Living in the Kingdom

Coming to a house-church near you: persecution!

I know we all talk about persecution in countries "over there" and we tend to downplay the instances of persecution that we encounter here, but our culture is rapidly becoming more polarized on issues of religion, so stories like the one above may continue to pop up. Don't be surprised, or even outraged- meditate on these words from Savior Jesus: "If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you: 'A servant is not greater than his master.' If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you...Whoever hates me hates my Father also."

Christianity has flourished in this country since its inception in large part because the men who wrote our founding documents recognized the danger of both state-mandated religion and state-suppression of religion. More frequently, however, we are hearing about instances of "cities," "counties," or "states," which are nothing if not limbs of the government, regulating and manipulating all available laws to suppress the Christian religion. I'm not a fan of people who deny the influence of Christianity on the foundation of America, but I am not so naive as to believe  that we are a "Christian" nation. "Christian" nations don't murder 50 million babies in 40 years. "Christian" nations don't spend $14 billion on pornography every year while holding 89% of pornographic website domains (Americans own and operate 244 million pornographic websites and that number is rising hourly). 

I hope that you will revert back to the words of Jesus as you process the escalating persecution of Jesus-followers. His Kingdom is not founded on human means or laws- it is a different city, ruled by a perfect King, and it's rule is grace. As you talk about religious freedom with your friends, neighbors, co-workers, and families, remember how Jesus loved those who persecuted Him, knowing that the glory that became His through His death will also become your glory through yours. 

Mission Trip Meeting

We'll have a brief Mission Trip summary meeting on Wednesday, June 3rd, at 6:30p. We'll go over the basic schedule for the week and answer any questions that you may have. 

As always, should a question arise, please don't hesitate to contact Dustin at the office or on his cell. 

Free Car Wash!!!

Hey guys- to whoever reads this, feel free to pass the information along to friends, family, coworkers, neighbors, and whoever else you know!!!

The students who are participating in this summer's mission trip will be offering a free car wash to anyone and everyone this Saturday, May 30th, from 9a-1p in the church parking lot! This is not a fundraiser, it is simply a service to members of the church and the Carlisle community. 

Mission trip students are required to be here at the church by 8:50 Saturday morning and will need to stay until the service project ends at 1p, unless Dustin is notified beforehand of pre-existing commitments. 

Spread the word!!!!! We hope to see you Saturday!

Young Anorexics

About 2.5 million Americans suffer from anorexia. Shay Fuell was only nine years old when the fixation began.

“(I) was starting to have body-image issues and looking in the mirror sideways and just pinching my skin seeing if there was fat there,” she says.

A few years later, she was 5-feet-2 and weighed 78 pounds.

“Literally, it becomes [a part of] every thought … in your head,” she says. “You can’t think about anything else. You can’t concentrate on anything. You can’t even hold a conversation with somebody because you are thinking about the last meal that you ate or what you should be doing to work out or how you’re going to be able to throw up without anybody knowing.”

According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the number of girls under the age of 12 hospitalized for eating disorders has more than doubled since 1999.

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Teens All Thumbs When Texting and Driving

Driving while text messaging or fiddling with an MP3 player is dangerous -- even more hazardous than talking on a cell phone, a new study shows.

Researchers at Eastern Virginia Medical School and Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters in Norfolk enlisted 21 teens between the ages of 16 and 18 to take part in a series of simulated driving experiments.

Each teen sat in the bucket seat of a simulated car, driving the vehicle through simulated scenery, in rural, then urban settings in 10-minute time blocks.

First they drove through the virtual scenes without distractions of any kind. Then they drove through the same scenes while text messaging, while talking on a cell phone, and finally while operating an MP3 music player, Donald Lewis, MD, chief of Eastern Virginia Medical School’s department of pediatrics and co-researcher, tells WebMD.

The findings, although not surprising, were frightening, Lewis says.

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Adult TV for kids means earlier sex as teens

Children exposed to adult-themed movies and TV shows are likely to have sex earlier in their teenage years than their peers who were not similarly exposed, according to a new study by Children's Hospital Boston.

The results of the study were presented recently at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies in Baltimore. The study followed 754 kids first in childhood and again five years later when they were aged 12 to 18. According to the data, earlier exposure to adult content correlated to the earlier sexual activity in the teenage years.

