resources. Communicate with Him continually, during crisis or complacency! Actually, especially during complacency, for often the good times end like David and Bathsheba.      

Yes, I know Kanagy released “A Church Dismantled, A kingdom Restored: Why Is God Taking Apart the Church?” in 2021 and I’m in its second chapter, and as before, I like his candor, honesty, transparency, etc. Perhaps I’ll have more on that later.

I am adding a link below for you to listen to that is perhaps representative of the chatter on these free speech platforms, that may open some doors for you. Perhaps you’ve never heard such an interview, or perhaps you  have been listening to one or two of these personalities for the past 5 or 10 years whom you’ve learned to trust, basically because their predictions came true, and perhaps, some may even claim to be a Christian, just not of your stripe but so what? I happen to believe there may be more truth on these free speech platforms than on the traditional conventional outlets, written or verbal. Scripture always rules, sometimes even in church. This clip is Dave Hodges of Common Sense being interviewed by Mike Adams.

Refute the evil. Live & Share the Joy…. merlin

https://www.brighteon.com/6658cc8d-ab08-493d-98db-bbc1818a75d1

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Home:

Home is the Birthplace of Confident Living &

Fruits of the Spirit Spawned Peacemakers

Who Change the World!

Home is the one place in all this world

where hearts are sure of each other.

It is the place of confidence. It is the place

where we tear off that mask of guarded and

suspicious coldness which the world forces us to

wear in self-defense, and where we pour out

the unreserved communication of full and

confiding hearts. It is the spot where expressions

of tenderness gush out without any dread

of sensation of awkwardness and without

any dread of ridicule.

Frederick W. Robertson  

Originally titled “Confident Living”

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My Fifty Years With Dan Ellsberg

the man who changed America by Seymour Hersh 03/7/23, written for you aging historians still desirous for the rest of the story…

I think it best that I begin with the end. On March 6, I and dozens of Dan’s friends and fellow activists received a two-page notice that he had been diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer and was refusing chemotherapy because the prognosis, even with chemo, was dire. He will be ninety-two in April.

Last November, over a Thanksgiving holiday spent with family in Berkeley, I drove a few miles to visit Dan at the home in neighboring Kensington he has shared for decades with his wife Patricia. My intent was to yack with him for a few hours about our mutual obsession, Vietnam. More than fifty years later, he was still pondering the war as a whole, and I was still trying to understand the My Lai massacre. I arrived at 10 am and we spoke without a break—no water, no coffee, no cookies—until my wife came to fetch me, and to say hello and visit with Dan and Patricia. She left, and I stayed a few more minutes with Dan, who wanted to show me his library of documents that could have gotten him a long prison term. Sometime around 6 pm—it was getting dark—Dan walked me to my car, and we continued to chat about the war and what he knew—oh, the things he knew—until I said I had to go and started the car. He then said, as he always did, “You know I love you, Sy.”

So this is a story about a tutelage that began in the summer of 1972, when Dan and I first connected. I have no memory of who called whom, but I was then at the New York Times and Dan had some inside information on White House horrors he wanted me to chase down—stuff that had not been in the Pentagon Papers. 

I was planning to write about my friendship with Dan after he passed away but last weekend my youngest son reminded me that he still had some of the magic trick materials that Dan had delighted him with in the mid-1980s, when Dan was crashing with our family, as he often did when visiting Washington. “Why not write about him now?” he asked. Why not? 

I first learned of Dan’s importance in the summer of 1971, when he was outed for delivering the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times a few weeks after the newspaper began a series of shattering stories about the disconnect between what we were told and what really had been going on. Those papers remain today the most vital discussion of a war from the inside. Even after the New York Times exposures, their seven thousand pages would be rarely read in full.

I was then working for the New Yorker on a Vietnam project and had learned that it was Dan who did the leaking a week or so before his name became public. His outing was inevitable, and on June 26, after hiding out in Cambridge, Dan strolled to the U.S Attorney’s office in Boston—there were scores of journalists waiting—and had a brief chat with the reporters before turning himself in for what all expected would be the trial of the decade. He told the crowd that he hoped that “the truth will free us of this war.” And then, as he fought his way to the courthouse steps, a reporter asked him how he felt about going to prison. His response struck me then and still makes me tingle: “Wouldn’t you go to prison to help end this war?”

