Brave Ole World

Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death:

1. “[E]very sight, every sound, every fragrance, every texture, every taste in this world that is not sin is meant to intensify our admiration and love for Jesus.” (Related.)
2. Ponder this chart. And this thread. And this interview. And this speech. And these lovely case studies.
3. “It is to the man who is trying to live, to the man who is obedient to the word of the Master, that the word of the Master unfolds itself.”
4. Right in the feels.
5. “[I]f you pray for all, all will pray for you.”
6. Dang.
7. “We should spend less time trying to qualify God’s infinite, unconditional love and more time in meditation on it, more time praising God for it, more time being astonished by it.”

More:

Clown World. Clown World. (Related.) Clown (strikethrough) Demon World. Demon World. Demon World. Demon World. Demon World. Demon World. But, as always, a beautiful world nonetheless (how ’bout that woodwork!) for those who have eyes to see. (Very much related.)

Informative.

Good news. 

“If Britain is ‘no longer a Christian country’ and the Church ’embraces the liberal instincts of the country’ on sexuality, then won’t the Church no longer be a Christian Church?”

She’s a devil, she’s an angel, she’s a woman, she’s a child:

1. “[E]ither nothing matters or everything matters.”
2. Timothy Snyder: “The human capacity for subjective victimhood is apparently limitless, and people who believe that they are victims can be motivated to perform acts of great violence.”
3. “Jews Return from Exile”
4. “In his medical practice, Richard has seen the carnivore diet work wonders for his patients. … From helping a patient become pregnant to alleviating autoimmune disorders, the diet has proven effective in various cases.” (Related: “Sarah’s daughter, who has autism, also benefits from the dietary changes. … [H]er daughter’s mood becomes more stable, and she’s calmer.” Related. Related—good advice.)
5. Chesterton: “It has often been pointed out that Cain was an agriculturist and therefore most probably a vegetarian; while Abel kept flocks and killed and ate them. I am sure that somewhere in this fact is to be found the key of that dark and terrible story. It seems so like a vegetarian to kill his brother on strictly altruistic principles.”
6. Thread. Post. (Related.)
7. Two years ago on Brave Ole World.

More:

Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. (Related.) But God bless it.

“A cynic might wonder why God’s call seems to match so closely with familiar patterns of career advancement in the business world.”

More good advice. More good advice. (Related.)

“[I]t is better to err frequently through thinking well of a wicked man, than to err less frequently through having an evil opinion of a good man, because in the latter case an injury is inflicted, but not in the former.” 

Would that the trees might speak on behalf of all things that have roots, and punish those that wrong them: 

1. “If you say stuff like that out loud, you’re going to sound like a holy-roller…. The sort of Christians you don’t want to be associated with. People who actually believe this stuff.”
2. Thread.
3. “8 Examples of the Weaknesses of the Argument from Silence” 
4. Correct. (Related.) Correct. Correct. Correct. Correct. Correct. Correct.
5. “[Paul’s] battleground is the realm of human perception.” (Related: “The problem is less about failing to live up to Christ than a complete misperception of Christ.”)
6. Beautiful family. (Related. Related: “The guardians and workhorses of the human species are high-fertility parents.”) Beautiful city. Beautiful sculpture.
7. Kent Smith: “Eternal community with God is the place of unshakeable joy.”

More:

Demon World. Demon World (“teens”). Demon World. Clown World. Clown World.

“I knew that my life, my aspirations, and my thoughts, could never have held up under the spotlight of a righteous judge.”

Sweet Moses.

“Psalms will CHANGE how we read Jesus and ‘church.'”

Let’s roll:

1. Hannah Whitall Smith: “Nothing else but this seeing God in everything will make us loving and patient with those who annoy and trouble us.”
2. You can’t trust the experts. You can’t trust the experts.
3. Three years ago on Brave Ole World.
4. “Within the next two weeks, all of a sudden my depression and my anxiety had vanished, my Ankylosing Spondylitis had gotten 90% better, the numbness in my hands was gone, my bruising started going away, my asthma went away, my heartburn went away, my digestive issues went away…my libido came back—pretty much everything you can think of went away within two or three weeks.”
5. “It took God eighty years of training to prepare Moses for forty years of ministry.”
6. “‘If the value system collapses,’ he wonders, ‘how can the social system be sustained?'”
7. On Hosea and Gomer.

More:

“[T]he Jacobins were genuinely hideous & you can tell by comparing them with the Vendean counterrevolutionaries.”

“Ours is a singing faith.”

“The Confederate monuments of Richmond, Virginia have been replaced by homeless encampments and … fentanyl deals on Monument Avenue.”

“How do you let somebody down through a roof?”

It’s time to see the world, it’s time to kiss a girl, it’s time to cross the wild meridian:

1. “Isn’t this what you prayed for? To burn / with visions, to suffer like God.”
2. God bless her.
3. “I replied, ‘I believe that as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.’ My questioner, not realizing I was quoting Scripture, accused me of taking an unbiblical position!”
4. “I suppose some fool would talk about one being better.”
5. Two years ago on Brave Ole World.
6. Homogeneity is their strength, it seems.
7. “When you hear the call—when you’ve really heard it, and you know—you need to follow, regardless of what your siblings say.”

More:

Carnivore success story. Carnivore success story.

