Commentary

How should you go about finding God’s will for your life?

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Here’s an interesting question from Tough Questions Answered. (And there’s a poll to vote in)

Excerpt:

As Christians we all agree that we want to follow God’s will for our lives, but there are two general approaches to following God’s will that I’ve seen in evangelicalism.

The first approach operates under the premise that God has a specific will for each and every one of our actions and decisions, and that we are obligated to discover what that specific will is.

The second approach operates under the premise that God only specifically wills that we obey his commands as revealed in the Bible, and on issues where the Bible does not speak, we use wisdom.

Here’s an example of what he means:

Let’s say that you are a Christian man looking for a spouse.  You have come to know three wonderful and single Christian ladies and you are wondering which one you should pursue for marriage.

If you are a follower of the first approach, you believe that God has one, and only one, of these women chosen for you.  It is your duty to discover which one of these women he has chosen in order to stay in his perfect will for your life.  If you choose wrongly, you will be outside of his will for your life.

If you are a follower of the second approach, you feel free to pursue any of these three ladies for marriage.  You believe that God will be pleased with any of the three women, as long as you choose wisely.

And you can imagine that this applies to all kinds of things – like what to study, what job to take, and so on.

So what do you guys think? Method 1 or Method 2? Anybody want to guess what my view is? I have a very strong opinion about the right answer to this question.

I’ll give you a hint about which one I like better. If I were explaining the first view to a non-Christian, I would describe it as God hiding Easter eggs for you and then you go through life reflecting on your intuitions and emotions and trying to hear God say “warmer” and “colder” in your ear when you get closer to or farther from his will, (i.e. – God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life).

On the second view, you get dropped behind enemy lines and the lines of communication are cut off. All you have left is the Army Field Manual, a map, and your fellow soldiers. Your job is to act in a way that you think will best achieve the General’s goals, (i.e. – God loves you and you should make a wonderful plan to participate in his plan).

News

MUST-READ: Which is worse: communism or Pepsi commercials?

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Story here from Jamie Glazov of Pajamas Media. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The tortures included laying a man naked on a freezing cement floor, forcing his legs apart, and then an interrogator stepping on his testicles, applying increasing pressure until the confession surfaced. Imagine the consequences of no surfacing confession. Indeed, many people refused to confess to a crime they did not commit.

Daughters and sons were raped in front of their fathers and mothers — for the sake of extracting “confessions.”

These are just some of the delicacies that the Stalinist machinery inflicted on its citizenry in the hope of bringing socialism into earthly incarnation. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has shared much of this horror with us in his Gulag Archipelago — a work, mystifyingly enough, that I had never heard mentioned, except with a few exceptions, by one professor in a lecture or seminar in my entire eleven years studying Cold War history in academia. It was a work that I never saw, again with a few exceptions, on any academic syllabus — and many of my courses concerned Soviet history and American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union.

Both of my grandfathers were exterminated by Stalinist terror. Both of my parents, Yuri and Marina Glazov, were dissidents in the former Soviet Union. They risked their lives for freedom; they stood up against Soviet totalitarianism. They barely escaped the gulag, a fortune many of our friends and relatives did not share. I come from a system where a myriad of the closest people to my family simply disappeared, where relatives and family friends died under interrogation and torture for their beliefs — or for simply nothing at all.

Now try to imagine me sitting in the company of left-wing “intellectuals” in the West who think they are oppressed. This is my lifelong experience. I remember one radical feminist, whom I sat next to in a graduate student lounge, lecturing me sternly about how women in the West are oppressed because they wear bikinis on beaches; with a reprimanding tone, she explained to me that this represented the way capitalism objectifies women, marginalizes them from spheres of power, and metaphorically decapitates them as human beings. I remember asking her what she thought of female genital mutilation and honor killings in the Muslim world. To this I received a stone-cold silence and a frightening hateful stare, a stare with which I have become accustomed: I would be confined to a gulag or a psychiatric hospital if this particular individual had the power to place me there. This would be done for the good of society of course. My question was heresy: she could not, naturally, admit that evil adversarial cultures and ideologies existed — under which women truly suffer real oppression — for if she did, then she would have to sacrifice her entire worldview and personal identity.

Another colleague of mine, with great moral indignation and personal angst, once complained to me about how we are being “attacked” by Pepsi commercials. “By trying to tell us that we are not cool if we don’t drink Pepsi,” he agonized, “the capitalist machinery practices the politics of exclusion. By trying to pretend it offers us choice, it actually negates choice.”

My mom’s father was executed by the Soviet secret police. He did not have the luxury of being oppressed by Pepsi commercials.

The article goes on like this, there is a lot more I wanted to excerpt but could not for reasons of space.

These communist regimes get started by promising to the economically-ignorant masses a more equitable distribution of material goods, controlled by the government. The people, including Christians, abdicate their individual liberty and responsibility to the state in order to avoid worrying about having to feed, clothe and support themselves. The end is always the same: tyranny.

There is no Biblical injunction for wealth redistribution by government. The purpose of life is not to make everyone equally wealthy, the purpose of life is to know God and to help others to know God. And a secular government cannot have that same goal. So it needs to be kept as limited as possible to avoid constraining the freedom to do what we ought to do.

The impulse to “spread the wealth” has always led to reduced liberty. You need liberty in order to do your job as a Christian. Don’t vote to expand the power of secular government – vote to expand the power of each individual to make their own way and to give their own wealth to others if they choose. Christians are supposed to use private charity as a too; for taking care of their neighbors so that they have the chance to investigate a relationship with God.

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Commentary

Dennis Prager investigates why men are in decline and how to fix it

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Another great column by Jewish scholar Dennis Prager.

Excerpt:

What is a man (as opposed to a boy)? The traditional understanding was that a man is he who takes responsibility for others — for his family, his community and his country — and, of course, for himself. A man stood for ideals and values higher than himself. He conducted himself with dignity. And he was strong.

[…]Boys today have fewer adult men in their lives than ever before. Many boys are not raised by any father. More are not raised by a father who lives in the home full time. Nearly every teacher and principal American boys have in elementary and high school is a female. The boy’s clergy person and physician may well be women. And few male figures in contemporary film radiate manhood as defined above.

[…]America has become a rights-centered rather than a responsibility-centered society. Aside from helping to produce a pandemic of narcissism, the rights-centered mindset is the opposite of the obligation/responsibility-centered mindset that makes a boy into a man. It is not good for either sex to be rights-preoccupied; but it is particularly devastating to developing men, as men are supposed to be obligation-directed.

[…]Males no longer have distinctive roles. Men do best when they are relied upon, when needed; and they feel most needed when they do something distinct from women.

[…]Many churches and synagogues have been feminized. This has occurred in at least three important ways: Clergy are increasingly female (and touchy-feely males) — for the first time in Christian and Jewish history; God is often depicted as androgynous and no longer either demanding or judging (He just loves all the time); and religion has been changed from morally and theologically demanding to a therapeutic model.

I think one of the big problems today is that men have abandoned their responsibilities to protect and provide because they are no longer appreciated. Instead, people have shifted the traditional male responsibilities to the government. Men have been replaced with a police force, welfare checks, social workers, and single-payer health care. If there is no recognition for doing hard things, having good character, and filling an important role, then men won’t even try.