In a glowing tribute to her friend Nancy appearing
in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal,
Peggy Noonan recalled how just a few years ago Nancy told her, “I didn’t
believe in the afterlife. I never believed in it, but things have happened
since Ronnie died. He visits me . . . I don’t know if it is dreams or what. It
sounds funny or crazy, sometimes I wake up at night and he’s in bed next to me
and I see him.”
Noonan writes, “Once, she said, she woke in
the middle of the night and looked over at the big beige stuffed chair at the bottom
of the bed to the left. ‘You look cold,’ she said to him, and went to the
closet for a blanket. She draped it over him and went back to bed. The next
morning she awoke and looked over at the chair. The blanket, she said, was
still there, but moved to the side as if someone had pushed it when he left. She
could not, she said, explain this. Whatever it was, love, she felt, did not
just disappear. ‘I now believe in the afterlife,’ she said."
*****
In the New York Daily News this week was a
piece about Nancy written by New York’s renowned “Mistress of Astrology,”
Jennifer Angel. Angel confirmed, “The
Reagan presidency exemplified the seemingly incompatible — yet extremely
successful — blend of West Coast spiritual philosophy and conservative
political strategy . . .
“While it may have been the most closely guarded secret of the Reagan White House, according to Donald Regan’s memoir, ‘virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House chief of staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise.’ ”
“While it may have been the most closely guarded secret of the Reagan White House, according to Donald Regan’s memoir, ‘virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House chief of staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise.’ ”
*****
It’s common knowledge that Nancy, out of her grave concern for her husband’s welfare following the assassination attempt on him in 1981, started heavily consulting a famed California astrologer, Joan Quigley, looking for Quigley’s approval before the president engaged in any important events.
A New York Times article from 1988 reveals, “Friends of Mrs. Reagan say she has long had an interest in astrology, but only a few of her aides apparently knew that she had an emotional concern.
“Tonight, on the ABC
News program 'Nightline,' Ted Koppel reported that he had learned that before
the President was shot on March 30, 1981, an astrologer warned Mrs. Reagan that
something bad would happen that day. In an interview after the show, Mr. Koppel
said a woman astrologer had told Mrs. Reagan that 'there was going to be an
incident on that day.' Mr. Koppel would not identify the source of his
information.
“A leading Republican
strategist, with close ties to the White House, said the reports would not be
damaging to the President. But others said the disclosures revealed a character
trait in the President and his wife that had remained largely hidden to the
public.
“Marcello Truzzi, a
professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University, said he has collected
evidence over many years documenting the Reagans' interest in astrology.”
*****
At Nancy’s funeral yesterday,
her daughter, Patti, made the comment, “Even God might not have the guts to
cross Nancy Reagan.”
The question is did
Nancy or Ronnie fear God? If they were unbelievers, was their love for one
another a true one, or was it the l-u-v of the world?
Obviously Nancy had
no serious desire to lean on and rely upon God following the assassination
attempt. Her fear was not a godly fear.
I John 14:8 says, “There
is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He
that feareth is not made perfect in love.”
Paul writes in II
Timothy 1:7, “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of
power, and of love, and of a sound mind.”
Imagine if, instead
of endlessly searching out security from their horoscope charts and
sun-and-moon alignments, etc., to protect their all-consuming love relationship
from harm or termination, Ronnie and Nancy had the love of Jesus Christ to bind
them and give them the absolute security of their being together for eternity.
A classic bit of
wisdom says most people are frightened of dying because they don’t know what it
means to live, hence the interval between their living and their dying is fear.
*****
Here’s an old study
passage on all this from Jordan:
“What
are you most afraid of? Losing your possessions? Losing your children to the
world? Losing the respect of others? Losing your health?“Why do you fear losing those things? Did you know that every one of those things you’re going to lose anyway? ‘Naked you came in and naked you’re going to go out.’
“All the things that you try and accumulate, you’re going to leave them. The only thing that’s going to last forever are the spiritual things you have; your identity in Jesus Christ, your riches in Christ.
“Why do we fear then? Because we have this idea that our identity, our worth, our meaning, our justification for existence, resides in what I can accumulate, how many people I can get to be happy with me, how well my children are doing so people give me accolades for that. Our fear comes from understanding we really can’t produce all that on our own.
“Your identity has to be founded in something that can’t be changed. It’s unbelief--it’s a lack of dependence on who God has made you in Jesus Christ, and who God has made Christ to you--for you to get your identity out of anything but Him.
“It’s not what you do, it’s what He did that makes you valuable. It’s not what you accomplish, it’s what He’s accomplished that gives you worth and meaning. Because He’s given you HIS value.
“I Corinthians 1:30 says, ‘But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption.’
“God has given you everything your heart could ever desire or long for--all the things you seek and chase and look for behind every tree and under every rock, you have in Christ.
*****
“At the most basic level, sin is a refusal to trust God to give you what you’re looking for in Christ. Anger becomes fear in disguise, striking out, and fear really is unbelief.
“There’s that arrogance syndrome. It starts out with self-justification. ‘I’m going to prove that I’m right!’ As soon as you start proving that you’re right, it moves immediately into self-deception.
"In order to prove that you’re right, you deceive yourself into believing that you can be right, that you are right, and pretty soon that leads into self-absorption and that creates bitterness; it’s brooding about why you’re right, and bitterness against those that don’t see it.
