Nary an Original Thought

A few gems from Pete as of late…

In AWANA Cubbies, Pete just memorized John 14:2. The “activity” to go along with this was a coloring page showing clouds, starbursts, some more clouds, and some more sun-looking things. Pete colored the starbursts yellow, the sky-looking area blue, and the rest green. He told his mom that the picture looked like it was supposed to be a bunch of clouds and stuff, but he thought it made sense to color a lot of it green because “there will probably be a lot of land in heaven, not just clouds and stuff.” I suppose he’s right.

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While we were in St. Louis the kids spent a fair amount of time “swimming” in my in-laws’ hot tub. At one point Elsie noticed that her scraped knee was “all better”. I said she should probably take a second to thank Jesus for healing her knee, and instinctively I looked up toward the sky as I thanked him myself. She asked why I looked up toward the sky, to which I replied that sometimes when we pray we can look up toward the sky to remember that Jesus is in heaven. She thought a minute and then said, “Alaina’s in heaven too, right?”:”(My cousin accidentally shot and killed his wife, Alaina, a few weeks ago. The kids are still trying to understand it all, as am I. More about this here.)”: Before I could get an answer out, Peter chimed in. “Yes, Elsie. Alaina is in heaven. When people who love Jesus die they go to heaven. And then, when Jesus is done fixing the earth, we will all come back to live with him on it again.” Looks like our little post-mil’er in training is well on his way.

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So, in light of what happened with my cousin, we’ve been doing a little bit of gun safety talking these days. I asked Pete if he was allowed to touch a gun. “Nope. Never.” Then I asked him if he would just stand back and watch if he ever saw one of his sisters playing with a gun. “No way,” he said, “because that would be just like what Adam did when the snake talked to Eve.” Yes. Good point. Wouldn’t want to repeat that little mistake.

HT: The Constructive Curmudgeon

From Doug Wilson:

The Muslims need Jesus and the Jews need Jesus. That’s my Middle East peace plan.

Exactly.

In case you’re looking for some help with your New Year’s resolutions, Stuff Christians Like has a great list to get you started.

A couple of favorites:

• Win the “please turn to” Bible verse race every Sunday.
• Find more subtle ways to discover if I’m with a Christian that will also drink a glass of wine or a pint of beer.
• Crush all foes in the “VBS Decorating Wars.”

While they don’t exactly have an Edwardsian ring to them, they might make you chuckle a bit.

Says Dan Siedell:

Art and religion both require belief for them to work. For the religious believer, water sprinkled over the head of an infant is more than a hair washing, it is the work of regeneration by the Holy Spirit; drinking a thimbleful of wine and eating a wafer is more than a snack, it is the body and blood of Jesus Christ, what the Church Fathers called the “medicine of immortality.” So it is with the believer in art. For this believer, a clump of fired clay with pretty decorations on it is more than the sum total of its materials, it is something more, it is “art,” an object with meaning and significance, an object that enriches one’s life with beauty. For the believer in art, a painting is more than the sum total of its banal and quite silly materials: smelly oil paints brushed onto a canvas sheet. It does something.

There are many who do not believe in religion. They think it is silly. They do not believe that water is a means by which the Holy Spirit saves or wine and bread the means by which Christ nourishes us. But there are also many who do not believe in art. They think it is silly. They go to an art museum and do not find powerful experiences of beauty and transcendence, they find only clumps of clay with decorations on them, canvas sheets with oil paints smeared on them. Art and religion are sacramental practices. They both require belief on the part of their participants that elements of the material world: water, oil, wine, bread, canvas, clay, oil paint, paper, and graphite are the distinctive means by which the immaterial comes to us. The transcendent appears to us through the vehicle of the immanent.

Paedo/credo baptism can be a touchy subject. Unlike some other “finer points of doctrine”, this one has a lot do to with what we “do”. It also involves our kids. So, when I say I believe that babies should be baptized, there is an unavoidable bit of condemnation in there that says, “You’re not raising your kids correctly because you didn’t baptize your babies.” Want to have the iciest Christmas on record? Tell your sister/cousin/aunt that she’s not raising her kids correctly. Then, duck. So, this doctrinal point is inherently personal. Handle with care.

One other caveat for the credos among us. Yes, there are some denominations that, as I see it, go too far in their belief of what baptism *does* to a baby. Not all paedos think that their kid is once-saved-always-saved because he was sprinkled on the 8th day. Furthermore, some of these denominations base their position on tradition and doctrine handed down from “denominational ancestors”. However, not all paedobaptists are guilty of holding to beliefs based on “tradition and the teachings of men.” It is profoundly ignorant to accuse a paedo of not “going to the scriptures” on the issue after he has argued his point from passages in Exodus, Psalms, Acts, Romans, 1 Corinthians, Colossians, 1 Peter, and 2 Timothy. To someone who holds sola scriptura at the center of his theology, this is about as offensive as telling him he isn’t raising his kids correctly.

Finally, let’s all admit that it is possible that *you* could be wrong on this one. There have been godly men and women on each side of this issue, dating back several centuries. R.C. Sproul is not a heretic, and neither is John Piper. If those guys can come down on different sides of the issue, something tells me that it’s OK if we do as well. That is not to say that truth does not matter. It does. In Reality, these positions are oppositional and, therefore, can’t both be correct. However, we can also admit that this is a complicated issue and both conclusions can be reached based on humbly and sincerely searching the Scriptures for God’s truth. God’s grace is big enough to cover this one. I promise.

