Greetings in the Name of our most sovereign and magnificint Christ:
May the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all who, though you dwell on this terrestrial ball, groan and labor for Kingdom of our Heavenly Father who is blessed forver Amen.
I had a most odd experience the other day as I was standing in line at Victoria's Secret about two days before the Pagan festival of Christmas. I was in the store to by lotion for my mother,( she really likes a particular brand of vanilla lotion that only they sell) and I was waiting in a most extraordinarily long line. There was a group of people behind me that, I believe, were of teen-age years and were a mixture of both sexes. Their conversation, which was rather loud and one could not help but hear, was so trivial and vain that I thought I was standing in a 1980's Baywatch Convention. All of this vainity and frivolity provoked me to thing about a CNN special on how supermodel photoshoots take place. I looked at several of the displays and advertasments (I was not in the lingere section and hence the photos were not to seductive) and struck by the fact that not one of the women in the advertisment were what could be considered "Normal". By that I mean that the women were all in quite an extraordinary high level of make up and all looked like they had not eaten in about three days. Let me comment on this by saying the CNN special on modeling showed that, in order to produce the "super model" effect, it took several hours of make up and then the pictures were all "touched up" by computer modificatiaton. The end result is that the model really looks diffrent in the picture than she would in real life. At this point you might be wondering, "why is the reformer going on about all this girly stuff?" I say all this to point out that our culture has a skewed view of reailty. In stead of honoring the inner beautify of a woman, we have to improve the exterior. Instead of being proud of the man who works a double shift at a crap job to support his family, we honor the Donald Trumps and Hugh Heifners of the world as models of excelence. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate make-up(though I prefer women who don't use a lot of it), /i don't mind rich men(except when they shirk their God given respocibilities that comes with power). my point is that as Christians we must guard against having out tastes assimilated by the hedonistic and etxernalistic culture that is bent on gaining a monolithic secular society. Let us rather esteem and admire the beauty of the internal spirit that longs for God's Holliness. Let us use our money and presitge to further the Gospel and bear the burdens of our fellow citizens of the Kingdom of Christ.
Sola Fide,
The Reformer
(P.S. The next post will be on the importance of realizing the synonomous terms of the "Kingdom of Heaven" and the "Kingdom of God")