The Children of the Burning Heart!

By Philip Martin

The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie. It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world. It is not the X-rated video, but the prime-time dribble of triviality we drink in every night.

But it would be a great mistake to think that the awakening of desire for the Bridegroom would produce a wave of monastic withdrawal into the fasting and prayer of passive waiting. That is not what the awakening of desire for Christ would produce. It would produce a radical, new commitment to complete the task of world evangelization, no matter what the cost. And fasting would not become a pacifistic discipline for private hopes, but a fearsome missionary weapon in the fight of faith.—John Piper1

I want deliberately to encourage this mighty longing after God. The lack of it has brought us to our present low estate. Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people. He waits to be wanted.

To have found God and still to pursue Him is scorned by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart.—A. W. Tozer2

When I was doing this study on having a hunger for God’s Word and I came across the two preceding quotations, they affected me deeply. Right then I felt the tug of the Spirit on my heart and I knew the Lord wanted me to stop and do some good old-fashioned soul-searching, self-evaluating, and bookkeeping with my soul to see how I was doing.

I asked myself, “Do I hunger and thirst after God’s Word and God’s Spirit like the ‘hart pants after the water brook’? Would I or could I call myself ‘a child of the burning heart’? What does it mean to have a ‘burning heart’?”

Almost instantly after asking myself these questions, I got the following, based on Bible passages. I tried my best to record them as they came. Here’s what the Lord gave me in answer to my questions:

“The children of the burning heart” hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they know that they shall be filled. Their soul thirsts for God, for the living God, and cries out, “When shall I come and appear before God?” Their flesh longs for Him in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is. As the hart pants after the water brooks, so pants their soul after God.3

They know that when they draw near to God that He draws near to them, because He loves them that love Him and they that seek Him early will find Him. They also count it all joy when they fall into diverse temptations, for they know that the trying of their faith is more precious than gold, even much fine gold.4

Daily they count not themselves to have already apprehended, but this one thing they do: they forget those things that are behind, and reaching forward to those things that are before, they press towards the mark of the high calling of God which is in Christ Jesus, that they may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His suffering.5

They are those who desire a better country, that is, a heavenly, whose builder and maker is God. In the past they have wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, and tormented, of whom it was said that the world was not worthy of them, and He (God) was not ashamed to be called their God.6

By seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, they know that all other things shall be added unto them. They esteem the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of the world. For this they are willing to suffer the loss of all things and to count them but dung, that they may know Him whom to know is life eternal.7

I'd like to share another quote from John Piper, which challenged me to want to drink deeply of the “water of life” and to desire to become a “child of the burning heart.”

“If you don't feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because you have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because you have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Your soul is stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great.”8
Bible verses on spiritual desire, hunger and thirst

One thing have I desired of the LORD, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to inquire in his temple.9

As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?10

Awake, my soul! Awake, harp and lyre! I will awaken the dawn. I will praise you, O Lord, among the nations; I will sing of you among the peoples. For great is your love, reaching to the heavens; your faithfulness reaches to the skies.11

Find rest, O my soul, in God alone; my hope comes from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will not be shaken. My salvation and my honor depend on God; he is my mighty rock, my refuge. Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your hearts to him, for God is our refuge.12

O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water. I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory. Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you. I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands. My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods; with singing lips my mouth will praise you. On my bed I remember you; I think of you through the watches of the night. Because you are my help, I sing in the shadow of your wings. My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.13

Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.14

How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord Almighty! My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the LORD; my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God. Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may have her young—a place near your altar, O LORD Almighty, my King and my God. Blessed are those who dwell in your house; they are ever praising you. Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere; I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked.15

My soul is consumed with longing for your laws at all times. My soul faints with longing for your salvation.16

I spread out my hands to you; my soul thirsts for you like a parched land.17

My soul yearns for you in the night; in the morning my spirit longs for you. When your judgments come upon the earth, the people of the world learn righteousness.18

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.19

For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry.”20

Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation.21

Yesterday I came across the article below by A. W. Tozer that I never knew existed.
Formula for a Burning Heart


(By A. W. Tozer)

Any Christian who desires to, may experience a radical spiritual renaissance, and this altogether independent of the attitude of his fellow Christians.

