Sovereignty

How would you like to be Mary or Joseph at about the time they are notified of the Roman census?

Mary is about nine months pregnant and no matter what Joseph tried to do to make her comfortable on that three day, 60 mile hike to Bethlehem over rugged terrain, it couldn’t have been very enjoyable. Then, to arrive and find that there is no place to stay and end up in the barn, surely must have added insult to injury. And to top it all off, give birth and lay your baby in a feeding trough to keep him away from the hooves of donkeys and goats.Still feeling “highly favored,” Mary?We often mistakenly think that only the right things, the comfortable things, the open doors and things that appear ripe for success, are a part of God’s design. When we encounter closed doors, inconveniences, and hardships we wonder what went wrong.Maybe nothing has gone wrong. Maybe it’s just perfect.

Do Seekers Exist?

The Bible seems to question the assumption that we should regard the typical unbeliever as a seeker of God.

In Romans 3:11, Paul says that there are none that seek God. Furthermore, in 8:7, he writes that the sinful mind is hostile to God.

In 2 Timothy 3:4, he speaks of a time when some even in the church will be lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.

In John 3:19-20, John explains that men loved darkness instead of light and that those who do evil hate the light.

Church Marketing?

A marketing approach to church seems to view people as consumers.

Question:

If the church treats seekers as consumers before they attend a service, will the dangers which accompany a consumer mindset disappear when they join the church?

Life as an Interruption to Prayer

If your prayer life is like mine, you probably recognize a need for improvement. However, the journey into a deeper prayer life can be a difficult one. But, it's worth it!

"Be not afraid of slow progress. Rather, be afraid of no progress."

Following, is a suggestion for a passage to read with your attention on prayer and some of my observations, comments and a practical suggestion. It's good to read the passage yourself and make your own observations before reading mine.

Read Matthew 14.

[6] But when Herod's birthday came, the daughter of Herodias danced before the company and pleased Herod, [7] so that he promised with an oath to give her whatever she might ask. [8] Prompted by her mother, she said, “Give me the head of John the Baptist here on a platter.” [9] And the king was sorry, but because of his oaths and his guests he commanded it to be given. [10] He sent and had John beheaded in the prison, [11] and his head was brought on a platter and given to the girl, and she brought it to her mother. [12] And his disciples came and took the body and buried it, and they went and told Jesus. [Jesus Feeds the Five Thousand] [13] Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a desolate place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. [14] When he went ashore he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them and healed their sick. [15] Now when it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a desolate place, and the day is now over; send the crowds away to go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” [16] But Jesus said, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” [17] They said to him, “We have only five loaves here and two fish.” [18] And he said, “Bring them here to me.” [19] Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass, and taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven and said a blessing. Then he broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. [20] And they all ate and were satisfied. And they took up twelve baskets full of the broken pieces left over. [21] And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children. [Jesus Walks on the Water] [22] Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go before him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. [23] And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up on the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone,

My observations, comments, practical suggestion:

Sometimes interruptions are opportunities. In other words, not all interruptions are bad. Jesus wanted to be alone, but when the people found out where He was, they came to Him. He did not send them away, but healed their sick and fed them. But notice that afterward He resumed His prayer time.

My friend, Jeremy, said that Jesus didn't look at prayer as interrupting life, but that, for Jesus, life interrupted prayer.

If, in prayer, we seek to be more like Jesus, we will need to pay attention to interruptions. However, being like Jesus doesn’t mean responding to any and all interruptions.

Here is a suggestion:

Keep a pad of paper with you when you pray. If something comes to mind that seems important or distracts you from your prayer, write it down. Then, ask if that interruption requires immediate action. If it does, be obedient and address it. If it doesn’t, you need not worry about forgetting about it later, for you have written it down. You can resume praying!
Keep in mind that even if you stop praying to attend to an important interruption, your prayer time with God is still important. You should make every effort to come back to it.

Praying

Something that can make listening to God difficult, is that we, on some level, think we know what God is going to say.
In other words, we are often all too familiar with the ways that we have fallen short and know that we are in for a beating when our Father gets ahold of us!

I have two comments about this:

1) It's ok for us to look into the face of God and realize how unworthy we are. In fact, it can't be avoided. God's utter holiness and glory is unfathomable and stands in stark contrast to our dirty rags. BUT, take a look at the next two passages and see what God says and does for Isaiah and Peter when this situation arises:

Isaiah 6:1-7

¹ In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. ² Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. ³ And they were calling to one another:
"Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty;
the whole earth is full of his glory."

⁴ At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

⁵ "Woe to me!" I cried. "I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty."

