OR : The things they should have taught you in school… if your mother would have let them.

1. You’re not “special”. Special is a skill you acquire, not a person that you are.
2. Your best try is not good enough. If at first you don’t succeed, examine your mistakes and adjust your game plan, try-try again is for kids learning to tie their shoes in 4th grade.
3. You’re not the most important person in the room. Be quiet and let someone else speak.
4. Not everyone is a winner and no, you can not do everything you set your mind to. Try flying unassisted….
5. Failure is an option, being a victim is a choice.
6. SMS is not a form of communication, smileys are not cute, an ipod is not considered a life-support system by normal people.
7. A sloth is an animal, it is not suppose to be an attitude to life.
8. Don’t just be yourself, you’re not that interesting. Be someone interesting. Do something interesting, live an interesting life.
9. There are two 6 o’clocks in the day.
10. Xbox is not a life skill.
11. Manners are important. Don’t yawn with your mouth open, don’t chew with your mouth full, brush your teeth, comb your hair and iron your clothes. Wrinkled maybe in, yesterday’s food stains never will be. Say thank you. Open the door for ladies. Call your mother. Pick up a check every now and again.
12. Showing your underwear isn’t trendy - wearing underwear is important.
13. Your boss does have the right to fire you.
14. Being born is not a qualification for employment.
15. Gratitude goes a long way towards sustaining your current employment status.
16. And yes, you have to work for a living and no, your boss doesn’t care if that is your mother on the phone or your girlfriend or your doctor, make the call at lunchtime. Stop stealing.
17. There is such a thing as second place - in the real world, not everyone gets a ribbon. Live with it.
18. If you want it, work for it, fight for it, pray for it but do not sit around and expect to have it handed to you.
19. Do not only pray for a miracle, pray to become the miracle.
20. It is only hard to quit the first time. After that you will stop believing in yourself and others willl come to expect it of you. So dont ever quit.
21. Excellence is dependent upon  attitude not income. It is doing the best with what you have now.

The stirring influence derived from great public movements, sweeping along with much national enthusiasm, comes not to-day. The force of the pulpit must now, under God, depend on the strength of the preacher’s convictions, the suitableness of his matter, the felicity of his utterances, and the warmth of his emotions. The kindling power not coming from any great movement without, must be derived exclusively from forces within. We are thrown, not more than ever, but more obviously than ever, on the living power of the Holy Ghost, energised in the souls of our preachers.

Unless our preachers of to-day are men of deep inward exercise,-men who know profoundly the powers of the world to come - men to whom sin stands out of all things on earth the darkest and most horrible, and redeeming grace the brightest, holiest, heavenliest - men of intrepid spirit, full of faith and of the Holy Ghost - the pulpit will not have the life and energy of other days.

In regards to Salvation there are three great concerns that must occupy us all.

The first is the discovery of the natural state of man, the conviction that comes when someone is faced with an understanding and a revelation of the true state of the heart and being before God.

The guilty sinner is convicted.

The second is the fact that there is Hope and that Hope is not a word, not a thought, not a denomination, not a chant, not a formula, but that Hope is a man and that Man is Christ Jesus.

The sinner is convicted and cured!

The third is the Christian duty that now comes as the consequence of redemption. The obligation above all to Christ and to those that we love. The obligation to bring a Living Jesus to a Dying World.

In his famous book, Human Nature in Its Fourfold State, the Scottish Puritan, Thomas Boston (1676–1732) tells us that the four states of human nature are:

(a) Primitive Integrity;

(b) Entire Depravity;

(c) Begun Recovery; and

(d) Consummate Happiness or Misery.

These four states, which are derived from the Scripture, correspond to the four states of man in relation to sin enumerated by Augustine of Hippo:

(a) able to sin, able not to sin (posse peccare, posse non peccare);

(b) not able not to sin (non posse non peccare);

(c) able not to sin (posse non peccare); and

(d) unable to sin (non posse peccare).

The first state corresponds to the state of man in innocency, before the Fall;

the second the state of the natural man after the Fall;

the third the state of the regenerate man; and the

fourth the glorified man.

It must be noted that in all four states, man is free to choose what to do or not to do according to his will.

His will is free because it is not forced or compelled from without. However, his will is determined by his own moral inclinations.

This means that while the glorified man will always choose to do good because his heart’s inclination is always to glorify God; the natural fallen man will always do what is evil (in God’s eyes), because his motives are never pure, and never to glorify God.

