Stand To for 16 December, 2013

Veterans Push Back with Prayer

0700 at BJ’s Restaurant

Hamilton, Montana

 

1. Opening - Round the Table Individual Prayers

2. Morning Psalm: 85

3. Breakfast Reading: Mark 13:1-13, 24-37

4. Breakfast is served

5. Breakfast Discussion Topic:

          Westminster Shorter Catechism in Modern English

           Each question posted at:  http://pushbackwithprayer.blogspot.com/2013/12/westminster-shorter-catechism-in-modern.html

          Holy Saturday March for Jesus Christ April 19, 2014

6. Closing - Round the Table Individual Prayers

NFL Player Turned Pastor Derwin Gray Shares How He Found 'Authentic Peace'

By Jeff Schapiro

 

December 10, 2013|8:59 am

Pastor Derwin Gray told Saddleback Church attendees over the weekend that even while he was playing in the NFL he didn't experience "authentic peace" until he committed his life to Jesus Christ.
Gray, who played as a defensive back for the Indianapolis Colts and Carolina Panthers, is the lead pastor of Transformation Church in Indian Land, S.C. He spoke at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif. this past weekend in the stead of Pastor Rick Warren, who he called his mentor, as part the church's advent series.
Gray says his mother and father were just teenagers when he was born, and he was raised primarily by his grandmother. He grew up in Texas just a half-mile from some government housing projects and says his childhood was anything but peaceful.
"Peace was not a part of my life. As a matter of fact, it was a war zone. It was a living hell," he said.
At the age of 13, he says, football became his god. He worshiped it because he saw it as an opportunity to get a scholarship and escape the situation he was living in. His high school football team won a state title, and he received a scholarship to play at Brigham Young University, where he met his wife, Vicki.
Gray was drafted by the Indianapolis Colts in 1993, and by his third year he was voted team captain. But even after accumulating wealth and finding success on the football field, however, he says he realized his accomplishments could not provide him with peace. He still struggled to forgive his father for being absent from his life, and his career successes could not help him love his wife better or take away his fear of being cut from the team.
Steve Grant, a linebacker who was known as the "naked preacher" in the Colt's locker room for evangelizing teammates while wearing nothing but a towel around his waist, asked Gray early in his NFL career if he knew Jesus. Gray responded simply by saying that he was a "good person."
"By the way, time out. Do you know how arrogant of a statement that is, to say, 'I'm a good person'?" said Gray. "In order for me to say 'I'm good' it means I judge somebody else as worse than me, which is one of the worst things that we could do. The beauty of the cross of Jesus is that the foot of the cross, it is level, and we're all in need of grace and forgiveness and mercy."
Gray says Grant, citing Romans 3:23, helped him realize that he has fallen short of God's standards, and that only Jesus was able to perfectly live up to those standards. Gray says he watched the way Grant lived out his faith during the next several years, and in August 1997 Gray called his wife and said he also needed to commit his life to Christ.
"At that moment I knew, for the first time in my life, that I was loved," said Gray. "That there was somebody who loved Derwin Gray, and it wasn't because I could run fast, it wasn't because I could jump high, it wasn't because I could help them win a game, but there was somebody who loved me with a passion that was so great and so marvelous and so beautiful that they went to the cross for me, to take my sins and nail them to the cross and nail all of God's righteousness and love to me, and it blew me away."
Jesus gives believers an authentic peace with God, says Gray, which he calls "upward" peace. He went on to name several other areas of life where Christ gives peace as well.
Christ offers believers "inward" peace even when the circumstances of their lives are unsettling, suggested Gray. In 2004, for example his wife was diagnosed with cancer. The night the diagnosis was revealed to them, Derwin and Vicki Gray lay in bed crying, and they only felt peace after they began quoting scripture to each other. Vicki Gray is now cancer free, but even if she had died, says Gray, there would be reason to praise God, because he would see her once again.
Gray also discussed the "outward" peace Christ gives, which is reflected in human relationships. In 2001 he heard a voice telling him to search for his father, he says, which made him "angry" and "offended." He didn't think he should have to seek out the father who abandoned him, until he sensed God telling him that Jesus sought him out and forgave him so he could become "an extension of [Christ's] forgiveness."
Gray discovered that his father was in prison, and wrote a letter to him saying he loved and forgave him, and they reconciled with one another.
"The response of someone else is not our job. It's only our job to extend forgiveness and peace," said Gray.
Jesus also gives Christians peace in the face of death, said Gray, and they are to use the peace they receive to be missionaries in their homes, schools and work environments.
"There is no bigger mission than becoming an agent of peace in a world that desperately needs it," said Gray.
Gray is the author of Hero: Unleashing God's Power in a Man's Heart and Limitless Life: You Are More Than Your Past When God Holds Your Future. Transformation Church, which was listed as Outreach Magazine's second-fastest growing church by percentage in 2010, has two campuses in northern South Carolina.

