Josh Mulvihill, in his book titled, Preparing Children for Marriage
described a great method for discerning on whether one is being condemned or convicted.
If you feel agitated while reading this chapter, determine whether you
are being condemned or convicted. One way to recognize the difference
between the two is to consider where each leads. Condemnation
proclaims you are a failure and points out a problem without providing
a solution. It leads to shame and often causes a person to inflict
self-punishment. Conviction from the Holy Spirit causes godly sorrow
and invites you to repent of sin. It leads to Christ, who offers to
take your punishment and declare you free from guilt. Satan condemns,
so a feeling of condemnation is not of the Lord (John 3:17). But God’s
moral standards are convicting. If God’s Spirit convicts your heart,
recognize this and respond appropriately. (Mulvihill 2017)
The neurodiversity movement tries to redefine the problem of mental
disability by suggesting that people with mental disabilities are
meerly different but equally healthy; that a healthy brain type is a
“culturally constructed fiction”. (2020)
The bible teaches us that nations and people groups experience a
generational compounding effect in their embrace of sin.1 One
generation espouses an evil practice, the generation following takes
it a little further and so on until a people considers actions such
as killing, maiming, and castrating children as a moral good. Satan works
incrementally to effect change toward greater sin and evil.2
Barring reformation and national repentance, the concerted effort to
plunge people into greater sin continues to progress.
It is hard by the nature of the elements involved. Claude Shannon
invented a mathematical theory for
it.(Warters 2012) On the
sending side, you have the message, the source, the transmitter. On
the path to the receiver you have a noise source that injects
noise into your signal. On the receiving side you have a receiver
that decodes the message and delivers understanding to the
destination.
What is the point of education? Why do people teach? At the core, it
is to shape the thoughts, views and beliefs of the pupils. When a
man gets up and tells a group of students ’these things are so’ he
does it that the pupils would believe him and act accordingly. Good
pupils do.
Finding a good church takes prayer, time, patience,discernment and
dependence on God.
Why put in the effort? God commands us to practice discernment.
Many organizations that call themselves churches are not true
churches, rather than building up, they cause real harm.
What do you look at when evaluating a church? Four things: doctrine,
practice, fruit and peace.
The Hebrew word יֶהְגֶּ֣ה (yehgeh) is often translated “meditate”.
It carries the idea of uttering a thing back out as well as
pondering it, of taking care and pains with a thing, and even the
idea of moaning for or growling over a thing.
One promise of Psalm 1 promise is that a man who does this with
God’s word will be blessed.
