Budget Update
A couple Saturdays ago I delivered my last FedEx package. God had me in that “wilderness” for two years. It was great for me. God talked with me … through Youtube.
That’s right. Youtube.
But I’m afraid that the ideas God used to challenge me may soon not be available on Youtube, Facebook or Google. Most of the people I enjoy listening to the most are being forced to find new revenue streams to keep food on the table.
The Farm Bureau Needs to Hear From You
Platforms
I’m not talking about shoes or stages. The word “platforms” is fast being adopted as a word to describe an online phenomenon. This reality is developing because of a conflict between limited attention spans, corporate goals and emerging privacy concerns.
Whitefield
Marriage and Civilization Snatchers in Mayberry
I remember from my childhood a movie about body snatchers. I think the idea was that aliens came to earth and snatched people’s bodies. The aliens had a way of stealing your body.
The West is allowing it’s body to be snatched.
Satan is the alien who is doing the snatching. And he is busy everywhere, even in Mayberry USA. While they haven’t hung the rainbow flag out front yet they are advertising “gay” marriage. This is on the website for the downtown Anglican church.
It is buried on a website, but it is there. They can’t openly and aggressively celebrate sodomy like they do in New England here yet. I guarantee it is coming. Evil just can’t hold back. It never stops in it’s death march. It will destroy everything unless God’s Holy Spirit intervenes.
It is sad because the church building itself is so quaint, innocent looking and wonderful.
Capture the Flag in Syria
We’ve made a mess overseas. Our efforts to “make the world safe for democracy” have only hurt people. We haven’t done anything to help — especially in North Africa and the Middle East. Ancient Christian communities have been destroyed and disrupted by our destructive Israel-centric approach to folks over there. Using “democracy” as our slogan we’ve weaponized Islam against Christianity. And now Islam is moving into the heart of Christendom, Europe. The United States did this. We are doing it even today.
My son was in the middle of it for a time. He was an embassy guard in Damascus. He closed the embassy and evacuated with the Ambassador when it was closed by order of the President of the United States.
We closed the embassy so that we could choose sides in Syria. As has so often been the case in recent decades we chose the wrong side. Instead of remain neutral in state political disputes we sided with local radical Islamists against ancient expressions of Christianity and the mostly secular ruling power. We did this in Iraq, Libya and Syria.
Since we must not judge by the words of our leaders but the fruit of their actions it is clear that most of our leadership in the church and government are choosing evil over justice. If they weren’t we wouldn’t be facing such a grim future. There is no plan to eliminate our national debt. Our materialism insulates us from the consequences of our evil actions in the world. It isn’t the economy, stupid. It IS morality.
Policy
Helping Hands Ministries is a Christian Ministry. We love the image of God in every person on the earth. This legal entity is incorporated in the United States of America. Laws respecting so-called discrimination and “hate” have become unhinged from reality. We participate in programs, and utilize services, provided by American technology companies that we disagree with vehemently. It is not possible to live and work in America without using services from providers like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Paypal. It is not hate or discrimination for a person, or a society, to choose sexual morality over sexual immorality. We summarily reject the imposition of all discrimination and hate practiced by American corporations and individuals against Jesus Christ and his Ambassadors on earth. Sodomy is wicked. Those who practice it, and those who choose to be allies with those who practice it, deserve — and receive from us — the very same quality of love and care we provide to all other sinners. And the government has a duty to penalize said behavior. The government’s failure to do this is not our responsibility. Our duty is to God first, and civil society second.
The Epidemic of a Seared Conscience – Dr. Mike Spaulding
Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn’t exist in any declaration I have ever read.[1]
Many Americans have been propagandized to the extent that they now form an entire subclass – the perpetually offended. What are the signs? One of the most glaring signs of this new genre of the walking infantile is the belief, often expressed by aggressive and even violent behavior, that anyone or thing that offends them ought not to be allowed to exist.
