Shake the Dust: A Final Warning to the Impenitent

by Patte Smith on Monday, February 21, 2011 at 11:38am

After Jesus has helped us faithfully discharge our duty to share the Law & Grace of the gospel & to love our born & pre-born neighbors at the killing place, we take time to issue a sober warning. We do this after we have spent a few hours pleading for mercy for the little children in the Name of Christ. We have offered help to the aborting women & men & all of their co-conspirators. We have given them clear information about adoption & offered a ministry packet with great information & resources inside. We have spoken the mercy & truth as it is in Jesus. We have proclaimed the command of Almighty God: "You shall not murder" & "Shed not innocent blood in this place" & commanded them to 'Repent or perish".  Those who harden their hearts against the gracious message of LIFE need to know that it is the Lord Himself whom they sin against & to Whom they will have to give an account on the Day of Judgment. God is good. The Lord instructed His disciples to remain in an area where they are received & welcomed & allow their blessing to abide on that place. However, Jesus also issues instruction to depart from the place where they are rejected, shaking the dust from their feet against those who are apathetic or hostile to the Good News. And when the heralds of Christ depart, a curse abides on the place.

We will notice that God always warns the wicked before He punishes the wicked. During the last 5-10 minutes or so we 'shake the dust' against the impenitent, as Jesus commanded His disciples to do. [Note: Remember as you read these scriptural warnings that many of the sexually immoral women & men who are murdering their babies at the killing places are professing Christians. This is also true of the clinic workers & even some of the abortionists. These presume upon the grace of Christ & His Blood.]

A friend has asked me to post the scriptures that I have been reading to Shake the Dust at the end of our ministry time. In your comments feel free to add to these with the biblical Words that you use to leave a warning to those who refuse to obey the gospel of Jesus Christ.

"If anyone turns his ear away from hearing the Law, even his prayer is an abomination (detestable to God).' ~ Proverbs 28:9

"If I regard iniquity (sin, rebellion) in my heart the Lord will not hear me." ~ Psalm 66:18

"When he is judged, let him come forth guilty, & let his prayer become sin." Psalm 109:7

"For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. Anyone who has set aside the Law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses." Hebrews 10:26-28

"Thus says the Lord...the One who formed you from the womb, 'I, the Lord, am the Maker of all things, stretching out the heavens by Myself, & spreading out the earth all alone..'" Isaiah 44:24

"When the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with His mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away fromb the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His might, when He comes on that Day to be glorified in His saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed." II Thessalonians 1:7-10

"Even the dust...that clings to our feet we wipe off against you. Nevertheless know this, that the kingdom of God has come near.’I tell you, it will be more bearable on that day for Sodom [than for you]... Woe! ...“Woe to you!...Woe to you!" Luke 10:11-13

"You are of your father the devil, & the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, & does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him...he speaks a lie...for he is a liar & the father of it...He who is of God hears God's Words; therefore you do not hear, because you are not of God." ~ John 8:43,44

"For you have trusted in your wickedness; You have said: "No one sees me'; your wisdom & your knowledge have warped you & led you astray; & you have said in your heart: "I am & there is no one else besides me." Therefore evil shall come upon you ... & trouble shall fall upon you ... You will not be able to put it off (to cover or atone for it). And desolation shall come upon you suddenly... No one shall save you." ~ Isaiah 47:17-19,23

"I call heaven & earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life & death, blessing & cursing: therefore choose life, that both you & your seed may live..." Deuteronomy 30:19

The Prayers God Does Not Hear

by Patte Smith on Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 7:03pm

We know that God does not listen to sinners,
but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will, God listens to him.
 ~ Jesus in John 9:31

You came back and wept before the LORD, but He paid no attention to your weeping and turned a deaf ear to you. ~ Deuteronomy 1:45

For you know how that afterward, when he would have inherited the blessing, he was rejected: for he found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears. ~ Hebrews 12:17

When you spread out your hands in prayer, I will hide my eyes from you; even if you offer many prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood. ~Isaiah 1:15

If anyone turns a deaf ear to the Law, even his prayers are detestable. ~ Proverbs 28:9

You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. ~ James 4:3

The LORD is far from the wicked but He hears the prayer of the righteous. ~ Proverbs 15:29

Then they will call to Me but I will not answer; they will look for Me but will not find Me.~ Proverbs 1:28

