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Our lives in a dozen frames

9/28/2016

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Tracked down to a site called www.demotivation.us, this terrific cartoon recently appeared in my inbox. Wish I knew the artist, because he or she gets it in a way that few Americans do.
 
The truth is, many of us living in Row 4 or this cartoon act like we’re still in Row 2, doing all we can to maintain our youthful vigor, looks and attitude. We diet routinely and work out at costly gyms; have our hair dyed and highlighted to banish the gray; invest in expensive face creams and even undergo injections or surgeries to stamp out the wrinkles; shop expansively for clothing that’s flattering and at least a little hip; read all the latest best-sellers on both the fiction and non-fiction sides of the aisle; and keep ourselves constantly busy, ideally with cultural events or cutting-edge entertainment or exotic hobbies to sharpen our conversational repertoire.
 
The trouble is, preoccupied as we are with all this frenetic activity, we fail to think deeply about the future captured so perfectly in this cartoon – especially about that last frame.
 
But Death Comes as the End, as Agatha Christie so famously titled her lone historical whodunit.  And we may be headed towards eternal tragedy if we fail to plan for it by seeking out, and responding to, the truth about eternity.
 
The good news is that, as long as we have breath, it’s not too late to do precisely that. And the resources needed to streamline our search have never been more plentiful or more readily accessible.
 
So if you aren’t sure of your ultimate destiny, why put it off another day? Set aside the best-sellers and Must See TV shows for a few weeks or months and educate yourself about eternity. You will be forever grateful that you took the time to do so. 
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Christ-filled or Christ-free?

9/22/2016

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I’ve been an avid student of death notices since my mother died in May of 2000 – a habit that’s one of just two reasons that we still get the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel twice a week (the other being the hilarious comic strip Get Fuzzy). 

I read these notices for several reasons. Natch, I want to see if anyone I know has died. But I also want to see if there’s any hint about whether each departed soul will be spending a Christ-filled or Christ-free eternity. 

There are no guarantees, of course, especially considering that few of the people featured here have written their own obituaries. In my mother’s case, for example, my oldest sister let me direct its writing by our funeral home rep. Being unsaved, I selected the ubiquitous phrase “born to eternal life” only as a nod to wishful thinking; and it never occurred to me to mention that she had considered herself a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ. I suspect that’s often the case these days, especially with the elderly who no longer have a church home to keep the connection fresh in the minds of unbelieving survivors. 

Still, many obituaries provide some clues about the dead person’s current location. Certainly explicit language about the individual going home to his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is a good sign, as is active membership in a solid Christian church. But of course only the Lord knows an individual’s heart, and whether he or she is His child. 

Which brings me to the other major reason I am such a faithful reader of our local death notices: The only real tragedy in this life is spending the next – which is to say all eternity – separated from the Lord, in what He described as “outer darkness” where “there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 8:12). 

Reading the death notices reminds me of how many people are apparently headed towards this end, because they refused the Lord’s gift of eternal life – a gift requiring only that we repent of what He has said is sin, and trust in Him to have paid our sin debt on the cross. It reminds me to pray for the lost, to ask for the Lord to use today’s sorrow to produce tomorrow’s new believers, and to redouble my personal efforts to reach those who have yet to make Christ their own.
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Deja vu

9/20/2016

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It's easy to become discouraged about what's happening in this country, to mourn the passing of what was once a very special nation rooted in the word of God and the gospel of Jesus Christ. 

It helps to put things into the perspective of what was truly the most blessed nation of all time, ancient Israel. Anyone who has ever read through the Old Testament has no doubt seen the parallels between then and now. Consider just a few:

Then: They burned their sons and daughters as sacrifices to their gods (Deuteronomy 12:31, for instance)

Now: We sacrifice our children to the god of this world, and the god of convenience, in federally funded abortion mills across the land

Then: They worshipped useless idols. As Isaiah said (46:7), "They lift it to their shoulders, they carry it, they set it in its place, and it stands there; it cannot move from its place. If one cries to it, it does not answer or save him from his trouble."
 
Now: Instead of the living God, we worship our own useless idols. Whether that means celebrities or money, work or education, friends or family, patriotism or religious ritual, none of it is of any help in times of trouble. 