I had done my bit in exposing the My Lai massacre and publishing a book about it in 1970. I was then in the process of writing a second book on the Army’s cover-up of the slaughter. “Hell, no,” I thought to myself, “No way I would go to jail—especially for telling an unwanted truth.” I followed Ellsberg’s subsequent trial in a Los Angeles federal court and even wrote about the wrongdoing of the White House creeps who broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst—at the request of President Nixon. (The government’s case was thrown out after the extent of the White House-ordered spying on Ellsberg became public.)

It was early in the election year summer of 1972 when Ellsberg and I got in touch with each other. I was banging away on the losing Vietnam war and CIA misdeeds for the Times. Nixon looked like a sure thing, despite continuing the hated war, because of stumble after stumble for the campaign of the Democratic nominee, Senator George McGovern. Dan had two stories that he thought could change the dynamics of the November election.

I liked him right off the bat. He was so earnest, so bright, as handsome as a movie star, and so full of the kind of inside information about the Vietnam War that few others had. And so willing to share them with no worry about the consequences. He understood that as the source of highly secret information and procedures he was taking all the risks and that as a reporter I was going to write stories that would get acclaim and put me at no risk. At some point in our chats, I brought him home for a good meal. His campaign against the Vietnam War was literally consuming him, and he immediately engaged with my wife and our two small children. He did magic tricks, he was marvelous on the piano—Dan could play the Beatles and Beethoven—and he connected with all of us. Our friendship was locked in—forever. I confess that late at night—we were both night owls—he and I would walk the dog and find time to sit on a curb somewhere and smoke a few Thai sticks. How Dan always managed to have a supply of these joints from Southeast Asia I chose not to ask. He would talk about all the sealed and locked secret files of the Vietnam War that he could recall, with his photographic memory, in near perfect detail.

In the early 1980s I was writing a long and very critical book about Henry Kissinger’s sordid days as Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of State, with a focus on Vietnam. At one point, Dan spent more than a week in our home, rising at 6 am to read the 2,300 pages of typed manuscript. He understood that I did not want his analyses or disagreements with my conclusions, but only factual errors. One morning Dan told me I had misread a mid-1960s Washington Post piece on the war by Joe Kraft, whose column was then a must-read. I argued, and he was adamant. So I drove downtown to my office, dug through boxes of files and found the column. Dan had remembered the details of a two-decade-old column in a daily newspaper. His memory was scary.

There were two White House abuses he wanted me to expose before the presidential election in the fall of 1972. Dan told me that Nixon and Kissinger—for whom Dan had written an important early policy paper he was appointed national security adviser—had been wiretapping aides and cabinet members. The second tip Dan had for me was that Kissinger had ordered some of his aides to produce a plan for using tactical nuclear weapons in South Vietnam, in case they were needed to end the war on American terms. If I could get one or two sources—by this time there were a number of former Kissinger aides who had quietly resigned over the Vietnam War—on the record, Dan said, it just might get the Democrats into office. It was the longest of long shots, but I tried like hell all summer to find someone who had firsthand information, as Dan did not, and who was willing to confirm Dan’s information, even if on background. Of course, it was understood I would have to tell Abe Rosenthal, executive editor of the Times, who my off-the-record source was.

It was a lousy summer for me, because there were a few former Kissinger aides who easily confirmed Dan’s information, but would not agree to my providing their names to the Times. In one case, with a very decent guy who very much hoped he would get a senior job in a future administration, I came close, aided by the fact that his wife—I always conducted such visits at night—said to her husband, “Oh, for God’s sakes just tell him the truth.” She said it over and over. Talk about a painful experience. Needless to say, their marriage did not last long. The wife’s anger that the truth was not being told helped me understand Dan’s obsession with a war whose worst elements were simply not known to the public. I wasn’t able to get any source on the record in time for the election, but in subsequent years I did get the stories. 

