[sim’-uhl yoos’-tuhs et peck’-aw-tore]
(Latin simul, “simultaneous” + Latin justus, “righteous” + Latin et, “and” + Latin peccator, “sinner”)
At the same time righteous and a sinner. The phrase was coined by 16th century German Reformer, Martin Luther. In his Lectures on Romans, Luther put it this way, “The saints in being righteous are at the same time sinners; they are righteous because they believe in Christ whose righteousness covers them and is imputed to them, but they are sinners because they do not fulfill the Law and are not without sinful desires. They are like sick people in the care of a physician: they are really sick, but healthy only in hope and in so far as they begin to get better, or, rather: are being healed.”
Unbelief says:Some other time, but not now;Faith says:
some other place, but not here;
some other people, but not us.Anything He did anywhere else He will do here;With our
anything He did any other time He is willing to do now;
anything He ever did for other people He is willing to do for us!feet on the ground,we walk out in this fullness of the Spirit, if we will yield and obey.
and our head cool,
but with our heart ablaze with the love of God,
God wants to work through you!
The Counselor has come, and He doesn't care about the limits oflocality,The Body of Christ is bigger than all of these.
geography,
time
or nationality.
The question is:
Will you open your heart?
(ahr-mih‘-nee-uhn-iz’-um)
A summary of teachings that are attributed to 17th century Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius. Arminian theology took issue with the teachings of John Calvin on 5 points, articulated in the Five articles of Remonstrance of 1610. The doctrines can be summarized as universal (prevenient) grace, conditional election, unlimited atonement, resistible grace, and uncertainty of perseverance. This eventually led to the Synod of Dort of 1618-1619, which resulted in the State church upholding what later became the 5 Points of Calvinism, while condemning Arminianism. Arminian theology later received official toleration by the State and has since continued in various forms within Protestantism.
So the king is dead. What a sad end to a sad life; a pathetic end to a pathetic life (by which I mean to use pathetic in its true sense as “arousing pity and sympathy). I don’t know that I have ever seen, in one man, such a combination of self-love and self-loathing, shocking narcissism combined with equally shocking self-hatred. Truly Michael Jackson was unparalleled.
Andrew Sullivan offered a few interesting thoughts.
There are two things to say about him. He was a musical genius; and he was an abused child. By abuse, I do not mean sexual abuse; I mean he was used brutally and callously for money, and clearly imprisoned by a tyrannical father. He had no real childhood and spent much of his later life struggling to get one. He was spiritually and psychologically raped at a very early age - and never recovered. Watching him change his race, his age, and almost his gender, you saw a tortured soul seeking what the rest of us take for granted: a normal life.
But he had no compass to find one; no real friends to support and advise him; and money and fame imprisoned him in the delusions of narcissism and self-indulgence. Of course, he bears responsibility for his bizarre life. But the damage done to him by his own family and then by all those motivated more by money and power than by faith and love was irreparable in the end. He died a while ago. He remained for so long a walking human shell.
I loved his music. His young voice was almost a miracle, his poise in retrospect eery, his joy, tempered by pain, often unbearably uplifting. He made the greatest music video of all time; and he made some of the greatest records of all time. He was everything our culture worships; and yet he was obviously desperately unhappy, tortured, afraid and alone.
I grieve for him; but I also grieve for the culture that created and destroyed him. That culture is ours’ and it is a lethal and brutal one: with fame and celebrity as its core values, with money as its sole motive, it chewed this child up and spat him out.
I hope he has the peace now he never had in his life. And I pray that such genius will not be so abused again.
From beginning to end, Jackson led a tortured life and he led much of it in full view of the public. As much as he was secretive, being whisked about behind masks and tinted windows, the sheer volume of cameras and the unending interest in his life meant that his every step was recorded. We saw him change his skin color, change his face, and almost change his gender. Through it all, we gasped at his obvious self-loathing, expressed in his desire to change everything he is and was and manifested in his increasingly bizarre behavior. He was a tortured soul and I doubt we can even imagine what was going on inside that increasingly twisted heart, that increasingly conflicted mind.