Then: They entered into ungodly alliances, trusting in other nations rather than the Lord God. Isaiah 31 says, "Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help, And rely on horses, Who trust in chariots because they are many, And in horsemen because they are very strong, but who do not look to the Holy One of Israel, Nor seek the Lord!"

Now: Trust in unholy alliances is rampant, starting with the UN. Check out the headlines of the day; really, only the names and the weapons of war have changed.

Then: They pursued sexual abominations. "Though they know God's decree that those who practice such things deserve to die," says Romans 1, a New Testament book commenting on practices almost as old as man himself, "they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them." 

Now: Where to begin? How about we just say that the day is coming when biblical Christianity will be forced into the closet; the wheels are already in motion in Massachusetts.  

And that's just a peek into a few of the parallels. If you think what's happening today is sad beyond words, take comfort in the fact that God gave His chosen people the freedom to destroy their land. Fortunately, we know the ending and the news is good for those who repent and trust in Him!

Updated from a 9/13 post
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Tapestry

9/15/2016

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A darling great-niece just sent me this amazing poem by Corrie Ten Boom – the Dutch Christian who famously hid Jews from the Nazis, suffered for her “crimes” in the Ravensbruck concentration camp new Berlin, and lived to tell her story in The Hiding Place.
 
The Tapestry

​My life is but a weaving
between my Lord and me;
I cannot choose the colors,
He worketh steadily.
Oft times he weaveth sorrow,
and I, in foolish pride,
forget he sees the upper
and I the underside.
 
Not ‘til the loom is silent
and the shuttles cease to fly,
shall God unroll the canvas
and explain the reason why.
The dark threads are as needful
in the Weaver’s skillful hands,
as the threads of gold and silver
in the pattern He has planned.
 
I’ve often tried to express this thought, even using the tapestry analogy, but never as clearly as Corrie did in just 84 simple words.
 
Nor have I ever come close to explaining this idea as concisely as the apostle Paul did in Romans 8:28: “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.”
 
In 1 Timothy 2:3b-4, Paul added that “God our Savior … desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” And maybe that’s the larger point: The undersides of our tapestries may look dull or even hideous to us in this life, particularly as we approach its end – but the Lord is creating the precisely the image needed to bring each of us into His heavenly kingdom, safe and joy-filled forevermore.  
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'Splain this, Mr. Atheist

9/12/2016

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I am becoming weary of being called (but oh so politely and indirectly) “delusional” and “intellectually stunted” by atheists whose evidence of their intellectual superiority is that they completely rule out the possibility of anything beyond the material.
 
One thing that’s amazing is how atheists respond to questions they can’t answer by attacking us – and somehow believe they’ve won the argument. For instance, there’s the infamous video of someone asking evolutionist Richard Dawkins “what if you’re wrong?” Does he respond with a reasoned explanation of why he knows he’s not wrong? No, he attacks people of faith for believing in myths and fairy tales. 
 
Well done, Dr. Dawkins! Touche! You really told us, didn’t you?! 
 
Another amazing phenomenon is the proliferation of atheistic “just so” stories … and how the complicit media help turn them into “scientific fact.”
 
One example: atheists were asked to explain the presence of comets, which should have burned themselves out long ago in a universe billions of years old. 
 
Their answer? The Kuiper Belt – a theoretical (tr: imaginary) “region of the solar system beyond the planets.” 
 
“Discovered” in 1992 (“imagined” would be a better word, in truth), it was initially thought to be the source of comets. No more, however. According toWikipedia, “the region now called the Kuiper belt is not the point of origin of short-period comets, but that they instead derive from a linked population called the scattered disk. The scattered disc was created when Neptune migrated outward into the proto-Kuiper belt…” 
 
I won’t bore you with the details, because they’re probably being revised at this very moment.  But let’s skip to the end of this passage: “Because the scattered disc is dynamically active and the Kuiper belt relatively dynamically stable, the scattered disc is now seen as the most likely point of origin for periodic comets.” 
 
“Seen as” and “most likely point.” If I were a gambler, I would bet that these phrases – two more examples of evolutionary escape clauses – will disappear from this listing  within a year or two. You see, the Kuiper belt was presented as a theoretical explanation for comets just a decade or so ago; now it’s presented as fact. And when any alleged fact doesn’t quite pan out, the experts simply keep pushing it a little further out, just beyond the reach of demonstrable fact. 
 
