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The Importance of Family

 Family has come under attack, most consistently by the forces of Marxim.   As a  movement , Black Lives Matter has taken that true concept (black lives matter) and twisted it into something completely unbiblical. The organization has recently showed its true colors, openly promoting causes that oppose biblical values. The two co-founders of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza, claim  Marxism  as their ideology: “We actually do have an ideological frame,” Cullors said in an interview, “Myself and Alicia in particular, we’re trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on ideological theories” (quoted in the  Washington Times , “The matter of Marxism: Black Lives Matter is rooted in a soulless ideology,” June 29, 2020).  [Quote:   https://www.gotquestions.org/Marxism-Christian.html ]   From GotQuestions.Org, we read of a Marxist inspired attack on the family, operating subtly through the Black Lives Matter movement.   Perhaps most troubling is Black
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"I Just Wish You Would Respect Me." 2 Kings 5

  9. So Naaman came with his horses and with his chariot, and stood at the door of the house of Elisha. 10 And Elisha sent a messenger unto him, saying, Go and wash in Jordan seven times, and thy flesh shall come again to thee, and thou shalt be clean. 11 But Naaman was wroth, and went away, and said, Behold, I thought, He will surely come out to me, and stand, and call on the name of the Lord his God, and strike his hand over the place, and recover the leper. 12 Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? may I not wash in them, and be clean? So he turned and went away in a rage. 13 And his servants came near, and spake unto him, and said, My father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it? how much rather then, when he saith to thee, Wash, and be clean? 14 Then went he down, and dipped himself seven times in Jordan, according to the saying of the man of God: and his flesh came again like unto the flesh o
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A Beckoning World

  November 2020, Thanksgiving has passed. It is Monday morning. I am with my daughter at her workplace. We sit in a kitchen, across from each other on a 3 1/2 foot diameter wooden table. She works at her computer, designing a house for us to live in.  Chapel Hill Handel's Messiah Open Sing:       https://cvnc.org/reviews/2002/december/ChapelHill37.html https://universityumc.church/event/annual-open-sing-handels-messiah/ We aim to move up in the world of sanctification. The only way we know how to "do" this is to repent and enter into prayer. Even so, the world beckons with desperate intensity that we do anything but pray. What is it about the world that it should so dislike prayer?  
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Science and Christianity

30 November 2020 Michael Strauss came to speak at chapel.  Here is what he said.   Is It Time To Dethrone The Big Bang Theory?
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Coffee On Top of the Car

I Like my Coffee Like I Like my Men Sliding off the Roof of my Car as I Drive Away   November 19, 2020 I will leave it to my Dear Reader to decide whether and to what degree to determine if and when such an allusion to men sliding off cars entails any socially undesirable suggestions. But what I can say from my studies "in proper theology and geometry" is that Man is created in God's image. This means he enjoys in some small measure the autonomy of God. We feel funny (and maybe even do not sleep as well, in the vain attempt to transform ourselves into a consciously cauterized, abominably amputated diminution of what He intended us to be and become in our fleeting, wilting grass-flowers semblance of time on this here lovely earth. Inasmuch, however, as our spirits may quicken to life, however fleeting, we are ennobled. We rise up from the tepid, quotidian level of banal existence, and we stand up boldly, in a renewed awareness of our stature in Christ. It is then tha
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Sun, Love, and God

I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when I do not feel like it. I believe in God even when I discover that His judgment allows zero chance for so many of my good friends and loved ones to get into heaven: Those committed to viewing as morally acceptable the celebration of various extra-biblical preferences.  It is sobering to realize that we do not have so much freedom a we may have thought. I had a professor here at the local seminary who said that we may worry that when we are in heaven, we will have our joy tarnished by the understanding that some of our loved ones are not there, but rather are in hell.  He said he believed that a new understanding would arise, to where we fully understand that those in Hell go there freely, in accordance with their most sincere preferences. And they therein belong there, if only because it is the only place of all possible options (two) that they want to be.  Most saliently, they do not want to be in heaven, as
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Young Pastors

Deceptive Disadvantage:  Young pastors are at a disadvantage in listening capacity. This is not entirely due to many of them being Millennials, either. Rather, they also suffer from not having suffered all that much, or not as much as they will have suffered by the time they are forty or fifty, and have seen life circumstances that can be trying, like loving and bringing their teens up through the travails and life exigencies of high school and college.  Suffering drives one to depend on God, and people will not only sacrifice more for their children than for themselves, but suffer more vicariously for their children when they are hit with difficulties.  This pounding is used by God for building maturity.  This maturity enables young pastors to grow in their ability to listen. There is nothing wrong with being "wet behind the ears" (for that is the nature of being low in experience), but it hurts one's growth when he fails to be respectful towards his elders, assuming tha
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