Urgent Message from Billy Graham (click to enlarge)

Quote

"Throughout church history, people who have tried to solve the tension between the sovereignty of God and the free will of man have ended up with a pile of Scriptures they constantly repeat and a second pile that they seem to ignore. Man's free will and God's sovereignty are parallel lines that meet only in the mind of our Creator, a paradox we will never fully comprehend in this life. So listen- both are true".  –James MacDonald

Quote from "Desiring God"

If the most terrifying news in the world is that we have fallen under the condemnation of our Creator and that He is bound by His own righteous character to preserve the worth of His glory by pouring out His wrath on our sin…

…Then the best news in all the world (the gospel!) is that God has decreed a way of salvation that also upholds the worth of His glory, the honor of His Son, and the eternal salvation of His elect. He has given His Son to die for sinners and to conquer their death by His own resurrection.

Fun Outside

Coffee & Reading @ Watertower Place

We just left the hospital where Izaiah had his stitches removed. He looks fantastic, and we've decided to make our long drive worth while and spend the morning downtown. Cheesecake Factory @ Hancock Tower for lunch!! Mmmmm!!!!

Izaiah Repair Update

On Friday, August 31st, our baby boy finally underwent the surgery to close his lip. As seen in the pictures below, he is extremely swollen, puffy, and today the area has actually become very bruised. This will all dissipate rapidly and will normalize. The surgery overall was by far the easiest with regard to his recovery time, although the procedure itself was the longest so far, over 2 1/2 hours. Some of the more prominent stitches have to be removed this coming Friday, and must be done under general anesthesia, though he will only be under for a few minutes. So one more drive into Chicago, and we are done with surgeries until some bone grafting is donewhen he's around 5 or 6 years old. We will be re-evaluating every year with his cleft team to determine any adjustments that may be needed, but don't expect to be doing anything further until the bone grafting procedure. We want to again express our deepest gratitude to Dr. Frank Vicari, craniofacial surgeon extraordinaire, and ultimately to God for placing a doctor with such amazing skill into our lives to do this amazing work. Modern medicine is a grace that we all too often take for granted, and is rarely put on display as it is when congenital deformities such as this are miraculously transformed before our eyes. And to all those who have prayed for us, for our church (Harvest Bible Chapel), and all who have walked with us through these last months, a thousand millions thanks. Only eternity will fully tell the stories of how our Lord and Savior has built his Kingdom through the love, prayers and work of his people. We love you all. Our journey continues...

On The Move!!!

Yesterday, August 17, we celebrated our baby boy's second birthday. The kids have been with us for 9 1/2 months now, and we continue to be overwhelmed with the joy that they bring into our lives. Izaiah took his first steps one week ago today and, as you can see, is taking more every day. His final surgery to close his lip will be the last day of this month, one week from Friday. We deeply appreciate and covet all of the prayers that have gone out for us in this last year. We continue to see the impact of those prayers in very real and tangible ways, as God continues to knit us together as a family through this wondrous miracle of adoption. Much love to all. -EnJ (nLnI!). :)

from Russell Moore, author of "Adopted for Life"                                  

Pat Robertson vs. the Spirit of Adoption

— FRIDAY, AUGUST 17TH, 2012 —

In a recent broadcast ofThe 700 Club, a woman sent in a question about a man who wouldn't marry her because she has children who were adopted internationally. If they were her "own" biological children, he would have no problem, she said. But because they were adopted, he saw too much risk. Host Pat Robertson's female co-host bristled and said he was acting like a "dog." Robertson disagreed.

He said the man "didn't want to take on a United Nations," and that, after all, you never know about adopted children; they might have brain damage and "grow up weird."

I am taking a deep breath here and reciting Beatitudes to myself. I had promised never to mention Robertson here again. Every few months he says some crazy scandalous thing. He blames 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina on gays and lesbians, cozies up to the Chinese coercive and murderous one-child policy, counsels a man that he can divorce his Alzheimer's-riddled wife because she's "not there" anymore.

Let me just say this bluntly. This is not just a statement we ought to disagree with. This is of the devil.

The last go round, Robertson "clarified" his statements on a man leaving his sick wife. Didn't mean to say it was right, he said, just that the man's got to have some companionship and a divorce is better than adultery. Please. Robertson's defenders said to me in letters and calls and emails that Robertson is just not what he used to be mentally and that you ought to hold him to a lower standard. That would be true if people were tapping his phone, or going to his house and recording conversations. However, the man is on television, representing to millions of people what Christianity is about.