There was one story Dan told me in late 1993 that seemed to capture the secret life on the inside of a major war. He had gone back and forth on short missions to South Vietnam while working as a senior State Department official, but he jumped at a chance in mid-1965 to join a team in Saigon committed to pacification—winning hearts and minds—of the villagers in the South. Its leader was Ed Lansdale, a CIA hero of counterinsurgency for his earlier efforts in routing communist insurgents in the Philippines.

I always took good notes in my meetings with Dan, not because I planned to write about him at some point—I knew he would write his own memoirs—but because I was getting a seminar on how things really worked on the inside. Read his words, and you can judge for yourself how complicated life could be at the top.

“In 1965,” Dan began, “I had done a study of the Cuban missile crisis and I had four operational clearances above top secret, including U-2 clearances” and National Security Agency clearances. He had also interviewed Bobby Kennedy two times about his role in the crisis. Ellsberg’s clearances were so sacrosanct that he was supposed to register in a special office upon arrival in Saigon and from then on he would not be allowed to travel outside of Saigon without an armored car or in a two-engine airplane or better. He got around the system by not deigning to register, a rarity in a world of war where top secret clearances were seen by many as evidence of machismo.

And so Ellsberg went off to work in Saigon with Lansdale. “For one and one half years,” Ellsberg said, “I spent nearly every evening listening to Lansdale talk about his covert operations in the Philippines and earlier in North Vietnam in the 1950s. By this time I’d been working with secrets for years and thought I knew what kind of secrets could be kept from whom. I also thought Ed and I had a good working knowledge of each other and our secrets. Every piece of information was cataloged in your mind and you knew to whom you could say and what you could say. In all of this, Jack Kennedy was mentioned and so was Bobby, but there was no mention by Lansdale of Cuba and no mention that Lansdale had ever worked for Jack and Bobby Kennedy.” 

A decade later, after both Kennedy brothers had been assassinated, I wrote a series for the New York Times on the CIA’s spying on hundreds of thousands of American anti-Vietnam war protesters, members of Congress and reporters—all in direct violation of the agency’s 1947 charter barring any domestic activity. It led to the establishment of the Senate’s Church Committee in 1975. It was the most extensive Congressional inquiry into the activities of the CIA since the agency’s beginning. The committee exposed the assassination activities of the CIA, operations undertaken on orders that clearly came from Jack and Bobby Kennedy, although no direct link was published in the committee’s final report. But the committee reported extensively on a secret group authorized by Jack Kennedy and run by his brother Bobby to come up with options to terrorize Cuba and assassinate Fidel Castro. The covert operation had the code name Mongoose. And it was led, the committee reported, in 1961 and 1962 by Ed Lansdale.

Ellsberg told me he was flabbergasted. “When I heard about Lansdale and Mongoose,” he said, “it revealed to me an ability to keep secrets on an insider level that went far beyond what I had imagined. It was like discovering your next-door neighbor and your weekend fishing companion”—Ellsberg, it should be noted, never went fishing in his life—“and close, dear friend who, when he died, turned out to have been the secretary of State.

“It was astounding, because Mongoose was exactly the kind of operation I’d expected to hear about from Lansdale. He told about covert operations all the time. I think Ed had been told by President Kennedy to ‘keep his fucking mouth shut.’

“When you’ve been in a system with as high a level as possible of secrecy, you understand that things do get talked about. And you get a sense of what is usually held back. I was hearing all about other covert operations, but somebody—not Landsdale—had put a lid on Mongoose.”

After the assassination of Jack Kennedy, Ellsberg theorized, “any far reaching investigation into his death would have to lead to many covert operations.” His point was that there was no evidence that the Warren Commission set up to investigate the assassination had done so.

In all of Dan’s many hours of tutoring, as I understood years later, he understood and empathized with my eagerness—even my need—to learn all that I could about his world of secrets and lies, things said out loud and hidden in top-secret documents. And so he happily became my tutor and taught me where and how to look inside the recessed corners of the American intelligence community.

