The One Thing Needful

You will seek Me and find Me when you seek Me with all your heart.-- Jeremiah 29

The amazing thing is that God designed us to be able to communicate with Him. We blew it but He sent us the Messiah Jesus to restore what we lost and a lot more besides.

What is man that Thou art mindful of him? -- Somewhere in psalms
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Thou hast made us for Thyself alone and our hearts are restless until we rest in Thee. Augustine ,br>
The chief end of man is to glorrify God and enjoy Him forever. -- Westminster Shorter Catechism ,br>
At Thy right hand are pleasures for evermore. -- Psalm 16:11

As the deer panteth after the water brooks, so longs my soul after Thee.

He that cometh to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him -- Hebrews 11:7


I am nothing, I have nothing, I desire nothing but Jesus Christ." This was the mantra as it were of fourteenth century Roman Catholic mystic Walter Hilton, and I like the brevity of this way of stating the essential mental set that takes us to the presence of God. It affirms both the command to deny ourselves and take up our cross and poverty of spirit. Hilton unfortunately had too many Romanisms to make him a trustworthy teacher but I nevertheless like this brief formula of his.

Finally a nod to John of the Cross' poem about the Dark Night of the soul. It's a treatise on the mystical path to God and it has nothing whatever to do with suffering which is how too many people take it. If there is any suffering at all involved in it, he probably disucseusses it in his commentary on his poem called "The Aescent of Mount Carmel" but just to read the poem itself certainly implies no suffering: "on a dark night," it starts out, "kindles in love with yearnings," -- does that sound l9ike suffering? No, the "dark night' he is talking about is the quieting of the senses that connect us to this physical world, and the clamorings of the self flife. When these are quieted, put under the blanket of dark night as it were, then the spirit can be freed to come into the presence of gOD.

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To be dead to myself and alive in Thee, empty of myself and full of Thee is my prayer. And I know I can't do this, I'm way too full of myself but hope that You might do it for me. Amen

Rape Victim and Abortion Continued Part 3

Maybe I got it said well enough but I keep thinking I didn't, it 't quite clear so here's another go at it. The problem with the supposed warm-hearted compassion to the woman who got pregnant from a rape is that it shows the basic cold-heartedness of the pro-choice position against the unborn baby. Tehy don't skip a b3eat when they say it's a clear case for an abortion, don't hesitate for a moment over the fact that they are talking about killing a human being. Even if they are willing to consider that moral questions kick in at some stage of a pregnancy there's no sense that they ever really see it as a human beintg. maybe a potential human being but in the rather distant sense that it really isn't a human being yet.

So they get all morally outraged at the suggestion that she should not have an abortion because in their mindset three isn't really an argument on the other side at all, it's just a cold-hearte person who wants to make the raped woman miserable for some unfathomable reason. As wih most positions on the left it's all about the person, it' s always an ad hominem, it's not about arguments and reasons, you're just a good or a bad person and if you suggest that even in the case of rape an abortionisnt' warranted that's just you being a bad person because in their mindset the baby isn't a human being so there isn't any argument. . And I don't think they are even conscdious of the fact that this is their mindset.

There are rare situations where the baby must be sacrifced for the health of the mother and that could apply in the case of a rape that threatens her mental health, but for the most part these are all just made-up situations. Pro-choicers often talk about the unborn child as if it were nothing more than an alien growth in the woman, a parasite or the like. This is the attitude betrayed but the way abortion is considered to be the only reaosnable response to pregnancy caused by a rape. That the baby is a separate independent individual is not part of the mindset. If it were it would be possible to consider it as a being apart from the rapist. But they connect it to the rapist as if it were this aliena extension of him ande that's the end of it. Getting ride of it is getting rided of the painfujl memory of the rape. And I don't doubt that in some cases that's true, but I also know that no0t all cases are the same and that some women are capable orf regarding the child as a person in its own right.

Well, I may still not yave said quite what I meant but I think it's a little clearer.

So Heavenly Minded No Earthyly Good?