The issue here isn't just that Robertson is, with cruel and callous language, dismissing the Christian mandate to care for the widows and orphans in their distress. The issue is that his disregard is part of a larger worldview. The prosperity and power gospel Robertson has preached fits perfectly well with the kind of counsel he's giving in recent years. Give China a pass on their murderous policies; we've got business interests there. Divorce your weak wife; she can't do anything for you anymore. Those adopted kids might have brain damage; they're "weird." What matters is health and wealth and power. But that's not the gospel of Jesus Christ. For too long, we've let our leaders replace the cross with an Asherah pole. Enough is enough.

Jesus was, after all, one of those adopted kids. Joseph of Nazareth was faced with a pregnant woman he could easily have abandoned. He knew this child wasn't his, and all he had to go on was her word and a dream. He could have dismissed either. But he strapped on his cross, provided for his wife, and protected her child. Indeed, he became a father to her child. God called this righteous. The child Jesus seemed to be a colossal risk. His own family and neighbors and villagers thought he'd turned out "weird" (Mark 3:20-21). Maybe he was demon-possessed, they speculated, or maybe even "brain damaged."

The Bible tells us that Jesus is present with the weak and the vulnerable, the "least of these," his brothers and sisters. When one looks with disgust at the prisoner, the orphan, the abandoned woman, the mentally ill, the problem isn't just with a mass of tissue connected by neural endings. The issue there is the image of God, bearing all the dignity that comes with that. And, beyond that, the issue there is the presence of Jesus himself.

Christians are the ones who have stood against the prophets of Baal and the empire of Rome and every other satanic system to say that a person's worth doesn't consist in his usefulness. Christians are the ones who picked up abandoned babies, who wiped drool from the dying elderly, who joyfully received developmentally disabled children, and who recognized that our own sin has made us nothing noble or powerful. We're all just dead and damaged and, well, "weird." But Jesus loved us anyway.

I say to my non-Christian friends and neighbors, if you want to see the gospel of Christ, the gospel that has energized this church for two thousand years, turn off the television. The grinning cartoon characters who claim to speak for Christ don't speak for him. Find the followers who do what Jesus did. Find the people who risk their lives to carry a beaten stranger to safety. Find the houses opened to unwed mothers and their babies in crisis. Find the men who are man enough to be a father to troubled children of multiple ethnicity and backgrounds.

And find a Sunday School class filled with children with Down Syndrome and cerebral palsy and fetal alcohol syndrome. Find a place where no one considers them "weird" or "defective," but where they joyfully sing, "Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world."

That might not have the polish of television talk-show theme music, but that's the sound of bloody cross gospel.

Sing Along!

Walking... Well, Kinda

The babies had a day of many firsts yesterday (Saturday). We headed out to a park west of us where they had their first carousel ride and first paddle boat expedition. Then later in the day, we attended a huge corn boil at Jacquie's sister church, where we had our first pony ride and watched a real cowboy give a horse handling demonstration! It was a wonderful, sunny and (relatively) cool day that left us all exhausted and full of fun new memories.

Horse Riding Day

4th of July and Avaline Skyy

Greetings All and Happy (slightly belated) 4th of July! For any who don't already know, Erich's eldest daughter Emma just gave us our first grandchild. Her name is Avaline Skyy Huntress, and she is absolutely beautiful. Born 7 pounds, 7 ounces on June 18th, she came into the world on the 70th birthday of Sir Paul McCartney as the hospital room rocked out to the finale of "Hey Jude"! Mother and baby are doing very well and we're all very excited. Our first 4th of July with the kids was wonderful, even though we here in the midwest are battling record setting temps (the 4th was a new record of 103 degrees)! The pics below were taken on the 4th, the outdoor shots at our hometown parade, where Jacquie's sister's family were the Grand Marshals.  Izaiah will have surgery to close his lip on August 31st. It will be fairly easy on him and difficult for mommy and daddy, who will have a bit of a hard time seeing his beautiful face look different! Love to all.

Sexual By Design

In April of this year, noted author and preacher Doug Wilson addressed college students at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. The subject of his two lectures and lengthy Q&A was sexuality from a Biblical perspective. Bloomington is said to now be "the 4th gayest city in America", and so the lectures and Q&A were volatile, to say the least. We found this entire event to be incredibly fascinating as it really is a micro-view into the cultural battle playing out across the country. The link below the trailer connects to the home page where both lectures and the Q&A can be viewed.


http://www.canonwired.com/bloomington

Teach Children The Bible Is Not About Them

by Sally Lloyd-Jones

When I go into churches and speak to children I ask them two questions:

First, how many people here sometimes think you have to be good for God to love you?

They tentatively raise their hands. I raise my hand along with them.