People that think this way apparently believe that the universe operates according to their ideology. They have no real justification for believing this way. They can’t point to any standard of moral reasoning, logical analysis, or time-tested system of thought that supports their viewpoint. They further demonstrate their ignorance by believing everyone would be better off believing like they do. Remarkable, they think they are the modern equivalent of the knights of old, riding in to rescue the damsels in distress, in this case culture, civility, and the American way. The truth that these individuals cannot grasp is something much different.
Here is a case in point: Two University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill students were recently arrested and charged with assault. What led to their arrests? They were arrested after they physically and violently attacked a pro-life activist who was on the campus with Created Equal, a group that uses dialogue to attempt to persuade people that abortion is the murder of unborn human beings. One of the strategies that Created Equal uses is the prominent display of actual pictures of the dismembered bodies of babies, the result of “choice” as abortion is euphemistically called by those attempting to disguise the barbaric truth of what abortion is and does to the preborn human.
Pictures of babies who have suffered the cruelest fate imaginable are a powerful reminder of the truth of what abortion really is. Pictures leave no room for debate about abortion being “women’s reproductive healthcare” as the brainwashed like to call it. Abortion ends the life of the baby and therefore trying to obfuscate this truth by calling it “reproductive healthcare” is idiocy.
The university students mentioned above were shocked when law enforcement officers arrested them. They could not believe that their noble cause of violently opposing and assaulting pro-life individuals resulted in arrest. One of the students said, “I cannot believe this is happening,” referring to her arrest.
Another example of the same mindset demonstrated by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill child murder supporters is the now infamous behavior of Pennsylvania State Representative Brian Sims. Sims, the self-proclaimed champion of a woman’s right to murder her unborn child, thought he was valiant and courageous for demeaning, belittling, and verbally intimidating an elderly woman outside a baby murder facility.
What was the crime that set Sims over the edge? This grandmother was walking in front of the murder mill while praying silently. For this gross offense Sims took it upon himself to video the woman, demanding her name and address, offering a money reward to anyone who would identify her and where she lived so that he and others that think like he does could go harass her at her home.
In the least Sims demonstrated that he has no business making decisions that affect citizens of the state of Pennsylvania in his capacity as a State Representative. More troubling than that however, is the fact that Sims thought it perfectly normal to call for a mass turnout of like-minded baby murderers to intimidate an individual for having the temerity to be at a place where women murder their children and pray that they would change their minds.
Then there is the recent case of the morally bankrupt young women celebrating the act of murdering babies by dancing through a graveyard of crosses representing aborted babies. This publicity stunt was noteworthy for the callousness with which these young women were exulting child murder. Here is one report of this incident:
Planned Parenthood supporters at the University of Texas at San Antonio protested at a Students for Life symbolic cemetery for the unborn.
The incident occurred on April 9 as Students for Life commemorated aborted babies through a cemetery display, the pro-life nonprofit group revealed in a press release Wednesday. Students for Life set up pink crosses and talked to students about pro-life options as part of a spring Planned Parenthood Truth Tour throughout college campuses.
Young women from the university’s Students United for Planned Parenthood group interrupted the memorial activity. The protesters strode through the assembled crosses, shouted and waved signs, according to video footage.
“Look, there’s mine right there,” one Planned Parenthood supporter shouted in the video, pointing at a cross and pretending an aborted baby lay beneath it. A student shouted across the cemetery that she loves having sex and aborting babies. “My number one kink,” she can be heard saying in the video, as noted by Students For Life.
“I love advocating for abortion! My uterus loves advocating for abortion,” another girl shouted, waving her sign. “When I say Planned, you say Parenthood. When I say aborted, you say fetuses!”
“It’s a fetus graveyard!” another protester said.[2]
What has happened to a great number of men and women in America is that their conscience has become seared. Their mind is in a state of depreciating ability to grasp morality personally and interpersonally. They have become incapable of moral reasoning and logical analysis that lead to guilt or shame related to their thinking and behavior. They are being turned over to the darkness they crave and prostitute themselves to and on behalf of.
