Ziklag F6.7 - Cheap Power

Wisdom is Summation, StrategyVsTactics, Fearless

SOS Discipline - Daily Proverb and Red Letter Reader

Don’t let your name become a curse. cf Pr. 10:7

Power is not cheap. cf Mt. 9.6

Appearance is not a strategy but an ally in tactics. cf Sun Tzu 6.5

From Today’s Stack

• Wisdom is summation.

• Jesus taught his disciples to pray. He taught them what they were not capable of learning on their own. It is not strange that man must learn to pray. The heart does not overflow with joy and love on its own. It is a very wicked and dangerous error, a poisoning leaven, to think that the sinner can know how to pray by himself.

Fearless

from Without Flesh

The book of Acts, with marvelous detail, recounts not only the maddening pace at which this message spread through the first century world, but also the dynamic consistency of the message itself. Certainly, the gift of tongues gave the people a leg up on translation for a time, but the fact remained that no matter what tongue the message was spoken in, no ink needed to be spilt on figuring out ***what*** to say. As Acts details it, every time anyone opens his mouth in a moment of witness, regardless of context or culture or expected style, he repeats one, permanent refrain: “*There was this particular, local dead guy, and he has refused to stay dead.*”

The first day it was spoken, thousands believed. But it is a sign of our modern, weak-kneed covetousness that we think the numbers are the thing which mattered. We forget that as stunning as all those first baptisms certainly were, a far greater number than that went home ***unbelieving*** that same day. On Pentecost day, in Jerusalem after the Apostles preached with glowing heads, more people heard and ***did not*** believe then turned and repented. Afterward, day by day, more believers were added to their number, but this was ***never*** a majority of those who heard.

Yet this did not once convince them to change the message. They clung firmly to the same story, insisted on the same proclamation, and emphasized the infallible nature of the task they had been given. They did all this in spite of the fact that as more people believed, the worse the situation became for those who were the most public believers. Far from chartering private cruise liners and traveling the world in style, the preachers were promptly jailed. People were beaten. They were driven into hiding. They were murdered on account of their message by having rocks thrown at their faces over and over again.