And second, how many people here sometimes think that if you aren’t good, God will stop loving you?

They look around and again raise their hands.

These are children in Sunday schools who know the Bible stories. These are children who probably also know all the right answers — and yet they have somehow missed the most important thing of all.

They have missed what the Bible is all about.

They are children like I once was.

As a child, even though I was a Christian, I grew up thinking the Bible was filled with rules you had to keep (or God wouldn’t love you) and with heroes setting examples you had to follow (or God wouldn’t love you).

I tried to be good. I really did. I was quite good at being good. But however hard I tried, I couldn’t keep the rules all the time so I knew God must not be pleased with me.

And I certainly couldn’t ever be as brave as Daniel. I remember being tormented by that Sunday school chorus, “Dare to be a Daniel” because, hard as I tried to imagine myself daring to be a Daniel, being thrown to lions and not minding... who was I kidding? I knew I’d be terrified out of my skull. I knew I would just say: “OK yes whatever you say! Just don’t throw me to the lions! Don’t pull out my fingernails! Make it stop!”

I knew I wasn’t nearly brave enough. Or faithful enough. Or good enough.

How could God ever love me?

I was sure he couldn’t.

One Sunday, not long ago, I was reading the story of Daniel and the Scary Sleepover fromThe Jesus Storybook Bible to some 6 year olds during a Sunday school lesson. One little girl in particular was sitting so close to me she was almost in my lap. Her face was bright and eager as she listened to the story, utterly captivated. She could hardly keep on the ground and kept kneeling up to get closer to the story.

At the end of the story there were no other teachers around and I panicked and went into automatic pilot and heard myself — to my horror — asking, “And so what can we learn from Daniel about how God wants us to live?”

And as I said those words it was as if I had literally laid a huge load on that little girl. Like I broke some spell. She crumpled right in front of me, physically slumping and bowing her head. I will never forget it.

It is a picture of what happens to a child when we turn a story into a moral lesson.

When we drill a Bible story down into a moral lesson, we make it all about us. But the Bible isn’t mainly about us, and what we are supposed to be doing — it’s about God, and what he has done!

When we tie up the story in a nice neat, little package, and answer all the questions, we leave no room for mystery. Or discovery. We leave no room for the child. No room for God.

When we say, “Now what that story is all about is…”, or “The point of that story is…” we are in fact totally missing the point. The power of the story isn’t in summing it up, or drilling it down, or reducing it into an abstract idea.

Because the power of the story isn’t in the lesson.

The power of the story is the story.

And that’s why I wrote The Jesus Storybook Bible. So children could know what I didn’t:

That the Bible isn’t mainly about me, and what I should be doing. It’s about God and what he has done.

That the Bible is most of all a story — the story of how God loves his children and comes to rescue them.

That — in spite of everything, no matter what, whatever it cost him — God won’t ever stop loving his children… with a wonderful, Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love.

That the Bible, in short, is a Story — not a Rule Book — and there is only one Hero in the Story.

I wrote The Jesus Storybook Bible so children could meet the Hero in its pages. And become part of his Magnificent Story.

Because rules don’t change you.

But a Story — God’s Story — can.

________

Sally Lloyd-Jones is one of the speakers at our National Conference this September, along with Carolyn McCulley, Elyse Fitzpatrick and others. Visit the event page to learn more and register.

Kitty UFC

Not our video; it was just too awesome not to share!

@ Brookfield Zoo on Fathers Day

The Great Wall Marathon

Anyone who has been to and attempted to scale The Wall will appreciate just how nuts this is. The pictures say it all!

The marathon along the Great Wall of China includes more than 5,000 stairs

more »

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Every year, several hundred runners freely subject themselves to a torture even worse than a regular marathon.The Great Wall Marathon takes place along the Tianjin section of the Great Wall of China east of Beijing. It involves running (or walking or crawling) up and down over 5,100 stone steps…

(Images: Last Man Running,Travel TST, Mark Griffith, Fine Art America, Great Wall Marathon, Michael Yamashita,Runners)

The Eternal Fatherhood

GLENN T. STANTON|

Fatherhood: The Core of the Universe

Far the most important thing we can know about George MacDonald is that . . . an almost perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom. From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be the core of the universe. He was thus prepared in an unusual way to teach that religion in which the relation of Father and Son is of all relations the most central. --- C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald: An Anthology

Fatherhood as the core of the universe.

