What's Wrong With Burning Aborted Babies?: A Common Grace Defense of Disgust

The bodies of thousands of aborted and miscarried babies were incinerated as investigation has found. The Department of Health issued an instant ban on the practice which health minister Dr Dan Poulter branded 'totally unacceptable.' But before it was ended, at least 15,500 fetal remains were incinerated over the last two years alone,clinical waste in the United Kingdom, with some even used to heat hospitals.....

Commenting on the news, my friend Mollie Hemingway says, "People are reacting to this story with the natural revulsion one feels for such callous treatment of humans . . ." From what I've seen, though, the "natural revulsion" has primarily been expressed by those within the pro-life community. I suspect that those who have no qualms about the dismembering of babies would likely not be disgusted by the burning of their bodies.

Unfortunately, Christians have helped contribute to this callous disregard by undermining the role of disgust in helping to recognize and restrain sinful behavior. While we should never be disgusted by people there a broad range of human behaviors that we should find inherently disgusting. Yet while disgust was once considered a guide (albeit a fallible one) to God's natural law, we now chastise Christians for even implying that any sinful behavior can be disgusting.    Continue at Joe Carter

Is Deception Calling? A review of Jesus Calling by Sarah Young

Just the other day I posted that Christians should be wary of God “experiences.” Although there are many prominent promoters of practices that claim to be ways to hear directly from God (other than by reading the Bible), it is my fear that these are really paths toward self-deception or worse.

As a follow up I’d like to share my thoughts about a book whose author purports to have received messages from God (which she turned into a bestselling book).

A couple months ago I was given a devotional book called Jesus Calling, and although I never read devotionals I began to examine the book. What I found shocked me. The author, Sarah Young, claims to have received revelations from Jesus through dialogue journaling (something she learned from two “listeners” who wrote another book called God Calling. I’ll get to that in a minute). Her book is even written as if Jesus is speaking those messages directly to the reader, which I personally think borders (or crosses into) blasphemy.

Alarm bells began to clang in my head. 

Young writes that a year after reading that book, God Calling, “I began to wonder if I, too, could receive messages during my times of communing with God. I had been writing in prayer journals for years, but that was one-way communication: I did all the talking. I knew that God communicated with me through the Bible, but I yearned for more…”   Continue at Julia

The Modern Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit

Well now that I don’t have to preach on anything but what I want to preach on since I finished the New Testament, I find myself all over the place trying to decide what to preach on in sequence…a new kind of experience for me and I’m working on some kind of sequence that makes sense over the future. But I am sort of at the liberty point of my life where whatever is on my heart is where I can go, and this is a wonderful opportunity for me. And there is a subject that has concerned me for a long time and I have wanted to address this subject but it hasn’t been a part of preaching through the gospels in the way that it can be now and that is the subject of the Holy Spirit…the Holy Spirit.

After all the emphasis of so many years, 25 years of preaching through the four gospels, and much emphasis, of course, on the person of Christ as it should be, much emphasis on the character of God, and the nature of God as manifest in Christ and is seen elsewhere in Scripture, it is time now to give honor to the third member of the Trinity, namely the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the most forgotten, the most misrepresented, the most dishonored, the most grieved, the most abused and I might even say the most blasphemed of the members of the Trinity. That’s a sad thing.

When our Lord cleansed the temple in John 2, He said that He was, in a sense, fulfilling the attitude of David from Psalm 69, “Zeal for Your house has eaten Me up, the reproaches that fall on you are fallen on Me.” And what our Lord was saying was when God is dishonored, I feel the pain. “You have taken My Father’s house, which is to be a house of prayer, and turned it into a den of robbers. You’ve corrupted My Father’s house. You’ve blasphemed My Father’s name. You’ve dishonored My Father.”    Continue at John F. MacArthur