What should I forsake?

Ask yourself:  What are the things in my life, my personal habits, my relationships, and my living situation that I need to forsake?

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Thinking Christians

Two great quotes on the importance of thinking to Christians. The first is from a non-Christian (as far as I know).  Alder was the promoter of the Great Book series years ago.  Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones was a famous preacher in London, England in the last century.

“Whoever passes by what is over his head condemns his head to its present low altitude; for nothing can elevate a mind except what is over its head; and that elevation is not accomplished by capillary attraction, but only by the hard work of climbing up ropes, with sore hands and aching muscles.”–Mortimer Alder

“Faith according to our Lord’s teaching in this paragraph [Matthew 6:25-33], is primarily thinking; and the whole trouble with a man of little faith is that he does not think. He allows circumstances to bludgeon him. … We must spend more time in studying our Lord’s lessons in observation and deduction. The Bible is full of logic, and we must never think of faith as something purely mystical. We do not just sit down in an armchair and expect marvelous things to happen to us. That is not Christian faith. Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them. … Faith, if you like, can be defined like this: It is a man insisting upon thinking when everything seems determined to bludgeon and knock him down in an intellectual sense. The trouble with the person of little faith is that, instead of controlling his own thought, his thought is being controlled by something else, and, as we put it, he goes round and round in circles. That is the essence of worry. … That is not thought; that is the absence of thought, a failure to think.”–Martyn Lloyd-Jones offering a a great critique to those who feel that faith and thinking are opposites; that a person who has faith is a person who refuses to use his mind (HT: Challies)

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He knows what you need

“Everything is necessary that He sends. Nothing can be necessary that He withholds.”–John Newton

(HT: FI)

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Abortion: a sin and scourge

Read this personal account of one Florida woman’s experience with abortion.

I  Owen Strachan makes some excellent points with this passionate appeal:

I would ask that every person reading this blog read this story, and pass it on to someone else. Every person. This is one of the most chilling pieces of writing I have ever encountered. It raised the hair on the back of my neck. It spells out a “botched” abortion in which a 23-week baby was born alive and was then, it seems, stuffed in a bag to die. This story is utterly awful, and it is essential that you and I read it, and digest it, and internalize it, and act.

Let me say one more thing here: there is nothing worse than abortion. There are horrible sins in this world: lying, stealing, cheating, greed, systemic and individual acts of racism, and much, much more. But there is nothing worse than abortion. It is the pinnacle of wickedness. It is the murder of the helpless, those who cannot even lift their head or move their arms to defend themselves. It is the scourge of American society; it is by a great distance the worst institutional sin of our country; it is a reality that demands judgment. When one thinks about America and its cozy relationship with abortion, one realizes that we are not better than Sodom or Gomorrah. We might be worse. We think that we are advanced and civil and great and just and we are, societally speaking, murderous and wicked.

If Israel was judged with just harshness for her sins, how much more do we deserve judgment?

And shame on people like myself who know of this evil, and others (racism great and small, greed, class injustice, etc), and do nothing, or next to nothing, about it and them. It’s not that we can singlehandedly overturn massive social sins like this one; we may very well not be able to. But we should fight much, much harder than we do, pray much, much longer than we do, and weep much, much more than we do for the least of us: the defenseless unborn.

Abortion is the worst sin we know. It is our scourge. It is not an option for Christians to fight it, as if we can pick from a fast-food menu of sins to fight. The very substance and nature of our faith in Christ, the guardian of the defenseless, demands that we fight abortion, in whatever way we can. I do not believe that this is an option for us as believers; it is by its very nature a mandate, an unavoidable responsibility.

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