God has no grandchildren
Some people are born into legacies of Christ’s grace and love, and it really is a blessing. I’ve seen it. I spent last year’s Christmas with a friend I met in Seattle and being able to witness a family so deeply rooted in God is clearly visible via the family’s interactions with each other. The Spirit, believe it or not, is so alive. I felt it, as I was lovingly welcomed into my friend’s family for the night.
What made this “work” was every family member’s own personal relationship with Christ merging together to create this mega-relationship—a body of Christ, per say, a term most of us would be familiar with. Nothing was lacking, because everyone was maintaining their own faiths while simultaneously nourishing each other’s.
God has no grandchildren. Just because we are Abraham’s children it does not give us privilege until we personally accept Christ ourselves. Someone at small group brought this up and it was so fascinating because it was so true; it hit me like a train. God only has children—a direct connection, not because we were born into the right family. It’s a choice to accept God’s invitation to His family, and once accepted, we are His child once and for all.
10:07 pm |
February 7 2013
| 4 notes
ilovecharts:
Friedman’s Hierarchy of Haters
From The Guardian:
It all started when Beard appeared as a panellist on the BBC1 programme, filmed in Lincoln. In response to a question about whether the UK could cope with more immigration, she cited a recent report claiming that immigration had actually brought some benefits to the local area. A perfectly reasonable thing to say, or so you might have thought.
But the next day, commenters on the now closed Don’t Start Me Off website, which encouraged anonymous posters to vent their anger on targets chosen by the administrator, launched a vicious and sustained attack on Beard. The internet trolls posted dozens of horrifying sexual taunts, in language too offensive to reprint. The level of the abuse was so shocking that even those accustomed to the cut-and-thrust of online debate were appalled.
In one of the milder examples, Beard was called “a vile, spiteful excuse for a woman, who eats too much cabbage and has cheese straws for teeth”. Beard’s features were even superimposed on an image of female genitalia.
5:30 pm |
February 6 2013
| 916 notes
randeecate:
Some packaging looks similar, but doesn’t taste the same.
(Source: nine-two-nine)
9:28 pm |
January 28 2013
| 13 notes
Gungor, “Crags and Clay”
It’s a season of breaking.
Strip out false confidence, shed away unsteady foundations, remove the pernicious remains of temporary satisfactions. Eliminate all things fruitless and feckless of which I once thought to be valuable and essential in life.
It’s going to hurt, but take it away. Take away all of it and fill me anew.
9:45 pm |
January 23 2013
| 3 notes
Dr. King’s sermon, “But If Not” (November 1967)
[Sermon is based on passage Daniel 3:16-18—listen to the entire sermon here]
I want to say to you this morning, my friends, that somewhere along the way you should discover something that’s so dear, so precious to you, that is so eternally worthful, that you will never give it up. You ought to discover some principle, you ought to have some great faith that grips you so much that you will never give it up. Somehow you go on and say “I know that the God that I worship is able to deliver me, but if not, I’m going on anyhow, I’m going to stand up for it anyway.”
What does this mean? It means, in the final analysis, you do right not to avoid hell. If you’re doing right merely to keep from going to something that traditional theology has called hell then you aren’t doing right. If you do right merely to go to a condition that theologians have called heaven, you aren’t doing right. If you are doing right to avoid pain and to achieve happiness and pleasure then you aren’t doing right. Ultimately you must do right because it’s right to do right. And you got to say “But if not.” You must love ultimately because it’s lovely to love. You must be just because it’s right to be just. You must be honest because it’s right to be honest. This is what this text is saying more than anything else.
And finally, you must do it because it has gripped you so much that you are willing to die for it if necessary. And I say to you this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and so precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live. You may be 38 years old as I happen to be, and one day some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause—and you refuse to do it because you are afraid; you refuse to do it because you want to live longer; you’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you’re afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity or you’re afraid that somebody will stab you or shoot at you or bomb your house, and so you refuse to take the stand. Well you may go on and live until you are 90, but you’re just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90! And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. You died when you refused to stand up for right, you died when you refused to stand up for truth, you died when you refused to stand up for justice.
9:57 am |
January 21 2013
| 4 notes
