Conrad Johnson's Blog, page 8

What is Christianity? (An eternal Christmas message)

Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

A Sermon on Romans 8:3-4For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. (ESV)More than sentimentality or philosophy; discovering the facts and their meaning; the state of man by nature; condemnation explained; the principle of sin working within man; the light seen in darkness. 
Click here to listen to this timeless message from the late great Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones.

Aaron Shust in Great Falls MT

Modern Art was a CIA Weapon--Culture Wars

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

Go to article

Nancy Pearcey and Total Truth

RENT-A-KID At the U.S. Border-Get in easy

Today our border security reporter Charlotte Cuthbertson sits down with Mark Morgan, who was U.S. Border Patrol Chief under President Obama, and is also a 20 year veteran of the FBI.We discuss the roots of the crisis, the day-to-day obstacles border patrol agents face, judicial activism affecting their efforts, and how the situation at the Southern Border has changed rapidly over recent years.TO SEE FULL INTERVIEW WITH VIDEO, CLICK HERE

Science proves Genesis creation account possible

A prototype of the new printer called the CAL4

BERKELEY (KPIX 5) — Researchers at UC Berkeley and LawrenceLivermore Lab have created a new kind of 3D printer that could potentially manufacture life itself.Normal 3D printers work by building up thin layers of melted plastic to create solid objects, but it’s hard to get intricate designs to hold their form.So, design engineers at Cal and Lawrence Livermore Lab got the idea of making 3D objects the same way a CT scan creates 3D images: by hitting a patient with X-rays from many different directions.READ MORE HERE AT KPIX 5 NEWS SITEThe Creation of the World1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
    in the image of God he created him;
    male and female he created them.

Ann Corcoran on Refugee Resettlement

Preaching the Gospel of Sexual Freedom

A self-styled progressive sociologist, Nick Wolfinger, recently presented the following eye-popping summary of his latest research at the University of Virginia: "A curious and unhappy feature of family demography is the stubborn persistence of poverty in mother-headed families. In the past 40 years the income gap between single-mother and married-mother families barely changed, a surprising result given women's gains in education and the labor force." In this short paragraph, several crises converge that characterize our age: the crisis of marriage and divorce, the crisis of manhood and absent fathers, and the crisis of promiscuity and out-of-wedlock sex. And what is fascinating to me is that in every case, today's gospel of liberation from nature and religion has only compounded the problem. Preaching the gospel of no-fault divorce and the gospel of marriage unbound from its natural purposes, liberationism has weakened, not strengthened, the institution of marriage. And as a result, participation in marriage, a major correlated factor of wealth and well-being, has decreased. Preaching the gospel of individual freedom, autonomy, and self-actualization, liberationism has written fathers a blank check to pursue their own sexual and personal fulfillment apart from the hard work, responsibility, and reward that comes with heading a family.  Preaching the gospel of sexual freedom, liberationism has untethered sex from its natural purpose and consequence and removed it from its proper context, which has hit the lowest socioeconomic demographics and minority communities the hardest. In 2014, "about 29 percent of white children, 72 percent of black children, and over half of Hispanic children were born to single mothers." Preaching the gospel of female empowerment in terms of functional and ontological interchangeability with males, liberationism has, as Wolfinger points out in the paragraph above, led to no change in poverty rates among mother-headed households. What is more, by stigmatizing fatherly headship and downplaying the importance of fathers in the home through campaigns to erase gender difference, men are no longer encouraged to rise to the challenge of fatherhood and own the role for which God designed them. After telling men they aren't needed, we act surprised when they listen. The scary part about this is that the problem is self-propagating and spiraling out of control. In his report, Wolfinger goes on to document the fact that never-married mothers, a percent of the population that is increasing, are most likely to come from households of mothers that were never married themselves, while mothers that come from married and even divorced households are more likely to have intact, married families. What is to be done? Embedded within the reason given for the first no-fault divorce law in modern history, introduced by the Bolsheviks in communist Russia following the 1917 revolution, is a historical irony. The reason the Bolsheviks gave for their opposition to marriage is that they considered it to be bourgeois institution, which must be eradicated along with the bourgeoisie. History may have proven them correct, but not in the way they intended. When marriage is discarded, the bourgeoisie—the middle class—shrinks because poverty persists. And Wolfinger's report suggests that mother-headed families, women and children, have borne the brunt of this devolution. Do you want to encourage spiritual and material flourishing in your community? Don't preach the progressive gospel of liberation from design, nature, and religion. Instead, be an advocate for marriages that are fruitful. Oppose divorce. Be an advocate for active fatherhood that leads and provides for families. Oppose cultural forces that celebrate the maverick lifestyle and the deadbeat dad. Be an advocate for chastity. Oppose sexual promiscuity. And don't buy the bill of goods being sold on every corner today that female empowerment is a kind of silver bullet to all our societal ills. Wolfinger's research suggests otherwise, and in this way the book of nature points us toward the Book of Life. Marriage is not merely a bourgeois institution, although it undisputedly correlated with middle- and upper-class prosperity. Marriage is more fundamentally a divine institution. And God made us male and female for a purpose, part of which is male-headed homes that provide for and raise the next generation. You don't have a society without the family, and you don't have the family without marriage. Our radically progressive society is running on borrowed social capital as well as those natural families that persist in spite of the reigning ideologies of the day. We need to reinvest in families and in marriage, and by doing so we are investing in nothing less than justice for our society. This is our aim at CBMW, and we'll keep doing that as long as God gives us breath and we have your support. 

