Tantalizing If True

The professions of teaching and social work are respectable, but not because they can do a better job than parents. Like a dishwasher, they are useful as ways to automate parenting. An automatic dishwasher usually does an inferior job, but it works when a human dishwasher isn’t available. In the same way, no classroom, however well-equipped, can approach the student/teacher ratio, professional dedication or understanding of the students that a committed homeschooling parent can. Public schools stay in business because, like orphanages, they can do their work even without parents if necessary.

“Defend the Bible? I would just as soon defend a lion. Just
turn the Bible loose. It will defend itself.”

– Charles H. Spurgeon

At a conference, Graham Old was told, “The vast majority of people decide to become Christians because of a crisis in their lives.” His initial reaction: that’s a “big over-statement”. I’m not so sure.
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“Only love to God shall stand and prevail; not boasting, denouncing, or threatening.”

– Michael Sattler, Martyrs Mirror p. 416

At root, many modern conveniences were not developed for people’s needs, but for the Industrial Age. Your automatic dishwasher was not designed for cleaner dishes, it was designed for automatic dishes. You have become used to washing the food off them before putting them in the dishwasher, precisely because it can’t clean dishes as well as you can.

“True conversion is a rare thing; but recovering from a false hope of conversion, after continuing in it for some time, is much more rare.”

– from Jonathan Edwards

I hadn’t been looking very carefully at the log files of homecomers.org, so I was unaware that my site was mentioned on the discussion boards of the New York Times and Beliefnet this year, as well as on Joe Kissell’s Interesting Thing of the Day. Probably it wasn’t my site that was so interesting — Joe was linking to the Anabaptist classic history Martyrs Mirror which I have been hosting for a couple of years.

As a new blogger, I’ve been submitting my site to the usual blog aggregators, directories, and search engines, such as Feedster and technorati. I have a problem with self-promotion, but I figure that if I have something to say, I shouldn’t make it too hard for people to find it and read it.

“Wake up, and give heed; you certainly see it is not in human power what the Lord enables us to do, that we can leave our dear children, yea, joyfully resign our lives, for the honor of God.”

- Claesken, Martyrs Mirror p. 611-616

An English Christian leader named Jonny Baker has compiled one hundred of what he calls “worship tricks.” Many of them require multimedia resources. Others resemble sophisticated object lessons, such as those used in children’s church, only these are for adults: music videos, mystical poems, spiritual labyrinths. One of them involves a flame-throwing sermon illustration — for the feast of Pentecost of course.
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“For when we consider that the world is rather a prison, we can perceive that you have rather escaped from than been committed to prison.”

- Tertullian’s consolation to the martyrs AD 200 , Martyrs Mirror, p. 1139-1141