Islamic Jihad on Christian Nuns: A History

By Raymond Ibrahim

Yet another phenomenon with a long paper trail in Islamic history has just taken place, even as the Western "mainstream" -- little acquainted with true history or reality -- dismisses it as an aberration. Asia News has the details:

Islamist rebels have kidnapped a group of nuns from the Greek Orthodox monastery of St Thecla (Mar Taqla) in Maaloula [an ancient Christian community where Christians were earlier forced to convert to Islam or die]... "Armed men burst in the monastery of St Thecla in Maaloula this afternoon [Dec. 2]. From there, they forcibly took 12 women religious," Mgr Zenari said .... Neither the nuncio nor the Greek Orthodox Church know [the] reason behind the kidnapping.

The "reason behind the kidnapping"? Sexual abuse and rape certainly should not be discounted, as these have been the lot of thousands of women abducted by U.S.-sponsored "freedom fighters" in Syria. Indeed, a new report issued by the National Reconciliation Commission in Syria states that some 37,000 women have been raped since the war started.

To keep the jihad in Syria alive, pro-war Islamic clerics have issued any number of fatwas, or Islamic rulings, permitting sexually frustrated, female-deprived rebels to rape women. Most of these are based on the simple fact that Islam permits jihadis, based on the example of the prophet, to copulate with any captured woman -- or, in the words of the Koran, "what your right hands possess" (see "The Jihad on Christian Women: Abduction, Rape, and Forced Conversion," pgs. 186-199 in Crucified Again for detailed information).

One cleric permitted the abduction and rape of any Syrian woman, provided she is not Sunni. Yet apparently because there are still not enough women for the jihadi hordes, many of whom are foreigners -- one Christian child was recently raped by 15 men before being killed -- Sunni Muslim women are also being targeted through sex jihad fatwas.

So would such jihadis and their clerics have any special respect for Christian nuns?

The fact is, raped nuns are a phenomenon that goes back centuries. According to Muslim historian Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi (1364-1442), during his raids on Egypt, Caliph Marwan II (r.744-50) "made captive a number of women from among the nuns of several convents. And he tried to seduce one of them." The account describes how the enslaved nun tricked him into killing her, by claiming she had a magic oil that make skin impenetrable: "She then took some oil and anointed herself with it; then stretched out her neck, which he smote with the sword, and made her head fly. He then understood that she preferred death to defilement."

Writing in the 10^th century, the Coptic chronicler Severus ibn Muqaffa records that "the Arabs in the land of Egypt had ruined the country. ... They burnt the fortresses and pillaged the provinces, and killed a multitude of the saintly monks who were in them [monasteries] and they violated a multitude of the virgin nuns and killed some of them with the sword."

Such is history -- expunged as it is in the modern West, even as it repeats itself today. Thus, in August 2013, after torching a Franciscan school, "Islamists," in the words of the AP, "paraded three nuns on the streets like 'prisoners of war'" and "[t]wo other women working at the school were sexually harassed and abused as they fought their way through a mob."

Indeed, the rise in attacks on Christian nuns throughout the Islamic world further demonstrates that they are no more untouchable than other "infidel" women:

• Somalia: In response to Pope Benedict's historical quotes, which, like so many other things -- including teddy bears -- so enraged the Islamic world, Muslims in Somalia shot Leonella Sgarbati -- a 66-year-old nun who had devoted 30 years of her life working in Africa -- in her back. Her last words before dying in hospital were: "I forgive; I forgive."

• Pakistan: In September 2012, gunmen on motorbikes dressed in green (Islam's color) opened fire on the St. Francis Xavier Catholic Cathedral in Hyderabad, murdering at least 28 people. Their immediate target was a nun, Mother Christina.

• Libya: In February 2013, after the fall of Col. Gaddafi, Islamic rebels threatened Christian nuns into fleeing the nation. They had been there since 1921, focused primarily on helping the sick and needy.

• Philippines: In an article discussing a Christmas Day church bombing in a Muslim-majority region, we learn that the jihadi group responsible "has been blamed for several bomb attacks on the Roman Catholic cathedral in Jolo since the early 2000s and for kidnapping priests and nuns."

