Today was children's Sunday which happens in our church once a year. It was and is always a delight to see the little ones do their thing. My spiritual high was thoroughly extinguished when, the preacher couldn't resist the "pitch" instead of simply dismissing us. No one responded to the "pitch" which is a par. It doesn't seem to matter that 99% of the congregation is there precisely because they are saved and come to worship and to receive instruction on Christian living. No no no, the slim chance that there might be one person who hasn't "decided" to " accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior" is the only thing that matters. I find the very notion that a fallen being can use their fallen reason to decide that they are now one of God's elect to be repulsive. 
   Please pray with me for guidance; I do not wish to leave, I love my fellow parishioners, they are my family but, I cannot subject myself to one more bile raising pitch. Perhaps the Lord will grant me a sort of immunity to these things which I find offensive to the depths of my soul? Then again it may be time to move on, nothing is clear at the moment.
  PS. Nana gets better every day!
PPS. In spite of the matter for which I seek your prayers, my heart overflows with joy at His wondrous ways which I see at work in my brothers and sisters in the Lord. Bless His Holy Name, Amen!

There was a hiccup in site access here the last few days, concerning the (tech-speak ahead) SSL cert installation. It's expiration date hadn't passed, but Chrome, and I assume other browsers as well, were treated it as expired. It's renewed and everything is normal.

For future reference, you can still access the site if it happens again, it's just that it won't have that layer of server security that an SSL cert provides. Anything could happen; use your best judgment, but this forum right now is so under the radar that no one is going to target us for the time being.

Source: Radix Fidem: A Covenant of Faith

Quote:Spiritual birth is a separate matter from a heart-led existence.

Non-Christians can be heart-led. What makes one a Christian is the presence of His Holy Spirit in your soul. Only your heart knows for sure; your mind will simply have to take the heart’s word for it. This includes whether the Lord has brought your dead spirit to life. Trying to construct a theology on spiritual birth is guaranteed to fail, because it twists you around impossible logical puzzles. Everything the Bible has to say about it is offered in parables, or symbolic language. That’s because the thing itself is beyond the intellect’s grasp.

The symbolism is chiefly two images in Scripture. One is the idea that you are born without a living spirit. Thus, you must be born from above, as Jesus told Nicodemas. The other image is that we are born with dead spirits, and they must be brought to life by the invasion of the Holy Spirit. Neither image fully captures what is going on in the Spirit Realm.

The few apparently blunt statements in Scripture indicate that God Himself decides who is born into His Kingdom; the initiative is His alone. You can become aware in your heart that He has called you, but there is no way you can prove it to anyone else. Instead, we rely on indicators referred to as Fruit of the Spirit. Yes, people can be self-deceived or faking it if they have a strong enough will, but God promises that He will eventually expose the fakes. So it’s really a question of what you can do with people in our fallen existence, not whether you can discern the ultimate spiritual reality.

This is why there is such a powerful emphasis on conduct and covenant law. We need to take a moment to put something to rest: grace versus law. The Reformation made a lot of that and it’s actually a false dichotomy. The New Testament passage that refers to “under grace, not under law” is in the context of “law” as the Talmud, a body of human tradition that Jesus disparaged as contrary to actual revelation from God. Again, the Jewish religion of Jesus’ day was deeply perverted by the intellectual influence of Hellenism; it was not genuine Old Testament religion. Thus, saying we are not “under law” means Christian Jews had no obligation to the Talmud, except as a matter of secular government regulation. It was the legal tradition of the official Jewish government, nothing more. Meanwhile, Paul says of the Old Testament that we are obliged to study it and “rightly divide” how it still applies to our lives in Christ.

In the Radix Fidem community of faith, we have a tradition of referring to Biblical Law. The term is meant to imply the Mind of Christ, by restoring the ancient Hebrew concept of law as the will of your sovereign, not merely some body of rickety legislation. We seek to overturn all the false images of law as it arose and exists in a Western society. Instead, we breathe life back into law as the living manifestation of a Person. Jesus Himself is the Living Law of God, so we use the term “Biblical Law” referring to an organic and vivid apprehension in the heart of what God designed us for.

The written record of various Law Covenants in the Bible are expressions of that Biblical Law. They were delivered in a context, and apply to that context. The Covenant of Moses applies directly to anyone seeking to claim the mission and name of Israel – you gotta have that mission or the name means nothing. It’s the mission to reveal the nature of God and His Creation, of how to live in a fallen world, as a nation of people who, as a whole, can claim His divine favor.