Michael Jackson was in so many ways a product of this sick celebrity culture (that he helped create) that will never rest satisfied until it has both created and then destroyed the newest celebrity. We want our celebrities to start strong and finish weak, to begin with a bang and then fizzle, pop and sputter, all for our enjoyment and entertainment (Susan Boyle stands as the most recent example of this). Jackson gave us so much to talk about, so much to enjoy. More than any other celebrity he embodied the “vanities” of Ecclesiastes. He was at one time known for what he did so well and then was known for being a freak; he was at one time fantastically wealthy and then utterly broke; he was once loved and then despised. He had it all and yet, it seemed, he had nothing. All of it was meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
Andrew Sullivan ended his reflection on Jackson by saying, “I hope he has the peace now he never had in his life.” I hope the same. Truly, I do. I never cared much for Michael Jackson. I listened to his music occasionally in life but, after losing my childhood collection of 45’s, I didn’t ever buy one of his songs or albums. But it was impossible to miss him completely as even decades after the peak of his fame, his face was often in the news and even a simple skim of the headlines would show that his strangeness was increasing year-by-year. Through all of this I haven’t ever hoped for much on his behalf. But I hope now that he has finally found peace. Sadly, though, his life showed no evidence that he had found the One who is peace, the one who offers true peace. And if that is the case, the true horror of it all is that Jackson will spend all of eternity in the same twisted mind that tortured him for most of the fifty years he was given here. Those fifty years seemed to drive him to the brink of utter insanity; the thought of an eternity in that state is too horrific to imagine. We may like to think that death inevitably brings peace to a tortured existence. But Scripture gives us no reason to find hope except in the One who offers hope by saying “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” May you find that rest today so you can enjoy that rest eternally.
Men are bearing the brunt of the current economic crisis because they predominate in manufacturing and construction, the hardest-hit sectors, which have lost more than 3 million jobs since December 2007. Women, by contrast, are a majority in recession-resistant fields such as education and health care, which gained 588,000 jobs during the same period. Rescuing hundreds of thousands of unemployed crane operators, welders, production line managers, and machine setters was never going to be easy. But the concerted opposition of several powerful women's groups has made it all but impossible. Consider what just happened with the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Last November, President-elect Obama addressed the devastation in the construction and manufacturing industries by proposing an ambitious New Deal-like program to rebuild the nation's infrastructure. He called for a two-year "shovel ready" stimulus program to modernize roads, bridges, schools, electrical grids, public transportation, and dams and made reinvigorating the hardest-hit sectors of the economy the goal of the legislation that would become the recovery act.
Women's groups were appalled. Grids? Dams? Opinion pieces immediately appeared in major newspapers with titles like "Where are the New Jobs for Women?" and "The Macho Stimulus Plan."The study of nearly 4,000 consumer products found "greenwashing" in nearly every product category – from a lack of verifiable information to outright lies.
Even the experts are confused. Case, whose firm runs its own Ecologo certification programme, admitted he had bought a refrigerator only to find it failed to meet its claims of energy efficiency.
I believe that we have another case of "A sucker is born every minute"
"Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out.
Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?
If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred."
This certainly applies in politics, doesn't it? When George W. Bush was President, he was demonized daily by those who thought virtually everything he did was utterly scandalous and terrible. And now many conservatives--including, ahem, many Christians--are returning the favor with President Obama.
[kuh-noe’-sis]
(Greek, “emptying”)
Describes the “emptying” of Christ at the incarnation. The Greek word kenoo (”to empty”) is found in Phil 2:6-11 where Christ humility is described through the incarnation. Debate exists concerning the meaning of the Kenosis. Did Christ lose divine attributes and thus “empty” himself, or did he give up rights for the independent use of his divine attributes, without actually giving them up? Most theologians would opt for the latter, believing that if Christ “lost” divine attributes he would no longer be divine; indeed, he would never have been divine in the first place considering the essential divine attribute of immutability (the inability to change in essence).
Russell D. Moore on the Good Father’s Quiet Desperation
Somebody please help me. I’m really, really depressed, and I don’t know what to do. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even know I was depressed until a new study came out, and I’m at high, high risk. An article by Vanderbilt and Florida State sociology professors, based on data from the National Survey of Families and Households, has concluded that parents are more susceptible to depression than non-parents.
According to the Sacramento Bee’s report, “Parents experience significantly higher levels of depression than grown-ups who don’t have children.”
I still thought I was okay, since I’m a reasonably happy man. That is, until I saw the definition of the problem. According to the Bee: “The researchers suggest that worry is a lifelong cost of having children.” And don’t think it gets better when they leave the house: “Parents of grown children (whether they live at home or have moved out) and parents without custody of minor children exhibit more signs of depression than other parents.”
To read the rest go Here
"The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self—all your wishes and precautions—to Christ."
