Politeness more important than Christ, right?

Doesn't a Christian know that a nonChristian does not "rest in peace" after death? Is it just a forgiveable convention to use that expression when someone dies? I think it's indicative of a compromised Christian understanding and it contributes to a blurring of the boundaries which we should be keeping sharp. Are we of this world or not? How far should one take politeness when eternity is at stake? Is it a service to anyone to perpetuate the fiction that you can reject Christ and still have a happy eternity?

Singer Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary fame just died. Recently actor Patrick Swayze died. A while back actress Farrah Fawcett died. And of course Michael Jackson. Where are they now? Was any of them Christian? No. Then they are not resting in peace.

Oh Lord Revive Us

Yearning for revival, looking for inspiration at Sermon Audio. Looking specifically for those I know to be Spirit-filled men, I'm tired of hearing good Biblical sermons preached without the anointing of the Spirit. It's terribly depressing. I know Tozer is Spirit-filled, sometimes I feel the Spirit in his preaching, which I suppose depends on how close I've been to the Lord myself.

I'm disgusted with myself really, I'm such a soggy half-dead Christian. The church should be something supernatural and powerful in this world, individual Christians should have supernatural power, rivers of living water pouring from us to bring life to the dead world around us. Nothing could be more obvious than that we don't.

I found this sermon by Tozer on being born again, Begotten Again Unto a Living Hope - I Peter, Part 3 and it was inspiring. I wish there were dozens more on that theme to listen to from him.

He made a very interesting statement in this sermon. He said that the reason we talk so much about revival is that Christians aren't initially born of the Spirit as we should be, and if we were the church WOULD be that powerful agent in the world we hope revival will make it.

Please pray for me, I want to spend WAY more time seeking the Lord than I do, WAY more.

Here's an example of the attitude I was writing about in my last post. This writer is chiding us for not remembering 9/11 and doing what's necessary to prevent it from happening again.

We've forgotten the shock and the patriotic fury Americans felt on that bright September morning eight years ago. We've forgotten our identification with fellow citizens leaping from doomed skyscrapers. We've forgotten the courage of airline passengers who would not surrender to terror.

We've forgotten the men and women who burned to death or suffocated in the Pentagon. We've forgotten our promises, our vows, our commitments.

We've forgotten what we owe our dead and what we owe our children. We've even forgotten who attacked us.

We have betrayed the memory of our dead. In doing so, we betrayed ourselves and our country. Our troops continue to fight -- when they're allowed to do so -- but our politicians have surrendered.

Are we willing to let the terrorists win?

Well, really, all this is true. It's really quite amazing to consider just how far we have gone toward capitulating to this enemy that attacked us, just how lacking in will and determination we've been in the face of such a threat, and how strange it is that Islam is growing in popularity since 9/11.

This very trend ought to be a clue to us that we're under God's judgment. This very weakness in the face of an enemy is His judgment. This erosion of our freedoms and our powers since 9/11 is God's judgment.

Is it up to us in the flesh to let the terrorists win or not? What can mere flesh do if God is against us?

No, we need the power of God if we are to win the war against terrorism and first we need to recognize we don't have the power of God. God has been abandoning America, allowing enemies internal and external to take over against us.

This couldn't be happening if the churches were in God's will. We have to recognize that we aren't in God's will, that God has a complaint against us, seek understanding and repentance and His guidance and power if we want to help America. America needs revival, repentance not patriotism, meek followers of God not warriors in the flesh. We don't need macho chestbeating, we need humbling and brokenness and submission to God.

Repentance is what we need to keep it from happening again

In remembrance of 9/11 I put a little American flag in my window today. But more than sadness about the day I feel a forboding, because it is still denied that it was God's judgment against the nation. I knew it would be denied of course, but that is the saddest thing about it, that the nation will not repent, which is the only thing that could prevent further acts of judgment.

I've run across versions of this sentiment quite a bit today:

I still remember the day with a heavy heart, and I pray that as a nation we will do whatever it takes to prevent something like this from happening again.

Well, "whatever it takes" is repentance, and for the nation itself to repent not every single citizen has to engage in it, but it should be an observance called by the leader of the nation. Past Presidents have done this on behalf of the nation in times of danger, before sending our troops to war for instance. A day of fasting for our sins as a nation, acknowledging them to Him, with prayer for forgiveness and protection.

Perhaps if enough of the churches had such an observance this would go a long way toward protecting the nation in lieu of a Presidential call, but I haven't heard of this going on in any of the churches.

But people remember it mostly with sadness for the suffering endured that day, and with a sense of righteous indignation, with no acknowledgment that it came from God and was deserved. The enemy is thought of as merely human, as if God could not have restrained them. The solutions thought of are merely human: vigilance, preparedness. Also even calls to pray for the dead, which of course is of no use. But people who don't know God don't know what to do; unfortunately many who do know God also don't, that's the biggest tragedy.

In many of the stories that came out of 9/11 God is shown to have clearly intervened: individuals apparently miraculously helped to safety, kept from going to work that day and so on. God intervened in the downing of the plane in Pennsylvania that was aimed for the White House. God has mercy in the midst of judgment.

But overall His hand of judgment has been more and more upon the nation since 9/11. The increase in the presence and status of Islam in this nation is truly astonishing considering that it was Islamic militants who attacked us on 9/11. That's God's judgment right there. We now have a Marxist in the White House who courts Islam. That's God's judgment. The White House didn't need to be physically destroyed; it's being spiritually destroyed.

