Presidential Prayer, Day Thirty-Eight

October 31, 2004 @ 8:08 pm by Pressed

Posted by Christopher

Father in Heaven,

I thank you for this day. I thank you for another day to serve you. Others would have me believe that today is somehow evil, but I believe that this is a day that you created and I thank you for it. I thank you for your saving grace and for the relationship that you provide. Thank you for this country that allows the people to have a say in who leads the country.

It is close to the time when Americans head to the poles to cast our votes for who we think should be lead our country. I pray that the process is fair and the every vote is counted.

I pray that you would bless the man that is chosen and that he would lead our country in a direction that is in accordance with your will. May he lead the country in a way that the country would be a blessing for others.

I also pray that you would be with the families that go out tonight to Trick or Treat. I pray that they would be safe and protected.

I pray all this in Jesus name,

Amen

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Presidential Prayer, Day Thirty-Seven

October 30, 2004 @ 9:46 pm by Pressed

Lord, as I come before you tonight in prayer I recognize my own weaknesses. I am altogether unworthy of you and it is only by your magnificent grace that I have the privilege to come before you in prayer. I thank you God for your patience with me and for the grace and mercy you show to those you came to save. Lord, I know that my ways are not your ways and neither are my thoughts your thoughts. Because of this I know that I must be careful to seek you in all things, refraining from making my own decisions based purely on my own ambitions and selfishness. God, I ask that you would forgive me for the times I do things on my own without coming to you in prayer. Your wisdom and guidance will far surpass anything that we can come up with or do. That is why tonight I pray for your guidance on the upcoming election. Lord, lead your chosen people to make the right decisions next Tuesday as we vote for the next President of the United States. Regardless of who is elected, I ask that you would let our attitudes be like that of Christ Jesus. Give us the right words to say and change our hearts that we me show honor and respect to the person you allow to lead this nation.

While I do not know who the next President of the United States will be, I pray that you would give them a special blessing as they lead our country. Lord, I know that you will use them to fulfill your purposes on this earth and it is by your sovereign hand that they have the privilege to lead us. Ultimately you are in control of all things, and nothing happens that is not allowed to happen by your hand. For this reason we shall not fear the future, but embrace it as another day, another month, and another year to live for Christ. Lord, give the President strength to stand up during the hard times that will come during his term. Lead him in the important decisions he will be forced to make and ultimately use him for your purposes. We lift our president, our government, and our nation up to you and ask that your will would be done in all things.

I pray specifically for President Bush and Senator Kerry tonight. Lord, protect them and keep them safe as the election draws near. I pray for both of these men that you would bless them, keep them strong, and give them what they need to be leaders of this country. Lord, I pray that they would seek you and find you. Reveal your truth to these men and lead them to you. I pray that in all things they will seek your face and that you would not be hidden from them. Reveal yourself, your purposes and your will in their lives and guide them in the journey you have for them. God, it is my personal desire that these men would come to know you in such a way that it would change their hearts, their lives, and the way they lead our country. Lord, in their search for power and glory, I pray that they find it only in you.

Thank you, Lord, for hearing our prayers. Thank you for giving us the freedom that we have to worship you in this country. Lord, don’t let us take that freedom for granted, but instead let us use it to the advantage of your kingdom. God I pray that you would continue to give us a passion for prayer. Lead us in your ways and teach us according to your truth. I ask these things in the precious name of Jesus. Amen.

_____________________________

Note: To view other presidential prayers, click here.

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A Wise Man (or Woman *wink* *wink*) Once Said…

October 29, 2004 @ 1:44 pm by Pressed

I have decided that I am quite ready for this election to be over. I am tired of the political commercials on the TV, radio, and all the signs in our yards. Let’s get this over with. Tuesday is the day! Until then I am willing to suffer through a few more commercials. The one thing I do like is reading the opinions of the people in the blogging world. Here are some things being said about the candidates and the upcoming election:

I was reading a friend’s blog today and one of his guest bloggers made a short, but insightful post about one of the presidential candidates that visited her school today. I thought this post possessed much wisdom and first hand personal experience with the candidate. She had a few things to say that I agree with and I am glad that someone else has come to the same conclusions that I have about him. If you get a chance go read Boo Kerry!

I find myself reading the Blogs for Bush website quite a bit. I know, I know, I am a glutton for punishment. Here I am saying I wish all this was over and yet I continue to read this type of stuff. One thing I enjoy about this website is the large amount of guestbloggers that post. It is not just the same person all the time, and certianly not simply the same issues. I enjoyed todays post, which is Thank You, Presdient Bush. I must say, well done to guest blogger Joe Dougherty for that post.

If you keep up with the news at all, I am sure you have heard about the missing explosives. I read another article today dealing with this issue, complete with satillite pictures and quotes. It seems that the double Johns are continuing their buisness of ignoring the facts. Oh, don’t listen to me, go read this post from Conservative Eyes.

Asisaid has a few comments about this issue as well.