• Guinea: In June 2013, during a mob-led frenzy, Christians and their churches weresavagely attackedin the Muslim-majority nation -- with some 95 Christians slain and 130 wounded -- including "the quarters of the nuns, [which] was looted before being torched."

The above examples come from five countries that have little in common with one another -- not race, language, culture, or economics. Only Islam.

That alone should say something.

But no matter. Far from discussing Islamic history and doctrine, and how they tie to current events, the predominant Western mentality sees Islamic violence as the West's fault, or, in the recent words of ex-nun Karen Armstrong, "We did this." Armstrong -- who quit the nunnery only to engage in pro-Islamic mummery -- insists that what's needed is for us to focus more on "Muslim pain, Muslim suffering." Such, according to the leftist mentality, are the "real" reasons why, wherever Muslim-majorities live near non-Muslim minorities, the latter are under attack.

Raymond Ibrahim is author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians.

The Religious Left's Moral Fallacy

By Eugene Slaven

President Obama is pivoting once again to decrying the alleged sin of income inequality -- the left's perennial and favorite class-warfare theme. At the same time, the religious left is becoming more vocal in American politics, couching its opposition to income inequality in theological rhetoric.

When Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin took shots at Pope Francis for his apparent critique of capitalism, leftist religious scholar Reza Aslan pounced.

Writing in The Washington Post's "On Faith" section, Mr. Aslan contends that Jesus preached "revolutionary social teachings" whereby "the rich will be made poor, the strong will become weak, and the powerful will be displaced by the powerless."

He writes of Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin:

[I]f these "culture warriors" who so often claim to speak for Jesus actually understood what Jesus stood for, they would not be so eager to claim his ideas for their own. In fact, they'd probably call him a Marxist.

To his credit, Mr. Aslan acknowledges that most modern Christians don't interpret these ostensibly radical pronouncements literally, but treat them as "abstract ethical principles." But then he summarily rejects this interpretation, presumably because it doesn't conform to his own radical leftist views.

The underlying theological doctrine advanced by Mr. Aslan, the popular leftist pastor and writer Jim Wallis, and the nascent left-wing political advocacy group "Nuns on the Bus" is that Jesus would have undoubtedly supported left-wing economic policies, such as wealth redistribution and high taxes.

In his book God's Politics, Jim Wallis -- the godfather of the contemporary religious left -- goes so far as to argue that true Christians should vote Democrat because Republicans favor cutting taxes for the rich (actually, Republicans support cutting taxes for everyone who pays taxes, but that's an inconvenient truth the left chooses to suppress). According to Wallis, tax cuts help the rich and hurt the poor. Ergo, the Republican platform of tax-cutting (and by extension smaller government) is antithetical to the Christian ethic of caring for the poor.

This theory is grounded in two false assumptions.

The first is that tax cuts and smaller government automatically help the rich and hurt the poor, while higher taxes and a larger welfare state do the opposite. This is the quintessential leftist attack on capitalism in general, and it has been empirically debunked in every corner of the globe that has abandoned socialism and radical wealth redistribution in favor of free markets and economic liberty. The infusion of capitalist policies, including lower taxes, has lifted people out of poverty and improved the standard of living for the average person exponentially.

Conversely, every nation that has embraced socialist policies has experienced declining standards of living and increased poverty, not to mention unsustainable levels of debt.

A massive welfare state advocated by Aslan, Wallis, et al. is not a recipe for alleviating poverty and improving the economic wellbeing of the masses. As history teaches us, it is a recipe for economic stagnation, or worse, economic calamity.

The second demonstrably false assumption is that Jesus's lesson that we must help those in need was actually a direct call for left-wing economic policies -- if not outright Marxism, as Aslan gleefully implies.

Speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast last year, President Obama echoed this tripe when he invoked Jesus to support redistributionist policies.

Notwithstanding Aslan's literal understanding of Jesus's premonition that the fortunes of the rich and the poor shall be reversed, at no point in the Bible does Jesus advocate for a coercive government that confiscates wealth from some citizens to give to others.

Jesus was a moral philosopher, not a political philosopher. He preached what the moral individual ought to do and how individuals ought to treat one another. That is decidedly different from advocating a political system in which the government determines what portion of their incomes individuals must forfeit to the state.

The religious left's false assumptions about the free-market economy and Christian duty stem from their conflating voluntary moral action with the government coercing individuals to act "morally." This is a perversion of the very essence of morality.

An action is moral only if the individual, endowed with the gift of free will, chooses to act morally. If you strip the individual of choice, forcing him to give up his income to a cause the state decides is moral, it cannot be said that the individual has acted morally.

