Monday Morning Music Ministry

11-30-20

“What a year this has been.” This has been a common theme of all our conversations with friends these days.

Turn from the pandemic to, say, the economy, which is related (some areas of rebound are remarkable), yet lost jobs, ruined businesses, and shuttered schools because of the oppressive, overhanging shadow – the long-term implications of which we only see through a glass darkly. Meaning, it will get worse before it gets better; the world has changed. Turn from that and we recall, and still face, the rank bitterness of politics, and the lies and thievery so evident. Turn from that and we find ourselves in an America where vandalism, destruction, and riots are virtually condoned and widely accepted as a way of life. Turn from that situation and we shudder to realize that unseen forces, Big Tech and Mainstream Media and Big Brother and others, are spying on us, manipulating us, and censoring us.

In sports, a team has a bad season but applies the balm, “There’s always next year.” We cannot say that in 2020 – or, as it used to be known, 1984. Next year is no guarantee of much better times; probably worse.

We have done our work this year – and by “we” I am referring here to Christian Patriots and Cultural Traditionalists – aware of these things. Except perhaps for the insidious infection of Social Media’s villains, they suddenly have loomed up, and we have tested their spirits.

For us the challenge is not so much to see what is right and wrong… but what to do about it, how to fight, and (frankly) to choose what risks we need take to redeem our culture and save our families.

I invite you to recall the words of John Donne from his Meditation XVII:

Every human’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in humankind. And therefore never look far to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for you.

I have brought 1633’s language into the 21st century, but we all know these observations.
Do any of us disagree, that the death of someone, especially when it is heinous, when we could have intervened, has an impact on the world in general, the human family, and the future? And how we then shall live? Or, at the other end of that scale that thinks of the entire world… that we, individuals, our souls, are diminished too?

John Donne’s “involvement in humankind” did not suggest membership in some club. He says in a unique way that we are all one; no person is an island; we are bound together, interconnected – and should be, and should want to be.

Now more than ever. And if our inescapable fellowship in humanity compels us to react to “every human’s death” when and where and how we can… then we come face to face today with the genocidal impulse behind abortion.

And the terrifying numbers. Not that I run to numbers, in fact usually the opposite, like polls. But this is a question of reality, not charts and graphs; of blood, not ink. The numbers are so cold and so many that they deaden our minds. In recent years:
• One in five American pregnancies ended in abortion;
• Approximately 862,000 abortions performed in 2017 (the most recent stat I found);
• Now, more than 22,000 abortions performed each day in America;
• Since 1973, almost 65-million babies killed by abortion – are we “diminished” as a people 65-millions times? Yes.

I will not crusade here beyond this, attempting to be calm, wondering where in hell this is leading us. Excuse me, but I choose my words deliberately. I know the debates; I know the history; I know the horror stories that “justify” abortion; I myself once was comfortable with the whole idea. Of that, I repent daily; and I can empathize with women who seek it, to an extent. (Not, now, the monsters who perform it.)

My objections are moral; my reasons are spiritual; my reactions are many. Mechanistic – how can we operate and thrive and continue as a civilization when life is worse than cheap but very often contemptible? Why is this the litmus-test issue for half of society, where people who love the unborn are shunned, condemned, and threatened? How do pro-abortion crusaders ignore the fact that many churches, many ministries, many parents desire to adopt “unwanted” babies?

If we have objections, reasons, and reactions, as I just shared, there is another agenda item: we must have responses. If this moral, culture-of-death challenge is spiritual (and it is)… then we need spiritual responses. It is political (and it is)… then we need to get political. If this private angst is, one by one across this country, personal (and it is)… then we need to get personal.

I am tempted not to qualify one moral outrage, or one festering problem, over another, but at the root of the abortion issue – beyond America’s obvious drift from God and the secularization of society – is what I called here “Lazy Virtue.”

Not “easy virtue,” or really even “lack of virtue.” Dr Bill Bennett notwithstanding, “virtue” is a malleable term. Our problems are not because people figuratively smash the 10 Commandment tablets, or burn down churches. Yet.

No: lazy virtue is the worst, because people fool themselves, and are persuaded to fool others, that good is evil and evil is good. For instance, that:
• concern for baby animals is more sacred than saving human babies;
• Lazy Virtue forces those who oppose abortions to participate and even fund them;
• “convenience,” defined so many ways, is more important than others’ morality;
• “What’s right for me is OK, as long as nobody is harmed.”

… whoops, but it is OK to harm a baby close to birth. Even kill it. During the pandemic we hear people yammering about “trusting science.” Well, “science” is now discovering that those blobs and fetuses are (of course) humans; unborn babies can feel pain much earlier than previously thought; and they can survive outside the womb at ever younger ages.