Bryan has much to say at Spare Change. I especially like the entry entitled Political Axi-ummm. Although I think I have said that before… now I am convicted. Thanks Bryan! *sigh*

There are just a few of the many bloggers who have been talking about the upcoming presidential election. Go read, talk, and be merry for tomorrow we may vote!

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Reality House: A Youth Tradition

October 28, 2004 @ 10:12 am by Pressed

Tonight I am taking my youth group to Reality House in Eureka, MO. Every year for the last seven years that I have been at my church, we have taken our students to this event. It is a house of reality where the students pile into a van that finds itself in an accident. When the students get out of the van they are in the middle of an accident scene. There is an ambulance and fire department there at the accident scene and it is pretty grusome, but reveals the reality of a fatal car accident. Next the students are picked up by another van, the county coroner, and they are taken to the hospital where they see a family waiting to hear the verdict of their child who has just been in an accident. The doctor comes out and tells them that their family member has passed away, and in the midst of the sudden screams and cries the students are taken into the morgue to see the dead body on the table as the doctors finish their final reports. The students are then put onto a gurney and pushed into a dark room, through the wall, where they enter the next stage of their journey. They go to the “judgment line” where they stand before St. Peter and say their name to see if their name is in the book of life. If not, which none of their names are in the book, they are sent to hell. When they walk in the room that represents hell it is dark, hot, and full of smoke. There are cages and people screaming and satan comes out with glowing eyes (from glow in the dark contact lenses). After going through the house of reality, the students pile into a room where they are broken up into smaller groups to meet with counselors who go over the plan of salvation with them.

To tell you the truth, I am not all that comfortable with this type of evangelism, by itself. While it does reveal the reality of our afterlife to teens, it seems to me to promote a scare tactic to attempt to get students to accept Christ. This is what many have called a “fire-insurance” tactic. For students to accept Christ simply because they do not want to go to hell does not seem like a Biblical example of conversion to me. Any students who show a serious interest in being saved during this event, I personally believe need to be counseled one on one. If they go off believing that a simple prayer or “just asking Jesus into your heart” gets them a ticket into heaven, then I fail as a youth pastor. This is why my recent goal has been to council each student who has professed Jesus as their savior and to make them go through a 13 day study that helps them to learn about assurance of salvation and spiritual growth. For us to simply let a student accept Christ or show interest and just leave them hanging is wrong. It is also dangerous to them. Many have come and said “the prayer” and yet they walk away unconverted. These students grow up believing that they have salvation and need to do nothing. This is more dangerous that simply being lost, and as Christians who are called to reach people for Christ, we must do whatever it takes to avoid this outcome and not promote it by using evangelism tactics that lead people into a fake salvation that they don’t understand.

I hope to have a post up about the Missouri Baptists Convention as soon as I find time to type it.

Pressed

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The Enigmatic Faith of John F. Kerry

October 27, 2004 @ 11:58 pm by Pressed

These excerpts are taken from an article written by Albert Mohler the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Senator John Kerry has been introducing himself to the American people, even as he is running for the nation’s highest office. Through his public appearances, televised debates, and political events, he has revealed a great deal about his political positions, personal history, and plans for America. Missing from this picture is any substantial understanding of John Kerry’s faith. When it comes to his religious convictions, John Kerry is a portrait in paradox.

Christianity Today recently profiled Kerry, looking at his public statements and private religious practices. The magazine had to dig deep in order to find enough material to fill out the article. On the campaign trail, Kerry routinely acknowledges his Roman Catholic identity, though his theological convictions and moral positions are often at odds with the doctrine of his church.

In his campaign manifesto, A Call to Service: My Vision for a Better America, Kerry asserts his Catholic identity. “I am a believing and practicing Catholic, married to another believing and practicing Catholic, and being an American Catholic at this particular moment in history has three particular implications for my own point of view as a candidate for the presidency,” Kerry explained. He went on to identify these three implications as: an obligation to love God and neighbor, a commitment to equal rights and justice, and an awareness of persecution.

Nevertheless, Kerry’s well-known positions on abortion, homosexuality, and a host of other issues place him directly in opposition to the official teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. Kerry is resolutely pro-abortion, having voted against every single piece of pro-life legislation that reached the floor during his tenure in the Senate. Most recently, he went out of his way to return to Washington in time to vote against legislation that would protect fetal life. He has opposed a ban on partial-birth abortions, and he has the stalwart support of the nation’s abortion-rights movement.

Similarly, groups promoting homosexuality have championed Kerry as the most pro-homosexual presidential candidate in recent history. Kerry has sponsored legislation that would add homosexuality as a protected class in anti-discrimination legislation, and he was one of only fourteen senators to vote against the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. He claims to oppose same-sex marriage, but endorses civil unions with full marital rights in the law. In other words, he supports same-sex marriage so long as such unions are not called “marriages.” Beyond this, he has suggested that as the nation’s conscience “evolves” on this issue, same-sex marriage is likely to become a reality anyway.

