Monday Morning Music Ministry

3-1-21

Let’s discuss children, if you have any; or grandchildren. Or yourself, reader, if you are a young adult with friends or siblings.

You look around and, increasingly, everyday life and its components disgust you. You are bothered, troubled, worried, alarmed. You see the trash and lies being taught in schools – things that were anathema to uncountable generations throughout history; and recently unspeakable within families. What to do? An answer might be Christian schools or home-schooling.

Ah, but outside that cocoon, it is almost impossible for kids to avoid contemporary music. And when you hear ubiquitous songs and lyrics, if you can understand them, the words and concepts often are filthy. Well, there’s Christian radio…

On the other hand, you can’t escape the awful music in malls and elsewhere, invading everyone’s space. Double-down on reality – current events, news, burning issues. But. The news media on TV, in magazines and papers, on the web, it’s all so distorted, one-sided.

TV has entertainment shows, distractions. But… are there normal lives, wholesome situations, depicted any more? Sexual references, gutter morality, blasphemy and cursing, homosexuality… What shows to watch; how to be warned; and can kids avoid TV at all?

Yes, and maybe by edict, but… these same worldly and offensive challenges are everywhere we turn these days, is my point. Standards of morality, politics, “education,” sports, documentaries, the celebrity culture: we are hostages to a suicidal culture of death, its malignant worldview pressed down upon us from every side.

There is an exquisite detail about the nature of this poisonous post-Christianity. I will say what I do not believe. The guilty parties who foment these attacks and serve them up so attractively do not conspire. I don’t believe that twice a year, or whatever, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey, Tim Cook, and Bob Iger secretly congregate and plot the subversion of our culture, or coordinate the attacks on traditional values.

But that is not to say there is not a conspiracy. The Bible foretells the time we now live in. End times? Perhaps; nevertheless times of rebellion and apostasy. It could get worse, and when it does, the noxious “values” that are replacing Biblical morality and rejecting our virtuous heritage will surely precede the fall. Like now.

The second chapter of Ephesians is a letter that talks about the dual nature of the threats we face – the enemies, not enemy.

You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air.

The “prince of the power of the air” is Satan. He is in fact lord of the earthly world, roaming about seeking whom to kill and destroy. It is the devil and his influence – his myriad temptations – against whom we do battle. He is the enemy of our souls.

Yet he is one being. His influence is everywhere but his presence is not: there are demons, just as there are angels; and they oppress and attack and tempt. Their work is more manifest.

…the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience [sinners and the unsaved] among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind… were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

In other words, those in high positions have low standards of morality. They exhibit evil intentions for our democracy and our traditions, and – frankly – hate us. They do not have to get together over pizza and plot our destruction. No need to hand out assignments – who will censor this; who will corrupt that; who will cancel what.

How, then, do these people arrive at the same place, share the same perverse goals? They (and of course other millions of deluded souls) have given themselves over to the “world.” The “spirit of the age.” False values, heresies, corruption. And then we see, clearly, that such error descends downward from media moguls to celebrities to members of your school boards.

These challenges to our homes and families are as old as the Garden – heresies and denial of God’s love and guidance; prideful people who “know better” than God. And the challenges are as new as headlines of this past week!

Item: Amazon removes the faith-based biography of Justice Clarence Thomas;

Item: The television services of D James Kennedy, Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, are removed from the cable channel Lifetime.

Item: The House passes the “Equality Act” that calls the Bible “bigoted”;

Item: A man who altered himself in an attempt to be a woman (yet has a “wife”) is nominated to a cabinet position by Biden and refuses to condemn counseling three-year-olds to change their sex.

There is no “conspiracy” when pigs wallow in the same mud; it’s what they do. The spirit of the age now rages with the fury of a hurricane.

Our resistance is more necessary, and the stakes are higher, than ever. But Kristi Noem, a Pentecostal and the Governor of South Dakota, said this weekend: “They want to be our shepherds. But that requires that we see ourselves as sheep.”

We are not only more than sheep. We are “more than conquerors,” the Bible says. And Luke 10:19 reminds us that followers of Christ have authority over all demonic forces. It was never more important than now that we exercise that authority.

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Click: This World Is Not My Home, Rich Mullins

2-22-21

Rush Limbaugh died this week. Death is an eventually that comes to us all, but Rush had the somewhat unique disadvantage of knowing several months ago that his time was nigh. “Disadvantage”? Something to ponder.

