The View From 1776

Sunday’s sermon at the Cohocton Assembly of God Church was delivered by Elder Joel Martin.  His principal text was from the Book of Matthew:

1Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples: 2"The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. 3So you must obey them and do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. 4They tie up heavy loads and put them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.

    5"Everything they do is done for men to see: They make their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long; 6they love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues; 7they love to be greeted in the marketplaces and to have men call them ‘Rabbi.’ (Matthew 23:1-7)

23"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. 24You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.

    27"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean. 28In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. Matthew 23:23-28)

Like the Pharisees who too often told others what to do without doing it themselves, we too often mouth platitudes about the Christian way of life without following Jesus.  To succeed at anything, from sports to religion, requires sincere dedication and continued application.  We have to get serious about it.

First, we have to be saved by becoming believers in Christ Jesus.  That justifies us before God through Jesus’s willing sacrifice of His own life.  But to be truly saved we must travel the lifelong road of sanctification - becoming as nearly Christlike as our human condition allows. 

By their fruit you will recognize them. ( Matthew 7:16)

Traveling the path of sanctification necessitates motivation.  That is a function of what’s inside us, what’s in our hearts.  An outward show in the manner of the Pharisees criticized by Jesus won’t do it.

What helps us to stick to the path of sanctification?

First, prayer.  As the Apostle Paul advised the Thessalonians:

16Be joyful always; 17pray continually; 18give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. ( 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18)

Second, study the Word of God. 

12For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12)

Third, while faith, not works, is the path to salvation, we must work to be truly faithful and to purify ourselves.

1Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. 2Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Romans 12:1-2)

Fourth, seek fellowship in the body of the church, where mutual help can be found.

Finally, stick to it.

16 for though a righteous man falls seven times, he rises again, but the wicked are brought down by calamity. (Proverbs 24:16)

Tom Emerson alerted me to this report, the conclusions of which are summarized below.

A large number of climate “scientists” have, for years, systematically, knowingly, embezzled taxpayers’ funds via government research grants.  They and the organizations that abetted their activities should be subjected to criminal penalties and compelled to repay all of their government grant monies.

SURFACE TEMPERATURE RECORDS: POLICY DRIVEN DECEPTION?
by Joseph D’Aleo & Anthony Watts | January 27, 2010
SUMMARY FOR POLICYMAKERS

1. Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and unidirectionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century.

2. All terrestrial surface-temperature databases exhibit very serious problems that render them useless for determining accurate long-term temperature trends.

3. All of the problems have skewed the data so as greatly to overstate observed warming both regionally and globally.

4. Global terrestrial temperature data are gravely compromised because more than three-quarters of the 6,000 stations that once existed are no longer reporting.

5. There has been a severe bias towards removing higher-altitude, higher-latitude, and rural stations, leading to a further serious overstatement of warming.

6. Contamination by urbanization, changes in land use, improper siting, and inadequately-calibrated instrument upgrades further overstates warming.

7. Numerous peer-reviewed papers in recent years have shown the overstatement of observed longer term warming is 30-50% from heat-island contamination alone.

8. Cherry-picking of observing sites combined with interpolation to vacant data grids may make heat-island bias greater than 50% of 20th-century warming.

9. In the oceans, data are missing and uncertainties are substantial. Comprehensive coverage has only been available since 2003, and shows no warming.

10. Satellite temperature monitoring has provided an alternative to terrestrial stations in compiling the global lower-troposphere temperature record. Their findings are increasingly diverging from the station-based constructions in a manner consistent with evidence of a warm bias in the surface temperature record.

11. NOAA and NASA, along with CRU, were the driving forces behind the systematic hyping of 20th-century “global warming”.

12. Changes have been made to alter the historical record to mask cyclical changes that could be readily explained by natural factors like multidecadal ocean and solar changes.

13. Global terrestrial data bases are seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends or VALIDATE model forecasts.

14. An inclusive external assessment is essential of the surface temperature record of CRU, GISS and NCDC “chaired and paneled by mutually agreed to climate scientists who do not have a vested interest in the outcome of the evaluations.”

15. Reliance on the global data by both the UNIPCC and the US GCRP/CCSP also requires a full investigation and audit.

Obama Doesn’t Care About Health Care Reform
By Robert Good
 
 
Obama doesn’t even care about the well-being of the Democratic Party.  He urges the Democrats on as they put their majorities at risk trying to pass a God-awful bill that the American public doesn’t want.  Comedians have even joked that he is some kind of secret agent of the Republicans.
 
What’s going on?  Obama has bigger fish to fry.
 
While the country has been transfixed by the Congressional and media circus, the action, folks, is elsewhere—and Obama has been getting a lot done.   
 
Ordering KSM tried in federal court.
Extending Miranda rights to the underwear bomber.
Investigating CIA agents who are trying to protect America against Islamic terrorists.
Tasking the CIA with tracking global warming.
Halting construction of America’s missile defense shield.
Cancelling production of the F-22.  (Russia is bringing out its version, by the way.)
Allowing Iran the time it needs to finish developing nuclear weapons.
 
Even if you have not been paying much attention to the news, you may have noticed some of these decisions, and other decisions like them, that Obama has made.  Odd decisions, aren’t they?
 
Or perhaps not.
 
A government take-over of health care and a massive tax on energy to “stop global warming”  may be stalled in Congress, but you have to admit that these loud debates certainly do keep the liberals aroused, the media busy and the country focused on the mess in Congress. 
 
I’ve heard people ask how Obama could spend 20 years in Rev. Wright’s “God damn America” church.  Perhaps that is not the question people need to be asking. 
 
Perhaps the right question is: what if Obama actually shares Rev. Wright’s feelings about America?  What would he do?

Read today’s Washington Times editorial.

Quote:

...the so-called stimulus actually has increased unemployment and delayed the recovery that economists were predicting last year. Mr. Obama’s claim that stimulus spending has saved jobs is based on bogus economics. Stephen Bronars, a labor economist at the University of Texas at Austin, pointed out to us that the stimulus doesn’t create new spending. “This money would have been spent someplace else [if the government hadn’t spent it],” he explained. The government is merely moving jobs from some firms to others and from some sectors to others, and in the process it causes extra temporary unemployment as workers are moved around.

Mr. Obama’s top-down manhandling of the economy is based on the assumption that government knows best, and that private businesses would be in better shape if they did what the bureaucracy tells them to do. Even the tax breaks the president proposes are flawed because they attempt to micromanage business decisions rather than lowering marginal tax rates for companies. This is because the president thinks he knows more about where companies should be investing than their executives.

Jobs are outsourced precisely because of strangling government regulations, higher corporate taxes than anywhere else, and government support for the extortions of socialist labor unions.  Never-ceasing government intervention has made the United States no longer competitive on world markets in too many product categories.

Obama’s solution is to bury the nation under debt, bankrupt private business, and have everybody working for his socialist government bureaucracies in so-called green jobs, green in the sense of corrosive fungi.