I remember reading an article about a man who avoided the beach in the summer after admitting his addiction to pornography to his wife. He concluded that being around people who were barely covered often triggered his compulsion. Other cases involved a man who stopped visiting certain sections at a local video store and a woman who stopped reading romance novels. Both concluded that viewing this material was stimulating lust. What about the gym and the yoga pants trend? Enough said!
How bad do you want freedom? Although these examples may seem extreme, to counter lust as believers we must avoid places, people, or things that stimulate that desire. I find it ironic that most of the Christian books that were written over a hundred years ago have a strong emphasis on holiness and obedience, but today we find these words offensive. We want New Testament power but not New Testament holiness. For example, J.C. Ryle (1816–1900) in his book on holiness said that we must stand guard as a soldier on enemy ground. The problem is that many love the world and have a hard time separating. They believe in heaven, but they don’t truly long for it. They “say” that they fear God, but they don’t live like it. They indulge temptation rather than fight it. They enjoy sin rather than confront it. And they compromise rather than conquer.
The lukewarm church disdains the heat of conviction. Holiness, to them, is outdated, old-fashioned, and too conservative, but holiness is clearly biblical and always linked to freedom from sin. Most people want to coddle their sin rather than crucify it. Again, how badly do you want freedom? An extreme attack requires an extreme defense.
Proverbs 5:3 reminds us that “the lips of an immoral woman drip honey, and her mouth is smoother than oil.” Sin is always enticing: it fascinates before it assassinates! But be encouraged: being tempted isn’t sin—surrendering to it is. Temptation is also an opportunity to do what is right by turning from it. First Corinthians 10:13 states, “No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.” The door of temptation swings both ways—you can enter or exit. If you choose to enter, once inside, you may not see the exit sign so clearly again.
To hit SIN right between the eyes, we need to “go back to the old paths” (Jeremiah 6:16)—the old paths of holiness and a deep hunger for righteousness. Accountability is great, and software protecting your phone or computer is important, but nothing compares to keeping your eyes on Christ and obeying Him. This forward motion leads to the filling of the Spirit. You can’t be filled with sin and the Spirit at the same time. One or the other will prevail depending on whether you feed your flesh or starve it.
The context of Jeremiah’s words is very relevant for us today. God said, “When I had fed them to the full, then they committed adultery and assembled themselves by troops in the harlots’ houses. They were like well-fed lusty stallions; every one neighed after his neighbor’s wife” (Jeremiah 5:7–8). Since we crave more of what we feed, consider fasting to silence the voice of the flesh. Gordon Cove reminds us in his book, Revival Now through Prayer and Fasting, that “fasting arrests the appetite of sex because food feeds all desires and appetites of the flesh and fasting starves them. A luxurious diet and habitual overfeeding produce an unbalanced animalism” (Schmul, 1988). A free download of my book, Feasting and Fasting, is available here for those needing additional support.
Conviction is a gift from God; use it to return to the old paths. We also must stop making excuses and see the death in sin. America’s porn epidemic will continue to pervert, with the ultimate goal of destroying. Men, stop the silly video games, get off Facebook, kill your porn habit, and tell your ungodly friends to hit the road. You’re called to lead, love, and die if necessary for your family. We are the reason the nation is deteriorating. We are the reason the family is breaking down. We must stop blaming everyone and everything, from God to the government, and face the truth that we are the stench in the nostrils of a righteous, holy, pure God.
I can hear it now: “Shane, you’re being too hard on the guys.” If that’s your thinking, wake up! Life is a battleground, not a playground. In the 1970s, Ted Bundy was one of America’s most brutal serial killers and rapists, who was put to death by electrocution on January 24, 1989. He said, “I’ve lived in prison a long time now. I’ve met a lot of men who were motivated to commit violence just like me. And without exception, every one of them was deeply involved in pornography. Without question, without exception, deeply influenced and consumed by addiction to pornography.”
And Ariel Castro, who was exposed in 2013 for kidnapping three women and holding them prisoner for ten years, admitted that a deep addiction to pornography fed his perversion. He eventually committed suicide in prison. His idol promised pleasure but brought death and destruction. But don’t let discouragement and failure stand in your way. Follow the apostle Paul’s advice, “Forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead” (Philippians 3:13). Forget your past mistakes, but remember the lessons learned because of them, and fully surrender your life to Christ. He is our only hope.Additional support: Both these videos will offer hope and freedom for those who struggle with pornography.
Every believer understands the frustration, confusion, and doubt caused by our sin after we’re saved. We know we’ve been transformed through the power of God’s redeeming work. He’s changed our nature and set us free from the dominion of sin and Satan. But we don’t always live in the reality of that freedom. In fact, we sometimes get the sense that we’re still wicked sinners, and that nothing has changed at all.
Apostolic Exasperation
That angst over remaining sin is probably best described by the apostle Paul in Romans 7:14-25.
For we know that the Law is spiritual, but I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin. For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate. But if I do the very thing I do not want to do, I agree with the Law, confessing that the Law is good. So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want. But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good. For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin.
That passage has puzzled scholars and theologians throughout the history of the church. Is Paul describing himself before Christ, or is he talking about someone else—perhaps someone with very little spiritual maturity, or a believer still caught in sin’s grasp? Or is this passage an indication that Paul was mentally unstable, as he seems to drift between two contradictory mindsets? The mind that has not been illuminated by the Holy Spirit likely cannot make any sense of Paul’s confessional self-description.
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
In his book The Gospel According to the Apostles, John MacArthur helps us answer some of those questions and understand the inner conflict Paul describes.
This is no carnal Christian or someone with a low degree of sanctification. Paul’s repeated use of the personal pronoun in this context emphasizes that this was his own personal experience. The verb tenses show that he did not consider himself past this stage. The conflict that he describes here was one he knew well—even as an advanced Christian. God’s sanctifying work in his heart is clearly evident. He says he hates his sin (v. 15). He loves righteousness (vv. 19, 21). He delights in the law of God from his heart (v. 22). He thanks God for the deliverance that is his in Christ (v. 25). Those are all responses of a mature Christian, in this case as seasoned apostle; not someone floundering in the throes of a desperate state of established carnality. In fact, it is the description of a godly man whose occasional sin feels like a constant thing when set against the backdrop of his holy longings.
Romans 7:14-25 thus describes the human side of the sanctifying process. We must not set it against Romans 8, as some do, imagining that these chapters describe two separate stages of Christian growth. They simply give two different perspectives on sanctification. Romans 7 is the human perspective; Romans 8 is the divine perspective. Romans 7 is Paul’s own testimony of how it is to live as a Spirit-controlled, spiritually grounded believer. He loved the holy law of God with his whole heart, yet he found himself wrapped in human flesh and unable to fulfill it the way his heart wanted to. Are there Christians anywhere who are so spiritual that they can testify to a life lived above this level? [1]
For believers, the push and pull the apostle describes is a common, even frequent occurrence. We understand hating sin even while we’re sinning. We recognize the compulsion to return to the very sins the Lord has saved us from. And we can appreciate how the remaining stains of our sinful past cause us to question whether we’ve truly been transformed at all.
An Unlikely Source of Assurance
But in the midst of that frustration, John MacArthur says we ought to find encouragement and assurance.
All true believers should be living at precisely this level, struggling with the tension Paul describes between an ever-increasing hunger for righteousness on the one hand, and a growing sensitivity to sin on the other. Though the degree of sin will vary depending on one’s level of spiritual maturity, sin in the genuine believer should always make him or her feel the conflict Paul describes in these verses. [2]
In a slightly ironic twist, the believer’s frustration over his sin and lack of spiritual growth is a strong indication that he is growing spiritually. In fact, it’s the believer who doesn’t have this inner struggle who needs to be concerned.
Though some have tried to claim they live above Romans 7, they only reveal their own insensitivity to the pervasive effects of sin in the flesh. If they would honestly measure themselves against God’s standards of righteousness, they would realize how far they fall short. The closer we get to God, the more we see our own sin. Only immature, fleshly, and legalistic persons can live under the illusion that they measure up well by God’s standards. The level of spiritual insight, brokenness, contrition, and humility that characterizes the person depicted in Romans 7 are marks of a spiritual and mature believer who before God has no trust in his own goodness and achievements.
So Romans 7 is not the cry of a carnal Christian who cares not of righteousness, but the lament of a godly Christian who, at the height of spiritual maturity, nevertheless finds himself unable to live up to the holy standard. It is also the experience of every genuine believer at every stage of spiritual development. [3]
We need to take great comfort in the fact that the struggle against our flesh is an indication of victory over the flesh. Paul was no ordinary believer—he encountered Christ face-to-face; he was whisked away to see the glories of heaven; he witnessed and performed miracles through the power of the Holy Spirit. In spite of all that, he still struggled with sin, and longed to be free of the fleshly shackles of his former nature, crying out, “Who will set me free from the body of this death?” (Romans 7:24).
That was not a helpless exclamation—he already knew the answer, as he immediately identifies His Savior: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord” (Romans 7:25). Paul’s confidence was not in himself or his righteousness, but in God’s triumph over sin, producing a settled hope of heaven’s glory. He made that clear just few paragraphs later in Romans 8:18-19.
I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God.
His assurance was rooted in the character and promises of God, and he knew that the Lord would not abandon His transforming work in His people before it was completed. “These whom He justified, He also glorified” (Romans 8:30).
He made the same reassuring point in his epistles to the church at Corinth. He wrote, “For this perishable must put on the imperishable, and this mortal must put on immortality. . . . But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:53, 57). “While we are in this tent, we groan, being burdened, because we do not want to be unclothed but to be clothed, so that what is mortal will be swallowed up by life” (2 Corinthians 5:4).
The struggle against sin is a good thing, so long as you continue to struggle. It’s a lifelong battle, but as John MacArthur points out, one that bears significant fruit.
Yet for now the battle goes on. Full deliverance awaits glorification. Victory here and now is only possible bit by bit as we mortify the deeds of the body through the power of the Holy Spirit: “Therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which amounts to idolatry” (Colossians 3:5). “For if you are living according to the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Romans 8:13).
We are bound to be frustrated by our inability to experience holiness to the degree we desire. That is the inevitable experience of every true saint of God. Because of our flesh we can never in this life achieve the level of holiness to which we aspire. “And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body” (Romans 8:23). But that hope further inflames our aspirations to holiness. [4]
In The Gospel According to the Apostles, John closes his chapter on Romans 7 by quoting 1 John 3:2-3. It’s a good reminder that while the holiness we long for sometimes feels a long way off, it is never in doubt.
Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is. And everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.
Next time we’ll bring our discussion of sin, grace, and righteousness full circle, as we consider the believer’s adoption into the family of God.
I’m always amazed that people will spend good money to be frightened. They’ll ride the most radical roller coasters at an amusement park or watch the scariest movies out there.
Another emotion that works in tandem with fear is worry. And there are a lot of things to be worried about in today’s world. Yet some experts say that worry can actually shorten your life. Charles Mayo, one of the founders of the Mayo Clinic, said that he never knew anyone who died of overwork, but he knew many who died of worry.
Worry never makes anything better, and for all practical purposes, it makes things worse.
I like the philosophy of our friends Down Under who love to say, “No worries, mate.” For instance, if you ask for directions, they might say, “No worries, mate. You just go right over there.” That’s how we all ought to live.
In his letter to the Christians in Philippi, the apostle Paul wrote about what we should do instead of worrying. He said, “Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:6–7 NLT).
Here’s something to consider. Paul wrote those words while he was a prisoner in Rome. It would have been one thing if he were lying on a beach somewhere in the Mediterranean, soaking up some rays and sipping an iced tea.
But he wasn’t. Not only was he in prison, but he didn’t know what his fate would be. His desire had been to go to Rome and preach the gospel, but instead he’d been arrested. He didn’t know whether he would be acquitted or beheaded.
Yet Paul could write these inspired words: “Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything.”