Depending on the severity of the behavior, psychologists call this psychopathic or sociopathic behavior. The difference between the two is that a psychopath has no conscience remaining. The psychopath’s conscience is completely seared and devoid of any emotion of shame or guilt associated with their behavior. Ironically, Hollywood glamorizes this behavior, giving tacit approval to the violent and murderous results of psychopathic people.
The sociopath has a small amount of conscience remaining. This person might still feel a twinge of guilt but not enough to stop their evil behavior. Both the psychopath and sociopath are dangerous to others with which they interact and especially those with whom they disagree. Courtrooms across this nation are filled with cases involving the egregious behavior of people with little to no functioning conscience.
All of the examples above demonstrate varying states of the inability to reason morally. America is well down the path of being wrested from its moral foundations by psychopaths and sociopaths whose faculties have been impaired by evil. What can be done to correct this development? We must first understand what we are dealing with.
J.I. Packer* said concerning conscience that:
An educated, sensitive conscience is God’s monitor. It alerts us to the moral quality of what we do or plan to do, forbids lawlessness and irresponsibility, and makes us feel guilt, shame, and fear of the future retribution that it tells us we deserve, when we have allowed ourselves to deny its restraints…Satan’s strategy is to corrupt, desensitize, and if possible kill our consciences. The relativism, materialism, narcissism, secularism, and hedonism of today’s Western world help him mightily toward his goal. His task is made yet simpler by the way in which the world’s moral weaknesses have been taken into the contemporary church.[3]
Packer identified the real crux of the issue. Conscience is a God-given warning system that has been deliberately turned off today in a large number of Americans. An alarm cannot warn of danger if it is not connected to a power source.
Slowly and over time the innate ability of Americans to determine right from wrong has been strategically and with malice corrupted. The constant drive to remove and even erase Christianity from the public mind and memory has borne the rottenest of fruit culturally speaking.
How can a culture sustain moral uprightness from generation to generation when even the Church, that instrument of God meant to inform and when necessary, correct culture, begins to emulate the culture? When a society becomes seared in conscience, when a critical mass of people begin to think and advocate for evil under the guise of good, and exchange light for darkness, their minds become seared as with a branding iron and the resultant scar tissue renders them incapable of returning to correct thinking and behavior absent a radical surgery.
The Church is meant to be God’s scalpel, guided by His hand to make perfect incisions to remove the cancer of evil, the scar tissue of a seared conscience, and in so doing, restore right thinking and behavior to all individuals. When the Church refuses to do that mass deception is allowed to congeal and that environment creates hostility toward the truth of man’s precarious condition and toward the only solution to his dilemma.
The answer to this predicament is not for the Church to go with the flow, to seek the path of least resistance, to affirm inclusiveness as that term is meant today and throw open the doors to culture. The only answer that will turn America around is a full-on biblical revival that must start in the pulpits of America and sweep through the local bodies of Christ spread out over this nation. That kind of revival cannot be contained and it will spill over into local school boards, city councils, college campuses, businesses, state representatives, and finally our national leadership. When God’s people once again bow their knee to Him alone, then revival will come, minds will be freed from the bondage of the demonic slavery imposed upon them from God-hating miscreants who have secretly snuck into our churches, communities, and governments at every level.
True biblical revival will transform hearts, heal minds, and lead to tangible action by those delivered from their bondage. True biblical revival will come on the heels of true repentance, a faith that demonstrates a changed heart, mind, and life trajectory.
The Scriptures[4] tell us that: There was the true Light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man. John 1:9
This means that only through faith in Christ will people become free from a seared conscience and the inevitable consequence of that state. Christian, rise up and take your place in the army of God, and march forward in victory, for our God has given us this land. Occupy until He returns!
[1] Quote attributed to author Salman Rushdie found here – https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/offense
[2] See https://dailycaller.com/2019/05/02/planned-parenthood-texas-unborn-cemetery/
[3] J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness.
[4] All Scripture quotations are from the New American Standard Bible, The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
*My original post listed Mr. Packer as “The late.” Mr. Packer is very much alive. My apologies to him and readers.
Barbwire Removes Article Critical of Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council?
