A Decaf Story!

Tim Hotons coffee plays a big role in Canadian world. Now it is rare to have a town without the popular logo. However, a New Brunswick man  is given a lifetime ban for complaining about “bad coffee”. Jimmy Craig of St. Andrews, a tiny community about 90 kilometres west of Saint John, was banned from two stores on Jan. 22 because he complained a half-dozen times about his decaffeinated coffee tasting burnt.

The coffee giant likes to keep its customers happy, said David Morelli, spokesman for Tim Hortons. In this case, Morelli said Craig had complained multiple times and “no matter what the staff did to make it right, he was unhappy,” said Morelli, adding Craig was also becoming aggressive with the store staff. So he was handed a lifetime ban under the province’s Trespass Act (with files from Toronto Star).

Craig who is a paramedic could only return only if he’s on the job as a paramedic, responding to a medical emergency.

When I heard the story on the radio this morning I couldn’t help but laugh. But after coming to my senses I realised how serious this is. Complaining just about anything is a growing problem in our society.  We tend to think that somebody somewhere owes us something. Of course when I buy a product I expect it to meet my expectations.  Now should a restaurant  be able to ban a customer for not being satisfied? And how much complaining is too much? If I don’t like a product am I forced to return there over and over again? I will love to know how many people felt their decaf was burnt dozen times in the same stores within that period of time.

Share your own opinion on the story. Just so you know, Craig is considering legal options and meanwhile he is given a percolator by a friend and he’s brewing his own coffee at home. “It’s never burned.”

A Word of Encouragement

I have been encouraged reading this wonderful devotional from Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening. Here it is for your edification as well. May the Lord bless you as you read through.

“He shall save his people from their sins.”
— Matthew 1:21

Many persons, if they are asked what they understand by salvation, will reply, “Being saved from hell and taken to heaven.” This is one result of salvation, but it is not one tithe of what is contained in that boon. It is true our Lord Jesus Christ does redeem all his people from the wrath to come; he saves them from the fearful condemnation which their sins had brought upon them; but his triumph is far more complete than this. He saves his people “from their sins.” Oh! sweet deliverance from our worst foes. Where Christ works a saving work, he casts Satan from his throne, and will not let him be master any longer. No man is a true Christian if sin reigns in his mortal body. Sin will be in us—it will never be utterly expelled till the spirit enters glory; but it will never have dominion. There will be a striving for dominion—a lusting against the new law and the new spirit which God has implanted—but sin will never get the upper hand so as to be absolute monarch of our nature. Christ will be Master of the heart, and sin must be mortified. The Lion of the tribe of Judah shall prevail, and the dragon shall be cast out. Professor! is sin subdued in you? If your life is unholy your heart is unchanged, and if your heart is unchanged you are an unsaved person. If the Saviour has not sanctified you, renewed you, given you a hatred of sin and a love of holiness, he has done nothing in you of a saving character. The grace which does not make a man better than others is a worthless counterfeit. Christ saves his people, not in their sins, but from them. “Without holiness no man shall see the Lord.” “Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity.” If not saved from sin, how shall we hope to be counted among his people. Lord, save me now from all evil, and enable me to honour my Saviour.

The Word of God and the God of the Word (II)

II. KNOWING AND DOING: A TOUGH CHALLENGE

O Lord, Thou hast created us for Thyself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee (Aurelius Augustine).

Our hearts cannot be inflamed about something we know not of. Unless we know God deeply we cannot love him deeply. A faint understanding of God is enough to begin the heart to stir. Deepening knowledge must precede deepening affection. The more  we know God, the more we love Him. If all  we know of Christ is a shallow and vague impression then our relationship with him will also be shallow and vague.

Most of us will agree  that  a confession of faith or a creed cannot save anyone. It is with the heart that we believe unto salvation. A necessary element of saving faith is affection and passion for Christ. A lot of knowledge with no love is worthless. A Little knowledge coupled with great affection is far preferable. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge (Prov. 1:7); For wisdom will enter your heart, and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul (Prov.2:10); Your wisdom and knowledge mislead you when you say to yourself, ‘I am, and there is none besides me (Isa 47: 10).

