Sacrificed Between Armies

This was an interesting History thread to follow. Wow!

First i read this in Plutarch (1st cen Greek Philosopher) this morning. In Plutarch's Morals. 

"Decius, the general of the Romans, anticipate it for himself, having piled up a funeral pyre between the two armies, and sacrificed himself to Cronos, dedicating himself for the supremacy of his country."

I asked myself, "Who is the Decius he is writing about, and is it true?" Keep in mind Plutarch is writing in the 1st cen AD, So it has to be an event in BC times.

Turns out it was Decius Mus became a Roman General in 340 BC. He indeed did sacrifice himself and a 1600's  painter moved by his story painted  a tapestry of him and his sacrifice. 

"Publius Decius Mus was raised to consular rank in 340 BC along with Titus Manlius Torquatus. Before they were to lead the army into battle near Vesuvius in the Second Latin War, both consuls had the same dream: one of them would have to sacrifice himself to gain victory. The oracle confirmed the truth of their vision and Decius Mus immediately offered himself to the gods, along with the enemy army. Victory was won for the Romans through the consul’s death."

Decius Mus Tapestry

Who Buys A Master?

"Dost thou bring slavery, and bondage, and sale? Diogenes despises thee, who cried out, as he was being sold by some robbers, "Who will buy a master?"

- Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals

Wealth You Can't Enjoy But Others Envy Unknowingly

I laughed  and laughed over this one.

1st Century Greek Philosopher.  PLUTARCH 

"He who gets a dowry with his wife sells himself for it, as Euripides says, but his gains are few and uncertain; but he who does not go all on fire through many a funeral pile, but through a regal pyre, full of panting and fear and sweat got from travelling over the sea as a merchant, has the wealth of Tantalus, but cannot enjoy it owing to his want of leisure. For that Sicyonian horse-breeder was wise, who gave Agamemnon as a present a swift mare, "that he should not follow him to wind-swept Ilium, but delight himself at home,"  in the quiet enjoyment of his abundant riches and painless leisure. But nowadays courtiers, and people who think they have a turn for affairs, thrust themselves forward of their own accord uninvited into courts and toilsome escorts and bivouacs, that they may get a horse, or brooch, or some such piece of good luck. "But his wife is left behind in Phylace, and tears her cheeks in her sorrow, and his house is only half complete without him," while he is dragged about, and wanders about, and wastes his time in idle hopes, and has to put up with much insult. And even if he gets any of those things he desires, giddy and dizzy at Fortune's rope-dance, he seeks retirement, and deems those happy who live obscure and in security, while they again look up admiringly at him who soars so high above their heads."

- Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals

Vice Needs No Ministers

"Vice has universally an ill effect on everybody, being in itself a sufficient producer of infelicity, needing no instruments nor ministers. For tyrants, anxious to make those whom they punish wretched, keep executioners and torturers, and contrive branding-irons and other instruments of torture to inspire fear  in the brute soul, whereas vice attacks the soul without any such apparatus, and crushes and dejects it, and fills a man with sorrow, and lamentation, and melancholy, and remorse. "

- Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals 

Oh Baby! Did You Miss Me?

"Coming out of Walmart in Charlottetown yesterday I heard a woman in her seventies going on: "Oh baby, did you miss me?" In kind of the voice sometimes used when talking to a baby or a pet. I looked over and saw an eager dog awaiting her arrival. I thought nothing of it all. When the woman realized I had seen and heard her she became very embarrassed that she thought I thought she was addressing her husband in that lovey tone of voice instead of her dog. I thought as I walked away what a strange world we live in that it would be an embarrassment to call her husband  by lovey names in that voice and yet normal to address the dog in that manner."
Gordon Weatherby. Jan, 28th, 2019

How To Reach Millennials

"To attract more millennials to church, our board suggested serving coffee before and after the service. I suggested we proclaim Christ crucified and risen. 

We will now have coffee served before and after the service."

@BoringPastor

Come Out Of Hiding!

“The psalms are God’s invitation to us to come out of hiding.” 

 - Darrell Winger

My Church Is Richer Than Jesus!

"To me it is not possible, O my God, to be rich and at ease and enjoy a prosperous life, when you were poor, struggling, living laboriously. I cannot love thus. ’It is not right that the servant should be above his Master, nor that the Bride should be rich and the Bridegroom poor,’ especially when he is voluntarily poor. S. Teresa, wearied with the importunities of those who wished her to accept endowments for her convent at Avila, was once almost ready to accept. But when she went to her oratory and saw the Crucifix she fell at the feet of Jesus, hanging naked on the Cross, and implored of him the grace never to let her receive any endowments, but always to be as poor as he was....."

