Top ten reasons you should visit New Zealand
Proud of you, Prime Minister John Key!
Revival in the air
Yesterday, a cousin from California sent us the link to an article in time.com dated 17 April 2009. It was called The New Calvinism by David Van Biema.
The article speaks of Calvinism becoming popular again and describes it thus:
“Calvinism . . . offers a rock-steady deity who orchestrates absolutely everything, including illness (or home foreclosure!), by a logic we may not understand but don’t have to second-guess. Our satisfaction — and our purpose — is fulfilled simply by “glorifying” him.”
As committed Christians, the Lord Jesus has been our Master and Saviour and a faithful Guide for many many years. About five years ago this same cousin from California introduced us to Calvinism. At first we did not think much of it, but it grew on us and delighted us more and more. Today we love the reformed doctrines as well as the rich background and history. I am sure that many non Calvanists would also love this teaching if given the kind of gracious opportunity that we were given.
We have since had the privilege of helping many others from our old church, Evangelical Bible Assembly (EBA) in India, including their pastor, my father, who now lives with us in New Zealand, to understand this doctrine. So we have been feeling that we are experiencing a revival of sorts as far as the EBA family is concerned.
But this article seems to describe a much bigger revival, although it does not use the word ‘revival’. It must be big if the secular press comments on it. Revivals are good for us and bad for us.
They are good because the right preachers are not fighting hard to be heard. It is always the easy to do the popular thing. For a change it suddenly becomes easy to do what God wants us to do.
But there is another side that we have to watch out for. From what I have experienced of revivals, with revivals, come conversions on a much larger scale, and with this larger scale come many conversions that are not genuine. It is easy to acquire jargons, prayers, songs, and postures when revival is in the air without any accompanying change of heart. Associations of light with darkness are not that easy to prevent anymore.
Sadly, this article makes subtle mention of the lack of unity among Calvinists. Just this morning Philip was telling me about the polarisation of people over a particular issue that is evident in the comments made in Tim Challies’ post Missing the Forest for all the Trees. When men of God disagree, we need patient and godly people who wait on the Lord for help, without making evocative remarks.
The article ends with a thought-provoking comment:
“Calvin’s 500th birthday will be this July. It will be interesting to see whether Calvin’s latest legacy will be classic Protestant backbiting or whether, during these hard times, more Christians searching for security will submit their wills to the austerely demanding God of their country’s infancy.”
Embryonic cloning and embryonic cloning
I would like to point my regular readers to an post entitled ‘9 Things the Media Messed Up’ about Obama’s Stem Cell Announcement.
Obama supposedly said:
“And we will ensure that our government never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction. It is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society, or any society.”
This is not as straightforward as it sounds because he speaks only of “reproductive cloning,” not mentioning the other kind of cloning—Research cloning—which allows for a child to be cloned, used in research, and killed within a few weeks.
By the way, I quite like this blogger scrubone.
Heaven is nearer to Joni
Joni Eareckson Tada became a quadriplegic when she dived into shallow waters. Painful though the experience was, it turned her life around and made her lean on God more. The more she leaned on Him, the stronger she discovered He was.
Joni has been a great role model for me. I’ve known about her from 1979 when I read a book about her. I’ve since taught her story to Sunday School kids. I’ve read a couple of her books. Her life has helped me keep my miniscule problems in perspective.
She is an artist and paints with her mouth. She writes books. The proceeds from all this goes to Joni and Friends International Disability Center.
Oh, and does she sing! Our family loves listening to the hymns sung by the foursome— Joni, John MacArthur, and the Wolgemuths. In New Zealand, you can order these from Grace to you, New Zealand. The books that come with these CDs are well worth the price.
Joni has a beautiful voice. Many years ago I had one of Joni’s song tapes. Why even right now, after all these years I can still hear her sing Joni’s Waltz written by Nancy Honeytree.
Though I spend my mortal lifetime in this chair,
I refuse to waste it living in despair.
And though others may receive
Gifts of healing, I believe
That He has given me a gift beyond compare….
For heaven is nearer to me,
And at times it is all I can see.