"[The natural life] knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that."
C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity
Alcohol has been the downfall of many ne’er-do-wells, but never quite like this. After a man stole Kayte Taylor’s wallet near a Santa Rosa, Calif., market on Saturday, the 28-year-old did what most women would — she grabbed a 12-pack of Miller Lite and shot-putted it at the thief.
The tasty beer missile hit its mark — knocking the man off of his getaway bike, where Kayte’s friends descended on him and retrieved the wallet. Boom goes the dynamite. It’s Miller Time.
From the SANTA ROSA PRESS DEMOCRAT:
Taking chase, Kayte reached the sidewalk to see the guy pushing and trying to mount a bicycle. It dawned on Kayte there was something useful in her hand. A 12-pack of Miller Lite — bottles. Her friends’ eyes widened as Kayte hoisted the box to shoulder height, reared back and shot-put the beer at the burglar maybe 12 feet away.
Pow. Down he went. Four women were on him like kids on a burst piñata. Kayte took back her wallet.
The police then showed up and were in a very arresty mood.
What onlookers failed to notice is that Taylor’s throw of 11 feet, 2 inches was a woman’s outdoor record for light beer (bottles). Be assured that the Chinese are assembling a women’s beer shot putting team as you read this.
When asked how she would stop the ruthless Megatron from demolishing the world, Fox first said that she would “barter with him.” She then, however, went on to say, “... and instead of the entire planet, can you just take out all of the white trash, hillbilly, anti-gay, super bible-beating people in Middle America?"
How tolerant.
" Like a gold ring in a pig's snout
“As a cutting-edge mega church, we’re always looking for innovative ways to grow our church, and DNA duplication just seemed like a no-brainer,” explained church spokesman and elder, Clarence Ambrose. “Statistically our lowest Sunday attendance is when Pastor Klagg is on vacation and our associate pastor, Raymond Elliot, fills in. No offense to Raymond, but the people think Pastor Klagg’s monologue jokes are just plain funnier than Raymond’s prop comedy.”
By cloning their pastor, Marina Bay hopes to fill their 3,000 seat auditorium every Sunday, whether the original Pastor Klagg is in the pulpit or not. During those times when Klagg is taking time off, his clone will perform the pastoral duties in his stead, assuring the congregation of no interruption in enjoying their pastor’s unique spiritual gifts. “Not to mention keeping the weekly offering at the same high level as the attendance,” Ambrose added.
Not all church members, however, are pleased with the cloning of Pastor Klagg. Herm Tayback, a deacon for twenty years, is a vocal critic of the RevClone project. “Am I the only one creeping out over this? Last week the pastor was performing a wedding while his clone was back home mowing his lawn. I mean, are we gaining a spare pastor or giving Mrs. Klagg another husband to take out the garbage?” Tayback also worries about possible theological ramifications. “Hey, I’ve seen those science fiction movies where the clone slowly goes insane because of a missing chromosome. What happens if Klagg’s twin loses his mind and starts preaching on sin and repentance? Good grief, we could lose half the congregation! In fact, I’ve shared these concerns with Pastor Klagg. At least I think I was talking to Pastor Klagg… Ooo, did anyone else just get a chill down their back?”
Regardless of the criticism, RevClone’s head scientist Farnsworth Diddle is quite proud of his work with Marina Bay, and he envisions a wide application for this new cloning technology. “Just think… churches won’t just use Rick Warren’s teachings, now they can hire a Rick Warren clone as their pastor.” Deacon Tayback disagrees. “Don’t we have enough Rick Warren clones in churches already?”
All in all, Ambrose says Marina Bay is very pleased with the initial reaction to their new genetically-created pastor. “Attendance has never been better,” he reported happily. “But if we ever start losing folks, we’re not worried. Our contingency plan is to start cloning the congregation, too. Doesn’t science work in mysterious ways?”
From Sacred Sandwich
Back in the 1940’s Donald Grey Barnhouse, a Presbyterian pastor, asked the question, “What would it be like if Satan took over a city?”
