26th June - 2011
Well here it is Sunday afternoon again. Who would have thought that we could arrive so quickly at the last Sunday of this financial year? It was great to see visitors at both Max seven and the morning meeting today at church. I got to preach today and launched out on a message called A NEW DAY - THE ABSENCE OF FEAR.
It was a standard word of exhortation about the many forms of fear that surround this day and how those fears are neutralised by the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Along with the various fears that I considered are the new fears of ecological disasters and the fear of the loss of privacy. Although young people don’t seem to fear losing their privacy because they’ve never really felt the persecution that the loss of privacy can lead to.
I had a look at the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham. You may never have heard of him but with the advent of two way smart televisions you might like to refresh yourself in his observations. His actual body, his corpse, is embalmed and stuffed sitting in a booth at the entrance of University College London. He bought forward the shocking theory that an observer could watch prisoners without the prisoners knowing for certain that they were under observation. He meant that the fear of being watched or rather not being certain that you are being watched would mean that you would need less prison staff in order to control the main body of prisoners. He was working on the psychological fear and the uncertainty of having your behaviour observed and monitored without you actually knowing that it was happening. Your behaviour could be monitored at any time without your knowledge and so you would automatically fear being watched all the time. He achieved this through architectural design of the buildings but now, of course, we have digital cameras and the Internet. Unless you’re careful someone could turn on your web cam and turn on the microphone to watch you and hear everything that you said or listen to. I think with these new smart televisions there will be more invasions of our privacy. You spend most of your life, these days, under the watchful eyes of one type of camera or another.
Governments will continue to use various fears as a tool of manipulation and control. Whatever happens we Christians are beyond the fear of man and natural thinking because of the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the grave. We have been made free from the law and this is certain certain by the resurrection of our lord Jesus Christ.
What a crowd we had for Sunday night supper! New people, old people and the regulars with a few missing entirely. Leone was coming back from a trip to Dubbo to pick up the grandchildren and so she missed the fun. On Sunday afternoon, right out of the blue, I got a phone call from the lady that we knew 30 odd years ago. Well actually, she was looking for Leone & went looking for her on Google but found me instead. Phone rings, I pick up and behold a voice from the past. What a joy and blessing to talk to people that you haven’t seen for years but are still serving the Lord Jesus Christ. I got her phone number and Leone rang as soon as she returned home.
Listening to the ABC National radio is an amusing pastime. Once upon a time I would have become extremely frustrated and upset at the loads of the waffle that I hear. Now it’s just the realisation that the world is swamped with humanism & natural thinking that doesn’t take into account the fact that God has spoken to us by the prophets. Speaking of this I’ve put up a post about the power of changing even small Anglo-Saxon words in a Bible translation. You will receive links to this post and I hope that you take the time to read it.
I got a phone call from the USA telling me that they wanted to pay me some royalty monies. What a nice surprise this was. The figure they quoted was so large that I thought it could not possibly represent the number of volumes that are being sold, it was more likely a kindhearted gesture to be a blessing in the Lord Jesus Christ.
It would be extremely gratifying to find out that people had brought that number of copies of the multimedia presentation that I did on “How to Find the Inbuilt Dictionary Contained in the King James Bible” or words to that effect. I’m going to launch out into another one about the simplicity and purity of the English language used in the King James Bible. In spite of what appears to be the everyday experience of the English Bible, the King James Bible is extremely precise in its meanings and context. There should be no excuse for the mired mixture of choices & doctrines that meet your investigations when you use modern the English versions of the Bible. After all the Bible should be simple and concise meaning the same thing to everybody. Admittedly, there is design mystery because you have to want to do his will to be able to rightly discern his will within the word of God.
Oh how I long for the strawberry season to start again. When I was a boy in the UK my father had a huge garden attached to an old manor house. In this garden there were at least three different greenhouses. One of these greenhouses was heated. There was a boiler that fed hot water pipes through the bedding mixture inside the greenhouse. You could grow exotic plants through the winter months. If I had this greenhouse in our backyard I would get it fired up to grow strawberry plants in the heart of winter. Yes I would. In my angry stupidity as a young teenager I systematically smashed the greenhouse glass windows at our home. One after another. It was a pointless and ungrateful display of anger. The most memorable part of it was the correction that my father administered. He told me that this was why I was sent away to boarding school & he paid other people to correct me with a cane. I felt awful and did not break any more greenhouse Windows.
That house had a great kitchen garden as well is formal gardens, orchards and a really amazing stretch a sloping grass that was kept rough-cut. In the centre was a huge mulberry tree and the whole area was filled with bulbs that grew up through the grass into a vibrant colourful shimmering display in the spring. Yes the snowdrops grew up through the snow before it melted in the spring. We had an inside Coldwater Fish Tank which overflowed out into a fish pond in the formal garden which then overflowed out of the formal garden down through a small waterfall arrangement flowing through a rock garden into a larger pond in the main general garden. I think we had about two acres attached to the Manor house that we lived in in a town called Orpington in the UK. We also had a swimming pool with a sort of pool pool house. This was very unusual in England at that time. At the end of the kitchen garden there was a brook that flowed and became covered in ice in the winter. On the other side of this brook was a steep Bald Hill that rose up and in the winter time it was covered with snow. It was our favourite toboggan area and we used to helter-skelter down the run hoping that we could break in time before we hit the brook and the water or if it was iced over crash hard into our backyard fence.