In return, I gave him my friendship and welcomed him into my family. He loved long talks with my wife, a doctor, teaching the kids magic tricks, and playing Billy Joel songs and similar stuff on the piano for them. We all sensed early on that there was a need for him to be an innocent kid, too, if only to serve as a brief respite from his constant anxiety and the guilt he carried in his soul about what his America had done to the Vietnamese people.

Dan was showing me an insider’s love, just as he and Patricia radiated love and acceptance to all their many friends and admirers who, like me, will never forget the lessons he taught us and what we learned. 

No way I’m going to wait for him to move along without saying what I want to say right now.

To watch Ellsberg speaking to a press conference on New Year’s Eve 1971, click here. To watch the 2009 documentary on Ellsberg, The Most Dangerous Man in America, click here.

Seymour Hersh is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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We Hard Of Hearing?

Read Exodus 3:4-22

Moses had been resistant for forty years, likely telling himself all the time that his was a lost cause. Now, when God came with a direct, simple call, the old shepherd couldn’t handle it. In fact, he wouldn’t let himself believe he might still be useful to God. “Therefore, come now, and I will send you to Pharaoh, so that you may bring My people, the sons of Israel, out of Egypt” (Exodus 3:10).

Now that wasn’t complicated, was it? The Lord spoke in a tongue Moses could understand. He gave him a simple, two-fold command. First, He said to Moses, “I will send you.” And second, “You will bring my people out.” That was the plan.

Notice, please, that this was not a multiple-choice arrangement. It wasn’t even an invitation. It was a call. God does not speak and ask our advice regarding His plan. God makes declarations. He doesn’t open up the scene for a rap session or a dialogue. He doesn’t call in a blue ribbon panel of consultants to suggest viable options.

He speaks, and that is that.

At very unique junctures of our lives, God says to us, “Now, My child, I have this in mind for you. I know that you have knotted things up in the past. And I know that you may knot things up in the future. But as far as today, right now, this is my plan for you. Now go. I’m sending you, and I will be with you.”

God told him that he would be an instrument in the deliverance, but God Himself would be the deliverer. Huge difference. In God’s calling, He has a plan: but He never expects you to carry out that plan. He’s going to pull it off. He simply wants you to be the instrument of action. After all, it is His reputation that’s at stake, not yours. All He asks is that you give yourself to Him as a tool He can pick up and use. That’s all.

And it’s really hard to hear while dozing in denial! Live the Joy Today! merlin

Verbatim from Chuck Swindoll’s devotional Great Days with Great Lives pg. 67.

Introduction

Our world is in desperate need of models worth following. Authentic heroes. People of integrity, whose lives inspire us to do better, to climb higher, to stand taller. This has always been true.

Perhaps that explains why biographies of great men and women have fascinated me throughout my life…. My soul is stirred and my heart inspired as those saints of old, people of “whom the world was not worthy” (Hebrews 11:38), play out their lives, make their mistakes, accomplish incredible feats, and finally pass on into glory. What encouragement! What enrichment!

The words of the Russian poet Boris Pasternik come to mind: “It is not revolutions and upheavals that clear the road to new and better days, but someone’s soul inspired and ablaze.” It is my hope that you will be enlightened and encouraged from beginning each day spending time with the Great Lives you’ll discover in this daily devotional. Here are ten deserving of our time and attention to help us endure the uncertain challenges of the future. Chuck Swindoll Frisco, Texas

The Great Lives Series

David: A Man of Passion and Destiny

Esther: A Woman of Strength and Dignity

Joseph: A Man of Integrity and Forgiveness

Moses: A Man of Selfless Dedication

Elijah: A Man of Heroism and Humility

Paul: A Man of Grace and Grit

Job: A Man of Heroic Endurance

Jesus: The Greatest Life Of All

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Are The Fruits Of The Spirit A Prerequisite For Peacemaking?

Today I am burdened by the lack of God’s peacemakers visibly impacting our world. And since we as Christ Followers operate by faith and not by sight as the world does, we may not even see or hear of many attempts at peacemaking, nor even, the end results. I now view peacemaking simply as a lifestyle choice that we Christ Followers (CF’s) choose to adopt and implement in our daily routines serving notice, first as a reminder to ourselves and our family, and secondly, to all those in our spheres of influence, that we are not their their typical next door neighbor. And therein, lies the biggest challenge for CF’s.

