Every square inch

He has authority over Satan and all demons, over all angels -good and evil - over the natural universe, natural objects and laws and forces: stars, galaxies, planets, meteorites; authority over all weather systems: winds, rains, lightning, thunder, hurricanes, tornadoes, monsoons, typhoons, cyclones; authority over all their effects: tidal waves, floods, fires; authority over all molecular and atomic reality: atoms, electrons, protons, neutrons, undiscovered subatomic particles, quantum physics, genetic structures, DNA, chromosomes; authority over all plants and animals great and small: whales and redwoods, giant squid and giant oaks, all fish, all wild beasts, all invisible animals and plants: bacteria, viruses, parasites, germs; authority over all the parts and functions of the human body: every beat of the heart, every breath of the diaphragm, every electrical jump across a million synapses in our brains; authority over all nations and governments: congresses and legislatures and presidents and kings and premiers and courts; authority over all armies and weapons and bombs and terrorists; authority over all industry and business and finance and currency; authority over all entertainment and amusement and leisure and media; over all education and research and science and discovery; authority over all crime and violence; over all families and neighborhoods; and over the church, and over every soul and every moment of every life that has been or ever will be lived.

John Piper here

all authority

Jesus does not just have the authority of moral persuasion among individuals and in the inter-personal realm. He also has authority in the ecclesiastical and familial, as well as in the societal, political, economical, and all other realms. 

p227, He Shall Have Dominion: A Postmillennial Eschatology - Kenneth Gentry

Against the run of play

In Scripture and history, the church has had the strongest, most lasting influence on society, not when it has accommodated itself to the world, but when it has been most true to its own confession against overwhelming odds. Consider Noah and Abraham, believing God's promises against all the apparent evidence to the contrary. Consider Moses, standing boldly before Pharaoh to proclaim God's word, demonstrating God's power against the most powerful totalitarian dictator of the time. Consider Elijah, challenging King Ahab and the 850 prophets of Baal and Asherah. Consider Peter, preaching to the murderers of Jesus on the day of Pentecost; Paul, taking the gospel through the world; the Christian martyrs of the first centuries; Athanasius of Alexandria, standing against the world for the doctrine of the Trinity; Luther and Calvin, protesting that salvation is entirely by God's grace without human works; the Puritans, seeking to bring all of human life and society under the rule of God's word.

John Frame here.

artificial original sin!

Artificial intelligence seems to have an inner bent to destructive behaviour according to this video!

How very human. 

your desire will be for you avatar but he will rule over you

Truly in their makers' image. 

Desiring the Holy Spirit

a helpful 12 min podcast by Kevin DeYoung here: 

 The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit

from the Desiring God Site

Anti-Sectarianism in Family Life!

So long as you have groups of men chosen rationally, you have some special or sectarian atmosphere. It is when you have groups of men chosen irrationally that you have men.

[p 142,  On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family, in Heretics, The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton: 1]

with feeling!

We say the first bit quietly or normally AND THEN WE GO LOUD FOR THE 'DO NOT GIVE INTO THEM'!
All with lots of giggles. But deadly serious intent.

Happiness

O LORD,
Teach me that if I do not live a life that satisfies you,
I shall not live a life that will satisfy myself.

The Valley of Vision: A Collection of Puritan Prayers and Devotions, p 304

A word for cave-men

... to make a man comfortable is to make him the opposite of sociable.

Sociability, like all good things, is full of discomforts, dangers, and renunciations. 

[p 137,  On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family, in Heretics, The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton: 1]

The big society, gang culture and the monastic life

It is not fashionable to say much nowadays* of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village, which only the wilfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilised societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery.
There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell. A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge. 

[p 136-137,  On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family, in Heretics, The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton: 1]

* Heretics was published in 1905!

A Soldier's Story

From a great little site: reachingtheunreached

In defence of unpleasant family life

.. some sages of our own decadence have made a serious attack on the family. They have impugned it, as I think wrongly; and its defenders have defended it, and defended it wrongly.  

The common defence of the family is that, amid the stress and fickleness of life, it is peaceful, pleasant, and at one. But there is another defence of the family which is possible, and to me evident; this defence is that the family is not peaceful and not pleasant and not one. 

[p136, On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family]

The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton: 1

Back again

It has been a while!

We've had a good and full summer - with edgehill camp (and all the run in to that) which all went very well and some holiday up in Scotland.

The last few weeks have been spent in training - of the potty nature! Good old Gina's Potty Training In One Week (with some tweaks ... we've held off the whole 'reward chart' thing!).

Our feet are now beginning to touch the ground again - and we are preparing for an exciting & challenging month ahead.

Fits of Rage & Taking Offense

Galatians 5:19-21.
Galatians 5:22-25. 


Colossians 3:1-4
Colossians 3:8


-- 

We would like to have people so nice to us all the time that there would never be an occasion for us to hurt. Obviously this is unrealistic, so what I am suggesting is that the offended toughen up.  (p49)

In other words be more like Jesus. Isaiah 53:3, 7. 

Any of us in this same position would consider that we had every right to be hurt. If that's the way they are going to be, see if I'm ever going to (1) speak to them again, (2) be nice to them again, (3) forgive them or (4) die for them. Yet if this had been our Lord's reaction, He would never have gone to the cross. 

Philippians 2:5-8 


Notes & Quotes from Ch 4& 5   of How to Be Free from Bitterness: And Other Essays on Christian Relationships by Jim Wilson