For what hope has the godless when he is cut off, when God takes away his life? ~ Job 27:8

The LORD is far from the wicked but he hears the prayer of the righteous. ~ Proverbs 15:29

Indeed, God does not listen to their empty plea; the Almighty pays no attention to it. ~ Job 35:13

 But anyone who sins defiantly...blasphemes the LORD, and that person must be cut off from His people. ~ Numbers 15:30

If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. ~ Psalm 66:18

For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. ~ Hebrews 10:26-27

Such sins are more heinous that are committed presumptuously. Under the law there was no sacrifice for presumptuous sins. (Num 15: 30). To sin presumptuously, is to sin against convictions and illuminations, or an enlightened conscience. 'They are of those that rebel against the light.' Job 24: 13. Conscience, like the cherubim, stands with a flaming sword in its hand to deter the sinner; and yet he will sin. Did not Pilate sin against conviction, and with a high hand, in condemning Christ? He knew that for envy the Jews had delivered him. Matt 27: 18. He confessed he 'found no fault in him.' Luke 23: 14. His own wife sent to him saying, 'Have nothing to do with that just man.' Matt 27: 19. Yet for all this, he gave the sentence of death against Christ. He sinned presumptuously, against an enlightened conscience. To sin ignorantly does something to extenuate and pare off the guilt. 'If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin,' that is, their sin had been less. John 15: 22. But to sin against illuminations and convictions enhances men's sins. These sins make deep wounds in the soul; other sins fetch blood; they are a stab at the heart.

How...may a man sin against illuminations and convictions?

When a man sins after counsels, admonitions, warnings, he cannot plead ignorance. The trumpet of the gospel has been blown in his ears, and sounded a retreat to call him off from his sins, he has been told of his injustice, living in malice...yet he would venture upon sin. This is to sin against conviction; it aggravates the sin, and is like a weight put into the scale, to make his sin weigh the heavier. If a sea-mark be set up to give warning that there are shelves and rocks in that place, yet if the mariner will sail there, and split his ship, it is presumption; and if he be cast away, who will pity him?

When a man sins against express combinations and threatening. God has thundered out threatenings against such sins. 'God shall would the hairy scalp of such an one as goes on still in his trespasses.' Psa 68: 21. Though God set the point of His sword to the breast of a sinner, he will still commit sin. The pleasure of sin delights him more than the threatenings affright him. Like the leviathan, 'he laugheth at the shaking of a spear.' Job 41: 29. Nay, he derides God's threatenings. 'Let him make speed, and hasten his work, that we may see it:' we have heard much what God intends to do, and of judgement approaching, we would fain see it. Isa 5: 19. For men to see the flaming sword of God's threatening brandished, yet to strengthen themselves in sin, is in an aggravated manner to sin against illumination and conviction.
~ Thomas Watson
http://www.ondoctrine.com/2wat0016.htm

The Prayers God Does hear are the prayers of the righteous, who fear the Lord:

He fulfills the desires of  those who fear Him; He hears their cry and saves them. ~ Psalm 145:19

The eyes of the LORD are on the righteous and His ears are attentive to their cry. ~ Psalm 34:15

Are We Missing The Church's Purpose?

by Patte Smith on Tuesday, February 15, 2011 at 7:53pm

It would be too easy to dismiss this dislike for church as only another symptom of original sin and love of moral darkness, but I believe that explanation is too pat to be wholly true. It doesn't explain enough. Some persons, for instance, find church intolerable because there is no objective toward which pastor and people are moving, aside possibly from the limited one of trying to enlist eight more women and 10 more men to chaperon the annual youth cookout or reaching the building fund quota for the month. And believe me, that can get mighty wearisome after a while, so wearisome indeed that alert, forward-looking persons often forsake the churches in droves and leave the spiritless, the dull and those afflicted with permanent insouciance to carry on, if a phrase so active dare be used to describe what they do. To Paul there was nothing dull or tiresome in the religion of Christ. God had a plan which was being carried forward to completion, and Paul and all the faithful in Christ Jesus were part of that plan. It included predestination, redemption, adoption and the obtaining of an eternal inheritance in the heavenly places. Gods purpose has now been openly revealed (Ephesians 3:10,11). It was the knowledge that they were part of an eternal plan that imparted unquenchable enthusiasm to the early Christians. They burned with holy zeal for Christ and felt that they were part of an army which the Lord was leading to ultimate conquest over all the powers of darkness. That was enough to fill them with perpetual enthusiasm.

