day no. 17,429: raised or razed?

"The modern world will have to fit in with Christmas of die." — G.K. Chesterton,  The Illustrated London News (1909)

Christmas will conquer the world. The world will either have to get on board by dying to itself or it will be killed by the coming on of Christ. The earth will be as it is in Heaven. That will come either by being raised from the dead by repentance or by being razed to the ground by the wrath of the Lamb.

day no. 17,428: i beg your pardon

Matthew 5:21-26

You have heard that it was said to those of old, "You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment." But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire. So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison. Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

Proactively repent. If you remember something someone might have against you, proactively go to them and ask them for forgiveness. Consider it from the other end of the equation. Imagine someone came to you and asked you to forgive them for something they said or did to you a while back. If you have forgotten about it, you will gladly forgive them and respect the fact that they came to you and humbled themselves. Or let’s say maybe you hadn’t forgotten, but had been thinking about that thing they did or said and they come to you and ask for your forgiveness for it. Aren’t you glad it’s out in the open and being dealt with? If you love them, you want to be restored and reconciled to them. Sin had gotten in the way of that, but now the only thing standing in the way of it is your acceptance of their apology and offering forgiveness.

Not about keeping yourself from communion, it is about not giving your tithes and offerings. It’s not a shocker that this isn’t preached more often or more forcefully, right? You’ve heard more sermons on tithing than you have on not tithing because of bitterness. And that makes sense. God does not want your grudge money. If you are holding on to a grudge, hold on to your money. And that goes for here as well. Christ Church Leavenworth does not need your money as much as it needs you to forgive your neighbor. God loves a cheerful giver. If you are grumpy with someone, go and get things right with them before you give. And if you have wronged someone, God is saying you owe them an apology more than you owe Him your tithes and offerings. He would rather see you righting wrongs than writing a check.

It is sometimes easier to give your money than it is to give a pardon to someone who has hurt you, but both are required. You cannot serve grudges and God and you cannot serve God and money. If you want to give, you need to forgive. If you don’t want to give or forgive, consider where that goes. Everything is going somewhere and sooner or later it is going to get there. Being stingy ends with the sting of death and hell to follow. But those who are generous receive charity. It is easier to give money than it is to give a pardon. 

Now, some of you might be thinking, “You can’t tell people that. Apologizing to others and forgiving others is already hard enough and now you’re telling them that they get to hold on to their money if they hold on to their grudges?” Doesn’t that simply incentivize them to do the wrong thing? It would if it weren’t for the rest of the passage. What does Jesus say about the one who refuses to repent of their sins and refuses to forgive others of theirs? They are liable to the hell of fire. 

Later in this same sermon Jesus said that “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.” (Matthew 6:24)

day no. 17,427: conservative and progressive according to the Spirit

"Christmas, being a Christian institution, contains in itself already the two alternative actions toward society — the preservation of what is good in the past, the removal of what is bad in the present." — G.K. Chesterton,  The Illustrated London News (1923)

We honor our fathers and mothers best by testing all things and preserving the good and tossing the bad. We cull our culture for its high water marks and we correct the errors that have emerged. We love our pasts in general and we repent of our failures at present. There is good in the past we have not honored sufficiently enough and bad at the present we have not repented of. By the grace of God, we must do two things at the same time: remember the work of the Spirit already accomplished and reform by the Spirit that which needs to be sanctified.

1 Thessalonians 5:21

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.

The Word of God proves things faithful or not. That which is faithful, we must hold on to with all of our might and that which is proven false, we must abandon as though our lives depended on it.

"Christmas does not honor the past simply because it is the past, but because it is the truth." — Ryan Whitaker Smith, Winter Fire

Christians must be conservative and progressive. We must conserve the works of the Spirit and we must make progress in the Spirit right here and now. We must fashion the future out of the best of the past and according to the vision of Christendom that is our future.

"We conserve the past in order to preserve the future." — Ryan Whitaker Smith, Winter Fire

Sanctification means keeping the gains of the past and advancing to the gains of the future. We must be like Christ, easy to please and impossible to satisfy. We must not settle for how far we've come, resting on the progress of the past, we must strive for that to which we have been called, never stopping until He returns or calls us home.

day no. 17,426: collateral damages

"Those who are governing us are not very good at governing us, but they are very good at staying in power despite being so very bad at their real job." — Douglas Wilson, Belfast Blues

Our representatives are like our government schools, they are not good at what they tell others they are doing and very good at what they are actually trying to do.

“No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems—of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.” ― Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America

A politician's job is keeping his job and as good as he is at that is as bad as he is at concerning himself with what concerns us most.

"Now the public school system may not work satisfactorily, but it works; the public schools may not achieve what we want, but they achieve what they want. The popular elementary schools do not in that sense achieve anything at all.” — G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong With The World

Government schools are not trying to educate our children for their own good, they are indoctrinating them for the State's own good.

