Feelings Come and Go

Feelings come and feelings go

And feelings are deceiving;

My warrant is the Word of God, 

Naught else is worth believing.

Martin Luther

Emotion Without Knowledge

All the Puritans regarded religious feeling and pious emotion without knowledge as worse than useless.  Only when the truth was being felt was emotion in any way desirable.  When men felt and obeyed the truth they knew, it was the work of the Spirit of God, but when they were swayed by feeling without knowledge, it was a sure sign that the devil was at work, for feeling divorced from knowledge and urgings to action in darkness of mind were both as ruinous to the soul as was knowledge without obedience.  So the teaching of truth was the pastor's first task, as the learning of it was the layman's.

J.I. Packer, Knowing God, p. 70

Hillsong Article

Back in 2008, while at the Personal Freedom Outreach apologetics conference, I mentioned to Kurt Goedelman that I had written up a report about Beth Moore's "Believing God" DVD series, exposing the false teachings. He asked if I would send them a copy to look at. He then contacted me and asked if they could use my information for an article, with me sharing the by-line. The article was published in the January-March 2009 issue.

Back in October 2019, right after I had rotator cuff repair surgery, I received an email from Kurt seeking anything I had written which might be worth while for another journal issue. Back and forth emails had me come up empty-handed. He then asked me if I would be interested in writing an article on Hillsong Church, to which I agreed.

Well, not having use of my left arm for a couple weeks, and needing pain killers beyond that, it was November before I started researching. I ended up with about 1000 pages of articles gleaned from the Internet.

Many doctor appointments through the end of February (before more March and April appointments were cancelled) as well as car repairs slowed down my writing process, but I finally finished the article and sent it off to Kurt a week ago. He is planning for publishing it in the fall issue of their Journal.

I highly recommend the PFO Journal for general apologetics studies. I have every issue, having ordered all the back issues in about 2001 after subscribing. You can get every issue from before 2020 on as pdf files on either CD or thumb drive. Here is subscription information as well as information for acquiring the pdf versions.

Women Teachers to Avoid

Someone shared a Facebook post with me from “Biblical and Reformed.” The very interesting thing about the post is that it is just five photos showing the most popular false teaching women whose works are invading the Church due to lack of discernment.  

So, look below and note the face and names of these false teachers, some of whom are more dangerous than others.  Sadly, they left out a BIGGIE, Beth Moore.

Children, Honor Your Parents

Honor your father and your mother so that you may have a long life in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. Exodus 20:12.

Children, obey your parents as you would the Lord, because this is right. “Honor your father and mother,” which is the first commandment with a promise, “so that it may go well with you and that you may have a long life in the land.” Ephesians 6:1-3

Yet another reason why honoring parents and long enduring civilization are connected is strong families form a major bulwark against totalitarian regimes. A standard feature of totalitarian regimes is the shifting of children’s loyalty and obedience from their parents to the state. One of the first things totalitarian regimes seek to do is weaken parental authority and replace it with the party or state. In such countries, children are encouraged to inform on their parents if they make critical comments—or even tell jokes—about government leaders or about the dominant ideology (in the modern period, that would almost always refer to communism, Nazism, or radical Islamism). Consequently, parents would often fear to speak openly in front of their children.

Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible, Exodus: God, Slavery, and Freedom, pg.258

Real Spiritual Warfare

The focal point of Satan's attack is in the mental realm.  That's why I can't emphasize enough that effective spiritual warfare is waged in the world of ideas and philosophies, in order to correct the deceptions….

Thus, true spiritual warfare is a matter of overcoming deception, accusation and temptation on a personal level, and in the wider sphere. The world is deceived. There are certain strongholds of thinking that must be torn down!

Bill Randles, Making War in the Heavenlies, p. 101, 103

Agglomeration

The Good - For Education and/or Edification

Why Sexual Morality May be Far More Important than You Ever Thought.  God was right  to have one man/one woman marriage for sex. But we knew that, didn’t we?

Did God ordain abortion as punishment for infidelity?

Passover, Catholics, JWs and Communion.

HMMMM

This has all the earmarks of a cult.

Did Hobby Lobby remain open because of a word from God? I don’t believe so.

More Wolves and False Teachings

Is Freemasonry Compatible with Christianity?  NO!  Masonry is a cult of wolves.

The paganism and heresy of the Roman Catholic Church never ceases to amaze me.

Then again, the Pope of enviro-nazism DID surprise me — one of the stupidest things I’ve heard him say in a long time.

Kenneth Copeland is a spawn of Satan. By the way, Christians never did the tithe, so if your church teaches tithing, they are WRONG.  But guess what, you no longer have to worry about the corona virus because Copeland cast a spell on it! Proving once again is a false prophet — it is well past March 29th.

Corona Virus Prophets Exposed?

Review of a Tony Evans book.

Joel Osteen Tests Negative for Christianity. The article is satire, but 100% true.

This 50 minute video gives all the proof you need to know that John Hagee is a false teacher who is unqualified for the pastorate due to sexual immorality.

Phony Spiritual Warfare

While Christians are waging phony war against Jezebel, lust and other "strongmen," the humanism, psychology, selfism and so on are going unchallenged, and are even being promoted in our churches!  When Paul waged war in Athens, his spiritual warfare consisted of the ideas of men being confronted by the Gospel of God! 

Bill Randles, Making War in the Heavenlies, p. 26

What About Mysticism?

