Friday, August 26, 2022

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!"

(← Click to see full-size) This is a familiar expression not only to Christians but also to the secularists who decry the hypocrisy of some who call themselves Christians. If someone tells me he won't believe in Christ because there are hypocrites in the Church, I reply – "There's always room for one more!" You see, to some extent we are all hypocrites, even Christians.

The Lord Jesus Christ repeats the phrase "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" seven times in Matthew 23:13-29 – it's called "the seven-fold woes." Also as this picture illustrates, when the Scribes and Pharisees brought to the Lord a woman caught in adultery, he put them in their place by saying – "He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone" (see John 8:1-11).

There are two kinds of hypocrites: those who sincerely believe that they're doing God a favor by their strict hyper-religiosity and those who are consciously aware that they are trying to deceive people by their hyper-religious acting. What lies behind these texts is that we so often identify with the self-righteous Scribes and Pharisees, pointing our finger at "the lowlife scum, the alcoholics, drug addicts, fornicators, homos, and social parasites" ...as all the while there are three of our fingers pointing back at us.

If the Lord meant these words to be directed only to the Scribes and Pharisees, there would be no need to record them in the Gospels. No, these words are recorded for us too, that's why they're in the Gospels. What is the remedy for this malady of the soul? See Luke 18:10-14 –

"Two men went up into the temple to pray; one was a Pharisee, and the other was a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed to himself like this: 'God, I thank you, that I am not like the rest of men, extortioners, unrighteous, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week. I give tithes of all that I get.' But the tax collector, standing far away, wouldn't even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner!' I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted."

The only cure for the sins of pride, deceit, and hypocrisy is humility – "God, be merciful to me, a sinner! Lord, have mercy!"

(Get this as a separate article on our ARC-News blog at blogspot.com.)

Friday, August 12, 2022

The Sheep and the Goats

goats don't turn into sheep The Lord Jesus, in Matthew ch. 25, gave us the parable of the sheep and the goats: the sheep go to heaven but the goats go to hell. Some believe we are predestined to one fate or the other, there's nothing you can do about it, no way to change your fate, you're "born that way." But is this always true?

Last week, we read about Eusygnius the Martyr of Antioch in our online "Morning Prayers and Readings." Eusygnius was martyred for his confession of faith to the Emperor Julian "the Apostate." Julian had been raised as a Christian, he studied the faith with Basil the Great and Gregory the Theologian and was even tonsured a reader in the Church. But later, Julian apostacized, he denied the faith and attempted to return his whole empire to paganism.

So it is possible for someone to confess Christ and later to deny Him like Judas did, to apostacize. Some will say – "Well, he never really believed in Christ to begin with!" But history is replete with stories of people who really thought they were believers and had eternal security, a guaranteed ticket to heaven, so they fell into sin – like pastors absconding with the church secretary and millions of dollars from their church – and thus denying Christ. Like Julian the Apostate, a "sheep" can become a "goat."

On the other hand, in a small number of cases "goats" can turn into "sheep" – read "Switching Sides: The Elusive ‘Russian Legion’ Fighting With Ukraine" about Russian soldiers and civilians who have joined the top-secret Russian Legion because they could not with a good conscience fight against Ukraine or stand idly by. Such conversions among adults are quite rare: for example, the most fruitful fields for evangelism are among teens and young adults – deathbed confessions of faith occur very seldom because as people grow older, they become more and more set in their ways. But they can happen!

In Matthew 10:14-15 we read – "Whoever doesn't receive you, nor hear your words, as you go out of that house or that city, shake off the dust from your feet. Most assuredly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on Judgment Day than for that city." As the Lord Jesus was sending out His 12 apostles to evangelize, He told them there would be many who would reject the Gospel and the consequences would be more severe for these "religious" people who were stuck in their mistaken beliefs than for the homosexual perverts in Sodom and Gomorrah who tried to rape God's angelic messengers.