Sweet music I hear
Coming down to my ear;
And I know that it’s playing for me.For I am Christ the Savior’s own bride,
And redeemed I shall stand by His side.
He will say, “Shall we dance?”
And our endless romance
Will be worth all the tears I have cried.
I rejoice with him whose pain my Savior heals.
And I weep with him who still his anguish feels.
But earthly joys and earthly tears,
Are confined to earthly years.
And a greater good the Word of God reveals.In this life we have a cross that we must bear;
A tiny part of Jesus’ death that we can share.
And one day we’ll lay it down,
For He has promised us a crown,
To which our suffering can never be compared
In an interview with Larry King on 3 August 2004, Joni said:
And I can’t wait go to Heaven, and I look forward to Heaven so much, because not only will I paint murals, but I’ll have back use of my hands, and I really will jump up, dance, kick, aerobics. And I hope I can take this wheelchair to Heaven with me. I know, if you had Pastor John MacArthur here, he’d say that’s not biblically correct. And it’s not. But if I could, I would take it with me and I would be standing next to my savior Jesus Christ, and I would say, “Lord, do you see this wheelchair? Well, before you send it to hell, I want to tell you something about it. You were right, when you said, in this world we would have trouble. And there’s a lot of trouble being a quadriplegic, but you know what, the weaker I was in that thing, the harder I leaned on you and the harder I leaned on you, the stronger I discovered you to be. Thank you for the bruising of a blessing it was, this severe mercy. Thank you.
And when asked about 9/11 in particular and bad things happening to us in general, she said:
That’s a tragedy, to be sure. And I look at that and I think: What has God done here? And when I look back at 9/11 — and I don’t know all — who am I? I don’t know reasons why.
If God told us the reasons why anyway, it would be like probably pouring million gallon truths into our one-ounce brains. We couldn’t contain it all. But when I look at national tragedies or even personal tragedies, sometimes I think these things are like God’s way of, like, wake-up calls, like yellow lights blinking, like red flags waving.
Like what are you doing with your life? Where are you going? Do you not know that this parade of life as you enjoy it is not going to last forever? And what will you do when you face the other side of your tombstone?
And it’s the — I think suffering is God’s way of sometimes waking us up out of our spiritual slumber with an ice-cold splash in the face and getting us seriously to consider his claims, who he is and where we’re going. (Click here for entire transcript)
Fertillized human eggs are human in North Dakota
‘North Dakota House Gives Fertilized Eggs Human Status’ reads the title of a story in foxnews.com dated 18 February 2009
A measure approved by the North Dakota House gives a fertilized human egg the legal rights of a human being, a step that would essentially ban abortion in the state. . .
The bill declares that “any organism with the genome of homo sapiens” is a person protected by rights granted by the North Dakota Constitution and state laws.
Way to go.
Tough times financially
We hear terms like ‘economic downturn’ and ‘recession’ here in New Zealand. But many of us have not yet started to feel the pinch. But this comfortable situation can change in a moment.
Here is a word of encouragement from John Piper about how Christians ought to face financial problems.
My friend David Porter has also posted a piece related to this called “Worried about the Economy and Recession?” introducing Dr. Steve Lawson’s series on “God’s Sovereignty over America.”
Why Israel Is The Victim
David Horowitz, American writer and activist, writes for FrontPage Magazine.
I came across his article ‘Why Israel Is The Victim And The Arabs Are The Indefensible Aggressors In the Middle East’ published in 2002. It was hard to chose one catchy excerpt to include here, because I found far too many. I will leave you with the last two on my list.
The Jews got a sliver of land without oil, and created abundant wealth and life in all its rich and diverse forms. The Arabs got nine times the acreage but all they have done with it is to sit on its aridity and nurture the poverty, resentments and hatreds of its inhabitants. Out of these dark elements they have created and perfected the most vile anti-human terrorism the world has ever seen:
For the Jews in the Middle East, the present conflict is a life and death struggle, yet every government in the UN with the exception of the United States and sometimes Britain regularly votes against Israel in the face of a terrorist enemy, who has no respect for the rights or lives of Jews.
The article is a great read and an enlightening one.
