Replies

INDEED.

However, James Robison was right recently . . . noting that we’d best come together to stand against the horrific demonized satanic globalist horrors in this country . . . that there’s no other viable, sensible option for authentic Christians, whatever the label.

Time is toooo short . . .

James Robison’s website:

http://www.jamesrobison.net/

Living in the Last Days article:

http://www.jamesrobison.net/?q=node/124

THE FLICKERING LIGHT OF AMERICA

Whatever happened to the “shining city on a hill,” as President Reagan and other leadersonce used to describe America? The description, of course, originated with Jesus Christ. Yet our nation, once a shining flame of freedom, is well on its way to becoming a flickering ember of debt, despair, dissension, and defeat. It does not have to continue.

Who bears the greatest responsibility for this predicament? I believe Christians do—those believers who are called to be light and reveal “The Light” of the world in order to inspire the ongoing presence of a true shining city that cannot be hidden.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus made it clear that we as believers are both salt and light. Salt helps preserve that which is precious and important while enhancing the flavor. Likewise, the Christian witness should have a positive effect on every aspect of life and culture. Jesus said that if salt loses its effect, it is good for nothing but to be trampled under the feet of men. Sure enough, everything sacred is being trampled under the feet of those who consider God unimportant or non-existent. Faith, family, and freedom are being trampled by many who call themselves liberals, socialists, progressives, and activists.

CONTINUED AT LINK BELOW:

http://www.jamesrobison.net/?q=node/123

INDIVISIBLE: Hope for the Future

By James Robison

http://www.jamesrobison.net/?q=node/122

For too long those who profess to have faith in the living God and claim to believe marriage, family, and freedom are important have hidden the light of truth under the covering of personal comfort, compromise, and unfruitful conformity. Now is the time to raise high the standard of liberating truth while standing together as one with the Father and other believers who love God in order to truly become the shining city on the hill that cannot and must not be hidden. INDIVISIBLE is our attempt to inspire all people of faith to find common ground for our common concerns. Together we can help correct our nation’s perilous course.

In its first week of release, INDIVISIBLE reached #1 on both Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com (non-fiction). We were informed this week that it will be listed #5 on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list to be posted March 11. To God be the glory!

With gratitude we share the following review from Ken Hagerty, Vice President, Policy for Renewing American Leadership (ReAL) and ReAL Action in Washington, D.C.

This is a book we’ve needed for a long time. Other conservative books provide useful analyses of various social and fiscal issues facing our country. This is the book that combines that information with a unique understanding and explanation of the crucial spiritual dimension.

Indivisible offers a unique fusion of Evangelical and Catholic scholarship in theology, culture, economics, science and history on a range of the most pressing issues in America today. This is the book that will equip pastors and priests to speak out knowledgably and effectively on the issues that are threatening our society. It will also arm lay church members to help educate their own clergy and to encourage them to provide the leadership we need to restore our Judeo-Christian values in this country.

High quality research and reasoning, combined with clear writing make this book unusually valuable. Indivisible analyzes and explains a host of the most urgent social, political and economic issues facing this country, yet it’s still accessible and easy to read. Those of us who try to write about these topics understand what a rare achievement that is. If Friedrich Hayek had been able to present his views this clearly, it could have changed history. But this book pulls together much of what we’ve learned in science, economics and culture since Hayek’s time.

The thesis is that there is no way to separate so-called “fiscal” issues, from so-called “social” issues, and we shouldn’t try. You can’t have free markets without free men. Economics should serve human freedom in all its dimensions—political, social, physical, spiritual. Our freedom, in other words is indivisible. (p. 211)

This is exactly the worldview that informed the American founders and allowed them to create the greatest charter of government for a free people in world history.

Now, after more than a century of progressive education, our political discourse has become so secular that a high percentage of our fellow citizens have no understanding of the relevance of the Judeo-Christian worldview to their lives. Indivisible offers a series of principles that explain the political relevance of our moral values. Two examples really struck home for me.

First, I was surprised by the power and simplicity of the principle that God wants us to be free. I had never recognized that our free will reflects the fact that God intends for mankind to be free. “God valued our freedom so much that he has given us the power to reject him. And we did… But God has also revealed ways for societies to restrain evil and achieve some measure of freedom. In free societies the government both protects and submits to the rule of law…Free societies protect private property. They allow their citizens to participate in the political process, to make basic economic choices, and to freely exercise their religious faith. These freedoms are indivisible. (p. 319)

Second, I have wondered all my life why and how the secular progressives and socialists can possibly continue to assert, and base their policies on the inherent goodness of man, when all of history, and especially the hideous record of the twentieth century demonstrate that the opposite is irrefutably the case. Well, now I finally understand.

