Anti-Anti's Modern Prosperendum

The lack of fake smiles is sometimes seen by the World as rude mannerisms and insulting!  This strange pressure to make fake surface peace loves the lie.  Don't give in to unreality, dear Church, but extend true kindness as far as the World allows it.  Perhaps we will even be driven to the silence of our Lord in front of Pilate, when the World's untrue peace attempts to corner us into agreeing with itself.

There's a strange commitment to implied slights of honor in some of the Generation Y and Millennial segments of Western culture, which resembles a mix of hedonistic paganism and Eastern stoical domination.  These groups are more liberal than their particularly liberal parents, and they are given to sexual perversity, wildly immoderate responses when their peer groups label it justified, and a rigorous code of surface behaviors, such as verbal respect with a certain amount of true respect but of a type which can instantly cease for surface reasons, especially for seeming to break group rules, even when morality suggests that they should be broken. Things that are not particularly embarrassing, degrading or meaningful in general are taken as something to be purposefully suppressed, while outright perversion is casually accepted with an enforced acceptance, including the bizarre notion of keeping one's thoughts and emotions hidden behind a stony or otherwise controlled facial expr...

Fulfillment is not pride.  Pride is self-fulfillment.  When we are fulfilled by God, we benefit with a benefit that is not to be shamed but delighted in, and He makes us glad!

[Adapted from Tom Nelson, Denton Bible Church, "0575 - Sin and the Saint: What to do when you Lose"] Sin is like a porcupine quill.  If you don't rip it out right away, it'll go deeper and deeper, even to the heart.

Brokenness, humility and a readiness to weep are righteous states for the preacher and the non-preaching Christian.  Seeing other Christians as worth your trouble to help is humble, and helping the broken depends on understanding personal brokenness.  Haughty self-contentment won't cry out to God for strength to help us all. On the other hand, we have the power to stand in God when we sincerely go to Him.  We have the opportunity to fight, and it feels strong and confident.  We do know that the knowledge we've gained is useful to help them; we know that they don't get the help easily because of their sin, which we have also battled, and which keeps all Christians at a low state - unable to receive strong food that must be chewed and digested with energy. It's a terrible thing to have a key to a door that your Christian sibling doesn't want to enter, even though the other side of it is pleasant, and they refuse to hold the key to turn the lock, even with your hand di...

A matter of phrasing seems to impart wildly different implied meanings, though the surface text retains identical meaning.  This implication system seems to be a gotcha-type of surface reasoning that becomes the basis for pseudo-righteous extreme reactions to it. Consider the difference:     Why?     What purpose does that serve? The first is taken to be a challenge and the second respectful inquiry.  Now, consider a person with simple speech who uses the first form as a matter of necessity.  The pseudo-righteous nature is revealed in such a case of the response by those inclined to base wickedness on implications that are not given by the speaker.  Those who practice this false basis of pseudo-righteous response only allow themselves to see what they want and do not regard the necessity of the speaker to use this shortened syntax, where no disrespect was intended.

Wanting me not to say things in front of you is understandable, especially after you've heard me say them once.  But daring me to not blush under presumed retaliation of kicking me off your team is another thing.  It shows your pettiness, which is a weakness that is like pride, and it has a high probability of hurting your team, often in severe ways. Do you have the wherewithal to say that these things I say and you do not like are evil?  That's the reason you have for severing all ties with me for saying them, isn't it?  But you do not know they are evil and are unwilling to commit yourself to proving that they are, but I can prove that your recalcitrant overbearing domination is highly unuseful, though my words have been known to help. Homosexuality is perverted, as is overweening ambition, pride, murdering a child and lying to a child to shield the emotions generated by a tragic situation.  They are all the same evil.  I should tell you, at least that on...

Have you heard Christians say, "Remember that we're only human!"?  These Christians often employ the phrase to mean that we shouldn't try to be Divine.  In a way, that's right, because we are not, in fact, God!  In another way, though, it's wrong, because we should be moving from one amount or level of faith to the next as we press toward our high calling in Christ, which is surely a very high calling.  Don't be swept away by Humanism as you remain humble.  Remember that you in your sin-corrupted body is a low, low creature; you as only human is weak.  But looking to Christ to raise you up will - eventually - involve some raising.  Strength and righteousness and clarity and knowledge and wisdom are all good things and desirable.. just don't try to get them by your fallen, corrupted will.  Subvert your will to Christ's real will, which He has laid out for us to see in God's Special Book, the Holy Scriptures.  There is where His mind is, and Th...