The much older and less detailed Covenant of Noah still stands today as the proper covenant of law applying to all other human governments until the Return of Christ. In other words, whether any particular government recognizes it or not, God is holding them all accountable to Noah’s Law so long as rainbows appear in the sky.

Anyone who represents themselves as a follower of Christ will most certainly revere and follow the Law of Noah, and will tend to live in a way that echoes the Law of Moses. Thus, we distinguish between the ineffable Realm of the Spirit and the very real Fallen Realm of human existence. For the sake of convenience, we refer to a moral realm where those two realms overlap. Among those who live under the Fall, there is the possibility of touching the Spirit Realm by awakening the heart to rule over the mind and embracing Biblical Law.

You see, only humans are fallen. The rest of Creation remains as it was from Eden. However, Creation was meant to be under our management, so it tends to be chaotic because as fallen creatures, we are unfit and simply unable to manage Creation by the Creator’s power. By extension, we cannot properly manage our own lives in a fallen state. We are an integral part of Creation, but we are fallen, while the rest waits for us to recover our eternal natures through a heart-led life and spiritual restoration. Without the heart-led way and without spiritual birth, we are alienated from Creation. It only seems that we are somehow separate because our sense of awareness is damaged; it’s the reason Adam and Eve hid from God in the Garden. Nothing had really changed, but human awareness of ultimate truth was shattered by the Fall. Adam and Eve had closed their minds to the truth from their hearts. They didn’t know God, they didn’t know Creation and they didn’t know themselves.

The remedy is to kneel before God, to pass through the Flaming Sword at the entrance to Eden. The New Testament equates the Sword to the revelation of God. The revelation of God came first in terms of Law Covenants. But the law is not the revelation itself; the law is an earthly manifestation of God’s divine moral character. Get to know the law in that sense and you begin to understand the personality of the Father. Get to know Jesus and you know the Father.

Your mind can organize for you individually what you know about Jesus, but only your heart can truly know Him as a Person.

Our new pastor is a Baptist and Baptists hold to the prescient view of election and decision theology, fine whatever floats your boat. Sermons always end with an altar call to "accept Christ as your personal savior" week in week out. I call it "First Stepology" it's baby food and it's boring. There is no meat. I find that this borders on an obsession with adding fresh souls and little else. I have friends who are Baptists that hunger and thirst for more. I find myself filling the role of teacher for these folks, well there's only two so it's not much of a class but, they are learning and they're finding joy which is awesome, praise the Lord.
Question. Is this focus on getting people saved the primary object in the training of Baptist ministers? I ask because these friends of mine are woefully ignorant of knowledge past salvation. It pains my heart somewhat.

Source: Radix Fidem: A Covenant of Faith

Quote:The Bible offers an entirely different anthropology than is common in the West.

The previous chapter sets the stage for adopting a different mind set. But of course, that’s just mowing down the old crop previously cultivated on the roots of faith. We propose to transplant those roots into an entirely different soil and climate. We want to plow the ground and prepare it well.

This different ground of assumptions cannot be trusted to mere intellect. This is not persuasion and conversion; we aren’t selling a new product for you to buy. If this thing doesn’t call your name, then you can’t truly belong. It must be a matter of conviction, not mere opinion and belief. This is not a decision; it’s a divine calling.

In the Bible, the Hebrew concept of human nature included the heart as the seat of faith and conviction, wholly separate from the mind. They meant this rather literally; it was no mere figure of speech. Frankly, there is good American science behind such a view. In my book, Heart of Faith, I referenced a large body of scientific research that recognizes the heart as a sensory organ in its own right. While the research doesn’t propose how to use it, the scientists were able to detect a very strong energy field emanating from the heart, along with an independent neural network with nodes for processing what that field could sense – a sort of “mind” of its own. The scientists could detect this field and how it changed in the presence of other living things – humans and other creatures have their own sensory fields – but still have no idea what it all means.


We aren’t surprised that scientists don’t know what to make of it. For them, the notion that there is something beyond the intellect is simply not an option. We believe this is answered in the biblical model of humans with a potential for being ruled by their hearts instead of their brains. Not the American “heart” as the repository of sentiment, however strongly held, but something quite different. Some Bible scholars say the heart is the seat of the will. The biblical model depicts the heart as the one part of us capable of committing to God as a Person, of clinging to Him in faithfulness and loyalty. This heart also knows God on a different level. Indeed, the Holy Spirit is depicted as speaking through the heart-mind, not the intellect. God gave us our intellects to organize and implement the demands of faith in our hearts.

