Tuesday, November 05, 2024

A New Bible Interaction Approach

Yesterday not only marked our marriage anniversary, it also marked the completion of a year’s worth of very valuable interaction with Tim Tebow’s Mission Possible One-Year Devotional. It has been a very helpful resource. Claire and I are regular donors to the Tim Tebow Foundation; we pray for them at least once a week; and we were blessed to participate in the “Night To Shine” ministry last year with plans to do so again this year and beyond. So, yes; we think a great deal of this young man, his family, and the multifaceted ministries he and his team lead. But spending time each morning with this devotional this last year has increased even more our admiration and gratitude for what the Lord is doing in Tim Tebow’s life and ministries. Thus, we recommend both the devotional and the Foundation’s work very highly.

However, beginning today we are trying a new method for our daily devotionals. It is one that involves 5 days a week of Scripture readings (the specific schedule of which I will organize as we go along) and a simple five step interaction with the text. 

1) Read. Take your time and read carefully and prayerfully the scheduled text. 
2) Reflect. Think about what you are reading with a specific attention to relevant applications. 3) Consider. Consider things from the day’s text that might prompt more study, what stimulates a specific action response, what things you might want to talk about with your spouse and others, etc. 4) Write. Write down items from Steps 2 and 3 plus perhaps other items to thank God for, to confess, to apply more wisely and diligently, to pray about, and so on. 5) Pray. Take a few minutes to talk to God about these matters.

By the way, why is it only a 5-day schedule? Well, it makes for a more do-able plan in that gives you a couple days grace to deal with other texts (like the Sunday sermon or a podcast that you’ve heard), to catch up in case you missed a day during the week, to use the time to pursue some of the questions arising from the week’s previous readings, and so on. 

Anyhow, we’re going to give it a go. Lord Jesus, please bless this effort with success.

Our first schedule is listed below. Feel free to use it or to share here in the comments section a devotional approach that you have found successful. And, by all means, if you are looking for a devotional book, you would do very well indeed to select Tim Tebow’s Mission Possible Daily Devotional.

1) Ephesians 1: 1-10 (Take 2 days with this text.)
2) Stay with Ephesians 1: 1-10
3) Ephesians 1: 11-14
4) Ephesians 1: 15-23 (2 days)
5) Stay with Ephesians 1: 15-23

6) Ephesians 2: 1-7 (2 days)
7) Stay with Ephesians 2: 1-7 
8) Ephesians 2: 8-10
9) Ephesians 2: 11-18
10) Ephesians 2: 19-22

11) Ephesians 3: 1-7
12) Ephesians 3: 8-13
13) Ephesians 3: 14-21 (2 days)
14) Stay with Ephesians 3:14-21
15) Ephesians 4: 1-6

16) Ephesians 4: 7-16
17) Ephesians 4: 17-24
18) Ephesians 4: 25-31 (2 days)
19) Stay with Ephesians 4: 25-31
20) Ephesians 5: 1-7

21) Ephesians 5: 8-14
22) Ephesians 5: 15-21
23) Ephesians 5: 22-33
24) Ephesians 6: 1-9
25) Ephesians 6: 10-20 (3 days)

26) Stay with Ephesians 6: 10-20 
27) Stay with Ephesians 6: 10-20 
28) Ephesians 6: 21-24

Monday, November 04, 2024

It's An Anniversary Day!

Claire and I are celebrating our 53rd wedding anniversary today. Well, true enough, ours wasn’t the traditional wedding service. For instead of a church and a minister, we had the Council Bluffs courthouse and a judge. And instead of a service featuring candles, flowers, and lovely music, ours featured something quite unusual; namely, an interruption and delay of the proceedings in order that the judge could sentence a handcuffed and shackled prisoner! 

But though, the regular wedding it was not, we were legally, lovingly, and in the sight of the gracious God who brought us together, wedded indeed. We have very much enjoyed the adventure we started on that day, especially the wonderful opportunity God gave us to minister together for His Kingdom. As a matter of fact, that’s how today's anniversary began -- joining a few beloved colleagues for prayers and public pro-life witness in front of the wickedly misnamed abortion business, Planned Parenthood.

By the way, the photo collage here shows that kind-hearted judge smiling upon our first married kiss whereas the photo in the lower right corner shows the same couple 53 years later to the day, now old warhorses from the pro-life battles of the last several decades. (In between are a couple of photos of those love-struck kids as they grew up.)

Saturday, November 02, 2024

The Top 5 (November 2)

* "This Race Is Close Only Because the Public Education Indoctrination Mill Has Succeeded" (Stephen Kruiser, PJ Media)

From the article -- The United States of America should not be on the precipice that it is now, with freedom-loving citizens terrified of being tossed into the abyss by this election. In a sane world, Kamala Harris wouldn't have made it out of San Francisco, let alone this close to the presidency. Now we're hoping for the best amid all this craziness....If we get lucky and Trump returns to the Oval Office, Republicans really need to move the school choice issue up higher on the priorities list, or they'll find themselves in this precarious existential threat position in every presidential election. It does get moved to the front burner once in a while — Trump has often spoken strongly in favor of it — but it too often gets moved to a back burner when there are so many problems with national security and the economy. 