I believe the Mennonite Church has always struggled with its identity in Christ. I certainly did as this weird 1 of 2 Mennonite kids in a class of 72 in the early 60’s. Our girls were not allowed to wear shorts to gym class and nor were they allowed to cut their hair. However, the one unique trait that I thought the Catholic Lutheran cultural majority had the most trouble with was that we didn’t fight. But now I think, that was all fabricated in our heads. Of course, we said we didn’t believe in war. And truth told, I was never ridiculed or made fun of nor was anyone else I knew. But not bearing arms or participating in the armed forces, was a point I avoided at all costs. Had I known my church history better then, I possibly could have constructed a diversion as Paul did with Pharisees and Sadducees over the resurrection, only here, I’d have used the Reformation.

When I got talked into declaim, I didn’t choose the Sermon on the Mount nor defending our position of non-resistance. No, I chose to speak on why smoking was not a wise activity: it was an expensive, dirty habit, that ruined cars, homes, clothing; and science was just beginning to discover all the health risks. Or so they said. Never once did I consider “Know ye not that your body is the temple of the living God…. ! Yes, speaking against smoking in ’65 was a very safe subject as smoking was quickly falling from favor,

Bottom line, have not we Christians always had an identity crisis? In the 70’s, Mennonite youth soon discovered the hippie and the anti-war movement nearly put them in the spotlight, and perhaps we today as a church are still struggling with the identities we adopted and the cultural alliances we made back then, rather than seeking out our unique identity in Christ as revealed to us thru the scriptures by discerning with truth tellers in community, what God’s actual desires were for us during these changing times into the ensuing years and decades.

Today, we exist in a culture that is truly on drugs and steroids virtually without any time to think a clear original thought since we’re being inundated by sights and sounds of in-your-face  examples of hate, selfishness, anger, distrust, greed, perversion, etc, all quite clearly, being everything except, how can we best produce the fruits of the Spirit in our daily living in this culture?

I am well aware that I sorely squandered most of my life in trivial pursuits when I was endowed to become a peacemaker in my personal life and my spheres of influence, and possibly, even beyond!  Sensing the time is now for me to intentionally write about this devastating dilemma I experienced as a youth, and I believe, am yet observing today, I’ll share this journey with you. If the Spirit so prompts me, I may write more.

Not having read nor studied the classics on this subject, I’ll let that for you to research. I shall keep this discourse short (I was hoping less than 500 words, but I’m already over 2000) and simple by beginning with Matthew 5:9, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the Sons of God.” Certainly, a worthy motivation, if not the premier text, as history supplies ample examples of such successes or dismal failures. These peacemakers were willing to risk their lives, health and wealth to bridge the gap between the camps to heal the disagreements and avoid the battles.

More pertinent though for most of us, is the unspoken or silent strife fermenting under the radar in just our personal lives, too often not spoken, certainly not confessed sin; never mind broadening the circle to include our families, congregations, and communities, all of which will be our focus here. I maintain if I can’t float my peacemaker ship in my own puddle, then just perhaps I’d better rethink my calling before I try a bigger pond with more ships. The apostle Paul advised us to first mature our digestive tract on milk before we attempt the complexities of digesting meat. You get the picture?

Have I ever looked critically in the mirror considering first the peacemaker dysfunction within first me, and my life?  I happen to believe and am now trying to live each day by replacing my personal dysfunctions (peacemaker quirks if you would, even sin perhaps) with operational and recognizable fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control. Until that is accomplished in me, brothers and sisters, I’m still on milk and perhaps not qualified to be seek any recognition as a peacemaker beyond myself, whether in my family, church or community. I believe it is inherent with all institutional church groups to suffer from this difficulty of function.

I also just happen to believe Peace and Justice is so much more than academic pursuits and spiritual makeovers. Is not today’s lack of peace and justice in our society fundamentally stemming from our world’s humanity being separated from God’s love such that healing (peace & justice) can only be addressed, influenced or corrected, by peacemaking ambassadors serving as bond servants of Jesus Christ as they are empowered by Holy Spirit following Jesus’s birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension?

