Month: June 2018

Kris Valloton: If you struggle with tithing, this could be why

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A great article about tithing by Kris Valloton:

Probably the most frequently asked questions about Kingdom finance are focused on the subject of the tithe. Questions like these come up all the time:

“Is the tithe a New Testament principle, or is it relegated to the Old Covenant?”
“What, exactly, is the tithe?”
“Whom should I give my tithe to, and what’s in it for me?”

These are great questions and I’ve answered some of them over here on the blog. But if you’re reading this and have similar questions, and if we were able to sit down together and talk about it, I’d follow up by asking you: “Are you trying to give more or trying to give less?”

I have been asked these tithing questions more than a hundred times, and only once in twenty years was the person who was doing the inquiring trying to give more. Most often, the people who are debating these questions have other agendas that they are often not even aware of.

WHAT’S AT THE ROOT OF YOUR STRUGGLE?

That said, let me ask you four questions that may help you come to grips with the root cause of any struggle you may have with tithing:

1. Do you trust God to take care of you? If you answered no to this then here is a great Scripture that will help you move forward in your quest to grow in trusting God: “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight” (Proverbs 3:5–6). I find that when we’re afraid that we won’t be taken care of, we hoard and try to control all of our money. Trusting God to provide in your life will set you free to express your love to Him with your tithe.

2. Do you honor the leaders over you who give an account for your life?
The writer of Hebrews gives us insight into the heavy responsibility that God has entrusted to His spiritual leaders. But in an age when family values are being exchanged for independence and even rebellion, this verse feels as if it were written to Martians, or at the least to cavemen: “Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they keep watch over your souls as those who will give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with grief, for this would be unprofitable for you” (Hebrews 13:17). To state the obvious, if you cannot honor your leaders in the sense of trusting them to steward well whatever you give, perhaps you ought to be under different leadership.

3. Are you serving Mammon (the spirit of greed and materialism) or God? You will always protect the God (or god) you are loyal to. Jesus put it best: “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth” (Matthew 6:24). If money is more important to you than God then you will protect your money more than you will trust Him.

4. Are you afraid of not having enough? I love the fact that the God of heaven cares about the practical needs we have here on earth. Jesus reassured us that the Father takes care of us with these words: “Do not worry then, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear for clothing?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things” (Matthew 6:31–32).

If you are struggling with the subject of tithing, I want to challenge you right now to stop reading and ask the Holy Spirit to search your heart. Ask Him if your resistance is really rooted in the theology of the tithe, or if there are deeper issues that trouble you. Let Him lead you into all truth and deliver you from poverty, the fear of lack, and the need for control.

HOW TO LOVE GOD WITH YOUR GENEROSITY

Let’s take a look at how the tithe can actually touch the heart of God. I believe that once we understand that this is a holy act that expresses our passion for our generous Father, that our heart issues and fears listed above become smaller and smaller.

It has always astonished me that the God of the universe actually has any interest in humans giving Him gifts at all, much less money. If you are God, what are you going to do with the stuff? All He has to do is speak and the very thing He needs appears in front of Him. So what’s up with giving to God?

There is one thing that God wants but that He cannot make happen—to be loved freely. God gave us a free will so that He could experience us freely giving our love to Him. Love, by its very nature, requires freedom of choice. Love forced or love programmed is not love at all. God is love, which means He has the capacity both to give love and to be loved. Because love “believes all things,” our trusting in God (in every way, including with our tithe) is a manifestation of loving Him (1 Corinthians 13:7).

God can discern a gift that is given out of obligation or manipulation from a gift that is rooted in love. This is evidenced in the story of Cain and Abel. Here is a short account:

“So it came about in the course of time that Cain brought an offering to the LORD of the fruit of the ground. Abel, on his part also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions. And the LORD had regard for Abel and for his offering; but for Cain and for his offering He had no regard.” (Genesis 4:3–5)

A few things come to light in this story. First, the need to give back to God is deeply rooted in human nature, so much so that Cain received no sympathy for giving God a crummy offering, even though he did it without God asking for it. I think that God had no regard for Cain’s offering because He had no respect for Cain’s motives. In other words, God refused to be manipulated by Cain’s gift. It is like having a teenage son who is in complete rebellion against you, and then he picks some old, wilted flowers out of your garden and hands them to you. You would be thinking, “What’s the catch? What is he trying to bribe me into doing?”

