Michael Ani

God lives here.

Christian | Bondservant of Jesus Christ | Architect @ScillaAtelier, Preacher @firebranddni, making music @firebrandmusic

[Michael Ani @michaelanijr]

https://t.co/6RzLEjpcrV

[Michael Ani @michaelanijr]

@DineshDSouza For example, Psalm 30:9 ESV:

"What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it tell of your faithfulness?"

[Michael Ani @michaelanijr]

@HwsEleutheroi Strawman.

[Michael Ani @michaelanijr]

@Biblicalman @DineshDSouza John 7:37-38 KJV
In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.

[Michael Ani @michaelanijr]

@Biblicalman @DineshDSouza Isaiah 55:1 KJV
Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.

[Michael Ani @michaelanijr]

@Biblicalman @DineshDSouza Revelation 22:17 KJV
And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.

[Michael Ani @michaelanijr]

@DineshDSouza Mr Dinesh D'Souza is right, and Calvinist Soteriology is wrong. The Scriptural data does not support a limited Atonement by any stretch. You have to have a prior devotion to the "TULIP" system, to arrive at it. It's an error, and it carries an unfounded arrogance with it.

[Michael Ani @michaelanijr]

Psalm 34:8

"O taste and see that the LORD is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him."

[Enes 🇹🇷 @enesovat22]

🚨 Atheist pretends to be Christian for 20 days and ends up converting.

[Michael Ani @michaelanijr]

@Breaking911 If this is true, this is obviously demonic activity, not mere psychosis. She needs a loving exorcism in the name and power of Jesus, and then she may be imprisoned. This is clearly demons at work, and pharmaceuticals will not help her at all.

[Michael Ani @michaelanijr]

@Tarmeim Even God does not demand this of His beloved. Why then should you ask this of finite man? "Ask," He says, "and it shall be given unto you." Asking and receiving does not compromise love; it is the very foundation of it. This—whatever it is—is unreasonable and impractical.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

It hit me on my evening walk that when James calls God the "Father of lights," in James 1:17, he executes a theological move that completely overshoots the modern debate on God and science.

Throughout history, human thought has swung between two equal and opposite errors.

The ancient pagan looked up at the sun, moon, and stars, fell to his knees, and worshipped them as volatile deities controlling human fate.

The modern materialist swings to the other extreme, stripping the heavens of all meaning and reducing the cosmos to a cold, dead clockwork of blind particles and indifferent math.

James dismantles both in three words.

By calling God the Father of the celestial lights, he strips the stars of their false divinity. The sun is not a god to be appeased. It is a creature.

But by calling God their Father rather than merely their mechanical manufacturer, James refuses to reduce nature to a sterile laboratory.

God does not look at the universe through the detached lens of a technician. He relates to it with paternal delight.

The biblical God is not a cosmic watchmaker who wound up a spring and walked away; He is the Father who brings out the starry host by number and calls each of them by name.

Modern skeptics demands that God should have addressed us as an engineer, handing down equations for nuclear fusion in the solar core. But technical classification is the lowest, most utilitarian way to engage reality.

Science can tell you what the light is made of. The phrase "Father of lights" tells you who the light belongs to, why it shines, and the affectionate character of the Mind that spoke it into being.

Nature was never meant to be a warehouse of raw materials or an indifferent backdrop. It is a living household. And within that household, humanity was placed not as an exploitative consumer, but as the appointed steward and priest.

This is why, when man fell, the tragedy was cosmic. In Romans 8, Paul writes that creation itself groans in frustration, waiting for the revealing of the sons of God.

Nature is not broken because God botched the physics. Nature suffers because its caretaker corrupted his character. When the steward of an estate loses his moral bearings, the garden withers, the animals suffer, and the house falls into ruin. The physical cosmos is entangled in the moral condition of man.

To demand that Scripture should have been a physics textbook is to ask God to treat His living household as nothing more than a blueprint. God did not come to explain the mechanics of the furniture to a rebellious child. He came to heal the steward who broke the house.

[Michael Ani @michaelanijr]

@AttorneyF_ Wow. So beautifully written. You have an excellent mind. God bless you, brother!

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

Most atheists would probably prefer a God who explained quantum mechanics to them over a God who told them to love their enemies.