Or, on what basis are we operating? Yes, the church has been infiltrated, incapacitated, and intoxicated with the headiness of the church’s institutional success in taking the gospel around the world. But are not those days over! Look at the data! During the last century, we’ve witnessed the spiritual take down of western Europe and North America while we’re seemingly unable to see the elephant in the church’s hospice room trashing the hospice team attempting to offer life support before they offer last rites!    

Is not the first line of strategy to consider in any peacemaking offensive (seriously, we’re not to cower in fear and be on the defensive) is for CF’s to be empowered? If you read me frequently, you may be sick and tired of hearing this by now, but it is so fundamentally basic in these last days to insure we move from milk to meat, and begin thriving spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and yes, for sure, even physically.

Succinctly stated, first and then sequentially, we must be obedient to God’s Word, then seek His forgiveness, His transformation, His empowerment by Holy Spirit, becoming discipling bond servants of Jesus Christ to serve as His ambassadors until death permits retirement.

Look around today on your road of life and you will see the worldliness in the church’s broad road’s exit to the narrow road. In fact, many Christians are just realizing now they stayed in the fast lane too long and no longer can squeeze over to the exit lane for the narrow way. They passed the “Cross” exit miles ago thinking exiting then was pure foolishness. Now with the family in the car, recognizing what is about to happen, panic rises as their lane is slowing to a standstill, and they are still stuck on the broad road and once again, locked down! Not a pretty picture but I believe it to be a crude reminder depicting the institutional church in W Europe and NA.  

I believe Jesus wants all of His Kingdom’s children to be known and sought after as peacemakers. Scripture makes it plain that we are to be known as ambassadors of peace leading or guiding persons “possessing no peace” toward:

  1. God: “God has given us the task of reconciling people to Him” (II Cor. 5:18 NLT). Read also the famous “unadorned clay pot” scripture from II Cor. 4:7-12 for additional understanding and clarity for the process. I prefer the Message here.
  2. Ourselves: “Joy fills the hearts that are planning peace!” (Prov. 12:20 NLT).
  3. Others: “And those who are peacemakers will plant seeds of peace and reap a harvest of goodness” (James 3:18 NLT).

Since the blessing of being a peacemaker is to be called a child of God, we can experience the joy of goodness, happiness, and peace within our own lives. When we exhibit these positive traits, we will begin to reflect:

  1. Contentment with ourselves: We will know our identity in Christ, thus giving us the contentment we’ve been searching for.
  2. Optimism in our faith: We will exhibit a love for God and reflect a positive faith toward out outlook on life and future events.
  3. Relationally connectedness: We will experience deeper & more intimate friendships. People will form closer bonds and our friendships will be strengthened.
  4. Doing what is right: We will have a benchmark to judge proper behavior for ourselves.

Make Jesus your Lord and Savior and gain your own peace. Trite but true. No God, No Peace. Know God, Know Peace. Enjoy the opportunities as Holy Spirit opens doors.

Prayer: Father God, may I have the courage to step out and become a peacemaker, Let it start with me and ripple out to the others in my pond. Help me humble myself so that I can thrive wherever you assign me short term or plant me long term, for service in your kingdom.

Action: Deal with whatever causes strife within yourself and others. Take your sins to the cross and leave them there, never pick them up again! If that is a re- occurring problem for you as me, go to the March 2 blog titled “Issues With Your Past” and click the link. Some of the best such teaching I’ve ever heard.

PS. Read the classics if I’ve challenged you. I have not the time or energy for such. God only gave me this simple message this morning after Emilie Barnes in her devotional “Minute Meditations” stirred the fire within me. Rather easy to tell the words she wrote. Her words intrigued me, and then the Spirit moved me. Simple. Get ready. War is coming! Wrong, it has been here and still is.

I hope Emilie and I inspire you to go far beyond with the intricacies of God’s command to be peacemakers ever broadening the ripples, perhaps in your lake, with the wisdom or scars (evidence of God’s healing) you’ve been endowed with. Live in the Joy.