- Charles de Foucauld. Méditations of a Hermit.

The Church No Longer Enthrones?

Where hearts that once held love are bare
and faith, in shreds, compounds the mess.
Where hymns and prayers no longer Speak,
and former friends no longer bless;
and when the church where some belonged
no more their loyalty enthrones, 
the plea is made, ‘lfYou are there,
turn stumbling blocks
to stepping stones.’

A Healthy Soul Hears God.

"My mind was getting jaded (critical), because my soul was getting hungry."
-Roger MacPhee

"Without A healthy soul we will never obey,  because we will never hear the voice of God."
- Roger MacPhee

"Be still and know that I am God. 
Stillness is a prerequisite of hearing and knowing the will of God."
- Roger MacPhee

"The body shouts.
The soul whispers.
So it's easier to focus  on the body. "
- Roger MacFee

"We have many people showing examples of how to live. We also need examples of how to die."
-  Roger MacPhee

Apostles Creed Says Nothing of Forgiveness

"There are other glaring oversights. The Apostles’ Creed does not once mention love, service, hope, the “least of the brothers and sisters,” or even forgiveness—anything that is remotely actionable. The earliest formal declaration of Christian belief is a vision and philosophy statement with no mission statement, as it were......

The Apostles’ Creed, along with the later Nicene Creed, is an important document of theological summary and history, but when the crowd at my parish mumbles hurriedly through its recitation each Sunday, I’m struck by how little usefulness—or even interest—the creed seems to bring as a guide for people’s daily, practical behavior. I hope I am wrong, but I doubt it.

Both creeds reveal historic Christian assumptions about who God is and what God is doing. They reaffirm a static and unchanging universe and a God who is quite remote from almost everything we care about each day. Furthermore, they don’t show much interest in the realities of Jesus’ own human life—or ours. Instead, they portray what religious systems tend to want: a God who looks strong and stable and in control. No “turn the other cheek” Jesus, no hint of a simple Christ-like lifestyle is found here.

 Richard Rohr 

Fate Of Following

"Following Jesus is a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of the world."
- Richard Rohr 

Lizard Brain Transformation

"I believe that we are invited to gaze upon the image of the crucified Jesus to soften our hearts toward all suffering, to help us see how we ourselves have been “bitten” by hatred and violence, and to know that God’s heart has always been softened toward us. In turning our gaze to this divine truth—in dropping our many modes of scapegoating and self-justification—we gain compassion toward ourselves and all others who suffer. It largely happens on the psychic and unconscious level, but that is exactly where our hurts and our will to violence lie, lodged in the primitive “lizard brain,” where we have almost no rational control.
A transformative religion must touch us at this primitive, brain-stem level, or it is not transformative."
- Richard Rohr 

Our Legacy Collapse Is Fertilizer For The New Tree

"Go ahead! Achieve all your goals! Break all the dams! Faster! You are unbound. Go ahead and fly with faster wings, with an ever greater pride for your achievements, with your conquests, with your empires, with your democracies! The pit must be filled: there is a need for fertilizer for the new tree that will grow out of your collapse."

- G. DE Giorgio. "Crollano Le Torri"  La Torre. 1930

Where Ever There Is Sun, We Will Go

"A human being is weak, weak. In the end, that spring, even the most stubborn of us wanted forgiveness and we're ready to give up a lot for just a little bit more life. An anecdote was current among us: "What is your last word, accused?" I beg you to send me where wherever you please, just as long as it is under the Soviet government and the Sun is there! No one was threatening to deprive us of the Soviet government, of course: just the sun. No one wanted to be sent beyond the Arctic Circle, to scurvy and malnutrition."

- Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. 

Laws Today To Hang You In Ten Years

"On this basis no single African leader has any assurance that we will not, ten years from now, promulgate a law in accordance with which we will put him on trial for what he does today. Yes. The Chinese, in fact, will promulgate precisely such laws just give them the chance to reach out that far."

- Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL 1. 

Your Government Deifies Jesus

In this respect the differences between the USA and the USSR are those of evangelical dinosaurs competing for domination on one small planet: the first deifies Jesus Christ, the other Karl Marx. Neither has much practical interest in what those two sincere and hard-working fellows actually preached.

- Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed:

We Are Our Enemies Devil?

"Suppose on reads a story of filthy atrocities (done by their enemy) in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils.” --C. S. Lewis

Christ Coming In Strangers

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me, '
Christ beneath me, Christ above me, .
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger."