A.W. Tozer

Evil Women Justify (& Glorify) Murdering Children in Suprising Ways: By using the paradigm of Sin & Redemption

Evil Women Justify (& Glorify) Murdering Children in Suprising Ways: By using the paradigm of Sin & Redemption

by Patte Smith on Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 3:47pm

"Sir, can I ask you a favor? Could you go get me a hamburger so my baby can have her last meal?"
~ aborting mom to a Christian who was offering her help

Friends,
The comment above reflects a psuedo-acknowledgement of the baby in the womb as a person deserving of a last meal before she is executed. We don't hear those old arguments like "It's just a blob of tissue" much any more. Women know they are carrying a real person. A human being who needs to be given nutrients to survive, but nonetheless, a person who is less valuable than her mother.

As I read through the comments from pro-murder feminists like Wolf & a baby-killer like Poppema (& others) I cannot help but get a chill. What they are saying is very much like what I hear in the 'pro-life' post-abortion movement. Read this & see if you don't agree.

There is a diabolical rationale afoot that speaks of grief, healing, redemption & even SIN as if it was something everyone who murders deserves.

Read & post your comments.

Together for Life & Eternity,
Patte Smith
Sanctuary Ministries
www.sanctuaryministries.blogspot.com

...we are also in danger of losing something more important than votes; we stand in jeopardy of losing what can only be called our souls. Clinging to a rhetoric about abortion in which there is no life and no death, we entangle our beliefs in a series of self-delusions, fibs and evasions. And we risk becoming precisely what our critics charge us with being: callous, selfish and casually destructive men and women who share a cheapened view of human life.

....those footprints are in fact the footprints of a 10-week-old fetus, the pro-life slogan, "Abortion stops a beating heart," is incontrovertibly true. While images of violent fetal death work significently for pro-lifers as political polemic, the pictures are not polemical in themselves: they are biological facts. We know this.

So, what will it be: Wanted fetuses are charming, complex REM-dreaming little beings whose profile on the sonogram looks just like Daddy, but unwanted ones are mere "uterine material"? How can we charge that it is vile and repulsive for pro-lifers to brandish vile and repulsive images if the images are real? To insist that the truth is in poor taste is the very height of hypocrisy. Besides, if these images are often the facts of the matter, and if we then claim that it is offensive for pro-choice women to be confronted by them, then we are making the judgment that women are too inherently weak to face a truth about which they have to make a grave decision. This view of women is unworthy of feminism. Free women must be strong women, too: and strong women, presumably do not seek to cloak their most important decisions in euphemism.

There is only one reason I've ever heard for having an abortion: the desire to be a "good mother"-- this is a falsehood that condescends to women struggling to be true agents of their own souls.... there were two columns in my mind -- "Me" and "Baby " -- and the first won out. Now, freedom means that women must be free to choose self or to choose selfishly. There is no easy way to deny the powerful argument that a woman's equality in society must give her some irreducible rights unique to her biology including the right to take the life within her life. Grief and respect are the proper tones for all discussions about choosing to endanger or destroy manifestation of life.

Sometimes the mother must be able to decide that the fetus, in its full humanity, must die. But it is never right or necessary to minimize the value of the lives involved or the sacrifice incurred in letting them go.

 But how, one might ask, can I square a recognition of the humanity of the fetus, and the moral ravity of destroying it, with a pro-choice position? The answer can only be found in the context of a paradigm abandoned by the left and misused by the right: the paradigm of sin and redemption.

We have no ground on which to say that abortion is a necessary evil that should be faced and opposed in the realm of conscience and action and even soul; yet remain legal. But American society is struggling to find its way forward to a discourse of right and wrong that binds together a common thic for the secular and the religious. When we do that, we create a moral discourse that can exist in its own right independent of legislation, and we can find ground to stand upon.

We on the left tend to twitch with discomfort at that word "sin." Too often we have become religiously illiterate, and so we deeply misunderstand the word. But in all of the great religious traditions, our recognition of sin, and then our atonement for it, brings on God's compassion and our redemption. In many faiths, justice is linked, as it is in medieval Judaism and in Buddhism, to compassion. From Yom Kippur and the Ash Wednesday-to-Easter cycle to the Hindu idea of karma, the individual's confrontation with her or his own culpability is the first step toward ways to create and receive more light.

