In case you haven't noticed, the economy is already on the decline. The term "economic collapse" should not conjure the image of something that suddenly halts everywhere at once. It's going to slowly break down in places, and in various sectors of economic activity. I've been praying a lot about what I might do to prepare given the resources at hand.

Yesterday, the Lord told me to go to Sam's and buy two boxes of printer paper. It's not like I had anything else I needed to do, so I went to Sam's just for that alone. The stuff we usually buy had gone up to $30 each for a big box of 5000 sheets. I didn't really want to spend that kind of money. But off to one side was this little section on the shelf with just a few boxes of another brand that was labeled "closeout." It was half-sized boxes of 2500 sheets at less than $9 each. I knew that's what I was looking for, so I grabbed two boxes.

I felt at peace about it when I got home and shoved them into a corner. With my new printer, I've been playing catch-up with stuff I revised and posted, but hadn't printed off my own copy yet. I wanted to wait until the Lord provided a more suitable printer. My wife's would have been taxed by that kind of high page count. The one I got with an donor's help the other day is just dandy for what I'm doing.

I'm trying to have a full set of Bible commentary on the shelf for when computer devices will be useless. I'm also collecting images that help to clarify the background of certain Bible passages. Sometimes it helps a great deal if you can form a mental image of the terrain for those events. For example, a good shot of Ebal and Gerizim standing near Jacob's Well, and where Sychar sits in relation to them, makes the story of the Woman at the Well come alive.There are lots of pictures not yet published in books, along with maps and so forth, that are worth saving. I've done a screen-grab from Google Earth in 3D mode of famous archaeological sites of the Bible a couple of times. All of this makes Bible teaching a lot better.

As always, do what your convictions tell you to do.

I have five daughters. Their father passed away in 2018 the youngest was 17 at that time. Needless to say I have young  adult daughters still relying on my input . They are like little chickens just peckin about at whatever interests them at the moment. They seem uninterested in much to do with Christianity. That would be much of my and their dads fault.
There is a little background. Before the end of this year their dads estate will close and they will be joint owners of the home that my oldest  and youngest live in now. I live with them too. 
My oldest daughter is planning to move in  a former boyfriend who will be getting out of prison in a month to the jointly owned home and has not discussed this with her sisters. This man claims to now be a Christian. I ask why would some who loves and serves God want to get out and live with any woman?
My youngest daughter called the parole board to let them know she does not approve of this housing assignment and gave them some background as to who owns the house. They said he could not live at an address where any owners did not agree. They would note this and he will be denied the request. 
My youngest is soon to discuss this with my oldest. 
I have been praying since since I woke today. It feels like a “Phineas get the Midianite out” kind of situation. Please beseech the Father in prayer with me that Gods Glory and Will be done.
Thank you RF family.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

The title is an intentional pun. I'm on my knees praying over things I'm discussing about my knees.

I sense that, no matter what treatment I end up getting from the VA, my legs are pretty much toast. That part of my life is coming to an end. I'll keep riding and trying to use them as much as they'll allow, but there's no real future in that direction. But I'm not ready to give up on fitness altogether. I'm praying for some kind of rowing machine, and maybe even an old rowing watercraft. That would be a fun way to explore things. I don't really know which way to go with this, but for now, it seems like the only path left open.

I'm not the kind to just give up. I'm not going to allow myself to get fat and die slowly from all the usual maladies. I'm going to go down fighting. By the same token, I'm not willing to be a burden by running another fundraiser. Just pray with me. I'll do what I can to keep using my legs as much as I can, but that party is over.

Happy birthday to Iain!

Glad you are with us, bro.

My allotment from the Lord is three people, my children and Nana. Taking care of my mother in law and hauling around my 19 year old daughter, who won't own her aversion to driving, is my job now. Anyway, Nana and I form the smallest acceptable church size of two and have church daily. One morning a couple of weeks back, I was struck dumb while praying for a spell while the Lord gave me something. I told Nana what had happened and that it might take a little bit before that message filtered up from my heart into something that made sense. It did and the next day, I understood that God had given Nana to me as a spiritual charge and that I had the authority under a valid covenant before God to rebuke the infection on her hip. The next week, the wound vac came off and the wound was improving. I should add Nana is a 74 year old blind diabetic so, infection is a serious risk. Anyway back to deep background. Yesterday, the wound vac went back on. I was perturbed so, I sought the Lord in prayer. He says to open up the prayer. Simply put, I don't have enough juice on my own and need y'all's help. Moses needed a hand holding up the staff so that the Israelites could whup up on the Amalekites. Yeah, that will do. May the Lord will direct your heart to the appropriate praying.