We've abandoned our Christian roots. I don't care how much people say this isn't a Christian nation or never was, there is a way that is true but a much much bigger way it is not true. The Christian influence in the institutions of the government at the beginning was enormous. Many of the few dozen founders were genuinely Christian. Others who were Deists were serious Deists, serious Unitarians, and they included church services even as part of a day of government business. It shouldn't be so glibly said we're not a Christian nation with that in our background, but it also shouldn't be so glibly said that we are, because Deism/Unitarianism is not Christianity, and apostasy in our leaders would necessarily have contributed to the seeds of our ultimate judgment.

We are no longer Christian even in the sense they used to be, so we probably can't have a day of repentance on that assumption any more. Obama wouldn't recognize the idea anyway, or he'd put a Marxist twist on it and any fast he'd call I'm afraid I would not be able to support.

But a genuine fast and repentance before God is the only thing that would save the nation. Except Christians separately or whole churches uniting in repentance and prayer on behalf of the nation.

Conspiratorial cabal or not, America is in trouble

Here's a discussion of what the blogger calls a conspiracy theory, but it's not what I mean when I use the term. He calls it The Great Conspiracy but he's simply spelling out some anti-constitutional provisions that are now in place that could threaten American freedoms, and in fact threaten us all bodily, in the near future.

What I mean by conspiracy thinking is wild imaginations that suppose there is an all-powerful human cabal behind all such goings-on, without being able to muster facts in any convincing way to prove it.*

To my mind a governing body that thinks Marxism is a good idea is already as much of a danger to the world as any plotted conspiracy by high-level hidden movers and shakers, and our current administration is Marxist and Fascist both. Who needs the Illuminati?

============================================
*This is the point -- I'm hardly incapable of believing in conspiracies but the fact is that the evidence offered is really NOT convincing. They assume too much, they sling around unsupported accusations. The worst write complete word salad in which it's obvious they think they've been giving evidence but it just isn't there. Springmeier doesn't prove anything, he simply asserts it. Schnoebelen writes novelistically which makes it sound like fiction to begin with and detracts from any truth there may be in his reports. I don't know what to make of all this. We've got conspiracies galore these days, explaining the economic disaster, anticipating a murderous outbreak of flu, well, really the vaccinations against the flu, about well-known American public figures plotting against the well-being and even the lives of Americans, about UFOs and whatnot. There's actually better evidence that there is a government conspiracy to hide knowledge of UFOs from the public (they think they're ETs of course; I know they're demons) than there is for the rest of it. It's not in principle beyond the pale, but there is simply no convincing evidence.

How Obama = Hitler

Here's a discussion of what makes Obama's administration like Hitler's. (I can't seem to select out the particular post. It's the one for August 29th).

Mark Dice's approach to the Illuminati

I took a look at Mark Dice's book about the Illuminati at Amazon where you can read a few pages of it. He does a good job of introducing the material, showing he understands where the reader is at, as Springmeier does not, but then he begins his introduction to his argument by saying that people wonder how 9/11 could have happened, or how an economic collapse could happen and so on and so forth.

Well, I don't wonder. I figure it's just the usual, human sin, and I also know these things are God's judgment on the nation, and Dice claims to be a Christian so he should know that too. But he thinks there's something strange enough about such events that we need to look behind the scenes to HUMAN manipulators. I think this is faulty reasoning. I see no need to postulate intentional manipulation of events at all. People being people is enough to explain events. Fallen humanity being greedy or negligent or self-absorbed or vindictive on a small scale can accumulate to large disasters. Satan's work in contributing to such human failings to bring about his own plans is a reasonable assumption too, but Satan doesn't need conscious accomplices in his plots. And the overarching explanation that God is in charge of it all and permits such things as judgment pulls it all together.

Satan can pull off amazing things people alone can't, if God wills it, and if God wills it amazing exactness can be seen in some events (the symbolism involved in the 9/11 targets is fascinating to think about), but human beings just don't have the power or precision of planning that is attributed to them in these conspiracy ideas. The Pentagon was only slightly damaged, the White House was missed altogether as the passengers of the plane defeated the hijackers. Human beings are an imperfect lot. The plans of fallen men as often go astray as hit their target. The TRUE conspirators of 9/11 have been identified as far as I'm concerned.

So I feel no need for a conspiracy theory to explain terrible events. Apparently some people do feel such a need. I'm very impatient with all the conspiracy theories about 9/11 myself. I don't expect our intelligence to be as perfect as apparently some people do. I can easily accept that a Muslim plot to attack our institutions got past our radar, because God has lifted His protection of the nation to that extent and no other explanation is necessary. None of the scenarios I've seen cooked up "prove" that human agents on our side of the WTC plotted this attack. I think it's all ridiculous.

Do I need to know anything more than that God is judging the nation? I really don't think so.

Which isn't to insist that conspiracies couldn't possibly exist. The Muslim conspiracy existed after all. Why isn't that one sufficient? Why must there be a HIDDEN conspiracy? I really don't get it. Any that do exist should be exposed and prosecuted. But the usual conspiracy theories are simply not believable.

So to my mind Mark Dice is off to a bad start in even making this claim that events make no sense without a human plot to explain them, or another human plot than the one we know about. That's already conspiracy-thinking. According to the introduction to his book, he's going to focus a lot on 9/11 and I've got to say I've heard enough silly speculation about that to last me six lifetimes so I have no interest whatever in reading his book.

But I would really really like to see someone write a book that would examine all the claims truly objectively some time and really show the part that human beings played.