IS WORRY SIN?

 

 

Worry/anxiety can be good or bad, as anger, judging, and jealousy can be used righteously or unrighteously. Jesus was tempted in every way that we are, even by worry, except without sinning.

·       Hebrews 4:15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.

 This means that worry and even desires are not sins in themselves. If all worry is sinful then vertigo and a sore throat are sinful! Instead, they can either turn us to Jesus or away from Him:

·       Psalm 56:3–4 When I am afraid, I put my trust in you. In God, whose word I praise, in God I trust; I shall not be afraid. What can flesh do to me?

 

“I shall not be afraid” doesn’t mean that the Psalmist believes that he will never again experience fear, an often-appropriate human reaction. Instead, it suggests that when fear comes, the Psalmist will not panic and run or suppress the feeling but instead will turn to the Lord and recall how he has been delivered in the past:

·       2 Corinthians 1:10 He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again.

Worry and fear are normal and needful. They alert us to dangers. Perhaps the foremost danger is that they might cause us to trust in ourselves, leading to self-righteousness, instead of to God to handle the various threats in our lives. Paul explained that he had to be delivered from self-trust before he could learn to trust in God alone:

·       2 Corinthians 1:8–9 For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.

It is also about meditating on how God has faithfully delivered many throughout the pages of the Bible, often after waiting:

·       1 Peter 5:10 And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.

To refuse to turn to God, to wait, and to endure is the sin.

CAN WE HAVE JESUS PLUS QUEER, POLY-AMOROUS SEXUAL RELATIONS?

 

 

This was a question by someone who wanted all these. I answered:

 “Thanks for your all-important question. When we turn to the new life in Jesus, it also means that we turn away from the old life of sin. If I trust in Jesus, I do what He tells me to do—run from sin. If I refuse, it means that I don’t trust in Him but in my own judgments and thinking:

·       If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. (1 John 1:6-7)

·       And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. Whoever says “I know him” but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him, but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him: whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. (1 John 2:3-6)

 Nevertheless, we are all far from perfection, but when we fail, we must honestly confess our sins with the sincere intention to turn away from them:

 ·       If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:8-9)

 If we refuse, we are telling Him, “I know better than You.” And “I will not trust in your teachings but in my own inclinations.” We cannot do both—Jesus and practicing willful sin. Any sexual relations outside of heterosexual marriage is sin:

 ·       For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. (Romans 1:26-28)

 The life in Christ is one of sacrifice but of an eternity of joy. We all must choose either Christ or the immediate but temporary pleasures of this life.”

PATIENCE, ENDURANCE, AND HEALING

Many hyper-Pentecostal (HP) groups insist that we should have it all now—wealth and healing. If we don’t get healed immediately, the sick were often told that there was something the matter with their faith. Now, it is more likely the un-healed are told, “There is something within you that is blocking your healing.” But they are not told:

•    “You might have to wait for your healing,” or
•    “It might not be according to God’s will to heal you. Instead, He might be accomplishing something more important within you like patience, endurance, character, and faithfulness,” or
•    “God’s grace is sufficient” and His strength is made perfect through weakness and infirmity.”

These considerations are left entirely out of the HP equation, although they are central to the Bible and our lives in Christ, even though the concepts of patience, endurance, waiting, and perseverance are mentioned many hundreds of times in the Bible. Abraham had to wait 25 years for His promised Isaac. Moses had to endure 40 years as a lowly shepherd in the desert before God would appear to Him in a burning bush and instruct him to lead his suffering people to freedom the very thing that he had previously wanted to do. But meanwhile God was preparing Moses who had become the humblest man on all the earth. And now we await Jesus’ return! Even our Lord waits patiently as He too forbears as our sins destroy:

•    Romans 3:25  [Jesus] whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.

Some of our Lord’s goals could only be accomplished through patience:

•    2 Peter 3:9 The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.

Jesus also had to patiently endure:

•    Luke 12:49–50 “I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled! I have a baptism [the crucifixion] to be baptized with, and how great is my distress until it is accomplished!”

Patiently enduring demonstrates the truth of our Faith:

•    2 Corinthians 6:4 but as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: by great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities,

If we patiently endure, we shall reap the blessings. There is no promise that we shall receive God’s promises immediately but in “due season”:

•    Hebrews 6:11–12 And we desire each one of you to show the same earnestness to have the full assurance of hope until the end, so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.

•    Galatians 6:9 And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.

We inherit the promises of God through patience:

•    Psalm 37:9 For the evildoers shall be cut off, but those who wait for the LORD shall inherit the land… 37:34 Wait for the LORD and keep his way, and he will exalt you to inherit the land; you will look on when the wicked are cut off.

We need the patience of the farmer who must await the harvest. There is no secret formula to reap the moment we sow:

•    James 5:7–8 Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it, until it receives the early and the late rains. You also, be patient…

Through patiently enduring, we receive God’s blessings, which we can pass on to others to build the Body of Christ. This also creates love and community:

•    2 Corinthians 1:3–4 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.