Obviously, this implies that the heart-mind defies mere ideas. The content of the heart cannot be packaged in words and thoughts, but rises above that level. This is partially reflected in the Hebrew approach to language itself. Hebrew is inherently different in purpose and operation from American English, for example. We use words as containers of truth; we describe things by drawing boundaries. We have a penchant for precision that way. Hebrew is not descriptive, but indicative. Words are treated as signposts, trail markers for further exploration. Ultimate truth cannot be declared in words; it cannot be known as a proposition or logical argument. Truth is known as a Person, a living being, not some static-objective-concrete body of fact. The heart is prepared to know in terms of persons and moral character that cannot be contained in mere words.

Thus, faith in Christ is not mere ideas and doctrinal orthodoxy, nor strong emotions, nor steely self-discipline in obedience, nor all of them together. Faith in Christ is a burning and yearning desire to be like Him and to please the Father. If someone asks you where you live in the sense of where the real you resides, you shouldn’t point to your head. You should seek to move the core of your awareness into the heart. This is where you will find the unshakable will to love and serve our Lord when your human resources are exhausted. This is how you know what the right thing is and that you must do it regardless of what makes sense to your mind or how you feel. You hold your opinions, but your convictions hold you.


Coming from an American background, it is wholly unlikely you will embrace our covenant, unless you first shift your sense of awareness into your heart. What we teach defies reason and broad human experience. It’s not as if American Christians can’t agree with our use of the term “heart-led” as a way of living, but the instinctive mental reaction to those words still clings to Anglo-American assumptions about reality. It does not know the Spirit Realm experientially, only as an idea. And behind the scenes of conscious thinking hides an ugly materialistic suspicion of anything that isn’t part of concrete reality. It’s exceedingly rare to escape that prison unless you can tap the power of the heart to rearrange the contents of the mind.

Of course, it doesn’t help that nearly every English translation of Scripture seems totally unaware of this. You’ll find words translated as “heart” because the original Hebrew, Aramaic of Greek words match the Anglo-American image of the heart, not that of the Hebrew people. Hebrew thinking, even in Greek writing, is rooted in a wholly different approach to expression. They would be perplexed at our American instinct to take the words at face value. The truth of the heart can never be confined to precise explanation; it can only be indicated by parables and characterizations. This is why Jesus taught in parables.

In Jesus’ day, the ancient Hebrew approach had been discarded, and was close to forgotten, by the rabbinical traditions that had embraced Hellenized intellectual traditions after Alexander the Great passed through Palestine in 323 BC. Judaism today is that Hellenized religion, not the ancient Hebrew faith of Moses. They had reduced religion to a matter of intellect and reason, and had forgotten the Hebrew tradition of trusting the heart first. This is the underlying problem behind all the debates Jesus had with the Pharisees and Scribes (the Sadducees were simply secularized). They had become legalized with nit-picking over semantics, something wholly alien to the ancient Hebrew approach.

The heart-led way is not part of our covenant; it is a prerequisite. It is presumed, and for good reason. We believe that the entire human race is equipped to make this transition. This is God’s free gift to mankind, regardless of whether they know Christ. Indeed, the heart-led approach is part of several pagan religions today, though often it is assumed without comment because it associates with non-Western cultures. Genuine pagan religions bear little resemblance to popular American notions about them. The lack of a heart-led concept is unique to Western Civilization.


Further, the very nature of the Fall in Eden was to shift from a heart-led obedience and faith in God to assertively placing human capabilities on the throne of the soul. The symbolism behind the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was the concept of “knowledge” in the sense of deciding for oneself what is good and evil. This points to the arrogance of the human intellect in presuming to discern by reason what morality is without having to defer to revelation. The intellect is fallen, so we don’t put a lot of trust in it.

Again, God gave us our minds primarily as the means to organizing and implementing what the heart knows.

On Wednesday evening, as I was walking from my car to the Church, I started singing "I stand amazed in the presence of Jesus the Nazarene". It is a blessing He grants me every time I'm on my way into the building, I'm not much of a singer but, I am loud and it never fails to bring a smile to someone's face. At least once and oftentimes many times a day, I'm literally amazed by our Lord and the fact he picked a sad sack like me for His own. It's ALL His doing, it wasn't earned, it wasn't a rational choice I picked from two alternatives. No, it was Christ alone, His grace brought me to faith in Him. I'm just a little fish in a little pond yet I can do great things. Great things that the fallen world sees as insignificant, lifting the spirits of a brother or sister who needs a boost is a great thing. To bring a blessing of comfort and joy to people is the highest service I can do in the service of Jesus Christ our Lord. So, for you, my brothers and sisters at Radix Fidem I send you a gift of joy this weekend and may God bless you all. Be Amazed at the great things He is doing in your lives. You are important in the Kingdom. Rejoice! Praise! Bless! We are His family, sought out and treasured by the Creator of All Things. Wow, this is huge... I must tell someone before this weekend is out. I better go fire up old Cannonball and take a ride on the Parkway.

