Friday, March 29, AD 2024 10:30am

More Than Conquerors

As faithful readers of this blog know,  I have often posted humorous videos from The Lutheran Satire.  The man behind the videos, Lutheran Pastor Hans Fiene, has a profound reflection on the Sutherland shootings at The Federalist:

 

So when a madman with a rifle sought to persecute the faithful at First Baptist Church on Sunday morning, he failed. Just like those who put Christ to death, and just like those who have brought violence to believers in every generation, this man only succeeded in being the means through which God delivered his children from this evil world into an eternity of righteousness and peace.

“We do not need to fear the day of persecution that’s coming to the church, because God said it’s going to come. He warned us over 2,000 years ago the day was coming. And rather than fear it, He said just endure it. Now ‘endure it’ is a hard word. ‘Endure it’ doesn’t mean that they might take your ice cream away today. ‘Endure it’ means it may be a rough day. It may be a rough few years. But the one who endures to the end will be delivered.”

 

These are words that First Baptist’s pastor, Frank Pomeroy, preached on October 19, 2014—a little more than three years before his 14-year-old daughter and 25 other members of his congregation were murdered. Despite the immense sorrow he, his family, and his congregation are now experiencing, I pray they will still trust in these words.

Despite the horror that madman made the saints of First Baptist endure, those who endured it with faith in Christ have received his victory. Although the murderer filled their eyes with terror, God has now filled them with his glory. Although he persecuted them with violence, God seized that violence and has now used it to deliver his faithful into a kingdom of peace. Although this madman brought death to so many, God has used that death to give them the eternal life won for them in the blood of Jesus.

 

Those who persecute the church and those who mock Christians for trusting in Almighty God rather than Almighty Government may believe that the bloodshed in Texas proves the futility of prayer. But we believers see the shooting in Texas as proof of something far different—proof that Christ has counted us worthy to suffer dishonor for his name and proof that no amount of dishonor, persecution, or violence can stop him from answering our prayer to deliver us from evil.

 

Go here to read the rest.

 

31What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? 33Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. 34Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. 35Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 36As it is written:

“For your sake we face death all day long;

we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”j

37No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,k neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8: 31-39

 

 

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Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Wednesday, November 8, AD 2017 6:34am

Amen! Ita vero Amen!

Christus vincit.
Christus regnat.
Christus imperat.

Omnis gloria Iesui Christo.

Nate Winchester
Nate Winchester
Wednesday, November 8, AD 2017 7:54am

And apparently after writing it, people started going nuts.

Mary De Voe
Wednesday, November 8, AD 2017 8:59am

Yes, the victims were sent to meet “their Creator”, and this gives people hope. I was once told that I ought to approve of abortion because all those innocent souls were sent to heaven. Be that as it may. Neither abortion, nor murder in the first degree intended to destroy another human being and deprive the person of his life is to be applauded as a “good deed” because the Justice of God rewards the victim in heaven. Justice is predicated on intent.
Devin Kelley ought to have been imprisoned until his rehabilitation.

Philip Nachazel
Philip Nachazel
Wednesday, November 8, AD 2017 10:56am

A reflection from a Remnant reader;

REMNANT COMMENT: Atheists who kill Christians are evidently to be given the same religious exemption pass the media routinely pass out to the “Allahu Akbar”-shouting shooters we’ve all gotten painfully used to here in the streets of America. So it stands to reason that this atheist connection to the Texas shooter isn’t particularly newsworthy to leftist ideologues such as Wolf Blitzer.

Still, for the sake of argument, let’s imagine for a moment that a meeting of Atheist Alliance International had been targeted by a gun-wielding Christian nutter last Sunday. Would mainstream “news” be so forgiving, failing even to mention the connection between the shooter and his Christian religion? Would they bury the flurry of testimonials pinging all over the Internet from friends of the shooter, insisting he’d been screaming anti-atheist epithets online for years?