The myopia of the secular progressives is caused by the simple and profound fact that they reject the concept of sin. I now recognize that the evil and selfishness of men simply does not enter into their calculations. In the absence of human sin, all their faith in the state, and their totalitarian ideas, make a lot more sense—but not in the real world. In the real world, the consequences of those ideas are the ones honest people see in the coercive “peoples’ paradises” around the world—and yet the progressives and socialists stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the horrors that inevitably flow from their utopian fixations.

The reason I haven’t confronted this simple, but totally foundational explanation before, is that we’ve all adopted secular conventions pushed by the progressives to such an extent that our “political science” and even our conservative media no longer acknowledge fundamental principles like human sin. Sin is something in the “religious” realm, and we reserve that for Sundays.

But once again the American founders knew better. The reality of sin was clear to them. Sin explains the need for limited government, for the separation of powers and for checks and balances. (p. 316) In James Madison’s famous words: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. (p. 25)

CONTINUED AT LINK ABOVE.

@@@

http://www.jamesrobison.net/?q=node/121

Bow Down or Be Brought Down

By James Robison

merica will either bow on her knees before God or be brought to her knees as a consequence of sin and by a refusal to build on biblical standards and founding principles. If we fail to respond to God’s invitation and receive His forgiveness, grace, and the divine guidance found only in the shelter provided by His presence, we will prove to be humiliated. But I am most hopeful that people of faith, along with those who love their families and appreciate freedom, will respond to the call of God.

As I write this commentary, I am riding in a bus in Mississippi on the way to Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma to sign copies of our book INDIVISIBLE. The co-author Jay Richards, his wife Ginny, and their daughters Gillian and Ellie, as well as Betty are on the tour. This week my beautiful wife and I celebrated our 49th wedding anniversary while on this important missionary journey across our great nation. At the same time, our mission team is literally sleeping on the ground in tents or whatever shelter they can find while seeking to help alleviate the suffering of people in Sudan. We received an email today from a team member. She reported that the people are so desperately hungry that an average of two children are dying each day from starvation while trying to get to the feeding lines. Our hearts break and loving Christians along with compassionate people around the world will come together attempting to help. My concern for impoverished nations increases my burden for America. If we do not turn back to God and liberating truth, we are going to lose the ability to see our own needs met, along with the ability to help others.

Every day I find myself shocked and amazed by the public response and especially the attention given by the media to any statement concerning the spiritual realm. Remember years ago when George W. Bush answered the question, “Who do you respect most in history? Who has had the greatest influence?” When he answered, “Jesus Christ,” you would have thought the world had come to an end. How dare anyone make such a claim! Certainly he couldn’t possibly really mean it. The fact he used it was portrayed as an attempt to gather the support of the brainless religious crowd. Sincere faith, biblical references, and respect for Jesus Christ are openly ridiculed.

This week Sen. Santorum referenced Satan as an enemy of America. (The Apostle Paul called this power “principalities and rulers in the heavenly realm of darkness and deception.”) The senator indicated Satan has focused the fury of his assault on the United States, a free nation professing to be “under God.” We probably won’t be able to say that much longer and get away with it. Many wish to purge it from the pledge! Granted, if Americans don’t really believe we need to live under God, then there’s no need to leave it in the pledge. The Bible declares heaven’s blessings are on nations “whose God is the Lord.”Total commitment to God and His truth does not mean you are imposing those ways on others, but certainly holding up the standard of truth while seeking to encourage and inspire people to line up with it.

Betty and I attended a play in New York City that presented a hypothetical debate between C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud. One of the statements that stood out was when Freud referred to a crooked line, and Lewis responded, “How do you know it’s crooked if you don’t have the standard of a straight line to measure it by?” Freud was taken aback, and the audience knew that Lewis had landed a solid blow. We do have a reliable standard and our founders knew it. The Constitution they left us is not an ever-evolving, unreliable document. It has proved to be the greatest founding document upon which a nation has been built. As a result of its soundness, Americans have prospered and blessed many nations with an outpouring of compassion.

Continued at above link

@@@

http://www.jamesrobison.net/?q=node/120

Body Armor for the Culture War

By James Robison and Jay Richards

We’ve heard for years that we’re in the middle of a “culture war.” A culture war, unlike a civil war, is not fought with guns and tanks, but with ideas, words, arguments, media, and education. Unlike ordinary political debates, it’s a fight over the fundamental principles on which cultures are based.

In our new book Indivisible, which will be officially released this Monday, February 20, we argue that Americans are “like tourists on a sunny beach. We’ve heard news of an earthquake on the sea floor, hundreds of miles away, but everything still looks normal. People are sipping iced tea, enjoying the warm sand and the sun overhead. Many think, ‘We’ve never had it so good.’ And yet, when we look closely, we notice that the beach is growing wider as the tide recedes toward the horizon.”