What do the terms ‘left wing’ and ‘right wing’ mean?
I used the terms right wing and left wing during lunch today, and some friends asked me what these terms meant. I started to reply and suddenly realised that I did not really know. But then I knew something. Now how was I to tell them that what I knew was valid although I did not really know.
I said:
I don’t know enough to define these terms exactly; I will find out.
But I can tell you what I do know.
Let’s say I did not know what trees are, and someone pointed those trees to me, and those ones and those as well, and said, “Those are trees.” I would now know that some trees could sway in the wind and appear green in colour on the top.
So let me tell you what I know about left wing and right wing from what I have picked up over time.
Having confused them with my analogy about trees, I proceeded to describle what I had noticed and read about left-wing and right-wing parties in the US, here, and India:
- Right-wing people tended to believe in God more than left-wing people did. (But then, in the US both party candidates profess faith in God. In New Zealand both main candidates are agnostics)
- You are more likely to find among left-wing people, those who are on the wrong side of pro-life issues (issues related to abortion, euthanasia, and stem-cell research), feminists, and those who do not want to stay with the God-given one-man-with-one-woman definition of marriage.
- Right-wing people would tend to agree and approve that the more hardworking you are, the richer you are likely to be, whereas left-wing people would want wealth distributed evenly among the people by means of welfare schemes. Not only would they tend to control your finances, they would want to exercise control over how you run your family and discipline your children.
But I have since looked up Wikepedia, which gave me these points:
Right-wing politics includes both culturally liberal and conservative movements, making economic policy a more universal difference between the left and the right
The right tends to support a decentralised economy based on economic freedom, and advocates policies such as property rights, free markets, and free trade. The left generally advocates regulatory economics and egalitarianism.
From mid-19th century, ‘left’ would increasingly refer to various forms of socialism and communism. The hard left is more strongly influenced by Marxism, while the soft left had a more gradualist approach to building socialism
The term today has different meanings in different countries. In the United States, left-wing is often used as a synonym for the Democratic Party, which is more socially liberal than the Republican Party.
Amazing Grace
CNN reports today: Hundreds of people sang “Amazing Grace” and prayed Friday evening as they gathered at a City Hall in suburban St. Louis, Missouri, to mourn the victims of a shooting spree.
Great hymns, because of their beautiful verse, and apt and familiar tunes give people a sense of comfort, a sense of standing on something solid when everything else seems to totter and fall. This may be likened to the sense of comfort that one may experience in a cathedral with stained glass windows and pipe organ. The very wood of the ancient mahogany pews offers a sense of stability.
Americans are so fond of this hymn, Amazing Grace and invariably sing it in all solemn occasions. And yet the words would seem so out of place in most of these occasions, because they talk about the wretchedness of sinners without Christ and the grace that saves those who have been found. I cannot see how these words can offer any comfort in a public gathering where such sentiments are alien. I conclude that the main culprit in this anomaly is the beautiful tune.
The tune of this hymn is special to me too and brings with it many distracting memories that I could do without, struggling as I already do to worship God from my inner man in spirit and truth. Finding an alternate tune was not difficult as it follows the common meter. Singing to the tune of “The Lord’s my Shepherd” was a bit confusing because of the similarity of tunes. I thought the tune of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” was perfect.
Another such hymn is ‘Just as I am without one plea,’ where playing the introduction is enough to set off some into bursts of copious tears.
Three lessons from 9-11
The following was written by Edward Fudge, a man of God, shortly after the terrible events of 11 September 2001.
First, we lament the mind-numbing and momentous loss of life. We mourn for those who perished and pray for their loved ones. Though thousands died, each was an individual, snatched without warning from family and friends. We cannot explain such tragedies, and humans cannot finally prevent their repetition. We can ponder certain larger implications, however, and be reminded of eternal verities. What appear, from earth’s viewpoint, to be apocalyptic bowls of wrath, may always serve constructively as trumpet calls of warning. We live in a fallen world. Nothing earthly is ultimately secure. God weeps, I believe, but he is not threatened. Evil does not take him by surprise. Isaiah chapter 40 says that God is still sovereign, just as he has always been.
