Economic Liberty

From the desk of columnist Rebecca Hagelin:

“Today, Americans are stifled by big government, smothered by over-regulation, and taxed to death. Our Founding Fathers who risked everything they had — their fortunes, their families, their lives — to secure freedom for us would not recognize our current economic reality as anything even close to the economic liberty they worked so hard to secure. Yes, we are endowed by our Creator with the right to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. But the government formed to protect those rights now makes it awfully hard for Americans to see economic liberty anywhere and nearly impossible to pursue financial security and the happiness that comes with it. It’s time to reclaim a bit of that old time religion. It’s time to secure economic liberty by cutting taxes, reducing regulations and shrinking the size of government. We’ve got to free individuals to use our God-given talents and imaginations to build a better life for ourselves and our children or we will eventually lose our liberty altogether.”

Read more here. . . .

The Church’s Undoing

In Above All Earthly Powers: Christ in a Postmodern World, David Wells writes:

“…[I]t is certainly the case that the Word of God, read or preached, has the power to enter the innermost crevices of a person’s being, to shine light in unwanted places, to explode the myths and deceits by which fallen life sustains itself, and to bring that person face to face with the eternal God. It is this biblical Word which God uses to bring repentance, to excite faith, to give new life, to sustain that life once given, to correct, nurture, and guide the Church (Jer. 23:29; II Tim. 3:16; Heb. 4:12; Jas. 1:18). The biblical Word is self-authenticating under the power of the Holy Spirit. This Word of God is the means by which God accomplishes his saving work in his people, and this is a work that no evangelist and no preacher can do. This is why the dearth of serious, sustained, biblical preaching in the Church today is a serious matter. When the Church loses the Word of God, it loses the very means by which God does his work. In its absence, therefore, a script is being written, however unwittingly, for the Church’s undoing, not in one cataclysmic moment, but in a slow, inexorable slide made up of piece by tiny piece of daily dereliction.”

James Madison On Charity

Quoting James Madison:

“Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.”

Will You Continue To Be Lost?

From a sermon by Robert G. Lee (1886-1978):

How sad it is for any man to know astronomy and not know Jesus, its Bright and Morning Star! —to know history and not know Jesus who is crowned by the centuries with the glory of all history—to know Botany and not know Jesus, the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley whose fragrance has perfumed the stifling atmosphere of continents —to have knowledge of many things and have no knowledge of Jesus who “of God is made unto us wisdom and redemption’ (I Cor. 1:30)! How tragic it is for people to be great musicians and know not Jesus whose name is ceaseless music at the throne of God and whose name sounds down the corridors of the centuries like the music of all choirs, visible and invisible, poured forth in one anthem. How woefully sad it is to know the ages of rocks and know not and have not refuge in Him who is the Rock of Ages for sinners deft! How sad for men and women to have their names written on scrolls of fame and not written in the Lamb’s Book of Life!

How tragic it is in time and eternity for folks to utilize chemicals that cleanse and have not the cleansing from all unrighteousness that comes from the blood drawn From Immanuel’s veins. How sad for any man to know law and not know Christ who is “the end of the law for righteousness to every-one that believeth” (Roman 10:4). How awful for a man to be a judge and hear the pleas of others and have no ears for God who commandeth all men to repent. . . .

What means that to you? You must admit that you are a sinner, lost and doomed and damned, without Christ as, your personal Savior by faith. Like Pharaoh, you must say, “I have sinned.” Like Achan, like David, like Baalam, like Micah, like Judas who betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, you must say, “I have sinned.” But you must be as the publican who, “standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes to heaven but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner” (Luke 18:13). And of the publican, Jesus said: “I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other” (Luke 18:14).

But whether you admit it or not, God admits and declares that you are a sinner under .the yoke of the Devil. He admits it by every thorn that punctured the brow of Jesus, by every ragged mark of the scourge upon His back, by His face which was beaten into a pulp, by the jagged nail holes in His hands and feet, by the hole in His side where the savage Roman spear drank its precious libation of His sinless blood, by the awful fact that on the Cross God ordered sin, your sins and mine, to execution in the body of His holy Son and dealt with Him as He must deal with sin — in severe and unrelenting judgment. . . .

Only by faith in Christ who is your earliest, latest, and only refuge— who is the only one who can quell your remorse, end your bankruptcy, blot out the accusing and incriminating record, and be to you in life like .the spring sun putting the fogs of winter to shame . . . [W]ill you continue to be lost? Will you refuse the medicine that cures your disease? Will you scorn the refuge provided? Will you scoff at the diagnosis and the certain prescription of the Great Physician? God forbid that you should be so foolish! (Sermon: “God’s Cure For the World’s Worst Disease”)