Lt Col. Stuart Scheller that the Father might grant he and his family fortitude and mercy.
Laura and Stephen, Jacob and Sarah for the Father to continue to awakening their spirits to the fullness of the truth as He has begun to do in their lives.
That you might stand with me asking the Father to forgive our country of our idolatries and bring repentance to the people.
Finally might you agree with me for our Father to keep me steadfast in true repentance and others like me today and until the hour of our death.

Something my Beloved said reminded me to clarify a few things. My primary ministry focus is the Covenant, and preparing for the day the Lord provokes an exodus from the mainstream churches. All the other stuff I chatter about is just alongside that one thing. Here is what my convictions say, just so you'll know where I'm coming from:

Yes, there is an information war online, and I'll be involved in that to some degree, right up to the day the Internet becomes irrelevant to what I am called to do. The ultimate focus of our faith is not online, but in our efforts to commune and fellowship as real humans in human space. We use the Net as a tool, nothing more. It's time is limited, so we darned sure better get ready for that. My faith says that my rushed investment in papers, pencils, etc., was not wasted. Meanwhile, I still need a printer, so pray with me about that. The last dying use of a computer for me will be as a glorified typewriter, which is where my first use of computers began in the 1980s.

During that short space of a few years or so before the Internet is no longer a tool of ministry, I will engage the Enemy online. I still say the single biggest threat to the gospel message is Zionism, and next to that is the neocons. I've tried to explain it before: the neocons aren't Zionists, but they use the Zionists as pawns. The neocons will throw Israel under the bus as soon as that project has served its purpose. A jillion Zionists will be awfully upset when they figure that out. Most Zionists are church folks in the first place. So the biggest mission field for my ministry is the church folks, and a major element in my message will always be to denounce Zionism, and boost the real Covenant.

In the near term, we have to deal with this crisis involving the globalist plot to murder most of the human race, and to enslave the survivors. That's going to collapse very soon, but it will be very messy before it goes away. The neocons are manipulating that whole thing as part of their theater of coming to save us. When it all gets too much to bear, they'll rise up and knock down the globalists, and do pretty much the same things to us that the globalists had planned, but with a different flavor.

And all of that is the background for our gospel message. It will be time of tribulation, very nearly an apocalypse. I have no idea what's on the other side; that's not my mission. My mission is to reestablish the meaning of the Covenant regardless of whatever else is happening.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

I got a question this morning and it provoked an academic discussion that may benefit others. It involves the meaning of the term "mysticism" and how we use it in Radix Fidem.

Mysticism is a word that indicates a means of perception, a sense of awareness. It includes a particular orientation on things in general. In the Bible, we can easily see that it's rooted in Abraham's background in Mesopotamia. You could spend your whole life trying to understand the history and culture of Mesopotamia and still only scratch the surface, since it encompasses several whole civilizations. It seems they all had certain things in common, and some that they shared with the rest of the Ancient Near East (ANE), which includes Egypt.

The ANE is our source of heart-led consciousness. Other parts of the world appear to be familiar with it, but our understanding of it in the Bible comes from the ANE. The heart isn't really the thing itself, but the heart is the one factor that connects us to the Spirit Realm. If the focus of your conscious awareness is in your head, and not in your heart, then you simply cannot connect firmly to your spirit. Of course, if your spirit is dead, you are out of luck in the first place. But if God awakens your spirit, then you simply cannot live a life of faith without moving your conscious awareness into your heart.

The wider background of the ANE on the awakening of the spirit is pretty fuzzy. We sense that there were some who had it, but never came to our kind of faith for any number of different reasons. Abraham seemed to be spiritually aware before God called him, but there's a lot we cannot know from where we are today. You can also discern that Balaam had some form of connection to the Spirit Realm, as did the Three Magi. We've lost a lot of their legacy over the centuries.

