What I wrote Mary is factual. I did not hear you say that it was untrue but that it is hateful and judging. Sometimes the truth hurts. There are things that are right and wrong and God is very concerned about them. God has given us His Word to tell us what right and wrong are. I am a great sinner and I know it. My claim is not that I am righteous and others are not but I am maintaining that there are things that are evil in God’s sight and many of our leaders embrace them. This leaves you and me to decide where we are going to stand. Does it trouble you that the President is a staunch advocate of infant murder? Does it trouble you that he did not even want babies who survived abortions to receive medical care? What do you agree with him about that is more important to you? I believe entirely in God’s forgiveness for those who seek it but those who persist in advocating evil must be spoken against. Did you notice the Bible verse at the top of my post from Ephesians 5? The Bible not only commands us to avoid evil but to expose it. Is abortion evil? Should it be exposed? My great concern isn’t to be thought nice, there are little ones who cannot speak for themselves and their lives mean more to me than being thought nice by anyone flesh and blood or not. I am sure many Germans in Germany did not really think that what was being done to the Jews was that wrong. But what do we think in hindsight? Many supporters of the President willfully close their eyes to what he supports and all the while he comes out and warns us that we will be judged if we don’t keep children safe.

Just so you know, I don’t give a damn about the Republican Party or Democrats. Ronald Reagan and both Bush Presidents did not act as they should have with their authority to bring an end to a national sin that should be halted. I am not a Bush man or Reagan man, all this means nothing to me. As for President Obama, measure his positions with God’s Word Mary, for it is God’s Word that we will all be judged by not our political persuasions.

As to Jesus…He did make clear to us what righteousness and unrighteousness is. The truh is not hateful, but keeping truth from people is and so is encouraging them in sin. I may love the President far more than his political supporters do for I am at least willing to speak truth to him. I am afraid that the Jesus of the Bible is not the Jesus that many say they believe in. For example a Jesus who said this:

Matthew 10:34-38 “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

Or this…

Matthew 10:16-22 “Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Beware of men, for they will deliver you over to courts and flog you in their synagogues, and you will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake, to bear witness before them and the Gentiles. When they deliver you over, do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say, for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour. For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death, and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.”

What Jesus makes clear is that belonging to Him and declaring His truth is costly and divides. It ultimately divides families and ultimately leads to persecution. Did you notice that Jesus said that His people will be dragged before kings for His sake? What do you think this is in reference to? Is it not about truth? Is it not clear that what God’s people have to say to rulers will be a condemnation of their ways? Do you believe that our government is seeking to honor God Mary? Do you believe their policies must be judged according to God’s standard? Does God turn His eyes away from what the President is doing? Does He want His people to stand by and say nothing about actions that harm others? This is not Christianity. I believe you belong to the Roman Catholic Church and if so, do you know what the church’s positions are on the President’s policies? Is the Catholic church and the Pope being hateful when they condemn abortion and homosexual marriage?

We must all choose where we are going to stand. If anything in our political party’s platform means more to us than God’s truth then woe to us.

If you think me hateful or judgemental I am sorry, I am not. As sinful as I am, truth matters to me. I believe there is a great day coming. I believe also that much of the evil that is taking place in our day is linked to the fact that we will not turn from our ways. Some of these sins came about under Republicans, some from Democrats, from my heart and yours, they are sins all the same. It is not my concern to be loyal to any party or leader or even my family but instead to God and His truth and I would urge you to join me in standing with God and His truth over a President or party.

Love, Gary

What is a gravatar?

Letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams[the 18th century spelling of some words has not been altered]

April 11, 1823
“DEAR SIR, — The wishes expressed, in your last favor, that I may continue in life and health until I become a Calvinist, at least in his exclamation of `mon Dieu! jusque à quand’! would make me immortal. I can never join Calvin in addressing his god. He was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was Daemonism. If ever man worshipped a false god, he did. The being described in his 5. points is not the God whom you and I acknowledge and adore, the Creator and benevolent governor of the world; but a daemon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable to believe in no god at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin. Indeed I think that every Christian sect gives a great handle to Atheism by their general dogma that, without a revelation, there would not be sufficient proof of the being of a god. Now one sixth of mankind only are supposed to be Christians: the other five sixths then, who do not believe in the Jewish and Christian revelation, are without a knowledge of the existence of a god!”

“And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”

“This gives completely a gain de cause to the disciples of Ocellus, Timaeus, Spinosa, Diderot and D’Holbach. The argument which they rest on as triumphant and unanswerable is that, in every hypothesis of Cosmogony you must admit an eternal pre-existence of something; and according to the rule of sound philosophy, you are never to employ two principles to solve a difficulty when one will suffice. They say then that it is more simple to believe at once in the eternal pre-existence of the world, as it is now going on, and may for ever go on by the principle of reproduction which we see and witness, than to believe in the eternal pre-existence of an ulterior cause, or Creator of the world, a being whom we see not, and know not, of whose form substance and mode or place of existence, or of action no sense informs us, no power of the mind enables us to delineate or comprehend. On the contrary I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in it’s parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of it’s composition.”
Another primary source proof is “The Jefferson’s Bible: the Life and Moral of Jesus of Nazareth.” In this book, Jefferson compiled in chronological order the teachings of Jesus selecting what he thought were “diamonds” of wisdom” and separating them from New Testament passages that he thought were contrary to reason and that he defined a “dunghill.”
These writings ought to give us pause for thought.Not all Founding Fathers thought exactly like Jefferson, but Deism was the predominant philosophy of their period. They welcomed God and Jesus Christ into national life, but would we advocate and encourage the reading of the Jefferson’s Bible or his thoughts and beliefs as expounded in his letter? Whether the leading Founding Fathers were predominantly Deists or Christians is important now as it was back in their time because they they wrote about their views and influenced their contemporaries. In our own times there are still many people who read historical documents, study American writers, and are exposed to their version of Christianity.
Thank you for listening the very “long” answer of a former English high school teacher.