THE JOURNEY - PART ELEVEN

REVIEW

The Journey

Know God

Find Freedom

Discover Purpose

Make a Difference

Jeremiah 1:5 NLT

5 “I knew you before I formed you in your mother’s womb. Before you were born I set you apart and appointed you as my prophet to the nations.”

We talked about the recurring theme of scripture of the discipleship journey that is also found everywhere in scripture. From the very beginning of God’s plan of redemption and reconciliation of His creation, they were blessed to be a blessing.

Genesis 22:18 NLT

18 And through your descendants all the nations of the earth will be blessed—all because you have obeyed me.”

The culmination of this was seen at the end of the Gospels”

John 20:21 NLT

21 Again he said, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.”

In finding your place to make a difference at LHC, what should I do?

Always work from purpose backwards.

That is, why does LHC exist? And, what can I do be a part of that.

Any number of people can participate, but there is only one team. Any number of jobs are required to accomplish our goals, but there is only one team.

There are essentially two wayss to make a difference at LHC:

Service

Ministry

All are necessary, no part of the body is without it’s purpose.

All ministry is rooted in service to others.

God will always pre-qualify a person with service before He allows them into ministry.

If service is beneath you; leadership is beyond you. But, why?

“Service is the only legitimate currency of influence.” ~ PD

THE SEVEN MOUNTAIN MANDATE

Bill Bright, Lauren Cunningham, Dr. Francis Shaffer

1) Arts and Entertainment

2) Business

The two companies most actively involved in the distribution of RU 486 are Hoechst A.G. of Frankfurt, Germany, and Paris’ Roussel Uclaf.

Hoechst is a huge multinational conglomerate with 224 subsidiaries in 124 countries. It does $23.7 billion in sales each year.

Hoechst is the parent firm of Roussel, the company which actually produces and markets this lethal drug. Hoechst owns 100% of Roussel stock.

But Hoechst has a historical reason for keeping a low profile in the RU 486 debate. It is Hoechst’s infamous relationship to the I.G. Farben Chemical Company.

Farben aided the Nazis in waging aggressive warfare and perpetrating crimes against humanity by manufacturing Zyklon B, the cyanide gas used in the Nazi death camps. At Nuremberg, in 1947, 24 Farben executives were charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity.

At Auschwitz Farben exploited slave labor to build the world’s largest synthetic rubber and oil facility. This installation — dubbed “I.G. Auschwitz” — was so huge that it used as much electricity as did the entire city of Berlin. Over 25,000 inmates were worked to death in its construction.

Pfizer

3) Education

Timothy Keller - “Preaching”

Andrew Delbanco, a secular scholar at Columbia University, whose book The Death of Satan argues that “a gulf has opened up in our culture between the visibility of evil and the intellectual resources available for coping with it.” He argues that many secular people understandably attribute all human cruelty to psychological deprivation or social conditioning and, in so doing, trivialize the terrible wrongs people are capable of. Delbanco recounts the story of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who along with many of the American elites during the Holocaust gave “no priority to the rescue” of the victims. Late in the war, after the evidence for the atrocities became too great to disbelieve, the president was given Kierkegaard to read and said that, for the first time, the Christian philosopher gave him “an understanding of what it is in man that makes it possible . . . to be so evil.”

Delbanco avers that secular liberals (a group of which he considers himself a member) had lost any concept of “radical evil.”

C. E. M. Joad, a British atheist intellectual who came to belief in God after World War II. “It was because we rejected the doctrine of original sin that we on the Left were always being so disappointed; disappointed by the refusal of people to be reasonable . . . by the behavior of nations and politicians . . . above all, by the recurrent fact of war.”40

Keller, Timothy. Preaching (pp. 108-109). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

“Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.“ —  Jean Rostand Source: https://quotepark.com/quotes/1938227-ts-eliot-men-have-left-god-not-for-other-gods-they-say-bu/

Critical Race Theory

4) Family

The 2021 U.S. A Census Bureau report revealed that 18.4 million children live in fatherless households.

Households without fathers are 4 times more likely to live below the poverty line.

Approximately 7 million biological dads are absentee dads to all of their minor children.

In the United States, there are an estimated 1.8 million solo fathers living with their children.

Children of fatherless households are 2 times more likely to drop out of school.

Infant mortality rates are two times higher in fatherless households.

Adolescents from fatherless households are more likely to commit crimes.

Children growing up without a father are two times as likely to commit suicide.

5) Government

Men must be governed by God or they will be ruled by tyrants.

William Penn

As political philosophy derives its sanction from ethics, and ethics from the truth of religion, it is only by returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organization which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality.

The term “democracy,” as I have said again and again, does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces that you dislike—it can easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin. —T.S. Eliot

“God remains dead,” wrote Nietzsche. “How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it?”1 With these words Nietzsche was at once echoing Pascal’s first option that “men become gods themselves” and heralding the creation of a new type of man — a heroic individualist no longer bound to a traditional “slave” morality, but creating his own rules. Such a “superman” would exercise the “will to power.” The history of the twentieth century is littered with such “supermen” who exercised the will to power. The first monstrous tyranny was carried out by the Nazis; tens of millions died as a result. A second tyranny, Marxist Leninism, would continue to kill and destroy for decades more. During the 1980s, one-third of the world’s population lived in the viselike grip of states run by gangster-statesmen. The goal of these massive bureaucracies was to preside over the death of God; their system for achieving it was most often called Marxist Leninism.* They carried out their policies with surgical efficiency, as millions of Christians and Jews who passed through Communist gulags would testify — if they could.

Colson, Charles; Zondervan. God and Government . Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

Because of the nature of the King and the price He paid for His Kingdom, much is required of its citizens, and Jesus made these demands of the Kingdom clear. Through the centuries, however, many of His followers have watered down His teaching, stripped away His demands for the building of a righteous society, and preached an insipid religion concerned only with personal benefits. This distorted view portrays Christianity not as the powerful source of spiritual rebirth and the mediating force for justice, mercy, and love in the world, but as the ultimate self-fulfillment plan. The gospel is not a release for the captives, but confidence for the shy. It is the spiritual equivalent of racy sports cars, designer clothes, and Gordon’s Gin — a commodity to help one get more out of life.

Colson, Charles; Zondervan. God and Government . Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

6) Media

Have you seen any of the above information in the mainstream media?

Russia has consolidated the media over the past 30 years since the fall of the USSR and were able to stop all non-state sanctioned new with the closure of the one remaining independent new source at the start of the invasion of Ukraine.

7) Religion

“A great disaster had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.“ —  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Source: https://quotepark.com/quotes/1938227-ts-eliot-men-have-left-god-not-for-other-gods-they-say-bu/

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

BLAISE PASCAL