The Seven Deadly Sins - And Me.

I think that there is only one of the seven which has never really applied to me. 
(Envy - in case you were wondering - and I've never been all that avaricious.)

EU Must Finally Face Reality.

EU must get real: In just weeks the EU will lose 10% of its income, 12% of its population, and 13% of its total GDP - because Britain is leaving... so it's time for them to be realistic about a trade deal, writes DOMINIC SANDBROOK

DOMINIC SANDBROOK: Britain's departure shows the EU is not the end of history and it is perfectly possible to get off the train, however clumsy our departure may have looked. Mail.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-7846615/Its-time-EU-realistic-trade-deal-writes-DOMINIC-SANDBROOK.html

Be Ready. If The Christ Returns Today, Are You Prepared?

Hmm. Looks Like We Are All Singing From The Same Hymn Sheet, Now.

Farage celebrates crushing Remoaners and removing Brexit blockers as UK leaves this month

NIGEL Farage wished Brexiteers a Happy New Year and celebrated helping the Conservative party gain its huge majority, saying that “without us, Boris would not have become PM”.

By BRIAN MCGLEENON, Express.

Gavin and Stacey - Christmas Unspecial.

Gavin & Stacey Christmas Special hits a new ratings high as viewing figures soar to 17.1 MILLION making it the most-watched scripted show of the DECADE.

Blogger: well, contrary to my customary grasp on sanity normally holding firm, I recorded and watched this programme.

Why I chose not to press the off button - I have no idea.

It was: wretched, hackneyed, tedious, appallingly scripted, riddled with the inconsequential nothingness and utterly devoid of any humour whatsoever.

Yuk. Seriously 'orrible! Far superior humour in early Carry On films. (Yes. Honestly THAT bad!)

It proves my contention that, given sufficient time, all comedies inevitably morph into soaps.

I Heave A Mighty Sigh of Relief At The End of The Crazy Season.

Many are shocked when I deplore modern Christmas practice but I do so with good reason.
Today, as I do annually, I have stopped to look back over the last two or three weeks of madness, excess, expense and wicked over-indulgence.
Am I so spiritual that I do not get drawn in? - Sadly, no!

Before beginning writing today's Blog, I paused to meditate on my spiritual state and conclude that, same as every year at this point, I am actually at my lowest spiritual ebb.
I have to start a spiritual rebuild; I need to renew and freshen up my relationship with the Saviour who has been sidelined somewhat over the course of the season. (Ironic, innit?)
Happily, it starts this very morning as the faithful gather in our home to rededicate ourselves to God and attempt to make Him far more central in our lives.

Shameful.

A Christian mother is speaking out against the neutralising of the Christian faith in the name of ‘inclusivity’ at her children’s school, after the headteacher announced that the world ‘Lord’ would be removed from this year’s nativity.

Margarita was told by her children that the headteacher of Whitehall Primary School in Chingford, East London, had announced in assembly that the lyrics to ‘Away in a Manger’ would be changed for their nativity play taking place at a local church on 17 December. Instead of singing ‘the little Lord Jesus’, the children would be singing ‘the little baby Jesus’, said headteacher Miss Zakia Khatun.

Changing lyrics

A nativity ‘celebration’ for infants at the school, which parents could not attend, had already taken place with the original lyrics from the famous Christmas carol omitted.

Margarita commented on her children’s reaction: “I picked my children up at the end of the day and they were so upset, saying to me: ‘Mummy, today in assembly the headteacher told everybody that she would be changing the words to the Christmas song.’ I was so shocked. As a family we go to church, pray together and celebrate Christmas as the birth of Jesus as the Son of God.”

Miss Khatun had announced in assembly that the rationale behind the change was so that “all pupils can participate in the celebration.” However, reportedly, other parents and staff at the school are also unhappy with the decision.

After a meeting at the school, Miss Khatun reinforced the decision to change the original lyrics despite Margarita’s objections that parents had not been properly informed. Margarita added that the decision had failed to solve the issue of ‘inclusion’ and would instead lead to the majority of Christian children from being excluded.

In response to the news, the Diocese of Chelmsford said: “The service maintains the traditional Christian message of the joy of Christmas in a way that can be celebrated by everyone, including those of other faiths and none.”

“My children have been discriminated against”

Margarita commented: “I am not alone; teachers and other parents are not happy about this. I believe my children have been discriminated against and they have been denied the freedom to fully express their faith.

“I am taking this stand as Christian belief and tradition, which mean so much to so many people of all generations, is being sacrificed and silenced in the name of inclusion and political correctness.”