⁶ Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. ⁷ With it he touched my mouth and said, "See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for."

Luke 5:4-11

[4] And when he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.” [5] And Simon answered, “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets.” [6] And when they had done this, they enclosed a large number of fish, and their nets were breaking. [7] They signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both the boats, so that they began to sink. [8] But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” [9] For he and all who were with him were astonished at the catch of fish that they had taken, [10] and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. And Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.” [11] And when they had brought their boats to land, they left everything and followed him.

2) Sometimes we are simply wrong about what God is going to say to us. Maybe God will choose another way to minister to us besides conviction. Maybe He will use comfort, love, mercy, or just a simple touch of His presence. Our job is to be receptive during prayer, not predictive.
Read the following quote from Philip Yancey during an interview about his book, The Jesus I Never Knew:

"I remember a long night sitting in uncomfortable Naugahyde chairs in O'Hare Airport, waiting impatiently for a flight that was delayed for five hours. Author Karen Mains happened to be traveling to the same conference. The long delay and the late hour combined to create a melancholy mood. I was writing the book, Disappointment With God at the time, and I felt burdened by other people's pains and sorrows, doubts and unanswered prayers.
Karen listened to me in silence for a very long time, and then out of nowhere she asked a question that has always stayed with me. "Philip, do you ever just let God love you?" she said. "It's pretty important, I think."
I realized with a start that she had brought to light a gaping hole in my spiritual life. For all my absorption in the Christian faith, I had missed the most important message of all. The story of Jesus is the story of a celebration, a story of love. It involves pain and disappointment, yes, for God as well as for us. But Jesus embodies the promise of a God who will go to any length to get his family back.

Denying Human Rights: A How-To Guide (Part 7)

This is the last of a seven part series of posts that come from a paper I wrote.

Because the paper is somewhat long, I decided to cut it into smaller pieces and post it in seven installments.

Consequently, as you read any of the posts on any given day, there may be a contextual flow of thought that is not readily perceived.

Simply scroll down to find the first post.

Please enjoy.

Denying Human Rights: A How-To Guide (part VII)

When all else fails with regards to denying fundamental human rights to those who should not have them by use of the various steps of the SLED test, it should be noted that one could still, yet deny those rights by taking one more step.
I call it the C-SLED (cumulative SLED).
In other words, if there is any confusion about whether a being meets any single requirement of the SLED test; we simply state that the being must meet them all. In so doing, we safeguard our method for categorizing human beings against those fancy philosophers and theological thinkers that would seek to undermine our efforts in this area. This step is necessary to ensure the outcome that we desire as a result of SLED testing, namely, that only the right human beings receive human rights. It is important for our method to be able to overcome objections and withstand any accusations of mistaken reasoning by those who would attempt to point out any fallacies in what is clearly a well reasoned, logically coherent argument for dividing human beings and objectively determining the legitimacy of any claim to, so called, human rights.

As you can see, it is critically important to have a method for determining which human beings should have human rights, and I believe that if the human race is going to continue to thrive and evolve, this issue of who should and shouldn’t have these rights is of paramount importance and deserves the type of deep thinking and sound reasoning that you have seen demonstrated here.

Denying Human Rights: A How-To Guide Part 6

This is the sixth in a series of posts that come from a paper I wrote for my English class.
Because the paper is long, I decided to cut it into smaller pieces and post it over the next few days.
Consequently, as you read any of the posts on any given day, there may be a contextual flow of thought that is not readily perceived.

Simply scroll down to find the first post.

Please enjoy.

Denying Human Rights: A How-To Guide (part VI)

The criteria we will hereby use to ensure that many human beings
(the right ones, of course) will be considered non-persons and, therefore, may have fundamental human rights denied them, revolves around

Size, Level of development, Environment, and Degree of dependency.

• Everyone knows “size matters.” I propose that, for the purpose of being able to deny fundamental human rights, we create a minimum size requirement. This is not to say that as a human being grows or shrinks that the number of rights would grow or shrink with her, but simply to establish a convenient and eminently measurable way of determining when these rights should begin to be honored and protected. This also provides a way for a human being to go from being a non-person to being a person if just the non-person in question is able to undergo some change that causes him or her or it to gain the correct size. It would seem rather intolerant of me to deny such a poor soul at least the opportunity to improve his lot in life.