Let’s be serious. CNN & Co would be leading every half-hour’s news cycle with the screaming headline: “BREAKING: Christian Fundamentalist Shooter Motivated by Hatred of Atheists”. The shooter’s religious affiliation in that case would be THE story.

So why the double standard? Why such careful journalistic “integrity” for this reportedly atheist shooter, whose anti-Christian tirades were all over Facebook? Why? Because it doesn’t fit the narrative. Christians are the only real haters–not Muslims, not atheists, not even deranged gay guys that walk into the American Family Association and start spraying lead at the defenders of Christian marriage.

The hate-hunting industry is fundamentally Christophobic. And the fact that the MSM are hard-pressed to actually find a single Christian hater who, in the name of Jesus, would mow down innocent people, doesn’t seem to particularly bother them. Christians gotta hate! Everybody knows that.

So hate on, atheists. CNN won’t out you. They’re only interested in a particular kind of “hate”, which isn’t hate at all. As long as you follow Allah, or believe that two men can get married, or hate God and all the Christians who love Him–well, you are by definition incapable of a hate crime. So rest easy, and hate on!

Fr. John A. Hardon S.J. once remarked; “Unless we recover the Zeal and the spirit of the first century Christians, unless we are willing to do what they did and to pay the price that they paid, the future of our country the days of America are numbered.”

Steve Phoenix
Steve Phoenix
Wednesday, November 8, AD 2017 10:40pm

The atheist connection of Devin Patrick Kelly/Cumberland Springs and the duo killers Klebold and Harris at Columbine High School, who specifically asked people if they were Christian before executing them, should not be overlooked.

The media deliberately chose to already.

Steve Phoenix
Steve Phoenix
Wednesday, November 8, AD 2017 10:47pm

The same was true of Chris Harper Mercer the 2015 Roseburg,OR, Umpqua Community College shooter, who killed 9. Witnesses said he specifically asked people if they were Christian before executing them. Harper Mercer had a long history of voicing hatred of religion.

Pshaw, tush, tush, no connection here at all.

Philip Nachazel
Philip Nachazel
Thursday, November 9, AD 2017 4:22am

@ Steve Phoenix.

At the very least we don’t have to listen to a Muslim POTUS incorrectly spew Christian aggression history via Crusades. Obama would “teach” his followers how Christians we’re the ransacking mob disrupting the poor practitioners of the religion of peace, Islam.

As for your two examples and the case of Atheists extremists gunning up, my guess is that there is more coming our way.

Rosaries and concealed carry permits.
So be it.

trackback
Thursday, November 9, AD 2017 8:38am

[…] Magazine “Side-hustle” Mom: Why New Type of Stay-at-home Parenting Growing – Jonkman, Al. More Than Conquerors – Donald R. McClarey J.D., The American Catholic Politicians Religion-Blindness Preventing […]

Nate Winchester
Nate Winchester
Thursday, November 9, AD 2017 9:26am

Oh please, Philip. We all know the only god Obama worshiped was the one in his mirror. 😉

TomD
TomD
Thursday, November 9, AD 2017 11:51am

Eighteen years ago there was another mass shooting at a Texas church in which 7 were killed and 7 wounded. A 19 year old confronted the shooter (who was another hater of Christianity with mental health issues), told him he needed Christ in his life, and the shooter then swore and shot himself.
see Sydney R Browning (aged 36, seminary graduate, teacher, church children’s choir director, shot
dead)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Gene_Ashbrook and
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/17/us/deaths-in-a-church-the-victims-back-to-the-flagpolethis-time-to-mourn.htm

Philip Nachazel
Philip Nachazel
Thursday, November 9, AD 2017 2:52pm

Nate Winchester.

Great point!
Himself was the greatest man he ever knew.
A humility challenged king, a Wonder of wonders who acknowledged his greatness at every opportunity, and never missed a moment of basking in his own brilliance before his zillions of faithful subjects.

Hussain. Meaning good, handsome, and Leader.

See. Even his middle name will clue us into his omniscience.

Excuse me Nate.
I’ve got to go take an Obama. Hope I have enough toilet paper.

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