A Pastor's Thoughts

Halloween is now the third most profitable holiday.  Christmas wins, by far.  Valentines Day is second and Halloween is third.  More and more people are decorating their homes with the latest in lights and animatronics and the cost of a good Halloween showing is going up. Albert Mohler stated that the themes of Halloween are getting darker and darker,  more satanic and evil focused than ever before.  He attributes this trend to the slasher movies of the 70s and 80s and the fascination with the occult that seems to be everywhere these days.  Vampires, who used to be portrayed as evil monster are now sold as teenage heartthrobs.  Zombie fantasies are all over TV and there are even people who are preparing for a imminent zombie apocalypse. Young people may find it fun to play with the spiritual realm but people of all ages need to realize is there there really is a spiritual part of our physical world.  It is not a counterpart place, but a different dimension or something.  Spiritual

Ever since Cain Killed Abel there has been division in the world.  The classic division is between good and evil, light and dark, righteousness and wickedness.  This type of division exists everywhere and cannot be avoided.  Through the millennia, people have learned to divide themselves many additional ways.  Language, ethnicity, geography, skin color, national origin, income level, education level and anything else people can think of to label and divide ourselves. In Galatians 3:28 , Paul explains that in Christ, there are no divisions.  There are no divisions because everyone is saved the same way, to the same level.  We all have the desperate need for Christ.  No one brings anything to the cross to aid or improve the work of Christ.  We all start at the very bottom and Christ lifts us up.  So in Christ we are all the same.  Paul explains that ethnicity difference, economic differences, even gender differences make no difference in Christ.  The body of Christ is not divided. Ye

Sunday, October 29, 2017 is Reformation Sunday.  Reformation day is October 31 of each year.  When we speak of the reformation and reformed churches, we have to look back 500 years to know what they mean. Martin Luther was born in 1483, into the Holy Roman Empire which was not holy, nor Roman nor an empire, but the Catholic Church wanted to regain its political and international power that it seemed to enjoy at the end of the true Roman Empire so they made this title for their influence.  Politics, power, influence and cash were on the mind of the Cardinals and the Pope at the time Luther was born. The trigger point for Martin Luther was the practice of the Roman Catholic Church and the idea of purgatory.  Purgatory does not exist, yet the Catholic teachers needed a way to explain what happened when people accept Christ then fall away and sin greatly.  Around 1160 someone suggested the idea of Purgatory, a place where sinners pay for their own sin.  It can take hundreds of years fo

…that every Christian must be able to answer.  What are these two questions?  A Christian must be able to tell people how they were saved.  If someone seeking God asks a Christian how they were saved, there needs to be a truthful, sort answer for that question.  Second, a Christian must be able to tell anyone else how they may be saved.  So if someone seeking God asks a Christian how they might be saved, the Christian must have a truthful, short answer. There is a one word description of each of these answer is known as the gospel .  Gospel literally means good news .  Evangelism means sharing or telling good news .  The one difference between telling how I was saved and telling how you may be saved is that I may include the events of my salvation, which would turn my story into a testimony .  A testimony contains the gospel and how a single individual came to accept it.  All testimonies are different, yet the gospel remains the same. It is imperative for every Christian to know

I have always described myself as politically aware but not politically active.  I vote and that is about it.  As for being politically aware, I read a great deal about politics and the political situation in America.  I do not watch much political TV because it takes too much time and is very selective in the stories they cover and the way they cover it.  TV news has become TV opinion and commentary.  Yet there are long form political pieces out there.  I also follow political thinkers on Twitter and Facebook and read what they post. I am politically aware for two reasons.  People will come to me and ask what I think about a political point of view and I want to be well researched.  Also with the problems my church has had with the IRS and the Alameda County Assessor, I want to know what bills are in the hopper, and which bills Governor Brown and President Trump have signed.  I use IFTTT to get alerts when a new bill is signed in my state or nation.  Then I can review them and know

