Joseph of Arimathea pulled a corpse off a cross with his bare hands.
Blood under his fingernails. The weight of a dead man sagging into his arms.
He wrapped God in linen, pressed the fabric into wounds that were still wet.
Nicodemus brought seventy-five pounds of burial spice. A king's funeral for a man the world just murdered.
They carried Him into a hole in the rock and rolled the stone shut.
And everything you've ever done went in with Him.
Every night you can't sleep because of what you did. Every morning, you can't look in the mirror. The thing you did to her. The thing you did to them. The
lie you've been carrying so long it feels like bone.
The version of you that drinks alone and pretends tomorrow will be different.
That man was buried with Christ.
Stone sealed. Done.
Not managed. Not in therapy. Not on a payment plan with God where you slowly earn your way back. Buried. In a tomb. Under rock. Gone.
Three days of silence. Three days of a cold body in the dark.
Then the stone moved.
And when He walked out, the grave clothes were folded on the slab. He didn't stumble out tangled in death. He left it sitting there like a man who's done
with the clothes he used to wear.
Lazarus needed someone to unwrap him. Death still clung to him even after he was breathing.
Jesus folded His own burial linen and walked out clean.
That's the difference between religion and resurrection. Religion unwraps you slowly. Asks you to manage your sin. Attend the class. Read the book. Try harder next week.
Resurrection says the man who walked into that tomb is dead. The man who walked out doesn't know him.
You're not fixing the old you. The old you is in a sealed tomb in Jerusalem, and he's not coming back.
The man reading this, the one who thinks he's too far gone, you're not too far. You're already buried. The funeral happened two thousand years
ago.
Now get up. The stone's already moved. The linen's already folded.
Walk out.
“Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.”
Isaiah 53:4-5 ESV
Oxford professor John Lennox on testing the reality of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ:
"Now, my final point is this. I'm a scientist of sorts, and people say to me, 'Come on. You can't believe this stuff.' Because in science and practical science you do experiments. You test your hypothesis. Christianity is not testable. Isn't it? Isn't it?
You see, the difference between the two last things I read were the difference between seeing something, those grave cloths, and working out an intellectual conclusion that something utterly remarkable has happened. That's not quite the same thing as meeting the risen Jesus. And you see, ladies and gentlemen, if it is true that Jesus rose from the dead, then He's still alive, and it's possible to meet Him.
Now, you can do an experiment, and it's this—this Jesus who claims to be risen tells us that if we're prepared to trust Him, repent of the mess we've made of our own lives, and the lives of other people, and we're prepared to receive Him as Lord and Controller of life as the risen Son of God, then He will give us forgiveness. Does the word forgiveness mean anything to you? He'll give us new life and a new power...
Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is the test...When you see people with narcotic or alcohol dependence, and they've no food to put on the table in front of their children, and you meet them then a year later, and something has happened. You say, 'What's happened to you?' and they say something like, 'Well, I met Jesus,' or 'I became a Christian,' or they'll put it different ways. When you see that again and again, you add two and two to get four.
I wouldn't sit here for a nanosecond if I didn't believe that not only is the resurrection of Jesus intellectually credible, but I believe it's existentially credible because the center part of my life and that of my wife and family is to walk with Him from day to day. Now, that may sound absolute jargon and mumbo-jumbo to you, but we're living in a universe where we discover that we are persons, and every analogy we know tells us that our origin cannot be sub-personal. It's supra-personal. And if we enjoy human friendship, what a magnificent thing it is if God makes a way where we can through faith in Christ become His sons and daughters and enjoy the biggest friendship and the most exciting friendship in the universe, and that is friendship with the risen Christ."
The church told you loving your neighbor means agreeing with him.
It doesn't.
Love warns.
Love confronts.
Love tells the truth when the truth costs friendships.
You're not loving anyone.
You're just scared to be hated.
@AndrewKolvet We have a member that lets her children bring noisy toys into service and then sets them loose during the sermon to crawl under seats. It’s completely inappropriate
America was never meant to be a hyperindividualistic society any more than a collectivist one.
