A Thanksgiving prayer

Dear precious Lord, we bow our heads in heartfelt, thankful prayer
For all the ways You’ve blessed our lives, and for Your loving care.

We thank You for the hands that have prepared this special treat,
And pray that You will bless all those who have no food to eat.

We’re thankful for Salvation’s plan, and for Your Holy Word,
And pray we’ll help to spread Your love to those who’ve never heard.

We’re thankful for our freedom, and for churches that are near,
Where we can meet to praise Your Name, and worship without fear.

We thank You for heroic troops who fight for liberty,
And daily risk their lives and limbs to keep our country free.

Forgive us of our many sins, and keep us close today;
And bless this food You’ve given us. In Jesus Name, we pray.

Amen.

We prayed this prayer over our Thanksgiving meal tonight with the Kelliher’s: Joe, Karen (Bonnie’s sister), Aidan, and Nora. It is an abbreviated prayer that I found here.

Giving Thanks to Whom, Exactly?

A good Thanksgiving article by Al Mohler

The Architecture of Time

A very good, even if short, piece on the great value of observing the Christian calendar. Too many of us Reformed-types have jettisoned the church calendar in favor of the supposedly “more spiritual” practice of spontaneity (I wonder, how so? I’d say more often than not it is more carnal), all in the name of removing all vestiges of papalism. Instead, this is one more instance of Protestants throwing a wonderful baby out with the bath water, and we are all the more poorer for it.

Doug Wilson on “The Architecture of Time”

America’s Seared Conscience

Al Mohler just completed an excellent two-part series over at his blog entitled “Gambling With Abortion: America’s Seared Conscience.”

• Go to Part I
• Go to Part II

This is a must read, for, as he writes, “Evil flourishes in the darkness.”

The Morality of Capitalists

“It is time we began honoring those in business with our attention. While we have rightly praised the virtue of charity, the church has no finances to give until those in the marketplace have earned them. Why is it then that we so loudly praise an act of charity but ignore acts of achievement? Moreover, how do we justify spending 90% of our time preparing 10% of our members for some sort of “ministry,” while ignoring the 90% who are called to business?”
from “The Morality of Capitalists” at the CCL website

Trinity and Story

The more I study about the trinity, the more I love the Trinity. And I’m thankful for Peter Leithart and the like for illuminating the Trinity all the more to me.

The following are thoughts of his on how the Trinity simply must be for stories to be possible in the first place. This is in the line of much that I have been reading on how even atheists must begin from certain Trinitarian presuppositions in order to frame their anti-Trinitarian arguments.

“Trinity and Story” by Peter Leithart

Peroutka Election Results

So, I know everyone is dying to hear how my man did. Well, here are Peroutka’s vote totals for the whole of the nation, the state of Pennsylvania (you substantially increased his total there, Mom!), Virginia, and the city of Alexandria, where my vote increased his total by one whole percentage point.

You will notice that for each level, his vote support rounded to approximately … 0 percent!

The Libertarians and the Constitution Party together amassed more than half a million votes. I guess the prospect of a Kerry Presidency was just too scary this time around. With good reason, I’m sure. Pat Buchanan’s reasoning was the best of all the Bush supporters, and came the closest to persuading me.

C.S. Lewis on The Nature of the Political Class

Following dinner tonight I finished reading The Silver Chair from C.S. Lewis’s “The Chronicles of Narnia” to Bonnie, Samuel, and Maggie. Like the rest, this book was a true joy and full of allusions (through the lion, Aslan) to Christ and His work and (through Eustace, Jill, Puddleglum the Marshwiggle, Prince Rilian, and the other protagonists and antagonists) the fallen nature of man and the walk of faith taken by the redeemed.

The closing of the book featured a fantastic portrayal of the resurrection of man through the blood and living water which flowed from Christ’s side, in the form of King Caspian awakening from the dead and emerging (baptism like) from the flowing stream mingled with the blood from Aslan’s paw. Great and powerful stuff there.

But, given that today is election day, I was particularly thrilled with the following most appropriate and timely passage:

And the Head [of Experiment House, Eustace and Jill's school back in England] … came running out to see what was happening. And when she saw the lion and the broken wall and Caspian and Jill and Eustace (whom she quite failed to recognize) she had hysterics …. When the police arrived and found no lion, no broken wall, and no convicts, and the Head behaving like a lunatic, there was an inquiry into the whole thing. And in the inquiry all sorts of things about Experiment House came out, and about ten people got expelled. After that, the Head’s friends saw that the Head was no use as a Head, so they got her made an Inspector to interfere with other Heads. And when they found she wasn’t much good even at that, they got her into Parliament where she lived happily ever after.

A classic indeed!

My Presidential Election Prediction

Since my prognostitory powers proved oh-so-accurate for this year’s baseball playoffs (click here for the proof ;)), I thought I’d try my hat at this year’s presidential election.