Mysticism is the exaltation of subjective experience over objective truth....  How many times have you heard the plea for us to get rid of our "silly doctrine," and come together in unity?... [Doctrine] is the body of objective truth, the teaching of God's Word.  Doctrine is the only basis for evaluating spiritual experience.  This is why Satan wants to move us away from it.  Without doctrine, all you have to judge by are your own fickle feelings.

Bill Randles, Making War in the Heavenlies, p. 15

A Sentimental Journey

Last week I got a message from a person with a far-left ideology in his religious and political beliefs; he made fun of me and said it was childish for me to have Snoopy on my profile, implying a lack of credibility on my part because of it.

Well Snoopy is a very important part of my life, and is how I met my wife, so I keep a lot of comics with him as a pilot, he’s on my Facebook profile and there are a lot of Snoopy things all over our house.  Now let me tell you the story of how all this came about!

On July 29, 1974, my brother was heading home from Ft. Hood, TX, after getting out of the Army so he stopped by Ft. Bragg on the way home to Springfield, OH, to take me with him.  It was my last leave (of 2 weeks), seven months before I got out of the Army.  This is a puzzle piece.

A year or so earlier my grandmother sent me a Snoopy pin as you see in the photo above (it is 1-inch high). She sent me that because she thought it would be appreciated since I was a pilot (I hold a commercial pilot license for single- and multi-engined airplanes, and helicopters; I also hold an instrument rating for airplanes.) I loved flying and intended to work as a pilot after I left service; I ended up as an air traffic controller instead but I still kept flying, including flying skydivers, flying Civil Air Patrol missions and ferrying planes. 

Anyway, I pinned it on my flight jacket sleeve-pocket. One day I was coming into the barracks as another guy was going out and I got too close to the locker: Snoopy slid up underneath the edge and snapped off.  Puzzle piece two.

How about puzzle piece number three: I had become a Christian in January 1974 and began thinking about what I’d do when I left the Army (I entered active duty 6/17/70 and left the Army on 2/27/75). Part of that was thinking about marrying in the future and I began praying that the Lord would lead me to a wife! (He answered that prayer pretty quick!)

On July 31, 1974 I asked my grandmother where she got the pin because I wanted to replace it.  She told me she got it from a card store at the mall.  Puzzle piece four.  

Now the rest of the story picks up the next day, August 1st.

The Springfield mall had two card stores: Hallmark and The Card Cage.  I tried Hallmark first and had no luck. So I went to The Card Cage. Not having the pin with me, I described it to the cashier who had no idea what I was talking about. But a few feet away was Jill, putting stuff on a shelf and she said she knew where they were, having just put them away. So she took the other girl's place at the register after bringing me the pin. 

Just being friendly, Jill asked what I wanted the pin for (after all, it's not every day a 22-year-old guy wants a Snoopy pin!). I told her he was my wingman. 

Of course that got her curious and she asked what a wingman was so I explained what it was and also said that I was a pilot. She immediately asked if I was based at Wright-Patterson AFB (20 min away) because I obviously had that military look and she told me her dad worked there as a civilian engineer at Research & Development.

I told her I was a civilian pilot because the military didn't like my vision but that I was indeed in the military - "A rompin', stompin', dancin', romancin', super-dooper U.S. paratrooper."  Great pickup line, eh?

Well that got her chuckling. I told her I was on leave visiting my mom and was heading out to Denver in a few days to visit my dad. She started talking about how she loved the mountains and then we talked about various things for about 10 minutes; then she had customers and I left. 

Ah, but now I had a few days in town so I decided to ask her out and the next day I showed up at the store and did just that. She told me she had to ask her parents and I could come back the next day!  It seems she was 18, had just graduated high school a couple months earlier and was going to start college at Wright State in Dayton. She was somewhat taken aback by this older guy asking her out!

So the next day I met her again and we went out that evening after she got off work. And the next day, and the next day, and I never went to Colorado; spent two weeks dating her! (Not long after this she bought earrings identical to — but smaller than — the pin; you can barely make them out in this photo, taken 9/8/74).

When I went back to duty we began a long-distance relationship via daily letters and a weekly phone call. I was able to get a 3-day pass in September and bought a car (a blue 1972 Super Beetle) just to go see her. Got Columbus Day weekend off in October, a 4-day pass for Thanksgiving, and a 3-day pass for Christmas (10 hour drive, by the way).  And then didn't see her again until the day I got out. By then she had transferred to Ohio State. 

I decided to get a job in Columbus so as to be near her. I worked six weeks as a laborer in construction, then got a job with the main P.O. in Columbus working midnights and weekends (until the end of Sept 1978 when we moved to the Chicago area). Of course this made dating a bit difficult because we could only meet after school and before I left for work. Then of course Spring and Summer breaks she went home (1.5 hrs away) so we were back to long-distance relationships until we married on August 1, 1976 — she picked the day because it was the anniversary of our meeting.

Over the years the original pin I had which broke has been a fixture on the dashboard of my VW and then our cars; the one I bought from her eventually broke and became the 12 in a clock she embroidered and framed. A few years back we decided we wanted to see if there was a way to find those pins, which hadn’t been sold for decades, and we indeed found a couple brand new on e-bay. So now we both have one (the photo above has him on my dark blue wool sweater). Jill has also embroidered copies on both my denim jackets.

And now you know the rest of the story!