The applause of this world lasts a brief time, but the approval of heaven goes on forever.  I like the motto of the person who suggested that we should aim to, “love God, die and be forgotten.” “Consider the path your heart is on” (verses 5 and 7). Think of your priorities. 

Chad Bird’s life fell apart, in part because his priorities were messed up.  He writes, ‘I went astray for two decades in the pursuit of my ambitions.  I drove myself to be an accomplished person.  My life had to be awesome.  I chased down the career I wanted, and clawed my way up to the position I coveted.  I pursued a degree, then another degree, the still another, until I knew more about my PhD studies than the details of my children’s everyday lives.  I could tell you Rabbi Oshya’s exegesis of the Hebrew of Genesis 1:1 … but I had no clue what my daughter’s favourite stuffed animal was.  When my dreams came true, when I reached the fabled end of the rainbow, I found a pot of gold – fool’s gold.’
Are you putting yourself first?
Previous generations thought that it was wrong to put yourself first.  This one thinks it’s a virtue.  The following is a meme I read: ‘You’ll learn to put yourself first after you notice that other people are constantly putting you last.’  I remember a children’s story from when I was a child.  It suggested J.O.Y. was found by putting Jesus first, others second, and yourself last.  That doesn’t come naturally to me, but it is both counter-cultural and satisfying.
Haggai opens, verse 1, on 29th August 520 B.C.  About 66 years earlier the Babylonians had overrun Jerusalem, destroyed the temple and taken people into exile.  Yet 18 years earlier, the new superpower, the Persians had permitted the people to return and rebuild the temple.  But, despite the fact that they have now been back eighteen years, the temple still lies in ruins.
This is not because the people weren’t capable of building things.  They say, ‘the time has not come to rebuild the house’ (2), but they have been building houses.  Their houses!  Fine-panelled home (4).  What does that say about their priorities?  It says that comfort and impressing their neighbours mattered more to them than fulfilling their calling to the glory of God!
What are our priorities?  What comes first for us?  What building projects occupy our minds most?  Are we primarily into protecting our comfort, establishing of career, or earning a reputation?  Even our relationships will be unbalanced if we don’t put God first.  Put Jesus before people and you will actually love people better than if you put them before Jesus.  For Jesus is the source of Christian love.
We are no longer being called to build a temple in Jerusalem.  In the gospels Jesus says that he is now our temple—where we go to meet with God—and so temple building involves showing the world how great he is.  Is that our first priority in life!
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, July 12, 2022
The coming months will be fascinating, and I suspect rather depressing, to watch. When it comes to abortion, especially after Dobbs, Christians face a choice of social respectability or religious fidelity. And the Christian commentariat already seems divided on which way to go.

The Dobbs decision has revealed fault lines in American Christianity. These fault lines lay just below the surface for a long while, but are now clearly exposed. As long as abortion was legal by Supreme Court decree, it was possible to identify as pro-life but keep that commitment at the level of theory; one could hold pro-life views but not be perceived as a threat. All that has now changed. To identify as pro-life post-Dobbs is not simply to hold an opinion many regard as wrong; it is to be part of an act of political and social “oppression.” And predictably, many Christians are feeling the need to “nuance” their relationship to the overturning of Roe.
The National Catholic Reporter has excelled itself in this regard. The strangest argument in its pages was made by Fr. Thomas Reese. He studiously avoided any expression of gratitude for the decision, and said it is a result of America’s domination by big corporations. The response of big business to Dobbs would seem to indicate his case is, to put it charitably, a little overstated.
Then, in an article attributed to “editorial staff,” the Reporter revealed the real reason for its nuance about Dobbs: Donald Trump appointed the Supreme Court justices who made it possible, and Trump was “arguably the most corrupt and morally degenerate president in history.” That claim may or may not be true—the competition for the title is a little stronger than the Reporter acknowledges—but the argument is specious at best. As to the article’s later assertion that “women will die without Roe’s protection,” one wonders whether the editorial staff of this prominent Catholic magazine are as familiar with their own church’s teaching on life and personhood as they are with Twitter (which has clearly had a baneful effect on otherwise intelligent people’s ability to construct an argument). It would seem not. By the standards of Catholic teaching, women have been dying by the millions for decades thanks to Roe.
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Written by Joseph A. Kohm Jr. |
Friday, September 1, 2023
Lewis points out that in previous ages, wisdom and virtue led to conforming the soul to reality in pursuit of becoming truly human. Now, the conditioners discard humanity by subduing “reality to the wishes of men” (77). Lewis argues that reality is subdued by replacing conformity with technological solutions, which may include rewiring the circuitry of our cells, implanting chips in our brains, or providing teenagers with puberty blockers.

In May 2023, Elon Musk’s company Neuralink received approval from the Food and Drug Administration to begin clinical trials on humans. Neuralink develops brain-computer interface technology where an implant is placed onto the surface of the brain, facilitating a connection between the subject’s electrical brain activity and electronic devices.
The company had previously been using animals in trials, and several years ago they released a short video of a monkey, who had Neuralink’s technology implanted in his brain, controlling the cursors and paddles in video games merely by thinking of doing it.
In February 1943, C. S. Lewis gave a series of lectures on education, which were published as The Abolition of Man. When they were delivered over three successive nights 80 years ago for the University of Durham, there was no way he was thinking of monkeys playing video games. However, in his earlier work That Hideous Strength, he depicted a world in which such absurdities could have been imagined.
In a 1955 letter to his American friend Mary Willis Shelburne, Lewis bemoaned that The Abolition of Man, though it was one of his favorite books, had been “almost totally ignored by the public.” We’d do well not to ignore it today.
The Abolition of Man is a powerful work for our day because, in many ways, Lewis predicted the future. He foresaw the rise of trends we’re currently experiencing: ethical emotivism, the sometimes unquestioned authority of science, and the increasing use of technology by states to control their populations.
Subjective Poison
In the first lecture, “Men Without Chests,” Lewis deconstructs an educational model subtly imposed on children via a language arts textbook, which he renames to protect the authors. The unstated worldview behind The Green Book serves to inoculate young minds against objective values by identifying all values with feelings and emotions. For example, awe in response to a waterfall is simply a reflection of the person’s attitude, not the sublimity of the waterfall itself. 
Instead, Lewis argues that educators must teach students to detect and respond appropriately to objective reality. Teachers must plant “just sentiments” in the fertile minds of their students (14).
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