This is nothing new: there have always been cabals and oligarchies, despots and tyrants lusting after money and power throughout recorded history; people amassing gold and armies with both serving to increase the other, lending under usury the former to all who would take it and threatening those who would try to live apart from the system with the latter. What has changed in the heart of man in this regard? What indication have we that we are any less selfish and self-centered than ever?

The “End Game” of the powers that be who crave a centralized international unified world government is coming within several years, which includes a fully prepared invasion of UN/NATO “peace-keeping” forces into the nations of the American continents. Foreign troops with no allegiance to our Constitution and no loyalty to our peoples are already stationed and training for full urban warfare within our borders. These “peace-keeping” forces are already toppling sovereign nation-states without regard for human life or legitimate legal excuse. Ron Paul is the only non-sellout left in the artificial left-right paradigm who presently is qualified, capable and proven faithful to serve as President and willing to place his “life, fortune and sacred honor” on the line in the battle against these persons. If Paul does not win the 2012 Presidential election, 2016 will be largely irrelevant in that barring the direct intervention of the Almighty One, the “End Game” will be underway, possibly with full civil war, if not world war. This is if the several united States even exist as a nation in our Constitutional form at that time. IF we are not going to act now, then when? After we have been disarmed, interned and murdered?

To the professing “Christians” who believe in a “pre-Tribulation” “rapture”: even if this understanding of the scriptures is correct, what makes you think that we are somehow immune from these present troubles? Have we not had our own revolutions and wars on our own soils in the past? What of the believers behind the Iron, Cactus and Bamboo curtains? Are we better and/or more deserving of divine protection than they? These troubles are not the wrath and work of the Almighty One and his messengers but the lusts and machinations of wicked people and fallen spiritual beings.

This is a war and most of us are asleep and angered with those who would wake us up. Voting for Ron Paul will not fix the problem for we, individually, are the problem. Vote for Ron Paul indeed but wake up yourself, first. Accept the mantle of personal responsibility, and liberty and freedom may be ours for the retaking—if it is not too late. We may not win the war with this battle but if we sleep through it, we are sure to lose.

When I first signed up for my Facebook (and other online social networks) account, I used it as a means to connect real life to online life, with no distinction between the two. Over time, my use has changed to view social networking not as the online analog to real life but as a means of enhancing communication. With the nature of social networking being what it is, I quickly came to see the problems inherent with adding people indiscriminately, even those who were mere casual acquaintances. Furthermore, as a person who is actively involved in youth ministry service and as a board member of a not-for-profit corporation that works with minors as its primary purpose, I am sensitive to the legal implications and ramifications of such interactions with minors, especially those with whom my contact is otherwise minimal. In short, I do not want to give the wrong impression in actively seeking out online contacts with those who not of legal age unless there is more than a casual or incidental connection in our lives.

To this end, I no longer send friends requests to non-relatives under the age of majority except in rare circumstances (such as when I’ve made a relatively significant connection through our mutual ministry interactions or they explicitly request it) so as to avoid giving the wrong impression. I have not unfriended any persons previously added as I see no problem with the connections themselves; to do so would only cause more harm than good (the past is exactly that and what is done is done). I accept all friend requests that are initiated by the other person when I know them personally without regard to age (there being a clear record of who initiated the online connection).

Most of your Facebook friends who are mine were probably added through my request before I made this change in personal practice. If you wish to be my Facebook friend, then by all means, send me a request and I’ll gladly accept it. If you know of anyone who might appreciate a friend request, send them a friend suggestion. If I know them, I’ll gladly accept their friend request, too.

Ps. 86:11 – “Teach me your way, O Lord; I will walk in Your truth; Unite my heart to fear your name.” (NASB)

David is praying for a devotion to God that has been cleansed from double-mindedness. Only then will he be able to walk in God’s way consistently and fear God’s name (His holy character) with both reverence and affection. He is praying for a work of divine power to be wrought within him. He knows that he cannot create an undivided heart within himself; it must be a gift of grace.

There is no question as to the supernatural nature of heart holiness. We can surrender, consecrate and trust but only the Holy Spirit can change the foundations of our nature.

People ask, “Do you believe in eradication?” My answer is: “If you mean, does God eradicate my natural instincts and propensities, both physical and mental, in such a way that these faculties can no longer be avenues of temptation thus making sin impossible, my answer is no. I do not believe in that kind of eradication.

“Further, if you mean the annihilation of my self-hood, with its natural self-awareness and instinct of self-preservation, again I must answer no.

“But if you mean the cleansing of my inner motives and springs of actions from that lurking reluctance to embrace the full lordship of Christ in every detail and in all its personal ramifications, then I gladly say yes, I do believe in eradication. I believe that I can be purged from that carnal mindedness which is ‘enmity’ against God (Romans 8:7). Nothing less than this will give us the inward foundation for happy service and growing maturity.”

(Edited for typos and punctuation in the reprint; translation version noted.)