Moral action via coercion is a paradox. Only voluntary action can be deemed moral or immoral.

By the same token, leftists conflate society with government. Whenever President Obama and the Democrats celebrate the virtue of people coming together to help those in need, they purport to espouse Christian, and indeed, basic human values. But invariably, they're talking about government force, not voluntary cooperation among individuals. The former is statism; the latter is the cornerstone of a free society.

Beyond confusing voluntary charitable action with state coercion, there's perhaps an even more fundamental point: the more power the state has over the individual, the less likely the state is to act in the best interest of the greatest number of people. To quote Lord Acton, "all power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely."

That is why every socialist regime that has ever existed has been tyrannical. In other words, even if you believe that forcing an individual to be "charitable" at the point of a gun is consistent with Christian theology or general principles of morality (it isn't), the inevitable outcome of state coercion will be not a more charitable and prosperous society, but a more economically depressed and despotic one.

Stand To for 9 December, 2013

Veterans Push Back with Prayer

0700 at BJ’s Restaurant

Hamilton, Montana

 

1. Opening - Round the Table Individual Prayers

2. Morning Psalm: 138

3. Breakfast Reading: Luke 1:5-25, 57-80

4. Breakfast is served

5. Breakfast Discussion Topic: Holy Saturday, 19 April, 2014: March for Jesus Christ

          March Planning Phase: Identify every church in each phase.

                   Phase 1 – Sula, Darby, Hamilton Grantsdale

                   Phase 2 – Corvallis, Pinesdale, Victor

                   Phase 3 – Stevensville, Lone Rock

                   Phase 4 – Florence

                   Phase 5 – Lolo

6. Closing - Round the Table Individual Prayers

For those of you that wondered what happened to America, here is your answer.