That's what we often hear when we spend more time seeking God as I've been doing for the last month and more. We take our attention off the disasters of the day in this world in order to lift our eyes to God and minimize worldly input and some think that's abandoning our calling to be salt and light.

Well, I don't thiknk so, I think the opposite. Besides my own personal need to renew my spiritual life I was motivated by knowing that the usual means being employed in the churches to deal with the current destructions of our lives by the lies we hear every day and the evil methods being used to deal with the pandemic and the like. For decades now things get worse instead of better. You'd have thought Nine Eleven would have empowered us against Islam but instead Islam has only grown in power against us. The same thing is happ-ening now as we are unable to deal with any of the lawlessness and destruction of daily life that has been happening to us. I do thiknk this is God's judgment against us and that is a major reason we have no power against it bbut at the same time there is no excuse for the weakness in the churches that really ought to be obvious but apparently isn't.

You can't fight these things in the flesh but that's what the Church is doing. We have no spiritual power. Christian leaders are doing a good job of identifying the problems but nobody in the Church is working on anything but a wordly and fleshnly leve. We do not have the power of God in much of anything we do. I think that is obvious but I'm not sure most others think so. As Tozer pointed out in his Pursuit of God the CDhurch is too content to operate without much input from God, assuming His input perhaps although there isn't a sign that it is actually with us.

Instead of praying for revival as some do, in their perfunctory prayer times, maybe as much as twenty minutes or so, we need Christians who devote hours to seeking God in Bible reading and prayer for His presence and guidance in our own lives and in the churches. I think if many did that the glib ton we so often hear in even the best discussions of the problems in this world and everything else would soon evaporate and we might actually start to see some power come down from heaven to lead us against the eviols of our time.


Deny yourselve, take up your cross and follow Me" said Jesus. Why do I have the impression there's hardly anyone in the churches who is even trying to do this? yle S Where is the Esther Church who comes to God for help in such a time as this? He's holding out His sceptre to us but we aren't there to receive it. I seem to see it lying in the dust at our feet. We have to search for Him with all our hearts He tells us, bur how many do much more than pray a little here and there for specific probglems and don't seek Him for His own sake.
You will seek Me and find Me when you seek Me with all your heart" He says in Jeremiah 29.

LATER: Just found this exhortation to prayer by J.C.Ryle.

More of God Than the Usual Preaching Brings

At my age I don't have much time less to recover what seem to me to be many lost years of the Christian life, but I'm very grateful to God that whatever time I have left He's allowed me to find the focus I most need. Yes it comes from the "mysticss" and I have to try not to be bitter that the Protestant churches discourage this trend among God's people. They should be encouraging and developing it in a Protestant context. most of the mystics are roman Catholics though not all, and the Romanist errors do rear their ugly heads here and there in the writings of these lovers of God. But at the same time God seems to work to preserve them from their worst dangers, steer them around them, give them reasons to avoid them in some cases.

A W Tozer knew the importance of the mystical traditions but few others do.His books "The Pursuit of GBod" and "The Christian Book of Mystical Verse" probably hold the most of his emphasis. I'd also recommend any teacher who knows that the Song of Solomon is a spiritual work that has nothing to do with earthly love but the love between God and Hisw Church. If they hold that view they aren't going to mislead their listeners as much as the others do. Spurgeon is one.

These passionate lovers of God make the attitude and tone of most of today's Protestant preachers sound tinny and false, worldly and fleshly, which they probably are. Their lack of protracted prayer and seeking God is noticeable. THEIR CONGREGATIONS SOMETIMES ACT LIKE FANS AT A FOOTBALL GAME INSTEAD OF SPIRITUAL FOLLOWERS OF cHRIST. tHEIR PERFUNCTORY PRYERS IN THE NAME OF jESUS, AND GIVINGSX ALL THE GLORY TO GOD JUST SOUND FALSE IN THE LIGHT OF THE GENUINE DEEP GIVING OF GLORY TO gOD SO INTENSELY FELT BY THESE "MYSTICS>" aND ALA MYSTIC IN THIS SENSE REALLY IS IS SOMEONE WHOSED LOVE OF gOD LEADS HIM OR HERE INTO LONG PERIODS OF SEEKING hIM IN PRAYER AND WORSHIP aLTHOUGH i THINK PEOPLE WITH SUCH A BENT ARE LIKEL Although I think often poeople with some bent toward a genuine closeness to God are attracted to the charismatic movement these days, that is a sad misdirection of their desires, a counterfeit that can only seduce them into a deeper carnality rather than the spiritual life they eek.