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Can Easter Bunny Trails Lead to Honest Conversations?

Plain Values Magazine: Restoration. Authenticity. Hope.

What Can I Learn About You Looking At The Magazines on Your Coffee Table?  

Every Christian Home Should Consider Getting Plain Values magazine!

Coming into my office after doing lunch, I collapsed in my chair and picked up my Feb edition of Plain Values I’d neglected to read yet while reflecting on the phenomenal Sunday morning I’d just experienced.

It started rough though by sleeping thru a 5:30 alarm until 6:45. I quickly cared for the animals, got my mother-in-law her pills, coffee & toast, and was off to the 8 AM men’s prayer group being only 6 minutes late. After this unique week being both buoyantly positive and the jury still out and, I inhaled the groups love and encouragement while we all renewed our bonds praying we’d be ready for whatever comes our way this week as His ambassadors in our congregation and community.

Returning home, I fired up the livestream for mother and I. Awesome service but no time here to share – listen for yourself on youTube Kidron Mennonite Church. I text the SS class I was coming before driving back to church (16 min) and we shared our prayer requests. One member’s friend Mark had called from Arkansas, requesting prayer as he is befriending a bizarre derelict in his 50’s evidently possessed and continually repeating “all I want to do is to go to hell to be with my friends,” and understandably so, as no wants to be around him in his current state. Mark has visited this man 30 times and so far, has seen little change. Rather reminds me of the demon-possessed man in the tombs as recorded in Matthew 8 and Mark 5. Please pray for Mark as he seeks help for this deliverance.

Indeed, a great morning, but finally, my chores are all done and I’m off the clock. Plain Values magazine is one of my literary life lines, seldom lying dormant for a few days, never a month.

Thumbing past Joel Sallatin, now known nation-wide, he having just returned from Israel, will be in Akron and Middlefield in March, and Walnut Creek in June. Joel now owns, with his family, Polyface Farm in Swope, VA in western Augusta County. Loretta & I bought our first home in Stuarts Draft, in western Augusta in’78 but I didn’t know Joel until after we returned to OH. When Joel is not on the road speaking, he’s home on the farm in Swope, keeping the callouses on his hands and dirt under his fingernails, mentoring young people, inspiring visitors, and promoting local regenerative food and farming systems.

I remember when I first met Joel at an Acres USA conference in ’84 and I recall that my father-in-law, LaVern, admired him and was hoping I’d become friends with Joel so their shared similar agricultural philosophies might help us grow our recently birthed mini-Penn State soil lab, NSWS Labs. LaVern greatly enjoyed passing thru the doors the lab opened for him for his fifteen years before retirement giving him the wings he needed to launch his other dreams. Some of his grandkids are now aware too, that he was definitely born a generation too soon. And it didn’t help the situation one little bit that I was the in-house doubting Thomas pain in the butt not quite willing yet to take on conventional agriculture as precarious as I was financially, and I certainly was not a poster child either from Matthew Kelly’s Book The Culture Solution, that I live by and teach from today.

Still thumbing thru the February issue, I passed the regular contributors; Homestead Living struck numerous chords, especially growing as a writer; I even paused to skim thru Ferree’s uniquely meaningful transparency detailing her second marriage proposal.

Finally, on page 45, I encountered Wendy’s contribution: Honest Conversations: Proof of God. I settled down into my chair in full sunshine, relaxed, and began to read the following and immediately was hooked. Later I realized, I’d never read her post prior, but now, I sensed a deep literary and spiritual kindred spirit forming. FYI, don’t miss her bio at the end of my abbreviated or condensed version of her post. Here is Wendy:

“I thought I had become a Christian. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my first conversion was to theism – the belief in God. And in many ways, I had become as “Christian” as many folks ever become – lumping everything together with a general understanding. If God was the king of the universe, and He said His son was Jesus, who was I to argue? But I quickly came to realize what I’m not sure the church at large has figured out: sometimes we believe completely, but don’t completely know what we believe.