Everyone knows who I voted for in the election, Michael Peroutka of the Constitution Party. I therefore predict that whether he wins or loses — (drum-roll, please!) — he will do so in a landslide.

This is what they call in the business a “sure bet.”

;)

And Perhaps the #1 Reason to NOT Vote for Bush is …

…Because he is an outspoken Christian, and yet he publicly promotes religious syncretism.

I’ll explain. George W. Bush is now officially on record as saying that Christians and Muslims pray to the same god, and that there are many ways to heaven. Of course, this is a flat out contradiction of what Jesus taught about Himself. There is only one way to heaven, and that is through Christ: “I AM the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” (John 14:6-7) . All of Scripture, all of redemptive history points to and culminates in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. There is no other door to heaven:

It is written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God. Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from Him comes to Me. No one has seen the Father except the One who is from God; only He has seen the Father. I tell you the truth, he who believes has everlasting life.’ ~John 6:45-47

Of course, the fact of Bush’s religious syncretism has been just as public as his outspoken belief in Christ for some time. Bush has observed Ramadan in the White House. He has conducted a polytheistic worship service in the National Cathedral. He has offered reverence in a Shinto shrine in Japan.

This, ironically, would not be so much of a big deal if it were John Kerry who was doing all this and if it was John Kerry who was saying that Muslims have their own effective way to heaven, even if they deny the Lordship of Christ. After all, no one ever accused him of being a serious Christian.

But Bush most certainly IS a serious Christian, who is very publicly such, and therefore when he sins like this so publicly, he should be rebuked just as publicly. Instead, evangelical leaders pat him on the back and even participate in his religious syncretism. Christian voters are his strongest electoral bloc, supporting him financially and at the ballot box. And everyone in America and around the world knows this and is consciously aware of it. And in all this, the Gospel of Christ is publicly misrepresented, and that misrepresentation is widely and effectively endorsed, thus putting millions of souls in jeopardy through a religious lie propagated by the most visible Christian in the world outside the Pope.

And through this all, we see once again how fatally compromised we conservatives become when we hook our train and our hopes — almost idolatrously so — too closely to the GOP.

As Doug Wilson said recently so well,

The concern here is that Christians have been so outmaneuvered in the culture wars that the vast majority support this kind of thing, instead of challenging it. Moreover, they are so compromised that they will think Christians who refuse to go along are somehow themselves compromised.

As we look at the Old Testament, we can see that the prophet Nathan belonged to “David’s political party,” if we may speak this way. But this did not prevent him from rebuking the king in the name of the Lord when he sinned grievously. I am looking for a high profile Christian supporter of the president to rebuke him for this. But while I am looking, I am not holding my breath.

And again,

Many of these things, if done by a liberal Democrat, would (rightly) have had Christians up in arms. But with Bush, they go along.

I do not blame him that syncretism is pervasive in the federal government. A good man might not be able to remove all the high places. Reformation sometimes take time. But participating in worship at the high places is another thing entirely.

So, for the sake of the Gospel, I have one more reason now that I cannot in good conscience vote for Bush.

To recap then with the election tomorrow, here is a quick rundown of my main reasons for NOT voting for Bush:

• A huge explosion in federal spending, even after discounting the war on terror, reaching $20,000 per household for the first time since World War II.
• The greatest expansion of the welfare entitlement state (i.e. Bush’s Medicare bill) since the Great Society.
• An unconstitutional war in Iraq which threatens to destablize the Middle East and actually increase terrorism against us.
• To stop being L.E. Font’s miserable lacky.
• To return to republican government and the rule of law, and move away from rule by the whims of the mob.
• To oppose unconstitutional strictures on our freedoms to associate and speak, via campaign finance law and Bush’s active efforts to shut down 527s.
• To veto the president who has yet to find an unconstitutional, pork-laden law worth vetoing.
• To publicly rebuke Bush’s religious syncretism.
• And on and on and on.

Case closed. I for one am voting for Michael Peroutka and the Constitution Party.

He won’t win, but at least I can make a statement. If enough people did the same, perhaps the statement will be heard loud and clear. And then we can get back to winning the GOP for conservatism in 2008.

But more on that at some later date.

In the meantime, I pray that God would grant whoever wins the elections tomorrow — at all levels — great wisdom and concern for justice and truth in all their dealings.

And I will continue acting in the most politically subversive ways I know how. I will actively participate in my church and feast on Christ at the Lord’s Table. And I will raise my family in the fear and admonition of the Lord. This, then, is the ground and essence of Christian politics. It simply overflows into electoral politics. But the root is in the church and in the home. Not the other way around. The GOP is not my sacred cow, though I hope and pray for the party’s reformation.

God bless America, I pray. Amen.