• Everyone has differences in their level of development. For example, I am quite advanced, developmentally speaking, in the area of intellect and reasoning capacity. I am also a fine physical specimen, if I do say so myself. Now then, in addition to meeting a minimum size requirement, it seems obvious that there should also be a minimum level of development that a non-person should have to reach before being granted “personhood.” We wouldn’t want a being of serious mental or physical underdevelopment driving around on our roads, casting votes at election time, performing surgery, delivering mail, or even cleaning toilets for that matter. It seems essential, then, to set some sort of minimum standard for mental and physical development, and who better to create such criteria than me. (However, I would entertain arguments in support of the likes of Peter Singer, Richard Dawkins, Marian Van Court, Charles Murray, Christopher Hitchens, Glayde Whitney, and others, who, through their writings in support of atheism and eugenics have shown reasoning capacity that is equal to or better than my own.)
  
• Environment is one of the least controllable factors for non-persons and one of the most variable. Nevertheless, there should be certain environmental “norms” that are established to determine when any given environment is conducive to personhood. In other words, since environmental factors such as availability of nutrients, clean air, temperature variation, access to care, protection from the elements, and so on, clearly have an impact on other important criteria for personhood such as level of development and degree of dependency, they should be taken into consideration any time questions of personhood arise.
  
• Degree of dependency may be the most important measure of personhood. For, what type of being could possibly be considered a person when that being is totally and utterly dependent on someone or something other than itself for its very life? These types of non-persons are the most socially, emotionally, mentally and economically destructive. For example, would there even be a health care crisis in the United States if medical professionals could only focus their attention on persons and forget about non-persons who don’t have fundamental human rights anyway? Clearly, it is the underdeveloped, the small (in one way or another) and environmentally challenged that seem to use up all our resources, thereby creating some type of inverse entitlement system where persons are discriminated against in favor of the vast minority of non-persons. You can readily see why the dependency issue is so crucial. Its impact is widespread and negatively affects the human beings that are most deserving of personhood.

Denying Human Rights: A How-To Guide Part 5

This is the fifth in a series of posts that come from a paper I wrote for my English class.
Because the paper is long, I decided to cut it into smaller pieces and post it over the next few days.
Consequently, as you read any of the posts on any given day, there may be a contextual flow of thought that is not readily perceived.

Simply scroll down to find the beginning.

Please enjoy.

Denying Human Rights: A How-To Guide (part V)

Now for the fun part; determining which of these human beings we will allow to have these fundamental rights to life and treatment with dignity.
Let’s face it; we don’t really want ALL human beings to have these rights do we? We don’t want to go about granting these types of rights all willy-nilly to just anyone, would we? And we certainly wouldn’t want fundamental human rights to interfere with other important rights.
For example, fundamental human rights should not infringe upon science’s rights to certain types of research and testing in the development of cures for various diseases.
The right of a person to choose is an example of another important freedom that fundamental human rights should not infringe upon.
However, it’s easy to see how a being could pass the taxonomic and genetic tests for “human-ness” and still be unworthy of fundamental human rights, isn’t it? It seems necessary then, to create more categories in an effort to further divide human beings into the types that should have fundamental rights and the types that shouldn’t.
Once again, I have a suggestion. Let’s divide human beings into two groups: those that should have fundamental human rights and those that should not.
We will call those who should have these rights, persons, and those that should not, non-persons.
This will provide a way to move from such all-inclusive terminology as “human being,” to more exclusive terminology, “person.” In this way, we will be able to deny the assumption that human beings have rights intrinsically and replace that assumption with a more workable extrinsic system that only allows for human rights when certain conditions have been fulfilled.
I will describe these conditions with the following acronym:
S L E D.

Denying Human Rights: A How-To Guide Part 4

This is the fourth in a series of posts that come from a paper I wrote for my English class.
The paper is long so, I decided to cut it into smaller pieces and post it over the next few days.
Consequently, as you read any of the posts on any given day, there may be a contextual flow of thought that is not readily perceived.

Simply scroll down to find the beginning.

Please enjoy.

Denying Human Rights: A How-To Guide (part IV)

Since science has given us the tremendous discovery of the double helix and genome sequence, we can use DNA testing as the foundation of our genetic category.

With DNA testing we can now answer many questions. For example, if blood is found at the scene of a crime, it can be determined whether it belongs to the victim or someone else. If there is a suspect in custody, this same testing can help verify or contradict his/her alibi.

Another great example exists in the field of anthropology. When bones are discovered that have testable DNA remaining in them, it can be determined whether they are human or animal. In fact, DNA testing is now being used to confirm and sometimes contradict accepted evolutionary theories regarding pathways from lower forms of hominid species to humans.

DNA testing provides the most accurate way of determining whether a being is a human being or not and is 99.99% effective.