Some pro-LGBTQ folks twist this Scripture text to say the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah refers to not offering hospitality to strangers. But a straightforward reading of this text and other related texts contradict this notion, for example Ezekiel 16:49-50 – "Behold, this was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: pride, fullness of bread, and prosperous ease was in her and in her daughters; neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. They were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw fit." Instead of offering hospitality, the homosexuals of Sodom and Gomorrah committed abomination before God.

As we see in the article "IT'S "NOT MORAL" TO REQUEST ABSTINENCE TO STOP MONKEYPOX: LGBT ACTIVIST," there are some LGBTQ people who will insist that their lifestyle is moral and anyone who doesn't condone it is immoral and a "hater." Their value system is turned upside-down. But the point here is not chiefly about homosexuality. The context is evangelism and about people's refusing to accept the Good News: that is a worse sin than homosexual behavior.

It may be difficult and rare for hardened people to convert, but once in a while a "goat" can be converted and become a "sheep"! As Romans 12:1-2 states – "Therefore I urge you, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service. Don't be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God."

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Saturday, July 30, 2022

Build a "DIY" Booklet Rack!

(← Click to see full-screen.) We've designed and built a "DIY" booklet rack for our free 5.5" x 8.5" booklets. You can too, by using these downloadable PDF instructions (set print size to "print to paper") on how to build them yourself from a sheet of 1/4" x 2' x 4' plywood. This booklet rack will cost just about $20 for materials. The only tools and supplies you need are a hammer and 3/4" wire brads, a sabre saw, a drill, wood glue, some sandpaper, paint and a brush. A donation jar is optional. It helps to have a workbench, If you have any further questions about it, write us.

To find these booklets, go to this page: https://agape-biblia.org/literatura/, press Ctrl-F and search for "5.5" (without the quotes) to see the title, author's name, number of pages, and description; or click → here ← for a list of just the titles with the direct link to each booklet.

Here are just a couple of these booklets: Building the New City - St. Basil's Social Vision, by Paul Schroeder. This 16-page booklet is a concise overview of St. Basil's "New City." He donated all his wealth to the poor for constructing the "New City" just outside Caesarea. He devised a new approach for monastics: both monks and nuns should serve God by serving mankind. Basil's Basiliad or "New City" had a hospital, lodging for pilgrims, and housing for the poor and elderly along with the monasteries.

And read Building the ARC by this webmaster. This 11-page essay and 9 pages of sketches illustrate a way to put St. Basil's "New City" (above) into practice on a realistic small scale for a single parish. You might ask - "Why would I want to build an ARC, anyway? Do I look like Noah?" How do you start building it? First, you gather people together who are committed to living together as Christians in community. Then take our 1 year of courses to train people how to do practical, hands-on ministry.

Why bother? Why read all this stuff? Why isn't it enough just to believe in Jesus, repent, be baptized, take holy communion once a month, and put a few dollars in the offering? Now that you've gotten the afterlife taken care of, why not get with it and enjoy this life? – that's the "minimalist" approach for many Christians. So in the past day or two, I've added this short paragraph to my online web page and booklet "A First-Century View of Yeshua, the Messiah" right after his baptism by John –

"If Yeshua the Messiah is now proclaimed to be God's sacrificial Lamb, why didn't he immediately go to Jerusalem, be crucified, and rise again? His three years of ministry were necessary to train his disciples how to do diakonia-ministry!"

(Bookmark this "First Century" web page and/or get the printed booklet here: https://agape-biblia.org/literatura/#1st-century.)

What we've done in the past century by secularizing Christianity is that we've set up a false dualism: an "either-or" choice. Either we believe and preach the message of getting people saved and on their way to heaven, or we get them involved in social action – feeding the poor, healing the sick, and counseling the broken-hearted. But it's not a false "either-or" choice, it's "both-and" – do both ...and start by reading these booklets!

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Friday, July 15, 2022

Ukraine, Russia, and Syria: How They Relate to the Orthodox Church

route of Ukrainian grain to Syria Caesar fiddled on his violin while Rome burned. Now the political and religious leaders in Ukraine, Russia, and Syria are playing a deadly game of chess while millions of Ukrainian lose everything: their homes and possesions, their physical and mental health, or their very lives. Also, hundreds of millions of malnourished adults and children in poorer countries may be starving to death due to these political-military games.