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5 Drugs Kids Steal Most Often From Parents

You may unwittingly be a big source of prescription drugs your teen is using. And more often than not, medicine cabinets are their go-to spot of choice. 

The Partnership For a Drug-Free America's latest survey has 61 percent of teens reporting prescription drugs are easier to get than illegal drugs, up significantly from 56 percent in 2005. And 41 percent of teens mistakenly believe abuse of medicines is less dangerous than abuse of illegal street drugs. 

"One out of every two Americans is on prescription medication. So these drugs are readily available,"CBS News Medical Correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton told co-anchor Maggie Rodriguez on The Early Show Thursday. "People think they're safe because they're prescribed by a doctor, and more and more teens are turning to the medicine closet to get their drugs of use and abuse." 

Ashton went through the five classes of prescription drugs kids get most often in their own homes: 

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Device helps tame teen drivers

Looks promising.

Is America "Christian" any more?

Two good stories to check out on this issue. The first is from Jon Meacham, religion editor at Newsweek. He reports that the number of self-identifying Christians is declining, while the number of those reporting no religious affiliation has doubled in the last decade.

While this can be troubling, Pastor Mark Driscoll wrote a clarifying response for Fox News about what the numbers are actually telling us, and how the Christian church in America can and should benefit from the post-Christian nation that America is rapidly becoming. 

Dan Brown’s America

The movie treatment of his novel, “Angels and Demons,” is cleaning up at the box office this week. The sequel to “The DaVinci Code,” due out in November, might buoy the publishing industry through the recession. And if you want to understand the state of American religion, you need to understand why so many people love Dan Brown.

It isn’t just that he knows how to keep the pages turning. That’s what it takes to sell a million novels. But if you want to sell a 100 million, you need to preach as well as entertain — to present a fiction that can be read as fact, and that promises to unlock the secrets of history, the universe and God along the way.

Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots,he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.” He’s working in the same genre as Harlan Coben and James Patterson, but his real competitors are ideologues like Ayn Rand, and spiritual gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. He’s writing thrillers, but he’s selling a theology.

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Why the president’s Notre Dame speech should hearten lifers . . . a little.

For all the controversy surrounding his invitation, President Obama’s commencement address at the University of Notre Dame on Sunday actually offered pro-lifers some causes for optimism. Although it was certainly not his intention, the president’s remarks point to the profound and growing weakness of the case for America’s radical abortion laws.

Obama himself, of course, is a cause for short-term pessimism: His policies have so far been true to his pre-presidential record, and there is every reason to expect they will continue to be. And that he can often clothe his substantive extremism in the garb of rhetorical moderation — that he can step back and describe the controversy with apparent distance even as he himself pulls hard for one side — further strengthens his cause in the fight.

But his speech should leave pro-lifers optimistic, because it illustrates the transformation of the abortion debate over the past 15 years. Put simply, defenders of the Roe regime seem incapable of making a case for themselves, and when they reach for the vocabulary of American liberal democracy in an effort to make some kind of argument, they end up closer to the case for their opponents.

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Praise God!

Let's hope this story raises some noise on behalf of the babies who will never make a noise!!!

A new Gallup Poll, conducted May 7-10, finds 51% of Americans calling themselves "pro-life" on the issue of abortion and 42% "pro-choice." This is the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995.

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No Mr. President

No Mr. President

The faith of Abraham

In preparing for tonight's talk with the students about the faithfulness of God and the faith of Abraham I came across this lengthy section of John Calvin's commentary on Romans 4:21, one of the passages which we'll be covering in tonight's talk, and I wanted to share it with you in hope that your faith would be encouraged and your heart would be filled to overflowing with thoughts of God's faithful love for His children! 

