The Way to Hell

"To give children good instruction, and a bad example, is but beckoning to them with the head to show them to way to Heaven, while we take them by the hand and lead them in the way to Hell."
-Archbishop Tilloston- (1630-1694)

The Death of Christianity

The pop culture is eating Christianity alive. The girls have surrendered their hoop skirts for bikinis, the boys have surrendered their swords and guns with which they used to play field sports for x-boxes and skateboards. Henty has been laid aside for The Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and Ballantyne's gentlemen have been replaced with Assassins Creed. The church, once a vibrant and powerful source of cultural power, has become a social club. The men have given their headship of the home to their wives, and the wives have born the double curse.
Not too many years ago a woman named Margret Sanger brought something to the world she called the birth control pill. It does two things, negates the punishments for fornication, and kept us from having children.
In modern America there is no idea of modesty on Broadway. Never do you see a magazine at Wal-Mart telling us it has 101 tips on how to be a modest woman with a meek and quite spirit, rather sexy is the look, and fun is the fashion.
The songs of the day rarely have any redeeming aspects, more often they are about rebellion against the last generation's rebellion, violence and drugs.
The popular films of today are not about how to glorify God in every aspect of life, they are more often a reflection of the ancient Roman idea of love.
The majority of the children are in Public Schools, paid for by tax payers, in which they are led through a whirlwind of sex education, evolutionary teachings, and an overall worldview that reflects the militant humanists. History has been forgotten, and math is taught as a subject devoid of any theological presuppositions.
As for politics, that realm is taught as off limits to religion, something to be kept sacred from the greedy hands of clerics and pastors, and only left to such professionals as come from special schools, in which they are indoctrinated in the mindset of atheism.
In the news broadcasts we see overly exposed news anchors telling us stories of what goes on across the world, without any mention of the staying Providence of God.
America looks as if it were in a sorry state, does it not? And where are the Christians? Sitting at the feet of the Secular Humanists, eating their meat and talking their talk, following their steps and thinking in their agenda. Mainstream Christianity has been pulled down into the whirlpool of degeneration into which Western Culture has fallen.
This has happened before. The Pilgrims left Holland because their children were losing their faith and their culture, Americans have no nation to which to flee, they are all infected with the Black Plague of Modernism. However, there is hope for the West, and the hope is the same as it was when the Pilgrims lived, and it was the same in the days of the Reformers, and it was the same in the days of the knights of the middle ages. The hope is the redeeming power of God, which calls us to come out from among them and be separate, and for the remnant to stand aside from the line that is marching so happily to the guillotine.
Western Culture is tottering on its foundation, and it will very soon fall unless there is a great change. However, the Church is not built upon the foundation of Western Civilization, it is built upon Jesus Christ, and the Gates of Hell Shall Not Prevail against it.

Through His  Strength We Will Conquer,

Andrew C. Abbott

Love

Love is an overused word.

There is an ideal about love that is not modern; it is really quite old, stemming all the way back to the time of the Greeks and Romans, and beyond that. The ideal is this; love is sex; hence such terms as “free love.” Even the idea of falling in love usually means falling into lust.

Throughout the modern culture of the west love is portrayed as something acted out between two people behind closed doors. However, love is not sin, because the modern idea of love is not love.

Romans 13:10 says: “Love worketh no ill to his neighbor: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.”

If love is the fulfilling of the law, then the modern idea of love cannot be love when it is enacted outside of marriage as it so often is. However, love is not simply having intercourse with a human being, whatever the circumstances.

Loving something is obeying that thing. If a man commits adultery, he was loving himself, and obeying his own desires. To love God is not to feel wonderful feelings about Him, it is obeying Him. Saying God is good, saying God is great, praying to Him, tithing to Him, and talking about Him, while these may be obedience to Him, do not prove your love towards Him. To love God, you must obey God in all things, which are vastly broader than reading your Bible and tithing.

If ye love me, keep my commandments. John 14:15

If you truly love Christ, then you will obey Him. To love you neighbor as yourself, you must obey God first, and look to Him to explain what true love is. You cannot show true love outside of obedience to Christ’s commands, and to obey Christ necessitates love. Anything done outside of Christ’s commands is sin. Thus; anything done without love is sin.

With man, true love is not possible. The dead man of the old nature cannot rise and walk, not even if he tried, which he will not. However, when Christ calls, he must rise and walk. Although never perfect, when a man is saved he will receive an ability to obey Christ, and thus to love Him, that was not formerly there while that man was dead. However, in a truly saved person it will be there, although at times imperfect, although at times monumentally so, Christ will never let His children stray without punishment from this commandment to “love thy neighbor as thyself.”