While Kerry has openly called himself a Roman Catholic, the majority of his moral positions are completely against the beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church. This says a lot about his respect for the teaching of the church and his faith. To claim to be religious and yet hold no religious values seems to me to be a paradox. I have to raise serious questions about his religious belief. Is he using it for political gain? It certainly does not seem that he is serious about his Roman Catholic faith.

In the October 7, 2004 edition of The New York Times, reporters Jodi Wilgorn and Bill Keller described the essentially secular character of John Kerry’s campaign and political philosophy. The reporters pointed to a town hall forum held this week in New Hampshire, where Senator Kerry, discussing his endorsement of embryonic stem-cell research, “never uttered the words faith, moral, religion, prayer, conscience, or God, instead conjuring Galileo and other scientists who once drew the wrath of established religion.” In other words, Kerry argued for unrestricted embryonic stem-cell research, directly countering the teaching of his own church and avoiding any reference to the moral dimension of the issue. As Wilgorn and Keller remarked, “It was a typical performance for Mr. Kerry, a Roman Catholic who attends Mass on most Sundays, but has largely avoided discussions of faith throughout a campaign in which Mr. Bush has frequently appealed to religious sensibilities and is trying to raise the Election Day turnout of the evangelical and the orthodox.”

According to the Christianity Today report, Kerry attends mass and receives Communion at the Paulist Center in Boston, which it describes as “quasi-independent of the local hierarchy.” The Paulist Center is a gathering place for liberal Roman Catholics disenchanted with the official church and its positions on political, social, theological, and moral issues.

Again, it seems the type of church he attends reveals the type of man he is. While he remains under the guise of ‘religion’ by attending a church, many Catholics and Protestants don’t bother to discover what type of church. I personally know several good Christians who would say something like this, “If he says he is Catholic, then he must be a religious man with religious convictions.” This is not necessarily true, revealed by his attendance of a liberal church whose positions have pulled away from the beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church on politics, social, theological, and moral issues. If you listen to the way Kerry talks about religion, it is obvious that he either doesn’t know much about the Bible or different religious beliefs in general or he doesn’t hold to those beliefs. He also affirms and finds himself fascinated with all different religions and how they are all connected. He would even included atheists and agnostics in the quest for spirituality “even atheists and agnostics wind up with some kind of spirituality, maybe begrudgingly acknowledging it here and there, but it’s there.” Apparently he simply picks and chooses what he likes and doesn’t like about his Religious belief, thereby making himself look Religious without having to hold to any Religious system of beliefs.

What do we make of all this? In the first place, we should understand John Kerry to be a liberal member of the cultural elite whose worldview has been overwhelmingly shaped by secular influences and the preoccupations of the academic elite. Beyond this, Kerry the politician has aligned himself with the left wing of the Democratic Party, taking positions on social issues that have uniformly pleased abortion activists and the homosexual movement, while never apologizing or even explaining for such a blatant violation of Catholic teaching. While he claims Catholic identity on the one hand, he subverts and rejects Catholic moral teaching with the other. He is what conservative Catholics call a “cafeteria Catholic,” identifying with Catholic moral teaching on selected issues of economic and political impact, but aligning himself with the forces that require absolute allegiance–the abortion-rights and gay-rights movements, for example–in order for a candidate to receive the Democratic Party’s nomination for president.

James Carroll, a liberal Boston Globe columnist who, as a Catholic, has called for the Church to abandon its central theological structure, champions Kerry’s mutation of Catholicism. According to Carroll, Kerry is not a “renegade Catholic,” but one among other liberal Catholics who “understand that moral theology is not a fixed set of answers given once and for all . . . but an ongoing quest for truths that remain allusive.” As Carroll further argued, “In the area of sexuality, for example, for which so many hot-button issues arise, it is clear that the human race is undergoing a massive cultural mutation, posing excruciating problems that human beings have never faced before.”

In other words, John Kerry is a Catholic who picks and chooses which Catholic doctrines he will accept and which he will reject, and who aligns himself with a worldview that understands morality to be relative to the “massive cultural mutation” that now marks postmodern culture.

The portrait that emerges from a look at John Kerry’s statements about faith reveals a man driven by an overwhelmingly secular worldview. He, like so many others in his generation, has formed his own “do it yourself” form of religion, picking and choosing among doctrines and accepting alternative worldviews directly at odds with his “self-identified faith,” without any sense of cognitive dissonance. The very fact that his most revealing statements about his faith have come in an interview with a magazine called The American Windsurfer tells us a great deal in itself. When he cites the Transcendentalists and Pantheists as sources of inspiration, he tells us more than he probably intends. When it comes to orthodox Christianity, there is no wind in Senator Kerry’s sail.

____________________________________
R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. For more articles and resources by Dr.
Mohler, and for information on The Albert Mohler Program, a daily national radio program broadcast on the Salem Radio Network, go to www.albertmohler.com. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to www.sbts.edu. Send feedback to mail@albertmohler.com.

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