Those of you who fall back into reliance on a lie in a tough spot, consider: What if you asked me if I've stopped beating my wife yet?  How could I answer (I've never been married)?  Silence.  Silence is a fine answer, even though we've been taught by society that silence is agreement or silence is cowardly or some such things - but the BIBLE doesn't say silence means those things, and so we have interpretive latitude!  Just stay silent, or point out that the structure of the question is evidence against the asker.  Here's another one:  What if Nazis came to your door asking if there were any Jews hiding in there?  Silence is again a viable answer, so far as it goes, but now you will have to put your life on the line for that non-lying answer when those soldiers try to commit murder.  Then you shoot them in the face, because morality is not the ethics of secular commands but morality comes from God's commands, and He has not only said that if a ma...

[Taken from the core belief handbook of the Global Methodist Church] A deeper understanding of the current problem in the Church is elucidated by understanding Wesleyanism.  The very influential "Wesleyan Way of Salvation", a term with great cringe effect on it's very surface, forces a pause before justification (salvation) when the Church - it implies - should behave toward non-Christians as though they will be Christians instead of the way Paul told us to behave toward the World.  The Wesleyans first have "prevenient grace", which strongly correlates with Predestination - that God must protect us until we come to believe and confess in accordance with the Scriptures to be saved.  But it is "Convincing Grace" that causes all this trouble.  Before justification, the Wesleyans believe and push with practice that anti-Scriptural belief that a person repents from their desire to be worldly due to a desire to "flee the wrath to come" and gains fr...

The sin of individuals is able to fight against the righteousness that many individuals have coalesced into corporate structures over many generations.  Protect those structures and those individual works that are righteous, and fight against those structures and those individual works that are wicked.  Neither the group or the individual is purely right or wrong, unless we are given to God and have His Son Jesus Christ's righteousness or are not and have our own evil, both in the individual work or the corporate.

We've heard it concluded that God had to give us free will, because we had to be given the choice to sin in order to know love.  But have you considered the angels at the time before Lucifer became Satan?  Do you suppose that they had a "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil" for themselves, even though such a thing has not been told in the Bible?  Or do you postulate that the angels did not know love at that time?  Absurd! I can see no other conclusion at this point than that sin is not to support love.  God did not intend sin.  Lucifer could obviously reach out, find, explore and take pride in his heart and allow it to bloom into every wicked thing - that's free will working sin, but it's not God making a plan for sin in order to allow free will in order to know love!  That's twisted, man! Like the angels, we could have skipped the whole sin thing - God does not tempt anybody.

We don't want the World to make peace with their human nature, we want their sin to be most obvious, because the effect of sin in the human condition is a metaphor for true, everlasting, spiritual death.  When we make them think Christianity is only kindness and try to alleviate their suffering without giving them the Gospel that Paul preached, we rob from them both the experience of the harm of sin and the knowledge of how to be saved by Jesus Christ from God's good justice against sin.

Don't forget sin, which Jesus became (He asked His Father on the cross "why have You forsaken Me?") so He could die for our sins as the substitutionary penal atonement, so that God the Judge now sees His righteousness and not the sin of those who do call on His name for our salvation by confessing with the mouth Master Jesus, according to the Scriptures, and then He was buried, and then God raised Him from the dead on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and then He was seen by Peter, the Disciples, over 500 brothers at one time (most of whom were still alive when Paul wrote this formulation that he had also been taught of the gospel to the Corinthian congregation), and then Jesus was seen after that by James and the Apostles and Paul, and believing that He can save us because of this great work of His, that's why we call on His name and confess Him "Lord", which is to say "Master". All sinners must end up in the Lake of Fire, but God s...

Concerning those with a certain different Gospel, if you don't believe that Hell is judgment after this lifetime but only eternal non-existence or a lack of consciousness, then what judgment is that compared to the agony not only of a Roman cross upon anyone, but of the separation from God that Christ endured on one of them as evidenced when He said, "Father, why have You forsaken Me"?  What a chilling thing, but the World often finds comfort in escape through eternal unconsciousness and finds living life a wearisome task by the ends of it.  And if you do believe that Hell is really God's judgment in this life for those who behave evilly, you only have to examine the states of those who practice evil for a living to realize that they often get along pretty well, even in their souls as well as their bodies!  So in either place, here or hereafter, where is God's judgment on your view that would come close to the sacrifice Christ made to save us from it?  How would i...

This article was printed in 1995 issue of Journal of the Grace Evangelical Society. Their website is www.faithalone.org. I. Introduction While it may not be in scholarly vogue, let me begin this rather theological article with a hypothetical story. Bob, a middle-aged salesman, was on a business trip in another state. Things have not been working well with his marriage. In fact, to his utter shock his wife had informed him a few hours before his flight that she was filing for divorce and leaving. The papers were in the process of being finalized. To make matters worse, after Bob arrived at his destination he discovered that his most substantial client had not responded to his business calls as expected. Bob was on the verge of losing this highly significant account. In his motel room that evening, in a state of extreme despair, Bob remembered how his Christian friend had spoken of the unusual change that Christ had worked in his life when all else seemed hopeless. Just as Bob had suspec...