I am going on a medical relief mission trip to Haiti from April 30 to May 7, 2011. As part of a team of approximately one dozen people, my primary responsibility will be to assist in the management and operation of the pharmacy (aka count pills and be the phamacist’s “gopher”). I also will assist in the logistics of transporting the medical supplies that the doctors and nurses will be using to meet the most basic physical needs of the people (grunt labor, go me!).

I ask for two things. First, we need your prayers. Not just for the success of our work, the provision of supplies and funds and the safety of our team, which are serious concerns, but for the good works that we will be doing to touch the hearts and lives of the Haitians whom we will be serving. We desire that the people to whom we will minister will see the pure love and grace of Jesus displayed in our lives and actions, knowing that most of them are practitioners of voodoo, animism, spiritism, mysticism and the dead works of formal religion (with many freely blending them in a pseudo-christian syncretism without distinction) with no knowledge of the true Gospel.

Second, we need your direct assistance, both in resources and finances. We want to take as much medication as possible. While here in the States there are strict rules that require the disposal of drugs long before their effectiveness and safety are compromised, most other nations, especially those in such dire need as Haiti, will gratefully accept anything they can acquire, even if it is past its official US “expiration date” as long as it is still otherwise safe and effective. There are programs available through major pharmaceutical companies and hospitals to receive for free or purchase at a substantially reduced price such life-saving medications that are near their expiration date. In addition, those of us going on this mission are all taking time off from work, many of us using our vacation time and own resources to make this possible; unfortunately, several of those going have limited financial means and need to raise funds to cover the cost of airfare, local transportation, lodging and food.

Please pray with us as we ask God for His hand of blessing and protection as we prepare to reach the Haitians with Jesus’ love by meeting these most basic physical needs. Also please seek God as to how you might be able to assist us in our mission, both sacrificially giving of your own financial resources and seeking donations of supplies for distribution to the Haitians.

If you would like more information about this mission project or how to make a tax-deductible donation, information is provided in the mission information letter from Whipping Post Minisitries and the requested items list.

Please take the time to pray about this serious need and how God may use you to help share his love and mercy with the Haitian people. Thanks!

Downloads

• Haiti Mission 2011 Letter from Whipping Post Ministries (PDF)
• Requested Items List (PDF)

First, almost everyone one in my locally-situtated family just finished suffering throught the single worst case of the flu—it lasted several weeks from beginning to end with my mother still recovering. On the heels of this, earlier this week my brother Eric was diagnosed with severe arthritis, which appeared and became near crippling over only several days. He is a manual laborer who lifts heavy furniture daily, depending on his body for his living. He has three children (9, 4 & 3 yrs) for whom he provides full and sole support. Also, my sister Autumn was just diagnosed with having had a TIA (“ministroke”), apparently about two to three days ago, resulting in a moderate loss of function in her hands, blurred vision in her right eye and confusion with difficulty in thinking. So far, the TIA seems relatively minor but she is still in the hospital for observation and further testing. She is married (her husband is an active-duty Marine) and has three boys (6, 3 & 1 yrs) at home.

Please pray that God heals both of them quickly, giving them a full and immediate recovery, and that we are all protected from further medical issues.

How do these things get started? Here are some online definitions of “personal” [edited for brevity; Merriam-Webster may be able to help....] So from where did the term “personal savior” come? Don’t really care, don’t want to research it, just want to eradicate it. “Accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior” Really? It waters the slippery slope into isolated faith, a dumbed-down Jesus who is at our beck and call to serve us…after all, He is allegedly our personal savior… End of mini-rant. Comments/observations more-than-welcome…

Well, since you asked….

Yes, really—Jesus is our “personal” savior!

We preach and teach that no one can accept Jesus for the individual person except that person: how that we each must “personally” (individually, for and on behalf of only ourselves) respond to the Gospel by God’s grace through faith solely in the merit in of Jesus’ finished work by believing in our heart upon the truths that he died for our sins and that God raised him from the dead and confessing with our mouths that he is Lord; how that we must “personally” repent towards God—not just feel sorry as does the world about the temporal consequences of sins and reform our actions to the point that we no longer feel the pain of those consequences so keenly but make an active change of our minds to agree with God’s mind about his wrath towards all ungodliness and unrighteousness, the exceeding sinfulness of our condition and the justness of our condemnation—because that without repentance there is no forgiveness of sins. We note how that God so loved the world that he gave his only naturally born Son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life and that he does not wish that any should perish but that all should reach repentance. We stress how that no one else can do this for us—not our parents, grandparents, pastor/priest, friends, anyone—only we can. In this sense, we do accept Jesus as our “personal” savior.

These are scriptural truths that we of the protestant understanding of the Gospel have universally held since God revealed the pure truth to Martin Luther in spite of the corruptions and lies of the Roman “church”.

We preach and teach that we are called a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people—a household of faith—(to name just a few) and that we are commanded to not abandon the assembling of ourselves together as the “ekklesia” (I’m avoiding the whole topic of the definition of this word and its common “translation” in particular but focusing rather on its generally accepted import) and to care for fellow believers in our midst: spiritually, mentally, socially and physically. In short, we are part of a community.