Again, Republicans won't be in much of a position to address issues like national security and the economy if we keep spending egregious amounts of taxpayer money to crank out good little Dem automatons.  Obviously, the well-indoctrinated K-12 kids who go on to college have the ripest minds for the final corruption by tenured professors who are ideologically about 10 miles to the left of Karl Marx.

* "What’s behind the Explosion of Churches Starting Christian Schools?" (Sarah Holliday, Washington Stand)

From the article -- Part of this wake-up call, Backholm went on to say, is also because the church is starting to see “the consequences of what happens [when] we allow pagans to be the leaders and the disciples of all of those hours.” Perkins added, “When pagans are teaching and training” children in the education system, “you get pagans” as a result. “That’s what happens,” he contended. “We send our kids off to Babylon, and we wonder why they come back as Babylonians.” But churches are waking up to this reality and “increasingly … stepping up to take charge,” Backholm said, which is largely fueling the growth in Christian schools.

Perkins pointed out that the efforts across the country to promote school choice are also playing a role. Backholm agreed, noting how Americans have noticed “there are partisan differences in the way states are being led,” especially regarding the education system. There are now “dozens of states [that] have recognized that we want parents to be the guardians and the leaders and the shapers of their children’s education,” which in many cases has led to the “decision that we should not force children to be placed in a school that teaches only secularism.”

Ultimately, Backholm emphasized, “All schools teach morals. All schools teach a worldview. All schools teach some form of functional religion.” In recent history, he noted, there’s been “this idea … that the government schools, the secularism of the government school, is the only religion that should be taught.”

* "Subcontracting Our Minds" (Timothy Burns, Public Discourse)

From the article -- As Rousseau put it, for the inhabitant of bourgeois society, it is necessary “to be or to seem.” AI will hand you the means to seem—at least so long as you are delivering the speech. It will deprive you of the ability to be...

AI will surely also further the path toward soulless homogeneity that characterizes so much of the modern world, the drift toward what James Kunstler has called “the geography of nowhere.” We will experience the rapid loss of the charming particulars that have hitherto been found in speeches drawn from the speakers’ own individual experiences and the admiration of how those experiences have been artfully crafted into a speech. AI will offer collections of cylinders for a music-box mind.

* "What’s Behind Kamala Harris’ Connection To A Mass Murdering Cult Leader?" (Paul Siewers, Federalist)

From the article -- In the 1970s, support from Democrat leaders enabled Jones to operate his abusive cult. Harris’ ex-boyfriend Brown, a former California Assembly speaker and San Francisco mayor, reportedly attended Jones’ Peoples Temple several dozen times and praised Jones liberally. San Francisco Mayor George Moscone appointed Jones chair of the city Housing Authority Commission.

LGBTQ icon Harvey Milk spoke often at Jones’ congregation, saying he found there “a sense of being … I can never leave.” Brown introduced Jones at a testimonial dinner positively as “a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein … Chairman Mao.” Brown’s flippancy about Mao, likely the greatest mass-killing leader of history, was more chilling given Jones’ finale, the greatest cluster of forced civilian deaths of Americans prior to 9/11.

Until then, with Jones as an ally Brown spearheaded legalizing homosexuality in California, building his political clout in what became ground zero of the new American civil religion, now also known as “wokeness.” The new quasi-religious awokening from the start sought to override the “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” cited in the Declaration of Independence.

Brown disavowed Jones, but only after the tragedy at Jonestown. Harris never disavowed Brown...

* "Preventable Tragedies: Why De-transitioners Are Suing Doctors: As many doctors are dangerously pushing gender-transition drugs and surgeries, de-transitioners are speaking out about the harms." (Grant Atkinson, ADF)

From the article -- Broadly speaking, de-transitioners are individuals who have chosen to stop receiving dangerous transition drugs or pursuing other body-altering procedures that doctors said would resolve their mental health struggles or discomfort with their sex. De-transitioners have typically come to embrace their biological sex and no longer wish to identify inconsistently with it.

Tragically, some transition efforts are irreversible. When a doctor removes a young woman’s healthy breasts, for example, she will never be able to nurse her children. And prescribing dangerous puberty-blocking drugs can cause irreversible damage on a child’s brain development and even affect a young woman’s ability to later conceive. Health-care professionals who tell parents and young people that these drugs and procedures are “safe and reversible” are lying.

Doctors who push their patients to undergo these dangerous “gender transition” efforts fail to follow the basic medical dictate to “do no harm.”