The “tumult and the shouting” of the recent campaign has stopped… No. It hasn’t. But we are supposed to say that every four years. Candidates and presidents come and go. Parties change their appeals and profiles.

But our problems will not go away in America; not automatically. And not easily. As horrible as the sin of abortion is, it is a symptom, not our real disease.

Christian Patriots, Cultural Traditionalists: you might be looking ahead two years or four, and that is good. But start looking to tomorrow. Those bells toll for us, otherwise.

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We toil and look toward that City. Beulah Land, as sweet as it will be, is not Heaven but the border before we cross to the Promised Land which is our home eternal. But what does God require but that we, as believers in Christ, are good and faithful as His servants; do justice and walk humbly.

Music Vid: “Sweet Beulah Land” (For readers with hand-held devices, click or copy and paste: )
https://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=avntXsW6WhU

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Click: Sweet Beulah Land

11-23-20

We have just been through a presidential campaign like no other. In other breaking news, the sky is blue – that is to say, it is evident to almost everybody that this election was far from ordinary.

But I am speaking as a trained and published historian when I point out that there have been contested elections almost as bitter. The elections of 1800, 1824, 1876, for instance, had delayed results, “rotten bargains,” and probably fraudulent outcomes. In 1960, John F Kennedy’s father called his vassal, Mayor Daley of Chicago, to “discover” Democrat votes in Illinois to take that state’s electoral votes away from Republicans. On that razor’s edge, Richard Nixon lost the presidency. In 2000, the national results seemed to come down to hundreds of votes in teeter-totter Florida. After Al Gore ran to courts here and there, in 37 days he lost the presidency to George W Bush.

Those elections are only anomalies regarding the contested results. There also were campaigns of dirt, sleaze, scandal, bribery, lies, and slander… much rougher, actually, than in 2020. Washington, our sainted Founder, was treated horribly in the press, and his rival Jefferson (and his rival Hamilton) even worse – moral turpitude and such. Andrew Jackson was libeled for having killed a man and married his wife illegally (she died, partly in shame, about the time he took office). Abraham Lincoln was called a baboon, frankly throughout his presidency.

U. S. Grant’s problems with alcohol were joyously portrayed by opposing cartoonists. Grover Cleveland was accused of fathering a child out of wedlock, in the Victorian days of 1884; he admitted to the fact but was elected anyway. During that campaign, correspondence soliciting bribes written by his rival, James G Blaine, when Speaker of the House, were exposed. In 1896 Democrat candidate William Jennings Bryan was regularly depicted as a demented anarchist. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt called President William Howard Taft a “fathead” with brains “less than those of a guinea pig,” and Taft called former President Roosevelt a “dangerous egotist.”

In contrast, one might think that 2020 was beanbags.

But there has been a difference, and a serious difference. It is a difference that exposes a possibly fatal malady in our Republic; a challenge to all citizens but to Christian patriots especially.

It is not the nature of discourse that should trouble us or, as I have pointed, is that different than disgraceful, quadrennial mud-fights of the past. It is a barely redeeming aspect of American democracy that in the past, the partisan enemies have dusted themselves off and civilly conducted their business. Government by Hypocrisy.

In our times, however, peoples’ basic humanity is questioned and slandered. Platforms, motives, standards, beliefs, sincerity, honesty, and actions are not merely questioned but disbelieved and ridiculed. For what Donald Trump promised in 2016 – and mostly delivered, in itself a departure in presidential politics – his enemies considered him worthy of being destroyed. Not defeated, but destroyed.

A further departure from historical tradition is that these vicious schemes were more personal than partisan; and they began, not in the post-convention season of 2020, but the moment President Trump completed his oath of office four years ago.

It is very important – and very difficult in our contemporary news-cycle and sound-bite culture – for citizens to realize how different this situation is from any time in the American past. How profoundly poisonous. How deep-seated in origin. And how difficult it is to return from. God forbid that we have not passed the point of no return in these civic cancers.

I address Christian patriots above because we are not the only segment of society to be concerned about moral drift. Some on the other side, in fact, think they have a monopoly on morality, and that becomes an excuse for rebellion, subversion, and violence.

As Christians we are aware of Higher Morality, and the necessity of calibrating that to all of our convictions, decisions, and acts. I am outlining a political essay that would in effect ask liberals and radicals, “For four years you have tried to teach us how to treat a president with whom we disagree. Shall I now adopt your methods?” Of course that would seem to be a child’s game of tit-for-tat…

Wouldn’t it? But how should we then act? This question addresses near-term questions about ballot fraud, and long-term attitudes toward government policies on abortion, education, free speech. And more.