If you cannot love, perhaps it is because you have never believed on Christ.

Through His Strength We Will Conquer,

Andrew C. Abbott

All that lies between is training

“Boys [should be] inured from childhood to trifling risks and slight dangers of every possible description, such as tumbling into ponds and off of trees, etc., in order to strengthen their nervous system... They ought to practice leaping off heights into deep water. They ought never to hesitate to cross a stream over a narrow unsafe plank for fear of a ducking. They ought never to decline to climb up a tree, to pull fruit merely because there is a possibility of their falling off and breaking their necks. I firmly believe that boys were intended to encounter all kinds of risks, in order to prepare them to meet and grapple with risks and dangers incident to man’s career with cool, cautious self-possession...” —R. M. Ballantyne
The above quote would shock the modern man a great deal, today few would care to leap take any great risks, and if they did they would most likely do so with a thought only for the fun and adrenalin involved, rather than the training it would give them.
Eight hundred years ago, in the great stone castles of the knights of Christendom, lived young boys who were dubbed pages. There job it was to hold the horses, clean the armor, cook the food, and, in all things, serve the master. It would have been at all times difficult, especially on the field of battle with the knights, with arrows flying and fires blazing, knights charging and swords clashing; none of the glory is yours, only the trouble, and yet, besides all of the tasks that these young men did; there was training, much training. Around the fires there were tales of battles, and the reasons why they were lost, and during the day there was horse riding, fights with swords and bill, lance and shield, until one day the the time would come when the page, who had come to the knight when he was a seven year-old boy, would be knighted, and would be a man. The change never would have happened without the most rigorous training. From the page comes the knight, from the boy comes the man, all that lies between is training.
Through His Strength We Will Conquer,
Andrew C. Abbott

The Lions in the Path

Proverbs 22:13 “The slothful man saith, There is a lion without, I shall be slain in the streets.”

 Although it may be that some of the lions mentioned in Proverbs 22:13 are imaginary, many of them are real, at least in a metaphorical sense. When a man decides to plow a field, he must first overcome the lion of slothfulness, and then the lion of stones, cut hands, and hardship, until he at last reaps his fruits.

There are many lions which separate us from our goals. Among the chief of these lions are these: pride, anger, and complacency. The lions are real, and they are there. He that does not believe they exist, and walks on through that street without your sword drawn, you will be torn in pieces. If you are afraid of these lions, and stay back because of them, you will be like an adventurer cowering at the edge of the mountain pass, knowing he must go over or die, and yet being afraid to go, he stays, and he dies.

All men have lions in their paths, large lions, strong lions, lions that, if not defeated, will devour them. They cannot all be fought the same way, but they must all be fought with the same weapons.

In John Bunyan's classics work Pilgrim's Progress, his hero, Christian, is making his way down the narrow path when he sees two lions in the path, he is frightened, until the warder shouts to him that the lions are chained and are placed there to test faith. Although not all lions are imaginative, Christ, the king of kings can overcome the king of the beasts.

Through His Strength We Will Conquer,

Andrew C. Abbott

The Death of William Wallace

William Wallace was, perhaps, one of the greatest men to ever live. In the early thirteen hundreds, against all odds, he fought the mighty country of England, who sought to overtake and conquer his native homeland of Scotland. Through Divine Providence, he several times soundly defeated the English at such battles as Stirling Bridge and Brigger. Without the aid of the nobles of his country, many of whom were fighting for the English, without the aid of vast amounts of money, he took on the flower of English knighthood and fought them again and again, and defeated them, despite the fact that his wife was killed, his friends deserted him, and he was betrayed and left to die on the battlefield of Fallkirk.

Out of patience, he went to France to seek aid, when he returned, he found his few remaining friends had deserted him, leaving the Scottish people to groan under the yoke of oppression to seek their own interests.

At last, after years of fighting, Wallace was betrayed by a friend, and dragged to London to be executed. In the words of one historian:

“He was loaded with irons and taken at once to London…Wallace spent a long cold night chained in a cart, there being no room for him inside. (of Carlisle Castle) The wheels of justice, so called, moved with lightning speed in disposing of the Scottish patriot. The day after he arrived in London, August 22, he was taken to the great hall of Westminster. A scaffold had been erected at one end and he was placed there, wearing a laurel wreath, a form of mockery typical of the period. Charges were made against him of being a traitor to the king (he had sworn allegiance only to the King of Scotland and so could not be a traitor to Edward), of sedition, homicides, depredations, fires, and felonies.