The first part of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States reads Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; Everyone always jumps to the second and third and fourth part of this amendment  and screams about freedom of speech or the freedom of the press.  However, the reason the original people came to America was to get away from religious persecution.  Therefore, the first protection against the government (which is what the amendments are), is about freedom of religion. In California there is a move, ever since 2010 the reduced the number of churches.  Actually, they don’t care if two people meet in a home and call it a church, they want to remove the large church meeting buildings.  This is because church buildings do not pay property or use tax.  Many churches in California, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area, have been in their current location for a century or more.  They were buil

The federal government is all over the news again demanding “backdoors” into our phones and computers.  They claim that if phones have secrets hidden in them, then terrorist and criminals can function unmolested by the FBI.  So the FBI and other government agencies whine and complain that their job is difficult because people have secrets. My thought on this is very simple.  If you were to ask me whom I fear more, Washington DC or ISIS, I would quickly say Washington DC.  I am also concerned about Sacramento, California and Alameda County.  This is because I have never been harmed or damaged by ISIS, directly or any terrorist organization.  Yes, America was attached, once and we recovered.  For me, the only place I see the effect of those attacks are in the actions of TSA when I fly.  People take off their shoes because of Richard Reid and we go through metal detectors because of D.B. Cooper .  Other than air travel, life for me goes on. Yet, I bump into the various governments ev

There is phrase that bounces around Washington DC and that phrase is this:  “Excess Savings.”  Nancy Pelosi brought it up again yesterday.  She was talking about how the US Government will take care of seniors in their old age.  Social Security is one fleeting example of how they do that.  Since Social Security and other programs are running out of money because of the welfare waste, Nancy Pelosi and others want to look at each senior citizen and what they have in the bank and in liquid assets.  If a senior citizen has more than they need, according to Nancy Pelosi, the government will take that person's savings and give it to someone else. It will not matter how people will get to their final place of retirement with savings or not.  It has been shown with Medicare that if a person spends their whole life, buying the latest thing, always having a new car and always having a bigger house, when they reach retirement age, they are in massive debt and have no savings, the government

That is an exclamation, usually heard in the south, when something outlandish is seen or heard.  Yet when it comes to the face to face meeting each person will have with God almighty, “have mercy” is the only thing we can beg for during that judgement.  People are all about justice these days and Social Justice is all the rage in the inner city and pulpits.  People understand rightly that justice means getting what is deserved under the law.  When a thief is caught and tried and placed in prison, we say justice was done because this malefactor got what he deserved under the law.  There is also the positive of righteous justice.  The Bible speaks of taking care of the widows and orphans and that feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and helping the homeless is an act of righteous justice. Over use of the term justice, however, can corrupt is meaning.  In some circles, people elevate their wants and desires to the place of justice.  So lower taxes, wider streets, a traffic signal, che

Bringing our requests, needs, desires and supplications before the throne of God Almighty is a right as sons and daughters of the king. It is also a privilege because he loves us so much that he actually cares about our stuff.  But if we consider who we are, in our core, and what God did to make this relationship possible, we will be driven to our knees in awe and wonder, full of thanksgiving and gratitude. People are evil.  Theologians say that people are totally depraved.  There is nothing good in anyone.  Our default position is to be at war with God, hating everything he is and does.  People spit at God and despise him.  And God sent his Son to die on a cross and shed his blood to save us.  If that does not cause everybody to praise God, then there is a misunderstanding of the facts. The healthy prayer life is one where our prayers are full of praise and gratitude and thanksgiving.  There may be times when a Christian just praises God for what he has done and spends a great dea

Prayer is communication with God.  God is our creator and it is good to find out what he wants and it is good to tell God what we need.  After all, he might have mercy and grant us our request.  That is the core of prayer.  People who believe in God come to him, thanking him and bringing supplication. Prayer is the most important and valuable communication we have.  If we are on the good side of someone on earth, that is valuable, but if God is against us, we are in trouble.  This is why all people of all nations and all religions have developed a system of prayer.  So the Hindus pray to their gods, the Buddhists pray to their ancestors for good things to happen, Muslims pray, Jews pray, Christians pray and even those who have no particular religious belief or system will find themselves praying during a time of trouble. Of course, as a Christian, I believe that the only being who can hear prayers and do something about them is the God revealed in the Bible.  During the Puerto Rico