The important question now is: How? Well, here are some suggestions which anyone can follow and which, I am convinced, will result in a wonderfully improved Christian life.

1. Get thoroughly dissatisfied with yourself.

Complacency is the deadly enemy of spiritual progress. The contented soul is the stagnant soul. When speaking of earthly goods, Paul could say, “I have learned ... to be content”; but when referring to his spiritual life, he testified, “I press toward the mark.” Stir up the gift of God that is in thee.

2. Set your face like a flint toward a sweeping transformation of your life.

Timid experimenters are tagged for failure before they start. We must throw our whole soul into our desire for God. “The Kingdom of God suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.”

3. Put yourself in the way of the blessing.

It is a mistake to look for grace to visit us as a kind of benign magic, or to expect God’s help to come as a windfall apart from conditions known and met. There are plainly marked paths which lead straight to the green pastures; let us walk in them. To desire revival, for instance, and at the same time to neglect prayer and devotion is to wish one way and walk another.

4. Do a thorough job of repenting.

Do not hurry to get it over with. Let godly sorrow do her healing work. Until we allow the consciousness of sin to wound us, we will never develop a fear of evil. It is our wretched habit of tolerating sin that keeps us in our half-dead condition.

5. Make restitution wherever possible.

If you owe a debt, pay it, or at least have a frank understanding with your creditor about your intentions to pay, so that your honesty will be above question. If you have quarreled with anyone, go as far as you can in an effort to achieve reconciliation. As fully as possible make the crooked things straight.

6. Bring your life into accord with the Sermon on the Mount and such other New Testament scriptures as are designed to instruct us in the way of righteousness.

An honest man with an open Bible and a pad and pencil is sure to find out what is wrong with him.

I recommend that the self-examination be made on our knees, rising to obey God's commandments as they are revealed to us from the Word. There is nothing romantic or colorful about this plain, downright way of dealing with ourselves, but it gets the work done. Isaac’s workmen did not look like heroic figures as they digged in the valley, but they got the wells open, and that was what they had set out to do.

7. Be serious-minded.

The devil’s ideals, moral standards, and mental attitudes are being accepted by you without your knowing it.

You wonder why you can make no progress in your Christian life. Your interior climate is not favorable to the growth of spiritual graces. There must be a radical change in your habits or there will not be any permanent improvement in your interior life.

8. Deliberately narrow your interests.

The jack-of-all-trades is the master of none. The Christian life requires that we be specialists. Too many projects use up time and energy without bringing us nearer to God. If you will narrow your interests, God will enlarge your heart. “Jesus only” seems to the unconverted man to be the motto of death. But a great company of happy men and women can testify that it became to them a way into a world infinitely wider and richer than anything they had ever known before.

Christ is the essence of all wisdom, beauty and virtue. To know Him in growing intimacy is to increase in appreciation of all things good and beautiful. The mansions of the heart will become larger when their doors are thrown open to Christ and closed against the world and sin. Try it.

9. Begin to witness.

Find something to do for God and your fellow men. Refuse to rust out. Make yourself available. Take the low place until such time as God sees fit to set you in a higher one. Back your new intentions with your money and your gifts, such as they are.

10. Have faith in God.

Begin to expect. Look up toward the throne where your Advocate sits at the right hand of God. All heaven is on your side. God will not disappoint you.

If you will follow these suggestions, you will most surely experience revival in your own heart. And who can tell how far it may spread? God knows how desperately the church needs a spiritual resurrection. And it can only come through the revived individual.22


1 Hunger for God (Crossway, 1997).

2 The Pursuit of God (Christian Publications, Inc., 1948).

3 Matthew 5:6; Psalm 42:2, 63:1, 42:1.

4 James 4:8; Proverbs 8:17; James 1:2; 1 Peter 1:7.

5 Philippians 3:13–14, 10.

6 Hebrews 11:10, 37, 38, 16.

7 Matthew 6:33; Hebrews 11:26; Philippians 3:7–8.

8 Hunger for God (Crossway, 1997).

9 Psalm 27:4 KJV.

10 Psalm 42:1–2 NIV.

11 Psalm 57:8–10 NIV.

12 Psalm 62:5–8 NIV.

13 Psalm 63:1–8 NIV.

14 Psalm 73:25–26 NIV.

15 Psalm 84:1–4, 10 NIV.

16 Psalm 119:20, 81 NIV

17 Psalm 143:6 NIV.

18 Isaiah 26:9 NIV.

19 Matthew 5:6 KJV.

20 John 6:33, 35a NIV.

21 1 Peter 2:2 NIV.

