The Five Challenges of Self-Sacrifice

I want to love God with all my mind, soul and strength and love others as myself. I want to have a personal daily altar to God. I want to replace the perverse altars and idolatry of ideas that enable evil to influence our lives and those around us.

The five challenges of self-sacrifice from two weeks ago can be generally linked with worldview statements as follows:

1. An atheist doesn’t pray (even in a foxhole) because the naturalistic or secular humanist worldview holds no hope in God.

2. A “cosmic humanist” doesn’t read the Bible as the Word of God to direct their belief and practice.

3. A Satanist does not submit to Jesus Christ as King therefore will not submit to authority of the Scripture nor to God’s authority in the church as a disciple of Christ in a small group.

4. A strict existentialist does not commit to regular small group relationships nor order their life to serve others in the body of Christ at all because life is about their own experience not a shared membership in covenant with others.

5. A moral relativist embraces the worldly ideal of poly-theism and reasons to himself that there is equal plurality of all beliefs. Since there “absolutely are no absolutes” he can not be held accountable for any belief or action. This leaves him open to hedonism or complete self-indulgence the same as a Satanist.

Since I am not an atheist, humanist, existentialist, Satanist nor a moral relativist I will commit to self-denial and sacrifice to hear and obey God. In order to learn God’s ways I will include the following in my daily life:

1. I will pray with the mind and pray with the spirit.
1 Cor 14:15; John 4:23-24; Rom 8:26-27; Jude 20 .

2. I will present my body, remove negativity and receive God’s Word to renew my mind.
Deut 6; Joshua 1:6; Psalm 1; Psalm 19; John 15; Rom 12:1-2; 1 Pet 2:1.

3. I will be in committed relationships for discipleship and fellowship.
Acts 2:42-46.

4. Through love I will serve others as a covenant relationships.
Gal 5:13; Eph 4:11-16.

5. I will get out of my comfort zone and be on mission because we as Christ’s Body are “God’s net.” (all four Gospels and Acts include Christ’s command and commission).

(The last two also include the sacrifice of regular and generous giving.)

~PD

Seven Men who took their own counsel

instead of God’s and though dead
are still influencing America.

“have no other God’s before Me.” Ex 20:3 (hundreds of x). “
The mind justifies what the heart has chosen” D. Peacocke
A nation can not rise above it’s gods, or it’s mental constructs.

How can a man though dead still “rule” men’s minds? By the veneration we give them whether their ideas are Godly counsel or not. The thoughts we allow to strongly influence our thinking become like gods exerting control our lives and whole nations. They are unassailable by reason, truth and revelation. The Humanistic worldview makes us all gods: “Everyone is entitled to their own ideas, especially if they work for them.”

38 nor does his word dwell in you, for you do not believe the one he sent. 39 You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, 40 yet you refuse to come to me to have life. John 5:38-40 NIV

QUIZ: Can you name the seven men “ruling from their graves?”

1. This anthropologist believed that there is no Creator-Designer-Ruler-God but only an impersonal force and chance therefore man can become and produce a better world? Man descended from animals so is little better than one.
2. What German theologian undermined the belief that Scripture is God’s inspired and true Word and rule for our lives?
3. Who provided the basis for atheistic socialism and communism?
4. He professed Christianity with the idea that “this moment is the thing that matters.” Without covenant relationship as a member in spiritual family and self-denying vision to serve the purpose of Christ as part of his Body, his “Existentialism” produced a melancholic individualistic life.
5. He believed Jesus a myth and used bad science to promote his repeatedly faulty experiments in how to treat mental and social disorders using hypnosis and psychoanalysis based on an entirely skewed view of man.
6. Whose ideas influenced President Nixon to take us off the gold standard and cause increasingly mounting US debt?
7. Another of the intellectually gifted who had elitist mentality was the father of modern public education and promoted humanism and false optimism of man’s own power (like tower of Babel all over again).

Don’t be discouraged if you can’t match these men to the blanks below, but I want to help us discern roots of vain philosophies and how resistant our minds are to Godly counsel.

____A. John Maynard Keynes (Keynesian Economics-government can control inflation and debt will not hurt us.
____ B. Charles Darwin The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) theory of evolution.
____ C. Karl Marx in 1847 wrote the famous Communist Manifesto with Fredrich Engels. They were heavily influenced by Rousseau and the “Enlightenment.” Their works like Das Kapital overwhelmed other thinking with it's assault on personal ownership, capitalism and free market economies. Their plan was to take control of minds and people through education and college campuses. Communism is responsible for over 100 million sadistic and violent deaths.
____ D. Søren Kierkegaard was full of contradictions prefiguring post-modern feeling dominated irrationalism. His focus on “my subjective experience” sounds like just so much more humanistic and agnostic religion. Though professing faith in God he clearly sought his own mind and counsel and experience above revelation from God. It dominates college campuses and inspired youth rebellion, sexual immorality and anarchy.
____ E. Julius Wellhausen, religious liberal and rationalistic scholar, held that human reason was more dependable than the Bible.
____ F. John Dewey’s atheistic idealism was a dominant factor in the early years of the 20th century. Ironically many of his ideas were always changing—showing the “pop-wisdom” of relativistic thinking whereby every man becomes his own god with his own mind. His focus was on situationally determined values and their consequences, and what our thought processes produced experientially rather than beginning with the seeking of absolute truth and the service of God. This continues to undermine the basis of education and has pushed the deterioration of learning in science, history, and ethics.
____ G. Sigmund Freud’s twisted view of man (Id, ego, super-ego, life and death instinct, and being ruled by libido-sexual fixations) contradicts Biblical body, soul, spirit of man, created in God’s image, fallen but being restored in Christ.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

-PD