As Milton Friedman said, "We are not an individualist society, we are a family society."
Christianity and the family are the answers to the errors of both collectivism and hyperindividualism. Belonging and community are provided by the family. Meaning and individual human dignity are provided by Christianity.
That's why both the Left and the groyper Right attack them.
I've often said that your English Bible has been changed -- not for the sake of corruption though but for clarity.
I find there are basically two extremes when it comes to the topic of textual corruption, and that these extremes basically amount to the same error.
On one side you have the radical skeptics. A radical skeptic is an individual who says something analogous to, "if the Bible is really a product of divine inspiration it would have zero issues throughout history. God would not allow scribes to copy it incorrectly, we would have the original copies written by the original authors perfectly and miraculously preserved." This position holds that because there is a history to the text and we have to evaluate it and toil over such an endeavor the text cannot be fully known or trusted. Any level of uncertainty collapses into a complete lack of knowledge of what God has said, and therefore, an utter lack in that being a standard for authority.
On the other side, you have textual absolutism (this term to my knowledge was coined by @mlward, Elijah Hixson, Peter Montoro, and Timothy Berg for their Textual Confidence Collective Podcast). A textual absolutist is an individual who takes any form of the text and treats that text as their final authority. This could mean a particular translation (eg: KJV, NWT, JST), a particular text (eg: Textus Receptus, LXX, Latin Vulgate), or a particular manuscript (eg: Stephanus' 1550 Greek New Testament, Codex Sinaiticus). Because a single form is held to as the authority any recognition of or evaluation towards the textual history, manuscripts, or complexity within the languages is waved away in order to land on a single and sole text.
Both of these suffer from the same problem: they look at the complexity of the history of the text of the Bible and dismiss it as too problematic -- either in denying that the text can be clear at all or to state that it must be *so* clear that there is no conversation concerning the matter.
In the example of the image below however, you can see how the text of the English Bible at Psalm 23 has changed over the last 1k years. This change is a good thing! The word of God in its meaning and intention does not change, but as a language like English changes so to do our translations for the sake of legibility. This says nothing about the base text (i.e. the Greek and Hebrew) but does speak to a change in the text of the Bible, and that change is a good thing! The language of the Bible changes as said language evolves, allowing the reader not only to understand what is written but to better apply it to their lives applicably and comprehensively.
Changed not for the sake of corruption, but for the sake clarity.
.@JackPosobiec is a phony. But why do we talk about him? Because TPUSA has promoted him.
I’m a conservative, like many, who has never gone to a conference like Amfest or any conservative gathering like it, because I can’t justify the expense and because I know it doesn’t help anything. We have people who are not conservatives speaking for a new conservative stripe here, and a different way to look at conservatism there, and by the way, the same people who, in arguments during campaigning stated, “What have conservatives ever conserved?”
And I’m here to tell you that conservatism seeks the truth of the matter. And as Margaret Thatcher said, “of course it’s the same old story. The truth is always the same old story.” Why? Because it works.
There is no new conservatism. There is no new conservative stripe or movement. It is the same old story as it has always been because it is what works and it seeks the truth.
So, when @TuckerCarlson says @marklevinshow is “almost 70 years old” as if the ideas he communicates are outdated, or @megynkelly tries to win a debate the @Ron_White way by screaming “Fuck you!” to @benshapiro , just know they are trying and failing to change something that is and will always be a constant.
Ultimately, regular conservatives all over the country reject them.
Conservatives all over the country know what is needed to affect change, and it’s not listening to podcasts who question our relationship with Israel, or insist on America Alone instead of American Leadership, or any other bullshit “break out” theories.
There are but a handful of people in broadcasting who know and can articulate what conservatism is, and Charlie Kirk was one of them. Ever since his brutal murder, these grifters have shown themselves by trying to take conservatives on a different, ultimately murderous path.
But it won’t work.
I hope they make millions of dollars, because that will be their only reward, ever.