Central truth of the Christian faith

Commenting on why the removal of the word ‘Lord’ is so significant for Christians, Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali said: “We need to respect the original form of the carol and the intention with which it was written. The words ‘the little Lord Jesus’ occur three times in the carol and point to the central message of Christmas, which is: God is with us in Jesus.

“Everything in the church where the nativity is being held points to this central truth of the Christian faith.

“If parents do not wish their children to participate in a Christian nativity play and any accompanying worship, they should be able to opt out and the school should provide an alternate activity for such children. But basic Christian teaching should not be changed just to accommodate everybody.”

Millions of Christians recognise Jesus as Lord

Andrea Williams, chief executive of Christian Concern said: “School nativities are special and provide unique memories for parents and children each year. It is special because the Christmas story, and carols such as ‘Away in a Manger’, give a message of timeless beauty and hope.

“Jesus, the baby born in a manger, who millions of Christians throughout history recognise as their Lord, born into a messy world to bring light and salvation.

“Removing the Lordship of Christ guts the Christian message of its truth, around which the whole of Western civilisation once based its culture.

“Let’s put the Lord Jesus Christ back into Christmas.” Christian Concern.

Birdies.

New Atheism: Old Spiritual Bankruptcy.

In the early 2000s, across the digital and print world of Christian apologetics, the so-called “New Atheism” was a central topic of conversation. Authors like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens generated quite an audience by attacking religion in general, and Christianity in particular, portraying both as irrational, evil forces in society. Books like “The God Delusion,” “God Is Not Great,” and “The End of Faith” argued that belief in God was unscientific, and that unbelief would make us all better people.

You may be thinking to yourself, “I haven’t really thought of those guys in quite a while.” Exactly. The movement has grown strangely quiet over the last decade. Message board debates have petered out, rallies and debates have been cancelled, and book sales flatlined.

In fact, the New Atheism has been largely replaced. Some folks who once joined in on the outrage against religion got woke instead and now aim their outrage at privilege, oppression, and perceived inequalities. Others migrated from Rational Wiki to alt-right online hubs like 4Chan and Reddit. Today, those sites are full of former Dawkins fans who swallowed so-called “red pill” ideas about race, sex, and politics, not to mention heaping doses of conspiracy theories.

It’s fair to say now, as Steven Poole did earlier this year in The Guardian, that the New Atheist moment has ended. But what killed it?

Poole makes a strong case that it just became old news. Authors like Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens rode the wave of 9/11 and the War on Terror. In the aftermath of the deadliest attack in American history, it was easy to make the claim that religion itself, and not just certain religions, posed unique threats to world peace, despite obvious differences between Christianity and radical Islam. According to the New Atheists, to quote Christopher Hitchens, religion “poisons everything.”

But with Al-Qaeda and ISIS in retreat and a generation coming of age that can’t remember 9/11, the New Atheism movement is out of tracks to run on and has failed to convert a younger audience.

And I also think that Patrick Henry College professor Gene Veith offers another helpful angle on the decline of the New Atheists in a piece he recently wrote at Patheos. Militant unbelief has faltered, he suggests, because it cannot adequately explain sin.

Atheism is a reductionistic worldview and is forced to either deny the existence of real evil or to blame religion for it. After watching institutions and industries drown in sex scandals and innocents mowed down in nihilistic mass-shootings over the last ten years, it’s clear that the fanatically religious do not have a monopoly on violence and evil.

In another “autopsy” of the New Atheism at Arc Digital, Ben Sixsmith suggests that those once preoccupied with arguing against the existence of God have moved on “to more intense areas of rhetorical dispute” like racial and gender oppression, while those who bang on about atheism now look—in his words—“increasingly monomaniacal, irrelevant, and dull.”

So where does this leave us? With the New Atheism in its twilight years and more fashionable false worldviews taking its place, Christians need to keep apologetically focused. All false ideas need to be answered.

Today, we might best serve our neighbors by pointing out the lies of identity politics or oppression politics, explaining the evolutionary roots of modern racism, and caring for the victims these bad ideas leave behind. And as we do, we’ll need to point out how inadequate every other worldview is in accounting for sin and evil, which—as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it—runs “through every human heart.”

In place of the numerous and varied failed accounts of what’s wrong with our world, we’ll need to continue to proclaim the truth the New Atheists denied and today’s fashionable ideologues ignore: that the problem with the world, that the source of evil, is “in here” not “out there.” And because we are, at root, the source of the world’s problems, salvation can only come from without not within.