For his followers it was an “advantage” – that is, versus a sudden death – because we could listen day by day to his reflections on faith, acceptance, hope, gratitude, forgiveness, encouragement, and… faith. Oh, I said that already. So did he, many times over.

Over his career, Rush did not become a preacher; and not particularly so in his last days. But as is often said, you can share the Gospel – and sometimes even use words. No listener, of his millions across the Fruited Plain, doubted that he knew who his Savior was. The Radio Revolutionary surely inspired people in his last days in matters of faith as well as in politics.

“Rest in peace,” many said.

But many people did not; have not; will not let him rest in peace. A tsunami of invective and hate began at the moment his death was announced. In conversations, on web posts, in the media. Gratitude, too; but people grateful that he died. People wishing that he suffered. Curses upon his family and friends.

Unbridled hatred.

With almost demonic fury, these people – fewer in number than his friends, I believe – have wormed into places of prominence, and cloned more such disciples. They allege horrible things – the worst of them tearfully refuted by his producer of many decades, a black man – but as with President Trump, the firestorm of hate from the Secular Left is not for things done or said, but for who these men were.

More specifically, and this is a major point, Limbaugh did, and Trump does, “get it.” They looked over horizons and saw the broader landscape of ideas and challenges. What people call the 30,000-feet view. Their allies quibble over statistics, but Limbaugh and Trump knew that statistics don’t lie… but statisticians do. The Dark State – and what is at stake today – they recognized.

Few people cut through the fog, perhaps occasionally checking “civil discourse” at the door. In the church today there are few, too few, counterparts. Franklin Graham, even more than his father Billy, gets to the salvation message, the centrality of Christ, in the first minute. I don’t mean in sermons; I mean in conversations and interviews. As we all should.

So it was not enough to defeat Trump: he has to be destroyed. Rush Limbaugh could not and cannot be dismissed – he has to be demonized and degraded.

In my little sphere, I have had phone calls and a note in my mail box wishing that… well, that I would join Rush in hell; and similar sentiments. When I once posted a photo of myself with Jack Phillips, the baker who declined to decorate a cake for a homosexual wedding, and was sued all the way to the Supreme Court… a Facebook “friend” immediately posted a message calling me (not Phillips) an obscenity. And this was a guy who previously put out feelers about collaborating with me on something or other. (Notice what Facebook does not censor.)

So they dance on Rush’s grave. They danced quickly on Herman Cain’s grave too when he died an early COVID death. His great sin was being a black conservative, successful entrepreneur, and a presidential candidate with an economic plan.

Dancing on graves – that is, destroying and not merely defeating – is the new blood sport of liberals and secularists. And, like sharks, blood in the water attracts more of them, ever more bloodthirsty.

Sometimes it is not only people but symbols. This summer’s onslaught on statues across America is of a kind. The arson against shop-owners’ stores. The desecration of public buildings. The burning of churches. Few people decried the images of Jesus and Mary defaced and smashed; or the torched historic church in Washington DC. But how loud was the scabrous venom directed at the President when he made a statement, holding aloft a Bible at its shuttered door.

None of this is new – in human history, that is; in societies when they disintegrate.

“The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones,” Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar (note to Andrea Mitchell: that’s William Shakespeare, not William Faulkner). Which, in my thesis, is why the loosed demons inspire today’s “Unity” squads to hate and destroy. They can’t stand the truth.

One grave that we remember, however, could not be danced on. The memorials to Jesus suffered superficial effects, spray painting and sometimes sledge-hammer blows this summer. The church buildings dedicated to Him were vandalized. But his grave? No one could or can dance on that, even metaphorically.

Jesus walked out of His tomb. There was no grave that could hold Him down. He conquered sin, flesh, and the devil. He lives. After all, He had more work to do, through His children.

The living do not belong in graves.

And that goes for us, too. If you have Jesus in your heart, neither can you recognize a grave that can hold you down in this life. We too have work to do.

And certainly… do not let anybody start planning to dance on your grave.

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I hope you will watch this music video, perfect with this message:

Music Vid: “There Ain’t No Grave” (For readers with hand-held devices, click or copy and paste: ) https://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=jwr-sciUwFQ

Click: There Ain’t No Grave