I discovered something curious. This is a snapshot of a webpage on Julio Severo’s blog, Last Days Watchman. The red arrows are pointing to hyperlinks. The text links to http://archive.is/Ku5jS.
When you click on either link a snapshot from “archive.today” opens. The entire archived page is published on this webpage below this text. The snapshot of the Barbwire page was taken on March 1, 2019. The page is not published on Barbwire. It is, however, published on Julio’s blog, along with a follow up article he wrote. Here are those webpage links.
http://lastdayswatchman.blogspot.com/2019/02/family-research-council-serving.html
http://lastdayswatchman.blogspot.com/2019/03/who-is-bothered-that-i-asked-more.html
What is this all about?
The Unforgivable Sin: Opposing Liberalism
The Western world generally has lost the concept of man as a creature made in the image and likeness of God, and reduced him… to a component part of the universe… This distortion of the true nature of man was due principally to the philosophy of historical liberalism, which saw man as endowed with no higher destiny than the economic. There is no word more “dangerous” than liberalism, because to oppose it is a new unforgivable sin. — Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
I discovered the quote above at a Roman Catholic website called The Vulnerable People Project.
I was drawn to the website because of the following idea stated on page one of the site, “The Great Campaign for a civilization that venerates the dignity, beauty and worth of the human person from the first movement of life to natural death and spiritedly defends life at every level of governance, from that of the smallest village to alliances and agreements among sovereign nations”
The gold nugget in this ideological dig is “venerating the dignity, beauty and worth of the human person.”
God drew me to this early in my adult life. On February 3, 1980 I decided to follow Jesus. I invited Him to rule over me. I became a partisan for Jesus Christ. After marriage and four years of college studying theology and philosophy God gifted me with four years of living with troubled souls at a place called Bethany Acres. I am honored to have been given the opportunity during those years to not only cooperate with God and my wife in the creation of three boys, but to lead Bethany Acres.
God challenged me to think and act bigger than Bethany Acres. He put me at the Christian Civic League of Maine where He told me to venerate the dignity, beauty and worth of the human person in state government. God further refined that calling. He helped me to take a stand for over two decades in that position for Christian morality.
Paul the Apostle wrote:
“I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith — that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death.”
Philippians 3:8-10
The source of Christian power is suffering.
From a page at the Vulnerable People Project website:
As the price of calling ourselves Christians, we must make our case for natural law, religious and economic liberty, the sanctity of life, and the truth about sex year in and year out, regardless of the vagaries of particular candidates and party platforms. Pragmatically, we have no other option. All those truths are inevitable implications of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which He ordered us to preach even in the face of persecution, offering us this promise:“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (Matthew 5: 10-12) Millions of Christians have seen the need to keep fighting as clearly as many Catholics have. In fact, evangelical leaders and theologians have come a long way toward accepting the necessity of classically Catholic natural law reasoning, instead of relying on Biblical proof-texts, cultural inertia, and natural repugnance in fighting back against the latest outrages proposed by sexual revolutionaries. This is enormous progress. As the ecumenical effort to fight back against the Obama administration’s HHS mandate showed, Christians can prevail when we act together—when the Protestant owners of Hobby Lobby cooperate with the Little Sisters of the Poor. There are many organizations that serve the cause of protecting religious liberty and unborn life across denominational lines, and we should energetically support them. We should also work with other organizations fighting to preserve the basic liberties of Americans, even if they are not religiously motivated, to protect our own rights to economic initiative, self-defense, private property, and free speech. We must look back to the dignified, free, responsible vision of man upon which our great Republic was founded, a profoundly Christian vision, which is Catholic because it is true. Defending the Bride of Christ from the modernist agenda, this will be our reason to have been here. There is nothing lovelier, nothing more profound, than the correct and true teachings of the Catholic Church positively impacting the individual, a society, a nation and the world.
Make no mistake this fight is both Christian and global. God is pulling back the veil and letting us see in bold colors the profound evil, hatred and ugliness that is Satan. We fight Him. While it is true that the Left has obviously decided to make Him their god, we see every single person in this satanic movement as a person who has intrinsic dignity, beauty and worth.
God help us to win.