"Public education has not produced an educated public." — G.K. Chesterton

Not because they have failed, but because they have succeeded. And in the meantime, those who suffer are the rest of us for those who educate their own children still have to live in a world where most other people's children are catechized by the government. 

“For those who suffer are chiefly the provident, the resolute, the men who want to work, who have built up, in the face of implacable discouragement, some sort of life worth preserving and wish to preserve it . . . They are, in fact, the bearers of what little moral, intellectual, or economic vitality remains. They are not nonentities. There is a point at which their patience will snap.” — C.S. Lewis, Delinquents in the Snow

Regular people want to be left alone, but the State wants mind our beeswax. This tension is untenable and anything that cannot go on forever... won't. A breaking point will come and when it does the wrath of those who did not want to get involved will be severe, Lord willing. This is not a threat per se, it is a natural consequence to being relentlessly infringed at every turn.

"The judge, if she read this article, would say I was ‘threatening’—linguistic nicety not being much in her line. If by a threat you mean (but then you don’t know much English) the conjectural prediction of a highly undesirable event, then I threaten. But if by the word threat you imply that I wish for such a result or would willingly contribute to it, then you are wrong.” — C.S. Lewis, Delinquents in the Snow

Those who cannot be shaken will eventually be stirred and then that which can be shaken will come crumbling down. God, grant us mercy in the meantime and may their fall not include much, if any, collateral damage.

day no. 17,425: new heights or new lows?

"Have you ever seen a fellow fail at the high jump because he had not gone far enough back for his run? That is Modern Thought. It is so confident of where it is going to that it does not know where it comes from." — G.K. Chesterton,  The Illustrated London News (1914)

If you refuse to look back, you cannot advance. Progress requires a reference point. If you merely seek to rewind the tape to a previous point, you will get the same result. You must begin somewhere else if you desire to end somewhere different. If you don't like the final scene, it does you no good to select a scene from earlier that you liked better. The story will end the same way. 

To put a finer point on it, if we do not go back to the Garden, we will continue to end up in Gomorrah. When we forget the Fall, we will always fall. If we ignore where we were before we fell and what we were doing before that, we will always walk off the edge and end up in the valley of humiliation.

Modern thought wants to lower the bar, but godly thought wants to raise it. In Christ, we can clear the requirements of God, but outside of Him, we can only fall short of our highest aspirations, regardless of how low we go. When we aspire to new heights, we fall to new lows.

day no. 17,424: majoring on minors

"There is nothing stranger today than the importance of unimportant things. Except, of course, the unimportance of important things." — G.K. Chesterton, Collected Works

Modernity majors on the minors. That fact is strange enough, but the fact that majors are now electives, is even stranger.

It is odd enough that there exists a trope that many churches split over something as insignificant as carpet color, but it is even odder that there exists a tendency for churches to rally around an indifference to sound doctrine. It is strange that someone would consider joining a church based on the ability of the drummer, but it is stranger that someone would plant a church for the purpose of ignoring the teachings of the Bible.

And yet, here we are. The phenomenon is one we are familiar with. An uninvolved person attempts to make up for his or her lack of involvement by being overly invested in some seemingly random detail of their neglected duty. So, a parent who is never around is always ready to throw down over what sports team the child cheers for or the wife who is otherwise indifferent to her husband has a vested interest in what he eats for lunch. We pick something to do and then we do it with all of our might in order to distract from the fact that we do nothing about everything else. And that, in a nutshell, describes the spiritual condition of many parishioners and unfortunately many pastors.

The same is true in politics, but unfortunately the pun takes on new meaning when considering their majoring on minors. In their case, they are not interested in small things to cover up their lack of interest in large matters, they are interested in little people and use their interest in big government to pursue them.

day no. 17,423: are we making any progress?

“[Progress] is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle.” — G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America

"Progress" implies an eschatology and an origin story. Without a starting point, what one might call a zero, you cannot measure how far you've come and without an end goal, what one might call a utopia, you cannot measure how far you have to go.

The Christian faith has an origin story and an eschatology. We know where we come from and where it's all going. As such, we can measure how far off the mark we have gotten by comparing it to Eden and we can see how well we are doing by comparing the kingdom on earth to the one that is in Heaven.

Secularism is dominated by a presupposed optimism that nature does not make mistakes. Christendom is dominated by a a presupposed optimism that God does not make mistakes.

Romans 1:20-25

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.

It is only natural that a natural man would turn to nature if he turns away from the supernatural. If he abolishes the category of god, he establishes idolatry.

"Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural." — G.K. Chesterton 

Everything is going somewhere and sooner or later, it's going to get there. Evil is progressing to its end, which is destruction and good is progressing to its end, which is eternal life.