One of the things I frankly fear is that folks would get an inflated view of me. When that happens, it seems they stop trying to learn and claim their own blessings from God. I'm not that special, just somewhere a short distance down the same road ahead of you, and only in just a few things, at that.

It's one thing when someone argues with me about something I post on my blog. It's another thing when their argument is eloquent and impassioned. It causes me to go back and pray and make sure I can trace the steps in my mind that brought me to the place where I could write what I did. That is, I sense the need to double check to make sure what's in my heart still leads me to that mental image and the words I chose. I'm quite willing to come under conviction for making a mistake and trying to correct it. Some of the things people argue with are simply too deeply rooted in my thinking. Sometimes I can't easily remember how I came to that conclusion.

But God has been consistently merciful in helping me trace those things back, and often adds further clarification that only reinforces my position. For example: twenty years ago I was utterly certain the US was doomed. Indeed, I was convinced in my soul that there was no turning back. Since then, that image has taken on some refinement; it's grown more prominent and clear. More than five years ago I sensed that there would be a right-wing backlash in America's future, with bloodshed a certainty. I still believe that. But for the longest time since that took shape in my mind, I was unable to say for sure what was behind that. All I knew is that it was a conviction slowly exposed to my awareness.

After today's post raised an eloquent objection, I went back and prayed. Where was this coming from? Here's what came to light: I sense in the moral realm the blind and visceral hatred of the American left for the right. Now, in countless sources of commentary, you could find folks writing about that, so it would seem obvious intellectually. However, I felt it burning in my heart as an eternal moral truth, that the Devil was on this like arson. It's not just a logical proposition; I feel it in my bones, taste it in my saliva. And because it comes from that source -- my heart -- it offers implications that reason can't find. So when I read commentary that notes this implacable division in American thinking, it simply gives shape to something I already sensed outside my conscious mind.

I'm not suggesting the right-wing is morally better; this is still the West we are talking about. But I also know from experience that righties see no need to hate like that. Somewhere along the path to where we are now, they have maintained a general willingness to negotiate and compromise. Have you noticed that virtually nothing significant has changed in recent decades when "conservatives" win control of Congress? The Court? But when lefties win, stuff does change; they don't waste the opportunity. And they do it with a vindictive flourish.

But they aren't armed. Here in America they have always relied on the hired guns of law enforcement to make things happen. They aren't like the Red Brigades, even if they are just a shade shy of communist at times. Their revolution depends on the system, a system they intend to take over completely. They are willing to do it piecemeal, but they are determined to win at all costs. There is not a single moral or ethical barrier they won't violate in the process. This thing is like a big horse ridden by a demon with a spiked quirt. Not many commentators see it in such stark terms.

Don't make the mistake of thinking I hate the lefties. I see them as victims of one of Satan's damnedest lies. Nor do I love the righties. But I do sense what's behind them in terms of demons and angels and the divine moral character of God. God will hit the lefties first, but He has harsh plans for the righties, as well. Their problem is imperial arrogance too big for words.

So I sense that vast glowing volcano of left-wing hatred in the moral realm and my mind sees no way this can keep smoldering without eventually blowing up. In the context of the current efforts to deal with an unanticipated problem -- Trump -- I don't see how they can keep from pushing things too far. My sense of right-wing tolerance says it's near the limits. I remain utterly certain that, had Clinton won, the shooting would have already started, with some of those bearing the government's sword in mutiny and things generally in chaos. In short, it would be an apocalypse. But my heart insists that God said this was unnecessary.

And to be honest, at least one factor in His changing His mind was that some tipping point was reached in the number of folks who embraced the heart-led way. Keep in mind that I did not dream up this teaching; I got it from somewhere else and simply recognized it for the truth. I seized upon it and pushed it with fervor after discovering how it answered so many questions. I intend to take full advantage of this, though I confess it's not yet obvious what that will look like because there are so very many big changes ahead of us. But while it will be painful, it won't be an apocalypse because He intends to reassert the teaching of the heart-led way. He has big plans for that.

