When God gives a promise, He always tries our faith. Just as the roots of trees take firmer hold when they are contending with the wind, so faith takes a firmer hold when it struggles with adverse appearances.-Robert Murray McCheyne, Comfort in Sorrow, Christian Focus, 2002, p. 40,

I would be true, for there are those who trust me;
I would be pure, for there are those who care;
I would be strong- for there is much to suffer;
I would be brave, for there is much to dare.
I would be friend of all- the foe, the friendless;
I would be giving, and forget the gift.
I would be humble, for I know my weakness;
I would look up- and laugh- and love- and lift.
Howard Arnold Walter

The English Established Church... will more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on 1/39 of its income. - Karl Marx, Capital

Have you ever noticed that to the Left, political ideology is a
religion, while to the rest of us, religion is the antidote to their
political ideology?
The bedrock of the Left's political philosophy is the principle that the state is dominant over man. That forms the basis for Marxism, Socialism, Nazism, or any of the other -isms proven over the past century to be a failure. Religion, particularly Christianity, teaches that only God is superior to man.
Therefore, the Left cannot accept religion and must denigrate those who do. In the alternative, they must substitute allegiance to and worship at the altar of a statist ideology with particular emphasis on unfettered abortion rights, with the same fervor and belief as do those who believe in the direct relationship between God and man.
The United States, founded on the tenet that the state serves the citizen, whose rights come from God, has become the most successful nation in the history of mankind. In order for the Left to change the United States into a socialist paradise, they must overthrow the founding principle of the country. - Steve McCann, Have You Ever Noticed?
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/08/have_you_ever_noticed.html

No candle which God lights was ever meant to burn alone.- J. C. Ryle

Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.- Yousuf Karsh, 1908 - 2002

Without Christ I was like a fish out of water. With Christ I am in the ocean of love.- Sadhu Singh

Without realizing what was happening, most of us gradually
came to take for granted the premises underlying this
philosophy of optimism. We proceeded to live these
propositions, though we would not have stated them as blandly
as I set them forth here:
Man is inherently good.
Individual man can carve out his own salvation with the
help of education and society through progressively better
government.
Reality and values worth searching for lie in the material
world that science is steadily teaching us to analyze,
catalogue, and measure. While we would not deny the existence
of inner values, we relegate them to second place.
The purpose of life is happiness, [which] we define in
terms of enjoyable activity, friends, and the accumulation of
material objects.
The pain and evil of life--such as ignorance, poverty,
selfishness, hatred, greed, lust for power--are caused by
factors in the external world; therefore, the cure lies in the
reforming of human institutions and the bettering of
environmental conditions.
As science and technology remove poverty and lift from us
the burden of physical existence, we shall automatically become
finer persons, seeing for ourselves the value of living the
Golden Rule.
In time, the rest of the world will appreciate the
demonstration that the American way of life is best. They will
then seek for themselves the good life of freedom and
prosperity. This will be the greatest impetus toward an end of
global conflict.
The way to get along with people is to beware of religious
dictums and dogma. The ideal is to be a nice person and to live
by the Creed of Tolerance. Thus we offend few people. We live
and let live. This is the American Way.-Catherine Marshall (1914-1983), Beyond Our Selves, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961, p. 5-6

Counterfeit Gods

One of the signs that an object is functioning as an idol is that fear becomes one of the chief characteristics of life. When we center our lives on the idol, we become dependent on it. If our counterfeit god is threatened in any way, our response is complete panic. We do not say, “What a shame, how difficult,” but rather “This is the end! There’s no hope!”
This may be a reason why so many people now respond to U.S. political trends in such an extreme way. When either party wins an election, a certain percentage of the losing side talks openly about leaving the country. They become agitated and fearful for the future. They have put the kind of hope in their political leaders and policies that once was reserved for God and the work of the gospel. When their political leaders are out of power they experience a death. They believe that if their policies and people are not in power, everything will fall apart. They refuse to admin how much agreement they actually have with the other party, and instead focus on the points of disagreement. The points of contention overshadow everything else, and a poisonous environment is created.- -Timothy Keller,Counterfeit Gods, p98


Another sign of idolatry in our politics is that opponents are not considered to be simply mistaken, but to be evil. After the last presidential election [i.e. 2008 election which Obama won], my eighty-four-year-old mother observed, “It used to be that whoever was elected as your president, even if he wasn’t the one you voted for, he was still your president. That doesn’t seem to be the case any longer.” After each election, there is now a significant number of people who see the incoming president lacking moral legitimacy. The increasing political polarization and bitterness we see in U.S. politics today is a sign that we have made political activism into a form of religion. How does idolatry produce fear and demonization?
Dutch-Canadian philosopher Al Wolters taught that in the biblical view of things, the main problem in life is sin, and the only solution is God and his grace. The alternative to this view is to identify something besides sin as the main problem with the world and something besides God as the main remedy. That demonizaes something that is not completely bad, and makes an idol out of soemthing that cannot be the ultimate good. -Timothy Keller,Counterfeit Gods,

The great danger is to single out some aspect or phenomenon of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than the alien intrusion of sin, as the villain in the drama of human life… This “something” has been variously identified as … the body and its passions (Plato and much of Greek philosophy), culture in distinction from nature (Rousseau and Romanticism), institutional authority, especially in the state and the family (much of depth psychology), technology and management techniques (Heidegger and Ellul)… The Bible is unique in its uncompromising rejection of all attempts … to identify part of creation as either the villain or the savior.- Al Wolters quoted in Timothy Keller,(Counterfeit Gods,

This accounts for the constant political cycles of overblown hopes and disillusionment, for the increasingly poisonous political discourse, and for the disproportionate fear and despair when one’s political party loses power. But why do we deify and demonize political causes and ideas? Reinhold Niebuhr answered that, in political idolatry, we make a god out of having power. -Timothy Keller,(Counterfeit Gods, p101)