- Saint Patrick 

Only The Souls Freedom

"Lonesome Whistle" - Mandolin Orange. 

All eyes out on the railroad

All eyes out on the sea

All these means of travel, darling

Mean nothing once your soul has been set free

Political Lies

"Tom, you can't do that. You can't make promises you won't be able to keep."

"We are i Washington, they are the only promises we are aloud to make." 

- Designated Survivor. Movie pilot.

Wait For Spring In Prison.

"Spring promises everyone happiness - and tenfold to the prisoner. Oh, April Sky. It didn't matter that I was in prison. Evidently, they were not going to shoot me. And in the end I would become wiser here. I would come to understand many things here..."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  The Gulag Archipelago. 

The Bible Is Better Than Your Preacher

"The printed page is a missionary that can go anywhere and do so at minimum cost. It enters closed lands and reaches all strata of society. It does not grow weary. It needs no furlough. It lives longer than any missionary. It never gets ill. It penetrates through the mind to the heart and conscience. It has and is producing results everywhere. It has often lain dormant yet retained its life and bloomed years later."

- Samuel Marinus Zwemer

Breast Meat or White Meat? Translation AND Culture Issues

'There was another dinner in Virginia, probably the same visit, when the butler came around with the chicken and asked my grandfather which piece of the bird he would like. He said, "I'd like breast." Whereupon the woman next to him said, "Mr Churchill, in this country we say white meat or dark meat."

'Next day she got a corsage of flowers, saying, "Pin this on your white meat!"'

- Winston  Churchill's Granddaughter

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1052774/Around-world-Winston-Churchills-grandaughter-reveals-tales-Onassis-yacht-Lawrence-Arabia.html

Simple Tastes For The Best

"For Celia, now 65 and a mother of four living in west London, it was always a pleasure to travel with her grandfather and in the last years of his life she spent several holidays with him in the penthouse of Monaco's famous Hotel de Paris. As he was wont to say, 'My tastes are simple. I am easily satisfied by the best.'

-----------------------------

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1052774/Around-world-Winston-Churchills-grandaughter-reveals-tales-Onassis-yacht-Lawrence-Arabia.html

Seeing Behind To See Further Ahead

“The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”

-Winston Churchill

I Hate Being Taught

"Personally I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.”

-Winston Churchill

Half The Lies

“There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.”

- Winston Churchill

Charles Spurgeon Smoked Cigars

“D.L. Moody went to London to meet Spurgeon, whom he had admired from a distance and considered to be his professional mentor. However, when Spurgeon answered the door with a cigar in his mouth, Moody fell down the stairs in shock. “How could you, a man of God, smoke that?” protested the great American evangelist.

Spurgeon took the stogie out of his mouth and walked down the steps to where Moody was still standing in bewilderment. Putting his finger on Moody’s rather rotund stomach, he smiled and said, “The same way you, a man of God, could be that fat!”

– Classic C.H.S

"Some one asked Charles Spurgeon about his cigar smoking, if it was moral or not.  He said it is fine just as long as it is in moderation. The person then ask him what cigar smoking in moderation meant. He said just so long as you don't  have more than two cigars in your mouth at one time."

- I Heard this on a Podcast

Spurgeon also suffered ill health toward the end of his life, afflicted by a combination of rheumatism, gout and Bright’s disease. He gave up smoking his beloved cigars due to failing health and, for different reasons… ”

– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Spurgeon

“After Spurgeon’s pronouncement of his “smoking to the glory of God,” English businessmen began to market the cigars that Spurgeon smoked. Spurgeon once entered a store and saw a sign that said, ‘Spurgeon smokes!’ He also heard complaints from parents who were encouraging their children not to drink alcohol or smoke, only to receive the reply, ‘But Spurgeon does…’

By the 1880′s, Spurgeon’s health was failing, and so the preacher who had once justified his cigar-smoking by claiming a doctor had prescribed it as a relaxant, realized that smoking was doing more harm than good to his body. So, he gave it up.”

– Trevin Wax

Not Coercion of Critics, Moral Integrity

"In an op-ed piece in the paper, Turkish writer Mustafa Akyol calls on the Muslim world to ease its concept of blasphemy.

"Rage is a sign of nothing but immaturity," he says. "The power of any faith comes not from its coercion of critics and dissenters. It comes from the moral integrity and the intellectual strength of its believers.""

Desire To Control Or Not

"Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire."

Robert A. Heinlein

Doctrinal Police Remember

Like it or not.