According to The Wall Street Journal, in order to firm up its political-military alliance with Syria, Russia is stealing grain from Ukrainian storage facilities in territories Russia controls, using its soldiers to drive truckloads of grain to ports on the Black Sea, and shipping this grain – over 400,000 tons of it – to ports in Syria.

The Wall Street Journal's documentary "Video Investigation: Russia Is Using a Secret Network to Steal Ukraine Grain" offers detailed evidence of just how these trucks and ships were tracked from those Ukrainian grainaries to the ports and then to Syria.

This is how Russia intends to profit from conquering Ukraine. Most often, war is not really about ideological or religious issues, it is about profiting from the material wealth garnered from the defeated country and its international trade. Religion or ideology is merely being used as a smokescreen: the Pope has admonished Patriarch Kirill against being "an altar boy for Putin."

While living in Moscow for 11 years, we frequently picked up the latest issues of The Moscow Times newspaper. At the start of this war, the newspaper's staff fled to various countries and has assembled a virtual network of reporters to publish The Moscow Times online that I receive each week. Their piece "Investigations Uncover Russia's Alleged Ukrainian Grain Smuggling" adds some details to the above story:

"Satellite images and GPS data indicate that Russia could be exporting grain smuggled out of occupied Ukrainian territory, investigations by the BBC and the Financial Times have revealed. Russia has been accused by Western powers of using food as a weapon in its war with Ukraine by targeting the country's grain storage facilities and blockading its Black Sea exports.

"The Financial Times said its analysis of satellite photographs and port records indicated that Russia had exported huge amounts of grain in eight shipments from annexed Crimea to Syria and Turkey in May. The figures mark an unseasonal increase in the volume of grain exports at the sanctioned Crimean port compared with previous years.

The publication also tracked activity consistent with the smuggling of looted goods, such as vessels switching off their transponders in violation of international law, using ship-to-ship transfers at sea and forging paperwork to obscure the origins of its cargo." "Alleged" is too soft a word: the evidence is rather damning.

Dmitri Trenin, director-in-exile of the Carnegie Moscow Center, writes in his article "Russia's Interests in Syria" that "because Russian foreign policy is currently acquiring an ideological dimension, with the Russian Orthodox Church becoming a key political ally and partner of the Kremlin, the protection [my emphasis] of the dwindling Christian community in Syria, and more broadly in the Middle East, is ostensibly beginning to feature as a new geopolitical interest, at least rhetorically."

How does Patriarch John of the Greek Orthodox of Antioch pay for this "protection"? – by switching from supporting its traditional ally, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, as the Greek Orthodox Church does, to supporting Russia's Patriarch Kirill, who would like to make himself the Ecumenical Patriarch, denies that the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople had the authority to grant autocephaly to the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine, and has gone into schism against the true Ecumenical Patriarch. Grain stolen by Russia from Ukraine is now feeding members of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch in Syria. In turn, with Russian assistance Assad's army protects that Church in Syria.

According to the article "Widespread Orthodox Church Backlash Unleashed Against Russia's Aggression in Ukraine," the three-way political chess game that is the war in Ukraine "is one of high stakes for the Russian Orthodox patriarch... as a bad outcome could imperil the dominant sway he [Patriarch Kirill] holds within Orthodox Christianity because his Church is much larger numerically than any other national Orthodox Church. By losing Ukraine, Russia would lose a very substantial part of its own Church; if it lost Ukraine, it would become much less than half of what it is now, and with this it would also lose universal primacy in Orthodoxy." Due to his "third Rome" mindset, the Moscow Patriarch considers that he already possesses "universal primacy" and does not want to lose it by losing Ukraine. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of soldiers on each side are being maimed or killed and millions of civilians have been forced to become refugees in other lands.