If Jesus had arrived explaining astrophysics instead of commanding repentance, forgiveness, and holiness, the modern world would have found Him far more compelling.

We do not seem to want a God who is holier than us. We want a God who is just smarter than us.

A God who is merely smarter is safe. He stays in the comfortable category of an intellectual superior. We could admire His mind, take His laboratory notes, and use His data to master the universe on our own terms.

A God of pure information gives us power without ever touching our pride.

The absence of a scientific manual in Scripture is not an oversight. It is an act of design.

In Genesis, God does not hand Adam a completed catalogue of creation. He brings the animals to him and lets him name them. God builds an intelligible world, gives humanity minds capable of interrogating it, and then leaves room for discovery.

The skeptic looks at that silence and calls it a deficiency. He demands that God should have handed us the finished physics.

But if God owes us the completed mechanics of the universe, why stop at science?

Why didn’t the Mona Lisa descend from heaven fully painted? Why didn’t Beethoven’s Ninth arrive fully scored? Why did God not pre-design the airplane, pre-discover penicillin, pre-build civilization and hand it to us at Eden?

He could have. The demand has no principled stopping point.

What you are actually asking for, worked out to its conclusion, is a world where humanity arrived to find everything already done. No discovery to make. No art to create. No problem left to solve. God would have been comprehensively generous. Humans would have been comprehensively useless.

The blank canvas is not God withholding. It is God protecting the only conditions under which making something actually means anything.

So why is Scripture so much more explicit about how we should live than about how God built the universe?

Look at the asymmetry of consequence.

Ignorance of astrophysics and the exact mechanics of creation is remarkably survivable. A civilization can flourish for centuries without knowing how the cosmos was physically assembled.

Moral disorder is different.

An abusive father does not need a better cosmology before his family suffers. A corrupt ruler does not need to understand thermodynamics before he destroys a nation. Societies can survive enormous intellectual ignorance. They cannot indefinitely survive the corruption of trust, justice, love, and leadership.

We treat technical mastery as if it were the summit of human purpose.

But knowledge is merely instrumental. It decorates our world, extends our reach and amplifies our power, yet it leaves the human soul entirely untouched.

We split the atom and did not become more virtuous. We simply acquired the capacity to industrialize our vices.
Science can tell us what we can do. It cannot tell us what we ought to do.
God never came primarily as our lab instructor.

He came as a Father to heal a terminal heart.

He gave us the cosmos to discover, our neighbour to love, and Himself to know.

[Jason Howerton @jason_howerton]

My young son recently had staph. It was pretty brutal for the whole family. I got it too.

He’s got a nasty mosquito bite today — he’s really anxious about getting it again.

I told him he is fine… but it wasn’t enough to settle his mind. So at bedtime, he asked me to read him something in the Bible about the worry he’s feeling.

I’m not upset in the slightest that my assurance wasn’t enough for him. I am bursting with pride that he knows where to look for the ultimate assurance from the greatest Father.

For all the mistakes I’ve made, and will make as a father, if he leaves this house knowing that God’s Word is where we look when we don’t have the answers… then I can rest in the imperfect job I did as a dad.

It was a really tough week, but I’m feeling grateful tonight. JESUS IS LORD.

[Walter 🇳🇬 🇵🇭 🇨🇦 @gamerwalt]

You prayed for a responsible husband.

You said you wanted a man who works, provides, stays faithful, protects his home and does not run away from responsibility.

Then you married one. But somewhere along the line, you quietly added another requirement.

He must also agree with you whenever you are upset.

Now every disagreement becomes evidence that he does not love you.

Every boundary becomes "control."

Every time he refuses to be manipulated by tears, silence or public embarrassment, suddenly he is "emotionally unavailable."

Be very careful.

You can destroy a good marriage trying to turn a good man into an obedient man.

A husband is not automatically wrong because your feelings are hurt. Sometimes your feelings are simply reacting to a boundary you do not like.

And if peace in your marriage only exists when you get your way, that is control with soft music playing in the background.

Audit yourself before you turn a disagreement into a character assassination.

A mature woman does not need to win every argument to know she is loved.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

I was rereading Exodus this morning, and there is a quietly absurd detail during the plagues that made me laugh before it made me think.

