2020: We Can All Understand!

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  2020 Version of Things

Here's hoping 2021 is better!

[Update: And now here's the new one for 2021.  That didn't take long.  But I'm glad to see we're trying to laugh about it.]


[And another update from February 15, 2021: I am adding this note here because I don't know where else to put it.  I just wanted to share this story which I believe confirms my idea that our online devices are indeed listening to us all the time, even when we don't know it.  Our online service is used for our few tablets, phones, and laptops, but we don't have smart TV's or one of those always-on units that listens and responds when you ask it questions.  Well, yesterday we had some friends over, and we got to talking about the movie "Return to Oz" from 1985, about how creepy it was.  We talked about it for just a couple minutes, maybe 2-3.  Well, a couple hours after they left, I turned on a tablet, looked at the home "news page" (through the search engine that starts with "goo" and ends with "gle") and - lo an behold! - there was an article about why Return to Oz wasn't a bad movie.  I think there's NO WAY on earth that could be a coincidence, not when that's such an old, obscure movie.  I think "they" are listening.  Always listening.  Even when we don't know it and didn't set it up that way.  Creepy and disturbing!]

Most Popular Posts of the Week:

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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Why is Calvinism so dangerous? #12 (Predestination, election)

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  [In this series, I'm breaking the long post   "Why is Calvinism so dangerous?"   into bite-sized pieces.] 12.  (We're getting closer to the end.  It's gonna go faster now.) Calvinism says ...  "Predestination/election/chosen" verses are always about God predestining people for salvation. No wonder they have so much support for their view.   But the Bible shows ...  "Predestination/election/chosen" verses are a bout God predetermining other things, such as predestining that believers will  grow  to be more like Christ, be redeemed, get an inheritance,  bring God  glory, or about God choosing the generation that would be the first to get salvation through faith in Jesus, or about God choosing people for certain jobs, roles, responsibilities, etc.  It's  never  about God   predestining certain people  for heaven . A sampling of verses Calvinists use to "prove" Calvinist predestination [and what...
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Hardest Spiritual Lesson #5: Just do your job

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Finally, another "hardest spiritual lesson" (here's #4: Thankfulness , #3: Praise , #2: Prunings , and #1: Let Go ): 5.    Obediently Doing Your Job and Letting God Do His Okay now, be honest and raise your hand if   you like to lead instead of follow?    To push through with your plans and make things happen?    To set your own rules and goals?  To follow your dreams?  To stand in the spotlight?   Our world values go-getters and leaders - people who succeed, who make the impossible possible, who dream big dreams and make them come true.    It doesn’t put much value on  people who shine the spotlight on someone else, who spend their lives in service to someone else, who work quietly in the background, or who follow and obey what someone else tells them to do .    It doesn’t respect submission, obedience, and following, not nearly as much as it does autonomy, self-reliance, and leading.    And so the wor...
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It is a dreadful thing ...

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"Then [Jesus] said to them: 'Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.  There will be great earthquakes, famines, and pestilences in various places, and fearful events and great signs from heaven."   Luke 21:10-11 Any of this sound familiar, kinda like newspaper headlines? I'm not sure how much time we have left, but I wouldn't wait too long. "Seek the Lord while he may be found; call on him while he is near."  Isaiah 55:6 "But wait," you say, "isn't God all soft and squishy, all about making us happy and giving us what we want?" “I gave you empty stomachs in every city and lack of bread in every town, yet you have not returned to me,” declares the Lord...  "I also withheld rain from you when the harvest was still three months away... People staggered from town to town for water but did not get enough to drink, yet you have not returned to me,” declares the Lord...  "Many times I struck your gardens a...
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An Angel and a Wink

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I try not to think too much about the death of my 30-year-old sister-in-law last week (she left behind 3 kids under age 6 for my brother to raise alone now).  I'm afraid if I think about it too much, I'll start crying.  And if I start crying, I might not stop.   In fact, I couldn't even go into the room where her body was during the funeral because there were so many pictures around of her and my brother and their happy, smiling children.  My goodness, to see the happy family in the pictures - the children who have no mother now - absolutely breaks my heart.  So I watched the children in the kitchen while the funeral happened. Thankfully, the children seem too young to really understand.  When I first got there, my 5-year-old nephew told me, "Come on and see my mom.  Come see my mom."  And he dragged me up to the casket.  And as he said, "There's my mom," his voice cracked ever-so-slightly with sadness.  But then he skipped out ...
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My Everyday Prayer (part 3)

