He played a good game. He eventually blundered a bishop as he tried to win a pawn and a rook for a rook. I then forced the trade of both queens and he chose to trade the remaining rooks to lead us into the endgame with me a bishop and pawn ahead. I think the position was essentially won at that point. It dragged on for another 20 moves before he resigned. I came close to blundering it myself by moving to centralize my king in the endgame when I should have gone straight for his passed pawn. I caught the error in time to capture the passed pawn before it was too late.

I love God.

I love people.

So does He.

This is why I get utterly furious when I learn about pastoral sex scandals and folks using God as a tool to take advantage of the unsuspecting.

So, as the world now knows, Earl Paulk, the so-called “Archbishop,” the great founder of the “Tabernacle of the Holy Spirit,” is the unholy father of his nephew by his own brother’s wife. Also, it seems he manipulated another woman into sleeping with him many times over the course of more than a decade by convincing her it was her only path to salvation. What does he make of the warning of scripture that those who become teachers face a stricter judgment? What of the words of our Lord who warned/promised that what is whispered in secret will soon be proclaimed from the housetops? Has he no fear?

When I read of such great wickedness it makes me long for the justice of God who will deliver his people from such great enemies of their souls.

Aparently Mona Brewer was a member of the church’s music ministry when she was invited to meet Paulk in his office to chat. She felt it was a great honor to meet the “prophet” in person.

“Nobody got to do that. I mean, he was awesome. I mean, everybody wanted to talk to him. And he just invited me to his office to talk to him for a few minutes. And that was really incredible.”

When she entered his office she was told to remove her clothes because he would “have to love her.” Brewer later said the following about how Paulk justified his abuse.

“He said, ‘you know, the adultery issue was for the little ones.’ It was for the — the people, the, you know, commoners. It wasn’t for people who God elevated and trusted with special things like this, relationships like this. And that’s the way he explained it to me.”

The only part of this story that I took any pleasure in at all was that when Brewer’s husband found out what his pastors had done with his wife he invited them for a visit and confronted them. When they tried to justify their evil he decked them both. True story. There’s the photos.

I wish Brewer would have never taken her clothes off for this pervert in the first place, but rather warned him about the wrath of a holy God upon men who do such things. It reminds me of The Green Mile where John Coffey says with tears on his face, ‘He killed them with their love.’

I pray so earnestly that God will deliver his church from such men. I pray he will keep me and all his kids from doing such evil. I long to always live the sort of life that I can be filled with hope by our Lord’s promise that what is hidden will be revealed and what is whispered will be shouted from rooftops. Oh that it will be always my good deeds that are done in secret and not wickedness.

There is one other part of this story I really delighted in. Mrs. Brewer’s faith in God was not crushed through this ordeal. Her last words in her CNN interview with Paula Zahn were “I know that God vindicates the righteous.”

How I long for her vindication and that of all God’s righteous ones. God deliver your people from such evil and swiftly deliver evildoers unto justice.

As I said in another place about Benny Hinn, deeds like Paulk’s remove all the difficulty for me in the doctrine of a literal and eternal Hell.

I think I learned more from preparing this sermon than I’ve learned from preparing any other of my sermons. I learned not just about my material, most of it I’ve already been learning, but I learned a lot about me and how I must lead and preach. It was the most worshipful and enjoyable time I’ve had preparing a sermon.

Here it is.

[qt:http://garrettperks.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/garrett_perks_12-30-07.mp3]

Or, you can download it here.

I just had a thought. Foreclosures are at the highest level our nation has seen since the Depression. Estimates are that barring Federal intervention (and perhaps in spite of it) a couple million more ARM’s will reset before the smoke clears and a solid chunk of these resets will result in foreclosures. Already in some areas it is not uncommon to see families in front yards full of furniture after a forcible eviction has been served. This amounts to a comparable, perhaps larger, refugee crisis than Katrina, just one that is not focused in such a narrow region as a single city.

The thought is just that a lot of folks need our prayers during this time. Many of them will be discovering that they have little else.

Here’s another thought. Eric Rofes is saying that becoming infected with HIV is a decision that we must respect. People must decide for themselves whether receiving body fluids from potentially HIV positive partners is more valuable to them as a sexual or spiritual part of their life than remaining alive is. The question arises whether the larger society is then responsible to provide treatment for men who seroconvert as a result of this decision.

Put another way, having unprotected sex of the sort Rofes is discussing risks health and life and also a great deal of money. Is the community responsible to subsidize that risk? Can someone demand that their community pay whatever it costs for them to have the sex acts the person feels they need to be fulfilled?

