Spiritual leaders are not elected, appointed, or created by synods or churchly assemblies. God alone makes them. —J. Oswald Sanders, Spiritual Leadership (1994) This was the character of Joshua… He understood the dynamics of choice —once for all choice and existential choice as well. —Francis Schaeffer, Joshua (1976) The Choosing of Leaders Since the creation
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What if coming from a culture shaped by the demands of growing rice also makes you better at math? —Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers (2008) Time and Chance There is more to success than genius or talent, we all know that.  Sometimes success stories are bound up with what look like coincidence and circumstance far beyond human
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They had the shadows, we have the substance. —Matthew Henry on Colossians 1:17 The Ever Circling Years In pagan religion, man helps sustain the cycles of Nature and perhaps the universe itself through ritualistic magic.  The traditional magician’s formula is, “As below, so above.”  For  pagan worship, the microcosm always turns the macrocosm—the universe.  Since
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The kingdom of this world/Is become the kingdom of our Lord, And of His Christ, and of His Christ;/And He shall reign forever and ever… —“The Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah Time… it is the one unifying constant, besides death, across the earth. We all march to the beat of its drum. Minutes stream into
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“We also predestine and condition. We decant our babies as socialized human beings, as Alphas or Epsilons, as future sewage workers or future … World controllers…” —Mr. Foster in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) “By real education I mean one that has no ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ nonsense. A real education makes the patient want what it
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He comes to make His blessings known/Far as the curse is found. —Isaac Watts Doom and Sorrow Jesus came to a broken world—a world wracked by war and disease; a world plagued by addiction, alienation, and abuse; a world polluted by bigotry, hypocrisy, and lies. A world littered with failed marriages, broken homes, and shattered
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“To hold that history is in the hands of anyone but the sovereign God is to be Satanist ultimately, because control is then transferred to creation and either to unseen malignant forces or to malignant men.” – R. J. Rushdoony In 1956, C. S. Lewis wrote a book titled Till We Have Faces.  The novel
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American citizenship means hard work, temperance, morality, and the habit of right living. —Samuel Chapman Armstrong, founder of Hampton Institute Business norms and values in the early social studies came, not from industry, but from a school whose special task was education of a docile work force. —Michael Lybarger, “Origins of Modern Social Studies” (1983)
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It is this, the human ability to create and transmit culture, that differentiates us as humans from the rest of the animal world. —Nancy Jarvis, “What Is a Culture?” Religion and Culture Culture is religion externalized.  Or put the other way around, our religious commitments always manifest themselves in our values and choices. They also
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I don’t like myself, I’m crazy about myself. ~ Mae West~ I celebrate myself, and sing myself. ~Walt Whitman~ A basic truth of life is this: you can’t get it right with others until you get it right with self and you can’t get it right with self until you get it right with God.
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