Christian Carnival XXXIII

The Christian Carnival is up at the New Trommetter Times. No submission from me this week; I intend to offer something approximately every other week, just so I am not under abnormal pressure to post something blogworthily Christian every week, and don't get unnecessarily repetitive with the "God's guidance" series.

Anyway, check it out. My personal favourites:

• LaShawn Barber argues that it is neither good politics nor good Christianity to overlook illegal immigration:

  Among illegal aliens I have brothers and sisters in Christ. The call to share the Gospel with unbelievers and worship a merciful and gracious God with believers doesn’t stop at our national borders. God saves all kinds of men, and all kinds of men are my fellow inheritors of Christ’s bounty!

  However, I am not required to ignore or oppose justice against lawbreakers, even if they are believers. Government is supposed to punish lawbreakers, and Christian criminals are not excepted. God appoints men to authority and laid down the function and role of government.

• Mark D. Roberts continues his series on the ongoing crisis in the Episcopalian Church in Los Angeles over biblical authority:

  I have not followed closely the actual debate in the Episcopal Church about the ordination of homosexuals. But my guess is that serious discussion of biblical texts has not been in the forefront of this conversation, at least in the last few years. Those who continue to hold on to the rather obvious (yes, literal, maybe even simple) meaning of biblical passages are dismissed by their opponents as “literalistic and simplistic.” It’s a way of avoiding serious debate about the meaning of the biblical text, and replacing it with an approach in which people need only to “speak their own view of the truth” in love.

• Joe Missionary explains why the fashionable practice of "prayer walking" is hocus-pocus:

  Whereas praying while walking certainly may have some benefit to the person praying, the contemporary practice of "prayer walking" is misguided. To claim that praying in a particular region has MORE power than praying at home or in your car has no basis in Scripture whatsoever. Further, it adds to the mysticism which is creeping into today's Church.

• William Meisheid at Beyond the Rim has an interesting article about what he and Ben Stein have in common:

  We are not responsible for the operation of the universe, and what happens to us is not terribly important. God is real, not a fiction, and when we turn over our lives to Him, he takes far better care of us than we could ever do for ourselves.

  In a word, we make ourselves sane when we fire ourselves as the directors of the movie of our lives and turn the power over to Him.

• Rebecca writes another in her series on the attributes of God, this time a good one about God's holiness:

  I'm not sure it is even right to think of it in the same way we think of the other attributes, for it doesn't seems to be one among the others, but rather the overarching attribute: the one that defines all of what God is.

• Finally, Reynaldo at The Bible Archive touches on a subject related to the one I had intended to tackle this week: open doors and what the will of God is when no one can agree on it:

  The difficulty then is found not in the heart of Paul for his heart was set for the Lord, but in his friends. He knew that he would have to suffer many things for the name of Christ Jesus—and yet, his very godly friends tried to persuade him from his course.

Enjoy.