The tide seems to be receding even faster in the last few weeks. We all know that our economy is teetering and the federal government is endangering our children’s future with unprecedented deficit spending. As we observe in The Christian Post, 2012 was supposed to be the year when economic issues would dominate presidential debates, and so-called social issues would take a back seat. Instead, abortion, religious freedom, and marriage are also in the headlines.

The first two issues—abortion and religious freedom—come together with the recent U.S. Department of Health and Human Services mandate that organizations, including religious organizations, provide health insurance that covers sterilization, contraception and drugs that induce abortion. The Catholic Bishops have been especially visible in responding to this assault on religious freedom. “This country once fought a revolution to guarantee freedom, but the time has clearly arrived to strongly reassert our fundamental human rights,” said the Most. Rev. Daniel R. Jenky, C.S.C., Bishop of Peoria. “I am honestly horrified that the nation I have always loved has come to this hateful and radical step in religious intolerance.”

The media has tried to turn this into a debate over contraception, which they portray—incorrectly—as a “Catholic issue.” In reality, all people of faith, indeed, all Americans have something to lose here. If the federal government can force its citizens to pay for things they find morally abhorrent, then there is nothing the government can’t do. We are gratified that ordinary Catholics, Catholic Bishops, leading evangelicals, and even some libertarians have denounced this power grab. Glenn Beck has just launched a campaign called “We are all Catholics Now,” to bring together a diverse group of Americans to defend religious freedom. As we argue in Indivisible, to restore our culture, those who value faith, family, and freedom have to set our differences aside and start rowing in the same direction.

The HHS mandate is just one example of the growing threats to religious freedom and the respect for human life. The institution of marriage is also under attack. This week, the Governor of Washington State, Christine Gregoire, signed a bill that makes it the most recent state to establish “same sex marriage.” And the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has just upheld Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision to strike down California’s Proposition 8, which defined marriage as between one man and one woman. This issue will almost surely end up in the Supreme Court, where the future of marriage in our country could be decided by nine Justices.

CONTINUED AT ABOVE LINK

@@@

http://www.jamesrobison.net/?q=node/118

Small God, Big Government

By James Robison

It is obvious for all with eyes to observe that when God and spiritual life decreases in importance, government expands its powerful, out-of-control attempt to be in total control and it expands rapidly. The less we hear God’s unadulterated Word, the duller our hearing.

The prophets said on numerous occasions in reference to the national population, “You have eyes but cannot see and you have ears but you cannot hear.” Faith fails when the Word which is necessary to open our ears to hear is not faithfully declared. The Word tunes our ears to hear clearly in the spiritual realm so that we can walk in the light of divine guidance. When we do not see and hear clearly, we will make very poor choices concerning those who serve and are chosen to lead. The population begins to believe lies and there is no more dangerous person than the deceiver who thinks he is telling the truth. Those who are deceived are most effective deceiving others. The prophet Jeremiah said to a nation facing similar problems as ours, “The Lord has rejected those in whom you trust, and you shall not prosper with them.”

Without the wisdom that comes from God and His Word, we will not be able to discern truth and choose those with proven character to serve in both houses of Congress and in the White House. Keep in mind our representatives also choose the judges, cabinet members, and heads of bureaucratic agencies. Every election is important because those chosen to represent us set the course determining our future security and stability while also encouraging or encumbering the potential for success and prosperity.

While everyone may long for freedom at some level, history teaches us that people will often give up their freedom without a fight if they are promised security in return. This is a sucker’s bargain! As Benjamin Franklin said, “Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security.”

The election this year is critically important because of the heavy weight of our present-day challenges. There is, however, something even more important than the election and that is to grasp an understanding of necessary direction and corrections that must be made. Beginning with this election, if we don’t know the correct course, we will function like a mindless monstrosity. Church and national leaders along with all believers must lift up a reliable standard and seek to find those who recognize its value and importance. The standard must be consistent with biblical and historically-proven principles. When we elect those that we believe to be committed to the right standard, we the people must then hold those representatives to the standard or remove them as quickly as possible.

As God becomes smaller and our all-consuming government grows larger, you will also observe the smaller others become, the less important they seem to be, the less noticed and less effectively assisted. Meaningful assistance is the result of personal attention, interaction and legitimate concern. When government and its bureaucratic agencies or institutions become the so-called “safety net,” little, if any, effective help results. Without what I refer to as the “compassion connection,” there will be no necessary inspiration or encouragement to improve. Without personal interaction, the importance of assuming responsibility and the proper oversight requiring accountability will always be missing. Through many federal programs we are actually contributing to a sense of insignificance and dependence upon the government rather than independence and the drive to achieve. Jesus did say, “To whom much is given, much is required,” but He never said we are required to give it to the government and yet we foolishly continue to tolerate this mindless practice. National leaders continually appeal to our legitimate concern to justify policies that always fail and cannot be sustained.

CONTINUED at above link

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@