Before the Fall, man was able to choose to do either good or evil, his heart, and so his inclination and disposition, being innocent and not tainted by sin.

But Adam’s state was mutable and when Satan tempted Eve, and then through Eve, tempted him, he chose to sin against God by eating the forbidden fruit and so fell from the estate of innocency.

Here is some of what Augustine himself had to say about this:

Man’s original capacities included both the power not to sin and the power to sin ( posse non peccare et posse peccare ).

In Adam’s original sin, man lost the posse non peccare (the power not to sin) and retained the posse peccare (the power to sin)–which he continues to exercise.

In the fulfillment of grace, man will have the posse peccare taken away and receive the highest of all, the power not to be able to sin, non posse peccare . 

Further reading

Ere long, there began to appear a recoil from evangelical doctrine, and a disposition to modify the message
of grace.

 Men who have never felt the burden of sin in their own hearts, cannot be expected to appreciate the doctrine of atonement or the doctrine of regeneration; not feeling the need of atonement or regeneration, they cannot see the importance of a divine Savior to atone, and a divine Spirit to renew.

Of necessity, Jesus Christ must comedown from the place of supremacy and vital influence which He holds in the teaching and preaching of those to whom the sense of sin is the most awful experience of life.

The supernatural features of the Gospel must pass away, as things do pass away that are not needed, and that which remains can be little other than an intensified naturalism-natural religion brightened up by the reflection of Christianity.

Men cannot help in these circumstances inclining, to Deism * or Socinianism** . And not believing in the change of heart and change of taste which regeneration implies, they cannot but regard earnest religion as something, of a sham, nor can they be expected to call on men very earnestly to renounce the world in order to follow Christ.

They consider that in point of fact your high-flying(read passionate preachers) men do injustice to the world -it is not such a bad world after all : it can be made a very tolerable world; there are many pleasures in life which are perfectly harmless, but which your fanatics condemn ; and so it becomes one of their objects as preachers to recover back for enjoyment as much of the world as they can decently reconcile with a Christian profession.

(They did not declare an open) assult (on the true gospel) but by a process of sapping and mining that the old faith came to suffer….there can be no doubt that during the last century many ministers who’s heart were in the world preached fairly orthodox sermons. But they preached without life or power.

But a religion which has no divine message of grace for fallen and guilty men; a religion which overlooks the demands of God’s righteous law, and dispenses forgiveness and acceptance as easily as a rich man scatters his charity; a religion which thinks by mere rose-water applications to cure the desperate disease of the human heart in its alienation from God, and to restore it to order and beauty; a religion which undertakes to get rid of all the bitterness of strife, and to diffuse everywhere an atmosphere of peace and good-will ; -a religion that undertakes all this without an atonement, without shedding of blood, without divine regeneration, may be very beautiful, very attractive, very delightful , but it is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

 * (rejects the supernatural)

**( do not believe in the trinity or in the omnipresence of God)

We find ourselves, as men and women in a confused and difficult world, aware of principalities and powers which we cannot understand and which we cannot explain.

The spirit of man, therefore, searches for something which it cannot find, and having shown that no human learning or teaching could ever solve that problem. We came to the conclusion that there is no hope for men and women to be saved unless they submit to the revelation that God has been pleased to give of Himself.

He has given that revelation in nature. He has given it in history. He has given it by sending His only begotten Son into this world and, in a very special way, He has given it in and through the book which we call the Bible.

We have no authority a part from this book, and we either take it as it is or else we must of necessity be in the position in which we say that we are superior to it, and we can pick and choose, and select and reject.

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For those in our Deeper Walk class, I found this and thought it might help:

This is a Latin term relating to correct Biblical understanding. It means literally ‘to lead out’. In the context of studying the Bible it means to get out of the text what the text is saying. This may include a number of things to aid the process such as reading the context in the chapter, in the particular book as a whole eg. Jeremiah or Matthew and even where it fits within the whole Bible. It may also include cultural awareness, the timing of the writing, and identifying the author and even the target audience. 

The term eisexegesis is often used to contrast with exegesis. This means to ‘read into‘ the text something that is not there and may often include the practice of de-contextualization or out of context quoting. In relation to the Bible (or any other piece of writing), the former is of course the correct method to achieve understanding, while the latter is not as it imposes a bias or personal view from the outside, rather than letting the document speak for itself.

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