A Favorite Song (or two)

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My all-time favorite Christian band is The City Harmonic.  And this is one of my favorite songs from them:  Praise the Lord.

 When you've learned to praise the Lord - even when it doesn't come out easily, even when you're heart is still broken and you're afraid and things look dark - then you've entered a whole new level of faith.  And it's a beautiful thing.  Painfully beautiful and beautifully painful.  But it's good!

 And I will keep reposting this one, over and over again:  Oh, What Love!  

 It doesn't get any better than that!

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When Calvinists say "But predestination!" (tiny, bare-bones version)

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[Here's the tiniest version of my "But predestination!" post.  The short version with more memes and quotes and information can be  found here , and t he longest version (a series of posts full of many more Calvinist comments, my Calvinist ex-pastor's sermons, and my replies to them, written for my own amusement and for my ex-church) can be found by  starting here .  But this tiny version includes only the most basic parts you need to know, with a few memes and quotes thrown in to spice it up and prove my points.  (I know this could be much tinier, but Calvinism has so many bunny trails, so many interlocking ideas, that it's hard to address one part without addressing more.  So this is as comprehensively tiny as I dared to make it.) ] At the heart of Calvinism is predestination and God's sovereignty (among other things, like "total depravity"), which according to Calvinism essentially amounts to:  "God preplans and controls everything, even sin ...
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"But predestination!" (16B: sin, evil, suffering)

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In this series, I'm examining some things that Calvinists (especially my ex-pastor) say about predestination.   Here's the posts in the whole series:  the pastor's sermons  ("When Calvinists say 'But predestination!'"), and my comments  1-4 (election)  and  5-6 (Romans and sovereignty)  and  7-9 (depravity, Book of Life, predestine)  and  10-11 (shaming tactics, Feb. 2015)  and  12-14 (dead, regeneration, born again)  and  15 (total depravity, manipulation)   and  16A (God's Will, babies)  and  16B (sin, evil, suffering)  and  17 (double-speak and the gospel) . For the shorter "for everyone" version which has a lot less quotes and a lot less of my thoughts,  click here . Sixteen B (I broke #16 up into two halves, so picking up where we left off in the last post...) And now, moving on from the bulk of my comments to the bulk of the Calvinist quotes, showing you Calvinism in its ...
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Greeting Card Headaches

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Finding the right greeting card can be so frustrating.   Like, where is the "I'm sorry you got arrested and will probably spend the rest of your life in prison ... but even though this terribly affected our family and friends forever, I love you anyway and hope you have as merry of a Christmas as you can, under these circumstances" kind of card? Oh, the headaches of trying to find the perfect card! (And, no, I'm not joking.  I mean, yes I am, to a degree.  But in a "if I don't laugh about it, then I'll cry" kind of way.)
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Hardest Spiritual Lesson #1: Let Go

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I wrote about some of the "hardest spiritual lessons" years ago on another blog of mine, but I am updating and reposting it here.   These are normal, typical (often painful) lessons that we will all eventually struggle with (it's okay to struggle) if we continue to walk with God and to chase after a deeper relationship with Him.    (And I know there are more than I've listed here.)   In no particular order (and broken up into individual posts), here are some of the hardest lessons I've learned over the years when it comes to faith and walking with God: 1.    Let Go or Hold on? Imagine you fell over the side of a cliff and are hanging onto a tiny root sticking out the side of the cliff with one hand, and God throws a rope down to save you.  But in your other hand, you're holding onto a water bottle you think you need.  You need both hands to grab the rope and climb, but you're afraid to let go of the water bottle.   After all, w...
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Get Comfortable

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       In our country, we are told over and over again things like:        “Follow your heart.”        “Make your own way.”        “Never take ‘no’ for an answer.”        “You can be anything you want or do anything you want.”        “Apply yourself and all your dreams will come true.”        (How else could we have so many reality shows where people want to be singers?)        We are told that anything is possible.   We can make it happen by dreaming big and reaching high and wanting it badly enough.   In fact, look at all the commercials and advertisements that tell us that “We deserve it.”   It doesn’t matter what it is – a luxury car, a vacation, a break, a new phone . . . “We deserve it.”   And it doesn’t matter how little effort or hard work we put in . . . “We deserve it.”      ...
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Why is Calvinism so dangerous? #7 (Hard hearts)

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  [In this series, I'm breaking the long post   "Why is Calvinism so dangerous?"   into bite-sized pieces.] 7. The Bible (and the concordance) says ...  That when God "hardens" hearts, it is retribution for first hardening your own heart, for  resisting God for so long even after He's been patient and long-suffering with you. But Calvinism says ...  God arbitrarily chooses whose hearts to harden against Him (non-elect)  and  whose to turn to Him (elect), with no in put/responsibility on our parts. Romans 9:18:   "Therefore, God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden."   [Calvinists say "See, God hardens whomever He wants.  We have nothing to do with His choice of whom to harden and whom to elect."  But in the concordance, "hardens" is retribution for first hardening your own heart, for resisting God.  And so, yes, we do have something to do with whether we are hardened or not....
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A Place For Us All!

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  A fantastic song from a fantastic movie ( Jesus Revolution  - a favorite!):  Living Water  by Anne Wilson  As she rightly sings, "He paid  every  sinner's price!" And so "every outcast, every wrong-way, runaway rebel" - no matter who you are or where you've been - can come on down to the Living Water and find hope, healing, and eternal life in Jesus.   No one is hopeless.  No one is too far gone.  No one is destined for hell.   There's a place for us all in God's family.  All of us are able to and welcome to freely accept the gift of eternal life, paid for by Jesus's death for us all.   “For God so loved the world that he sent his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.    For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him."    ( John 3:16-17 ) "This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who w...
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Though they have eyes, they will not see

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[I originally posted this on one of my other blogs , Oct. 2021] So   according to this article , it appears that scientists have found evidence of the type of biblical destruction that happened to Sodom.  They say they found a town that was destroyed by a blast of heat so hot that it pretty much melted everything.  They say that there's no earthly natural heat source that could do this, so they speculate that it must have been an asteroid that exploded over the town, melting everything.  Oh, and they speculate that the reason no one lived there afterward was that the asteroid impact might have brought over so much salt from the nearby Dead Sea that nothing could grow.  This, they say, must be what inspired people to make up the story of Sodom in the Bible. But I say that here's your "asteroid," scientists: "The Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah - from the Lord out of the heavens.  Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, incl...
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List of Calvinist Preachers, Authors, Theologians, Websites, etc.

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I  found a lot more names to add to my list of known Calvinists (found in my various  "How to Tell if a Church, Pastor, or Website is Calvinist"  posts).  But instead of adding this huge list to all those posts, I am going to put it here, and I'll just provide a link on those posts to this one.  [FYI: I added a note at the bottom of this post on May 5, 2021.] So here it is, a "master list" of known Calvinists to help you be careful and discerning about who you listen to and where you get your theology from.  There are plenty more Calvinists out there, but these are just the names that I ran across the most.   These are either definite, self-professed Calvinists or "most likely Calvinist," in my estimation.  (I haven't heard of most of them, but it's good to know their theology before I do.)   After finding these names in various places online, I looked up each person to see if they are Calvinist.  If they did not self-identify ...
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