Paul was saying, “Look, I’m in dire circumstances. If anyone could be miserable, it would be me. But I’m saying don’t worry about anything. Pray about everything.” His contentment came from knowing God.
In the same way, our contentment should come not from the things we have but from the relationship we have with God. That’s because no matter what we’re going through, God never will abandon us. God never will desert us.
The Old Testament prophet Habakkuk wrote, “Even though the fig trees have no blossoms, and there are no grapes on the vines; even though the olive crop fails, and the fields lie empty and barren; even though the flocks die in the fields, and the cattle barns are empty, yet I will rejoice in the Lord! I will be joyful in the God of my salvation!” (Habakkuk 3:17–18 NLT).
Are these the words of a crazy man? No, they’re the words of a man who knew that God was in control of his life and that God wouldn’t abandon him.
The word oops is not in God’s vocabulary. Isn’t that nice to know? I also know that God’s plans for us are better than our plans for ourselves, because God said, “For I know the plans I have for you . . . They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope” (Jeremiah 29:11 NLT).
You might be experiencing tough circumstances today. Know that God is in control. God is sovereign. God knows what He’s doing.
The psalmist wrote, “But each day the Lord pours his unfailing love upon me, and through each night I sing his songs, praying to God who gives me life” (Psalm 42:8 NLT).
Paul knew about singing songs in the night. The Bible tells us in the Book of Acts that he and Silas were thrown in prison for preaching the gospel, their back ripped open by a Roman jailer’s whip. At around midnight, with their feet fastened in stocks, they “were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening” (16:25 NLT).
When you’re in pain, the midnight hour is not the easiest time to have a worship service. When you’re in the doctor’s office waiting for test results or in a waiting room when your loved one is having surgery, that is not an easy time to rejoice.
But you don’t rejoice only when you know the outcome; you rejoice ahead of time because you know that God is in control.
Freedom from worry not only requires right praying, but it also requires right thinking. Paul went on to say, “And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise” (Philippians 4:8 NLT).
Maintaining personal peace involves both the heart and the mind. The Bible tells us that God “will keep in perfect peace all who trust in [him], all whose thoughts are fixed on [him]!” (Isaiah 26:3 NLT).
What we think about ultimately affects what we do. So we want to have our minds set on the things of the Lord.
Every temptation that will hit you always will come in the realm of your mind. Why? Because it’s command central. It’s in our minds that we plan, that we think, that we contemplate. It’s in our minds that we reach to the past through our memories and reach into the future through our imaginations.
So we need to train our minds to think both properly and biblically. Far too often we emote. We just react in the moment.
However, we need to think as the Bible teaches us to think, “casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5 NKJV).
Everyone can have lapses of faith. Everyone can have moments of despair. Everyone can experience times when they don’t understand what is going on in their lives. That is when we need to remind ourselves of what the Bible says.
Samson and Delilah, c. 1610. Found in the collection of the National Gallery, London. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)
By John MacArthur
Now, I told you a couple of weeks ago that we had finished the New Testament. Doesn’t mean I’ll never go back there again. I will. I have some plans to. But the natural assumption is that we’re going to take a look at the Old Testament. And I do have some plans for that. I’m working on kind of putting together a sort of a long series that could last the rest of our lives together, that you could – you could sort of call “The Road to Emmaus.”
You remember in Luke 24, Jesus on the road to Emmaus said to the disciples, it says that he said to them, “Beginning at Moses and the prophets and in all the holy writings, He spoke to them of the things concerning Himself.” Well, Moses, that’s the law; the prophets, the prophets; the holy writings, all the other books. Those are the three categories of the Old Testament.
So Jesus went to the Old Testament and taught them the things from the Old Testament that were about Him. So I can’t cover everything in the Old Testament, but I think we’ll go on a road-to-Emmaus journey and we’ll go through the Old Testament and find all the things that refer to Christ there. And there are many of them, and you might be surprised to know that Christ appears first in the Old Testament in Genesis 1:1. And last, in the last chapter of the Old Testament, in Malachi. So He is the beginning and the end of the Old Testament and whole lot of places in between. So that’s one of the things I want to do, among several others, and I’m kind of working on that as I attempt to reinvent myself this summer.
Now, I want to demonstrate to you that I do really know there is an Old Testament, and I am actually willing to teach the Old Testament to you. So let’s get a sample, all right? Open your Bible to Jeremiah – open your Bible to Jeremiah, the remarkable prophecy of the man known as the weeping prophet. He wrote this great prophecy of fifty-two chapters, and in addition to that, of course, he is responsible for the wonderful, deep, and insightful book of Lamentations. Jeremiah.
And I want to talk about Jeremiah because I think Jeremiah is a man for a time like our time. The Old Testament prophets were historical figures, real figures living in real events that are laid out for us in their prophecies and in their histories. But they are not unique in the sense that the times and the seasons and the issues that faced them were somehow never repeated. They are, in fact, the same cycles that are repeated through all of human history. Jeremiah lived in a time in a nation that is very instructive for us, living in the time and the nation in which we live today.
I think you are pretty much aware, if you are at all attuned to the character of our culture, that naturalism dominates our society. You might say there was a time in America when supernaturalism dominated our thinking. In other words, we were a nation under God. And you know they’re deleting that from the Pledge of Allegiance, I understand even at a golf tournament, trying to figure out how to get it off our coins. But there was a time when we were happy to say we are a nation under God, we are supernaturalists.
We believe in a Creator. We believe in God as a sovereign ruler of the universe. But we have abandoned that and we are essentially now rapidly becoming a nation of naturalists. The most influential intellectuals, philosophers, scientists, educators, politicians, judges in America are mostly naturalists.
Naturalists assume that God exists only in the imagination of religious people, that the idea of God is, frankly, a superstition, an irrational superstition that is created out of a pre-scientific era to meet certain anxieties of the human heart. The truth is, however, there is no God and everything is simply a consequence of natural effects. Naturalism is the idea that nature is all there is, that virtually everything that exists is simply the product of unplanned, uncontrolled accidents. Life is based on this assumption, that we have just randomly evolved into what we are today.
Creation, then, is the result, as we know it, life as we know it is the result of unconscious forces randomly mutating. Man says evolutionary science is the purposeless end of a purposeless process that did not have him in mind. Oops, he just showed up. This is what is taught in the universities and then this is what is learned by the students. Those students then become the next generation of educators, the next generation of politicians, the next generation of social architects, the next generation of judges who make their legal decisions. They become the next generation of journalists who interpret things that are going on in the world from a naturalist perspective. It is a form of atheism.
And while not all of them would deny the existence of some god, they are almost all very anxious to deny the existence of the biblical God. Those who believe in God are seen as irrational. Those who believe in the biblical God are seen as dangerous and must be kept out of the public discourse. And in the name of separation of church and state, we cannot have people who believe the Bible and the biblical God to be the true God have anything to say about public policy, public life, education, government, social order, law, courts, or morality.
All this rejection of God is purported to be based on science. It is called for by intellectualism. It is demanded by freedom and tolerance and mutual respect. There’s no place for anybody being an authority, anybody saying there is one God who is the absolute ruler who has written one book in which is contained all His will and all truth pertaining to Him and life in His world that is necessary. That is absolutely objectionable. There is this wholesale rejection of God. It is, however, not intellectual, it is the product of the love of iniquity. That’s all it is. Not a love of freedom, not a love of intellectualism, it’s not a love for science, it is a love for sin that drives this.
If you get rid of the God of the Bible, you get rid of the Bible. If you get rid of the Bible, you get rid of biblical morality. If you get rid of biblical morality, you can live any way you want with the assumption that there would be no consequences. So all the supposed intellectual naturalists are nothing but Hedonists wanting to express their lust in an unbridled way. Anybody with half a brain knows that all of this didn’t come from no one. Spurgeon said, “I can scarcely conceive a heart so callous that it feels no awe or a human mind so dull and destitute of understanding as fairly to view the tokens of God’s omnipotent power and then turn aside without some sense of wonder and obedience.”
How can you look at what exists and not be in awe of the source of it? How can we sin against so great a reality by denying it and then sin against the will of the very God we deny against the greatness of the Almighty? Well, our instruction today is going to come from the prophet Jeremiah as to how we respond to a society like ours which is very much like his.
Turn to Jeremiah chapter 5 – Jeremiah chapter 5. In a 52-chapter book, obviously there’s a lot more than we would attempt to cover, but I think I can give you a feel for the man and his time that will relate to how we approach the time and the place where we find ourselves today. Chapter 5 and verse 20 is one of the sermons of Jeremiah that comes from the Lord, and it gives us a good insight into the way things were.
Jeremiah is told by the Lord to say these things. “Declare this in the house of Jacob and proclaim it in Judah, saying,” – here is the message that God gives him – ‘Now hear this, O foolish and senseless people who have eyes but do not see, who have ears but do not hear. Do you not fear me?’ declares the Lord. ‘Do you not tremble in my presence? For I have placed the sand as a boundary for the sea, an eternal decree so that it cannot cross over it. Though the waters toss, yet they cannot prevail. Though they roar, yet they cannot cross over it.
“‘But this people has a stubborn and rebellious heart. They have turned aside and departed. They do not say in their heart, “Now let us fear the Lord our God who gives rain in its season, both the autumn rain and the spring rain, who keeps for us the appointed weeks of the harvest.” Your iniquities have turned these away and your sins have withheld good from you.’”
Now, what is this saying? It’s really a very, very clear statement. He is saying that the people of God, the men of Judah, the people of Jacob, the Jews have looked at the creation, they have seen the ocean and the land that bounds it, they have understood the rain at the appropriate season and the seasons and the rain that together produced the food that sustains life. They have seen the enduring consistency of all of this. They have seen the power of these provisions and the wonder of them – that is to say, the majesty of God in creation is on display. The providence of God is manifest, and it ought to stir up their hearts in worship. That’s why he says in verse 22, “Do you not fear me or worship me? Do you not tremble in my presence?”
On the contrary. They say in their heart, “Let us” – verse 24 – “not really fear the Lord.” It should say, “Let us fear the Lord now.” But they don’t. Their wills do not submit to Him. They don’t even give Him honor as the Creator and the provider. The almighty power of Jehovah is manifest, it is visible in the works of His creation, that should constrain His covenant people, Israel, and any people in any era of history to fear His name, to be in awe of Him as the Creator, to reverence Him as the source of provision, the One who controls the sea, provides the land and the seasons and the food.
How can we contemplate this God and not worship Him and not give Him honor and not turn to Him and not obey Him? That is the question that God tells Jeremiah to pose to Judah, the southern kingdom, the remaining people in the land of Israel. The northern kingdom already had been taken into captivity for their own apostasy.
But there’s more here than fact. There is an analogy here, and I want you to see the analogy. The analogy appears in verse 22. It is a fact that God places sand as a boundary for the sea. It is a fact that the waves toss and yet they cannot prevail, they roar yet they cannot cross over. It is a fact that God controls the oceans with the shore. The sea, then, Jeremiah says, never breaks its boundary. It obeys me in all its movements. It may toss and turn, there may be an occasional tidal wave, there may be an occasional tsunami, but the sea will go back to its ordered place.
However, on the contrary, verse 23, “This people has a stubborn and rebellious heart. They have turned aside and departed. They will not be bound. They will not stay within the confines of God’s will and purpose. They are a revolting and rebellious people. They go astray. They break all the boundaries. This pure, puny, sinful man, this little creature that God could crush like a moth under your shoe, this man will resist the restraints of God and overrun all his boundaries. Man in his fallenness cannot be held in check, either individually or collectively. The sea tosses and turns but it obeys. It is restrained by a little belt of sand. Its mighty powers are held back.”
But people, says God, who have stronger restraints than sand are rebellious and overrun the borders that God has established. That’s what the people of the nation Israel had done. The borders, the boundaries, His promises, His threats, His judgments, His commands, His Covenants, and they overran them all. Man is hellbent on revolt. It’s just the way it is. That is how, God says, Jeremiah must see His people.
