The first in a mini-series on sickness and healing. In this message I lay out a Theology of Sickness beginning from Romans 8:18-25. We address God's good creation now corupted by sin, captive to sickness, yet corrected in Christ's death with a hopeful look to the consummation when we will be perfectly healed in body, mind and soul.
place of self in everything from first to last, great or small. He is the substitute for self in the matter of our standing before God. As the first thing the Holy Spirit does is to set aside self in the matter of justification and acceptance, so His next is to present to us the Son of God as the true ground of our acceptance. We no longer seek to be justified by self in any sense or on account of anything done to self, on account of ammended self or improved self or mortified self, but solely on account of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who died for us and Who rose again. And in this Son of God, Whom we take as a substitute for self, we find an object worth living for, someone we can carry through every part of our life and into every region of our life." - Horatius Bonar
"The bridge of grace will bear your weight, brother. Thousands of big sinners have gone across that bridge, yea, tens of thousands have gone over it. I can hear their trampings now as they traverse the great arches of the bridge of salvation. They come by the thousands, by their myriads, err since that day when Christ first entered His glory. They come and yet never a stone has sprung in that mighty bridge. Some have been the chief of sinners and some have come at the very last of their days but the arch has never yielded beneath their weight. I will go with them…trusting to the same support. It will bear me over as it has for them."
I do not like the thought of God having all the disposal of my destiny. If He gets His will, I am afraid that I shall not get mine. It comes out, moreover, that the God about whose love I was so fond of speaking, is a God to whom I cannot trust myself implicitly for eternity. Yes, this is the real truth. Man's dislike at God's sovereignty arises from his suspicion of God's heart. And yet the men in our day, who deny this absolute sovereignty, are the very men who profess to rejoice in the love of God, - who speak of that love as if there were nothing else in God but love. The more I understand of the character of God, as revealed in Scripture, the more shall I see that He must be sovereign, and the more shall I rejoice from my inmost heart that He is so.
A health official in the Netherlands has called for a debate on the idea of forced abortion and contraception to deal with what she sees as a crisis of unwanted children.
Alderman Marianne van den Anker of the Leefbaar Rotterdam Party wants specifically to target communities of Antilleans and Arubans where she sees the biggest problems of unwanted children.
Her comments have stirred protest by a health foundation working with those communities in Rotterdam. The group, which called the comments degrading, is asking Mayor Ivo Opstelten and other politicians to distance themselves from Van den Anker's views.
Van den Anker is a mother of two children and the official in charge of Rotterdam's health and security portfolios.
In an interview in a newspaper Saturday, she said she had tried everything to prevent child abuse.
"I fail, I fail," she told the interviewer as she outlined her controversial idea for a debate on compulsory abortion and contraception.
The target groups for her program are Antillean teenage mothers; drug addicts and people with mental handicaps, she said, according to a report in Expatica.
According to the report, Van den Anker said children from these groups run an "unacceptable risk" of growing up without love and with "violence, neglect, mistreatment and sexual abuse."
"The exceptions," she said, "and there are some, can be counted on a pair of hands."
Van den Anker pointed to the growing number of Antillean youth gangs in Rotterdam whose members come from loveless homes.
It is reserved for certain Christian churches to degrade themselves by tolerating as their teachers the acknowledged and professed propounders of another gospel, and allowing the inspiration of the Bible, the deity of Christ, and the verifies of the faith, to be scoffed at to their faces on the Sabbath-day by their own paid ministers. How long ere this reproach shall be rolled away!
The West has failed to grasp the extent to which Islamic extremism is rooted in men's fear of women's sexuality, the British author Salman Rushdie says in an interview to be published today.
Rushdie told the German weekly Stern that his latest novel, Shalimar the Clown, dealt with the deep anxiety felt among many Islamic men about female sexual freedom and lost honour.Asked if the book drew a link between Islamic terrorism and damaged male honour, Rushdie said this was a crucial point. "The Western-Christian world view deals with the issues of guilt and salvation, a concept that is completely unimportant in the East because there is no original sin and no saviour," he said. "Instead, great importance is given to 'honour'. I consider that to be problematic. But of course it is underestimated how many Islamists consciously or unconsciously attempt to restore lost honour."
Rushdie, 58, said that much of the Islamists' anger toward the West was provoked by that split on sexual issues.