So while I cannot say with heart-led certainty that there will be a civil war in America soon, what I can say is that it seems the only obvious result from the things my heart does tell me. Yep, that much is just my opinion, my interpretation of the things I cannot question: the unspeakable left-wing hatred, the monumental right-wing arrogance, and God's wrath falling on the US.

There's more than one way to idolize something, to knock God off of the throne and put something in His place. There's also many different ways to serve mammon, or money, material wealth and gain. It's not merely for thieves a swindlers, or for the well-connected elite making political power plays. Current systems make it very easy for the "normals" to lash themselves to the yoke of debt. There's many things that play into this phenomenon, but college loan debt can be especially heinous because of the "perverse incentives" and motivations that shovel young adults into higher education.

I shouldn't have to make a few disclaimers, but I feel I should to head off questions: no, college by itself isn't bad. Like anything in life, decisions like this are highly contextual, so there are no easy answers for people as individuals. The Bustle article in the video is probably carefully worded for maximum emotional impact, and Molyneux's commentary has plenty of flair and drama. There's nothing wrong with hyperbole, since it can speak to the heart better than mere facts can; just something to bear in mind (in the video, there are some vulgarities/scatological terms). More importantly than that, Molyneux is an atheist, 100% steeped into the Western philosophical tradition, so this post shouldn't be considered a wholesale endorsement of his views. However, his extreme skepticism of current worldly systems often align with what we teach here at Radix Fidem.

Since no one was using any of the other two optional themes for the forum, I deleted theme. That leaves just the default theme. I would leave them up but they have some functionality problems, albeit they were nothing fatal. I'd rather not have to bug hunt those things when the default theme is just fine for what we need it for.

Wrap this into your reading of Old Testament History: Ephraim's tribal leaders were often frightfully arrogant, always seeking to dominate decision-making in the nation of Israel. They were a primary source of discontent and internal rivalry.

They came by it honestly. Consider: Who was Jacob's favorite son? Who had visions of saving the whole family and them bowing down to him? And who eventually did save the household from famine by bringing them down to Egypt? Who became the viceroy of Egypt and locked in for Pharaoh his feudal power over the ancient Egyptian nobles? Joseph.

Joseph wasn't particularly arrogant, but his job required him to act in an overbearing manner in public. He was most certainly very self-assured because of his faith. He had two sons in Egypt and Jacob was able to bless them and to promote them forward as his own heirs, making them fathers of their own tribes. And in the process, he promoted Ephraim over the elder Manasseh. Try to imagine how all of this would impact Ephraim as a boy, and later as a man. His father was viceroy of Egypt and savior of Israel's household. Ambition was built into situation.

Granted, during the Exodus and Wandering, Reuben was a major problem. This was related to the fact Reuben was the first born son who lost his ranking. He slept with his father's concubine at some point. It took a while for the tribe to absorb their loss of stature. And we bear in mind that Jacob also said that Simeon and Levi, as the next two in line for primogeniture, both committed a crime back in Canaan Land that could have gotten the whole family killed -- they murdered a whole city through trickery. This put every pagan nation in Palestine on edge about Jacob's household. It's a good thing they moved to Egypt for a few centuries.

Once we get past all of that and into the Conquest, right away Ephraim starts making trouble. Joshua was an Ephraimite, but a rare humble one. Still, his leadership elevated his tribe's political stature. During the period of Judges, Ephraim remained pretty pushy. And who was the first king of Israel? Saul was an Ephraimite. He wasn't so much chosen by God as it was that God tolerated Saul's election by the nation. Saul was a nobleman and stood physically head and shoulders above most everyone else. This, when the biggest need of Israel was a warlord, not an actual "king."

But the prophecy said Judah was the royal tribe, and eventually things had to be corrected. The Tribe of Ephraim resented their loss of stature yet again. Consider that well before they even had a king, the Ephraimites and the rest of the northern tribes had already developed a somewhat different culture. Their pronunciation of words had drifted away from that of the southerners. Look up "shibboleth." That symbolizes a cultural drift that saw the northern tribes so quickly and easily drift into idolatry, far more so than in the south.

When David rose to become king, Ephraim led the northern tribes in delaying by seven years their acceptance of him as king. When Rehoboam acted a fool and provoked the nobles of the tribes, it was Ephraim that led the revolt. What you need to understand here is that we should be surprised at how long it took. All of the tribes engaged in some manner of rivalry, but Ephraim led the way in being the biggest headache of anyone trying to rally the nation for anything at all.