Now, into this situation in the southern kingdom of Judah, God drops this prophet, and he’s a remarkable man. His message is the judgment that is coming and it is coming fast. In fact, the judgment came in his lifetime. About a century earlier, there was another very familiar prophet, Isaiah, who said the same thing, “Judgment is coming, judgment is coming, judgment is coming,” and he was referring to the Babylonian captivity, the holocaust of the arrival of the Babylonian-Chaldean army to desecrate the temple, destroy the temple, conquer Jerusalem, massacre multiple thousands of people, and carry the rest off captive into a pagan culture. That particular holocaust, among many in the life of Israel, Isaiah said would come. About a century later, Jeremiah arrives, and it’s during his lifetime that it actually does come.
Jeremiah was a preacher for about the same length of time as I have been here, 42 years – 42 years. He preached during the reign of five kings. The first king was a man named Josiah – Josiah. The end of the reign of Josiah was a time of reformation and a time of revival. The law was recovered, and Josiah sought to bring the law to the people, and it produced a revival.
However, a prophetess named Huldah showed up and said, “This is superficial. This is man-centered. This is not going to last. This will have no permanent reformation.” That was true. The superficial revival under Josiah didn’t last. What Josiah did was right, he did all the right things, but the people’s response was surfeited and superficial.
Josiah’s reign was followed by the second king during the ministry of Jeremiah, a man by the name of Jehoahaz. He only lasted three months. He was followed by Jehoiakim and he returned the people to corruption. He led them right back into idolatry and the worship of false gods.
He was followed by Jehoiachin, who also lasted three months. And Jehoiachin was followed by the final king during the time of Jeremiah and the last king of the southern kingdom before the captivity, a man named Zedekiah, who was a vacillating weakling, saw the nation more swiftly down the steep slide of depravity that led to absolute ruin and deportation. He had tough going.
The first king, superficial revival; the next four, rapid decline. And through 42 years of these five kings, Jeremiah’s message never changed – never, ever changed. He was always the voice of God to that society, as any faithful preacher must be. His preaching in no way deterred the idolatry. His preaching in no way stopped the slide. His preaching in no way eliminated the judgment. He never saw, essentially, any impact on a national level through 40 years of his efforts. He was faithful and he was despised, and eventually they threw him in a pit to try to shut him up.
I see so many parallels between Jeremiah’s time and Jeremiah and our time and faithful preachers today. We stand near the holocaust. We have to be on the brink of a devastating judgment in this nation. We have gone through some quasi revivals. There are people who would argue that we’ve had some revivals, that the gospel has spread, that Bibles have spread, that we’re on television and radio and through all kinds of media, the gospel is going out and yet we see no – no reversing of the direction of this nation. We see no lasting results.
The church seems superficial and shallow and consumed with self-fulfillment and self-gratification. So we come to a place in the life of Jeremiah that parallels our own time, and we ask this question: How do we approach a nation on the brink of judgment? Let’s learn from Jeremiah. I’m going to show you three elements.
Number one, Jeremiah understood that he had a divine mission – a divine mission. I’m sure there were people in those days who were calling for all kinds of social reform, all kinds of political action, all kinds of educational advancement. But none of those had anything to do with the calling of Jeremiah, nor did they have anything to do with our calling. Ours is a divine mission – a divine mission.
In other words, Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” That becomes clear to us in the commission of Jeremiah. Let’s go back to chapter 1. It’s one of the most fascinating callings that any man of God has ever had and here, Jeremiah is informed of things about which he had no knowledge. Verse 4, “The Word of the Lord came to me,” he says. “The Word of the Lord came to me, saying, ‘Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you. I have appointed you a prophet to the nations.’” Wow.
Here’s the first thing to understand about a divine mission: Your life is predestined by God – your life is predestined by God. Long before Jeremiah was ever conceived in the womb of his mother, long before Hilkiah, his father, and his mother came together to bring him life, long before that, sometime not only before the birth of Jeremiah, before the conception of Jeremiah, but probably before the foundation of the world, Jeremiah was chosen and appointed as a prophet, not only to Judah but to the nations. His message extended beyond Judah and it’s still extending even today, across the globe wherever the prophet is read.
Long before life ever was given to this man, God had determined to separate him, put him in a unique place at a unique time as a consecrated prophet of God to speak for God – predestination. Here, in this brief beginning with eleven short Hebrew words, God gives Jeremiah his own biography. Beginning in eternity past, the timeless eons of eternity, right on through until there are no more nations left for him to preach, God sums up his calling as predestined. He is an intensely human personality, this Jeremiah, and if you read the book and read it and read it and read it, you’re going to learn to love this man.
He is very human, and yet his humanity does not explain the power of his preaching and the relentless endurance of his faithfulness. He is a man who is mysteriously endowed with power from on high to survive the rejection that marked his entire life. He is so humanly weak that he can’t stop crying, and yet he is so unassailably strong that he will not yield and compromise. He is a powerful personality. He is a lovable personality.
Now let me tell you something. When there is a crisis, people look for a program, but God looks for a man. When there is a crisis, people look for some system to fix it, and God looks for a man and God looks for a woman. When God wanted to deal with a crisis, He started with a baby. In this case, Jeremiah was that baby. And He designed him in the womb. And He put him together to have the human capabilities that he needed to do this. He also endowed him with the spiritual equipment to fulfill his appointment by God.
Jeremiah knew this, and this was the bottom line, he was sovereignly ordained by God to do what he did. And it was never a matter of results. It was never a matter of his will. In fact, to show you that, look at verse 6, “Then I said, ‘Alas, Lord God’” – sounds like Isaiah, “Woe is me.” Are you kidding? “Alas, Lord God, I don’t know how to speak, I’m no speaker, and I’m just a youth.” You’re looking at the wrong guy. I’m inadequate, I’m not qualified, I can’t do this.
How did he overcome that sense of insufficiency, inadequacy? What took him beyond that was the clear indication that he had been predestined by God to this calling. By the way, whoever doesn’t have a sense of being predestined by God to service will never lead a spiritual revolution. Most people living in the church today have no sense of divine mission, they’re just bouncing from job to job and event to event and engagement to engagement and activity to activity. That’s the way they live, that’s the way they raise their kids.
There’s no sense of an overarching divine mission. There’s no sense – and this is tragic – in the life of believers that the birth of every believer was ordained by God, the death of every believer was ordained by God, which means the middle was ordained by God and for purposes that advance the name of Christ and the glory of the kingdom, and that’s the last thing on our priority list. Not Jeremiah. He knew that he had been called by God from before he was born, designed in the womb, separated from the womb, separated from the society, appointed to be a prophet, and he had been called to fulfill his mission.
Not only was he predestined by God but he was provided by God what he needed. He says, “I don’t know how to speak and I’m a youth.” So the Lord says to him, “Don’t say ‘I’m a youth,’ because everywhere I send you, you shall go, and all that I command you, you shall speak.”
Now, the first thing you would say is, “What am I going to say? What am I going to say?” The educators say that the greatest fear that humans have is the fear of public speaking. Well, the reason people have a fear of public speaking is very often related to the fact that they have no idea what to say or they think that what they have to say isn’t important and most of the time they’re exactly right. In fact, some of the people who do most of the public speaking have the least to say and should be embarrassed about speaking.
But when you have the most important message, that hesitancy has a way of disappearing, does it not? When you see the children on the brink of being consumed in the house fire, you really don’t stumble over the fact of whether you should publicly yell, “Fire, get out” and grab somebody. It’s about the passion of it. You don’t have to worry about what you’re going to say because you’re not going to have to invent it – you’re not going to have to come up with it. I’m going to provide it.
I’m going to give you the words to say. You’re going to speak for me. You’re going to have divine wisdom. All that I command you, you shall speak, and everywhere I send you, you shall go. That’s how any true minister, any true preacher that represents God has to approach ministry. I am predestined to this and I am provided the message. Jeremiah was resisted and hated and despised and abused.
That leads to the third aspect of his calling, not only predestination and provision but protection. Verse 8, “Don’t be afraid of them, I am with you to deliver you,” declares the Lord. You have nothing to fear. You are called by me. You are empowered by me. You’re going to face opposition. You’re going to face antagonism, and he certainly did, constantly.
Nobody listened to him. Nobody paid attention to him. The nation didn’t turn. It was a very hard, discouraging 42 years, and people hated what he said and hated him for saying it. If you want to do an interesting study sometime in your Bible, find all the places where it says, “Fear not,” and it’s not said just to little widows who didn’t know where their next meal was coming from or orphaned children who didn’t know who was going to care for them and protect them.
“Fear not” is said by God to Abraham and Moses and Daniel and Mary and Peter and Paul because any human being, even the strongest leaders, face the fear that comes with confronting people with a message they don’t want to hear. But you’ll have protection from God.
There’s a fourth component here, verses 9 and 10, power. “The Lord stretched out His hand, touched my mouth and the Lord said to me, ‘Behold, I have put my words in your mouth.’” Verse 10, “‘I have appointed you this day over the nations, over the kingdoms, to pluck up, to break down, to destroy, to overthrow, to build’ and to plant.’”
That is amazing. Jeremiah feared he was nobody. He was young, he wasn’t effective as a communicator, he was unskilled in oratory. The divine answer is, “Don’t worry about it. I am going to give you the words to speak. Don’t worry about the reaction, I will protect you from the enemies of that truth. And know this, that the words that come out of your mouth will shatter and build. They will tear down and they will plant. Your words will be destruction to people and nations and construction to other people and nations.”
This is the power that belongs to the one who proclaims the truth. The great power brokers in our world, the kings and potentates and the rulers, have no power – they have no power. The power they do have is the weakness of human power or even worse, the power of the kingdom of darkness, neither of which can even approach the power of God. Kings, nations, empires boast of their power, yet the power in the world belongs to the mouths of the messengers of heaven. God picks up this obscure young man of about 30 years of age from a tiny, little, obscure country and says, “I will set you over nations, over kingdoms of the earth. Your Word will destroy and your Word will build.”
So this was his calling. He was on a divine mission. And, people, we live in a nation in a dire crisis of abandonment of God, headed for a holocaust of judgment. We’re already under the judgment of Romans 1, we’ve been turned over to our immorality, our homosexuality, and a reprobate mind. We’re on the brink of divine judgment, and what is needed is that the kingdom of God. And the representatives of that kingdom understand that our mission is divine. The reason for your birth, the reason for your death and your conversion in the middle is so that you can speak the Word of God to this culture on the brink of a holocaust. It’s a divine mission, it’s why we live.
Secondly, what characterized Jeremiah was a direct message – a direct message. He didn’t pull any punches, we would say. He didn’t pamper, cajole, soft-soap, skirt issues. He didn’t say, “Well, we don’t really want to talk about sin,” and he paid for it. Chapters 30 to 33, he wrote when he was in prison. He didn’t spend his life trying to avoid controversy, trying to make everybody happy. If you read chapter 14 and verse 7, you will hear him say, “We have sinned against God as a nation.”
If you read chapter 17 and verse 9, you will hear him say, “Your hearts are deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” He preached against sin. He indicted the nation. He indicted the sinners for their sin categorically in chapter 3, chapter 9, chapter 11, chapter 19. He accused them of being involved in false religion – false religion. You have turned to idols from the true God.
Chapter 2, verse 12, “Be appalled, O heavens, at this. Shudder, be very desolate, declares the Lord, for my people have committed two evils. They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, to hew for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water” – that’s false religion. They have turned away from the fountainhead of life, the Lord God, the One who made His Son the living water to quench the thirst of the soul of every penitent sinner.
This wicked thing they have done, turning from the fountainhead and trying to fill up their broken buckets, concocted and created by themselves as if they could hold the water of life. Labor long, do they, in false religion, hewing out cisterns, man-made, collecting dirt and dead animals but holding no water. That’s false religion.