In the end, I think the answer is that a community owes sick people treatment. We can’t watch folks suffer without mercy. We must provide treatment to people suffering from AIDS. If we as a community take responsibility to provide treatment for these HIV positive men, then even if their decision to risk infection is educated, it is not a decision that affects only them. Unless they are able and willing to take responsibility to provide their own medical care, then they are only taking partial responsibility for their decision.

If they expect their community to join them in assuming responsibility for the risks of their personal decisions, can the community not express a degree of risk it is willing to accept and a degree it is not willing to accept?

The personal is political.

He helped me understand how AIDS felt to members of the gay community in a way I never did before. He tells the story of that culture from the early ’70s through the outbreak of the epidemic and the early fallout; the initial response and then the evolution of response as it became clear that AIDS wasn’t going away, in fact was going strong through the ’90s. He discusses what it felt like when he first heard of ‘gay cancer’ and then GRID, he discusses the impact of Stonewall and so forth.

Finally, he tries to reconceive a means of addressing the epidemic. I’m really startled by his view of AIDS prevention. He is critical of an approach to prevention that emphasizes safe as opposed to unsafe behaviors. For example characterizing unprotected sex with an HIV positive partner as an ‘unsafe behavior’ is problematic for Rofes. That’s startling. I was startled by that anyhow.

He argues that exchanging body fluid is an act with more value for some gay men than staying alive. In that light he feels we should respect these men’s values and that AIDS education should be limited to informing people of the relative risks of activities and the best scientific knowledge available on the disease, its transmission and other relevant facts without representing any particular acts as ‘unsafe.’ That, he would say is a determination to be made by individual gay men. He advocates a transition from risk prevention to risk management.

In defense of this position, it does seem that its first premise is sound. There do appear to be a large number of gay men who value unprotected sex with potentially infected partners more than they value life, or at least life without these acts of unprotected sex. Well after high risk behaviors were well identified, high risk behavior clearly continued. The idea that education equals prevention was obviously oversimplified.

In a way this isn’t an unusual problem at all. There are situations all around us where folks value various activities such that they are willing to die to continue enjoying them. Many smokers value a high risk behavior more than life, or at least more than life without the high risk activity. How about people who prefer overeating with cardiac infarction more than life without the two? For that matter, what about folks who’s personal spirituality involves Nike’s and Kool-Aid? Do we respect their values and allow them to make an informed decision? I suppose intelligent people can disagree about the answer to that one, but I think we have to.

One important difference between binging oneself to death on deep fried twinkies and pork rinds on the one hand and having unprotected sex with a man who is or may be HIV positive on the other, is the issue of harm to others. HIV is communicable, and exposes one to other communicable diseases in a way that obesity isn’t and doesn’t. A person who makes an informed decision to contract HIV doesn’t offer an informed decision to those who may in turn contract other diseases as a result of his disease.

The perfect world of informed decision makers that makes Eric Rofes’ argument work only exists if everyone who allows themselves to be infected informs everyone whom they partner with that they are infected. It only works if they exercise the utmost diligence to stay informed about whether or not they have become infected. Doesn’t it? And it only works if they don’t contract other diseases as a result that in turn are passed to others.

I’m sort of thinking aloud here. It is an interesting question that the book raises either way.

The passage that fell to me was 1 Corinthians 9:1-18. The issue is rights and laying them aside for the sake of others. Specifically, Paul has in mind his right as an apostle to receive pay from the Corinthian church, which he has not availed himself of. In this passage Paul asserts that Jesus has commanded churches not to compel their pastors to be bivocational, or work some second job to support theselves. He commands churches to provide their pastors with a living. Paul goes further in by mocking the notion of a bivocational pastor, “Who serves as a soldier at his own expense?” He asserts that a pastor has a right not to be bivocational.

In my sermon I challenged the notion that some churches are too small to support their pastor by pointing out that the alternative is that one man rather than an entire church, however small, support him. If the church will not support him, he must support himself.

I also discussed Paul’s choice not to exercise his right to be paid. This is contrary to the custom in our Western culture in which we fight for our rights and view the ideal society to be the one in which everyone has fought for their rights and won. Give me liberty or give me death. The personal is political. The trouble with this is that when everyone fights for their rights, the weak still lose. Even when the oppressed win, it is because they have become strong and they become the new oppressor. Look at the history of revolution.
Paul’s picture is of a society in which the strong lead by laying aside their rights for the sake of the weak. Husbands lead by laying aside their rights for the sake of their wives. The mature lay aside their rights for the sake of the immature and young. The powerful do not lord their power over the powerless, they lay aside their rights. There is no need for feminism in this society. No need for activism.