Unlike Cain, Abel gave God the first and best of his flock as a precious gift, and God loved it. Here lies the beauty of our wonderful Creator basking in the love of His mere mortal creature, giving Abel a pathway of expression to unleash the passion that gushed within him for his God. More than a thousand years before Moses ever wrote the Law that required the people of God to give their Creator the first and the best, Abel already was loving God freely with his extravagant gift.

So my challenge to you today is two-fold: first, work through the questions and any heart issues that may be getting in the way of your tithe. Second, when you go to tithe, give God your first and best. Lavish your love upon Him and watch the extravagant ways He will pour back out to you!

Do you want to learn more about why God cares how you spend your money? Then check out my latest book, Poverty, Riches and Wealth. I wrote it to help demystify God’s heart for us to live in true Kingdom prosperity, and I pray that it will bless you to become a blessing to those around you!

Jo Nova On Warming In The Antarctic

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You may have head on the ABC about how the Antarctic is losing its ice cover and one day will be ice free. Scientist Jo Nova puts that into context

Antarctic Ice Loss Tripled, from near zero to an extremely tiny number! (Nobody mention those volcanoes)

Quick — tax the magma

It’s another round of Antarctic Doom about next to nothing. In April Antarctica’s ice was melting five times faster than usual. Now it’s losing ice three times faster in the last five years than the 15 before that! What you won’t hear is how the Antarctic ice cap has 29 million cubic kilometers of ice and has been there for 30 million, mostly warmer, years. You also won’t hear how Antarctica was warmer in Roman Times, or that the  Antarctic Peninsula has cooled by almost 1 degree.

You also won’t hear a word about any volcanoes

The new paper has zero mentions of the word. But other scientists have published plenty of papers describing how the West Antarctic zone is being warmed from below by 1200 degrees of magma. According to scientist Dustin Schroeder and co,  it is as if the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctic is sitting on a “stovetop burner”.[1]  His words. Thwaites Glacier,, smack in the middle of the warming is being melted from below by geothermal heat. Then there is the large blob of superheated rock 60 miles below West Antarctica. The researchers use the phrase “like a blow-torch”….  Capping it off, only last year 91 new volcanoes were discovered 2km underneath the West Antarctic Rift. That’s new, as in, we didn’t know they were there.

Follow the reasoning, either a trace gas 10 kilometers up is causing some spots of Antarctica to warm and other parts to cool, or hot magma at 1,200C is. What’s more likely?

Antarctic ice, warming, melting, map, graphic, location of volcanoes, geothermal heat.

Antarctic ice is warming in West Antarctica and the Peninsula, but not over most of East Antarctica.

 

From the new paper we get the same old pattern. The biggest part of Antarctica is East Antarctica and it’s not melting — even in this alarming new paper.

I thought there was CO2 there as well?

Antarctic Melting, 2018. Graph

…

The battle of Big Meaningless Numbers

From the abstract we find tiny fractions are written up as big numbers of small units with no real context. Then they extrapolate a 6 year trend on an ice mass that’s been around for millions of years.  Adding up the losses, in this “worst of the worst” scenarios Antarctica might be losing 187 billion tonnes of ice per year (give or take a lot). That’s 187 cubic kilometers of ice, which sounds like a lot until we look at the size of the Antarctic Ice Sheet (29 million kilometers cubed). At this new “accelerated” rate the total loss is one 155,00oth of the total mass. Expressed another way, it’s 0.0006%. At this rate Antarctica will be entirely melted 155,000 years from now.

This agrees quite well with the April round of Antarctic Doom which implied it would melt in 118,000 years. Lucky us, we have 30,000 years to spare now.

The first line in the paper’s introduction:

“The ice sheets of Antarctica hold enough water to raise global sea level by 58m.”