That was me. Once I got over being wrong (or maybe more aptly stated, misled) and surrendered my life to God, my husband pointed out there was a difference between my Father in Heaven and Jesus, my Savior. We know them as two parts of the Trinity – the Godhead – but do we know them separately specifically? Because I had spent so many years debating and considering God’s existence, it was easy to just include Jesus in the equation. If God’s real, Jesus is real. End of story.

But with Jesus comes the proof of God. He is the tangible element of our faith….

It’s not hard to conclude the impact of Jesus must be supernatural. Since we’re blessed with a mountain of prophetic accounts to examine, you may be like I was, leery and asking what do they prove? Are they reliable? Are they not like fortune tellers? When I get stuck in the weeds of just how many specifics were prophesied about the coming Messiah, it becomes impossible to check so many boxes oneself. I will defer to mathematician and author of the book Science Speaks, Peter Stoner, because he explains it so perfectly.

“If we take a quantity of 10^17 [10 to the 17th power] of silver dollars and lay them on the surface of Texas, all 265,596 sq. mi., they will cover the state two feet deep. Now mark one of those silver dollars and then imagine you could stir all that mass of silver dollars, thoroughly! Blindfold a man, put him in a helicopter and tell him to land at his will to pick up the marked silver dollar. What chance would he have getting the right one? Just the same chance that the prophets would have had of writing just eight prophecies and having them all come true in any one man, from their day to the present time, providing they wrote in their own wisdom.

Now these prophecies were either given by the inspiration of God or the prophets just wrote them as they thought they should be. In such a case the prophets had just one chance in 10^17 of having them come true in any man, but they all came true in Christ…. This means the fulfillment of just eight prophecies alone proves that God inspired the writings of prophecies to a definitiveness which lacks only one chance in 10^17 of being absolute.”  

I don’t know about you but I’m convinced. But just in case you need more proof, Stoner goes on to say that the likelihood of one man fulfilling 48 of the OT prophecies is mathematically impossible. He suggests the number is a one with 157 zeros after it. For reference, there are not only eight or even 48 prophecies fulfilled in the Bible. There are more than 300. And they’re written by different authors over hundreds of years.

We can be sure Jesus was the Son of God!

Now, appropriately asked in this Lenten season with the undercurrent of whomever casting about their doubts, the question becomes, “Can we be sure He rose from the dead?” Well, I would answer: “How can we be sure of anything?” Somewhere along the way, Christians stopped referring or thinking about Bible as history. Perhaps with the rise of academia? Y’all, it’s a historical book, and in many cases, it’s more accurate and cross referenced more than other typically accepted historical documents. Consider how we learn about anything that happened before we were born.

For example, we have a substantial collection of accounts from the Second World War, both from survivors of Nazi Germany as well as from Nazis themselves. Soon, we will enter a generation where there are no survivors from that time period. We will be left with only their stories – written, recorded, photographed, and otherwise – as evidence that it happened. But we’ve had nearly 100 years to collect information from both sides of WWII, allowing for it to be contested, corrected, and corroborated. From that point on, those first-hand accounts will remain as a written record of what happened from those who were there, data we now call history.

The same is true of the Bible. There are many things in this world to be uncertain of, but Jesus’ death, and resurrection – the cornerstone of our faith – is not one of them. In the end, there is a difference between knowing about Jesus and knowing Jesus. It’s good to believe in God. It’s important and foundational. But it is hollow without the confidence that comes from knowing what is true and why. Not just believing, but actually trusting in the truth of what you believe. We can’t follow a God we don’t know, and we can’t lead others to a Savior we’re not certain is the Lord.

Every congregation needs spark plugs like Wendy to be “truth tellers in their community.” Wendy Cunningham is wife to Tom and homeschool mom to three amazing gifts from God. In addition to that calling, she is an entrepreneur and author. Her book What If You’re Wrong?, blog, and devotionals can be found at gainingmyperspective.com. She is also host of the podcast Gaining My Perspective. Wendy loves Jesus and inspiring people to step into their calling – whatever that might look like in this season. When she’s not doing all of the above, she can be found homesteading and chasing kids and cows on her farm in Middle Tennessee. Sounds to me like we just met a Proverbs 31 woman with skin!    

   

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