Enduring suffering is also God’s command. Through this God produces character, humility, hope, and gentleness:

•    Ephesians 4:1–2 therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love,

•    Romans 5:3–4 Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,

All these promises are foreign to the HPs who claim that they receive their blessings in the here and now. They are forceful motivational speakers who make bold claims. One such speaker, before tens of thousands promised that no one will leave his crusade unchanged.

Can we honestly make such wild claims? According to the Scriptures, we are an insubstantial mist, a sinful nothing:

•    James 4:13–16 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.

In any event, we need not worry that we are missing out: Romans 8:26–27 Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

WHO OWNS OUR CHILDREN?

 

 


Utopian idealists tend to believe that the State owns them. Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao had also believed this but proved to be  poor parental substitutes. Consequently, they are now all gone and their misguided experiments in State sovereignty over our children.

Some collapses haven’t been violent and abrupt. Some utopian communities have merely found their idealism unworkable, and, therefore, have reverted to a more traditional understanding and practice.

In the early 70s, I had spent time on a number of Kibbutzim of the most radical and socialistic movement, Hashomer Hatziar. The Kibbutzim of this movement had been so radical that, initially, they had rejected marriage and the nuclear family as oppressive forms of “ownership.” However, by the time that I had arrived in the 70s, these communities all had reverted back to traditional nuclear families, although some aspects remained communal.

However, this discredited ideal of the State ownership of children stubbornly continues. In “To Whom Do Children Belong,” Melissa Moschella attempts to defend parental rights. At the beginning of her book, she quotes Melissa Harris-Perry:

•    “We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.” http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2016/09/17692/

Well, why shouldn’t children belong to their State? Doesn’t the State have a right and responsibility to ensure that children grow up into responsible adults? Of course! However, who can best ensure the welfare of the children and their positive adjustment to society?

Under the various utopian schemes, children have been made into the pawns of the prevailing ideology rather than the beneficiaries of parental love. The same critique can be made today.

Now, many school districts are pandering to the ideology of transgenderism. As a result, they are proscribing gender specific pronouns and encouraging young children to explore sexual alternatives. Besides, this ideology has become so militant that parents are no longer allowed to exempt their children from teachings they regard as inappropriate. They have even been labeled “domestic terrorists” by our administration! Often, they are not even informed about the schools’ advocacy of transgenderism.

About transgenderism and the State usurping the responsibility of the parents, psychiatrist Boris Vatel has written:

•    The NYC Commission on Human Rights maintains that gender identity is "one's internal deeply held sense of one's gender, which may be the same or different from one's sex assigned at birth. This statement intentionally uses language to distort reality. Except in cases of rare medical conditions resulting in ambiguous genitalia, no one's sex is "assigned" at birth any more than the fact of belonging to the human species is assigned at birth.”

•    More significantly, this statement erroneously implies that a person's beliefs about himself carry more legitimacy than the physical facts that contradict such beliefs. Using the Commission's reasoning, can we declare an alternate "age identity" to be legitimately different from one's true age? What about "race identity" or even "species identity"? If one accepts as legitimate the logic by which men may identify themselves as women and insist on being considered as such by others, there is no reason to reject as invalid any number of other idiosyncratic identities that have no basis in reality. (Salvo Magazine)

Vatel compares the delusion of a boy thinking himself a girl with the delusion of declaring yourself the CEO of the company, if you are just the mail-carrier. Vatel argues that responsible psychotherapy has to challenge delusional thinking and not exalt it and promote it through sex-change therapies.

If choice is exalted to encourage a boy to think he is a girl, why not also to encourage a Black to think he is a White, or a human to think he is a bird or a cow!

The parent understands the absurdity of such thinking, even more so and the potential damage to their children. The State doesn’t care. It has other concerns.

King Solomon, in his surpassing wisdom, understood this. When two women came before him, each claiming maternity over a newborn, Solomon ordered that the baby be cut in two – one half given to each claimant. At this, the real mother cried out:

•    “Please, my lord, give her the living baby! Don’t kill him!” But the other said, “Neither I nor you shall have him. Cut him in two!” Then the king gave his ruling: “Give the living baby to the first woman. Do not kill him; she is his mother.” (1 Kings 3:26-27)

Solomon understood something that is now left out of the equation. The mother, and not the State truly cares about the welfare of her child. In contrast, the State might have answered, “Fine! If I can’t have the child, then no one else should.”

The State can never provide parental love (and it has no interest in providing this), any more than a nursing home or a State orphans’ ward. In contrast, the parents will never sacrifice their child to a vague, politically correct ideal. This is why parents must retain control over their children! Therefore, vote “No” for any bills using deceptive wording such as “reproductive rights.”