Handy to know what people in 155,000 A.D. will be facing. Now that’s forward planning….

Stephen McAlpine: When The Bodies Start Washing Up On The Shore

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Stephen McAlpine talks about the casualties of the Sexual Revolution and the people who defend child abuse when it’s committed by their leftist heroes. Not so much tolerance for other perpetrators who have not been pre-approved such as Rolf Harris or alleged perpetrator George Pell. Just another but of lefty double standard I suppose.

As McAlpine suggests there is a huge tsunami of damage wrought by the Sexual Revolution and it is only going to get worse through the generations.

When The Bodies Start Washing Up On The Shore

STEPHENMCALPINE

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It’s been my contention that the bodies of the Sexual Revolution tsunami will eventually start to wash up on the shore.

It’s also been my contention that the church has to be prepared for that time; to put behind it its sin of falling under the spell of that cultural narrative, admitting it has been complicit in it, and first living, then telling a better story.

The liberal arm of the church decided the future lay in accepting the Sexual Revolution – only at half speed.

Many within the evangelical arm of the church decried the sexual revolution, only to practice it “in-camera”, but is now being exposed by camera for its hypocrisy.

It’s always a good time to repent.  But no time like the present, for the bodies are starting to wash up on the shore.

Thick and fast.

This came home to me reading the harrowing account of two of the children of one of the revolution’s sexual heroes, the Australian playwright and poet Dorothy Hewett in the Weekend Australian newspaper.

In my university days Hewett was lauded as pinnacle of the new age, the sexually free age in which the old repressed ways were being laundered out of our culture, and the utopian dreams of the sexual sixties and early seventies were being realised.

Only those dreams are now becoming a nightmare. Hewett’s daughters, Rozanna and Kate, have revealed that the sexual liberty of their household was a sexual dungeon in which adult men repeatedly forced both girls into sex, often at their mother’s tacit approval, and more tragically, as a way to further her own interests and image as a new age libertine.

What’s more galling is how many of those men were the heroes of the progressive narrative in Australia over the past forty years, including the late writer and film director Bob Ellis, whose every utterance and written word was viewed as gospel by the sexular Left, and who was also a speech writer for  ALP luminaries.

The searing concern, however, is that the girls thought these sexual encounters were the new normal, the way things were to be.  At least they did back then when it was happening, as Kate says in the article, there was no coercion:

“…just an understanding that he wanted to have sex with me and I just did…whenever he turned up, he’d have sex with me.  I didn’t at the time think that some big terrible thing…I was reasonably neutral about it.  I didn’t hate him.”

Rozanna recalls it like this as she and her sister slept with men twice their age:

“We felt we were special people doing special things.”

Special things like realising Mummy’s dream of a sexual utopia.

Well that’s alright then.  Except of course it wasn’t.  And for both of the girls, the dream has turned into a nightmare. Both women, now in later middle age, have been living the life if anti-depressants, therapy for decades, and a fear of the backlash of telling the stories which indict the literati and pop cultural icons of our fair land.

When Ellis died everyone lined up to laud him, from former Prime Ministers to journalists, artists and other bastions of our arts scene.  But with the bodies washing up on the shore, those days of hagiography are over.

The interesting thing is, however, those who decry the sexual revolution can carry on all they like about the body count, it’s only when the revolution’s former advocates and children line up to put the boot in that anyone sits up and takes notice.

Hence we get this in The Guardian:

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Delaney states:

finding out your literary hero is not only a grub, but had sexually abused underage girls, forces a major reconsideration of the man and his work.

Yes I imagine it must.

But not for all:

I’ve spoken this week to half a dozen people who knew Ellis (although not during the era Hewett’s parties took place – their friendship with him was more recent) and one or two are of the opinion “judge the times, not the person”. The rest of us are taking our weighty copies of Goodbye Jerusalem off the shelf and hurling them across the room.

In other words, the secular church is at as much pains to protect its sainted ones as the actual church has disgracefully, been. Of course this all happened forty years ago.  So let’s judge the times, and not the person, as per the request.

Read the rest of the story here