The immediate answer of Egypt’s magicians to every national catastrophe was simply to duplicate it.

Twice, nearly verbatim, the text notes the routine. When YHWH made the Nile run thick with blood, cutting off the empire’s fresh water, Pharaoh’s sorcerers rushed forward to produce more blood:

“But the Egyptian magicians did the same things by their secret arts, and Pharaoh’s heart became hard; he would not listen to Moses and Aaron, just as the Lord had said.” (Exodus 7:22)

When YHWH made the frogs choke the fields and the bedrooms, they similarly hurried to summon more frogs:

“But the magicians did the same things by their secret arts; they also made frogs come up on the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 8:7)

Pharaoh looked at the spectacle and hardened his heart because his court had matched the trick, entirely indifferent to the reality that the water remained undrinkable and dead amphibians were piling up in the streets.

Think about the sheer vanity of that response.

This is the exact modus operandi of counterfeit power. It is strictly imitative and relentlessly additive.

It can mimic the mechanics of judgment, but it possesses no capacity to reverse them. It inflates the disaster while presenting the duplication as proof of parity.

Egypts magicians could stage the ruin, but they could not redeem an inch of ground from it.

By the third plague, their technique collapsed entirely. When the magicians tried to produce gnats from the dust, they hit a hard wall and were forced to concede to their king: “This is the finger of God.” (Exodus 8:19)

By the sixth, they were physically incapacitated by the very boils they claimed the authority to ward off:

“The magicians could not stand before Moses because of the boils that were on them and on all the Egyptians.” (Exodus 9:11). From imitation to total humiliation.

By the eighth, Pharaoh’s own inner council was openly pleading with him to concede that Egypt was already finished.

God could have shut down the contest from the opening encounter. When Aaron threw down his staff, God could have paralyzed the sorcerers so their serpents never appeared at all. But He permitted the stage because the contest was designed to expose a fundamental asymmetry.

YHWH did not merely possess superior initiative power, creating life and commanding nature in ways Egypt’s pantheon could never fathom. He possessed the singular power of reversal, undoing the destruction their gods could not even begin to heal.

By allowing false power to exhaust every move in its arsenal, God turned the court inside out.

He did not simply crush the opposition from without; He conscripted the resistance into evidence, leaving the very men hired to defend the empire to stand as the prime witnesses to its collapse.

[Christian Quotes, Humor, Some Cultural Commentary @CSLCHSnMore]

Richard Baxter
Spend your time in nothing which you know must be repented of; in nothing on which you might not pray for the blessing of God; in nothing which you could not review with a quiet conscience on your dying bed; in nothing which you might not safely and properly be found doing if death should surprise you in the act.

[EMRYS @novjb]

Dear Star 🌟
Happy Birthday to you ❤️

Since I met you, you’ve been my steady light. You comforted me through the hard times, prayed for me, fought for me, and never stopped believing in me.
Thank you for giving me the privilege of calling you my wife. I’m more grateful than ever for the woman you are and the family we’re building together.
Thank you for your love, your strength, and the beautiful life we share.

Happy Birthday, my beautiful wife.
I love you more My Shining Star. 🎂

[Michael Ani @michaelanijr]

@novjb What a wonderful woman! Happy birthday to her, and congratulations to you my brother ❤️

[Owen Strachan @ostrachan]

The need for young men to be gentle, kind, humble, quick to confess sin, accountable, and self-controlled will never become more apparent than when you have a daughter approaching adulthood.

[Katy Faust @Katy_Faust]

This little girl is not in the video. She wasn't even born. But she is moved to tears watching her mother and father get married. Why?

Marriage researcher and family therapist Pat Fagan once told me:

"When a child sees their mother loving their father they feel like their mother is loving them. When they see their father loving their mother they feel like their father is loving them. It is the only time in the human experience where you can be loved indirectly. No one's even looking at you or touching you or talking to you, but you feel loved."

That is not the case with a step parent, he said. The child may tolerate the romantic expression. But they do not experience that same circuitous love. More often they feel competition or jealousy.

If every child could order their own world, this is what they would say:

"I want my mom and dad to love me and I want my mom and dad to love each other."

Sometimes that's not possible. Woe to a culture that intentionally denies that to children in the name of adult freedom.