If you are to be a faithful prophet in a nation in decline and crisis, you must expose false religion where it exists. This is not a time for tolerance, this is not a time for embracing everybody and saying, “It doesn’t really matter what you believe as long as you follow your heart.” Listen, this world is full of damning false religion. I have been accused through the years of being intolerant and I accept that as a compliment. Of course I’m intolerant, I am as intolerant as God is, as Christ is, as the Bible is of anything that damns people’s souls while promising them heaven. It is a direct message. We’re not just talking about making people feel good, we confront lies.
In the seventh chapter of Jeremiah, Jeremiah indicts them for worshiping the queen of heaven, who is now cast under the name of Mary, the mother of Jesus. And so we confront Roman Catholicism and Mormonism and every other ism and spasm and schism and whatever it is, any of it, all of it, because we have no choice but to confront and expose false religion. That’s what Jeremiah did. He did it all the way through chapter 19 and beyond that.
He also confronted corrupt spiritual leadership. Go to chapter 5, where we were, and we’re just looking briefly at these, but chapter 5, verse 30, an appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land. What is it? The prophets prophesy falsely, the priests rule on their own authority. He confronted the false prophets. He confronted the deceivers and the liars who had infiltrated Judaism. So on the one hand, he attacked the idolatry of false religion, and then he attacked the corrupt infiltrators of the true religion.
You cannot be the prophet of God, you cannot be the mouthpiece of God, you cannot be the representative of God unless you have a direct message that goes at false religion as it exists contrary to the truth and as it exists inside the categories of the truth. Jeremiah 23 says the same thing. Jeremiah 25 says the same thing.
These were false teachers who were saying whatever they wanted to say, whatever satisfied them, and the people loved it. Sure, they fill up those places where false teachers tell them what they want to hear, how good they are, how wise they are, how powerful their thoughts and their words are and how they can create their own euphoria in this world. All those liars find people who love to hear that, but what will you do at the end of it? What’s going to happen at the end when you face the judgment?
This is a direct message. He addressed wickedness in general in chapter 3. Chapter 3, verse 24 and 25, will be a sufficient illustration. “The shameful thing has consumed the labor of our fathers since our youth, their flocks, their herds, their sons, and their daughters.” It’s just – the whole society is immoral. Shame describes all conduct. Verse 25 talks about lying down in our shame. We have sinned against the Lord our God and our fathers from our youth, even to this day have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God.
There’s overtones of sexual deviation, sexual perversion, sexual immorality, all about the book of Jeremiah. Perversion of marriage in chapter 3, sexual perversion there and elsewhere as well, the sexual perversion coming physically as a part of the spiritual perversion of worshiping idols. They were a wicked, wicked people.
They were also dishonest, chapter 5. This is really an indictment that we can identify with. Aren’t you weary of being lied to by people in power? Listen to what Jeremiah says in chapter 5, verse 1, “Roam to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem. Go everywhere in Jerusalem, look now and take notes, seek in her open squares. If you can find a man, if there’s one who does justice, who seeks truth, and I’ll pardon her.” Huh. I’ll halt the judgment if you can find one guy who tells the truth – one person.
Liars, deceivers, “O, Lord,” verse 2, although they say as the Lord lives” – as the Lord lives, that’s a way to swear. I swear I’m telling you the truth, God is my witness, as the Lord lives, I’m telling you the truth – they still lie, they still swear falsely. “O Lord, do not your eyes look for truth?”
Sounds so much like our society. Corrupt religion abounds everywhere. False prophets have infiltrated Christianity everywhere. Moral corruption abounds on every front. Dishonesty is everywhere. There’s a rejection of Scripture.
Look at chapter 11, and we’ll wrap this up in a minute. Chapter 11, verses 8 to 10, “They didn’t obey or incline their ear but walked each one in the stubbornness of his evil heart. Therefore, I brought on them all the words of this covenant, which I commanded them to do; they did not. The Lord said to me, ‘A conspiracy has been found among the men of Judah, among the inhabitants of Jerusalem. They have turned back to their iniquities of their ancestors who refused to hear my words. They have gone after other gods to serve them. The house of Israel, the house of Judah have broken my covenant which I made with their fathers.’”
Pull one statement out, “They refused to hear my words.” Characteristically, they rejected the Word of God. They rejected the Word of God. They deliberately abandoned the Word of God. You know, that’s characteristic of our culture. There’s no place in our society for the Word of God, the truth of God, the Scripture, the Bible. It’s an amazing thing. And then in chapter 13, just to kind of summarize this second point, God does a very interesting thing. It’s a visual aid. You don’t need to read it, I’m just going to tell you what happened.
He tells Jeremiah, “Go get a pair of shorts” – underwear – “and put it on and wear it and don’t wash it.” You’ve heard of wash-and-wear, this is wear-and-don’t-wash. “Wear it and don’t wash it.” And then He comes to him and says, after he’s done that, “Go take that pair of shorts and go far away, go” – according to chapter 13, verse 4 – “up to the Euphrates River and hide it. Bury it in the crevice of a rock.” What? That’s two hundred miles. And by the way, two hundred miles is a long trip when you’re walking.
Go two hundred miles and bury dirty shorts? What is this? Well, he goes and does it, and the Lord tells him later, “Go back and get it.” What? “Go back, get those dirty shorts.” And when he goes back, by the time he digs them out, they’re horrible, disintegrated. And He says, “That’s my people. I drew them to myself as intimately as I could, and they became more foul and more foul and more foul, and I separated myself from them, and they corrupted, and they’re under judgment.” God doesn’t change the rules, right? And we don’t have covenant protection. Jeremiah was a man who had a divine mission and a very direct message – very, very direct.
There’s a third thing, and I’ll close with this. He was characterized by a deep mourning. He’s known as the weeping prophet, chapter 13, verse 17, “If you will not listen, my soul will sob in secret for such pride. My eyes will bitterly weep and flow down with tears because a flock of the Lord has been taken captive.” This is God weeping, and God wept through the eyes of Jeremiah. God wept through the eyes of Jeremiah. Jeremiah says, “O, that my head were a fountain of waters, that my head were a spring that just kept gushing water so that my tears could continually flow for my people.”
We don’t ever want to get to a place where, as we go to a nation on the brink of a holocaust of divine judgment, we become indifferent or callous. We want to have the heart of Jesus, who saw the city of Jerusalem that He was going to judge and wept over the city of Jerusalem. We want to have the heart of Jeremiah. I’ll read that to you, chapter 9, “O that my head were waters and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people.” I just wish my head was a fountain of unending tears. He even calls, in chapter 9, later in the chapter, for mourning women to come out and mourn with Him over the condition of His people.
So for 42 years, he followed his divine mission. preached his direct message, and was characterized by deep mourning. What was the result? What was the result? Chapter 7 – quickly – the result, verse 23, I’ve already told you, “This is what I commanded them saying, ‘Obey my voice and I’ll be your God and you’ll be my people and walk in all the ways I command you, that it may be well with you.’ Yet they did not obey or incline their ear but walked in their own counsels and in the stubbornness of their evil heart and went backward and not forward.” Wow. Discouraging – discouraging. Why do you do this if nobody listens?
I’m going to close with the twenty-fourth chapter – twenty-fourth chapter and the fourth verse. “Then the Word of the Lord came to me, saying, ‘Thus says the Lord God of Israel, ‘Like these good figs’” – that had been illustrated on a fig tree – “‘Like these good figs, I will regard as good the captives of Judah, whom I have sent out of this place into the land of the Chaldeans. I will set my eyes on them for good. I will bring them again to this land. I will build them up and not overthrow them. I will plant them and not pluck them up. I will give them a heart to know me, for I am the Lord, and they will be my people and I will be their God, for they will return to me with their whole heart.’”
What is that saying? There is a remnant. There is a remnant. After the destruction and the devastation and the judgment and the purification of the captivity, there is a remnant that God will save.
Why do we preach if nobody listens? Because the nobody is qualified. Within that vast number of rejecters, there is a remnant that God will save, that God will forgive, whose hearts He will change. That’s why we do what we do. You, dear ones, are that remnant, part of that remnant in a nation on the way to judgment.
Father, thank you for your Word to us. We are so grateful for its richness. It’s life-giving to us. Thank you for this precious church. I pray for those here who have not come to Christ. O Lord, would you give them that new heart? Would you cleanse them? Would you love them and seek them and draw them to yourself and save them? Thank you for all that you’re doing here and will continue to do as we’re faithful to you, and we’ll thank you in your Son’s name. Amen.
Your every action matters in a way that it couldn’t have during any of those times — whether you were a pauper or a billionaire, a parent at home or a celebrity on the red carpet — now, your individual actions mean so much more than they did then.
We are in that kind of moment. Some call them “fourth turnings” after the work on generational theory by William Strauss and Neil Howe. A fourth turning is when crisis brings about rebirth. It’s even more significant than that though. A new epoch is being brought into existence and an epic battle is being waged. Whether you like it or not, whether you recognize it or not, you are involved.
The results portend to be more impactful that the Revolutionary War, more impactful than the French Revolution, more impactful that the War Between the States, the Great War, World War Two, the Cold War or any other great shift in culture, for the possibilities are far more total than what humanity has ever known. An Awakening may be ahead, alternately the Dark Ages may be ahead.Buy New $44.99(as of 03:44 EST – Details)
Once tiny events now shed momentous light, carry tremendous weight, and can ripple out in ways unimaginable.
It’s not 1959. It’s not 1979. It’s not 2019. We are in the days after the Ides of March 2020. Today, February 12, 2021, is the 333rd day of the “3-week lockdown,” the 333rd day since the decades long war against you, your individuality, and your humanity was openly declared.
A Public Conversation On The Non-Existent Scientific Support For Medical Mandates In Response To Covid-19
Wednesday, February 10, 2021, I watched Oregon-based naturopath, Dr. Henele Ealy discuss PCR testing, Covid numbers, and corona vaccines with Dr. Dean Sidelinger, the Oregon State Health Officer and State Epidemiologist. To his credit, through the use of reason and evidence, Ealy has been part of efforts to use legislative bodies to open counties in Oregon.
Over the course of the hour, Ealy asked a dozen or more insightful questions that pointed to the weak foundation of the governmental response to Covid that brought about the corona communism under which we live and continue to live. Sidelinger spoke at considerable length in response to each question, yet curiously did not answer a single one. One would be remiss to imagine this seasoned public health professional did not realize what he was doing.
Really, Ealy didn’t even scratch the surface of the nonsense of a mask mandate or a lockdown or the fact that SARS-COV-2 has yet to be isolated or that decades of half-hearted safety testing around vaccines have been thrown out the window and people are being treated exactly like the lab ferrets of decades past were treated: a low value life to experiment on. Lab ferrets cost the vaccine manufacturers more. With no liability and a blank check from government, your life really is worth less than a lab ferret to them and a healthy bonus will come their way if they can keep that in mind.
Whether Ealy realizes such things is irrelevant, he is keeping mum and working the system, just as Sidelinger is reading from his script and working the same system.
Had Yamhill County Commissioner Mary Starrett not spoken up around 55 minutes into this 60-minute “conversation,” Sidelinger would have run down the clock reciting the same litany of official professions that every living adult on this planet with a screen knows by heart as “the science” behind the increasingly extreme and constantly shifting measures taken that have ushered in this system of corona communism.
The Oregon public health professional is paid to read a script. It may be a piece of paper in front of him, like an actor with cue cards, or something memorized. It is a script nonetheless.
The Coronavirus May Not Be Novel, But Their Behavior Certainly Is
It is not just this one Oregon public health professional. Virtually every voice in the public health field, in politics, in corporate America, in academia, in medicine, in Hollywood, in the media, and in the Church is reading a script.
It has never been like this in the United States.
Europe has finally arrived in the United States.
The stultifying dogma of so much of acceptable European thought has finally caught up with the New World.
The signs of that are mere symptoms. It long preceded European style bureaucracy and is institutionalized in European style bureaucracy, but it is not the fault of European style bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is but a symptom and a tool, a tool that can be used for good or ill.