There are so many questions that atheists could be asked to help them see who's really believing in fairy tales. Alas, they'll usually answer with attacks on the questioner, or with some new imaginations, or occasionally by saying that this isn't their particular area of expertise. Just for starters: 
  1. How do you explain the origins of the theoretical Singularity? What’s your proof? 
  2. What was the cause of the Singularity exploding into all matter, space and energy? What’s your proof? 
  3. How do you explain the emergence of life from non-life? What’s your proof? 
  4. How do you explain the lack of evidence for transitional fossils, as even the late great Harvard evolutionist Stephen J. Gould admitted? What’s your proof? 
  5. How do you explain the evolution of irreducibly complex organs such as the eye or immune system? What’s your proof? 
We creationists point to Genesis for the answer to all such questions. What’s our proof? Just the universally available facts, which fit neatly into the Genesis account of creation and the Flood – without any need for twisting the facts or inventing "just so" stories. Isn’t it funny how Moses, writing about 3500 years ago, was able to give bullet-proof explanation for absolutely everything?    

Today, there are scores of wonderful books presenting the facts that evolutionists cannot explain away with intellectual integrity. For a terrific overview, check out one of my favorites -- Dr. Scott Huse’s excellent The Collapse of Evolution. 

Adapted from a 9/7/13 post
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The lies of higher education

9/6/2016

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“For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal.” -- 
2 Corinthians 4:18b

This verse is from one of my favorite passages in all of scripture, telling us as it does that we needn’t worry about our earthly afflictions. They’re light, in the context of all eternity; and they are working for us a “far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” (verse 17).    

So don’t sweat today’s problems, folks. Don’t even really consider them, if they involve things that you can see – your money or career or possessions, your appearance or wardrobe or career, your hipness or lack thereof. These things are all just temporary, and they have nothing to do with what’s in store for us in eternity.

Talk about liberation! And this is just one of scores of Bible passages that free the believer in Jesus Christ from the bondage of this world. 

What blows my mind is how I spent years believing just the opposite, thanks to the teaching of a popular Journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and a little gem of ‘70s higher education that he called the Ploggly Theory.

According to this professor, the Ploggly Theory said, in a nutshell: If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. And this includes fairies, demons, devils and gods.  

Isn’t that interesting? It’s a direct contradiction of the apostle Paul’s teaching that “the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal.” And it was a key component of '70s-era Journalism training, at least at UWM.

“If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.” To think that my widowed Christian mother paid good money to have this professor teach me this lie. 

And to think that I was not smart enough (or perhaps enough of a truth hawk) to call him on it – to say, “Hey, Professor, does that mean love doesn’t exist? How about peace? How about other unseen things, like patience and charity, joy and truth, faithfulness and self-control? Or how about hatred and jealousy, idolatry and selfish ambition? Do none of these ‘unseen things’ exist?” 

Such a challenge might have led to an interesting discussion, especially if one of my classmates had turned out to be biblically literate – a real possibility 40 years ago. But even without that key component, our lives might all have turned out differently if just one of us had had the intellect, and the guts, to exercise a little critical thinking.

But it didn’t happen. In fact, I took as many classes as possible from the Journalism professor who taught me about the Ploggly Theory.  And I was far from alone; my hippie-dippy friends were equally crazy about him. 

How can this be, that such a beloved professor could  teach such a bold and spiritually destructive lie, and get away with it? 

I guess the apostle Paul answered that question, too, in the 11th chapter of the same epistle to the Corinthians: “Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light.” 

Wish I’d known all of this back then. Wish I’d known, too, about the apostle Peter’s warning in chapter 5 of his first epistle: “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.”

Of course, the Ploggy Theory would have told me to ignore such warnings, since devils and demons don’t exist. But maybe, just maybe, I might have at least given the issue a little thought. 

Originally posted 3/5/15
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    Kitty
    Foth-Regner

    I'm a follower of Jesus Christ, a freelance copywriter, a nursing-home volunteer, and the author of books both in-process and published -- including Heaven Without Her. 

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