"Prayer is such a critical issue because the Word of God and prayer go together. The Word doesn't work without the Spirit and the Spirit doesn't work without the Word.
"Without God's Word working in your life, your life is directionless. Without Pauline prayer, prayer the way God designed it to operate in the dispensation of grace for you and for me, if you don't have that active in your life, you're living your life in the energy of your flesh; in your own resources.
"Paul writes, 'Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.' Set the things you cherish on things above. There are all these lusts and affections, but he says, 'What you need to do is set your AFFECTION on Christ. Focus your occupation and your mind, not on all these things out here, but just on Him.'
"This is a trans-dispensational issue and a good illustration is in Luke 11: [34] The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is evil, thy body also is full of darkness.
[35] Take heed therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness.
[36] If thy whole body therefore be full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall be full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light.
"If you're going to get light in your body, it's going to come in through your eye. 'Therefore when thine eye is single.' When you have a single mind, single-eyed occupation with Jesus Christ, with who you are in Christ, then every circumstance and situation in your life, everything that you're facing, you're facing it thinking, 'His mind. Let this mind be in you which is also in Christ Jesus.'
"II Peter 2, talking about some false teachers putting out bad doctrine, says, [14] Having eyes full of adultery, and that cannot cease from sin; beguiling unstable souls: an heart they have exercised with covetous practices; cursed children:
[15] Which have forsaken the right way, and are gone astray, following the way of Balaam the son of Bosor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness;
"When you have eyes full of adultery, that means everywhere I'm looking that's what I'm seeing. When your eyes are FULL of evil you can't stop it. Somebody says, 'I can't stop this sinful habit.' I know why. There it is.
"In verse 20 of II Peter 2 is the opposite: [20] For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the beginning.
"How did they escape the pollutions, the sin? By focusing on the Lord Jesus Christ."
*****
As I wrote in yesterday's post, a white elderly priest in Manhattan (St. Francis Xavier Church on 16th Street between 5th and 6th avenues), gave this as a closing prayer:
Pastor Kenneth Holler: I now invite you to stand and join us in the prayer for racial justice by responding ‘yes’ to each of the following statements. Do you support racial justice, equity and compassion in real human human relations?
St Francis Xavier Congregation: Yes.
Pastor Holler: Do you affirm that white privilege is unfair and harmful to those who have it and to those who do not?
St Francis Xavier Congregation: Yes.
Pastor Holler: Do you affirm that white privilege and the culture of white supremacy must be dismantled wherever it is present?
St Francis Xavier Congregation: Yes.
St Francis Xavier Congregation: Yes.
Of this prayer, Eric Metaxas, author of the book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, recognized as "one of the greatest heroes of the 21st Century," said on a radio show Thursday, "The abolition movement in Europe and in this country was led by Christians. What we're seeing here is something else entirely. The people who are using these new terms, systemic racism or white privilege, these are Marxists. These people not only don't believe in God, they hate God, and on the Black Lives Matter website, they reject just about everything a Christian would SAY. So what they're doing now, it's a power play. They want to hollow out the church from the inside because the REAL church is their enemy. This kind of church that will do this kind of nonsense, of course, is perfect for them. I wrote a book about Bonhoeffer being a Christian in the 1930s seeing the Nazis do this. In other words, they didn't come and say, 'Hey, we want you to worship the devil. Hey, we're atheists. Hey, we don't believe in God.' They would come in and they would effectively co-opt the churches; force the churches to play along just enough so that slowly they could confuse people and take over. What we're seeing right now is exactly that."
The radio show's host responded, "Totalitarianism doesn't happen without all elements of civil society folding into the state. Bonhoeffer was one of the few Lutheran priests who resisted the Reich. The MANY went with the Reich. Universities, corporate America, cultural institutions, the arts community, allowing art monuments to be torn asunder.
"You know, in WW II (there was a terrible movie made about this by George Clooney called The Monuments Men) historians and art/museum curators, people who believe in the beautiful things in life, in England and in America, organized to RESCUE works of art that Hitler was going to destroy that the Nazis had come in possession of through the plunder of Western Europe.
"Today we have those same individuals in the same professions standing silently by if not cheering on the mob destroying the things that are beautiful in life. You have a priest in NYC destroying in the name of the state and the overthrow of the state. That was something you would have expected Bill Ayers to have written for that priest.
"Christianity is the only hope for people who think racism is wrong. It's only the Bible that says we're made in God's image. Ask a Marxist if they believe in God's image. What did Karl Marx say about races? He was a vicious racist. So Marxists are just doing this to get power. They have no values, they couldn't care less about whether we're made in God's image; they don't believe in it."
Metaxas went on to say, "Marxism is seen as the pathway to destroy American society. Black people, because of their historic oppression, were just a means to their end of Marxist revolution. Just as it is with the Marxists who founded and run Black Lives Matter. Where do you go to church? 'Our Lady of Big Government.' It's cultural Marxist in expression but what you're really saying is, 'I worship the government.' "
(new article tomorrow)
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