“Rules are made to be broken.” That is a sarcasm thrown about informally. There is more determinism than morality in the proposition, as in “mangers are hired to be fired.” But for Christians, rules – adopted or broken – are the types of formulations that are meant to be in flux; adaptable; open to comment, challenges, and change; understood to meet the exigencies of the moment.

Mature discernment, when exercised with responsible citizenship, persuades me that situations allow for rules to be broken.

“Obey the law.” Yes, render unto Caesar. …the things that are Caesar’s. Submit to authorities. Even Jesus went to jail. Disciples went to prison. If the laws, “right” or wrong, sent them there, they complied. But they opposed certain laws, and when the Holy Spirit sent an earthquake the Apostles walked out. There was no democracy in the first-century Roman Empire. There is, today, or supposed to be, in America. In a democracy you obey the law… or submit to the consequences.

Mature discernment, when exercised with responsible citizenship, persuades me, like Martin Luther and Martin Luther King alike, that unjust laws must be challenged.

“Keep the Faith.” Friends, let this become our watchword… but only the first half. An annoying aspect of Obama’s 2008 campaign was the vagueness of his slogans. “Hope.” “Change we can believe in” – changing what, exactly? And “Yes we can!” – can what? The meanings were deliberately elusive, as he gambled on a pliant, gullible electorate.

The same is a danger of “Keep the faith.” Never share that with a complete, intentional meaning. Demand of yourself: Faith in Jesus? Faith that God answers prayer? Faith to pray without ceasing? Faith that our opponents may change their hearts (as we change the laws)? Faith that God is in control?

Faith that if we are forced to go the route of civil disobedience in the next years, God, who protected those in the fiery furnace?

Faith that as we walk through the shadow of death – because we might – God will be with us?

Faith enough to pray, not only that God be on our side, but, as Lincoln maturely discerned, that we be on God’s side?

The Holy Spirit brings gifts of discernment. We can not proceed without it. Especially in these next four years.

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Music Vid: “Help Me” (For readers with hand-held devices, click or paste: )

11-16-20

Today’s message is a guest essay by Bridgette Ehly, a journalist and author of the science-fiction thriller, Smiling Ghosts.

How has the Body of Christ – the church, representing God on this side of Heaven – in our day come to lose the moral high ground in so many realms? To relativists,
secularists, and liberals who talk about kindness, but routinely have supported the violent murder of babies in the womb, erosion of God-given rights, and destructive social policies? It was, after all, righteous Christians who normalized the concept of universal human dignity, the idea that all lives, all people, are precious.

How did we drop the ball? I think it has to do with action vs complacency, and the
spread of what we may call Communist Christianity. Communist in the context of
enforced uniformity, a godless suppression of individual initiative, a denial of the need to obey and please God.

I once read that in His three-year ministry, Jesus Christ traveled over 3000 miles. He was constantly on the move on foot or by sea, and went from town to town revealing God’s loving nature. He healed the sick and showed humankind how to love our neighbors as God commands us.

Jesus was a man of action. And the Holy Spirit literally flows through the Father and the Son and through us as Christ-followers. God is a God of action – as we see from the opening of a rose, the change of the seasons, cycles of birth and death, and the stories of a hundred billion lives.

When Jesus talks about faith, it always is associated with action.

Whoever does the will of God is brother and sister and mother to me. (Mark 4:35)

Why do you call me, Lord, Lord, and not put into practice what I teach you? (Luke 6:46)

Are we failing to answer Christ’s call to action? We are the Body of Christ in this world… but sitting idle as our culture and traditions die; are we a body whose legs no longer work? Instead of walking upright, do we now drag our useless limbs behind us? What is the verdict to those charges?

Lack of action on the part of the Church is rooted in what I call Communist Christianity, the descriptive notion that all believers are literally the same.

But if this were true, why does God refer to some people as righteous? If we are all equal, why even have the word righteous? There would be only “saved” and “condemned.” Salvation is instantaneous, but sanctification is a process. Really, what would be the point of living if we do not strive to improve ourselves and become more perfect children of God? St. Paul tells us to “walk as children of Light (for the fruit of the Light consists of all goodness and righteousness and truth), trying to learn what is pleasing to the Lord.”

By faith alone through grace we are saved, but what is faith? Is it a thing, a magical trinket in a box that guarantees a Christian entrance to heaven regardless of whether he loves his fellow man or strives to do what Jesus tells us to do? Or do works follow from faith – is faith a manifestation of God in the physical world, a series of actions that turn a belief into a living force for good; that is, God’s will be done on Earth?

Jesus ties faith and action so closely and consistently that we must act, cherishing them as one impulse.