These too are scriptural truths that we of the protestant understanding of the Gospel must take care to not abandon in our rush to correct other errors.

I agree that stressing the former over or even to the exclusion of the latter is bad theology and a theologically slippery slope. I just hope that we can avoid the other extreme that comes when we abandon the fact that we are and remain individuals with an individual, “personal”, relationship with God: one that is part of and must not be segregated from the communal relationship, to be sure, but individual/personal nonetheless.

To stress either aspect of the individual/communal duality of our common faith over the other misses the point (not that either of you two are) that while we are saved alone, we are not saved to remain alone. I like to compare this dualism to that of electricity. By themselves, the electric and magnetic forces are impressive enough but limited in their use. When brought together as a cohesive whole, we have, among other things, the means to use this very medium though which we can read, ponder and pray about each other’s musings on these wonderful truths!

Facebook has also come under fire in the past for its “secret” (officially undisclosed but publicly known) agreements with various government agencies, not the least of which are those agreements which allow back-end access to otherwise confidential personal user information without a court order or user notification.

For those of us who have switched, after a period of usage Facebook requests that we participate in a short survey. The dozen or so questions were multiple choice except for the last, which was short answer, and it took me less than five minutes to complete.

The short answer question was: “Why do you think that Facebook has redesigned the user profile?” Here is my response:

I think that Facebook has redesigned the user profile to encourage users to share more personal information and generate a higher level of user interaction. The long term strategy over the past several redesigns appears to be to acclimate the user to revealing more personal information without considering or otherwise giving due regard to personal privacy implications. While I cannot know what the underlying motives for this are inasmuch as I cannot read minds, I note that this will probably increase the ability of Facebook to attract more advertisers and thereby generate a higher revenue stream. It also gives law enforcement officials and other persons who do business with Facebook easier access to information that would have been otherwise more difficult to obtain in the past.

So, why do YOU think that Facebook has redesigned the user profile? Is Facebook learning its lessons?

Here’s an idea: you got a friend list? Of course you do, silly, you’re on Facebook, MySpace or a number of other social networking sites! Well, there’s the start of a prayer list for you!

I’m sure that even if every single one of your friends are saved, sanctified and serving God faithfully (ha!), they still need your prayer because of the spiritual attacks that are certain to come. Even in the absences of a present spiritual attack, there’s still the ever-present needs of this life that arise daily as well as one’s general growth and maturation over time. Of course, we know how many have yet to reach these spiritual milestones….

If your prayer list is thus “too long”, do what I’ve done: divide it into more manageable chunks: it usually takes me ~5-15 minutes per friend, depending on how well I know the circumstances of your present life. Pick enough to last you 15 minutes to start; then, as God works in your heart and mind, expand that as he leads (or convicts!).

Just a thought….

In this era of the nearly ubiquitous social networking phenomenon, for those of the latter portion of my generation and latter there is really no reason why friends and friendly associates cannot remain connected. Indeed, thanks to online tools such as Facebook and Myspace, we can find and reconnect to friends from our distant past who only ten years ago would have been difficult to track down, at best. However, this has led to many new dangers that were barely thought of a decade ago, including unscrupulous identity thieves and social networking site owners who would try to profit from our personal, private information at the expense of our safety. Anyone who has followed Facebook’s recent pattern of sharing more of our information “under the radar” with only the thinnest veneer of concern for respecting our reasonable expectations of privacy should realize how serious this situation has become.

In addition, there is information that, quite frankly, I am willing to share only with those who actually want an interpersonal relationship with me. In short, if one doesn’t care to be as open with me as I am willing to be with them, I think it best to let them go their separate way. This includes former “friends” who have “de-friended” me and no longer want a social network connection with me, most often with no explanation at all. Hey, I can understand that we may not be “bff”s but don’t you think that if I have done something to offend you or even simply “rub you the wrong way” because of personality differences, you should at least give me an opportunity to apologize as appropriate and consider how to avoid giving unnecessary offense? Indeed, do we need to agree on every issue, or even most, to be friendly and maintain a caring and concerned relationship, even if it is only online and or isn’t one such that we would otherwise get together in “real-life” on a regular basis?

In my opinion, the bio that I provide in my online profiles should be enough to let you know if I am someone who you might want to get to know better, especially if we don’t know each other in “real-life”. It is all the information that I am willing to share with you until we become at least “online friends”. Why? Quite frankly, friendship is something shared. If you aren’t willing to let me into your life, so be it, that’s your choice but don’t expect me to put everything out on display. If you are willing to take a risk and open up to me, then I will happily do so for you. I have lived most of my life pandering for approval and I’m tired of it. Either you choose to accept me the way that I am because you value me as a person or we should simply part ways. This doesn’t mean that we should or that I expect us to like each other’s flaws and mistakes; rather, we choose to relate to and care for each other in spite of them and work towards a meaningful relationship while addressing them. If this is too strong of a statement for you, then there really isn’t much of a basis for any relationship, let alone “social connection”, at all, is there?

I welcome and appreciate your comments.