Joshua 24 In Picture Form

Joshua 24- a pertinent passage of blessing and charge to the Israelites upon the passing of Joshua

The Necessity of the Atonement

In no case, by no means can sin be pardoned without atonement. It is clear, then, that there is no hope for me out of Christ; for there is no other blood-shedding which is worth a thought as an atonement for sin.

Am I, then, believing in him?
Is the blood of his atonement truly applied to my soul?

All men are on a level as to their need of him. If we be never so moral, generous, amiable, or patriotic, the rule will not be altered to make an exception for us. Sin will yield to nothing less potent than the blood of him whom God hath set forth as a propitiation. What a blessing that there is the one way of pardon! Why should we seek another?

On how to rehearse for death and how to diminish fear

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On how to rehearse for death and how to diminish fear.

17 June 1963

Pain is terrible, but surely you need not have fear as well? Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer? It means stripping off that body which is tormenting you: like taking off a hair- shirt or getting out of a dungeon. What is there to be afraid of? You have long attempted (and none of us does more) a Christian life. Your sins are confessed and absolved. Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

Remember, though we struggle against things because we are afraid of them, it is often the other way round—we get afraid because we struggle. Are you struggling, resisting? Don’t you think Our Lord says to you ‘Peace, child, peace. Relax. Let go. Underneath are the everlasting arms. Let go, I will catch you. Do you trust me so little?’

That Which Needs Changing

If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God. But, of course, if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you cannot talk like that. You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will. Confronted with a cancer or a slum the Pantheist can say, ‘If you could only see it from the divine point of view, you would realise that this also is God.’ The Christian replies, ‘Don’t talk damned nonsense.’ For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world—that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God ‘made up out of His head’ as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again.

From Mere Christianity
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis

Work While You Wait

Great concept of delayed gratification.

We tell them all the time, you’ve got to work while you wait. Most people, in their personal life, they stop working until the door opens, and then they want to work again now that the door is open. But in this profession you’ve got to work while you wait.”

http://footballscoop.com/news/coach-explains-many-kids-quit-sports-today-youve-got-work-wait/

Gun Problem or Something Else?

The answer to the so called gun problem ……..IT IS Who Has the Guns


This may explain why there has never been an attempt on Obama. 

In 1865 a Democrat shot and killed Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States. 

In 1881 a left wing radical Democrat shot James Garfield, President of the United States, who later died from the wound. 

In 1963 a radical left wing socialist shot and killed John F. Kennedy, President of the United States. 

In 1975 a left wing radical Democrat fired shots at Gerald Ford, President of the United States. 

In 1983 a registered Democrat shot and wounded Ronald Reagan, President of the United States. 

In 1984 James Hubert, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 22 people in a McDonalds restaurant. 

In 1986 Patrick Sherrill, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 15 people in an Oklahoma post office.

In 1990 James Pough, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 10 people at a GMAC office. 

In 1991 George Hennard, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 23 people in a Luby's cafeteria in Killeen, TX. 

In 1995 James Daniel Simpson, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 5 coworkers in a Texas laboratory. 

In 1999 Larry Asbrook, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 8 people at a church service. 

In 2001 a left wing radical Democrat fired shots at the White House in a failed attempt to kill George W. Bush, President of the US. 

In 2003 Douglas Williams, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 7 people at a Lockheed Martin plant. 

In 2007 a registered Democrat named Seung Hui Cho, shot and killed 32 people in Virginia Tech. 

In 2010 a mentally ill registered Democrat named Jared Lee Loughner, shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed 6 others. 

In 2011 a registered Democrat named James Holmes, went into a movie theater and shot and killed 12 people. 

In 2012 Andrew Engeldinger, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 7 people in Minneapolis. 

In 2013 a registered Democrat named Adam Lanza, shot and killed 26 people in a school in Newtown, CT. 

As recently as Sept 2013, an angry Democrat shot 12 at a Navy ship yard.

Clearly, there is a problem with Democrats and guns. 

Not one NRA member, Tea Party member, or Republican conservative was involved in any of these shootings and murders. 

SOLUTION: 
It should be illegal for Democrats to own guns. Then If the communist liberal gun grabbers really wanted to do something about public safety as the say then all they would have to do is disarm all the illegal immigrant Hispanic gangs and all the black gangs in the big cities. This would fix 90% of the so called gun violence problem, instead of piling more restrictive gun laws on the law abiding citizen that are armed because of the aforementioned THUGS.

CS Lewis writes magnificently on Death

On death

On the one hand Death is the triumph of Satan, the punishment of the Fall, and the last enemy. Christ shed tears at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood in Gethsemane: the Life of Lives that was in Him detested this penal obscenity not less than we do, but more. On the other hand, only he who loses his life will save it. 

We are baptized into the death of Christ, and it is the remedy for the Fall. Death is, in fact, what some modern people call “ambivalent.” It is Satan’s great weapon and also God’s great weapon: it is holy and unholy; our supreme disgrace and our only hope; the thing Christ came to conquer and the means by which He conquered.

Satan produced human Death. But when God created Man He gave him such a constitution that, if the highest part of it rebelled against Himself, it would be bound to lose control over the lower parts: i.e., in the long run to suffer Death. This provision may be regarded equally as a punitive sentence (“In the day ye eat of that fruit ye shall die”), as a mercy, and as a safety device. 

It is punishment because Death—that Death of which Martha says to Christ, “But . . . Sir . . . it’ll smell”—is horror and ignominy. (“I am not so much afraid of death as ashamed of it,” said Sir Thomas Browne.) It is mercy because by willing and humble surrender to it Man undoes his act of rebellion and makes even this depraved and monstrous mode of Death an instance of that higher and mystical Death which is eternally good and a necessary ingredient in the highest life. “The readiness is all”—not, of course, the merely heroic readiness but that of humility and self-renunciation. 

Our enemy, so welcomed, becomes our servant: bodily Death, the monster, becomes blessed spiritual Death to self, if the spirit so wills—or rather if it allows the Spirit of the willingly dying God so to will in it. 

It is a safety device because, once Man has fallen, natural immortality would be the one utterly hopeless destiny for him. Aided to the surrender that he must make by no external necessity of Death, free (if you call it freedom) to rivet faster and faster about himself through unending centuries the chains of his own pride, lust, and of the nightmare civilizations which these build up in ever-increasing power and complication, he would progress from being merely a fallen man to being a fiend, possibly beyond all modes of redemption. 

This danger was averted. 

The sentence that those who ate of the forbidden fruit would be driven away from the Tree of Life was implicit in the composite nature with which Man was created. But to convert this penal death into the means of eternal life—to add to its negative and preventive function a positive and saving function—it was further necessary that death should be accepted. 

Humanity must embrace death freely, submit to it with total humility, drink it to the dregs, and so convert it into that mystical death which is the secret of life. But only a Man who did not need to have been a Man at all unless He had chosen, only one who served in our sad regiment as a volunteer, yet also one who was perfectly a Man, could perform this perfect dying; and thus (which way you put it is unimportant) either defeat Death or redeem it. He tasted death on behalf of all others. He is the representative “Die-er” of the universe: and for that very reason the Resurrection and the Life. 

Or conversely, because He truly lives, He truly dies, for that is the very pattern of reality. Because the higher can descend into the lower He who from all eternity has been incessantly plunging Himself in the blessed death of self-surrender to the Father can also most fully descend into the horrible and (for us) involuntary death of the body. 

Because Vicariousness is the very idiom of the reality He has created, His death can become ours. The whole Miracle, far from denying what we already know of reality, writes the comment which makes that crabbed text plain: or rather, proves itself to be the text on which Nature was only the commentary. In science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.