What we do know for now is that your heart is the seat of faith. Faith is like a separate faculty, higher and much more powerful than mere human intellect. Mysticism is the orientation that takes seriously what the heart has to say to our minds. By probing our convictions on different moral questions, we gain a sense of what our heart knows. If we trust that path for getting answers, and strive to make our flesh obey, then we are exercising faith. It's good if the intellect has been seasoned by Bible study, but that's not enough by itself. Faith breathes life into what the mind can learn from Scripture.

Christian Mysticism is the basic orientation that says God is a living Person who speaks to us personally. Understanding the Bible is not merely a question of intellectual analysis. We assume that it's right and just to understand what the Bible says by giving priority to the moving of the Spirit in our hearts. Your convictions are a repository in your heart of God's will for you individually; it's what the finger of God wrote on your heart before birth. The point is to expose what His finger wrote there, to get familiar with it and obey what it demands of us. It comes across as an imperative: you must do this; you must not do that. It's rooted in our identity, our sense of who we are.

To someone without a heart-led consciousness, this looks like gobbledygook. It looks like subjective wishful thinking to the intellect. Keep in mind that the fallen intellect is endlessly arrogant and boastful about its capabilities. It rejects divine revelation instinctively. This is true in any cultural background, but it is critical to the identity of what Western Civilization means. Now, anyone can observe the very real effects of genuine faith, but the intellect cannot explain it completely. Because the West is a very ugly mix of Greco-Roman rationality (with a dose of superstition Westerners pretend isn't there) and pagan Germanic superstition, it isn't purely rational. It pretends to be Aristotelian, but can't get rid of the spooky unexplained stuff that actually happens.

So, Western tradition includes something that claims to be mysticism, but isn't the same thing. It substitutes a range of intellectual capabilities that don't get much attention. Chief among them is intuition. That's normally consigned to the spooky realm, but it's not that hard to explain. Intuition is largely a talent for pattern recognition. If you are really good at it, when analyzing something, you can skip over certain logical steps and arrive at a valid answer. The brain really is supposed to do that. If you start trying to use things like intuition as a means of analyzing spooky stuff around you, it's going to look a lot like mysticism. It's not mysticism, because it's not a genuine connection to the Spirit Realm, but from the viewpoint of the intellect, it looks the same.

Thus, Western tradition, to include the wide range of superstitions from outside the ANE, has it's own brand of mysticism. The Western brand of mysticism is bogus. It leads to things like Gnosticism, the Kabbala, etc. Judaism is part of this, in that it abstracts Old Testament documents from the perspective of Western rational and intuitive analysis. Judaism is what happened when rabbis ditched the ANE mysticism of Hebrew culture and replaced it with Hellenistic reasoning. That's throwing away an awfully large body of culture going all the way back to Abraham, at the very least, and replacing it with Aristotle. Aristotle was a pagan who was acquainted with ancient Hebrew religion and rejected it. He's roasting in Hell right now, as it were.

But Aristotle is our primary source today for the assertion that we must rely on "propositional truth." This is where we get Bibliolatry (worship of the Bible as an idol) in modern evangelical Christianity. It subconsciously assumes that the intellect is not fallen, but that it can be perfected in the flesh. We still hold ourselves accountable to what the Bible says, but we don't read it through the same glasses as evangelicals do (nor Catholics, Orthodox, Jews, etc.). We strive to approach the Bible the way Abraham would, as Moses did, and Jesus, too. The boundaries offered by ANE mysticism in general, and Hebrew mysticism in particular, are sufficiently knowable to provide a reliable guide. We can trust God to speak to and through our own hearts in this way, because it's how He worked with those who wrote the Bible.

Yes, the results tend to be conflicting at times, but a critical element in our testimony is how we handle those variations. Mysticism is the approach that helps us to discern what we need to work with each other. There can be no clear and precise logical solution for all humanity for all time. It is dynamic and living, and we need decide only what we have to do to have peace with God in the here and now.