Here is Brother Lawrence, a lovely old simple "mystic" I just redisocovered in audio bform online.

Rape Victim Continued

The idea that it is cold-hearted to oppopse abortion in the case of rape is just part of the prevailing cultural mindset, and that mindset comes out of what is in itself a cold-blooded mentality built on the theory of evolution. If we are nothing but the product of millions of years of mindless evolution oif physical matter then any softhearted feelings we may have are just adaptations to further our survival or wellbeing. There is no objective morality and no objective basis for either supporting or opposing abortion, it's all a subjective matter to be decided ultimately in terms of its utility for the furtherance of the human race. Actually you'd think the murder of millions of our future generations would show that it has no evolutionary utility at all but they'll figure out how it must have, since of course it must have. Oh well no, I suppose sometimes it goes wrong and we could go extinct? Even aftger all these millions of years of getting to our current complex condition?

Anyway how the rape victim feels about the pregnancy that ensued is not all that predictable as they seem to think it must be. Women are designed -- oh dear, yes desligned -- to love babies. It's this pernicious culture that makes us all into mindless products of physical animal evolution that renders such feelings arbitrary. And we can be easily enough trained out of them. As we are easily enough persuaded that the fetus is not a human being.

the Nazis committed their muders on the basis of eugenic principles that defined the dispensable people as genetically inferior. That came out of evolutionary theory just as Margaret Sanger's eugenics did, but we don't like to think that these days.

Rape Victim and Abortion

You are considered to be cold and unfeeling if you would oppose abortion even for the victim of rape. It is assmed that such a pregnancy would only be a horrible experience for the girl, or woman. Why? Why couldn't she see it as a victim like herself? Why couldn't she sympathize with it for that reason, even bond with it for that reason? Isn't that as likely a possibility as that she'd feel nothing but repugnance at being so unfairly imposed upon? Th4e real cold-blooded attitude is the prevailikng one in today's culture, that dehumanizes the baby in the womb. If you see it as an innocent human being you may have an entirely different set of feelings toward it. I could write a long post about this but my computer only tolerates a small post these days.

The Nation Can't be Saved by Political Means

Recently I heard Sean Hannity say how simple it looks to him what we need to do to save the nation, and he went on to list the conservative policies he believes would do it. I agree, those policie4s would save the nation if they were vigorously put into practice by a majority of elected oficials. Mark Levin is another conservative who knows what would save the country. And there are others of course. Get the right people into office who will put the right policies into effect and that will do it. Quite right.

But the signs of the times are clear. It isn't happening, it isn't going to happen, and those who are so sure of what needs to happen and are right about what needs to happen don't seem to have a clue why it isn't going to happen.

It isn't going to happen because the nation is under god's judmgnet and all the policies that are now being denacted are only deepening the judgment against us. The policies alone won't save us, we are under judgment because we are in violation o God's Law. Only rolling back the violations would give us the foundations for saving the country and the forces working against that are loud and aggressive and the foces who would oppose them are weak and confused. The Left is violently in favor of abortion, of murdering our next generation of citizens in the womb, they are calling it a right, fulfilling the description in Isaiah of those who put evil for good and good for evil. And that's just one of the violations that need to be rolled back.

So the people who need to g3et into office where they might do some good aren't going to get into office or if they do they aren't going to be able to do what needs to be done to rol back god's judgment if they even had the foresight to realize that is what does need to be done which sadly isn't likely to be the case.

A fasting and praying Church is the only hope and that isn't happening either. g