It seems that everyone wants to know what I think about the service I have received.  I go get my car worked on, and I get a survey.  I call apple and I get a survey.  I take my mother to the doctor and I get a survey.  Some times, usually, the surveys are emailed and I just delete them.  More and more often, like today, I receive a phone call. My mother has spent time in a skilled nursing facility recently and today I received a phone call asking me questions about the place where she was treated.  They asked about the staff and then did a Likert scale  on various aspects of the facility.  Today’s call was from a woman who had a very strong accent and was clearly in a call center.  I know this because I could hear other voices asking questions in the background.  Also her phone system kept cutting out so I could only get part of the questions. Many years ago, I am not sure when, companies decided that it would be a good idea to get customer ratings based on their service.  Survey

Not much, actually.  I think maintaining a military is a good idea since state sponsored actors need a state sponsored response, so the Fed can have a military.  I like the interstate system.  I makes a way for goods to be trucked across the nation, easily.  I like that, so they can keep that.There needs to be some sort of state sponsored research on diseases and things like that.  This needs to be a non-political, by design, system where people who love science and biology can try things and look at things and even develops preventative systems.  These preventative systems can be offered, but cannot be mandatory.  The government also needs to be funded, and that is by taxes, so the government needs a way to collect those taxes.  Currently it is the IRS, which is a political organization and needs to be abandoned and Lois Lerner needs to be put in a Super-Max prison for the rest of her life.  The Fed also needs to manage international trade and relations.  Individuals and individual st

The dictionary defines Utopia as “ An ideally perfect place, especially in its social, political, and moral aspects .”  This is what the progressive left believes they can turn America into.  Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are two people that used to throw around that term in reference to President Obama’s immigration stance, his “dear colleague” letter regarding bathroom use and Obamacare.  The deep state which is responsible for the hundreds of thousands of regulations that choke the life out of America also seeks to form a utopia.  The hyper-litigated country is the cherry on top, suing everyone who does not comply with the utopia wishes. There is a universal feeling, among the left, in Washington DC that if  certain people are forced to shut up and certain regulations are put in place then America will become a perfect place.  There will be no hate, no violence, no racism, no death, no pain, no poverty, no hunger and nothing bad will ever happen again.  This is a fantasy and anyo

There is a free newspaper in my town telling of the various events, items of interest and weather.  The paper’s headline today is “City Council Bans flavored Tobacco.”  The ordinance passed 4-3 and does not include menthol cigarettes.  Cigars can still be flavored.  Fines upwards of $2,500 will be levied against anyone selling flavored tobacco. These types of regulations truly amaze me.  The question that I will always ask is this:  Do we need the city council to make this law?  Is my city better, safer, more comfortable or more fun because of this regulation?  The purpose of this regulation goes back to an earlier study by the FDA which said that flavored cigarettes are used to get children hooked on smoking and if flavored cigarettes are allowed to exist, more and more people will smoke.  The city council took that and made a law so that flavored cigarettes cannot be sold and then, they assume, fewer people will smoke.  I wonder if anyone will look, ten years from now, and find out

Today the idea that you are offended is the most important thing you can say.  When a person claims to be offended they take the moral high ground and others have to shut up. People being offended goes hand-in-hand with virtue signaling.  Claiming a great offense will cause people to look with great admiration. Only the truly virtuous can claim offense.  Of course what offends you must be politically correct. For example, public prayer can be greatly offensive but people burning down UC Berkeley campus  is awesome and no where near offensive. So the virtue signaling, offensive taking is a tight rope or a razor’s edge that has much risk.  If a person guesses wrong then they are mocked. I have tried to live my life not being offended. From a very early age, I was told that offenses must be taken or taken up.  No one can force me or make me be offended at something, being offended is always a choice. So if I do not choose to take up any offense, then I will not be offended. Those who do

