Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Who has believed our message
    and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
    and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
    nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
    a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
    he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.

• Isaiah 53:1-3

for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,

• Romans 3:23

“We are not ‘acquainted with grief’ in the same way our Lord was acquainted with it. We endure it and live through it, but we do not become intimate with it. At the beginning of our lives we do not bring ourselves to the point of dealing with the reality of sin. We look at life through the eyes of reason and say that if a person will control his instincts, and educate himself, he can produce a life that will slowly evolve into the life of God. But as we continue on through life, we find the presence of something which we have not yet taken into account, namely, sin— and it upsets all of our thinking and our plans. Sin has made the foundation of our thinking unpredictable, uncontrollable, and irrational.
“We have to recognize that sin is a fact of life, not just a shortcoming. Sin is blatant mutiny against God, and either sin or God must die in my life. The New Testament brings us right down to this one issue— if sin rules in me, God’s life in me will be killed; if God rules in me, sin in me will be killed. There is nothing more fundamental than that. The culmination of sin was the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, and what was true in the history of God on earth will also be true in your history and in mine— that is, sin will kill the life of God in us. We must mentally bring ourselves to terms with this fact of sin. It is the only explanation why Jesus Christ came to earth, and it is the explanation of the grief and sorrow of life.”

• Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

To reconcile Rev. Chambers quote of ‘acquainted with grief’ with the Isaiah quote above, the NIV says ‘familiar with pain.’  The Revised Standard translations say ‘acquainted with infirmity,’ but many others state it, including the KJV, as Rev. Chambers quoted, ‘acquainted with grief.’

The world, which we are not to conform to, has gone totally toward the crazy side of things.  I see an advertisement on television quite often that makes this woman doing jump rope looking like she is levitating.  They just slow the action down – a lot.  The sales pitch is for collagen and the catchphrase is that the answer is already within us.

Yes, the answer is within us already, but it is not the answer that you want to hear.  We cannot get there from here, regardless of where or what “there” is, on our own, unless it is to Hell.

We cannot solve Climate Change because some people will cheat, and it is a global problem.  When China lives without ever seeing the sun, they will not comply.  And we will eventually shut down all industry on earth to save the planet and buy all our products from China and the Climate will still go down the tubes.  Why?  Because no one’s solution is to repent and turn to God.  We rely on the government to fix it.

You can replace “War” with the words “Climate Change” in the last paragraph and a few other words and you come to the same conclusion.  We ask our leaders for help, but they are too busy helping themselves to a comfortable retirement while we suffer.  They cannot hear us, and they are so far out of touch with reality that there answers are idiotic at best.

Recently a politician was asked about the growing gasoline prices and his solution was that everyone should buy an electric vehicle (EV).  He is rich.  He could buy a different EV for each day of the week.  There are few EVs available for purchase.  There are few charging stations.  Battery life is so poor that driving to visit our son in Tennessee would be a three-day trip in the best of the EVs on the market, if we could find charging stations along the way.  Where do you not find charging stations?  At hotels.  A three-day trip is impossible with my wife on dialysis.  Come back to me when the life of the battery pack is a thousand miles.  Then we can talk, if the infrastructure is set up for it, which it is not.  And GIVE me the EV.  I cannot afford such luxuries.  Your statement was idiotic and STUPID and totally out of touch with reality.  And people elected you.  What does that say about us?!

And we are asking the idiots that we elected to SAVE us?!?!?!

Each election cycle seems to revolve around the new politicians saving us from the old politicians.  But election day is on Tuesday, generally in the USA.

What is everyone doing two days before?

Is anyone repenting of their sins?  Most people say that we cannot say “sin” because it hurts people’s feelings.

Too bad.  That concept was borne from our sin nature.  We want to think, like the advertisement says, that niceness, apple pie, and puppy dogs are what is within us.  But history proves the opposite.  Our sin nature comes out the strongest when we ignore that it is there.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.