Denying Human Rights: A How-To Guide III

This is the third in a series of posts that come from a paper I wrote for my English class.
The paper is seven or eight pages long, so, I decided to cut it into smaller pieces and post it over the next few days.
Consequently, as you read any of the posts on any given day, there may be a contextual flow of thought that is not readily perceived.

I encourage you, however, to keep reading (and sometimes re-reading) the subsequent posts (and prior posts) as it will become clearer as you go.

Please enjoy.

Denying Human Rights: A How-To Guide (part III)

Two questions must be answered here:

The first is, “What is a human being?” This might sound like a strange question to ask but there is much dispute on this topic as it pertains to the question of human rights. Once we have answered the question about which beings will be classified as human beings, we come to the next question:

“Should each and every one of these human beings be granted these two fundamental rights?” Or, another way of asking the question might be: “Under what circumstances can these rights be denied?” Once again, this may seem like an odd question, since, as we define which beings are and aren’t human beings, one might think that the rights simply fall into place but this also is a topic of debate among people and even in countries with a high value of and commitment to human rights, there seem to be times when these rights are denied.

Let’s answer these questions.
The first question is the easiest to answer in my opinion. I suggest we use the two criteria which scientifically and conclusively leave no room for doubt as to which beings are human beings. Let’s call these two criteria the taxonomic and the genetic systems of categorizing beings. These two systems of classification share much in common but come to their conclusions in different ways.

According to the taxonomic system, a human being is that which is in the kingdom animalia; phylum chordata; class mammalia; order primates; family hominidae; genus homo; species homo sapiens; and subspecies homo sapiens sapiens. According to science, only one type of being fulfills all of those categories at once; a human being.

Denying Human Rights: A How-To Guide II

This is the second in a series of posts that come from a paper I wrote for my English class that I wanted to share.
The paper is seven or eight pages long, but that is too much for your average blog post.
So, I decided to cut it into smaller pieces and post it over the next few days. Consequently, as you read any of the posts on any given day, there may be a contextual flow of thought that is not readily perceived.
I encourage you, however, to keep reading (and sometimes re-reading) the subsequent posts (and prior posts) as it will become clearer as you go.

Please enjoy.

Denying Human Rights: A How-To Guide (part II)

However, if we are to continue this discussion of the most effective way to deny fundamental human rights to those who should not have them, it would be critical to understand what fundamental human rights are!
For example, do all human beings have the right to government funded health care? How about clean drinking water? Is it true that all human beings have the right to not be enslaved by other human beings? What about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? What about other rights such as: freedom of speech, democracy, a minimum wage, citizenship in the country of your choice, cost of living pay increases, internet access, a trial by a jury of one’s peers, shelter, clothing, freedom of choice, or dozens of other possibilities?
I have heard it said that the most basic and fundamental human rights are the right to life and the right to be treated with dignity and that if only those are granted, 99% of all the evils of the world would be eliminated. Whether this is true or not, I am not sure, but for purposes of discussion and in the interest of simplicity I will assume that human rights don’t get much more fundamental than that.
Nevertheless, this is not enough, for, while we have come up with some type of workable definition for what the most basic and fundamental of all human rights are, we still have not determined who gets them and how to deny them.

Denying Human Rights: A How-To Guide

I wrote a paper for my English class that I wanted to share.
The paper is seven or eight pages long, but that is too much for your average blog post.
So, I decided to cut it into smaller pieces and post it over the next few days. Consequently, as you read any of the posts on any given day, there may be a contextual flow of thought that is not readily perceived.
I encourage you, however, to keep reading (and sometimes re-reading) the subsequent posts (and prior posts) as it will become clearer as you go.

Please enjoy.

Denying Human Rights: A How-To Guide

It is not true that all human beings have fundamental human rights.
Have you been to Darfur lately? In Darfur, government sanctioned ethnic cleansing occurs daily. Remember a place called Rwanda? Same story there. How about Kosovo? If these place names don’t jog your memory, maybe 1940’s Germany and Adolf Hitler or Russia and Joseph Stalin will be more familiar examples.

But, one might object that there is a difference between “is” and “ought.”
In other words, just because a situation “is” a certain way, doesn’t mean it “ought” to be that way. Someone who holds this point of view would say that while certain basic and fundamental human rights really do exist and “ought” to be honored among human beings, it, unfortunately, “is” the case that they are not granted to all human beings at all times.
This is not a problem with rights but a problem with humans. And it is not whether these rights are or aren’t granted that determines when and which human beings get them. Human beings should have these fundamental rights simply because we are human beings.
This person would also certainly agree to the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic rights, meaning that human beings have intrinsic rights by virtue of being human and that these rights are not somehow added to us from some outside source (extrinsically).