"As all men acknowledge God's power, Paul seems to say nothing very extraordinary of the faith of Abraham; but experience proves, that nothing is more uncommon, or more difficult, than to ascribe to God's power the honour which it deserves. There is indeed no obstacle, however small and insignificant, by which the flesh imagines the hand of God is restrained from working. Hence it is, that in the slightest trials, the promises of God slide away from us. When there is no contest, it is true, no one, as I have said, denies that God can do all things; but as soon as anything comes in the way to impede the course of God's promise, we cast down God's power from its eminence. Hence, that it may obtain from us its right and its honour, when a contest comes, we ought to determine thus: That it is no less sufficient to overcome the obstacles of the world, than the strong rays of the sun are to dissipate the mists. We are indeed wont ever to excuse ourselves, that we derogate (detract) nothing from God's power, whenever we hesitate respecting His promises, and we commonly say, "The thought, that God promises more in His word than He can perform, (which would be a falsehood and blasphemy against Him), is by no means the cause of our hesitation; but that it is the defect which we feel in ourselves." But we do not sufficiently exalt the power of God, unless we think it to be greater than our weakness. Faith then ought not to regard our weakness, misery, and defects, but to fix wholly its attention on the power of God alone; for if it depends on our righteousness or worthiness, it can never ascend to the consideration of God's power. And it is a proof of the unbelief, of which he had before spoken, when we mete (measure out) the Lord's power with our own measure. For faith does not think that God can do all things, while it leaves Him sitting still, but when, on the contrary, it regards His power in continual exercise, and applies it, especially, to the accomplishment of His word: for the hand of God is ever ready to execute whatever He has declared by His mouth."

Soli Deo Gloria!!!

Gender Wars

No, not the kind which employ a board game to determine the supremacy of males or females. This war seeks to answer not which gender is better/smarter/stronger, but whether the genders even exist as concrete categories. Are we born male and female, as the Bible teaches, or are we androgynous creatures at birth, free to peruse our options and decide later in life whether to be male or female? This seems like a ridiculous question for those of us with a biblically-based worldview of sexuality and gender, but secular academics and politicians are weighing in on the issue with a vigorous denial of gender being an established category given to humanity from God, or whatever Creator one has a belief in. 

Albert Mohler commented on a recent op-ed piece in the NY Times: 

Controversies and debates about gender define much of today's cultural landscape.  In reality, if you take away all debates about gender, gender roles, and sexuality, our world would be a much quieter place.  Nevertheless, the world we know is a world increasingly in revolt against the idea that gender is assigned by our Creator and is thus a fixed category.

A perfect illustration of this confusion is found on the May 12, 2009 op-ed page ofThe New York Times.  There, along with articles by the paper's own columnists, was an article by Jennifer Finney Boylan, a professor of English at Colby College in Maine.

Professor Boylan argues that we should just accept and celebrate "the elusiveness of gender" and see the most difficult questions about gender as "sometimes unanswerable."

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Is narcissism on the upswing in the young? Studies disagree

Are teens and young adults more narcissistic today than in the past? That's the view of a California researcher who studies young people.

In her new book, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, psychologist Jean Twenge of San Diego State University and co-author W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia say research shows more young people today have "narcissistic traits" than in previous generations. Such traits, Twenge says, include a very positive and inflated sense of self, which is illustrated by a preoccupation with MySpace, Facebook and YouTube.

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Is Your Kid a Video-Game Addict?

Are nearly 10 percent of kids and teenagers who play video games showing signs of addiction? That’s the word from a report in the journal Psychological Science, which says that 8.5 percent of the 1,178 kids ages 8 to 18 who were randomly sampled by a 2007 Harris poll showed at least 6 of 11 addiction symptoms.

But don’t trash the Xbox just yet. First of all, the addiction symptoms included skipping household chores or homework to play, playing games to escape problems, and lying about length of playing time. If that’s true, I’m definitely addicted to reading, because I’ll happily evade vacuuming and other unpleasant aspects of life by burying my nose in a book. And who hasn’t lied when asked about staying up last night surfing Craigslist or checking out Facebook? It’s a great question, particularly since today marks the beginning of Turnoff Week, a time to consider life without video.

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Study: Nearly half of high schoolers have been hazed

PORTLAND, Maine — Authors of an ambitious survey of hazing in colleges and universities have turned their attention to high schools and discovered that many freshmen arrive on campus with experience — with 47% reporting getting hazed in high school.

As in college, high school hazing pervaded groups from sports teams to the yearbook staff and performing arts, according to professors Elizabeth Allan and Mary Madden of the University of Maine's College of Education and Human Development.

The hazing included activities from silly stunts to drinking games, with 8% of the students drinking to the point of getting sick or passing out, they said.