We have the supreme example of this in Jesus who, though He upheld the universe by the word of His power, humbled himself to the point of being tortured and killed by those He upheld. For their sakes he died. Death, however was unable to hold him and He rose from it. We for our part are empowered to endure suffering by His resurrection because we are told that those who are united with Him in the likeness of His suffering will also be united with Him in the likeness of His resurrection.

We can lay aside our rights because the suffering we endure as a result isn’t worthy to be compared with the glory we gain through it.
[qt:http://garrettperks.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/06-17-2007.mp3]
Or, download the sermon.

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.

There are a ton of amazing things in that passage. Two in particular jumped out. It said Jesus upholds the universe and that He made purification for sin. The thing that blew me away was the fact that there is no indication Jesus stopped upholding the universe when He made purification. It gives us every indication that as Jesus walked in Judea, as He was scourged and as He hung on a cross and died, He was at the same time upholding the universe by the word of His power.

As Jesus sweat in Gethsemane and as He cried out on the cross “Why have You forsaken me?” and when he yielded up His spirit, He was upholding the universe by the word of His power.

How about this, Psalm 8

O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
Out of the mouth of babes and infants,
you have established strength because of your foes,
to still the enemy and the avenger.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?

Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet,
all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!

It says God has crowned man with glory and honor and established strength from the mouth of babes. You wanna talk about strength from the mouth of babes? In Bethlahem there was once a baby who upheld the universe by the word of His power.

Or how about this, as He was being killed by the Romans and praying for their forgiveness, He was upholding His murderers by the word of His power as part of His universe. As Peter denied Him, Peter was upheld by Him.

Let’s bring this home. As you were impatient with your wife this morning or as you were looking at porn this afternoon, Jesus upheld you by the word of His power. What would it look like for us to live our lives like Jesus upheld the universe by the word of His power, or if we read the stories of His life in an awareness that He upholds the universe.

35 Reasons Not To Sin

1. Because a little sin leads to more sin.
2. Because my sin invites the discipline of God.
3. Because the time spent in sin is forever wasted.
4. Because my sin never pleases but always grieves God who loves me.
5. Because my sin places a greater burden on my spiritual leaders.
6. Because in time my sin always brings heaviness to my heart.
7. Because I am doing what I do not have to do.
8. Because my sin always makes me less than what I could be.
9. Because others, including my family, suffer consequences due to my sin.
10. Because my sin saddens the godly.
11. Because my sin makes the enemies of God rejoice.
12. Because sin deceives me into believing I have gained when in reality I have lost.
13. Because sin may keep me from qualifying for spiritual leadership.
14. Because the supposed benefits of my sin will never outweigh the consequences of disobedience.
15. Because repenting of my sin is such a painful process, yet I must repent.
16. Because sin is a very brief pleasure for an eternal loss.
17. Because my sin may influence others to sin.
18. Because my sin may keep others from knowing Christ.
19. Because sin makes light of the cross, upon which Christ died for the very purpose of taking away my sin.
20. Because it is impossible to sin and follow the Spirit at the same time.
21. Because God chooses not to respect the prayers of those who cherish their sin.
22. Because sin steals my reputation and robs me of my testimony.
23. Because others once more earnest than I have been destroyed by just such sins.
24. Because the inhabitants of heaven and hell would all testify to the foolishness of this sin.
25. Because sin and guilt may harm both mind and body.
26. Because sins mixed with service make the things of God tasteless.
27. Because suffering for sin has no joy or reward, though suffering for righteousness has both.
28. Because my sin is adultery with the world.
29. Because, though forgiven, I will review this very sin at the Judgment Seat where loss and gain of eternal rewards are applied.
30. Because I can never really know ahead of time just how severe the discipline for my sin might be.
31. Because my sin may be an indication of a lost condition.
32. Because to sin is not to love Christ.
33. Because my unwillingness to reject this sin now grants it an authority over me greater than I wish to believe.
34. Because sin glorifies God only in His judgment of it and His turning of it to good use, never because it is worth anything on it’s own.
35. Because I promised God He would be Lord of my life.

Relinquish Your Rights – Reject the Sin – Renew the Mind – Rely on God

Copyright © 1992 Jim Elliff Christian Communicators Worldwide, Inc. 201 Main, Parkville, MO 64152 USA www.CCWonline.org Permission granted for not-for-sale reproduction in exact form including copyright Other uses require written permission. Write for additional materials.

www.BulletinInserts.org

Good stuff eh? Interesting this Elliff guy connected rights to sin in the last line there. I think I might write more about that later.