How could one live with a conscious view that abortion is an evil and still be pro-choice? Through acts of redemption, or that the Jewish mystical tradition calls tikkun or "mending." Laurence Tribe, in Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes, notes that "Memorial services for the souls of aborted fetuses are fairly common in contemporary Japan" where abortions are both legal and readily available. Shinto doctrine holds that women should make offerings to the fetus to help it rest in peace; Buddhists once erected statues of the spirit guardian of children to honor aborted fetuses (called "water children" or "unseeing children").

...In such a world, in which the idea of gender as a barrier has become a dusty artifact, we would probably use a very different language about what would be -- then -- the rare and doubtless traumatic event of abortion. That language would probably call upon respect and responsibility, grief and mourning. In that world we might well describe the unborn and the never-to-be-born with the honest words of life. And in that world, passionate feminists might well hold *candlelight vigils at abortion clinics, standing shoulder to shoulder with the doctors who work there, commemorating and saying goodbye to the dead."
~ feminist Naomi Wolf

I am saddened by Ms. Naomi Wolf's claim to speak in a revolutionary new moral tone about abortion. Her article makes short shrift of people like myself who have been doing abortions for over 20 years and who have quietly believed and acted in what I thought was a moral way for all those years.

Perhaps if Ms. Wolf had taken the time to speak with some of us, she wouldn't have felt so alone in her views. Her claim that pro-choice rhetoric has arrogantly demeaned women is suspect in view of her own arrogant dismissal of her high school classmates' having abortions as being like "getting a fraternity pin"! Whatever Ms. Wolf may believe, she clearly has not stood in the operating room thousands of times watching and supporting these same young women as they grieve their lost pregnancies. For many of these women, it is also a time of loss of a relationship, of the support of their families, of the life plan that they had for themselves. As a physician, I have a grave but welcome responsibility to honor and validate my patients when I see them at such vulnerable and psychologically defenseless moments in their lives.

I have performed abortions for many tens of thousands of women and I have supported them in their grief and sorrow and have tried to allay some of their universal feelings of shame. Women are to be honored for making these difficult decisions; they do not make them in haste or in a moral vacuum! My clinic has long offered women the opportunity to see the embryos or fetuses after the abortion, to see the ultrasound picture before or after the procedure, and to own the full spectrum of their feelings around this most intimate decision. To choose to abort a pregnancy is indeed an intensely personal decision. That it is personal does not somehow deny that it is also deeply moral as Ms. Wolf seems to imply.

I do agree with Ms. Wolf that an abortion is a traumatic event, but that does not mean that it is not also possible for it to be a major life-affirming event for the woman as well. I also agree with Dr. Elizabeth Karlin that a woman is doing the best that she can at that moment in her existence when she chooses an abortion -- even if that sometimes can be expressed only as "I just know I couldn't be a very good mom right now". I wish that Ms. Wolf could have acknowledged in her "soul" that many of us in the prochoice movement have been quietly living her "new morality" for over 20 years.

~ Suzanne T. Poppema, abortionist
Medical Director, Aurora Medical Services killing place

http://fidei-defensor.blogspot.com/2004/01/naomi-wolf-on-abortion.html

STIGMATIZE ABORTION.

Beware of Pragmatism

by Patte Smith on Wednesday, January 26, 2011 at 2:02pm

In the popular book, "The Externally Focused Church” by Rick Rusaw, there is a story about how a church & it's members volunteered at a local woman's shelter. (It's in the chapter entitled: "A Closer Look: When Partners Don't See Eye to Eye") They also financially supported the shelter. One of the services that the shelter provided was 'counseling'. The director of the shelter was adamant that any woman living in her shelter who became pregnant should kill her baby by abortion. She would also use the shelter's 'ministry' funds to pay for the babies to be murdered. In spite of all of this, the church and it's people continued to volunteer there and donate funds to the shelter. The book says: "The shelter's director was a wonderful woman whose compassion for the people she served was evident." The director 'promised' that she wouldn't use the funds that the church gave to pay for killing babies, but of course, having the extra income to use became a buffer to replace the money the director used to murder the babies in the shelter. Beware of pragmatism.

Btw, this book is blatantly ANTI-intentional biblical evangelism. I know of a leadership team that is reading this book in order to find ways to 'launch' their church plant.

"And what concord has Christ with Belial? or what part has he that believes with an infidel?"
II Corinthians 6:15