In the Seventh chapter of Luke we read, Then turning towards the woman, He said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave Me no water for My feet, but she has bathed My feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. You gave Me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not stopped kissing My feet. You did not anoint My head with oil, but she has anointed My feet with ointment. Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.” Then he said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” But those who were at the table with him began to say among themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?” And He said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

The woman’s actions and her faith are interchangeable. Jesus says her sins are forgiven because she showed great love, and then says that her faith saved her. We are forgiven in proportion to our love, and love is expressed in a million different ways, the hands and feet of God alive on this earth!

I believe evil people have taught us to think of faith as a “thing” for two reasons. One is to cause fights about theology among Christians and thereby weaken the Church by fracturing our unity. The other motive is to destroy the powerful force of “love in action.” Communist Christianity tells us that a simple prayer, a 10-second pledge to the Will of God, is all that is required from us in this life.

Communist Christianity corrodes the Church just as Communism destroys economies
and societies by crushing a people’s desire to achieve excellence. People who are saved and believe they need to do nothing more, or can do nothing more, to improve their standing before God lack the motivation to please the Father. Jesus told us to visit the sick and spread His Word, but Communist Christianity says it isn’t mandatory, so why do it? (Besides, the government “releases” us from that moral impulse.)

The moment in time that we commit our lives to Christ is the beginning, not the
completion, of our spiritual journey. Certainly, many Christians do answer Jesus’ call to visit the sick and those in prison, but many, many people drop a 20 into the collection plate and call it a week. God forbid!

Faith is God’s love in action. Now more than ever, we need to live our faith by speaking up for Christian beliefs at city council meetings; by volunteering with kids so that they have a Christian influence in their lives; by showing the poor that the helping hand in their neighborhoods is a Christian hand.

We all need to get involved, even a couple of hours a week, not to earn salvation but to exercise faith! We can’t improve the world together, or preserve what is precious about our society, if we don’t act.

Jesus’ life was a series of actions that led to the greatest act of love, His death on the cross. Our Savior said, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

Jesus’ giving His life freely remains the ultimate expression of faith in God, a standard for us and His revealed plan for our salvation.

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(For readers with hand-held devices, click or copy & paste:
https://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=itgTjU5toz0

Click: Hands and Feet

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Click here for information about Bridgette’s new novel

11-9-20

Yes, we need to be praying more than ever. And some of us have been, lately. We have been reminded that the best position from which to advance is from our knees.

We pray “believing,” as the Bible instructs. “The fervent prayer of the righteous avails much,” we are told. Yet if a billion of us – or merely two of us – pray for different results, can God grace us with the same answer? Or if two pray alike, will God’s response be the same for each?

We should pray for God’s Will to be done – His righteousness – and that our desires may then be pleasing to Him, and right for us, in return.

Sometimes, when we pray over an imminent event, God might say, You think the crisis is nigh, but wait; it is yet coming.

That is, we should trust in His timing. And realize that things can get even worse. And maybe we created our own crises!

Sometimes, in His wisdom, He sees that we only turn to Him in times of crisis. Shudder to think: would that persuade God to keep crises before us, so we turn to Him more? He desires our communion.

Sometimes God says I hear your prayers! But I will answer… in time.
We must learn to trust His timing, not our agendas. Maybe “no” is “not yet.”

“But God,” we cry, “Your enemies are loosed! Help us to fight them!”

Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord. So are justice and righteousness. We are in His army; He is not our servant.

“God! You don’t understand! We are in the midst of a STORM!”

He understands. Better than we do. Must we endure more? Maybe. Storms are part of life; and God sends them, or allows them, sometimes. They clear the air; they wash away dead things; they rearrange things on earth. Sometimes He calms the storm. Sometimes He shows us shelter. All the time He is with us in the midst.

And behind the darkest storm clouds the sun shines. As bright as ever.

I would hasten to my place of refuge From the stormy wind and tempest. – Psalm 55:8

The Lord is slow to anger and great in power, And the Lord will by no means leave the guilty unpunished. The whirlwind and storm are His way, And clouds are the dust beneath His feet. – Nahum 1:3

Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone, and fire from the Lord out of heaven. – Genesis 19:24

When the whirlwind will pass, the wicked will be no more; the righteous have an everlasting foundation. – Proverbs 10:25

And remember, fellow believers and voters and warriors – not from the Bible, but good advice:

When Satan whispers to the warrior, “You cannot withstand the storm,” the warrior whispers back – “I AM the storm.”

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(For readers with hand-held devices, click (if clickable) or copy and paste: https://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=GrcvXUvyn44 )

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Click: Till the Storm Passes By

Election Day, 2020

With lack of guidance a nation falls, but victory is won through holy advisers.
– Proverbs 11:4

Use below link on PC only

O God, Our Help In Ages Past

Copy and paste this link for mobile devices

https://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=N-hN740J6qA

Artwork: Winsor McCay, 1914. Restoration copyright Rick Marschall