Unfortunately, too many of us can relate to the content of this poem.  Let it drive us into the open, safe arms of the only one who can give true aid and healing.

he enters at night and it is sleep that i pretend.
he stops and he listens and than advances yet again.
 
i tell my self it is not my fault but the words do not work
his abuse and selfishness has caused years of hurt.
 
every touch becomes a brick to this wall around my heart.
i want to break free but i have no tools for with to start.
 
with hands to my head i am shaken it wild,
i was forced to to be a woman no longer a child.
 
the years go by and the lack of emotions increase
i am on a never ending search for healing, revenge, answers, and peace.
 
a pinch to check reality is for a world of fairy tales.
i cut just to feel as i silently yell.
 
to ashamed to talk but the angry always shows,
so relationships stay shallow for fear they will know.
 
than a gleam of hope spouts like flowers at the end of winter,
for a moment pain is gone as love somehow enters.
 
it is only for a minute here and there,
that the wounds begin to heal but it always ends with another tear.
 
than the impossible happened and i met someone who had experienced much grief,
and with this relationship a friendship was started and i began to feel relief.
 
a brick starts to fall and the foundation begins to break.
so many emotions pouring in that at times it is to hard to take.
 
my friend was not at fault but also felt rejection and was accused,
with poison words and slashing hands he was beaten and abused.
 
to have someone he loved and called them his friend
be the very same person who was his enemy at the end.
 
it gave me hope at last to know He felt the same things,
He experienced the rejection and felt the raw pain.
 
He came through and had victory in his moment of hell.
He taught me to rise up ,stand tall and my story to tell.
 
Lives will be changed, walls will break down,
when I tell of this friend, named Jesus , that I have now found.
 
written by charlene turney
may 20, 2008

“The spiritual giants of old would not take their religion the easy way nor offer unto God that which cost them nothing.  They sought not comfort but holiness, and the pages of history are still wet with their blood and their tears.

We now live in softer times.  Woe unto us, for we have become adept in the art of comforting ourselves without power.”

-AW Tozer

The Radical Cross

“Though the cross of Christ has been beautified by the poet and the artist, the avid seeker after God is likely to find it the same savage implement of destruction it was in the days of old.  The way of the cross is still the pain-wracked path to spiritual power and fruitfulness.

So do not seek to hide from it.  Do not accept an easy way.  Do not allow yourself to be patted to sleep in a comfortable church, void of power and barren of fruit.  Do not paint the cross nor deck it with flowers.  Take it for what it is, as it is, and you will find it the rugged way to death and life.  Let it slay you utterly.” – A.W Tozer

From “Coddled or  Crucifed?”

Jael Holmberg           

Revised Photo? NOT Revised History

Was Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood and leading icon in the woman’s rights movement, a heroin of world betterment and ahead of her times? Or did she run with the Nazi idea of exterminating those who were deemed as “undesirable”?

Who better to speak for her than the lady herself? Let us look back to the titles of some of her papers, “The Negro Project” and “Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics”. How can one claim she is not for selective breeding when she calls her own cause “Birth Control: The True Eugenics”? Not only is she for it to be an option, it is to be enforced “The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind.” – Maragret Sanger

She was an undeniable advocate of the sterelization of the “unfit”, and who were the “unfit”? Sanger was clever, to state it out right would be social suicide, by using terms like “unfit” she did not have to put a name to any specific group and be branded as a racist. So she mixed her words, hiding her intent in words of care, “…medically-supervised birth control integrated into existing public health services could improve the general welfare of Negroes, and to initiate a nationwide educational program.”

Posing as an advocate for the welfare of the Negro, she hid her true intent, later saying, “We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”

Who better to propagate this dangerous concept than the Ku Klux Klan? She met with this group in 1926 and lectured to the women’s auxiliary branch afterwards saying, “Always to me any aroused group was a good group, and therefore I accepted an invitation to talk to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan…I saw through the door dim figures parading with banners and illuminated crosses…I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak…In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered.” (Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography, P.366)”

Not only was she for the death of future generations of the “unfit” she was for the abandonment of those in need, a belief hauntingly similar to that of the Nazis.

“It [charity] encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.

The most serious charge that can be brought against modern “benevolence” is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression.”