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            “Pour out on us Your love, grace, and mercy, for we are bankrupt without these.   Protect us from evil and surround us with Your Heavenly angels, for we are desperate for Your care and protection.   We cannot fight this battle without You!”             I have a hard time praying that God pours out His blessings on us, like the “prosperity gospel” preachers teach.   Instead, I am learning to pray that He helps me be content with the life He has given me, to notice the blessings that are already there.   To find Him in it.
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John Calvin Adds Things That Aren't In The Bible

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This is a section from my post "Problems in John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion."   I wanted to break that long post up into smaller sections long ago, but I never got around to it, until now. This is Point #4 from the original post: Calvin adds things that aren't in the Bible (at least not in our translations of the Bible). Such as (these are just a couple examples), in Book 1, Chapter 16, section 5, he refers to Matthew 10:29 by saying, "Not a sparrow falls to the ground without the will of his Father."   However, he basically added the word "will," which makes it sound more like God willed the sparrow to die, that every time anything happens it's because God actively willed it to happen.  But there is only one translation I can find that has the word "Father's will" in it, the World English translation.  Every other one just says something like "apart from the Father" or "the Father...
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I So Needed This Today - "Strength In Your Struggles"

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I desperately needed this sermon today: Tony Evans Speaks on Strength in Your Struggles .  Such a great one! Last week sometime, I made a very deliberate effort to decide to not believe that everything goes wrong all the time, to have hope that things were going to be okay and that I'd make it through the crushing trials .  Generally, I wake up with a feeling of anxiety (and I have for over 3 years now), but that morning I had decided "No more!  I can't keep living like this.  I'm just going to trust that God's got it in His hands and that it's going to be okay.  I am just too tired to be anxious anymore."  And I felt rather relaxed for the day, in a way I hadn't in a long time.  And it felt good! And then ... that very night ... the night I felt like I had finally turned a new leaf ... one of my young sons comes to me sobbing for the first time ever about the anxiety he feels about life.  I had no idea that was going on inside of him....
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"Secret Ambition" by Michael W. Smith

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I have always, always loved this song:  Secret Ambition by Michael W. Smith I don't know why we don't hear it more often! If we have a Lord and Savior who is big enough, good enough, and loving enough to face torture and death on a cross so that He Himself could pay the penalty that we owe for our sins so that we could be forgiven and spend eternity with Him, then we can trust that He is big enough, good enough, and loving enough to handle any fear or concern or trial we might be going through right now! And personally, I like the way that the Jesus in this video gets really angry and aggressively overturns the tables of the people who turned God's house into a marketplace.  It reminds me that we don't have a wimpy God.  We have a strong, powerful, holy, righteousness-loving God.   And so in a world where we few faithful Christians can feel so helpless in the face of growing evil and corruption, we can take comfort in knowing that we have a big, powerful God w...
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Calvinism doesn't rescue anyone

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Calvinism doesn’t rescue any sinner from hell.  Because the elect were never on their way to hell, never at risk of going to hell at any point in time ... and the non-elect can never be rescued from hell because Calvi-Jesus never died for them and because Calvi-god made it impossible for them to believe. All Calvinism does is convince some people that they’ve always been saved without ever having to do anything about it, not even choosing to believe in Jesus (because in Calvinism, we  can't  choose to believe), while convincing others that they can never be saved, that God doesn’t love them, that Jesus didn’t die for them, and that there’s no hope for them. A lie from the pit of hell.  Destroying the evangelical church from the inside out.  And it will cost people their souls. [A comment I left on the Soteriology 101 post  "(Re)Thinking through Romans 9" , with a few small alterations.  And of course, not all Calvinists will word things this way. ...
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