When I first read this statement more than a decade ago, two things struck me. One, it is a grand and sweeping claim. Two, I had no idea what MacDonald meant. Not a clue. But it intrigued me so much that I kept thinking, and it slowly started to make faith-shifting sense. Fatherhood is not merely a motif God chose as he revealed himself to us. Nor is it merely an anthropomorphic device to relate to us. Jesus called him Father because he is. As the Trinitarian God is the center of the universe and of all reality, so is Fatherhood and Sonship. Fundamentally, ontologically, metaphysically, truly, actually, really. As Lewis says, Christianity is that religion in which the relation of a Father and Son is prior to and more central to all other relations. And it has been this way eternally. Jesus tells us as much.

Francis Schaeffer noted that even though Scripture starts with "in the beginning," something was there before the beginning. John 1:1 speaks of what existed before Genesis 1:1, and John 17:24 clarifies, giving us the opportunity to eavesdrop on an intimate conversation between God the Son and God the Father. Jesus says, "Father . . . you loved me before the creation of the world." So before "in the beginning," there was a loving Father. And before "in the beginning," there was a real Son loving, adoring, praising, and enjoying a very real Father. Jesus, in John 17:5, says they also shared glory.

This is a mind-blowing and universe-shifting truth. It means that the universe is not a dark, empty, impersonal place. Just the opposite. At its core, it is an overwhelmingly warm, relational, personal place. This explains why broken and unhealthy relationships, loneliness, and abandonment are among the most painful of human experiences.

More specifically, consider why all cultures have a problem called "fatherlessness." People who don't suffer from the "father wound" are as fortunate as they are rare. It is not a cultural construct. It does not exist in the imagination. It exists because Satan despises and seeks to pervert and destroy---every day, every moment, everywhere in the world---that which God is. As such, he sets himself against the God-like, life-giving nature of mothers (see Genesis 4:1) through the human evil and pain of abortion. But he also loathes our fathers and those of us who are fathers. He recognizes fatherhood's power. He recognizes each earthly father's iconic nature. He realizes the pain it causes God and his image-bearing creatures when fatherhood is corrupted. And this delights our mortal enemy.

How many of us had a dad like the one who welcomed back the prodigal son mentioned inLuke 15:11? His heart is deeply compassionate, non-judging, and forgiving toward his son. He loves freely, openly, and boldly, without condition or expectation. Jesus tells us this is what his Father---and ours---is like. As such, it is reality's very character. We yearn so passionately for the true acceptance of our fathers and are crushed by their shame and judgment for the deepest of reasons.

The Christian Story: Rich in Fatherhood and Fatherlessness

What are the first recorded words of our Savior in the Scriptures? "I must be about my Father's business." Jesus' first words---when Mary and Joseph scold him for scaring the wits out of them after getting separated for three days---are about his Father and his house, as if to say, "Where else would I be?"

What are the words that got Jesus killed? The Lord is arrested and asked a pointed and very serious question by the high priest. He knows his answer will light the fuse. In Matthew 26 they ask, "I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God." Jesus responded "You have said so. But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power and coming on the clouds of heaven."

Jesus knew exactly what he was saying. The high priest knew exactly what he was saying, so he tore his clothes because of the blasphemy. Jesus is the Father's Son. Jesus was killed in a savage way for stating this truth. Satan was bent on attacking the divine sonship and fatherhood. And so Christ was condemned to die.

How do you wound a father more than by killing his only son?

What were Jesus' last words at his crucifixion? Matthew and Mark report they were, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" John records "It is finished" as the last words uttered. At noon on this terrible day, the sky went dark and remained that way for three hours. God turned his face from the Son because of the sin he bore for our behalf on that rugged cross. Words cannot adequately describe the significance of this forsakenness. The Evil One sought to attack fatherhood at its core by separating Father from Son. But we know the rest of the story. Image the glorious union between them in the Resurrection and Ascension!

In the Blue Like Jazz film, one character ruefully observes that God has a major PR problem in referring to himself as Father because of the raw deal that so many have gotten from their fathers. But have we ever considered that the sins of our fathers, being so hurtful in such wounding ways, offer evidence that fatherhood is indeed divinely profound? Or that the pain itself suggests the existence of a great, welcoming Father who has placed a desire for him in the deepest part of our being?

It does so indeed, in an intense and penetrating way. It does because Fatherhood is the core of the universe.

Beware V.V.S.!!!!!!

Izaiah Repair Update

This morning, Izaiah had surgery to close the front part of his palate. His surgeon said it went very well, though he may have more discomfort in recovery than after his previous procedures. The staff here is working hard to control his pain, but it has been a rough day so far. We would deeply appreciate prayer for Izaiah for quick healing and pain management. Also for his emotional well-being. He is 3 months older now than his last surgery and he seems more aware that he shouldn't be hurting like this. Will try to update soon. Love to all. -EnJ

Varsity Stackin' Practice!