December 1, 2013

Morality, Anti-Morality, and Socialism

By Deborah C. Tyler

American life gives individuals the chance to make two kinds of personal choices. Structural choices are the big decisions that configure the course of life and involve significant risk and responsibility -- when to marry, how to support oneself and dependents, where to live. They tend to be made after conscious consideration of alternatives. Functional choices are the everyday decisions such as what words to speak, how to behave towards others, what to eat, and wear. Functional choices tend to be made more or less unconsciously, according to tastes and preferences, without deep consideration of alternatives.
Since the founding of America, personal choice has been organized around the teachings of Judeo-Christian morality. But this psychology of personal choice has been upended by a vast reaction against the idea of morality itself. Today in America the psychological process of personal choice is influenced by anti-moral experimentalism, the end stage of which is socialism.
Morality
A consensual moral code is an integrated body of knowledge taught to children and used by adults as a guide to personal choice. The purpose of morality is to curb selfishness in choice. The American moral code is founded upon the common teachings of the Judeo-Christian religions and comprises three sets of teachings: 1) God-given directives that either require or forbid certain behaviors; 2) psychological attributes called vices; and 3) psychological attributes called virtues.
First, morality encompasses religious statutes and commandments. Second, it concerns aspects of selfishness called vice: pride, lust, anger, greed, jealousy, hatred, and envy. It teaches recognizing and suppressing these tendencies in oneself. Morality teaches that even biological reactions necessary for survival, like anger and sexual lust, create moral vulnerabilities that are to be transcended. Third, the moral code includes virtues, or psychological attributes of selflessness, which are taught by all the Judeo-Christian religions. For example, from the Catholic catechism: chastity; temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, humility. (For some reason, vices and virtues are enumerated in sets of seven.) Morality is the expression of these attributes through virtuous choices.
Prior to the mid-twentieth century, American law, literature, social convention, and popular culture tended to inculcate the tripartite moral code. Moral structural choices tended to be made consciously in light of religion, and moral functional choices were influenced by an ingrained awareness of vice and virtue.
A consensual moral code involves penalty and loss for transgression. While punishment has lightened -- scarlet letters and stocks in the public square went out with those funny collars -- in the early 20th century people whose structural choices violated the moral code might still be shunned or socially restricted. On the level of functional choice, people who behaved in an aggressive, lazy, vulgar or lewd manner were liable to be censured by family and society, and lose their chances for a good life.
Because of the multicultural nature of American society, a consensual moral code has been the glue holding America together and has been indispensable for the functioning and defense of the Republic. Without a moral framework, the only force in society which restrains harmfulness is the law. The weakening of the moral code is why people today call the police for everything. The "greatest generation" was really only the last generation of Americans who were taught the same moral code; and as the unifying power of consensual morality diminishes, America declines.
Anti-Morality
The rise of anti-morality has been the most transformational psychological shift in American history, but it is not recognized as such. Anti-morality should not be confused with amorality or immorality. It is the affirmative belief that an enforced moral code diminishes individual potential and power. Anti-morality is a reaction against the belief that selfishness is the primary cause of suffering. According to anti-moral beliefs, suffering arises not from selfish choices, but when a person is blocked from "self-actualization" by restrictive and oppressive social conditions. Anti-morality is the belief that morally based discrimination and penalty are narrow-minded, bigoted, and thwart freedom.
What caused anti-morality to take hold in America? Some call these the "end of days" when cruelty and vice reign. Also, immorality historically increases in wealthy societies as affluence makes moral regulation less necessary for survival. The shift away from personal choice based on morality was also abetted when electronic mass media became the dominant source of cultural conditioning. Morality cannot be enforced through television or computers.
Anti-morality is an unintended consequence of 20th-century humanism. The central tenet of humanism is that personal choice be directed toward the goal of self-actualization. Abraham Maslow and the humanistic psychology movement put forth the ideal of life as a permanent process of finding and becoming oneself. Humanism offers no basis for a consensual moral code. Personal choice is made through a process of experimentalism. Structural choices are made by posing questions: What will work for me? What will actualize my identity? What am I ready for? Functional choices are made according to what feels good and asserts the personality.
There is no shame, guilt, or personal responsibility in humanist experimentalism. If a choice appears to work out badly the experimenter says, "I learned a lot," and moves on. Wreckage left behind is part of the journey of self-discovery.
An unintended consequence of anti-moral humanism has been the unleashing of selfishness. Freedom in all its forms is dependent on the moral integrity of a society. The ascendency of anti-morality is why the family, the free market, and the military are all in decline, and opiates are the religion of the masses.
Humanist experimentalism is not threatened by belief in God, but it can't abide morality. Anti-morality can include a belief in a deity who is like a personal coach, helpful in choosing experiments, but not a God of law and judgement. Many experimentalists believe they are very moral, and pride themselves on following a less judgmental morality. This is self-delusion. No matter how much angst one brings to the question, "What will work for me?" humanist experimentalism remains a process of following your own lights, a lantern carried by a blind man.
Progressivism is the fear that someone, somewhere is behaving morally. As anti-morality flourishes, its mouthpieces become more abusive to anyone they believe typifies morality, as it becomes more difficult for them to repress their own sense of shame.
Anti-morality is why the education of children no longer focuses on examples of virtue but emphasizes self-esteem. A strong sense of self is necessary to make self-actualizing personal choices. It doesn't matter if George Washington told the truth when he chopped down the cherry tree. The question is how did he feel about chopping down the tree? Would he chop it down again? It doesn't matter that the tree is dead, as long as he learned something from the experience.
Socialism
Socialism is the endgame of anti-morality. When Abraham Maslow introduced the term "self-actualization" in 1943, he did not foresee the paradox that the ideal of freedom from stifling convention would undermine moral responsibility and pave the way for socialist tyranny in America. Socialism obviates morality in personal choice and replaces it with the pathetic fallacy of virtuous government. Governments cannot be virtuous, only people and dogs can.
Socialism encourages venality and corruption because it operates on the level of law, not morality. American socialism encourages people to contribute as little as possible while taking everything they can get -- inevitably less than what virtuous effort can earn in a free-market economy. In Soviet socialism everybody had to work, but American socialism rewards people for the structural choices not to work, not to marry, not to raise and educate their own children.
During the ObamaCare enslavement, Speaker Pelosi made a statement of utmost dopiness, which captures the essence of humanist anti-morality. She said to the effect that if young people had government healthcare they would be freed to be artists and musicians. It expresses the delusion that self-actualization means being an artist, and implicitly denigrates most work and the virtue of diligence. If everyone is to be a government-supported artist, who is left to make things, to raise children, to pay the bills? In other words, socialism works until you run out of other people's morality.

Stand To for 2 December, 2013

Push Back with Prayer

0700 at BJ’s Restaurant

Hamilton, Montana

 

1. Opening - Round the Table Individual Prayers

2. Morning Psalm: 95

3. Breakfast Reading: Matthew 3

4. Breakfast is served

5. Breakfast Discussion Topic:

          Holy Saturday, 19 April, 2014: March for Jesus Christ

          40 miles in 13 hours,

          Start at Sunrise and finish just before sunset,

          Angler’s Roost to Lolo,

          Baptisms

          Renewal of Faith

6. Closing - Round the Table Individual Prayers