The front of the property along the main road was shielded by a band of trees that was like a small strip of woodland. In one corner of the kitchen garden that was what was quaintly called a Wendy House. This is like a small house with small doors and windows and had several rooms inside. It was a great place for me to go to to have a quiet smoke until my sister ratted on me to my mum. The people who brought the house from my mum and dad developed it into suburban blocks for housing and so we were the last children to enjoy it this wonderful space in the centre of an urban town.
We are getting frosty nights and that extremely bright but pale sunshine through the day. I’m looking forward to the midweek meeting tonight and I hope that some of our visitors return because the entrance of the word of God always brings light. If you allow the word of God to stir your conscience and build your faith you will move into the pathway of the freedom of being able to serve God with your whole heart and mind, body and strength.
I nearly had a heart failure this morning – I sighed to myself – I got a text message on my mobile to say that my Internet charges for the month had not been paid and my access to the Internet was barred. Mock horror how would I survive without being able to go online? My immediate thought was “I should not have shutdown that modem access account” and as the horror of it all started to sink in I remembered “hey – you have a pre-parade USB broadband – all is not lost you can use that.” I checked the bank and there should have been enough money and then I remembered that I had, in a cost cutting frenzy, taken on a cheaper broadband plan and low and behold I’d gone beyond my quota of download gigabytes and the reason that I didn’t have enough money for the payment was because I had been charged an excess for the extra gigabytes that I had downloaded. Oh dear, I tried to save $20 only to be charged an extra $28. I wouldn’t have had to pay any more for the excess if I’d stayed on the old plan. Oh well we live and learn but I have a funny feeling that they will charge me a fee to change the plant back again. Perhaps the best way forward is not to use the Internet for so much traffic. One of my latest perks is to be able to control my main desktop computer while out on the road with my netbook. I also run all of our main phoneline bills to VoIP which is an over Internet phone connection. It saves me heaps.
I’m becoming a bit of an expert on cheap fuel and cost savings although I have not got to the point where I turn all the electrical appliances in the household off standby. I can’t get to most of the mains plugs on the wall anyway but I’m told that if you are serious about saving electrical power you have to shut down all the stand by appliances.
I’m on the list to have an energy audit as part of my Hardship arrangements. I just know they’re going to tell me that we can’t afford to have a huge chest freezer and three different refrigerators, some with their own freezers, all running at the same time for two people. Oh, did I mention the small refrigerated cooler that I keep by my main chair in the front room? It runs through a 12 V adapter because it is really designed to use in a car. Really being able to cool things is a sign of civilisation. In ancient times runners had to bring blocks of ice down from the ice clad mountains to store in earth caves for the rich to be able to enjoy the refreshment of icecold drinks.
Fortunately I have to go on a waiting list before my energy audit can be carried out. What will they say about my main computer that is always on with its two huge screens and various backup devices humming away in the background? To say nothing of the Internet connection that is always on. Could I live without my electronic baubles? I hope I don’t have to find out.
We packed all my books to take down to the second-hand bookshop for sale but I’ve been scratching through the boxes and pulling them out to read again. If I like an author I normally end up with everything that they’ve never published. My wife laughs at me because there are virtually no female authors in my collection. What will I do with all the empty bookshelves?
I have kept all my Bibles and anything to do with Christianity including my vast library of heresies and corrupt doctrines. I like to know the background of the things people say they believe are true. Although I must admit that most of this is posturing because I certainly haven’t read every volume that is in my library but I do know the generalised content and where to go to get references if I need them.
28th June - 2011
Is not such a bad thing being disabled. I actually got up this morning a little earlier than normal and went into the front room to listen to the radio and enjoy my breakfast. I then picked up a book I was reading and whiled away the time until after 11 o’clock. I knew I had to get out on to the office and do some paperwork that I wasn’t too keen on. Before lunch, I went to the bathroom and enjoyed my ablutions and then got dressed and clean casual clothes and got out into the office in time to get my lunch. I should say that my wife brought my lunch out for me which I ate at a leisurely pace and then turned to my paperwork only to discover, via a text message on my mobile phone, that my Internet was down. Praise the Lord I had enough cash in my wallet for Leone to go down and top up the bank so that the Internet can be paid for.
All this activity and I still hadn’t got to read my Bible or do much praying. It’s 4:30 PM already and I must start getting ready for tonight’s meeting at 7 PM. We will properly continue with the Hebrew study although if we get some new young Christians along we may turn our attention to the need to be filled with the holy spirit and speak in tongues because I happen to know that although they have been involved with charismatic churches they do not have any teaching or understanding on this mighty subject or indeed any subject that involves the word of God. Why would anybody deny a child of God the awesome privilege of being able to speak and pray to God directly from the heart, bypassing their mind, in a language that they’d never learnt and in so doing, glorify God and edify themselves? It makes you wonder doesn’t it? I think that talking in tongues is beginning to die out as an accepted Christian pastime. This is a great pity and is in total contradiction to the word of God.
We had Rayna around for tea last night or more precisely she joined us to eat tea with us. For once she did not arrive with the food but we sat down to a great lamb casserole that Leone had cooked. We had a mighty time of Fellowship and Reina produced a couple of bars of dark chocolate. Dark chocolate, in moderation, is an acceptable treat for diabetics. They persuaded me, Leone and Reina, to watch television with them but I quickly grew bored as they incessantly chat during the show. One redeeming fact was that I’d seen the episode before. I soon returned to the front room and my meditations.
Thank you for your e-mail replies and any comments that you make to my posts. Is very encouraging. Whatever you do determine that you will not lose sight of the lovely son of God and that you will centre your heart and your mind upon him and his will. The driving force in his life was to please his heavenly Father and I hope that this remains the driving force of our lives.