Eighty years after Margaret Sanger’s Historic speech to the Ku Klux Klan, the following situation exists:

1.      A black baby is three times more likely to be murdered in the womb than a white baby.

2.      Since 1973, abortion has reduced the black population by over 25 percent.

3.      Twice as many African-Americans have died from abortion than have died from AIDS, accidents, violent crimes, cancer, and heart disease combined.

4.      Every three days, more African-Americans are killed by abortion than have been killed by the Ku Klux Klan in its entire history.

5.      Planned Parenthood operates the nation’s largest chain of abortion clinics and almost 80 percent of its facilities are located in minority neighborhoods.

6.      About 13 percent of American women are black, but they submit to over 35 percent of the abortions.

These facts were submitted by The Black Genocide Project and if only half of their facts are correct then Sanger was indeed a clever but evil woman.  Dare I say, she was not a maiden.

http://www.blackgenocide.org/home.html

http://www.citizenreviewonline.org/special_issues/population/the_negro_project.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger

1957 Interview by Mike Wallace with Margaret Sanger:

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/sanger_margaret.html

Does God Hate?

By Eric Holmberg

Click here: Malediction to listen to one of the most awesome songs ever composed… written by our friend Kemper Crabb.

  MALEDICTION

Lyrics: Kemper Crabb
Music: Kemper Crabb & Frank Hart

The judges sat outside the law
And in their pride no evil saw
In setting teeth to Satan’s jaw
And feeding him our children

Torn from out their mother’s womb
Denied the sky, denied the tomb
Conceived in lust to their own ruin

A sacrifice to pleasure

O rid us of this evil, Lord
And turn our hearts by cross or sword
Our nation cannot long afford
To live beneath Your anger

A curse, a curse upon their heads
O save them Lord or slay them dead
And fill our country with your Dread
And turn away Your anger.

A curse, a curse upon their heads
Oh save them Lord or slay them dead
And fill our nation with your dread
And turn away Your anger

Lord, turn away Your anger

Lord, turn away Your anger

(Kyrie eleison; Christe eleison)
Lord have mercy
Christ have mercy

What is a malediction?  Its Latin prefix mal means “evil” or “cursed” and diction has to do with “speaking;” hence its meaning: “speaking evil” or more commonly “a curse.”

Its antonym benediction has as its root bene, meaning good and and therefore means a blessing.  At the end of traditional church services a spiritual leader usually pronounces a benediction or speaks a blessing on behalf of the Lord to  the people.

Are Christians ever supposed to pronounce maledictions?  Many (most?) believers would likely say, “No.”  After all doesn’t the Bible say, “Bless and not curse”?  Plus it doesn’t seem very loving or “nice.”

Well, tell all that to King David, the author of the Psalms.  They contain dozens of maledictions pronounced on God’s enemies, which just so happened to also be David’s enemies.

The fact is there is no justice without righteous wrath and punishment.  To love all indiscriminately is to minimize if not even destroy the critical distinctions between good and evil. We can not love hard work and thievery at the same time. We can not love our children and love killing them, too.   To love good also means to hate evil.   

We must learn to love the things God loves and hate the things God hates.  Does God hate?

Proverbs 6:16-19

How can we say we love our children and kill the “inconvenient” ones?  Will a just God not avenge innocent blood? 

Of course, we are not God.  Furthermore, we do not know which of those who shed innocent blood, or condone its shedding, are people upon whom God will have mercy and one day redeem.  (I happened to be one such man.)  And because “there but for the grace of God go I” we are called to love our enemies.  Or to put it in the words of the Apostle Paul:

“Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”  1 Cor. 6:9-11

So does that mean that David was wrong?  Are we to only bless and not curse? 

In David’s day, before the atoning work of the cross and the Gospel’s wonderful powerful being released into the earth, Satan was “alive and well on Planet Earth”, and often the best way to restrain evil was to see evil people destroyed.  That explains why God told Joshua to go into the promised land and kill every man, woman and child that had been marinated in the “deep things of Satan” for so many generation.  The Jews did not have the power to cast out demons and liberate their enemies.  Better to destroy them than to see the spiritual pollution than was in them gradually corrupt the people of God.