"One man's theology is another man's belly laugh."

- Robert A. Heinlein

When Church Runs The State

"It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so."

Robert A. Heinlein

Strange Times For Truth

"Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught falsehoods in school. And the person that dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool."

- Plato 

The Spirt Convicts Enough So You Shouldn't Have To

"A lot of evangelism is because we don't  trust the Holy Spirit, right? Because, obvioisly the Holy Spirit is not doing a very good job of convicting the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment, so, he needs my help. I can convict the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment, just give me a chance.
I used to know what God was doing and used to tell everybody. 
What i did was I met him where he was at because I believe the Holy Spirit is already all over and after him."
- Wm Paul Young. Aug 23, 2013 talk. 

Wm Paul Young. 13 min in.. but the whole message will disintegrate our fear of loss. We have nothing to lose 

Too Nice.

“You taught me to be nice, so nice that now I am so full of niceness, I have no sense of right and wrong, no outrage, no passion.”

~ Garrison Keillor

Give Up Religion To Find God

"Many people begin coming to God once they stop being religious, because there is only one master of the human heart – Jesus Christ, not religion."

~ Oswald Chambers

Loving Larger

"Well he’s a human being that continues through a process of change, like the rest of us. Only he welcomes it while I tend to resist it. I have noticed that he loves larger than most, is quick to forgive, and even quicker to ask for forgiveness."

( The Shack. William P. Young)

He Is Especially Fond Of You

"“Willie, he was there! Oh, was he there! Wait till I tell you. You’ll never believe it. Man, I’m not sure I do either.” Mack stopped, lost in his memories for a moment. “Oh, yeah,” he said at last. “He told me to tell you something.”“What? Me?” Mack watched as concern and doubt traded places on Willie’s face. “So, what did he say?” Again he leaned forward. Mack paused, grasping for the words. “He said, ‘Tell Willie that I’m especially fond of him.’“ Mack stopped and watched his friend’s face and jaw tighten and puddles of tears fill his eyes. His lips and chin quivered and Mack knew his friend was fighting hard for control. “I gotta go,” he whispered hoarsely. “You’ll have to tell me all about it later.” And with that Willie simply turned and left the room, leaving Mack to wonder, and remember."

(The Shack. William P. Young)

How To Move Forward?

Move light!

"To move forward, we can't keep everything we've always had."

- Hugh Halter. The Tangible Kingdom 

A Worship With A Larger Part

"Thus we clutch the moment of intimacy in worship when we become momentarily a part of the larger whole,  a fleeting strength, which we pit against all the darkness and dread of other times."

- Howard Thurman. The Inward Journey 

Strong Prayer

"Be with the weak to make them strong and with the strong to make them gentle. Cheer the lonely with thy company and the distracted with thu solitude."

- John Baillie. A Diary Of Private Prayer.

Nothing I Want You To See?

"You invade my privacy and see nothing,  and I try to get it back, it's a crime." (Anon)

"Don't you get it? The more you try to hide the more attention you attract.Why is it so important that nobody knows you? You get ride of other people's secrets, what's yours?" (detective)

"Does their have to be one?" (Anon)

"Everyone has something to hide." (Detective)

"That's what you do, what you look for every day of your life; why you will never understand. It's not that I have something to hide. I have nothing that I want you to see." (Anon)

- Movie "Anon"

Speaking To My Chatacter

"Another time, my dad gave 50 bucks to a guy who said he needed to buy medicine for his kids. I told my dad he was probably going to spend the money on alcohol or something, but my dad said that "whether he was lying or not says something about HIS character, but hearing someone in need and choosing not to help when l have the means to says something about mine".

I never forget that."

- Josh Wolcott

How We Treat Those We Disagree With

"One test of the character of a man is to see how he treats those who disagree with him. If his only desire is to destroy those who disagree, then he is much like the bramble - plenty of good points, but no real substance for good."

- David Guzik. Commentary on Judges 9.

Better Than Church

"Thus, one who makes it a rule to be content in every part and accident of life because it comes from God praises God in much higher manner than one who has some set time for the singing of psalms.

The person who dares not say an ill-natured word or do an unreasonable thing because he or she  considers God as everywhere present performs a better devotion than the person who dares not miss the church."

- William Law. A Serious Call To a Devout and Holy Life. 

They Pour Prayers For Me

"Five bleeding wounds he bears, 
Received on Calvary;
They poor effectual prayers;
They strongly plead for me.

- Charles Wesley. Hymn "Arise, My Soul Arise"