Holding the Antiochian Church hostage for "protection" is the same sort of tactic as blackmailing Western Europe by threatening those countries with an oil and gas embargo. In "Ukrainian World Congress to sue Canada for returning Nord Stream 1 turbine," we read that Paul Grod, Ukrainian World Congress President and CEO in Canada, says – "We cannot supply a terrorist state with the tools it needs to finance the killing of tens of thousands of innocent people. This is not just about a turbine or possible many turbines to support Russia's energy exports, this is about continuously succumbing to Russia's blackmail." [my emphasis] I wonder whether the consciences of any Antiochian Orthodox Christians besides mine is troubled about participating in this theft, protection racket, and blackmailing?

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Saturday, July 2, 2022

Who Has Most Abortions?

Click the picture to read the whole article: scroll down about 1/3 of the way to "WHO HAS ABORTIONS?" This shows you that unmarried women account for 86% of all abortions. Further down, you see that unmarried women "living with a partner" account for 25% of abortions. This means that 61% of all abortions (86% minus 25%) are due to casual sex – "hooking up" and having "one-night flings."

Pro-abortion people will almost always bring up the "whattabout" argument: "What about cases of rape, incest, or when the mother's death is likely?" The article "Just the FAQS" in USA Today – hardly a conservative source – states: "Just 1% of women obtain an abortion because they became pregnant through rape, and less than 0.5% do so because of incest, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Yet the battle over exceptions for both has garnered outsized attention in the national abortion debate." The Guttmacher Institute is a pro-abortion research group, so again these figures are not from a conservative viewpoint.

A third article, "Abortion and Maternal Mortality," explains that the mortality rate of mothers is only 27 per 100,000 live births, or less than 0.003% which is a statistically insignificant number. So using the under 1.5% of pregnancies, the cases of rape, incest, or the life of the mother as a "whattabout" argument to justify all abortions is like justifying all speeding by pointing to an instance of a husband exceeding the speed limit to get his pregnant wife who's in labor to the hospital. The exceptions do not make the rule. We simply don't write wide-ranging laws just because of rare exceptions. We should not invent a blanket "right to abortion for any reason" due to these rarities. And adding the crime of murdering a live human being to the crimes of rape or incest does not lessen the evil of those two latter crimes.

Is the right to life found anywhere in the U.S. Constitution? The 14th Amendment to the Constitution says a state cannot "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." So the general rule is that all persons possess the right to life and equal protection. If states pass laws allowing abortion in the cases of rape or incest, the laws must follow "due process" – the rape or incest must be proven by law to have taken place.

The 14th Amendment uses the word "person" – is an unborn baby a "person"? My high school biology teacher who believed in evolution showed us illustrations of the supposed evolutionary ladder of monkeys and apes becoming humans and of a little tadpole as it passed through stages of development to become a frog. He made the analogy that a fetus is just like a tadpole, not a real human being. A few years later, we learned that he was convicted of having sex with one of his students. It is obvious from the first paragraph above that the vast majority of pro-abortion people adopt that position to rationalize having sex outside of marriage: what you really believe determines how you behave and vice-versa.

When Roe v. Wade was decided, one of the Justices wrote that the science was inconclusive as to when human life begins. But long before that case, people such as Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that human life begins at conception. And a fourth article, "The science is conclusive: That fetus is a baby," quots several scientific and academic and legal sources that state, for example: "In McGraw-Hill's textbook, Patten's Foundations of Embryology, 6th ed., ... biology professor Bruce M. Carlson of the University of Michigan, writes, 'The time of fertilization represents the starting point in the life history, or ontogeny, of the individual.'" An unborn baby is a human person, not a tadpole or a frog or a dog or a monkey.

Thus, Justice Samuel Alito was correct in writing the Court's decision: Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided from the outset. It was contrary to known science and had no basis in the U.S. Constitution. Now it is up to the states to pass laws that follow the Constitution. Pro-abortion women have gone to extremes over this decision: one of the most egregious examples is "Pro-abortion women threaten sex strike over Roe v. Wade reversal" telling that they will abstain from sex outside of marriage because of the Court's decision. At last, we have agreement between the Pro-abortion and Pro-life folks on abstinence!