 

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Not A Complaint, As Such, But More A Question. Twenty-Nine?

Published December 30, 2019 at 4:39 PM

A Sudanese court sentenced 29 members of the national intelligence service to death  for the killing of Ahmed al-Khair, a teacher placed in detention during anti-government protests earlier this year, according to Reuters.

The agents were sentenced to hanging on Monday. 

Protesters and supporters celebrated the ruling, one of the first sentences issued following crackdowns on protests surrounding the ousting of former president Omar al-Bashir in April. Khair’s brother Saad told reporters it was a “victory for justice.” 

Sorry, Boris But I Struggle To See How That Can Be.

Boris Johnson says Remainers 'no less' patriotic than Leavers in New Year message.

YES, Ruth!

No Jeremy Corbyn allies deserve our vote: Former Labour MP Ruth Smeeth says entire Shadow Cabinet should be banned from the party's leadership race for failing to root out anti-Semitism 

Former Labour MP Ruth Smeeth says the Shadow Cabinet should be banned from the leadership race for paying 'lip service' to rooting out anti-Semitism. She claims 'none of them deserve a vote'. Mail.

Be Ready. PLEASE Be Ready.

RIP, Requiescat In Pace, Rest In Peace.

I fall into the trap too. All too often, I add RIP after hearing about a death. Just to be polite, I suppose.

BUT, if that person did not die in Jesus - there ain't gonna be no peace!

If they did die in the Lord - they will certainly be able to 'rest peacefully in the everlasting arms.'

Cyprus 'Rape' Case?

https://youtu.be/s5T0vy0-Oak

Okay, there is a lot of shouting the odds but, factually, what do we know for certain?

Blessings To All of My Readership Whether You Know God Or Are Yet To Find Him.

If You Do Not Know The Lord ...

... the start of a New Year is the time to give your life what it really needs - Jesus The Saviour.
Please approach an evangelical Church or join an Alpha Course or speak to a Christian friend who 'lives the life'.
Do not delay.

We have no idea whether or not 2020 will be the final calendar year ever. We do not know the hour when the return of Jesus will be.
We are not promised 2021.

Birdie.

Coming Back Prodigal-Like Into The Arms of The Loving Father.

Simon Ponsonby: How I came back to Jesus, my first love.

12th December 2019

Simon Ponsonby is on the leadership team of a large UK church, speaking at events and writing books about Christianity, but after 30 years of ministry, he realised that his passion for Jesus was growing cold. He explains how he found his way back to his first love and how you can too

After 30 years in ministry I was worn out and part of me was wanting out. Married to an amazing wife with two remarkable grown sons, I served with a gifted team, in an inspiring and even influential church. I had published a number of books, some well received and these opened the door to speak in numerous contexts home and abroad. But ministry had sucked the life out of me.

I felt bruised, jaded with much of church life, disappointed at the drift in my denomination (Church of England), sad at seeing friends and former role models falling into serious moral failure, doctrinal error or throwing in the towel on church. After years of longing and praying and preaching for church renewal and national revival it seemed further away than ever.

I was not aware of any glaring sin in my own life, but God seemed distant and I was becoming apathetic and cynical. I didn't like what I saw in me. I was spiritually dry, and physically tired, and mentally anxious and depressed. Always an introvert, the strain of public ministry had much reduced me, and I was increasingly withdrawing from company. I snatched comfort in eating and drinking a little too much and hiding in my hobbies. I spent more time with the latter than the Lord. I was not in a good place – all the while, with more desperation than faith, I was calling out to God for help, for change.

Then in March 2019 I attended the funeral of evangelist and theologian, Michael Green. I first came across Michael when I became a Christian 35 years ago. I was discipled and equipped by many of his books. Years later I got to know him personally in Oxford. He did me a great honour of writing a beautiful Foreword for my first book More.

Michael Green’s infectious evangelism

Michael was one of the outstanding evangelical Church leaders of the last 40 years and his contribution, through hundreds of missions and over 70 books, is unquestionable and almost unparalleled in his generation. But what struck me at his funeral, as I listened to the contributions and testimonies, was that this man was ablaze with the love of Jesus. It was this love for Jesus that made him such an infectious and effective evangelist.

At the age of 88 he was still passionately preaching Jesus on student missions, still witnessing to the hospital staff nursing him, still handing out booklets to strangers that he had written about Jesus. He was all about Jesus. And people wanted to know the Jesus they saw and encountered in him.