But after the cross and Pentecost — now that “He that is in us is greater than he that is in the world” (1 John 4:4) (Satan may still be alive, but he is no longer well.  He’s stumbling about with a tremendous head wound caused by a certain Man’s foot!!) — we can, through the Gospel — see God’s and our enemies redeemed.  So we pray a “good word” over them — that ironically also carries a Davidic curse: “Save them, Lord, through the power of your mercy and grace as made manifest through the cross.  But if you will not have mercy on them, if they will continue to sin and cause others to stumble (or, as in the case of abortion, to die) and hence only heap up a greater weight of Your wrath on themselves for the Day of Judgment, then stop their evil ways as you see fit.  And if that even means killing them, that is far more merciful than to allow them to continue.

As Kemper so prophetically sang:

A curse, a curse upon their heads
Oh save them Lord or slay them dead
And fill our nation with your dread
And turn away Your anger

Christian, join with me in singing that song to the Lord.

Amen.

 Be sure to read the comments on this post – in lieu of new posts this week

Expelled – Not Just for Professors Anymore…

We recently I attended a Q&A Panel Discussion including a primer on Darwinism and Intelligent Design prompted by the movie “Expelled”.  The eight panelists each presented fascinating and compelling ten minute mini-lectures on the intricacies of design and patterns from their particular fields of science.  The prestigious panel included molecular biologists, rocket scientists, professors, and social commentators. 

We all saw the movie and know that “Expelled” established the fact that the word “design” and “intelligent” are not allowed to be uttered in the same sentence from the mouth of  a teacher or research scientist lest you risk losing your career and reputation –  tenured or not. Such goes the political correct police who are empowered to banish you to the institutional nether regions.   

One of the most interesting comments came during the second half of the presentation during question and answer time. Two visiting lawyers from the Center for Academdic freedom or The Alliance Defence Fund  www.centerforacadmicfreedom.org  made some enlightening comments.  They said that suppression of free speech and research followed by persecution is not limited to professors only.   But in fact, they represent many students who have unjustly suffer reprisals from their teachers and administration for a number of view points that some universities deem as “conservative” or “religious”.  Some students have been degraded for presenting data that suggests that a monogamous marriage between one man and one woman builds stable and better environments for children.  One of their clients along with her class mates were forced to write and send letters to their legislator endorsing pending legislation for pro-homosexual marriages; and the examples when on.   

So, free speech and academic freedom seem in some cases to be just a nice paper thin PR facade for some of our major universities.  We all know that universities are inhabited by many grown-up hippy ideologist – but I thought hippies were into peace and love.  This type of behavior is more like brass knuckles to the gut when the parents and public aren’t looking.  I was worried about the new rash of day care abuse and then to be followed the nursing home abuse scandals.  Now its Darwinian materialists and hippies gone bad.  What is the world coming to?

Eric Holmberg

Erik Hollander

Does Sexual Purity Really Matter?

By The Apologetics Group

Who is the Real Jesus?

 Ever since the dawn of modern rationalism, skeptics have sought to use textual criticism, archaeology and historical reconstructions to uncover the “historical Jesus” — a wise teacher who said many wonderful things, but fulfilled no prophecies, performed no miracles and certainly did not rise from the dead in triumph over sin.

Over the past 100 years, however, startling discoveries in biblical archaeology and scholarship have all but vanquished the faulty assumptions of these doubting modernists. Regrettably, these discoveries have often been ignored by the skeptics as well as by the popular media. As a result, the liberal view still holds sway in universities and impacts the culture and even much of the church.

 This presentation explodes the myths of these critics and the movies, books and television programs that have popularized their views.

Presented in ten parts — perfect for individual, family and classroom study — viewers will be challenged to go deeper in their knowledge of Christ in order to be able to defend their faith and present the truth to a skeptical modern world – that the Jesus of the Gospels is the Jesus of history — “the same yesterday, today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).  He is the real Jesus.

Speakers include: George Grant, Ted Baehr, Stephen Mansfield, Raymond Ortlund, Phil Kayser, David Lutzweiler, Jay Grimstead, J.P. Holding, and Eric Holmberg.

Ten parts, over two hours of instruction!

Running Time: 130 minutes

You can order this DVD at: www.theapologeticsgroup.com

Written by Jay Rogers

Hosted: Eric Holmberg

Music: Ryan Holmberg