Everyone with power is reading from a script. Those who don’t read from a script are being dismissed as having votes not worthy of counting (as can be seen in the sham November 3, 2020 election) supporting candidates that they aren’t permitted to support (it isn’t Trump being impeached, it’s you, you have to open your eyes if you think otherwise), political decisions they aren’t allowed to make (pay your taxes, enlist your kids, and shut up you serf, because Liz Cheney is the future whether you like it or not) investments they aren’t allowed to make (if you pay Wall Street to invest for you, that’s okay, if you act unpredictably en masse on Wall Street Bets that’s not okay: the establishment outcry over Wall Street Bets and the many extensive wars against cryptocurrency show that), and most poignantly in this moment — say the F-Word, and you’ll be deplatformed.
FRAUD. FRAUD! FRAUD!!
As in: The 2020 election was a FRAUD. Biden is not the legitimate president. He is a FRAUD. Harris is not legitimate. She is a FRAUD. And who knows how much other FRAUD there is.
Is truth not treason in the empire of lies? Could the very hesitancy around the word FRAUD indicate that it’s all really just a big FRAUD, the entire narrative fed to us?
What’s certain is that Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi alike, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey alike, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates all agree: you’re not allowed to ask that question.
Yes. You’re not allowed to ask any questions about FRAUD.
The Establishment Agrees There Was FRAUD And Proudly Illustrates A Massive, Previously Unknown Conspiracy
In response to Navarro and others claiming that a conspiracy to steal the 2020 election took place, Molly Ball of Time magazine , shockingly, in the days before the second Trump impeachment trial began in the Senate, dedicated 6,500 words in the February 15, 2021 edition of Time to effectively saying “Yeah we stole the election, and here’s exactly how we did it, and I will publicly state this, because not a single one of you has the guts to do anything about it.”
In hubris, Ball revealed so much more about a conspiracy than anyone could ever imagine and that no one was saying publicly. Reading the piece illustrates that it wasn’t aimed at Navarro and the acolytes of his work as much as it was aimed at every single person who believes any official narrative.
Molly Ball is not stupid. The most powerful establishment players are not stupid. You are being taunted. And if you don’t respond, it all becomes normalized, solidified, and institutionalized. They are pretty sure they know exactly how you will react.
We Live In A Special Time
We live in a special time.
Never has the United States looked like this.
It didn’t happen during the Revolutionary War, during the War Between The States, during World War I, World War II, or 9/11. It’s never been like this. There’s never been this level of totality.
In a time when ultimate and total compliance is demanded, a script reader can just as effectively be replaced by a computer. He paves that path in his life.
A person who acts unpredictably cannot be. And that is one of your superpowers in a time like this, dear friend.
It’s your superpower, until the window of opportunity closes. And the more disobedient and unpredictably you behave, the harder it is for them to close that window of opportunity. Not only that, the more disobedient and unpredictably you behave, the harder it is for the narrative to hold. It really is a superpower.
Explode the “why” and you explode the “will.” Explode the narrative and you win. The war is for your mind, not for land or for a munitions depot. Explode the narrative and you win!
Self-Dehumanization
Dr. Sidelinger, the script reader, dehumanizes himself. The leftist NPC, repeating talking points, dehumanizes himself.
Great swaths of writers would like to deny you that agency, both today and in decades past, to have you believe modernity inevitably dehumanizes man. Modernity does not dehumanize us. We, by our actions, choose to dehumanize ourselves individually.
The NPC Meme
Memetics is the study of the spread of ideas, especially viral ideas. A meme is an idea, especially an idea with the potential to go viral. It is not just an eye-catching photo on the internet with pithy captioning. It is an idea. To understand this is to have an advantage in this era of information warfare. That advantage — especially in the subsegment called “the meme wars,” contained within the greater war for your mind — does not belong to the left.
It is said on the interwebs “The left can’t meme.” It’s true — especially, if one defines memes as poignant examples of internet art and propaganda with viral potential. Internet art and propaganda from the left falls flat.
The statement “The left can’t meme,” read more literally, though, is the equivalent of saying “The left can’t think.” Enter the NPC meme. Art imitates reality.
Wikipedia claims the NPC meme, the viral idea that leftists have come to behave increasingly like script readers, increasingly like a computer controlled, preprogrammed, predictable “Non-Player Character” in video games started on 4chan with a post entitled “Are You An NPC?” that appeared around Independence Day 2016.
“If you get in a discussion with them it’s always the same buzzwords and hackneyed arguments. They’re the kind of people who make a show of discomfort when you break the status quo like by breaking the normie barrier to invoke a real discussion. it’s like in a video game when you accidentally talk to somebody twice and they give you the exact lines word for word once more.”
— Anonymously Posted “Are you an NPC?” 4chan (July 7, 2016)
Art imitates reality. 2016 reminded us that politics too is downstream of culture. It isn’t isolated to the left. The troubling and accurate observation that the left can’t think has had powerful and reverberating consequences on culture when the lever of such total political and technological power was cobbled together into an alliance in 2019, 2020, and 2021, partly described by Ball, and put in the hands of a group of people, across society, across the political spectrum, who were and are unthinkingly reading a script.
Who Writes These Scripts?
Who writes these scripts? Anyone may try to point a finger at someone else, but in reality there is no single person to point a finger at.
The scripts are written by committees, and because so many people recognize not the validity of the individual, the action of the committee is seen as authoritative and legitimate. They are often written by one committee, passed to another for editing, and to a third, forth, and fifth for risk analysis, shuffling back and forth between them.
Who wrote that script? A committee. Who sat on the committee? It doesn’t matter. They won’t individually take responsibility for their role. They don’t perceive you as an individual and may not even see themselves as individuals. They will point fingers defensively and ad infinitum like the fearful voles that they are.
Henele Ealy and many other heroes of 2020 are playing that game against the NPC, banging his head against the head of the NPC, knowing that eventually the NPC will lose. We will owe him a debt of gratitude for his success.
Thank you Henele Ealy, because of men like him, who will play that contorted game, and adeptly challenge the NPCs in positions of power, America’s 3,000+ counties are reopening one at a time. Help heroes like Ealy as much as it serves your interest, and emulate any methods of such heroes that prove effective.
And Play A Different Game, A Far More Natural One
I beg of you, dear reader, to make sure you do something else as well, not just in official forums, but everywhere in life and every chance you get.
Disobey.
Misbehave.
Do everything you want and none of what you don’t want.
Do it regardless of consequence.
Dogfights everywhere. Everywhere in your life. They will die the death of a thousand cuts. You will bolster your courage and secure freedom in your own life. The truth is, if you can say “No!” to the face mask, you can say “No!” to the vaccine, and you can say “No!” to much worse. If they can get you to say “yes” to the face mask, the field of public health knows it can get you to say “yes” to much more.
Live life on your terms. Don’t let them set the rules. Don’t let them dictate the game. Play your game, the game they can’t defend against. Blow up the narrative and you win.
And it all begins with your lack of compliance, however that may look in your life.
Public Health Is The Establishment’s Revolutionary Vanguard Because It Is Fundamentally A Study Of Mind Control & Compliance
Public health calls their study of your compliance “public health motivation theory.” This is a study of how public health officials claiming to be operating in your interest convince you to comply with their interest no matter how harmful it is for you.
The entire unethical field is built upon the rationale that the ends justify the means. Don’t let them lie to you about their existence being about anyone’s health. Health is a matter of the individual. If you can’t recognize individuals as sovereign and existing in their own right, the fundamental unit of society, then you have no ability to perceive health.
Their only health concern is the “health” of the collectivist regime they seek to install, the utilitarian “ethics” they seek to replace barbarous morality with. How frightening this might all be if their foolproof plan were in fact foolproof.
A Problem With The Plan
The NPC has a weakness. The script reader has a weakness.
The behavioral psychologist designing manipulative human resources programs meant to beguile and confuse, that expert has a weakness.
The Ivy League, CIA alumnus, artificial intelligence technocrat claiming possession of your future, he too has a weakness.
The Nobel Prize winning biometric passport program committee futurist, excited to be able to create the algorithm to dictate your every behavior from cradle to grave has a weakness.
The Rhodes Scholar who designs propaganda campaigns disseminated through Hollywood, disseminated through video games, and disseminated through social media designed to drive a wedge into your family — the last remaining institution — even he has such a mighty weakness.
What They Need
They need predictable patterns for their models to make any sense, for their learning to be of any value.
And you can explode it all, because at the heart of the concept of everything they do is a deeply impoverished philosophy: That individuals do not exist, and that they can model you as a group member, a group member with inputs and outputs as predictable as an automated teller machine, with inputs and outputs as predictable as a gumball machine, with inputs and outputs as predictable as an air conditioner.
Does that sound like any human you know? Predictable inputs and outputs? Not if they embrace their humanity it doesn’t.
And that is precisely what I ask of you: To embrace your humanity.
The Greatest Hacker
The greatest “hackers” of our era, the ones who will be able to so mightily fell vast silicon-lined and pantsuit-occupied empires of hubris may be the ones who don’t know a thing about programming, who don’t know a thing about peer reviewed managerial best practices, who don’t know a thing about data-driven preference steering and push-polling, who don’t know a thing about pre-emptive behaviorial psychology, who don’t know a thing about public health motivational theory, but who instead know themselves and know how to be human.
YES, the greatest “hackers” of our era are those who know themselves and know how to be human.
I’m talking to you — the one who got out of school as quickly as he could and never looked back, who lived life differently, who both failed mightily and succeeded mightily.
You know what it feels like to have grit in your teeth because you’ve fallen on your face, and you know just as well what it’s like to hold your chest high like a champion.
My friend, all the things “they” have always told you were your greatness weaknesses, are the things that are, in fact, your strengths, strengths lesser men do not have. Can it be any surprise that lesser men worked so hard to convince you that your strengths should be a source of shame?
Use your strengths, your unpredictabilities, your humanness, and you win every war, every time.
Disobedience everywhere.
Dogfights everywhere.
Let them never have a moment of rest. Let them never sleep the sleep of he who has obedient slaves in his home, but disobedient free men who abhor the tyrant. Let him never sleep easy at night. Let the tyrant never be able to call this land his.
YOUR DISOBEDIENCE MAKES HIS TYRANNY IMPOSSIBLE.
Do I want immorality or unethical behavior? No. That should go without saying.
But that does not mean obedience to illegitimate authority.
Illegitimate Authority Devises Illegitimate Uses For The Law
The Law in many ages has been used as a tool to enforce immorality. Astute European thinkers have known this intimately and for ages. In our age, the Law has come into its own in the United States as a tool of total control heretofore unknown, a potential for control grown exponentially when melded with the technocratic class.
The brave new world is here if we let it be.
Your compliance is all that is needed.
There are no collective decisions. There are no collective impacts. There are no collective outcomes. You are an individual.
If you believe otherwise, go read someone else. I have nothing to offer you. Go suck your thumb on the lap of Karl Marx and in the comfort of the NPC army.
If you recognize that you are an individual, then you recognize that little done to you matters. It is how you interpret it, how you respond, how you act that gives life meaning and structure and purpose. You have agency in your own life, and all action happens at the individual level.
It’s not about anyone else. It’s about you. It’s about your individual action.
On your own, you put an end to the brave new world in your life by simply disobeying.
Want Tyranny? Be Obedient. Want Freedom? Be Disobedient.
Everything comes down to your ability to disobey.
So much comes down to you being able to surround yourself with others who do the same.
If you can do these two things, freedom wins. It wins in your own life and wins in the world as you know it around you.
It’s that door-to-door salesman Fauci’s foot-in-the-door technique.
Close that door shut and lock it tight.
Open up the other door to your free spirit. Obedience to illegitimate authority will not bring you salvation or joy.
It won’t bring you blessing or prosperity.
It won’t bring you certainty or good conscience.
It won’t bring you legitimacy.
It won’t bring you a happy, healthy home or a lineage that lasts for ever.
Obedience to illegitimate authority leads to more tyranny.
Obedience to “them” leads to more tyranny.
Obey even once more and may you forever have the gift of a vivid memory, to remind you that when your friends, your family, everything and everyone you cherished most needed you, you did not answer the call.