Obedience  is build on the word of God. It is by reading the word that we discover the mind and the will of God. Loving the word and the God of the word is to keep the balance between the knowledge of the truth and its application. If the knowledge is what is pressed on the mind, its application should be what goes from the mind to the heart. In other words, to know God is to love him and to act upon his commands and precepts.

For example, knowing that God is Holy must lead to godly life  (Titus 1:1-2; 2 Peter 1:8; 3: 18; Phil 1:9-11). And the pursuit of knowledge of God must not serve as an end in itself, but as a means to an end. The goal is to inflame the heart to obedience.

Many of us will have trouble answering Jesus’s question: Why do you call me Lord, Lord and do not what I command? Pray to God that in reading his scripture everyday we might connect with the mind and the will of God so to stir us up for a complete surrender. Let us  learn dependance on the Holy Spirit in our efforts because submitting to Christ in the details of everyday life is one of the marks of a disciple.

Chew On: Surrendering to Christ in the details of everyday life is one of the toughest challenges Christians face. There are so many things that pull us away from obedience to Christ. So many things we don’t understand. So many that stand in our way. And yet, we will never be fulfilled until we relinquish control of our lives to Christ.

Shift in Canadian Morality: No Suprise!

From the death penalty to same-sex relationships, a new poll shows huge shifts in what Canadian really believe according to Maclean’s magazine.

According to the magazine, an Ontario court judge will soon decide if Canada’s prostitution laws should be struck down. In British Columbia, the Supreme Court will decide if laws prohibiting polygamy can still be enforced. And in the House of Commons, a private member’s bill would make it legal for the profoundly ill to seek a doctor’s help to commit suicide. As a nation we are reinventing, refining—or undermining—our morality in dramatic fashion the magazine added.

With so many moral issues at a crossroads, Angus Reid Strategies undertook a national survey last month asking Canadians to consider 21 ethical issues. Their answers—on issues as diverse as animal rights, prostitution, homosexuality and illegal drug use—show some profound divisions by gender and region. But taken together, they seem to reveal a rather astounding liberal tilt in our morality, albeit with some exceptions.

The question was asked: Consider these six sticky moral situations. Which are the most and the least acceptable to you, and to most Canadians?

1. You plan to have an abortion. 2. You wear a mink coat. 3. You favour killing convicted murderers. 4. You think the dying have the right to commit suicide with a doctor’s help. 5. You don’t care if the drugs you buy have been tested on animals. 6. You support medical research using the stem cells of human embryos.

I am no fan of surveys. They always tend to produce what the authors where looking for. However they help us see or remind us in a more dramatic way what we already know. For example, most of us will agree without a survey that people are more and more interested in animal rights than Human Rights.

According to the survey there’s never been a better time to be a Canadian mink, or a seal, or a lab rat. Canadians today are more likely to moralize about the treatment of animals than about the lives of our fellow humans. Just 22 per cent oppose euthanasia, but 41 per cent condemn medical testing on animals, the survey found. Abortion is considered morally wrong by 22 per cent of Canadians, fewer than the 31 per cent who have moral qualms about wearing fur. But while four in 10 oppose animal testing, only 17 per cent take issue with researchers using human embryonic stem cells. As for capital punishment, 53 per cent of Canadians consider it “morally acceptable,” a jump of six percentage points since Reid last asked the question in 2007.

Now the big question is Why is it so? Why is the morality in “declension”? No one on the survey or any “intellectual” consulted can really give us a satisfying answer.

“Morality is actually very complicated stuff in terms of where it comes from and what we hang onto, and how we change,” says Kerry Bowman, a bioethicist at the University of Toronto’s Joint Centre for Bioethics. Bowman says ethical choices are shaped to an extent by a complex response to the issues of the day, but that a person’s ethical core goes far deeper, to an evolved instinct that predates religion and even humans themselves. “Contemporary religions, the great religions of the world, are really only a few thousand years old and they really would not resonate if they weren’t plugging into something that already existed,” says Bowman.

