"Not so Young" Restless and Reformed

You are glory.
You are pain.
You are master.
You are the servants.
You are fire.
You are rain.
You are justice.
You are returning again.
Oh, holy one, risen exalted king.
My God.
Messiah.
Jehovah Shalom.

You are presence.
You are joy.
You are my future, You are my past.
You are faithful.
You are true.
You are judgement.
Only Your justice remains.
Oh, holy one, risen exalted king.
My God of breakthrough.
The Lord, our banner.

Oh, King Jesus, You are my God.
You are so worthy, holy in violence.
And when that trumpet blasts, I’ll bow in awe.
And for one half hour, silence.

Jesus enthroned.
Let the world be silenced.

Jehova Shalom by Sleeping Giant from Kingdom Days in an Evil Age

Homosexual Activist Admits True Purpose of Battle is to Destroy Marriage | Illinois Family Institute

“It’s a no-brainer that (homosexual activists) should have the right to marry, but I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist. …(F)ighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there — because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie.

The institution of marriage is going to change, and it should change. And again, I don’t think it should exist. And I don’t like taking part in creating fictions about my life. That’s sort of not what I had in mind when I came out thirty years ago.

I have three kids who have five parents, more or less, and I don’t see why they shouldn’t have five parents legally… I met my new partner, and she had just had a baby, and that baby’s biological father is my brother, and my daughter’s biological father is a man who lives in Russia, and my adopted son also considers him his father. So the five parents break down into two groups of three… And really, I would like to live in a legal system that is capable of reflecting that reality, and I don’t think that’s compatible with the institution of marriage.”

If you’ve read Evolving in Monkey Town, you know that the public execution of a woman named Zarmina in Afghanistan marked a turning point in my faith journey. The injustice of the situation was troublesome enough, but when my friends insisted that Zarmina went to hell because she was a Muslim, I began wrestling with some serious questions about heaven, hell, predestination, free will, God’s goodness, and religious pluralism.

Evangelical apologists were quick to respond. And while their answers made enough sense in my head; they never sat right with my soul.

Why would God fashion a person in her mother’s womb, number the hairs on her head, and then leave her without any hope of salvation? Can salvation be boiled down to luck of the draw? How is that just? Shouldn’t God be more loving and compassionate than I?

Oh, the Calvinists could make perfect sense of it all with a wave of a hand and a swift, confident explanation about how Zarmina had been born in sin and likely predestined to spend eternity in hell to the glory of an angry God (they called her a “vessel of destruction”); about how I should just be thankful to be spared the same fate since it’s what I deserve anyway; about how the Asian tsunami was just another one of God’s temper tantrums sent to remind us all of His rage at our sin; about how I need not worry because “there is not one maverick molecule in the universe” so every hurricane, every earthquake, every war, every execution, every transaction in the slave trade, every rape of a child is part of God’s sovereign plan, even God’s idea; about how my objections to this paradigm represented unrepentant pride and a capitulation to humanism that placed too much inherent value on my fellow human beings; about how my intuitive sense of love and morality and right and wrong is so corrupted by my sin nature I cannot trust it.

They said all of this without so much of a glimmer of a tear, and it scared me to death. It nearly scared me out of the Church.

Rachel Held Evans, The Scandal of the Evangelical Heart (via hislivingpoetry)

AND THAT, LADIES AND GENTS, IS MAN-CENTRIC THEOLOGY DEFINED AND STATED. IF YOU WORSHIP A GOD YOU HAVE CONCEIVED IN YOUR MIND AND NOT THE GOD WHO HAS REVEALED HIMSELF IN SCRIPTURE, YOU ARE AN IDOLATOR IN NEED OF REPENTANCE.

A documentary film about Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia Women’s Medical Society disaster and the cover-up by state and local oversight agencies.

The Twenty-third Psalm

The Lord and I are in a shepherd-sheep situation, and I am in a position of negative need.

He prostrates me in a green belt grazing area, and conducts me directionally parallel to a non-torrential aqueous liquid.

He restores to original satisfaction levels my psychological make up.

Notwithstanding the fact that I make ambulatory progress through the non-illuminated inter-hill mortality slot, terror sensations shall not be observed within me due to the proximity of the omnipotence.

Your pastoral walking aid and quadruped pickup unit introduce me into a pleasurific mood state.

You design and produce a nutrient bearing furniture type structure in the context of non-cooperative elements, and my beverage utensil experiences a volume crisis.

You enact a head related folk ritual utilizing vegetable extracts. Surely it must be an ongoing non-deductible fact that your inter-relational, emphatical and non-vengeful capacities will pursue me as their target focus for the duration of this non death period.

And I will possess tenant rights in the housing unit of the Lord on a permanently open ended time basis.

New Millennium Version of the Bible (by Kenneth Gentry)

In a time of universal self-deceit — telling the truth is an act of love.
Refusal to tell that truth — unvarnished, ungarbled, unfettered, unashamed — is either malice or cowardice. If you know a man to be utterly deceived, and in a way that is lethal to his soul, and you choose to say nothing because he will react violently to it, you either despise him, or you love your own peace and safety more than you love him.

Douglas Wilson

Don’t be so concerned that the unbeliever can’t fathom how God made a donkey talk. A frog becoming a prince is not a fairytale in the unbelieving worldview. Just give it some time!

Sye Ten Bruggencate