October 3, 2016

Abortion

Must-watch video: Confused pro-abortion witness testifies in favor of a pro-life law by Ben Johnson

Bioethics

Sperm donors: there’s an app for that in London by Michael Cook

Children Of Donor Parents Caution Against Three-Parent Babies by Glenn T. Stanton – “No child should need an org-chart to explain her artificially constructed, experimental family.”

Treat Hippocratic Doctors Like Draft Dodgers by Wesley J. Smith

Contraception

Does the pill cause depression? by Xavier Symons

Creation

Got Proof? by Rev. Ken Klaus

Devotional

Manufactured Approval
(Source: www.redeemerclc.info/ministries)

2 Corinthians 10:12: We do not dare to classify or compare ourselves with some who commend themselves. When they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are not wise.

It’s easy to exaggerate our own good qualities and forget about our faults. It’s also easy to exaggerate our neighbor’s faults and forget about his good qualities. When we insist on seeking approval by comparing ourselves to others we usually end up lying to ourselves and hurting others.

Paul says, “Don’t grade yourself by comparing yourself with others.” Paul also says, “Don’t grade yourself by comparing yourself with yourself.”

Proverbs 21:2 says, “Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the hearts.”

When we judge ourselves by human standards, we can usually find a way to come out looking pretty good. Christians, we need to stop manufacturing approval for ourselves and seek instead the approval of God.

Faith contact with Christ is the way to God’s approval. The only way. By faith in Christ the lowliest criminal finds forgiveness and approval in God’s eyes (Luke 23:39-43). Without faith in Christ even the rich and powerful find swift judgment (Acts 12:21-23). Praise God for the approval expressed in the beloved hymn:

Jesus, Thy blood and righteousness
My beauty are, my glorious dress;
Midst flaming worlds, in these arrayed,
With joy shall I lift up my head!
(The Lutheran Hymnal, 371:1)

End-of-Life

Leading Australian journalist decries push for euthanasia by Paul Russell – “Paul Kelly fears that it will change the country for ever.”

Family Living

Video: Daughter Surprises Dad With Light Up Tennis Shoes

Viral Photo of Grandpa Doing His Wife’s Hair Is True Couple Goals by Katie Jones

Movies – Television – Video

Entertainment as Indoctrination by Robin Smith – “Two current TV shows illustrate the Left’s fundamental transformation of culture.”

Worldview and Culture

Racial Reconciliation That Matters by Dr. Charles Ware

How To Handle People Who Betray You by D.C. McAllister – “Betrayal is an inversion of love, and perhaps its greatest perversion. What, then, to do with a traitor? What he will not do for you.”

Audio: Faith’n’Family – Science, Myths, and Children’s Identity with Andy Bates – “Guests Quentin Van Meter, M.D. (first half) and Rev. Dr. Matt Rueger (second half) discuss the ethics, science, and myths surrounding sexual identity and gender identity in children. Find The New Atlantis article mentioned in this discussion here. Read the American College of Pediatricians position statement on gender identity here: Gender Ideology Harms Children. Dr. Van Meter is the Vice President of the American College of Pediatricians and a Pediatric Endocrinologist. Rev. Dr. Matt Rueger is pastor of Saint John Lutheran Church in Hubbard, Iowa.”

The Man So Beautifully Out of Step by Larry Thornberry – “How to survive your era, Vin Scully style.”

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Breaking Down Courage
by James M. Kushiner, Executive Director, The Fellowship of St. James
(Source: Email, 9/3/0/16; www.fsj.org)

Hacksaw Ridge, the first film directed by Mel Gibson in ten years, depicts the true story of Desmond Doss, a conscientious objector soldier who refused to carry a gun yet was awarded the Medal of Honor, the U.S.’s highest military honor, “for personal acts of valor above and beyond the call of duty.” Doss, a Seventh Day Adventist, entrusted his life to God on the battlefield as a U.S. Army medic at Okinawa in May 1945 and personally saved the lives of an estimated 75 of his comrades while under fire. He was wounded and went on permanent disability after the war.

I’ve never seen a more compelling portrait of the unbreakable meekness that will inherit the earth: moral courage under fire sustained by faith and humility. There is beauty, grace, and pathos here to behold, and together they speak to our ultimate human questions. 

Perhaps I was primed for this by my forays into World War histories, especially my reading of The Somme by Peter Hart this summer. The book brought to the imagination in grim detail the carnage witnessed on the battlefields of the Great War. Most soldiers who witnessed it did not care to speak of it, lest the conjured memories return and re-traumatize the heart and mind. Most kept these things behind an earthen dam to hold back those floodwaters.

Hacksaw Ridge is rated R for depicting such battlefield violence, including the sights a medic would have encountered in war. The Okinawa battlefield was also a charnel house of newly- and lately-slain Allies and Japanese soldiers in various stages of decomposition, a home for vermin and pestilence. These images are not for the squeamish.

In 2004, documentary film director Terry Benedict made The Conscientious Objector about Doss. He knew Doss for 17 years before his death in 2006 at 88. At a private screening of Hacksaw Ridge last night, Benedict described how Doss told his amazing story for years–“by rote,” but never let out the full story of what he experienced until Benedict pressed him on it, friend to friend. Doss’s dam broke and he emotionally told his interior and personal story to Benedict. In the film, the Doss character does look deeply shaken after his heroics.

In relating this last night, Benedict himself swallowed hard and nearly lost it when be began to describe how Doss lost it when he opened up. Such is the power in the personal encounter of such events that, when shared friend to friend, run deeper than rote surface descriptions of a basic story line. The true story is passed on in a personal way from man to man, or in a phrase Russell Kirk often used, a conscience speaking to a conscience.

So, too, does the gospel-directed encounter with Jesus Christ rise up within our hearts, seeking to convert the whole man, deeply shaking our inner dams so that we let go of the world we clutch with our self-centered egos and love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul, and might. Those dam breaks often come with tears. Religion can give us a surface appearance of integrity we maintain; but the pure in heart, the unbreakable meek, will be the ones to see God. In Hacksaw Ridge, I saw a lightning flash of that courageous and suffering love for mankind that enlightens this dark and woeful world of war. Follow the Light.