Go Ron Paul!

I dig Ron Paul and think he's the best man for the President we have going this time around, and last time too for that matter.  I'd like to break down why that is exactly, but alas, I have no time to do such a thing right now.  But I did find an excellent article by pastor Voddie Baucham's on his blog entitled "Why Ron Paul?"  which I agree with completely.  It's really well written and I encourage any of you reading this blog to take five minutes and read it through. 

Mission Work to Your Neighbors

"Jesus didn't run projects, establish ministries, create programs, or put on events.  He ate meals.  If you routinely share meals and you have a passion for Jesus, then you'll be doing mission."

- Tim Chester, from his book A Meal with Jesus

The Sacred Ordinariness of Sharing Meals

"It's good to be reminded that the table is a very ordinary place, a place so routine and everyday it's easily overlooked as a place of ministry.  And this business of hospitality that lies at the heart of Christian mission, it's a very ordinary thing; it's not rocket science nor is it terribly glamorous.  Yet it is the very ordinariness of the table and of the ministry we exercise there that renders these elements of Christian life so important to the mission of the Church...

       Most of what you do as a community of hospitality will go unnoticed and unrecognized.  At base, hospitality is about providing a space for God's Spirit to move.  Setting a table, cooking a meal, washing the dishes is the ministry of facilitation: providing a context in which people feel loved and welcomed and where God's Spirit can be at work in their lives.  Hospitality is a very ordinary business, but in its ordinariness is its real worth."

- Simon Holt, quoted in A Meal with Jesus by Tim Chester

Christian Meditation

     "Meditation is a lost art today, and Christian people suffer grievously from their ignorance of the practice.  Meditation is the activity of calling to mind, and thinking over, and dwelling on, and applying to oneself, the various things that one knows about the works and ways and purposes and promises of God. It is an activity of holy thought, consciously performed in the presence of God, under the eye of God, by the help of God, as a means of communion with God.

     It's purpose is to clear one's mental and spiritual vision of God, and to let His truth make its full and proper impact on one's mind and heart. It is a matter of talking to oneself about God and oneself; it is, indeed, often a matter of arguing with oneself, reasoning oneself out of moods of doubt and unbelief into a clear apprehension of God's power and grace.

     It's effect is ever to humble us, as we contemplate God's greatness and glory and our own littleness and sinfulness, and to encourage and reassure us --"comfort" us, in the old, strong, Bible sense of the word -- as we contemplate the unsearchable riches of divine mercy displayed in the Lord Jesus Christ."

-- excerpt from Knowing God by J.I. Packer

Are We Heralding Jesus' Good News?

"Jesus' teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day.  However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect.  The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones.  We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people.  The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church.  That can only mean one thing.  If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did."

- Tim Keller, from his book Prodigal God