They couldn’t bring him to Jesus because of the crowd, so they dug a hole through the roof above his head, then they lowered the man on his mat right down in front of Jesus.
Observation
Jesus returns to his home into Capernaum. Word gets around, and the house becomes packed with visitors.
While Jesus is preaching, four men arrive carrying a paralysed man on a mat. Seeing that they cannot get close to Jesus, they climb up to the roof, dig a hole and lower the man on his mat right down in front of Jesus.
Seeing their faith, Jesus says to the paralysed man, “Your sins are forgiven.”
Some teachers of the law think to themselves that this is blasphemy. Jesus knows their thought processes, and He asks them if it is easier to heal a man than to forgive his sins.
Jesus then turns to the paralysed man and says to him, “Stand up, pick up your mat and go home.”
The main jumps up, grabs his mat, and leaves. Everyone is amazed at what God is doing.
Application
These men were desperate to get their friend to Jesus, so that He could heal him. They would not let the crowd of people block their way, so, they climbed onto the roof and dug a hole, and lowered the man down.
This is audacious faith, bold faith. They knew that Jesus would heal, so they took action based on their faith.
It wasn’t the paralysed man’s faith that impressed Jesus, but the four men who carried him.
When we are praying for healing or some other miracle, it doesn’t matter if the person involved has faith, as long as somebody has faith. We must believe that God will heal this person and then go before the throne of grace to intercede for them.
So listen carefully and take that audacious step of faith.
Listening
Lord, is there anything you want to say to me about this miracle?
Keith, the religious experts were too busy judging my words to experience a miracle. The young men just got on with doing what they needed to do to see their friend healed.
Never let your preconceived ideas stand in the way of a miracle. Listen to me and obey me. Give others the grace to see me in their own way and rejoice when healing and miracles happen, even when they seem strange.
You need to exercise both grace and discernment. As I move over this nation, evil spirits will arise to deceive the elect. You must be open to strange manifestations of my Spirit, but don’t let the manifestations of evil spirits lead people astray.
The Great Tribulation is not in our future – it is in our past! There will never be another Herod’s Temple. There will never be another Emperor Vespasian. There will never be another Great Tribulation. Cindye Coates
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese didn’t need to use ChatGPT — but probably did anyway — to script his statements yesterday morning about the terror attack at Bondi on Sunday.
“We are stronger than the cowards who did this,” he said with practised gravitas. “We refuse to let them divide us. Australia will never submit to division, violence or hatred — and we will come through this together.”
This schmaltzy liberal routine is older and even more grating than The Seekers’ I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony). Simpletons like Albo and the rest of the ruling elite who have been peddling it all their lives are the only ones unable to see what is now blindingly obvious to the rest of us.
On the contrary, Albo, many of us want to be divided. We don’t want to “come through this together” any more. We are tired of all your enforced togetherness. Instead, we want to “come through this” in a country where we feel at home, surrounded by people we can love, respect or at least have a beer with. Everyone else can — pardon me while I resist the urge to use expletives here — kindly find somewhere else to live.
Your entire schtick is based on the postwar consensus that the best way to avoid repeating the horrors of World Wars I and II is to open our borders and “tolerate” people who are different to us. The veracity of this idea was never tested. Neither were we asked if we wanted it. It was simply packaged under the cute but oxymoronic term “multiculturalism” and pushed on us in increasingly intrusive ways.
We were told that the migration of people from undeveloped countries into prosperous liberal democracies was essential and good; so good in fact that the Labor government had to pass section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act in 1995 to enforce compliance with it.
This has since spawned “hate speech” laws, which have had the intended psychological effect. Over the years, mass immigration has become unquestioningly virtuous, to the point where your government could import millions of unskilled parasites, and anybody who objected was automatically labelled a racist. By promising, through state-funded translators, to give these new arrivals loads of free things, you secured huge blocks of votes at every election.
You couldn’t care less whether these new Australians want to live among the rest of us. Turns out many of them don’t. Worse, some of them want us dead, and our culture erased. Immigrants who don’t assimilate are not immigrants, they are invaders. And eventually they act like them.
Every time the predictably “unthinkable” happens, as it did again Sunday, your instinctive response is to deny your own culpability and instead cling to the same tropes that caused the problem in the first place. That is, when you’re not throwing red herrings like gun laws out as a distraction.
Essentially, you are asking young and future Australians to reject the homogenous culture and high-trust society that allowed your generation the freedom and opportunity to become comfortably rich, and in its place put up with fragmentation, tediously shit jobs and a reduced sense of belonging in their own country.
And that’s not the only fundamentally flawed liberal idea you and the ruling elite are pushing through. You’ve told young women that motherhood is not as important as having a career, young men that their masculinity is toxic, and infant children that government childcare centres are even better than being at home, the odd serial pedophile notwithstanding.
There are alternatives to these suicidal ideas. Poland and Hungary, for example, both use taxation to encourage young people to start families, and are defiantly independent and resolute about the people they allow to settle there. It’s no coincidence that both these countries endured some of the worst atrocities in living memory. They are determined to rebuild themselves on their own terms because they know that the alternative to a strong, homogenous culture is unavoidably horrific subjugation by someone else.
Young Australians don’t have much time before your plan to replace them becomes irreversible. The attack on Sunday might be the catalyst for them to finally en masse call for an end to your suicidal empathy for foreigners, and maybe call bullshit on the rest of your anti-family, civilisation-killing novelties as well.
There are people amongst us who wish us harm. Instead of organising a wreath-laying photo opportunity at the scene of the latest crime, a proper national leader would be mobilising police and military to root out the remaining potential provocateurs and send them packing.
We’ve reached a fork in the road. Either we continue to embrace liberalism (in which case the next Bondi attack is just around the corner) or we reclaim the civilisation we were so lucky to inherit.
Because Matthew 24 has been incorrectly taught to be relevant to a modern-day church as opposed to its true first-century audience, Christian teens have had abortions based on this scripture. I was horrified to discover this years ago when speaking at a local high school and a cheerleader told me she wanted to have an abortion because Jesus said, “woe to those who are pregnant in those days.” This young lady was told by her ministers that we were in “those (last) days.” No telling how many children were aborted because of Dispensational Futuristic Eschatology. Cindye Coates