22 A. W. Tozer, “Formula for a Burning Heart.”

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Greece in "Great Depression!"

Reuters, July 22, 2012

ATHENS (Reuters)—Greece is in a “Great Depression” similar to the American one in the 1930s, the country’s Prime Minister Antonis Samaras told former U.S. President Bill Clinton on Sunday.

Samaras was speaking two days before a team of Greece’s international lenders arrive in Athens to push for further cuts needed for the debt-laden country to qualify for further rescue payments and avoid a chaotic default.

Athens wants to soften the terms of a 130-billion euro bailout agreed last March with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, to soften their impact on an economy going through its worst post-war recession.

By the end of this year Greek GDP is expected to have shrunk by about a fifth in five consecutive years of recession since 2008, hammered by tax hikes, spending cuts and wage reductions required by two EU/IMF bailouts. Unemployment climbed to a record 22.6 percent in the first quarter.

“You had the Great Depression in the United States,” Samaras told Clinton, who was visiting Greece as part of a delegation of Greek-American businessmen. “This is exactly what we’re going through in Greece—it’s our version of the Great Depression.”

Athens must reduce its budget deficit below 3 percent of GDP by the end of 2014, from 9.3 percent of GDP in 2011—requiring almost another 12 billion euros in cuts and higher taxes on top of the 17 billion successive governments have cut from the budget shortfall.

Greece wants its lenders to give it two more years to achieve the budget goal to avoid an even deeper economic slump but its lenders have opposed the idea because it would imply even more financial aid.

Highlighting growing frustration with Athens, German magazine “Der Spiegel” reported on Sunday, citing high-ranking representatives in Brussels, that the IMF may not take part in any additional financing for Greece.

German economy minister Philipp Roesler told ARD public television he did not expect Greece could fulfill its requirements and that that would mean no more money to Athens.

“I am more than skeptical,” Roesler, who is the head of the junior party in Germany’s ruling coalition and often outspoken on euro zone issues, said in an interview.

“If Greece does not fulfill its requirements, there cannot be any more payments to Greece,” added Roesler, whose views often do not reflect those of Chancellor Angela Merkel or Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble.

Clinton criticized Greece’s lenders for focusing excessively on austerity, saying Athens will be more likely to repay its debt if its manages economic recovery first.

“(It) is self-defeating… if every day people are saying this may or may not work to give us back 100 cents on the dollar, so give us more austerity today,” he told Samaras.

“People need something to look forward to when they get up in the morning—young Greeks need something to believe in so they can stake their future out here,” Clinton said.

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The German Circumcision Debate