"[It is] because Western societies do not veil their women. Because they do not defuse this potential danger," he said.
Were you ever in a new trouble, one which was so strange that you felt that a similar trial had never happened to you, and, moreover you dreamt that such a temptation had never assailed anybody else? I should not wonder if that was the thought of your troubled heart.
Well, isn't that special...For those of you who were kind enough to inform us about our previously inaccurate quote...we thank you! We were recently made aware that the former quote we had posted in the header on our site was actually not based on the word of Jesus but was a quote posed to him during his temptation. As soon as we were made aware of this we removed the quote from our site. We removed it...not hackers as some ill-informed bloggers would have you believe. This lesson is a demonstration why when using tools online to identify quotes that you think deliver the honest and sincere message you intended you should always view the quotes in their whole context.
This baptism message for my son, Jonathan, is based upon on the admonition of Proverbs 22:6.
A communion message linking Leviticus 3 and 7 with the proper celebration of the Lord's Supper. In the OT peace offering we see a foreshadowing of how we may approach God in partaking of communion.
There will be no new God, nor a new devil, and we shall never have a new Savior, nor a new atonement: why should we then be either attracted or alarmed by the error and nonsense which everywhere plead for a hearing because they are new? What is their newness to us; we are not children, nor frequenters of playhouses? Truly, to such a new toy or a new play has immense attractions; but men care less about the age of a thing than about its intrinsic value. To suppose that theology can be new is to imagine that the Lord himself is of yesterday. A doctrine which is said to have lately become true must of necessity be a lie. Falsehood has no beard, but truth is hoary with an age immeasurable. The old gospel is the only gospel. Pity is our only feeling towards those young preachers who cry, "See my new theology," in just the same spirit as little Mary says, "See my pretty new frock."
"There are those who shrink from a consideration of these great questions of principle; there are those who decry controversy, and believe that the church should return to its former policy of politely ignoring or taking for granted the central things of the Christian faith. But with such persons I, for my part, cannot possibly agree. The period of apparent harmony in which the Church in America, for example, found itself a few years ago was, I believe, a period of deadliest peril. Loyalty to Church organizations was being substituted for loyalty to Christ; Church leaders who never even mentioned the center of the gospel in their preaching were in undisputed charge of the resources of the Church; at board meetings or in the councils of the Church, it was considered bad form even to mention, at least in any definite and intelligible way, the Cross of Christ. A polite paganism, in other words, with reliance upon human resources, was being quietly and peacefully substituted for the heroism of devotion to the gospel. In the face of such a condition, there were some men whose hearts were touched. The Lord Jesus had died for them upon the cross, and the least they could do, they thought, was to be faithful to Him; they could not continue to support, by their gifts and by their efforts, anything that was hostile to His gospel; and they were compelled, therefore, in the face of all opposition, to raise the question what it is that the Church is in the world to do. God grant that question may never be silenced until it is answered aright! Let us not fear the opposition of men; every great movement in the Church from Paul down to modern times has been criticized on the ground that it promoted censoriousness and intolerance and disputing. Of course the gospel of Christ, in a world of sin and doubt, will cause disputing; and if it does not cause disputing and arouse bitter opposition, that is a fairly sure sign that it is not being faithfully proclaimed. As for me, I believe that a great opportunity has been opened to Christian people by the "controversy" that is so much decried. Conventions have been broken down; men are trying to penetrate beneath pious words to the thing that these words designate; it is becoming increasingly necessary for a man to choose whether he will stand with Christ or against Him. Such a condition, I for my part believe, has been brought about by the Spirit of God; already there has been spiritual advance....Christian heroism in the face of opposition has come again to its rights; a new interest has been aroused in the historical and philosophical questions that underlie the Christian religion; true and independent convictions have been formed. Controversy, in other words, has resulted in a striking intellectual and spiritual advance. Some of us discern in all this the work of the Spirit of God. And God grant that His fire be not quenched! God save us from any smoothing over of these questions in the interests of a hollow pleasantness; God grant that questions of principle may never rest until they are settled right! It is out of such times of questioning that great revivals come. God grant that it may be so today! Controversy of the right sort is good; for out of such controversy, as Church history and Scripture alike teach, there comes the salvation of souls."