We spy on them and they spy on us.  This time around they are trying something different.  Since we have insecure Facebook, Twitter and email around here, meaning anyone can post anything any time and no one asks questions, Russian troll farms created thousands of accounts.  People call them “fake” but there is no such thing.  A facebook account is a facebook account and lots of people lie about their name, location, age and gender to remain anonymous and secure.  For me, I only put my church address and phone number. So these troll farms which used to be responsible for 85 billions spam emails a day, now took Kremlin money and went to work.  They posts pro-Trump and anti-Trump.  Pro-abortion and anti-abortion.  Pro-gun and anti-gun and pro-Hillary and anti-Hillary.  No one from America paid them to to do it and no one in America profited from it.  Trump did not win because the Russias posted facebook messages.  They posted as many for Trump as they did against Trump. Recently it w

The other day I took my mother to the emergency room with kidney problems.  While she was being treated, I went outside to get some sun.  A person was sitting outside crying and I asked if I could help.  This person was dressed like a woman, had a woman’s name, but also had several days of stubble growth of a beard.  This person told me that people were so mean to them that they just felt so bad.  So they hitchhiked to the hospital, leaving their car by the side of the road.  The emergency room could not find anything wrong so they were discharged without treatment and they were very upset with this. This person told me that they had asked five people for money that day and all five were mean to them.  This is the strange part of the encounter.  First, this person is a confused being who cannot figure out what they want to be today.  Culture would call them a trans-gender of fluid-gender person depending on how often they changed.  No matter what the politically correct progressive l

I was in the Air Force from 1981 to 1985. For the last 2 years of my enlistment, I flew in an RC135W off the coast of Russia listing to telephone conversations.  I was a back end tech making sure the receivers and recording equipment worked well.  Others in the plane spoke Russian.  This was a long time ago and it was called passive reconnaissance .  It was spying by listening to electronic communication, recording it, translating it and using it.  My assumption is that China and Russia and God knows who else has been listening to us the same way. When I was in the Air Force, I learned of a project called Echelon .  It was a program by the NSA that put huge listening or receiving antenna up in Alaska and on both coasts and they were sensitive enough to hear phone conversations all over the world.  This is because electrons don’t die.  When messaging moves along a wire, the message radiates out all across the world and gets mixed up with all sorts of other messages.  Good programs on

The number one charge leveled against churches and Christians for the past several generations is that Christians are hypocrites.  That is an easy charge to level because we teach and preach perfection, righteousness and holiness but Christians are anything but perfect, righteous and holy.  For the Christians our holiness is an alien holiness imputed to us and we add nothing to it and do not participate in any way. We teach and preach that we need to live up to that foreign righteousness, but we will not until Jesus Christ returns again.  Anything "good" that we do on earth is through the power of the Holy Spirit and not human strength or moral will. For the unsaved, like the sexually immoral perverts in Hollywood, their hypocrisy is truly despicable.  Harvey Weinstein was exposed in the New York Times and after decades of covering up and laughing about him behind their backs, the Hollywood hypocrites need to sacrifice him to save their sexually immoral culture. It is a pub

The progressive left sees the world through the lens of who is being oppressed and who is doing the oppression. The difficulty with this paradigm is that there are no policies, rules or standards as to who is an oppressor or who is being oppressed. If someone says something that the progressives do not like then the speaker is declared an oppressor. This is an easy way to turn people against anyone by calling them the oppressor. The oppression society that has been created has one effect:  The victim class.  All the darlings of the progressive left are victims.  The trans-gender, the people who can’t get a wedding cake made, the single mother, the hungry child and on and on it goes.  Watch any left-wing news program and you will quickly see that every story has a victim.  Today, more than ever, President Trump is the bully and everyone else is the victim.  At least that is how it is portrayed. The goal of America, the American dream, the reason America was founded was because there

Alameda county is the East Bay county in the San Francisco Bay Area.  It stretches from Oakland to Fremont.  As with any residential place in America there are churches.  There are over 180 churches in Alameda County.  The church that I pastor has been in this county since 1946 and has been a tax-exempt church the entire time. In 2010, Lois Lerner, the head of the IRS began threatening churches in Alameda County and all over the US.  I received phone calls and letters from the IRS telling me that we were a political organization, and therefore not tax exempt.  In 2011, agents of the IRS showed up at my church to inspect, take pictures and measure the sanctuary .  Also in 2010 Alameda Country declared Cornerstone Fellowship a for-profit business and therefore we owed property tax. Going back to the founding of this nation certain benefits were afforded churches and full time ministers.  One benefit is that churches do not property tax.  If they did, it has been stated, people who do

