Tag Archives: spiritual worldview

Two Trees and Two Worldviews


When I got up this morning, after losing an hour’s sleep with the start of Daylight Saving Time, I turned on CBC’s Sunday Edition. While fixing breakfast, I began listening—but promptly turned it off. It was just too much to swallow, before I’d even had my morning cup of tea.

What is it about these liberal “thinkers” that so aggravates? Perhaps, it’s because they’ve fallen for the world’s oldest con, and I hate to see people deceived and used. Seemingly, the “leftie” pundits can only speak about those things that come from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This source of understanding is pollinated solely by human reason—”I make up for myself what is right or wrong.”  Sincere liberals think their “Tree” will only produce progressively good fruit. But this tree of good and evil produces a variety of fruit and some have not been good.

Our world’s increasing plague of promiscuity, impurity, indecency, hostility, strife, jealousy, violence, selfish ambition, envy, substance abuse, and riotous behaviour, are they not just the progressively rotten fruit of that old tree? It’s painful to listen to liberal commentators who’ve forgotten, or never knew, that if one just goes a little deeper into Eden’s Garden there is a much better source of understanding: the Tree of Life whose fruit is pollinated by Divine Revelation.

The Two Trees at Eden symbolically represented two completely different worldviews. The Tree of Life produces love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. This good fruit is a stark contrast to the fruit of the other tree – The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. A recent survey by the Barna Research Groups says only 4 percent of North Americans know about the Tree of Life and its worldview that makes for a happy, fulfilling life.

If you’d like to learn more, follow this link: http://cogwebcast.com/sermons/video-archives/a-biblical-worldview-where-many-christians-fail/

 

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Punishing the message and the messenger

The news media in Canada over the last few days has been covering the story of the five-day suspension from a Nova Scotia high school of a 19-year-old senior, William Swinimer. His offense was wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Life is wasted without Jesus.”

According to the superintendent of the South Shore Regional School Board, Nancy Pynch-Worthylake, Swinimer was kicked out of school because the message on his T-shirt offended the beliefs and/or feelings of some other students. The superintendent, however, refused to give any specifics about the complaints that the school authorities had received.

So what was so offensive about William Swinimer’s mild, profanity-free positive affirmation of the Christian faith?

What has happened to our Canadian right to freedom of speech and freedom of religion? Well, this effort by the school authorities to deprive William Swinimer of his freedom to quietly express his faith in a public arena is just one more indication that Canada is well on the way to transforming itself into an aggressive, secular state that insists on uniform compliance with political correctness. Militant secularists progressively attempt to sideline, minimize, label, ridicule, and then suppress the expression of Christian ideas, morality, and ethics in the media and all other arenas of public life.

Why do the secularists do this? Well, it’s obvious. The spiritual worldview taught by the Bible and faith and the secular worldview of materialism and unbelief are diametrically opposed to each other.

When Tory MP Stephen Woodworth introduced his Motion 312 in Ottawa—asking for a parliamentary committee to be formed to review scientific evidence about when human life actually begins so that our 400-year-old definition in the criminal code might be updated—all hell broke loose. The secularists called Woodworth’s motion “an insulting and offensive attack on women’s rights.” They’ve labeled him a “misogynist” and an “ultra-conservative.”

The secularists and pro-abortion people, of course, don’t want a public investigation, or—horrors—a debate on what the scientific evidence on the subject might reveal about when a human being actually becomes a human being. They want to suppress any such parliamentary investigation at all costs. They shudder at the idea that a review of the evidence and a discussion about the morals and ethics of when it’s okay to kill a human fetus might make them look hard-hearted and selfish. Of course, Christianity’s long-held position is that a “good” society promotes loving one’s neighbour—even the most powerless, weak, and vulnerable neighbour of them all.

So, when an audacious teen-ager wears to public school a T-shirt saying, “Life is wasted without Jesus,” uneasy consciences convict the secularists who are indeed upset at the profound implications of that slogan. So, they must suppress the message and punish the one standing in for the Messenger.

The Message that points to Christ on the Cross seems like sheer silliness to those hellbent on destruction, but for those on the way of salvation it makes perfect sense. This is the way God works, and most powerfully as it turns out. It’s written, I’ll turn conventional wisdom on its head, I’ll expose so-called experts as crackpots.
So where can you find someone truly wise, truly educated, truly intelligent in this day and age? Hasn’t God exposed it all as pretentious nonsense? Since the world in all its fancy wisdom never had a clue when it came to knowing God, God in his wisdom took delight in using what the world considered dumb—preaching, of all things!—to bring those who trust him into the way of salvation (1 Corinthians 1:18-21 The Message paraphrase).

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