AJ Gossip: “Thanksgiving is the language of heaven, and we had better start to learn it if we are not to be mere dumb aliens there.”

Ubi maior est amor, minor est labor: 

1. John Alexander: “[M]ost of the hard things Jesus says … seem impossible but turn out to be freedoms.” (Related: “Independence does not bring life, not for long. It’s just another name for rebellion.”)
2. “Delay school if possible. … Family formation first, family formation last, family formation always.” (Related. Related.)
3. “Jesus’s death is essential for atonement, but so also are his resurrection, ascension, ongoing intercession, and hoped-for return.”
4. Beautiful. Beautiful (not that it should be noteworthy). Beautiful. Radiant.
5. “[T]he name Azazel refers either to a place or to a demon that lived in the wilderness.”
6. An interesting read. (Related: Carnivore success story. Carnivore success story. Carnivore success story.)
7. An interesting suggestion.

More:

Fleming: “The enemy was never really Marxism per se but liberalism in all its forms: not just the liberalism of Rousseau but the liberalism of Voltaire; not just the socialism of Marx but the destructive antisocialism of John Stuart Mill.”

“Goliath was a descendant of the Anak, a Nephilim.”

Three years ago on Brave Ole World.

“We’re all James Dean now.”

Turne ye vnto me, saith the Lord of hostes, and I will turne vnto you:

1. Dallas Willard: “Spirituality is a matter of another reality. … [I]t is not a ‘commitment’ and it is not a ‘life-style,’ even though a commitment and a life-style will come from it. Above all it is not a social or political stance.”
2. “I wrote the music I wrote because I was suffering with mental health and depression. These songs have connected with millions of people on such a deep level because they’re being sung by someone feeling the words in the very moment they were being sung.” (Language warning.) 
3. Very cool.
4. “[D]ivorce does have a negative impact on behavior.”
5. “I like the Holy Rollers, snake handlers, and prophets of doom, because among them you feel that something is at stake.”
6. “[T]hinkers must be heretics.”
7. Good stuff here.

More:

Not wrong. Not wrong. Not wrong. Not wrong.

“‘Garlon Sampson,’ almost biblical.”

Perhaps the State Department will sanction Pakistan in light of these human rights violations. Or perhaps not.

Chesterton: “The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. … The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.”

Lord knows they all just wanna have total control (language warning):

1. Lesslie Newbigin: “How is it possible that the gospel should be credible, that people should come to believe that the power which has the last word in human affairs is represented by a man hanging on a cross? … [T]he only answer, the only hermeneutic of the gospel, is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it.”
2. “All Lives Matter” is hate speech, “Kill the Boer” is not. (Related. Related. Related—Nelson Mandela, Nobel Peace Prize winner and co-founder of the ANC’s military terrorist wing. Related.)
3. “There is a mystical core at the heart of the religious life, a radical amazement, that catalyzes and sustains righteous moral action in the world.”
4. “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.”
5. “What does the Pool of Siloam in John 9:7 have to do with the Feast of Tabernacles in John 7???”
6. “Our anniversary is a family holiday, we don’t dip out by ourselves, we have a big party at home with a nice meal with the kids.”
7. Habakkuk 2.14: “For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters couer the Sea.”

More:

‘[F]ailure meant a stripping away of the inessential.”

More than you ever knew about Tarshish.

Thread (language warning).

“How on Earth Did Jesus Become God?”

And the streets of the citie shall be full of boyes and girles playing in the streets thereof:

1. Walter Brueggemann: “Our lives are occupied territory… / occupied by a cacophony of voices, / and the din undoes us.” (John Alexander on a related note: “[T]he very structures of modernity and postmodernity … fracture our lives so deeply that they make it almost impossible for us to connect deeply with one another.”)
2. Chesterton: “An honest man falls in love with an honest woman; he wishes, therefore to marry her, to be the father of her children, to secure her and himself. All systems of government should be tested by whether he can do this.” (Related: “[F]alling fertility has been making our world older, and I think this is a big reason for the many ways it has been decaying and declining. Old secure folks are less willing to allow risky innovations or changes. They care more about keeping what they have…. Problem is, without sufficient change even what we used to have will slowly fade away.”)
3. “[I]t is virtually certain that [Jesus] used Greek at various times in his itinerant ministry.”
4. John Alexander: “Our selfishness easily becomes invisible when we’re alone.”
5. “Are you acting as a persuader or a manipulator?”
6. “[H]e also noticed a profound impact on his spiritual life.” (Related: “Jenny’s uterine cancer has become benign.”)
7. “To be sure, guilt and shame haunt us. But for my part, this understanding of our predicament doesn’t cut deep enough.”

More:

So true! So true! So true.

“The invasion of Judah by the Assyrian king Sennacherib in 701 BCE is one of the most consequential events recorded in both the Hebrew Bible (2 Kings 18:13-15) and the region’s archaeology.”

“Think of the hick-lib as a collaborator—someone who stands to gain socially, financially & gain better opportunities by helping the regime in power make the normal, sensible population of rural, red parts of the country feel surrounded, discouraged, and despondent.”

Micah 6.6-8: “Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow my selfe before the high God? shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calues of a yeere olde? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rammes, or with tenne thousands of riuers of oyle? shall I giue my first borne for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sinne of my soule?Hee hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doeth the Lord require of thee, but to do iustly, and to loue mercy, and to walke humbly with thy God?”