Sideboard

In the dining room of early American homes, almost, always, a sideboard, a large piece of furniture from which food from the kitchen was placed and diners served their plate. I so well remember that my mother would place her many Christmas cakes on the sideboard in preparation for Christmas feasting.

Supposedly, Christmas activity stared today, Black Friday. If any one had any doubts about satin controlling the world, the day after thanksgiving, BLACK FRIDAY. You expect the heathen to act like a heathen, spending, spreeing, stand in line, to buy junk. The thing that bothers me, those who claim the name of Christ, pretending to know Christ, acting like the world, the flesh, the devil. We have reached the place that unless you are Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or some other minor religion, you call yourself Christian. How many Romans 12 Christians do you know? Even cults like Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Seventh Day Adventists, call themselves Christians. Even well known preachers such as Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, TD Jakes call themselves ministers of the gospel. Don't waste your time digging out what these people actually believe. Much like Joel Osteen, an entertainer, one without any ministerial or theological background, said on TV when asked about Asian religions, “I don't believe they are God's best.”

Why not use a sideboard-buffet-cafateria selection. Just pick and choose what you want to believe. Some of my family, who are buffet Baptists, have said to me, “I don't believe that or I don't think this.” It make s no difference what they think or believe, it is what God says that matters. Liberal denominations have messed up people with their lost pastors. Baptists, the largest non-Catholic denomination have led the way, with a cauldron-blender-spattering “of this and that”. At least you can look at Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Unitarians, etc. with their women and in many cases lesbian preachers, same sex marriages, pro choice-pro abortion, democrat party stance, and know, without a doubt, that such are just fooling themselves.

In my lifetime, churches as well as nations have bowed to Baal... and nations as well as churches are paying the price. Two men, crippled, walking with two canes had great influence on my life, Drs. Cecil Johnson, UNC-CH, Dean and Vance Havner, great Baptist preacher. Dr. Havner Said, “The greatest distance known to man is the 14” between a man's brain and his heart.” How well I remember many teachers, particularly, C.B. Ramsey who, at Bellevue Baptist Church, Memphis, TN, taught the large Sunday School class of men studying to be doctors. He would give the lesson with tears running down his face. So intent was he that the listeners would know the concern, the courage, the commitment to Jesus Christ. In this time of doctrine-less, moral-less, Christ-less “religion” no wonder that churchianity instead of Christianity occupies the pulpits and the pews. “judgment begins with the House of God.” (1 Peter 4:17)

This week, national radio “Christian” talk show. Professor from Westminster seminary, “so-called” specialist talking about Thanksgiving, early pilgrims. HE DID NOT KNOW, a professor, how many died the first winter. Is it possible for preachers or professors to embarrass themselves any more with their total lack of knowledge? Their lost condition? The lost condition of people and the world around them? On the sideboard of vocations, choices, you do not pick, God picks you.

In the Broadway Musical, Porgy and Bess, song, I got plenty of nothing it is at a time of economic depression, such as now, that most find how little of this world's goods, they actually own. America, the world, debt that can never be repaid. Working their entire lives, saving, clipping coupons, just to have the basics of a comfortable life, most have found their savings gone, their lives turned upside down. It breaks my heart to think that most people live their entire life in a dream world. I hear about those standing on each side of the red carpet on Oscar nights, as the celebrities, from their limousines, in their finery, walk into a Hollywood Theatre. The masses there and on television, dreaming of such. Just today, people camped out for days and hours at stores, things, dreams, searching for happiness “in the wrong places”. Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. (1 John 2:15) Advertising agencies, psychologists, satanic forces, have just made US GLORIFIED MONKEYS.

In my long life of “people-watching” I have found that the average unbeliever knows nothing about science or Darwinism, knows nothing about theology or creationism, Has never spent 20 hours In actual study determining the reason for man's belief in Jesus Christ, faith, and the need for salvation. In life's lottery, on the sideboard, afforded by state-controlled media and education, they have just picked, as did Eve in the garden, low hanging fruit that looks good-easy-exciting. We do not want the challenge of thinking, knowing how we have been hoodwinked. For instance, fifty years ago when I was studying the medical sciences, birth control was new and exciting, now the new and exciting study is In Vitro Fertilization. Be careful of sideboard tampering.

Conversations

One of the most memorable plays on Broadway is Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,”  first produced in 1938.  The scenes from a New Hampshire town finalize with a cemetery scene in which towns' people buried in the cemetery sit in chairs and carry on conversations about their past lives.  One young girl named Emily is undecided about returning to life, but she gives the famous answer about the living, “they don’t understand.” 

In all study of human behavior the greatest mystery is man's inhumanity to man and our total inability to comprehend the strength and weaknesses of others.  Aristotle described the human brain as a vast cosmos.  Frederick Niche, one of the early founders of the “god is dead” doctrine, a famed atheist philosopher, was also a pianist. His realization that life is not an even “playing field” helped him understand why he could not play the piano as well as some. 

William Golding wrote the famous book which become a movie “Lord of the Flies.”  In this epic, a shipload of English school boys sinks and they find themselves on a deserted island.  It was amazing how quick these well educated, sophisticated English school boys became savages.  An officer on the English ship who finally rescued them said he “would have expected better from British boys.” 

Real Christians understand savagery and undisciplined lives because we know that only God can change the heart.  And this comes by grace and faith through Jesus Christ and nothing else.  In conversations with the atheist in the academic community “and I firmly believe the last bulwark of true communism is the academic communities of the US,” (in my visits in communist university in Russia and China I did not find as much communist, Godless Marxism indoctrination as I find in American colleges).

The Godless, Marxist, communist countries such as Russia, North Korea and China, are poverty stricken in other ways.  The people there, in conversations with them, have a pathological poverty of ideas with a sick loyalty to nationality.  They have resigned themselves to a life of obedience for the sake of surviving.  As was the desire of Marx, Mao or even ACLU founder in this country Rodger Baldwin, the only value of a human being is his value to the state. 

When crossing Russia on the Tran Siberian Railroad, I don’t remember the name of the town, but I did get off the train briefly, I remember there was a large iron bear in front of the station. Departing from the train was long lines of prisoners chained together heading for the prison camps of Siberia, where they would work as slave labor.  I saw the same thing happening around the railroad tracks at Irkutsk and near Lake Baikal (It contains more water than all of the North American Great Lakes combined).  Conversations about religions and slavery are always useless to those who do not know the truth “Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth.”  (JOHN 17:17)

C.S. Lewis, known for writing the “Screwtape Letters” and “The Chronicles of Narnia,“  when he was converted to Christianity was known as  “the most dejected, reluctant convert in all England.”  But later wrote the book “Mere Christianity” and became one of the most prolific Christian writers.  His conversations, before he died, shared that the only hope of the world and those in the world who are the slaves of political and religious ideology such as communism and Islam, are not to be compared to those who are the slaves of unbelief in the Christian God of holiness.  “ye shall therefore be holy, for I am holy.” ( Leviticus 11:45). 

Like the man who, lame from birth, lay by the gate beautiful of the second temple for 40 years begging and was healed by Peter, only the disabled, slavery to physical ailments suffering from the poverty of pain as well as the conversations of people who pride themselves into an act of charity, can know the loneliness and defenselessness from humanity.  The Jews who had conversations about the man's poverty before he was healed, then had conversations about his jubilation, after his healing and after he held on to his deliverers, cannot possibly know the mental anguish of the mental behaviors of others.  Our conversations like our actions should always demonstrate a generosity of human spirit because the only difference in the human spirit and that of the lower animals is that of our nervous system, our ability to think.