Some Excellent Essays!

I just discovered a great treasure: an on-going series of little essays by my nephew James Sander-Cederlof. He calls it Tilted Talk.

• The Walk — When a child asks about the strange way he walks...
  
• Commercials — Thoughts about mis-directed and thoughtless TV commercials.
  
• Hot Coffee — "There is nothing wrong with knowing your child; that is called being a parent. Since when did it become un-cool to have a game that you do not mind your child seeing you play?"
  
• The Price of Education — "It is astonishing how much better home-schooled children behave, act, and think compared to those in the public education system."
  
• 9/11 Revisited — His flight was cancelled, just in time.
  
• Education, Again — "You became involved with your child nine months or so the child was born. Remain involved throughout their life; the education of the child should not stop at some magical age. Only the subject matter should change. Just keep God at the center, and the other things will fall into place."
  
• Spiritual Leaders — "Our leaders should be men of faith."
  
• Lawyers in Love — Afterthoughts from a lawyer's TV commercial.
  

James also writes poems, and you can read some of them here.

Tampering with Physicians?

   “To be always tampering with physicians upon every occasion is the way to lose all natural soundness of health, and to be continually talking and enquiring about the nature of ailments and powers of medicines for the head, the heart, the spirits and nerves is the way to lose all true judgement concerning our own sickness or health.

   “It is much the same with respect to our spiritual health and constitution. We do much hurt to it by running after spiritual advice on every occasion, and wanting the help of some human prescription for every fear, scruple or notion that starts up in our minds. This actually weakens the true strength of our spiritual constitution which, if left to itself, would do all that we need to have done.

   “If it be asked what this soundness of our spiritual constitution is, it may be answered that it is a state or habit of such humble, total resignation of ourselves to God as by faith and hope expects all from Him alone. This is the health and strength of our spiritual constitution, and nothing is health in the soul but this state.”

[ William Law, in a letter to Lady Huntingdon, January 10, 1754 ]

Need to Uncover Need

“So many preach the human aspect of Christ, His sympathy for the bereaved and the suffering and sin-stained, and men listen whilst Christ is brought down to their conditions; but a preacher has to bring the Gospel of God to men’s needs, and to do this he has to uncover their need and men resent this -- ‘I don’t want to accept the verdict on myself that Jesus Christ brings; I don’t believe I am so sinful as He reveals.’ A man never believes what Jesus Christ says about the human heart until the Holy Ghost gives him the startling revelation of the truth of His diagnosis. (See Mark 7:20-23: And he said, That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: all these evil things come from within, and defile the man.)”
[Oswald Chambers, in Approved Unto God, “The Origin of Our Salvation”.]

Were you ever in all your life sorry for your sins?

"Give me leave to ask you, in the presence of God, whether you know the time, and if you do not know exactly the time, do you know there was a time, when God wrote bitter things against you, when the arrows of the Almighty were within you? Was ever the remembrance of your sins grievous to you? Was the burden of your sins intolerable to your thoughts? Did you ever see that God's wrath might justly fall upon you, on account of your actual transgressions against God? Were you ever in alI your life sorry for your sins? Could you ever say, My sins are gone over my head as a burden too heavy for me to bear? Did you ever experience any such thing as this? Did ever any such thing as this pass between God and your soul? If not, for Jesus Christ's sake, do not call yourselves Christians. You may speak peace to your hearts, but there is no peace. May the Lord awaken you, may the Lord convert you, may the Lord give you peace." 
[George Whitefield, from a sermon titled, "The Method of Grace". Quoted in Whitefield Gold, compiled by Ray Comfort.]

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. (Genesis 1:1)

In his commentary on the the first book of Moses (Genesis), commenting on the first verse of the first chapter, Calvin says: "Moses simply intends to assert that the world was not perfected at its very commencement, in the manner in which it is now seen, but that it was created an empty chaos of heaven and earth. His language therefore may be thus explained. When God in the beginning created the heaven and the earth, the earth was empty and waste. He moreover teaches by the word "created," that what before did not exist was now made; for he has not used the term "yatsar", which signifies to frame or forms but "bara", which signifies to create. Therefore his meaning is, that the world was made out of nothing. Hence the folly of those is refuted who imagine that unformed matter existed from eternity; and who gather nothing else from the narration of Moses than that the world was furnished with new ornaments, and received a form of which it was before destitute. This indeed was formerly a common fable among heathens, who had received only an obscure report of the creation, and who, according to custom, adulterated the truth of God with strange figments; but for Christian men to labor (as Steuchus does) in maintaining this gross error is absurd and intolerable. Let this, then be maintained in the first place, that the world is not eternal but was created by God." [More of this commentary online here]

"Jesus is alive and very truth"

"It was while I was in the Holy Land for thc purpose of making three B.B.C. television programmes on the New Testament that a curious, almost magical, certainty seized me about Jesus' birth, ministry and Crucifixion. I realised, in the first place, that the many shrines, and the legends associated with them, were for the most part, from my point of view, as fraudulent as the bones of St Peter, the fragments of the True Cross and other relics revered by the pious. Then, seeing a party of Christian pilgrims at one of these shrines, their faces bright with faith, their voices as they sang so evidently and joyously aware of their Saviour's near-ness, I understood that for them the shrine was authentic. Their faith made it so. Similarly, I, too, became aware that there really had been a man, Jesus, who was also God. I was conscious of his presence. He really had spoken those sublime words. I heard them. He really had died on a cross and risen from the dead. Otherwise, how was it possible for me to meet him, as I did in the desert wrestling with the Devil, on that hillside preaching of how the meek inherit the earth and the pure of heart see God, falling in step along the road to Emmaus? As I tried to explain in my commentary (included in this volume), the words Jesus spoke are living words, as relevant today as when they were first spoken; the light he shone continues to shine as brightly as ever. Thus he is alive, as for instance Socrates who also chose to lay down his life for truth's sake isn't. Let the dead, as Jesus himself said, bury their dead; in other words, relate themselves to history. Socrates is historical, the shrines and the legends are historical, the Resurrection is historical; Jesus is alive and very truth." 
Malcolm Muggeridge, in the Introduction to Jesus Rediscovered

A New Book

I bought a new book today at Mardel's, Whitefield Gold, by Ray Comfort. I have long been a fan of George Whitefield, and more recently of Ray Comfort, so it is a delight to read this book!

For some truth about the Da Vinci Code, visit Haven Ministries for a fascinating interview with Lee Strobel, author of a new book Exploring the Da Vinci Code.

More on Arthur H. Compton: His father was Professor of Philosophy and later Dean of the College of Wooster, where Arthur was educated; his older brother Karl was also a noted physicist and president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
[Paraphrased from this biography]

Arthur H. Compton said...

Arthur H. Compton (1892-1962) won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1927. He is quoted as saying: “Science is the glimpse of God‘s purpose in nature. The very existence of the amazing world of the atom and radiation points to a purposeful creation, to the idea that there is a God and an intelligent purpose back of everything ... An orderly universe testifies to the greatest statement ever uttered: ‘In the beginning, God...’ ”
[ quoted in Hidden Wealth Series - Scientific Facts in the Bible, Ray Comfort, Bridge-Logos 2001, page 31. ]