By David Rising, AP, Jul 22, 2012 BERLIN (AP)—Rabbi David Goldberg had performed about 25 ritual circumcisions this year before a regional court ruled in June that the practice amounted to causing criminal bodily harm. Despite the decision, he expects to perform the same number in second half of the year. “I haven’t changed anything,” said Goldberg, one of Germany’s few mohels—a person trained in the Jewish ritual of circumcision. Though the Cologne court’s decision has raised fears among Muslims and Jews that circumcising their children could get them into legal trouble, it has had little practical effect in reducing religious circumcisions—especially since the government has weighed in with assurances to both communities that their practices will be respected. But both Jews and Muslims say that a more lasting effect may be “us vs. them” tensions that have raised an invisible barrier between secular Germans and religious minorities. “It is no surprise that the Catholics and the Protestants have stood behind the Muslim community in this case and denounced the verdict,” said Aiman Mazyek, the chairman of Germany’s Central Council of Muslims. “In my opinion this is no picture of tolerance or religious freedom from a modern civilization. It is a step backward.” Jews are religiously required to circumcise baby boys on the 8th day after birth in a ceremony seen as their entrance into a covenant with God. Muslims also usually perform the procedure early in a boy’s life, though sometimes wait until later in childhood. In the Cologne decision, announced June 26, the court said circumcising young boys on religious grounds amounts to bodily harm even if parents consent to the procedure. The charge is punishable by anything from a fine to up to five years in prison. The ruling came in the case of the circumcision of a 4-year-old Muslim boy that led to medical complications. The boy was circumcised at the request of his parents. He developed complications two days later and was rushed to the hospital. Prosecutors charged the doctor, who was acquitted when a Cologne court found that he had performed the procedure properly, and that he had the parents’ permission to carry out the circumcision. But prosecutors appealed, and the higher Cologne court ruled that in a case of circumcision for non-medical reasons, the welfare of the child outweighed the religious rights of the parents. The acquittal of the doctor, however, was upheld because the court said the law had been unclear. Though not precedent setting for other courts in Germany, the ruling prompted an outcry from Jewish and Muslim groups across Europe, while in Israel the German ambassador was invited to explain the decision to the Knesset. Germany’s main Catholic and Protestant organizations also condemned the ruling as an attack on religious freedom. The most disturbing part of the ruling for Jews and Muslims is the court’s contention that being circumcised “runs contrary to the interest of the child to later choose his religious affiliation,” said Josh Spinner, an American rabbi who grew up in Hamilton, Canada, and has been in Berlin for more than a decade. “I’m a circumcised male, I expect that I have the right to become a Catholic or Protestant or Buddhist or atheist if I choose to today. But what the court is saying is that if I am circumcised I am a Jew,” he said. “There’s a very dark and very illiberal view of what this mark does on the individual.” Spinner said the ruling has the potential of opening the door to even greater restrictions on religious freedom for minorities—a particularly sensitive issue in Germany given the years of state-imposed anti-Jewish measures under the Nazis that preceded the Holocaust. “Germany needs to understand that if they want to tolerate Jews then they need to tolerate Judaism,” Spinner said. In the past week, however, Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert has weighed in several times, promising that the government will come up with a solution that will allow the practice. Had the government spoken out strongly sooner, said Goldberg, Germany may have managed to prevent the discussion from turning into an “us vs. them” embroilment. “I get a lot of emails from non-Jewish Germans saying things like ‘if you don’t like it, leave Germany’—very anti-Semitic. It’s a bad atmosphere,” said the rabbi, who immigrated to Germany 19 years ago from Israel and now lives in the southeastern city of Hof. Furer said he hoped that the circumcision debate would be expose more Germans to other religious ideas. “I think a lot of Germans don’t understand our religion and our religious issues,” he said.

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War Is Still a Racket

Book review by Christopher J. Coyne, Reason, July 21, 2012

Useful Enemies: When Waging Wars is More Important than Winning Them, by David Keen. Yale University Press, 2012, 304 pp. $38.

“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”

So begins U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler’s 1935 pamphlet War is a Racket. Butler, who had participated in many military interventions, came to realize that war allowed elites to gain while less powerful citizens and foreigners bore the conflict’s financial, physical, and emotional costs. Citizens, policymakers, pundits, and scholars have yet to internalize Butler’s warning. Hence the importance of David Keen’s Useful Enemies.

Keen, a professor of conflict studies at the London School of Economics, investigates why wars last as long as they do despite the significant costs associated with fighting and despite western governments’ supposed efforts to minimize the violence. To address this issue, Keen argues, we need to go beyond the basic “contest model” of conflict, which holds that war is a fight between two sides who seek victory and, with it, an end to violence. War, he argues, serves economic, political, and psychological functions that, taken together, can lead to long, persistent conflicts. To demonstrate this, he explores a wide range of cases: Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Uganda, Vietnam, and more.

The economic functions of war include control of natural resources, steady employment for soldiers and rebels, and continued flows of international aid from outside governments, who tend to throw significant amounts of money at conflict situations. The aid has several perverse effects: propping up regimes that violate basic human rights, distorting the local economy, contributing to corruption, and funding the purchases of weapons and other resources that perpetuate conflict. Keen points out how supposed enemies often avoid direct conflict and work together to secure and divide resources while harming innocent civilians. In Sierra Leone, for example, government forces colluded with rebels to minimize conflict and share in the spoils of diamond mining. Part of this arrangement involved soldiers providing weapons to rebels who, in some instances, used them against citizens. The basic contest model overlooks these dynamics because it assumes that two clearly defined “sides” are fighting each other with the goal of victory.

