Steve/Kristy Kurkinen treated us & Elder Acer Lee and Pastor Joel and Judy Linton (w/daughters) to traditional Taiwan feast today. More fish/seafood than you could ever in million years imagine. And it just kept coming! Kurkinens spent weekend here w/their seven daughters. Check them out: Let’s Meet The Kurkinen Family | 7 Sisters Explore Taiwan - YouTube
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BTW, if you’re keeping track, the count is twelve to four. I kept thinking about Jonathan Edward father, Timothy, and his “sixty feet of daughters.” Edwards had ten sisters each six feet tall.
The Lintons have five daughters and the Kurkinens seven. So their families have fourteen of the female of the species and two of the male of the species. The wives are outstanding and their daughers are also outstanding. Take note, fathers. Plan ahead.
… We are defined more by our enemies than our friends, and more by those we don’t listen to than those we do.
Or to quote U2’s ‘Cedars of Lebanon’, which I’ve been wanting to do here for a while:
… Choose your enemies carefully because they will define you
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Good thing about abortion is you don’t bother enslaving them. Just kill them. Dead people leave no descendants extorting money from your great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren. The logic of feminist genocide is inarguable. #abortionreparations
Email today from Wheaton:
“A new ‘Cabinet Conversations’ video featuring President Philip Ryken & Chaplain Angulus Wilson is now ready for viewing. Drs. Ryken & Wilson reflect on the recent revival at Asbury College and Wheaton’s vision for Life with God Together, the initiative to help enhance already thriving spiritual growth and development for students, faculty, and staff. We ask that you keep this content private and for your viewing only.”
“God” nestled between “with” and “together.”
“Already thriving spiritual growth.”
“Private.”
#thisiswheaton
Note altho at first David was angry at God, later he publicly owned his part in sin that killed Uzza: "Because you did not carry it at the first, the LORD our God made an outburst on us, for we did not seek Him according to the ordinance.” “We.” Such a man of God. #goodshepherd
"We ask that you keep this content private and for your viewing only.”
Um … what have they got to hide?! Quite apart from the fact that someone will watch this and will leak the contents.
Removed this one.
Reading Keller reminds me of Chesterton: “There is a corollary to the conception of being too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the fighting.” Thank God Apostle Paul, Luther, Calvin, Knox were humble. Church needs men humble enough to fight. #goodshepherd
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Most telling in Tim’s piece is “for me as a Christian, Jesus’s (sic) costly love, death, and resurrection …sustained me all day.”
“As a Christian.” Perfectly nuanced. He’s no threat to age of secularism. “I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution, take a bow for the new revolution. Smile and grin at the change all around.”
Added comment:
What Tim’s doing here is relativizing, personalizing his religion. The Apostle Paul universalized his. In Athens (no less) he proclaimed, “In Him we live and move and have our being,” and “all people everywhere” must “repent.”
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“Only the people of God are romantic today. We publicly promise never to consider divorce as an option. We promise never to have sex with anyone other than our own spouse. We promise to submit to our sinful husband. We promise to cherish our sinful wife. We promise to do these things through good times and bad, through wealth and poverty, through sickness and health.”
(from "The Helpful Marriage Book) Get a copy and read it. It’s helpful. The Helpful Marriage Book: Biblical Wisdom for Husbands and Wives - Warhorn Media
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What God’s people must be saying publicly and constantly is that God our Maker made man “male and female.” As our Lord said, “from the beginning.” The beginning of creation. The beginning of conception. Try to trash sex’s beauty all you want, but the book of nature and the Book of God both declare sex is binary.
Repent. #sexisbinary
Out of Our Minds 4th podcast on preaching. Final episode on preaching focuses on discernment and manipulation Out of Our Minds | How to preach, Part 4
As Barbara and I settle into our dotage, we are constantly reminded of the blessing that has accrued to us because of parents on both sides were this kind of romantic. And amazingly so, too!