What???  [An evolved ethical instinct that predates religion and even humans themselves]? Have you noticed that line? So moral life has nothing to do with religion or any set rule of conduct. It depends rather on instinctive behaviour  and necessity and circumstances of the time. There might be some truth that each generation faces different challenges but to say that morality has nothing to do with religion is another way to reject  the morality promoted by the Bible as the measuring standard for human life. More over the conclusion from the argument is  since Christianity is relatively young its message cannot be used as reference to morality. If  humans are not religious and if there is something before them that should dictate  the rules morality and ethics what what was there before human beings? Please help me out here!

The real answer to moral shifts is the rejection of God and his word for righteous living. That is no surprise at all. It has always been so since the Garden.  To say there is no high moral authority that should guide our lives and at the same time pretend to make moral laws  out of nothing is a contradiction. We must have a perfect reference point.  For some, religion is infringing on their freedom to do whatever they want and yet at the same time  within their conscience they wish to live as God requires. And since they happen to reject the Bible, they have to make their own rules and ideas that fit their lifestyle. As a result, the guilt of conscience of wrong doing ” is taken” away  and since there is no longer a higher standard of morality as a reference, the right could be wrong and vice versa. Everything becomes relative. The Bible calls it perversion and abomination.

Perversion is a concept describing those types of human behaviour that are contrary or a serious deviation from what is considered to be normal and orthodox by the society. There is yet more shifting and awkward/backward behaviours to come. Paul says:

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them...For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened...Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones...Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. Romans 1: 18-32.

The answer to our moral deviation is not  found in any theory  or on a campus but in Genesis 3 when the first man Adam decided to make his own rules. And thank God there is a new Adam, Jesus Christ who unlike Adam did not make his own rules but obey the  will of God the Father in order to redeem our wicked and depraved nature. That’s the old gospel no intellectual will be able to change.

Full article please click here What Canadians really believe

The World in Agony

The end of all things is near. Therefore be clear minded and self-controlled so that you can pray (1 Peter 4:7). Yesterday, we were reminded again of the precarity of life.  Haiti a country that is desperate for change and development was once again hit by a deadly earthquake. Even the presidential palace which supposedly could stand any kind of  disaster did not resist the magnitude.

Haiti has been stricken by all kind of natural disasters in last decade and toppled by political, cultural, social and economic turmoil  for decades. Unfortunately, it is one of the most impoverished and least developed in Americas and in the world.

My prayers go  out to the families that lost their love ones and to those who have been injured I pray for recovery. May our hearts go out to the victims families and everybody in Haiti.

Speaking of tragedies, this one is not the first and it won’t be the last. This surely catches the eyes of the whole world. Unfortunately there are tragedies on a small scale happening every day around us. I think of the woman hit by a driver who run the red light in Toronto yesterday. She was survived by her baby boy she was pushing in a stroller.

The whole world is gripped by moral, physical and spiritual decay. Corruption, abuses, exploitation, evil behaviour, wickedness of all kind and the darkness we leave in seem never ending. Isn’t it striking that the presidential building, the center of power and corruption was not spared? I am being reminded of 2 Pet 3.

…The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.

Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat.

But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness. So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him. Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation.

There is hope because the world is waiting in eager expectation for the salvation of the Lord. The Bible tells us that God is in control and in hope we believe that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

The Apostle Paul said:  “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

Therefore,  let us prepare our minds for action, self-controlled;  and let us set our hope fully on the grace to be given to us when Jesus Christ is revealed (1 Peter 1:13). As strangers on earth let us live our life in reverent fear of the one and only God to whom belong power, majesty and authority for ever and ever. The  time of judgment is near and it shall come to pass that everyone who will not call on the name of the Lord will be destroyed. Let us the living be reminded of this capital truth and may we do our best to reach out to those in need around us with the hope found in the gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.