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Why tween girls are finally covering up

Droves of tween girls went, with their BFFs (and often their brave parents), to the newHannah Montana movie this past weekend. While the singing and dancing of course took center stage, both the tweens, decked out in their Miley Cyrus fan gear, and their parents were also paying close attention to the surprisingly modest outfits in the movie - which seems to be making modesty's comeback in the tween fashion category official. Lead by tweensetter franchises such as High School Musical,iCarly and tween queen Hannah Montana, girls are finally backing away from the the belly-shirts and short-shorts of years past.

Why are tweens no longer aspiring to dress like Britney? One reason is that in response to criticism from concerned parents, many tween entertainment properties are now featuring more innocent (and wacky) looks. As such, tweens are seeing their role models wearing cardigans instead of tube tops and they want to do the same. Additionally, tweens these days are much closer to their parents and are hyper-conscious of anything that could upset them.

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Teens on Social Networks

Making friends is important, but the experience not always positive.

Young people are going online more than ever before, and many are using social networks.

eMarketer estimates that in 2009, 15.5 million US Internet users ages 12 to 17, or 75%, will use social networks.

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As an addendum to this story, I would highly recommend that parents sit down with your teen or pre-teen child and explore their social networking page, if they have one. Teens are getting into trouble at school and at work for information and pictures that are showing up on their social networking websites, and I think a lot of that could be avoided if parents took the time to discuss the benefits and dangers of social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook. Even in my high school days, stupid decisions were only known to those who participated in them. Now, teens are showing a tendency to post their stupid decisions (often via picture form) on their Myspace or Facebook pages, available for all to see. There are potentially deleterious effects on scholastic and employment pursuits for posting lewd or otherwise inappropriate behavior online. Admissions departments at various universities are now starting to peruse prospective students' social networking activities as an aid in determining the student's suitability for admission, and employers are doing the same. A Philadelphia Eagles employee was fired last off-season for making disparaging remarks on his Facebook page about the organization for not re-signing fan favorite free safety Brian Dawkins. 

Be involved in one of the most important aspects of your teenagers life! Check their social networking pages and read their text messages. You aren't being overly intrusive if you do so, regardless of what they may say in protest. You are simply parenting, which is what you signed up for when you decided to bring new life into this world. Don't feel like a secret service agent for investigating what is going on in your teen's life. Your primary responsibility as a parent is to provide for and protect your children, not to give them autonomous freedom. This especially applies to younger teens, who often lack the experience and judgment to make proper decisions without parental involvement. 

How Abercrombie & Fitch is losing its cool

To the dismay of the Abercrombie & Fitch empire, teenagers whose parents have cut back on their allowances may be coming to a recessionary revelation: Paying $90 for torn jeans isn't that cool anymore.

While other retailers are responding to the downturn with red-lined price tags and tempting promotions, upscale Abercrombie & Fitch isn't budging on its price points. This scarf, for example, will still cost you $58. The company is fiercely protecting its image as a "premium" brand, and, as a result, it's getting snubbed big time by its once cultlike, ever-loyal fan base.

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Most American Christians Do Not Believe that Satan or the Holy Spirit Exist

While stories like this can be alarming, and at the very least indicate that we have to proclaim loudly and clearly what the Christian faith is comprised of as well as what it is not comprised of, Barna's research is comprised of people who call themselves Christians, not necessarily those who actually are Christians. A helpful book for you to check out on the discrepancy between who Barna identifies is a "Christian" and who the bible identifies as a "Christian" is John Piper's book "Finally Alive." Piper blunts the alarming edge of Barna's research by distinguishing between those who are self-identified Christians and who the Bible defines as Christians. You can purchase the book here, or download the book for free in a PDF format here. At the latter link you can also listen to the sermons that John Piper preached on John 3, which served as the basis for his book.

A new nationwide survey of adults’ spiritual beliefs, conducted by The Barna Group, suggests that Americans who consider themselves to be Christian have a diverse set of beliefs – but many of those beliefs are contradictory or, at least, inconsistent.

The survey explored beliefs about spiritual beings, the influence of faith on their life, views of the Bible, and reactions to faiths other than their own.

Views on Spiritual Beings

The Barna survey asked questions about God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, Satan, and demons. All 1,871 self-described Christians were asked about their perception of God. In total, three-quarters (78%) said he is the “all-powerful, all-knowing Creator of the universe who rules the world today.” The remaining one-quarter chose other descriptions of God – depictions that are not consistent with biblical teaching (e.g., everyone is god, god refers to the realization of human potential, etc.).

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