I woke up today to the reports of fires all over Northern California.  I went outside to go the gym and could smell the strong odor of smoke in the air.  According to official reports earlier today, 65,000 acres or 100,000 square miles are burnt or burning.  1500 structures have been destroyed.  The news showed pictures of a golf course in Napa county.  All the homes along the ridge above the golf course were nothing but a pile of ash.  Remnants of garage doors and vehicles dotted the landscape.  The devastation is amazing. I have not heard what started the fires, but at this point it does not matter.  With none of the fires even partially contained, this will take a long time to control.  The wind has been the enemy of the fire fighters with 50 mile an hour winds forcing the fire forward.  The only thing the fire fighters could do, the reporter said, was to get people out of the way. The head of California Fire said, on the news today, that October has always been California’s wor

Some time ago, the congress of the United States declared or resolved that the second Sunday in October would be Pastor Appreciation Day.  It never became a national holiday, and pastors still have to work on that day, but it is a nice thing. My church celebrated it to show me some appreciation and that was nice.  After church there was a time with cake.  People had written notes saying how much I mean to them and that is a good thing. A pastor works hard, no matter what the size of the church is.  In smaller churches a pastor does most of the physical work.  In a larger church a pastor manages the people and does more counseling and managing divisions.  In our church everyone works together to make our church a loving place where everyone is welcome, including the pastor. The cake that was served was chocolate, which is always a winner.  I was also given a large stuffed Minion, dressed up like a pirate for Halloween.  I like the minions and that was an unexpected gift.  It made

In Mark chapter 4 Jesus tells the story of a farmer spreading seed.  In the story, the farmer has a bag of seed and he grabs a handful of seed and throws it out in front of him.  Some seed falls on the road, some among the thorns and some among the rocks.  None of these seeds grow.  Some seed, however, fall on good soil and this seeds take root and grow into large plants. Today people from my church went out into the community to talk to people and to place informational cards on their doors.  This activity is much like the sower of seeds in Mark 4.  We just pick some streets and hit every house.  Even though the informational cards are about our church and not the full Word of God, they will lead to the Word of God. Some people will see the cards and simply throw them away (the road).  Satan is active and alive in the San Francisco Bay Area and the rest of the world.  He wants people to think that church is judgmental and full of hypocrites.  So anytime anyone speaks of church, p

That’s right, people are evil.  Not some people, not people in government, but all people, back to the first person, are evil.  If you are reading this, you are evil.  That is the truth of the universe.  Of course people change the definition of evil all the time so that they exempt themselves from that label.  However, God, the creator of all that is, has a righteous standard and if a person violates one of those laws, that person is totally and completely evil, evil, evil, evil. This morning, revelations about Harvey Weinstein's immoral sexual behavior of the last many decades.  His story is the Hollywood story.  Women were offered roles and positions based on who they would have sex with.  This is the open secret about Hollywood.  They joke about it on Mad Men, but people just nod and accept it.  Sexual immorality is the height of evil.  So people enjoy movies and TV shows and listen to the “wisdom” of actors who live in and support this immoral, evil, debauched, depraved and

Recently Apple released a new Apple Watch.  It has a cellular chip in it so it can have coverage wherever there are cell towers.  This coverage will allow people to make phone calls and to stream their Apple Music.  That tagline that “you now have 40 millions songs on your wrist” is rather interesting. Apple's keynote about the watch showed a lady on a lake making a phone call with her watch. Back when I was in High School, there was a TV commercial that showed a man entering a roadside diner.  He approaches the jukebox and asks the person behind the counter, “what song’s do you have.”  The proprietor says, “All of them.”  If I remember correctly the product it was an ad for BASF which had a recording medium back then.  They were saying if you had the right recording sub straight you could store all the songs. Many years ago, Spotify came on the scene.  It is a British company, and they allowed people to stream all the music they had access to, on a desktop or mobile device.  S