Michael’s single-minded focus moved me and indeed provoked me. Had I become so caught up in working for the Lord that I had lost the Lord of the work? Probably. Martha was dutifully preoccupied with many things for Jesus, but neglected “what is better”; the option her sister Mary took by sitting and gazing on Jesus. I knew I needed to begin again at the beginning, and return to my first love, Jesus.

Shortly after Michael’s funeral I was meditating on the gospels and was struck by how often the response to Jesus from those who met him was amazement. As I pondered this, Jesus presented himself afresh to me. Words tumbled out as I sat in a café, tears rolling down my face trying to capture what I was seeing – just how amazing Jesus is. Those words preached the next Sunday were put to music and image by some gifted creatives and joined by some photos to become a small booklet called Amazing. That has been expanded to a large study on Jesus called Amazed, which is out next spring.

Three decades ago I became a minister because I had met Jesus and he transformed my life and I wanted to tell the world about him. Somewhere that vision of Jesus became blurred, and the ministry had bizarrely pushed Jesus to the periphery. No longer. An evangelist of an earlier generation, Gypsy Smith, once said of Jesus: “I have never lost the wonder of it all.”  I don't ever want to either.

Falling in love again

How do we fall in love with Jesus all over again? Jesus challenged the Laodiceans because they were lukewarm and he challenged the Ephesians because they had forsaken him, their first love. Jesus is always wanting us to come back to our first love, the one who loved us first. How can we do that? Well, absence makes the heart grow colder. We need to consciously seek him, like the Greeks who came to Andrew and said: “Sir, we would see Jesus.”

First and foremost, we find Jesus revealed in his Word: “These are the very scriptures that testify about me” said Jesus (John 5:39) and we need to immerse ourselves in this ocean of revelation. All the while praying that God would reveal Jesus to us.

Steep yourselves in the gospels. Read them over and over and over. Secondly, we need to ask the Spirit to reveal Jesus. Much of prayer to and for the Spirit has been for power for ministry, and that is surely appropriate to pray. Less so has been the prayer that the Spirit would conform me to Christlikeness. But specifically, Jesus tells us the Spirit will make him known and lead us into all truth, the Spirit sublimates himself in the son, shines the spotlight on the son, fills us with the height and depth and length and breadth of Christ’s love. Seek the spirit to know Jesus nearer and dearer and clearer.

In Donald Miller’s superb book Blue Like Jazz – he recalls a friend of his, Alan, who was researching ‘successful’ churches and interviewing big church leaders. He visited Bill Bright, one of the most influential Christian leaders in the twentieth century – founder of Campus Crusade which has some 25,000 missionaries in 200 countries. Alan was shown into a grand office and sat there behind a big desk was “a big man, full of life, who listened attentively and engaged with the interview”.

The final question put to him was: “What does Jesus mean to you?” Bill Bright just started to cry. This big man, sat there in a big chair, behind his big desk, wept. Donald Miller comments: “When Alan told me the story I wondered what it was like to love Jesus that way. To cry at the very mention of the name Jesus…I knew then, I would like to know Jesus like that.”  Me too.

Rev Simon Ponsonby is pastor of theology at St Aldate’s, Oxford. Amazing is now available to purchase from all good bookshops or online at muddypearl.com

Premier Christianity.

Mercy.

Free Range Eggs, Ritual Slaughter and Perspectives.

This week, I bought a dozen large, free range eggs for £1-55.

Free range eggs are a very cheap food.

Why does Mr Packham not spend far more time on campaigns to end battery hen conditions?

Millions of creatures are ritually slaughtered to create halal meat. (Perhaps lessons could be imposed from the excellent equivalent slaughter methods in Jewish abattoirs, BTW.)

Compared to minute numbers of verminous foxes 'killed for sport', the halal carnage of animals is a national disgrace.

Surely, almost 100% of Packham's campaigning should be redirected to things that actually matter.

Do you, like me, suspect that many anti-hunt folks are simply 'anti-toff?'

Do you, like me, suspect that many anti-hunt folks are not prepared to be defined as 'anti-Islam?'

I do hope that nobody bandies around terms such as 'double standards'.

Aw, Bless!

Gary Lineker admits he regrets coming out as Remainer - 'Maybe I shouldn't have'.

BREXIT hating Gary Lineker admitted he might have made a mistake in coming out as a remainer.

Blogger: Lineker did not 'come out as a remainer' at all. He misused his TV fame to proselytise, pour scorn on those of different opinions and act in a thoroughly undignified and unseemly manner!