Yes, like so many others decisions made by committee, you can point the finger and say you were “just following orders.”
If anyone ever holds you to it and asks what happened “back then,” you can use the Nuremberg defense of the NPC, of the committee member, of the script reader “I was just following orders.” But you and I, we both know better.
Following orders is exactly the problem.
Disobey dammit.
Disobey or see your children turned into slaves.
That is the choice of this moment
If you don’t know how to stop wearing the face mask, read Allan Stevo’s best selling “,” read his LewRockwell.com writing, signup at his website RealStevo.com for pointers, and email him directly at the email address below. It all comes down to committing to disobey illegitimate authority and doing what you know to be right in every situation. It is for you, dear Warrior that he writes these pieces. Join him in holding the line.
“Nazi” is the abbreviation of National Socialist Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei).Its leader was Adolph Hitler, who became Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933.Hitler began implementing a plan of universal healthcare, with no regard for conscience.Read as PDF …
The New York Times reported October 10, 1933:“Nazi Plan to Kill Incurables to End Pain; German Religious Groups Oppose Move …The Ministry of Justice … explaining the Nazi aims regarding the German penal code, today announced its intentions to authorize physicians to end the sufferings of the incurable patient … in the interest of true humanity …”
The New York Times continued:”The Catholic newspaper Germania hastened to observe: ‘The Catholic faith binds the conscience of its followers not to accept this method’ …In Lutheran circles, too, life is regarded as something that God alone can take …Euthanasia … has become a widely discussed word in the Reich … No life still valuable to the State will be wantonly destroyed.”
When Germany’s economy suffered, expenses had to be cut from the national healthcare plan, such as keeping alive handicapped, insane, chronically ill, elderly and those with dementia.They were considered “lebensunwertes leben” — life unworthy of life.
Then criminals, convicts, street bums, beggars and gypsies, considered “leeches” on society, met a similar fate.
In the United States, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., took the fateful step to “play God” in his infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell decision, that “for the protection and health of the state,” those deemed intellectually disabled should be forcibly sterilized by the government:”Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
His pseudo-science research on eugenics, Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene, was read by Hitler in prison and became a basis for Hitler’s racial superiority in Mein Kampf.Eugen Fischer’s work led to the Nazi Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, 1933, which caused hundred’s of mixed-race German-Africans and French-Africans to be subjected to compulsory sterilization.
An associate of Margaret Sanger was eugenicist Madison Grant, founder of the New York Zoological Society.He put an African pygmy from the Congo Mbuti tribe, Ota Benga, in a cage in the Monkey House of his Bronx Zoo.Grant wrote the racist Darwinian book The Passing of the Great Race, which Hitler not only read, but sent him a thank you letter.
Margaret Sanger stated January 1, 1932:”Apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.”Sanger founded a magazine, The Birth Control Review.In the April 1933 edition, her magazine published the article “Eugenic Sterilization” by German eugenicist Ernst Rudin, considered “father of racial hygiene” for the National Socialist Workers Party.
Ernst Rudin recommended that the state prevent hereditary defective genes from passing to future generations by those considered inferior “under mankind” — “untermensch.”
The National Socialist Workers Party labeled the Aryan race as “herrenvolk” (master race) and “ubermensch” (super mankind).Aryan etymology originated in Iran, from where the Indo-Iranian people group descended.
The National Socialist Workers Party enacted unconscionable plans to reduce the population and purge the human gene pool of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, Negroes, and other whom they considered “inferior.”As a result, 6 millions of Jews, and millions of others, were barbarically killed in gruesome gas chambers and ovens.
Nazis anatomists harvested human body parts from prisoners for scientific research and gruesome laboratory experimentation.
One cannot help but see similarities between Nazi medical experimentation with human body parts and recent headlines:
“Planned Parenthood exec, fetal body parts subject of controversial video” (CNN, 7/15/15);
Cardinal Timothy Dolan described New York Governor’s Reproductive Health Act which allows killing of babies as they are being born, as “ghoulish, grisly, gruesome” (Fox and Friends, 1/28/19);
“Report: China still harvesting organs from prisoners at a massive scale” (CNN, 6/24/16).
In 1948, Lawrence Sullivan wrote in The Case Against Socialized Medicine: A Constructive Analysis of the Attempt to Collectivize American Medicine (Washington, DC: The Statesman Press)“Would socialized medicine lead to socialization of other phases of life? Lenin thought so. He declared socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state.”
The American Medical Association printed this quote in a pamphlet, and in the early 1960s recruited Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors Guild, for a campaign to educate the nation.Called “Operation Coffee Cup,” an LP recording was produced titled “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine,” in which he stated:”One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project …Congressman Ferrand introduced the Ferrand Bill … that all people of social security age should be brought under a program of compulsory health insurance … He said ‘If we can only break through and get our foot inside the door, then we can expand the program after that.’”
U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop stated in 1977:”When the first 273,000 German aged, infirm and retarded were killed in gas chambers there was no outcry from that medical profession … and it was not far from there to Auschwitz.”
British Journalist Malcolm Muggeridge explained:”We have … for those that have eyes to see, an object lesson in what the quest for ‘quality of life’ without reference to ‘sanctity of life’ can involve …The origins of the Holocaust lay, not in Nazi terrorism … but in … Germany’s acceptance of euthanasia and mercy-killing as humane and estimable.”
Exemplifying this socialist ideology in the U.S., the Federal government engaged in a 40-year-long Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, where black men infected with syphilis were allowed to die while government health-care workers documented the disease’s progression.
The next victims of statism were political prisoners. In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote:”Over there people are groaning and dying and in psychiatric hospitals. Doctors are making their evening rounds … injecting people with drugs which destroy their brain … There are tens of thousands of political prisoners in our country … under compulsory psychiatric treatment.”
In 1933, just one month after Hitler was made Germany’s Chancellor, there was a crisis.Germany’s capitol building — the Reichstag — was attacked and set on fire under suspicious conditions.Historians implicate Hitler and his supporters as being responsible in what is termed a “false flag” event — a crisis perpetrated by deep-state government insiders which could be blamed on Hitler’s innocent political opponents to create a panic of sufficient magnitude to induce the population to surrender their freedoms and to implement a purge.
Immediately after the Reichstag fire, Hitler declared the “Fire Act,” February 28, 1933, which nullified civil liberties and suspended basic rights.In the midst of this national frenzy, Hitler swiftly arrested his political opponents and had them shot without a trial.
The Nazi Minister of Propaganda was Joseph Goebbels, who famously defined “fake news”:“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Goebbels’ propaganda methods were studied in the U.S. after WWII, most notably in Solomon Asch’s Conformity Experiment.
Students were brought into a classroom and shown two cards:
the first had one line on it, and
the second had three lines, one the same length as the first card, another longer and another shorter.
All student were paid actors, except one naive participant.One by one, the paid actors said the wrong length matched the first card. Last was the naive participant’s turn to answer.
So strong was the desire to fit in and be accepted, that 30 percent of naive participants denied their own perception in order to conform with the group.This method of promoting agendas through peer pressure and the manipulation of one’s desire for acceptance has been integrated into classroom education, television sitcoms, news reporting, social media platforms, and political campaigning.It most recently is used in the advancement of novel sexual agendas, which many privately consider contrary to biology but are afraid to express so publicly for fear of being shamed, ridiculed or ostracized.
Goebbels propaganda methods utilized cinema and immense Super Bowl-size choreographed gatherings.
Hitler rose to power with the help of violent homosexual activists called Brownshirts, who organized social unrest, street riots, vandalism, and boycotts of Jewish businesses.Like disrupters of speakers on modern-day college campuses, or ANTIFA or BLM protest organizers, the Brownshirts violently stormed into and disrupted meetings of opposing parties.Once securely in power, Hitler had the Brownshirts killed in the Night of the Long Knives, thus eliminating competition and giving the public impression of cracking down on law-breakers.
Hitler swayed the public with mesmerizing speeches.
He then confiscated weapons from law-abiding citizens.An SA Oberführer warned of an ordinance by the provisional Bavarian Minister of the Interior:”The deadline set … for the surrender of weapons will expire on March 31, 1933. I therefore request the immediate surrender of all arms …Whoever does not belong to one of these named units (SA, SS, and Stahlhelm) and … keeps his weapon without authorization or even hides it, must be viewed as an enemy of the national government and will be held responsible without hesitation and with the utmost severity.”
Foreshadowing present-day political candidates, Heinrich Himmler, head of Nazi S.S. (“Schutzstaffel”-Protection Squadron), announced:”Germans who wish to use firearms should join the S.S. or the S.A. Ordinary citizens don’t need guns, as their having guns doesn’t serve the State.”Disarming the civilian population was a necessary step in state control, as Vladimir Lenin explained: “One man with a gun can control 100 without one. “George Mason, a founding father from Virginia, stated:”To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.”Noah Webster wrote:”Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed.”Machiavelli wrote:”It is not reasonable to suppose that one who is armed will obey willing one who is unarmed.”Theoretical arguments for disarming citizens become indefensible when faced with actual situations:
disarmed North Koreans being sentenced to labor camps;
disarmed Nigerians being killed by Islamist Boko Haram;
disarmed Iranians being killed by their fundamentalist state; and
disarmed Venezuelans being killed by a corrupt dictator.
WND published the headline, Feb. 3, 2021:”Dems push psychological evaluations for gun owners and ‘family members’ — Measure also includes massive insurance fees.”
In 1938, when a suspected homosexual youth shot a Nazi diplomat in Paris, it was used as an excuse to confiscate all firearms from Jews.German newspapers printed, November 10, 1938:“Jews Forbidden to Possess Weapons By Order of SS Reichsführer Himmler, Munich …’Persons who, according to the Nürnberg law, are regarded as Jews, are forbidden to possess any weapon. Violators will be condemned to a concentration camp and imprisoned for a period of up to 20 years.’”
The New York Times, November 9, 1938, reported:”The Berlin Police … announced that … the entire Jewish population of Berlin had been ‘disarmed’ with the confiscation of 2,569 hand weapons, 1,702 firearms and 20,000 rounds of ammunition.Any Jews still found in possession of weapons without valid licenses are threatened with the severest punishment.”
Of the Waffengesetz (Nazi Weapons Law), March 18, 1938, Hitler stated at a dinner talk, April 11, 1942 (Hitler’s Table Talk 1941-44: His Private Conversations, 2nd Edition, 1973, p. 425-6, translated by Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens):”The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing …So let’s not have any native militia or native police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order.”
The Church had allowed Hitler to rise to power because of Germany’s version of separation of church and state.For centuries the German Church had embraced pietism, which, on one hand, emphasized a genuine personal relationship with God; but on the other hand, focused so much on the personal side that it abandoned responsibility to influence the state.Martin Luther King, Jr., later declared:“The church must be reminded that it is … the conscience of the state.”
Hitler at first pretended to be sympathetic to Christianity in order to get elected.He duped naive Christian ministers with his placating rhetoric, but once in power he dispensed with the pretense and revealed his nazified social Darwinism and open hostility toward Christianity.
Recently headlines indicate a similar phenomenon is occurring in communist China:
“China Trying to ‘Rewrite the Bible,’ Force Churches to Sing Communist Anthems (The Christian Post, 9/28/18);
“In China, they’re closing churches, jailing pastors – and even rewriting scripture. China’s Communist party is intensifying religious persecution as Christianity’s popularity grows. A new state translation of the Bible will establish a ‘correct understanding’ of the text (The Guardian, 1/13/19).
Goebbels confided in The Goebbels Diaries 1939-1941, that in reality, Hitler “hates Christianity, because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity.”
Hitler forced old traditional military generals to retire, thus purging his administration of any still retaining a remnant of “archaic” Judeo-Christian values, who might resist him.
Franklin D. Roosevelt stated December 15, 1941:”To Hitler, the church … is a monstrosity to be destroyed by every means.”