By the way, I spent a bit of time outlining my position on the issue awhile back, when we decided to baptize our oldest two. My position has developed a bit further in the past couple of years, but it hasn’t changed a whole lot. And, no, I don’t think you’re raising your kids incorrectly!

Catholic bishops may respect Obama as the president, but that doesn’t mean that they’re willing to sit idly by while Obama works to “support and expand abortion rights” (that’s a euphemism if I’ve ever seen one). Some quotes from their meeting in Baltimore yesterday:

“This is not a matter of political compromise or a matter of finding some way of common ground, it’s a matter of absolutes.” – Bishop Daniel Conlon of Steubenville, Ohio

“Any one of us here would consider it a privilege to die tomorrow–die tomorrow!–to bring about the end of abortion.” – Auxiliary Bishop Robert Hermann of St. Louis

“If Catholic hospitals were required by federal law to perform abortions, we’d have to close our hospitals.” – Bishops Thomas Paprocki of Chicago

I’ll be the first to tell you the Catholics get a lot of things wrong, even centrally important doctrinal things. But at least they are standing up to “the greatest social evil of our day – abortion. Our people voted to overlook a little thing like the slaughter of the unborn, because of other considerations like economic prosperity, climate change and the desire to have all the other nations in the world like us again.” (source)

Regrettably, it seems that many Christians were more concerned about their carbon footprint than the blood on their hands from the present-day holocaust that continues to rage on in our nation.

This is embarrasing. From ChristianityToday.com:

Twenty percent of American Christians (19 percent of Protestants; 28 percent of Catholics) give nothing to the church. Among Protestants, 10 percent of evangelicals, 28 percent of mainline folk, 33 percent of fundamentalists, and 40 percent of liberal Protestants give nothing. The vast majority of American Christians give very little—the mean average is 2.9 percent. Only 12 percent of Protestants and 4 percent of Catholics tithe.

A small minority of American Christians give most of the total donated. Twenty percent of all Christians give 86.4 percent of the total. The most generous five percent give well over half (59.6 percent) of all contributions. But higher-income American Christians give less as a percentage of household income than poorer American Christians. In the course of the 20th century, as our personal disposable income quadrupled, the percentage donated by American Christians actually declined.

It’s no wonder we elected a Marxist as president. People look around and see that there are poor, hungry people living among us and something (good) inside of them feels a bit compassionate. “Somebody ought to help them,” we think. But who? Certainly not the Christians, who apparently haven’t read through the end of Matthew too frequently.

What would happen if Christians actually trusted God and gave to his Church according to his standards?

If just the “committed Christians” (defined as those who attend church at least a few times a month or profess to be “strong” or “very strong” Christians) would tithe, there would be an extra 46 billion dollars a year available for kingdom work. To make that figure more concrete, the authors suggest dozens of different things that $46 billion would fund each year: for example, 150,000 new indigenous missionaries; 50,000 additional theological students in the developing world; 5 million more micro loans to poor entrepreneurs; the food, clothing and shelter for all 6,500,000 current refugees in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East; all the money for a global campaign to prevent and treat malaria; resources to sponsor 20 million needy children worldwide. Their conclusion is surely right: “Reasonably generous financial giving of ordinary American Christians would generate staggering amounts of money that could literally change the world.”

You can try the “I already help the poor because I pay my taxes” route, but I’m not buying it. We already know that the State can’t help the poor. Yes, they can give them money. Even your money. But that isn’t what most of them need. Jesus didn’t die so that the poor could have affordable housing. If we were truly committed to following Jesus, we would be loving the poor so well that they would kindly tell Obama to “keep the change” when he offered them other people’s money in exchange for the ballot box version of indentured servitude.

The irony here is astounding. If we gave as if we believed in eternal life, *this* life would be radically changed. Can you imagine what 5 million loans to entrepreneurs would do for the world’s poorest economies? What difference would 150,000 new missionaries make? I can barely imagine it.

Instead, we hoard our riches or squander them on the temporal comforts of this world. We don’t believe in eternal life. We don’t believe in eternity. Or, if we do, we certainly don’t act like it. And so, people suffer in the “here and now” while we patiently wait in the drive through at Starbucks, thinking that venti “fair trade” mocha we will soon be consuming absolves us of our greed and indifference.

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ …And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” – Matthew 25:41-43, 46

I’m pretty sure he was serious.

I have frequently reminded Nary an Original Thought readers of the sovereignty of God, in all circumstances. This morning I’m wondering if someone would return the favor….

Somehow the death of roughly 4 million babies during the reign of Obama the Merciless fits into God’s eternal plan. I’m having trouble understanding how.

Keep this in mind when you vote tomorrow:

10 If you faint in the day of adversity,
your strength is small.
11 Rescue those who are being taken away to death;
hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.
12 If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,”
does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?
Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it,
and will he not repay man according to his work?

- Proverbs 24:10-13

Don’t think that God will be fooled by the excuse that you had other “social injustices” in mind when you voted for Obama. A vote for the most pro-abortion candidate to ever run for the presidency is not just a failure to rescue those who are being taken away to death. It is outright participation in their murder.