In his newest book, Christless Christianity, Dr. Mike Horton warns Evangelicalism in America that Barnhouse’s hypothetical scenario is quickly becoming a reality. According to Horton, the driving mantra of so many Evangelical churches today is, “do more, try harder.” Sermons are filled with seven or twelve step plans for having a happier marriage or better finances. Ironically, as a newer generation reacts against the harsh legalism of their parents, they are merely replacing it with a softer (but more sadistic) form of legalism. Famous TV preachers like Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer victoriously proclaim that they have finally realized that Christianity isn’t about following a lot of rules. But they go on to tell their audience that it is only about “Loving God and each other.” The sixteenth century Reformer, John Calvin, heard similar sentiments coming from some of his Roman Catholic brethren (who were also reacting to the harsh legalism of their upbringing) and remarked, “As if that were easier!” According to Jesus Christ, loving God and your neighbor is the essence of the whole Old Testament Law. Loving God and your neighbor is in the hardest thing that anyone could ever ask you to do!Barnhouse speculated that if Satan took over Philadelphia, all of the bars would be closed, pornography banished, and pristine streets would be filled with tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The children would say, “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am,” and the churches would be full every Sunday . . . where Christ is not preached.
" leaves no room for the Holy Spirit.We may think we avoid evil by fleeing the sins we perceive to be greater. But Jesus dealt harshly with such thoughts. “But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” “But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire.” Jesus gave no quarter to sin. He knew that sin begins in the heart and it begins not with a great act of sin, but with many small acts. Surely Cain first grumbled against Abel, and then plotted against him before finally murdering him. Surely David allowed himself to think lustful thoughts and surely he went to the roof of his palace knowing what he might see. Those little sins led to breathtakingly horrifying, ungodly acts of lust and anger.
To read the rest: Challies.com
[hoe-moe-oo’-see-oss]
(Greek homo-, ”same” + Greek ousia, “substance” = “of the same substance” “consubstantial”)
This is the Trinitarian term that expresses a belief that Christ is of the same substance or nature as the Father. This word was central to the fourth-century debate between Athanasius and the Arians. Arius believed that Christ was of “similar substance” to the Father (homoiousios), but not of the “same substance” (homoousios). The two positions were separated by one letter in Greek, an iota. Thus the common phrase “it doesn’t make one iota of difference.” The Council of Nicea (325) believed that Christ shared in the exact same essence as the Father and therefore adopted the term homoousios to describe the relationship between the members of the Godhead. This concept was further developed by the Cappadocian fathers and further applied to all three members of the Trinity at the Council of Constantinople (381).
"When it comes to being accepted by God, observing the law is completely ruled out. Here Paul makes an absolute distinction between salvation by works of the law and salvation by faith in Christ. Law-keeping cannot justify anyone.
Not that there is anything wrong with the law itself, which comes from the righteous character of God. As Paul said to the Romans, "the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good" (Rom. 7:12) The problem with the law is our lawlessness! The reason we cannot be justified by the law is that we cannot keep it. Even if we could keep God's commandments outwardly, we break them inwardly. "No human deeds, however well motivated and sincerely performed, can ever achieve the kind of standing before God that results in the verdict of justification."
...we are acceptable to God - not by keeping the law ourselves, but by trusting in the only man who ever did keep it, Jesus Christ. The doctrine of justification can be stated in these general terms: we get right with God not by observing the law, but only by trusting in his Son...
There is no way to be made right with God except through faith in Christ. In Luther's words, "Now the true meaning of Christianity is this: that a man first acknowledge, through the Law, that he is a sinner, for whom it is impossible to perform any good work.... If you want to be saved, your salvation does not come by works; but God has sent His only Son into the world that we might live through Him. He was crucified and died for you and bore your sins in His own body."
- Philip Graham Ryken "Galatians: Reformed Expository Commentary - Chapter 5: The Battle for the Gospel (Galations 2:11-16) (p.63-65)
This war will not be won by bullets. It will be won by brokenness and humility and sacrifice. It will be won when we identify with the children in our suffering rather than with the abortionist in his killing.Amen.
Whoever murdered George Tiller has done a gravely wicked thing. The evil of this action is in no way diminished by the blood George Tiller had on his own hands. No private individual had the right to execute judgment against him. We are a nation of laws. Lawless violence breeds only more lawless violence. Rightly or wrongly, George Tilller was acquitted by a jury of his peers. "Vengeance is mine, says the Lord." For the sake of justice and right, the perpetrator of this evil deed must be prosecuted, convicted, and punished. By word and deed, let us teach that violence against abortionists is not the answer to the violence of abortion. Every human life is precious. George Tiller's life was precious. We do not teach the wrongness of taking human life by wrongfully taking a human life. Let our "weapons" in the fight to defend the lives of abortion's tiny victims, be chaste weapons of the spirit.
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