As he had been declared an outlaw, he was not allowed to make any answer in his own defense…The fate of William Wallace had already been determined and the trial was no more than a formality. He was found guilty by five judges, who sat on the case and was condemned to die by the now familiar method, he was to be hanged, drawn, and quartered.

The sentence was carried out without so much as an hour’s delay. Wallace was taken from Westminster to the tower and then through the streets crowded with avid watchers to Smithfield, being dragged the whole distance on a hurdle at the heels of the horses. The gallows at Smithfield had been raised high so that multitude assembled could see the body turn on the hempen rope. He was cut down before dead and was mutilated in the manner prescribed by law. His head was struck from his lifeless trunk and was hoist on a spear above London bridge.

Edward was one of the very few men in London who did not see Wallace die.

The body was cut into quarters and distributed for display in Stirling, Perth, Newcastle, and Berwick.

It is said by one historian that as Wallace was about to be pulled up on the rope for the last time, he was asked if he had anything to say, to which he replied by shouting at the top of his voice “Freedom!” And then the rope was pulled taught.

May God grant us the courage to do the same for Christ’s cause.

Through His Strength We Will Conquer,

Andrew C. Abbott

Willingly Ignorant

Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.
-Winston Churchil-

A Proper View of Language

Language is an old art.

From the time Adam stood in the Garden of Eden six thousand years ago and said "Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh" man has spoken. From dramatic, such as Shakespeare's "For God's sake let us sit on the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings" to illiterate men who can barely say the word "cool."

Language is the currency with which we trade at the exchanging table of ideas.

Occasionally throughout history nations have been conquered by other nations, and it is not uncommon for the conquering nation to force the vanquished to use its language, why would this be? Because language is powerful, and social planers know it.

In modern America, good language is a lost art. Rather than saying "how art thou?" it is more common to say "what’s up?" Such phrases as "hey man" "neato" "ya know" and others that are equally illustrative of the speakers ignorance have come to be common currency at the trading table of ideas. Not only does this sound highly uneducated, but it also is irreverent to God to be loose and careless with our language. When speaking before a king one would never say “when man, you know like, I was like going to tell you, if you know what I’m saying that your arch enemy, you know like King William, well man, he like you know is like coming dude to like take you out.” And yet we speak before the Almighty King every moment, let us not show earthly sovereigns more respect than the One who created us.

Anyone who has read the writings of the founding fathers knows that to read their writings, unless you have a vocabulary that is astounding for the man of the modern era, you will need a dictionary to simply read a love letter.

However, the ultimate goal of language is not to astound people is our social circles, move audiences, of write plays that will be remembered long after we are dead. The ultimate purpose of language is to glorify God

I Corinthians 10:31 says: "Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God."

It is not acceptable to be slovenly or lazy in our speech. As we are to do all things decently and in order, we are to speak decently and in order. (Such things as single negatives, proper verb usage, as well as the use of only contractions that truly exist, not spur of the moment ones, would perhaps be in order here.)

As we attempt to reform all of life for the glory of Christ, we must also reform this area of language, which has been to long neglected. So long in fact that Christians have adopted the vocabulary of the heathen.

He who defines the words wins the argument, and not only are our words changing so are the meaning of our words. There was a time when the word cool meant not hot and gay meant happy.

If the Chinese were conquered by the country of India, and were kept in subjection for one thousand years, and at the end of that time a leader rose who wanted to bring back the national identity of China, he would begin by bringing back their flag, their religion, and their language. Christianity has lost much ground the heathenism, we must bring back our true religion, not its forms. We must bring back our true standard, the Scriptures. And we must bring back our language.

We are not seeking to speak as if we were all King James I, we are attempting to speak like Christians. We are not trying to be imitators of Shakespeare, we are striving to be children of the King.

Language is a dying art, but it is not yet dead. Christians who self-consciously attempt to speak in such a way as to glorify God in a grammatically correct form, with proper use of words and phrases that evince respect for God and their elders may be laughed at if they do not adopt the modern language, yet the modern language is not God honoring, and honor is what we are to show to God is it not?

Through His Strength We Will Conquer,

Andrew C. Abbott

An Italian Freedom Fighter

Garibaldi was an Italian freedom fighter. In his first attempt at breaking the chains of his countrymen he utterly defeated the French forces near Rome and captured five-hundred prisoners. However another of the generals let all of the prisoners go in exchange for one priest, and ordered Garibaldi not to attack the French, and to let negotiations carry on. Breaking his truce the French general told them he would attack on the 4^th, he attacked on the 3^rd. Garibaldi and his men were forced to flee. Almost to a man his men were all either captured or killed. Fleeing with twelve followers and his wife in a boat they made their way down the river. His wife died and his followers were shot on the river bank. Garibaldi himself escaped capture, but he was forced to leave the body of his wife behind.