In the proper context of marriage, a man's and a woman's sexual desires coincide: a man desires to have intercourse, and a woman desires to have a baby. This creates normal, healthy families. But the "hookup culture" after the 1973 Roe decision has deceived women to believe they have the same desires as men. The article "Supreme Court Decision May Force Young Women to Confront Sexual Reality" explains – "The hookup culture only benefited men. And men have benefited from abortion becoming a form of birth control. Abortion on demand meant that men impregnating women to whom they were not married came with no consequences. Abortion meant that men didn’t have to marry the woman they impregnated. Abortion meant that men didn’t have to raise the child they conceived. And abortion meant that men didn’t have to pay child support."

86% of all abortions result from having sex outside of marriage, a lack of abstinence. As for the remaining 16% of abortions, married couples' excuses of "not ready yet" or the financial cost of "unexpectedly expecting," there are more married couples seeking to adopt than there are babies in the U.S. available for adoption and there are well over 3,000 pregnancy care centers and pregnancy resource centers in the U.S. – see Here's Where to Go If You Need Help With Your Unexpected Pregnancy. The pro-abortion people argue – "What is the use of a new baby? It wakes us up at night with its crying, it makes stinky diapers, it's always outgrowing its clothes, it's very inconvenient and expensive... and it gets in the way of our having uninhibited sex!" But that "useless" baby might be the next Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Michael Jordan, or Ben Carson... if he or she (not "it") lives.

The pro-abortion folks are supreme hypocrites:
if they'd just practice on themselves
what they preach for others,
it would put an end to this foolish debate.

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Monday, June 20, 2022

Phil Miglioratti Interviewed Robert Hosken, Author of "The Ministry Driven Church"

Phil Miglioratti Interviewed Robert Hosken, Author of The Ministry Driven Church

Just last week, I was interviewed by Phil Miglioratti for his website The Reimagine.NETWORK about my book The Ministry Driven Church. Here's an excerpt that I hope you'll find interesting:

PHIL >>> Before inserting ministry as the central role, what would leaders need to "re-place" or reposition?

ROBERT >>> Some of my later research shows that the church expanded greatly because it built hospitals, orphanages, and old folks homes and staffed them with Christian doctors who were often also priests, Christian nurses and other staff (see "HEALTH AND HEALING IN BYZANTIUM" and "Seek the Welfare of the City.") But over the centuries, especially in the last century, we have allowed these functions to be taken over by the secular state's welfare programs and socialized medicine. So in order to grow again, it must be relevant to society: the church needs to reclaim her social ministry.

The Evangelical movement is based upon witnessing, soul winning and studying the Bible. But if the main thing is just to get people saved from sin and on their way to heaven, why didn't Jesus, right after His baptism when John said: "Behold, the Lamb of God Who takes away the sins of the world!" – go immediately to Calvary, be crucified and rise from the dead? NO! There's more to salvation than just going to heaven. "Salvation" is "soteria" in Greek and it has the dual meaning of healing as well as going to heaven. Jesus came to heal body and soul. In my role as editor of a revision of the Russian Bible and producing a harmony of the Gospels during our 17 years as Evangelical missionaries in Russia, I studied the ministry of Jesus, the Messiah (Christ). He began His ministry by reciting in the synagogue the prophecy of Isaiah that the Messiah would heal the sick, give sight to the blind, etc. Then He spent 3.5 training His disciples: showing them how to do diakonia-ministry and then sending them out to actually do that kind of ministry. Only then did His time come to die, rise again, and go to heaven.

Here's how to learn about our "Agape Restoration Communities" – then scroll down halfway to see how to get a free copy of my e-book The Ministry Driven Church.

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Saturday, June 4, 2022

Backgrounder on the Religious Aspect of the War in Ukraine

Why is the (former) UOC-MP's becoming independent from Moscow such a "big deal," as I wrote in last week's "SPECIAL EDITION: UOC Declares Independence From Moscow Patriarchate"? Religion plays a much larger part in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine than it does in the West. It is being used by Moscow as an ideological justification for their war in Ukraine, claiming that Ukraine is overrun by homosexuals and fascists, that the new OCU is not legitimate, and that only the UOC[-MP?] is the true Orthodox Church in Ukraine. But now, if the UOC has really broken with the MP due to Russia's invasion, Moscow lost that ideological prop. Here's some background information:

The difficulties and differences between the UOC-MP (Moscow Patriarchate) and the new OCU (Orthodox Church of Ukraine) go back many centuries. Cyril & Methodius, missionaries to the Slavs in the 800s, developed the "Glagolithic" alphabet for the Slavs, which soon developed into the Cyrillic alphabet, so they could translate the Bible and the Liturgy into the language of the people. But Frankish (western) church hierarchs resisted their missionary work in Bohemia, thus beginning the tension between Eastern and Western church centers in Slavic lands: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyril_and_Methodius.