“You run that syndrome out there and your old sin nature turns it around and comes back, and once it’s created bitterness, that self-absorption goes right back into self-deception; goes right back into self-justification. That just intensifies the bitterness and then it becomes what Hebrews 12 calls a ‘root of bitterness' that can’t be rooted out.
“You go out into my yard; my wife and I hate dandelions. She has a little metal thing about that long and she goes out and gets that dandelion, and if you don’t get that root out way down deep, pop the top off, it will be back in two days.
“So she’ll take that thing and run it down into the ground but I can always go out and see where the dandelions were because there’s a hole where she’s dug that thing out and a root of bitterness is like that.
“To get it out it leaves a scar in your soul, in your emotions, in your heart, and you carry that along in life.
“Now, what happens in this issue of anger, and it’s obviously something Paul understood that leaders are going to face, is it’s one of the chief motivating things of religion: ‘I got to be right, I am right, I know I’m right because I got to be right, because if I’m not right, I’m nothing.’
“You always camouflage it by, ‘Well, I’m just defending the truth; I’m set for the defense and confirmation of the gospel.’ Defending the truth is a good thing, but when it morphs into self-defense, what you discover, and what you have demonstrated, is how deeply rooted your identity is in you being right. And that’s a burden you can’t bear because you aren’t right. You’re a sinner and your righteousness isn’t in you; it’s in Him.
*****
“If you can get that monkey off your back that you got to be right to measure up and to belong and have value, then you’re free to let His life produce His rightness in and through you.
"Instead of anger, you see, ‘I don’t have to be right.’ I can have the humility of mind to say, ‘I’m probably wrong somewhere in this.’ As soon as you do that, there’s that humbling of your mind, that lowliness of mind, that doesn’t say, ‘I know I’m right and I know I know the truth.’
“Listen, being right doesn’t depend on you. Would you relax and realize that? Paul says, ‘You can do nothing against the truth but for the truth.’
“Truth doesn’t depend on you. Close up shop and go fishing. Truth is still truth. That doesn’t mean you don't preach the Word and contend for the truth; it means it doesn’t depend on you.
“The other thing is you’re never 100 percent right. Not you. And when you realize and remember, ‘I’m never 100 percent right,’ No. 1 that means I’ve got more to learn if it’s doctrine. There’s always more for me to learn. If I had it all right, I could just sit down and do nothing because there’s nothing else to learn. There’s more to learn and the fact is, if you could be 100 percent right, you wouldn’t need a Savior who is.
“So when you go down through these things, it’s fascinating to me how many of the qualifications—at least 20 percent of them—have to do with that issue of pride manifesting itself in conduct through anger. ‘Only by pride comes contention.’
“In Acts 20, when Paul’s talking to these elders and bishops at Ephesus, when he called them together and met with them at Miletus, he says in verse 19 about his own manner with them, ‘Serving the Lord with all humility of mind, and with many tears, and temptations, which befell me by the lying in wait of the Jews.’
“Notice, he says ‘serving the Lord with all humility of mind.’ That’s the inside attitude he had. It’s not about me, it’s not about me being right, I don’t have to defend myself, I don’t have to make it look like I’m okay and I’m right, but ‘with many tears, and temptations.’ He was willing to appear weak so that the power of Christ might be the real issue.
“What he’s looking for here, and obviously what Timothy was facing at Ephesus, were leaders who weren’t doing these things. But where does that come from? It comes from that lack of leadership.
*****
Proverbs 13:10 says, ‘Only by pride cometh contention: but with the well advised is wisdom.’
“Pride brings anger. There’s a fascinating thing about anger. Anger, more often than not, is really fear in disguise. Because when you sit down and analyze where anger comes from--and I say that because one of the issues that men, especially in leadership and ministry, have to deal with is this issue that comes out of pride—it’s that contentious, ‘I’m right and I’m going to prove that I am.’
“That anger really comes out of fear. There’s something I’m afraid I’m going to lose, there’s something I’m afraid I’m not going to get, and in order to get what I think I have a right to and not lose what I think I should keep up with, I develop anger, contention. But fear, disguised as anger, really comes from unbelief.”
*****
“You’ve got the information and when you
believe it, it becomes the energy and the life and the transforming power down
in your soul that His life then works out through you,” explains Jordan. “It’s
not a warm, personal feeling. It’s a love that abounds in knowledge and in
judgment. It’s a mental- attitude love. It’s the capacity to look at a thing
and value and esteem it the way God does.
“You can take divine viewpoint and look at it
and say, ‘God thinks that way.’ God says, ‘You get out of the way and I’LL love
them through you, but it isn’t your love that’s the issue. It’s my love and, by
the way, it’s my love for you.’
“When you get loved that way, and you realize
how you love that way, you begin to love back. And you begin to think like He
thinks. You begin to love the things He loves, not because you have to, He just
begins to love them through you and you begin to think about them the way He
thinks about them and you know what, that’s what love is.
“When He gave you that righteousness of Jesus
Christ, that righteousness will bear fruit in your life. How does it do that?
By Jesus Christ. Who’s the one who’s going to produce the fruit? The one who
made you righteous. All you are is the fruit-bearer. He’s the fruit-producer.
It’s an interesting thing about fruit. Fruit is seasonal. It’s not always on
the tree. But it’s constant. It comes back every season.”
(new article tomorrow)
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