Hitler attempted to “nazify” German Protestant Churches.Ministers who resisted were imprisoned, such as Rev. Martin Niemöller, a founder of the Confessing Church.A profound statement of Niemöller‘s, of which several variant versions exist, is:”In Germany they first came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.Then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up.”
FDR stated in his State of the Union Address, January 6, 1942:”The world is too small … for both Hitler and God …Nazis have now announced their plan for enforcing their … pagan religion all over the world … by which the Holy Bible and the Cross of Mercy would be displaced by Mein Kampf and the swastika.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt stated of Hitler, December 15, 1941:“Government to him is not the servant … of the people but their absolute master and the dictator of their every act …The rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness which seemed to the Founders of the Republic inalienable, were, to Hitler and his fellows, empty words …”
FDR continued:“Hitler advanced: That the individual human being has no rights whatsoever in himself … no right to a soul of his own, or a mind of his own, or a tongue of his own, or a trade of his own; or even to live where he pleases or to marry the woman he loves;That his only duty is the duty of obedience, not to his God, not to his conscience, but to Adolf Hitler …His only value is his value, not as a man, but as a unit of the Nazi state.”
Winston Churchill, in From War to War (Second World War, Vol. 1, ch. 4, p. 50) described Hitler’s Mein Kampf as: “… the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message.”
Hitler was initially going to allow Jews to be deported to Palestine, but the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husseini, who met with Hitler, also held anti-Jewish views.
Beginning in 1931, al-Husseini attempted to follow Hitler’s example by expelling Jews from Palestine, as the Muslim Brotherhood would also do in Egypt.
Mufti al-Husseini recruited 30,000 Bosnian Muslims to join Hitler’s Waffen-SS.Hitler gave al-Husseini financial assistance, and then asylum in 1941, with the honorary rank of an SS Major-General
During the final battle in Berlin in April of 1945, as allied forces closed in on Hitler’s bunker, they confronted a hundred Muslims of the Mufti’s Arab Legion making their last suicidal stand.
Hitler’s view was the Nazi’s had the right solution but the wrong religion, stating:”Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers (732 AD) … then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world.”
Hitler stated of the Nazis:”The peoples of Islam will always be closer to us than, for example, France.”>
According to Albert Speer, Third Reich’s Minister of Armaments and War Production, Hitler stated in private:”The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity … with its meekness and flabbiness?”
A leader of the Confessing Church who resisted Hitler was Dietrich Bonhoeffer.Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born FEBRUARY 4, 1906.
He studied in New York in 1930, where he met Frank Fisher, an African-American seminarian who introduced him to Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church.
He was inspired by African-American spirituals and the preaching of Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., who helped Bonhoeffer turn “from phraseology to reality,” motivating him to stand up against injustice.
Bonhoeffer helped found the Confessing Church in Germany, which refused to be intimidated by Hitler into silence.He stated:”Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless.”This view was derived from Proverbs 24:11-12:“Rescue those who are unjustly sentenced to death; don’t stand back and let them die. Don’t try to disclaim responsibility by saying you didn’t know about it.For God, who knows all hearts, knows yours, and he knows you knew! And he will reward everyone according to his deeds.”(TLB)
In his book, The Cost of Discipleship,Bonhoeffer rebuked nominal Christians:“Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline. Communion without confession.Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.”
This was similar to what William Penn wrote when he was imprisoned in the Tower of London, 1668″Christ’s cross is Christ’s way to Christ’s crown … The unmortified Christian and the heathen are of the same religion, and the deity they truly worship is the god of this world.It is a false notion that they may be children of God while in a state of disobedience to his holy commandments, and disciples of Jesus though they revolt from his cross.”
Bonhoeffer stated in a 1932 sermon:”The blood of martyrs might once again be demanded, but this blood, if we really have the courage and loyalty to shed it, will not be innocent, shining like that of the first witnesses for the faith.On our blood lies heavy guilt, the guilt of the unprofitable servant.”” align=”left”>
Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned Germans not to slip into the cult of Führer (leader) worship, as he could turn out to be a Verführer (mis-leader, seducer).” align=”right”>
Jimmy Carter wrote in his book Sources of Strength, 1997:”Rev. Niebuhr urged Dietrich Bonhoeffer to remain in America for his own safety. Bonhoeffer refused. He felt he had to be among the other Christians persecuted in Germany.So he returned home, and … in resistance to Hitler…preached publicly against Nazism, racism, and anti-semitism …Bonhoeffer was finally arrested and imprisoned.”
Of his return to Germany, Bonhoeffer wrote:”Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies. At the end all his disciples deserted him. On the cross he was utterly alone, surrounded by evildoers and mockers.For this cause he had come, to bring peace to the enemies of God. So the Christian, too, belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life but in the thick of foes.”
Jimmy Carter continued:”Dietrich Bonhoeffer died April 9, 1945, just a few days before the allied armies liberated Germany. He was executed on orders of Heinrich Himmler. He died a disciple and a martyr …”
Carter added:”The same Holy Spirit … that gave Bonhoeffer the strength to stand up against Nazi tyranny is available to us today.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer challenged:”To endure the cross is not tragedy; it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ”
On February 16, 2002, Dr. James Dobson told the National Religious Broadcasters:”Those of you who feel that the church has no responsibility in the cultural area …What if it were 1943 and you were in Nazi Germany and you knew what Hitler was doing to the Jews … Would you say, ‘We’re not political-that’s somebody else’s problem’?”
Dobson concluded:”I thank God Dietrich Bonhoeffer did not give that answer, and he was arrested by the Nazis and hanged in 1945, naked and alone because he said, ‘This is not right.’”—
“Sin whispers to the wicked, deep within their hearts. They have no fear of God at all. In their blind conceit, they cannot see how wicked they really are. Everything they say is crooked and deceitful. They refuse to act wisely or do good. They lie awake at night, hatching sinful plots. Their actions are never good. They make no attempt to turn from evil.”
As the battle for our Nation’s future continues, I am once again reminded of Benjamin Franklin’s challenge to the American people. At the conclusion of our Founding Father’s Constitutional Convention, Franklin was asked by a woman waiting in the crowd outside, “What kind of government have you given us?” Franklin answered with both a challenge and a rebuke, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” Freedom, like the Gospel, must be preached and practiced or else it will grow old and wither away.
“Facts are stubborn things,” said John Adams. But sadly, we have lost our appetite for truth. We have become a nation unworthy of the very freedoms we enjoy in this God-given republic.
Most today, but thankfully not all in the United States, are civically ignorant of their constitutional rights and biblical calling. Uninformed to the point that they have no vision nor understanding of what to do with them. They are willfully blind, having resigned themselves to 15-second sound bites promulgated by those who are themselves blind. To that end, Psalm 36:1-4 speaks to me about those boldly and brazenly committing acts of deception, lying, cover-ups, and fraud. They are, in short, political jihadists.
During these days, I have dedicated my morning hours to intercessory prayer for our Nation. I teach and preach that Jesus Christ could return at any moment for His Church in the Rapture (Titus 2:13), yet I must also occupy in this world until He comes. I must be busy about my Father’s business in all things, obedient to live it out now.
In the next several weeks your life and mine are about to be changed forever. The coming persecution and violence can only be met with an equal resolve to preserve our liberty and freedom for our children and our children’s children.
Truth is active and the pursuit of it is a vigorous ethos. Christian, be ready to defend your faith, family, and freedom. Someday, our children will ask us, “What kind of government have you given us?” May our answer to them be, “A Republic, if you can keep it.”
(Natural News) Democrat Joe Biden’s message of wanting to ‘unify our divided country’ suffered another credibility blow in the wake of a newly uncovered Democratic memo that warns two-thirds of our country is a bigger threat than China, Russia, Iran and North Korea combined.
A report prepared especially for the (potentially) incoming Biden administration from the Secular Democrats of America PAC provides guidance to “boldly restore a vision of constitutional secularism and respect in the land for religious and intellectual pluralism.”
And here we thought that after four years of President Donald Trump that his efforts to uphold the right of Christians — and Jews, and Muslims, and whomever else — to practice freely, as outlined in the First Amendment, was him restoring constitutionality.
In any event, the PAC says it “represents secular Democratic individuals and organizations” while advocating for “secular governance” as well as the promotion of “respect and inclusion of nonreligious Americans,” while mobilizing “nonreligious voters.”
Again, that same First Amendment guaranteeing Americans the right to worship freely also lacks a provision that mandates a religious society or the practice of a certain religion. So — if there can be no forcing of religion on Americans, why does this group think it can force secularism on all of us?
We digress.
Just The News reports that the proposal was formally presented to the Biden team by Democratic Reps. Jamie Raskin and Jared Huffman, co-chairmen of the Congressional Freethought Caucus; it was also endorsed by Democratic Rep. Jerry McNerney.
The proposal calls for Biden’s team to work with Congress and governors to “advance a secular agenda at all levels of government, taking into account the current makeup of the federal courts and new, unfavorable precedents that your administration will have to contend with.”
In the document, the group argues that Trump has “empowered the religious right in ways no other administration has before, making significant advances in enacting their Christian nationalist agenda.”
The proposal outlines recommendations for reversing certain policies and “proactively” implementing new rules that would “restore secularism to federal governance and disentangle entrenched religious interests from federal policy.”
Again, what is inherently wrong with Trump ‘empowering’ people of faith within his administration? Understand that this proposal would not have been given to Team Biden unless these three lawmakers had a problem with the empowerment of religious persons within the Trump White House — none of whom were pushing to mandate Christianity across the country.
Only people who do not believe in any religion are ‘suitable’ for government, according to this PAC.
But it gets worse: These bozos liken Christians with a threat to America’s “national security.”
“The rise of white Christian nationalism is a national security threat,” read the document. “We recommend you: encourage the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice to dedicate resources to de-radicalization programs aimed at hate groups, including, but not limited to, white nationalists; increase monitoring of such groups, including the online environment, and take action to address increased hate crimes toward minority faith communities; and shift rhetoric to label violent white nationalist extremists as terrorists.”
That is outrageous. If there are any threats to America’s national security that emanate from within the country, they are coming from the insane left: Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and burgeoning anarchist organizations on both the left and right.
But you can see what this is really about.
There is no bigger impediment to authoritarian rule than a belief among the populace in something higher and more divine than ‘big government.’ And what better way to destroy the fundamental right to not only believe in a higher authority but to worship that higher authority than to declare those who do to be our most dangerous threat.
The Marxist Democratic left hates America as it was founded, period. This is just another modicum of proof.
Marxist tactics to overthrow a country involve sowing division.Proverbs 6:16-19 states:”The Lord hates … he that soweth discord among brethern.”Read as PDF …
Marxism endeavors to get people to identify with subgroups:
class;
racial;
ethnic;
religious;
economic;
sex;
class; etc.
These groups are then pitted against each other as victims and oppressors, “haves” and “have nots,” in order to create conflict and division.
This is followed by chaos and violence, making people feel insecure.In the ensuing panic, people surrender their freedoms to some mayor or governor who promises to restore order, but insists on emergency powers to do so.In the end, the usurping mayor or governor rules as a socialist dictator.
Best-selling author David Horowitz wrote about the radical socialist group Students for a Democratic Society:“An SDS radical once wrote, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’
… In other words … civil rights or women’s rights – is never the real cause; women, blacks … are only instruments in the larger cause, which is power.Battles over rights and other issues, according to Alinsky, should never be seen as more than occasions to advance the real agenda, which is the accumulation of power.”
The opposite of Marxist divisions is “patriotism,” which unifies a country.Patriotism is where people, though different, choose to identify as citizens.They focus on what they have in common, such as language, morals, and religious faith.Psalm 133:1 states: “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!”
President Eisenhower stated February 20, 1955:”The Founding Fathers … recognizing God as the author of individual rights, declared that the purpose of Government is to secure those rights …But in many lands the State claims to be the author of human rights … If the State gives rights, it can – and inevitably will – take away those rights.Without God, there could be no American form of Government, nor an American way of life.Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first – the most basic – expression of Americanism.”
Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language defines “PAT’RIOTISM” as derived from the Latin word pater, or being of one’s father):“Love of one’s country; the passion which aims to serve one’s country, either in defending it from invasion, or protecting its rights and maintaining its laws and institutions in vigor and purity.Patriotism is the characteristic of a good citizen, the noblest passion that animates a man in the character of a citizen.”
Andrew Jackson stated in his Farewell Address, March 4, 1837:”My own race is nearly run (ref. 2Timothy 4:7); advanced age and failing health warns me that before long I must pass beyond the reach of human events …I thank God that my life has been spent in a land of liberty and that He has given me a heart to love MY COUNTRY with the affection of a son.”
Clara Barton stated of the wounded Civil War soldiers:”What could I do but go with them, or work for them and MY COUNTRY?The patriot blood of my father was warm in my veins.”
“Citizen” is from the Greek and means co-ruler.In America, citizens are the final authority, ruling through representatives.
America’s founding was unique in that instead of people having allegiance to a king, the people are the king!In contemplating war with the King of Great Britain, John Adams declared:”If it be the pleasure of Heaven that MY COUNTRY shall require the poor offering of my life, the victim shall be ready, at the appointed hour of sacrifice …But while I do live, let me have a COUNTRY, and that a free COUNTRY!”
The theme of “MY COUNTRY” has run through America’s history, such as the statement by 21-year-old Yale graduate Nathan Hale who declared before being hanged by the British, September 22, 1776:”I only regret that I have but one life to lose for MY COUNTRY.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a patriotic address to the White House Correspondents’ Association, February 12, 1943:”In every battalion, and in every ship’s crew, you will find every kind of American citizen representing every occupation, every section, every origin, every religion, and every political viewpoint.Ask them what they are fighting for, and every one of them will say, ‘I am fighting for MY COUNTRY.'”
In 1775, when British General Gage attempted to intimidate Samuel Adams, he replied:”I trust I have long since made my peace with the King of Kings.No personal consideration shall induce me to abandon the righteous cause of MY COUNTRY.Tell Governor Gage it is the advise of Samuel Adams to him no longer to insult the feelings of an exasperated people.”
During the Revolution, General Nathaniel Greene wrote to Samuel Ward of Rhode Island, January 4, 1776:”Permit me, then, to recommend from the sincerity of my heart, ready at all times to bleed in MY COUNTRY’s cause, a declaration of independence;and call upon the world, and the great God who governs it, to witness the necessity, propriety and rectitude thereof …Let us, therefore, act like men inspired with a resolution that nothing but the frowns of Heaven shall conquer us.”
President Dwight Eisenhower approved the Code of Conduct for Military, August 17, 1955:”I will never forget that I am an American fighting man, responsible for my actions, and dedicated to the principles which made MY COUNTRY free.I will trust in my God and in the United States of America.”
Signer of the Constitution Gouverneur Morris wrote April 17, 1778:”While MY COUNTRY calls for the exertion of that little share of abilities, which it has pleased God to bestow on me, I hold it my indispensable duty to give myself to her.”
In January of 1790, President George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregations of Philadelphia, Newport, Charlestown and Richmond:The power and goodness of the Almighty were strongly manifested in the events of our late glorious revolution …My agency … has been guided by … a sense of the duty which I owe MY COUNTRY.”
John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary:”I implore the Spirit from whom ‘every good and perfect gift’ descends (James 1:17) to enable me to render essential service to MY COUNTRY, and that I may never be governed in my public conduct by any consideration other than that of duty.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt stated in his Radio Campaign Address from Hyde Park, New York, November 4, 1940:”When you and I step into the voting booth, we can proudly say:‘I am an American, and this vote I am casting is the exercise of my highest privilege and my most solemn duty to MY COUNTRY.’Dictators have forgotten – or perhaps they never knew – the basis upon which democratic Government is founded: that the opinion of all the people, freely formed and freely expressed, without fear or coercion, is wiser than the opinion of any one man or any small group of men …Democracy is the birthright of every citizen, the white and the colored;the Protestant, the Catholic, the Jew; the sons and daughters of every country in the world, who make up the people of this land.”
Upon the death of James Madison, his wife, Dolley Madison, sent his papers to Congress, stating August 20, 1836, stating:”The best return I can make for the sympathy of MY COUNTRY is to fulfill the sacred trust his confidence reposed in me,that of placing before it and the world what his pen prepared for their use — a legacy of the importance of which is deeply impressed on my mind.”
Kit Carson stated:”No, this is a service for MY COUNTRY, and it doesn’t matter whether I do it as an officer or as a plainsman. The big thing is to do it.”
John Quincy Adams composed the poem:“MY COUNTRY’s weal (well-being) — that be my polar star –Justice, thou Rock of Ages, is thy law –And when thy summons calls me to thy bar (ref. 2 Corinthians 5:10),Be this my plea, thy gracious smile to draw –That all my ways to justice were inclin’d –And all my aims — the blessings of mankind.”
Attributed to Thomas Paine, “The American Patriot’s Prayer,” written in 1776, reflected the sentiment of the colonies:”But chief to hear MY COUNTRY’s voice,may all my thoughts incline,’Tis reason’s law, ’tis virtue’s choice,’Tis nature’s call and thine.”
Benjamin Franklin wrote from Philadelphia to David Hartley, December 4, 1789:“God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: This is MY COUNTRY.”
General George Washington wrote October 18, 1777, upon hearing of the surrender of British General Burgoyne at Saratoga:”I most devoutly congratulate MY COUNTRY, and every well-wisher to the cause, on this signal stroke of Providence.”
General Washington wrote from Mount Vernon to Benjamin Lincoln, August 28, 1788:”I trust in that Providence, which has saved us in six troubles yea seven, to rescue us again from any imminent, though unseen, dangers …Heaven is my witness, that an inextinguishable desire (for) the felicity of MY COUNTRY may be promoted is my only motive in making these observations.”
The song, “MY COUNTRY ’tis of thee,” was written by Samuel Francis Smith, who died November 16, 1895.Samuel Francis Smith was a classmate at Harvard with poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote the famous poem “Old Ironsides.”Smith went to Andover Theological Seminary and became a Baptist minister.
While a student in 1832, Samuel Francis Smith admired a tune while translating a German Hymnal.The same tune was used for the national anthems of Britain, Canada, Russia, Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland.
Smith stated:”I instantly felt the impulse to write a patriotic hymn of my own, adapted to the tune.Picking up a scrap of waste paper which lay near me, I wrote at once.”
Baptist minister Rev.Martin Luther King, Jr., stated at the Civil Rights March on Washington, August 28, 1963:”I have a dream … where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers …This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning,‘MY COUNTRY ’tis of thee,Sweet land of liberty,Of thee I sing.Land where my fathers died,Land of the Pilgrims’ pride,From every mountainside,Let freedom ring.'”
Proclaiming “Let Freedom Ring Day,” July 3, 1986, President Ronald Reagan recalled the 4th stanza of “MY COUNTRY ’tis of thee”:“As the golden glow of the Statue of Liberty’s rekindled torch calls forth … throughout our land, let every American take it as a summons to re-dedication, recalling those words we sang as children:‘Our father’s God, to Thee,Author of Liberty,To Thee we sing,Long may our land be brightWith Freedom’s Holy Light.Protect us by Thy might,Great God, Our King.'”
In his Eighth Annual Address, December 7, 1796, George Washington stated:”The situation in which I now stand, for the last time …I cannot omit the occasion, to congratulate you and MY COUNTRY, on the success of the experiment; nor to repeat my fervent supplications to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, and Sovereign Arbiter of Nations, that his Providential care may still be extended to the United States.”
On May 20, 1792, from Mount Vernon, Washington wrote to James Madison:”I take my leave of them as a public man; and in bidding them adieu (retaining no other concern than such as will arise from fervent wishes for the prosperity of MY COUNTRY)I take the liberty at my departure from civil, as I formerly did at my military exit, to invoke a continuation of the Blessings of Providence upon it.”
President Andrew Jackson stated in a Protest message to the Senate, April 15, 1834:”The only ambition I can feel is to acquit myself to Him to whom I must soon render an account of my stewardship …If the Almighty Being who has hitherto sustained and protected me will but vouchsafe to make my feeble powers instrumental to such a result,I shall anticipate with pleasure the place to be assigned me in the history of MY COUNTRY,and die contented with the belief that I have contributed in some small degree to increase the value and prolong the duration of American liberty.”
President Franklin Pierce stated March 4, 1853:”With all the cherished memories of the past gathering around me like so many eloquent voices of exhortation from Heaven, I can express no better hope for MY COUNTRY than that the kind Providence which smiled upon our fathers may enable their children to preserve the blessings they have inherited.”
President Herbert Clark Hoover stated in his Inaugural Address, March 4, 1929:”If we hold the faith of the men in our mighty past who created these ideals, we shall leave them heightened and strengthened for our children …I ask the help of Almighty God in this service to MY COUNTRY to which you have called me.”
Daniel Webster stated at the Bunker Hill Monument, June 17, 1843:”I mean to stand upon the Constitution. I need no other platform. I shall know but one country.The ends I aim at shall be MY COUNTRY’s, my God’s, and Truth’s.I was born an American; I will live an American; I shall die an American.”
Following the ringing of church bells, explosion of artillery and deafening applause, President George Washington proceeded to Federal Hall, at Wall and Nassau Streets.There, he delivered his Inaugural Address to both Houses of Congress:”The foundations of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality, and the preeminence of free government be exemplified by all the attributes which can win the affections of its citizens and command the respect of the world.I dwell on this prospect with every satisfaction which an ardent love for MY COUNTRY can inspire, since there is no truth more thoroughly established than that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness …The propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained.”
Chief Justice John Jay wrote in his Last Will and Testament:”His protection has accompanied me through many eventful years, faithfully employed in the service of MY COUNTRY;and His Providence has not only conducted me to this tranquil situation, but also given me abundant reason to be contented and thankful. Blessed be His Holy Name.While my children lament my departure, let them recollect that in doing them good, I was only the agent of their Heavenly Father,and that He never withdraws His care and consolations from those who diligently seek Him.”
Samuel Adams stated:”I thank God that I have lived to see MY COUNTRY independent and free.She may long enjoy her independence and freedom if she will. It depends upon her virtue.”
John Quincy Adams stated in his Inaugural Address, March 4, 1825:”I shall look for whatever success may attend my public service; and knowing that’Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh in vain,’with fervent supplications for His favor, to His overruling providence I commit with humble but fearless confidence my own fate and the future destinies of MY COUNTRY.”
President Dwight Eisenhower stated in his Farewell Address, January 17, 1961:”This evening I come to you with a … farewell, and to share a few final thoughts with you, MY COUNTRY …We face a hostile ideology – global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method …As we peer into society’s future, we … must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow.We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage.”
Anne Graham Lotz, the daughter of Billy Graham, warned:“For years we’ve been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives.And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has calmly backed out.How can we expect God to give us His blessing and His protection if we demand He leave us alone?”
Thomas Jefferson wrote in his Notes of the State of Virginia, Query XVIII, 1781:”Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis,a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the Gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath?Indeed, I tremble for MY COUNTRY when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.”
President Ronald Reagan stated June 16, 1983:”We’re a nation under God, a living and loving God.But Thomas Jefferson warned us, ‘I tremble for MY COUNTRY when I reflect that God is just.’We cannot expect Him to protect us in crisis if we turn away from Him in our everyday living.But you know, He told us what to do in II Chronicles … He said,’If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from Heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.'”—Read as PDF … “My COUNTRY ’tis of Thee, Sweet LAND of LIBERTY”
America 101 – A Certification Class for TRUE PATRIOTS !!! You cannot be a CERTIFIED PATRIOT without this class! Why? Because – the most basic and yet least understood principles of our great nation will be taught to you at last. You will forever be changed in how you think of our forms of government. YOUR CHILDREN NEED this education because they will not get it in civics class…. I regret that I did not know these things earlier in life but TODAY you can !!!!!