He went to America to live.

Eleven years later he returned to Italy, and with one thousand men, very little ammunition, and barely the support of his own government, invaded the Kingdom of the two Sicilies. When they marched into the country they were attacking, they were outnumbered by their opponents army 128 to 1. However, I will let the general speak.

“I do not promise you ease, I do not promise you comfort, I promise you hardship, weariness, suffering, but I promise you victory.”

Through His Strength We Will Conquer,

Andrew .C Abbott

The Democrats have Removed God

Tuesday, 6 September, A.D 2,012, The Democratic Party made known to the world that they had removed the word "God" from their platform. This should come as no surprise to Christians, before, if the Democrats had had the word God, a word would be all it was, as God's law has, in recent years at least, not been followed.
Even if the language was not always atheistic, having a fornicator speak, espousing high-handed thievery and communistic and Nazi principals show more readily than words what the Democrats truly believe.
Through His Strength We Will Conquer,
Andrew C. Abbott

Friendship

Metal is to be tested by fire, porcelain is to be protected from it. A man sharpens the countenance of his friend, as sword sharpens sword; trials build strong friendships. If your friendship is porcelain, beautiful to look out, yet useless in the battle for Christ's kingdom, than expose it to the fire of the gospel, if it breaks, it was never worth having.

Through his Strength We Will Conquer,

Andrew C. Abbott

They are not God

The conspiracy theorists have a theory for why everything that ever happened has happened. From the Spanish Armada in 1588 to the Terrorist Attacks 0f 9/11, they can tell you about an elite group that had interests, made plans, and did…everything that has ever happened. They will tell you that the French Revolution was run by a few dozen men who took a perfectly good, happy populace, with a kind king, made fake mobs go into the cities, kill everyone, and pretended as if the populace was a part of it all, the people only wanted their benevolent king back. Another conspiracy theory will tell you Adolf Hitler was set up by the Catholic Church.

In America, these fright freaks will explain to you how the Civil War was set up by a few people over in Brittan. You will be told the Catholics set up the Russian Revolution. You can read how Columbus was a fraud, and Washington a fake.

History is the story of the Providence of God written out so that finite man can worship their creator all the more. The Hand of the Omnipotent and ever loving king of kings overlooks every aspect of every facet of every creature, every effect, every cause, of every other object. God is sovereign, not man. Therefore we are to fear God, not man. Man is a weak and decrepit thing by the side of the God that created him.

These conspiracy men, (whoever they may be), are nothing but men. We are not to fear them as if they were the deciders of the outcome of our lives, they are not. While it may be that at certain times there have been conspiracies to bring down kingdoms and lift up rulers, this is not whom we are supposed to fear.

Of all of the “great conspiracies” real or imaginary, there is one that stands forth from this desert like a tower, or a sinkhole. Over six thousand years ago a woman stood by a tree, and a serpent began to unveil the greatest conspiracy of all time when he said “yeah hath God said” and this call would be the war cry of his soldiers down through the ages. This is the great conspiracy, Lucifer’s dream to be as God, and man’s dream to be God.

This is a true conspiracy, of one fallen angel to call many other angels as well as men to be the useful idiots of a scheme, the fuel for a machine. His declaration of war is told of in Isaiah 14: 13-14.

“For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.”

Yet those who follow this wild plan, this path to ruin and destruction, have failed to read the ensuing verse; verse number 15.

“Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.”

This is the world’s greatest conspiracy, the most catastrophic, and consequential, the most horrific, the one that all men most seek to follow, becoming God. Yet even though this is the great conspiracy, even though this is the master plan from which all other sinful conspiracies and all dread-fear of these schemes of men come from, we are not to fear it.

Matthew 10:28 says “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Yes, even the king of darkness is not to be feared by a true child of God, thus, if we do not fear him, why should we fear the Masons? (Or anyone else?)

2Ti 1:7  “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. “

And yet we are to fear God, it is the only fear which a Christian should be controlled by, the only power that should rule a Christian’s life. Thus, let us let it control us, and while men’s plans may be allowed to rise or fall by God’s sovereignty, yet we know they can never touch a truly saved soul, and being saved is our only hope.

Through His Strength We Will Conquer,

Andrew C. Abbott