Colossians 1: 15-28 (links validated 6/23/22)

Seditious people are sometimes quick to accuse others of sedition. On August 23, 1775, Great Britain’s King George III issued “The Proclamation of Rebellion,” officially calling it “A Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition.” In it he declared that because the American colonies were in “open and avowed rebellion,” Britain’s forces were authorized to do everything they could to put down the Americans’ rebellion. The Americans, of course, eventually succeeded in rebelling against and overthrowing British rule over them. Yet scarcely 10 years after their successful rebellion, they enacted their own “Alien and Sedition Acts.” Because they worried France would declare war on their fledgling nation, they strictly limited foreign residents of their country’s activities and shrunk freedom of speech and the press.

always good insights!

Larry Taunton wrote a book entitled, The Faith of Christopher Hitchens. The title seems like an oxymoron because Hitchens was one of the 20th century’s most notorious atheists. He once wrote, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him will believeth in anything” and called it “Hitchens 3:16.” In the April 2016 “Books and Culture” Douglas Wilson gives a glowing review of Taunton’s book about Hitchens’s faith. Wilson had come to know Hitchens fairly well through a series of debates with him about Christianity...

Four years ago my son, Patrick, suffered a stroke. It left considerable damage on the right side of his brain. The left side of his body was paralyzed. Slowly, he covered most, but not all, of the use of his left arm and leg. The therapist explained that the lingering paralysis was due to the brain injury, not the muscles; that the muscles depended on signals from the brain in order to know what to do...

Things are not always what they seem. What seems to be the most obvious can be awfully wrong. An organist was practicing one day in a great church in Europe. A man came up to the organ and asked if he could play. The organist looked at him and thought to himself, "I shouldn't let this man play, just look at him, he is unshaven, his clothes are dirty, he looks like a bum". So he told the man no. But the unkempt stranger asked again and again. Finally the organist let him play thinking he wouldn't play very long, after all what does a bum know about organs. The bum's fingers danced over the keyboard in a way the organist hadn't heard in his lifetime. The stranger played on and on. The organist was spellbound. When the stranger got up to leave, the organist could not contain himself and shouted, "Who are you, what is your name??" As the stranger, who looked like a bum slowly walked away, turned over his shoulder and said, "My name is Felix Mendelssohn." The organist gasped. On the exterior the man in ragged clothes and badly in need of a shave and a shower but in actual fact was a prince of the organ. Things were certainly not as they appeared to be...

("An anonymous author made this striking comparison: "Socrates taught for 40 years, Plato for 50, Aristotle for 40, and Jesus for only 3. Yet the influence of Christ's 3-year ministry infinitely transcends the impact left by the combined 130 years of teaching from these men, who were among the greatest philosophers of all antiquity....")