Please Sign the "Manhattan Declaration"

    I cannot urge readers of this blog site strongly enough to go to www.manhattandeclaration.org and sign the "Manhattan Declaration," a document which most major evangelical leaders have already heartily endorsed.  The home page for the document details its three main thrusts:

We are Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christians who have united at this hour to reaffirm fundamental truths about justice and the common good, and to call upon our fellow citizens, believers and non-believers alike, to join us in defending them. These truths are:

1. the sanctity of human life

2. the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife

3. the rights of conscience and religious liberty.

 

 

No Limits to Our Appetites Here

    The great colonial American pastor Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) once preached a magnifcent sermon titled "Spiritual Appetites Need No Bounds."  In Edwards's day many preachers understood the Old Testament book Song of Solomon (also known as the "Song of Songs") mainly to paint a picture of the love relationship between Jesus and the church.  Edwards thus based his sermon on Song of Solomon 5:1.  Whether his choice of a text was right our wrong, his words are certainly spot-on, and they breathe the passionate and unbounded love for God that we all want to enjoy in the deepest recesses of our hearts.  In the following paragraph Edwards explains that the command to eat and drink in abundance in Song of Solomon 5:1 is a call to satisfy our deepest spiritual appetites in the beauty and glory of God:

Men cannot exceed the degreee of those [spiritual] appetites.  There is no such thing as inordinateness in holy affections; there is no such thing as excess in longings after the discoveries of the beauty of Christ Jesus, greater degrees of holiness, or the enjoyment of communion with God.  Men may be as covetous as they please (if I may so speak) after spiritual riches, as eager as they please to heap up treasure in heaven, as ambitious as they please of spiritual and eternal honor and glory, and as voluptuous as they please with respect to spiritual pleasure.

Jonathan Edwards, "Spiritual Appetites Need No Bounds," reprinted in The Puritan Pulpit: Jonathan Edwards (Morgan, Penn.: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 2004), 227.

 

   

 

 

 

 

Why John Calvin Locked the Church Doors

    The great Protestant Reformer John Calvin served as pastor of the St. Peter's church in Geneva from 1536-38 and again from 1541 until his death in 1564.  After Sunday morning services would end at the church, it was Calvin's custom to lock the doors to the buidling.  Why did he do so?  It was an act Calvin intended to carry weighty symbolism.  "Christians, having been fed and equipped, refeshed and nourished, are to be in the world, according to Calvin."  (Stephen Nichols, The Reformation: How a Monk and a Mallet Changed the World; Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2007; p. 79.)  In other words, the church building is a place where, among other things, we build Christians up so that they are able to go out into the world and live and share the gospel, in the power of the Holy Spirit. 

    We used to have a sign posted at the exit to our church property that we need to replace, because it served the same end as Calvin's locking of the doors.  Just as people left our parking lot they would see this reminder: "You are now entering the mission field."  May the Lord help us to recover that sense, for his glory.

 

 

 

Pro-Lifers Need to Act on Health-Care Legislation

            The health-care bill filed last week by House speaker Nancy Pelosi may come up for a vote as early as the end of this week.  This morning’s Washington Post reports that there may be enough Democrats who object to the pro-abortion provisions of the bill (as many as 40) that it could be defeated.  “The abortion dispute centers both on federal subsidies that would be provided for people who cannot afford health-care coverage themselves and the much-debated government insurance alternative, which is included in the Hose version of the bill but is still being debated in the Senate,” the Post reports (www.wahsingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article.html).

 

            Though the bill reported out of the Senate Finance Committee three weeks ago differs from this House version of health-care legislation in many respects, the pro-abortion portions of the two pieces of legislation are complex but essentially the same.  In a recent letter to Speaker Pelosi signed by 183 House members and led by Democrat Bart Stupak of Michigan, members argued that “[t]he U.S. government should not be in the business of promoting abortion as health care.  Real health care is about saving and nurturing life, not about taking life.”

 

            Would you please take the time today to email your two U.S. senators and your U.S. House representative to let them know of your opposition to the abortion provisions in health care legislation as it now stands?  Whatever else you may think of this legislation, these provisions run headlong into the Bible’s teaching that God’s people must upheld the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death.  Here is the short email I will be sending today:

 

Dear Congressman/Senator ________________:

 

            I write you today to express my adamant opposition to any health-care legislation that includes provisions for federal financing of abortion, as do both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s bill filed last week and the bill reported out of the Senate Finance Committee on October 13.  I agree with all my heart with the 183 members of the House of Representatives who signed a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and who argued that “[t]he U.S. government should not be in the business of promoting abortion as health care.  Real health care is about saving and nurturing life, not about taking life.”  It is the duty of the law to protect human life from conception to natural death, and the two bills pending at this time instead promote a “culture of death.”  Thank you very much for opposing the health care bills as they are now written.

 

Respectfully yours,

Stephen E. Farish

Libertyville, Illinois