The political functions of war include consolidating power while weakening the opposition, gaining advantages in elections, rallying support from citizens in the fight against the enemy, and destabilizing rival regimes. Although many view conflict as a problem plaguing poor counties, Keen points out that these political functions apply to both developed and underdeveloped nations. Indeed, as the economic historian Robert Higgs has demonstrated in his research on the political economy of crisis and fear, governments invest significant resources creating a culture of apprehension among its citizens in order to create a demand for its various interventions at home and abroad. The ongoing War on Terror is but one example of this logic at work, and Keen dedicates a powerful chapter to demonstrating how the state of “permanent emergency” in the U.S. is driven by a variety of vested interests who benefit from the perpetuation of fear of a faceless enemy. The military benefits directly because a permanent state of emergency serves as an ongoing justification for high levels of spending. Industry benefits too, be it the firms with lucrative contracts to supply bases abroad or the information technology companies that receive federal funds to develop surveillance equipment.

Finally, conflict can serve a psychological function for those involved. For example, war is one means of remedying feelings of injustice and powerlessness. Further, initial violence can lead to retaliatory violence by victims who seek to restore some sense of control. Those who wish to orchestrate conflict often manipulate feelings of shame in order to attract soldiers and to give violence some sense of legitimacy.

Keen concludes that many of the standard policy tools for solving conflicts—foreign aid, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism—actually extend a war’s duration. He also makes it clear that violence is often easier to begin than to end. Though Keen does not say so, this implies that we should have a default foreign policy of non-intervention, in terms of both direct military engagement and indirect interference such as foreign aid. If we take seriously the idea that most wars are characterized by actors who benefit from the continuation of conflict, than we should strive to avoid intervention in the first place.

Granted, that’s easier said than done. While Keen’s analysis highlights the various functions of war, it also makes clear why policies based on those insights are unlikely to be adopted. The massive existing edifice that benefits from a permanent state of conflict will also work against non-interventionist policies. This edifice includes the array of bureaucracies, contractors, consultants, and international organizations whose very existence is predicated on the continuation of conflict.

The way out of this situation is by no means simple or clear. But it will surely help for citizens to become more skeptical of governments’ intentions when it comes to war. This would require the realization that international interventions, more often than not, do more to undermine citizen safety than to enhance it. Shifting public opinion requires the reiteration of Smedley Butler’s message, and Useful Enemies does that nicely.

Christopher J. Coyne is F.A. Harper Professor of Economics at George Mason University.

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Opinion vs. Biblical Authority-Georgia Purdom

Proclaiming the Faith in Branson

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 06:00 AM PDT


Last week, I had the opportunity to speak five times to the audiences at AiG’s Branson conference. I spoke four times to the women (in two identical women’s tracks) with the focus being human life. Specifically, I addressed the issues of the oneness of the human race and the value of human life. It really frustrates me in today’s culture to see a lot of Christians battling against the issues of racism and abortion on the basis of opinion. Some Christians will say there should be equality and we should value life because “all people are important no matter what ‘race’ or disabilities they have because they can contribute something good to society.”

While this may be a true statement, it should not be the basis by which we argue for the concept of one race and the value of life because they are nothing more than opinions. I shared with the ladies quotes from other people who have very different opinions.

Who’s opinion is right? I told them I didn’t care what their opinions were and that we need to be arguing for the concept of one race the value of life from the authority of God’s Word, not opinion! My presentations focused on equipping them to do just that. I’m thinking the topic of opinion vs. biblical authority would be great for a future presentation.

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Eisenhower´s Farewell Prophecy!

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Bill Cooper: Why he was killed!

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JFK´s Exposing the Illuminati

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Bill Cooper about JFK´s killing!

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JFK´s speech about the Illuminati/Bilderburgers: Prophetic warnings form JFK

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