Abortion
America’s Women Thrown to the Wolves by Bradley Mattes
Maya Angelou Explains Why She Decided Against An Abortion by Bre Payton
Pro-Abortion Activists Oppose Free Car Seats For Needy Babies by Jay Hobbs – “How committed to abortion do you have to be to fight free car seats? Committed enough to be earning a six-figure salary while providing nothing to needy women and children.”
Adoption
I Won’t Let My Kids Watch “Finding Dory,” But You Should by Brittany Cover – “‘Finding Dory’ may cause pain to foster or adoptive kids, but everyone else will have a ball.”
Creation
Reporter Says “Huge” Just Doesn’t Describe the Ark by Ken Ham
Family Life
15 Ways To Celebrate Independence Day With The Kids by Mollie Hemingway – “Read the Declaration, make flag-themed desserts, and do a dozen other things to celebrate the greatest-country-on-Earth’s Independence Day.”
Woman Told She Would Never Have Children Because of Cancer Gives Birth to Healthy Baby Boy by Emily Derois
Instead I Held You by Regan Long
Love Actualized The Meaning of Marriage by Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller reviewed by Terrell Clemmons
Worldview and Culture
The American Church Needs to Get Serious about Religious Liberty, Now by David French
Russia’s Proposed Law: No Evangelizing Outside of Church by Kate Shellnutt – “Evangelicals protest the law, which would severely limit where and how Christians share the gospel.”
No-Gun List? How About a No-Abort List? by Jonah Goldberg
Watch Dick Van Dyke Sing “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” in Front of Walt Disney’s Childhood Home – Old age has nothing on Bert by Michelle Profis
Small ≠ Broken: 5 Steps to Greatness In a Small Church by Karl Vaters – “You don’t need one more person, one more dollar or one more square foot of building to start being a great church.”
Video: Ambulance crew sets off chain of giving – A wonderful story out of Minnesota: “Farmer Fred Pitzner never had any children. So when he passed away, he left nearly $200,000 to his Minnesota ambulance crew. They decided to pay a good deed forward. And the result will warm your heart …”
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What is Government by R. J. Rushdoony
One of the more abused words in all languages today is government. When most people say government, they mean the federal government, or the state, county, or city governments, or all of them combined. Such use of the word is a major departure from Biblical, Puritan, and early American usage.
The Bible speaks of government as the attribute of God and of Christ. Isaiah 9:6 declares of the Messiah: “[T]he government shall be upon his shoulder.”
On the human level, all government is by delegation from God, and there are seven basic levels of government. The first area – and the most basic – is self-government: the self-government of godly men. Without this, we have only lawlessness. One of our most serious problems today is lack of self-government.
The second area is the family. In the Bible, the family is set forth as the most important single “institution” or agency on earth. The family is man’s first and most basic government, school, and church, from childhood on. If family government is weak, the country is weak.
A third area is the church. Too often today, the church either does not govern, or governs weakly, because people are in rebellion against all good government.
A fourth area is the school. For better or worse, schools are a very important form of government. Their influence as a form of government marks us all for life. Bad government in schools can – and usually does – mean bad government after schooling and for life.
A fifth area is our vocation – our work. You and I are governed by the work we do. It sets the pattern for our time use, our training, our income, and our daily lives. Our employers govern us, and the kind of work we do governs us. Our work is thus a very major form of government.
The sixth form is our community or society. What people think, do, and expect governs all of us. We feel social pressures which govern us.
Finally, a seventh form of government is civil government. There was a time when no one spoke of government as anything but civil government, one form of government among many. Today, civil government tries to control all other areas of government, by usurping the powers of self-government, family, church, school, work, and society. This is the meaning of totalitarianism: the control of all other forms of government by civil government. It spells certain disaster for any country.
What is government? It is certainly not the federal government. Over all, it is the government of Almighty God, and subject to God-ordained spheres of life and agencies. It begins with our own self-government.
If we deny the government of Almighty God, and if we fail in self-government, then we invite slavery and totalitarianism. You will get the kind of government you exercise.
(From the Chalcedon Foundation email of June 28, 2016.)