The days of punishment are coming,
the days of reckoning are at hand.
Let Israel know this.
Because your sins are so many
and your hostility so great,
the prophet is considered a fool,
the
inspired man a maniac. (Hosea 9:7 NIV).
Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. (Galatians 6:7-8 NIV).
Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. (Galatians 6:7-8 NIV).
I
will have to share with you the honest truth. Sometimes I feel that
the blessed days of America are being replaced by a cursed nightmare
in which we reap the consequences of bald materialism. Now we look
to things, drugs, and alcohol to uplift our spirits rather than to
humbly seek the face of God. Somehow we see this as sophisticated
realism rather than the deadly addiction to escapism it actually
represents. We in fact have in practice embraced the conviction of
our one-time adversary Karl Marx that religion is the opiate of the
people. The irony of this reversal in perspective is so great as to
indicate a certain lunacy on our part. We have reduced religion to
just another marketplace commodity that we cavalierly take or leave.
We completely ignore the long painful history of the consequences of
spiritual apostasy and in our phony sophistication assume that we are
above all that—past all that—with our modern brave new world of
gadgetry and our fevered cacophony of hype. I will be the first to
admit that as regards religion there is, as Jesus himself found, much
to criticize and reject—Christian terrorists can and do sometimes
fill pulpits and pews. But let us not throw out the baby with the
bath—abandoning the spiritual reality of Jesus and substituting in
its place glittering but tawdry substitutes. When we judge ourselves
and thus self-justify whatever we do, we clinch a certain destiny and
strike foreboding chords of doom.
Music video: Joyful,
joyful we adore thee.wmv
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