Second Amendment Sanctuary Cities Spring Up in USA

A growing number of states, counties, cities, and towns are declaring themselves “Second Amendment Sanctuaries” and are refusing to enforce gun-control laws that infringe on the Constitutional right to keep and bear arms.While adopting ordinances and resolutions to defy gun laws isn’t a new tactic, momentum is rapidly building – likely in response to increasing calls for more gun control at state and federal levels.GO TO FULL ARTICLE HERE

Past Due Book Review: The Democratization of American Christianity

Camp Revival Meeting, circa early 19th Century
Trying to review a decades old book with a fresh perspective is like pouring new wine into old wineskins--bursting the seams is a very real danger. Nevertheless, the importance of keeping before us how we, as a nation, got to where we are at in terms of Protestantism and politics far outweighs the pitfalls, especially in today's almost completely fragmented world of competing ideas forced upon us by a multitude of sources that keep us from what the author and Christian apologist Nancy Pearcey calls 'total truth' in her groundbreaking book of the same name. 
The Democratization of American Christianity, by author and president of Wake Forest University, Nathan O. Hatch, is a work that should be required reading in every American history class at the high school or college level today. Not only has it stood the test of time in a literary sense, it also helps the reader to see that there is nothing new under the sun in American politics and religiosity in the current climate of populism, identity politics and antidisestablishmentarianism.


 
Many will no doubt argue and firmly hold to the position that politics and faith don't mix but to deny the reality that, in fact, it is the only mix that matters says more about the denier than it does anything else. And notice that I use the word faith and not religion which is far more inclusive of the human condition. One simply cannot live long without having faith in someone or something. For Christians, it is every word that proceeds from the mouth of God (Matthew 4:4) and, in reality, for all non believers also even though they do not have ears to hear unless it is granted to them (John 6:44).
But back to the uniquely American experience of democracy in action as a reaction against professional clergy, orthodox biblical teaching and political federalism that mostly favored elite land owners who rebelled against taxation without representation from King George III from across the pond. There's no need to go into detail here because every schoolboy knows the story. But how many schoolchildren were lectured on the First Great Awakening and the role that Calvinist preachers and philosophers like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield and others like them played in setting the nation on fire for God? How many realize that the Second Great Awakening which followed a couple of decades later was more an intensely charismatic and a populist reaction to centralized government and biblical doctrine that rightly teaches predestination, or regeneration before faith? In other words, the age old debate between predestination and free will (or Calvinism and Arminianism) tore this nation apart and led, eventually, to the Civil War. Looking at it from this perspective, Hatch argues quite convincingly that American religiosity plays (and still continues to play) and integral part in shaping American culture, Christianity and politics in the 21st century. Or as he writes:
The democratic movements of the early republic all took root in the same soil, and environment that favored certain approaches, answers, and leadership styles. Competition in the religious marketplace muted the appeal of orthodox churches and amplified the message of insurgents. A variety of disparate movements manifested a common style and demeanor (pg.67).
As England's Prince of Preachers, Charles H. Spurgeon once said, "Nothing angers mankind so much as the doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of God" or "Everyone always talks about the free will of man but what about the the free will of Christ? Does he not get to choose who will be His bride?"
If you read Hatch objectively, The Democratization of American Christianity  will most likely show many how they were robbed in school of the historical truths regarding the shaping influences of American civilization, culture and politics and why we got to where we are today with preaching in the pulpit that "tickles the ears" of congregations (2 Timothy 4:3). As John Owen, perhaps the greatest theologian to come out of England during the Puritan era wrote in his commentary on Hebrews warning preachers who do not speak authoritatively and biblically about God's wrath:
Some would fancy that all threatenings belong unto the Law, as though Jesus Christ had left Himself and His gospel to be securely despised by profane and impenitent sinners; but as they will find to the contrary to their eternal ruin, so it is the will of Christ that His ministers should let them know it. These threatenings belong to the gospel, they are recorded in the gospel, and by it His ministers are commanded to make use of them (Matt 10:28; 24:50,51; 25:41; Mark 16:16; John 3:36; 2 Cor 2: 15,16; 2 Thess 1:8,9), and other places innumerable (Kregel Publications, Grand Rapids, 1968, pg. 17)
Perhaps England's most notable nonconformist preacher of the last century, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, has said it best: "There is always this danger in our sinful natures of going from one extreme to the other from cold, hard legalism to unscriptural spiritism but, as church history shows, the most powerful and life changing preaching came from men who understood the Doctrine of Election and taught it correctly with grace and truth and in love starting with Christ Himself and continuing through the running centuries." And before you dismiss this doctrine outright, consider the great men of God who have believed and preached it including St. Paul, Augustine, Martin Luther, Charles Spurgeon, Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield just to name a few. It is all the difference between a sermon like Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and the entertaining showmanship of television charlatans today like Benny Hinn and others who follow in the heretical footsteps of the early 19th century itinerant, Lorenzo Dow, which Hatch details in this history.
Hatch's notable survey of early American history and the synergy of Christianity that shaped it expertly shows how the battlefield of Scriptural truth and its players are merely manifestations of an unseen reality that would most likely shock us into a paralyzing fear if we could but see the spiritual forces constantly at war around us in what we call the 'secular' world.

In conclusion, if you're in any doubt as to why we in the United States are on the verge of something terrible and great in the history of our young, and perhaps, short lived Republic, it might benefit you to start with Hatch in one hand and the Bible in the other and then put them both down and fall to your knees in prayer...
For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm. (Ephesians 6:12-13)