My grandparents on both sides were divorced, with many pernicious after-effects cascading down around Mom’s and Dad’s heads. It did not go well with several of their siblings - men and women who never married, men who abandoned their marital headship, women who gladly seized those reins in their stead.
My parents and Barbara’s had very, very rough patches lasting years in which divorce was always an obvious solution. One local prominent Baptist pastor counseled divorce for my father-in-law at one point. “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” he responded.
A grandfather on Barbara’s side had an affair. Divorce to follow? No. He repented and his wife forgave him. She had some repenting to do as well, and she did it. They died in peaceable affection with one another.
The aftermath is two-fold. First there continues to be a material blessing in the form of estate from parents on both sides, estates that were not scattered by divorce and its aftermath, estates which not only nourished my own marriage in its early impoverished days, but placed into my wife’s and my hands resources with which we deployed in many “tight” times in the lives of our children and their own families.
Second, we have a spiritual blessing that runs parallel to the material one, each echoing the other. The spectacle (a spectacle inside the family, not so much a public spectacle) of our Lord’s grace and guidance, His forgiveness, the strengthening that comes with patient suffering and the Spirit’s subsequent strengthening (cf. Matthew 4:11) - these and similar blessings not only accrue to individuals within our extended family, but come to characterize our common Christian heritage as we have received it and made our spiritual lives within it.
Oh, yes - give us those kinds of Christian romantics again! God grant their tribe to increase.
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Your parents’ estates also blessed others of us, through you. May God bless you and others hear your testimony pointing to Christ and His Bride. Love,
Snuck into homiletics class at Westminster-Escondido for a demo of sermon explaining Two-Kingdom doctrine "Turbo Encabulator" the Original - YouTube
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Tucker Carlson: “They’re not here to inform you, really, even on big things that really matter, like economy/war/COVID. Their job is not to inform you. They are working for the small group of people who actually run the world.”
We’ve become morally depraved. Love dogs while murdering children. Image of God is nothing to us. Our compassion for dogs/cats is bogus. Man who refuses to love children can’t love his dog. He just loves that his dog pays attention to him. It’s self-love. #petsvschildren
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Not opposed to attachment to animals. Look at Nathan’s story told to King David. Men can love animals, but this is not what is going on today.
Spent an hour the other day watching a couple preening with their dog, switching off between them who held the dog and who took the picture of it being cuddled by the other. Must have taken way over a hundred pics with 30-50 different poses. They’d walked in with the dog in a baby stroller.
We must condemn this. Opposing such assaults against the image of God in man, not animals, is a key part of Christian confession of faith and Gospel witness today. Not just by having children, but also by opposing dogs replacing children.
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This reminds me of a recent Sunday school class where I applied the image of God in man to various social concerns (abortion, homosexuality, etc.). I realized I had to mention pet ownership and especially this “fur babies” idea, whereby people are pretending that animal ownership is nearly equal to raising children. Taking manicured pictures, buying special products, talking about their pets as equivalent to children, obsessive and pampered treatment. Cambridge dictionary now recognizes the term “fur baby” while there are TikTok videos out there wishing Happy Mother’s Day to “the moms of children and fur babies.”
To illustrate the depth to which Christian publishing is complicit in this, there’s a hopelessly stupid book titled Vegangelical: How Caring for Animals Can Shape Your Faith by Sarah Withrow King (published by Zondervan, 2016). I happened to run across a copy couple of years back in a discard pile. The book is there to justify animal rights activism among evangelical Christians.
One quote will suffice to give a flavor of where this comes from and where it goes. While reflecting on the Old Testament sacrificial system and the animals that were slaughtered, the author theorizes:
I imagine that God felt every slit of the blade, every drop of blood that fell, every broken neck and bruised body. I imagine that he wept at every lost life. I imagine that when Jesus wept and prayed at Gethsemane, and that when he was hanging on the cross, he also felt every drop of blood, broken bone, and bruised body that had suffered before him and that suffered since. (pp. 47–48)
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