Perelandra

The title is AVOID being shellacqued. Believe it or not.

I’ve turned up an Amazon affiliate site at http://albatross.wingedwheel.net/

The point is to review products available at Amazon.com and link to them for purchase. The links are built at Amazon and as such, I get a credit/commission for them when you click the link and buy. As an added bonus, I get credit for ALL purchases made via the click-through to Amazon. So I don’t even have to review something in order for your purchase to benefit me.

This is only a request, please use albatross.wingedwheel.net for all your Amazon purchases. Ok, if you don’t, I won’t hate you. I won’t even serve you last if you ever have dinner at my house again. You won’t even be the intended butt of my jokes ANY MORE SO THAN Usual. But I did say “please”. Also: please tell your friends. =-D

Also, this post and that button is the ONLY mention I’ll make of it here.

Philippians 4:8 (ESV)

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

http://www.challies.com/archives/001999.php

oh my…

http://www.challies.com/archives/002042.php

I guess it was too good to be true.

-smirk-

One of my favorite preachers is Mark Driscoll, and I was on http://theresurgence.com tonight and it finally hits me who he reminds me of.  Archie Bunker!  Check out the pictures and tell me the physical resemblence isn’t uncanny.
         

WOW!

Dang,

Desiring God Ministries have a “Whatever you can afford policy” meaning that anyone can get a single copy of almost anything they publish or sell:
http://www.desiringgodstore.org/store/index.cgi?cmd=view_tmpl&tmpl=wyca.html

Not only THAT, but consider this:

Desiring God has to be one of the most popular Christian books ever sold. But instead of using that fact to collect cash and build an empire, they put it online so anyone can access it for free at any time.

http://www.desiringgod.org/dg/id1.htm

MAJOR respect coming from me to John Piper and DG Ministries.

Mark Dever writes in the T4G blog that “Membership, at root, is regular admission to communion.”

http://blog.togetherforthegospel.org/2006/08/where_is_member.html

Mark is an incredibly smart man who knows more about the Bible than I probably ever will. A lot of respect goes from me to him. I don’t get the above statement. Where does it say that administering communion is the exclusive realm of local church to the body of believers?

What keeps me as the head my household from administering communion in my home to my family? What keeps me from offering the Lord’s supper to house guests who are known to be Christians?

I’m sick and tired of it. Not of corporate sponsorship. I am sick of the implmentation of it.

I live near Indianapolis. The Brickyard 400 is no longer The Brickyard 400. It is now The Allstate 400 at the Brickyard. The event’s identity is not nor is it ever the company footing the bill. If Allstate goes away, the Brickyard will still happen, but the new title of the event would suggest otherwise. It should be The Brickyard 400 by Allstate, or The Brickyard 400, brought to you by Allstate.

The Winston Cup became the Nextel Cup. Huh…Winston money went away and the racing continued. How about that?

Here’s one for the folks at RCA: I still call it the “Hoosier Dome” even though you’ve renamed it the “RCA Dome”. Dilemna: I don’t know WHAT I am going to call “Lucas Oil Field”, the currently under-construction new home of the Indianapolis Colts.

Another one: Conseco Fieldhouse. It started out life as Indiana Fieldhouse. It was cool, it had character, then a local insurance company dumped $40 million it probably didn’t have into the project and it should never have been renamed. Just hang a tag on the sign: Indiana Fieldhouse by Conseco.

Flow with this for a while, I am going to a wierd place, but I am not staying there. Reserve your crys of “heretic!”, Reserve your judgement, until the end.

Sigmund Freud is often vilified in evangelical circles. This is not a defense of Freud, I intend to make an example of his work here. I maintain that the man was on a legitimate search for truth and failed miserbly, oh so close to his destination.

Examine the Holy Trinity and the 3 components of personality set forth by Freud:

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Father: Creator

Son: Redeemer, required because of the Law.

Holy Spirit: Comforts us and helps us make Godly decisions.

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Id: Requires immediate gratification without concern for external forces. When I was taught this in Psysh 101, they said, “One brother wants to hit another with a hammer, so he DOES.” And that’s the id. The id is entirely in the subconscious, unseen and unknown. The id KIND OF looks like both a totally depraved person, and at the same time a HOLY God.

Ego: According to wikipedia, “the ego mediates between the id, the super-ego and the external world.” Really? A Mediator? Interesting…my psych 101 illustration was “One brother does NOT hit another with a hammer even though he wants to, because if he does, he is disciplined for it.” Now we have a concept of justice and penitence.

SuperEgo: Again from wikipedia: “The super-ego is a symbolic internalization of the father figure and cultural regulations. The super-ego tends to stand in opposition to the desires of the id because of their conflicting objectives, and is aggressive towards the ego. The super-ego acts as the conscience, maintaining our sense of morality and the prohibition of taboos.” My psych 101 defintion: “One brother does not hit the other one with a hammer because he has learned right from wrong, and knows that this is WRONG.” Huh…sounds a lot like the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives, doesn’t it?

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Now.. PUT AWAY YOUR TORCHES! My point here is NOT to say that Freud has an alternate truth on the Trinity. As much as reading this may tempt you to think that.

I think that, like a LOT of very smart, lost people, Freud was on a search. The result of his search was classical psychology. He got SO CLOSE to the truth that perhaps without realizing it, wound up with a fractured description of the Holy Trinity.

He didn’t nail the truth, that much should be obvious at least to any evangelical. But I claim that he skirted close to it. Imagine if his search had been accompanied by the welcome advice of an evangelical friend.

I love seeing people on a spiritual journey, searching for truth. I see these theological “near misses” like this all around me. They remind me that people are on a spiritual journey, but a lot them embark without a Shirpa. Wandering the landscape they come up with some CRAZY ideas.

As Christians, we’ve got the “X” that marks the spot, it’s called the Cross.

Matthew 7:21-23 (English Standard Version)

I Never Knew You

21“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

This verse is often slated as a threat that Christians don’t do more in service with their gifts. Did we somehow miss somewhere along the way that salvation is a free and undeniable gift?

The problem with the subjects here are not that they did too little. The problem is that they were doing a lot for the wrong reasons. What was it that Jesus said to them? “I never knew you”. That is the problem.

The subjects never knew the real Jesus and this should be obvious because they were asking the wrong QUESTIONS of Jesus. You don’t earn your salvation and you do not present WORKS as your claim to Heaven.

If they had known Jesus, had a real relationship with him, their claim on Heaven would have been (with faces planted in the dirt, BTW) “Lord, we are not worthy of your presence even now, and only by your shed Blood and resurrection can we claim residence in Heaven.”

They were asking the wrong questions and staking the wrong claims because they didn’t know the Savior.