More recently, in the late 16th century, the Roman Catholic Church became dominant in Central and Eastern Europe and formed a hybrid "Union" that allowed the Orthodox believers there to retain their eastern liturgy and married priests if they would commemorate the Pope in the liturgy as head of the Church instead of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, calling these Christians "Uniates." the Ruthenian Uniate Church. The Moscow Patriarchate has struggled against the Uniates for centuries: the Russian Empire eventually expanded and absorbed the eastern part of Ukraine but the western part still has many "Uniates" – now called Greek Catholics.

The "Ruthenes" are the Latin name for the Rusyns, sometimes called the Carpatho-Rusyns who are found in today's southern Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, and Hungary. When millions of them immigrated to Pennsylvania and Ohio in the early 1900s, they were still "Uniates" or more recently called "Greek Catholics" but when a Roman Catholic bishop insisted that they stop allowing priests to marry and begin using the Latin liturgy (Mass), about half of them returned to Orthodoxy. Some joined the Orthodox Church of America (started by Russia), some joined other Orthodox jurisdictions, and some started the Carpatho-Russian (Rusyn) Orthodox Church under the Ecumenical Patriarch, which we have attended for several years here in Pittsburgh. I have a copy of the Greek Catholic liturgy in which I've pasted "the Ecumenical Patriarch" over "the Pope of Rome" in 6 places, and presto! It's an Orthodox liturgy again!

For some years after WW1, Ukraine had its own autonomous Orthodox Church under the Ecumenical Patriarch but the Bolsheviks eventually took over Ukraine and exterminated those clergy, then established the UOC-MP there. This situation lasted until the collapse of the USSR when Ukraine gained its independence and a few versions of an autonomous Orthodox Church formed again. This was formalized in 2019 by the Ecumenical Patriarch recognizing the new "Orthodox Church of Ukraine" (OCU). Of course, the UOC-MP strongly resisted this, broke off relations with the Ecumenical Patriarch, calling him just "the Patriarch of Constantinople," not "Ecumenical" (Russia has long contended that it is the "Third Rome" after Constantinople fell to the Turks). Then Russia invaded Ukraine, which caused many Moscow-oriented parishes in Ukraine to join the OCU. Now the UOC is dropping the "-MP" in its name but still maintaining friendly and subordinate relations with Moscow. It's a complicated, convoluted affair: why can't Christians come together in peace, harmony, humility, and agape-love?

St. Paul preached on the Areopagus (Mars Hill) in Athens, saying that God has made "every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings" (Acts 17:26). God sets the timeline for a nation's existence – Russia's population is projected to fall to about 80,000,000 by 2050 from the high of 148,650,000 when the USSR collapsed; abortion is the most common type of birth control and alcoholism is one of the highest causes of death in Russia. God also sets the boundaries for a nation to dwell in – why does Russia need to expand its boundaries, if its population is falling so drastically?

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said when someone asked him why such terrible things took place – "The people have forgotten God, that is why such things are happening." The Epicurians and Stoics that the Apostle Paul mentioned in the above sermon on Mars Hill were philosophers that taught that life's meaning was to be found in self-indulgence or in self-control. But when we try to find the meaning of life, our existence, in "self" – whether it's pleasure or power, we come up against a dead end, circular reasoning of "it's fun to have fun" or "it's good to be good" – neither option explains the "why" of life. Only when we center our lives on the Absolute Who has revealed Himself do we find meaning and satisfaction in our fleeting existence on this planet Earth.

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Friday, August 26, 2022