"Trump Won't Forgive This" - Andrew Tate DESTROYS Zelenskyy Over Oval Office Fiasco
Tuesday, March 4, 2025
We Are Imperfect, He Is Perfect
March 4, 2025
A compilation
Audio length: 10:21
Download Audio (9.48MB)
Download Audio (9.48MB)
Ephesians 4:13 says that the spiritual gifts are given to build up the body of Christ “until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” Some translations say that we will become “perfect” (instead of “mature”), and from this some people have mistakenly thought that we can reach sinless perfection in this life. The Bible teaches that, while we are in the flesh, we will always struggle with a sin nature (see Romans 7:14–24). No one will be “perfect” (sinless) until we reach heaven.
The word translated “mature” in Ephesians 4:13 is the Greek word teleios. It is used throughout the New Testament to mean “perfect,” “complete,” “full-grown,” and “mature.” What Ephesians 4:13 teaches is that, the more we grow in Christ, the stronger and more unified we will be as a church. The verse does not teach that we will stop sinning. …
True perfection will not come until the rapture of the church, when we rise to meet Jesus in the air (1 Thessalonians 4:17). At that time the dead in Christ will be resurrected, and the bodies of the living will be changed (Philippians 3:20–21; 1 Corinthians 15:54). … Our redemption will be complete, and our sin will be gone forever. We will live and reign with Christ in sinless perfection forever.—GotQuestions.org1
*
I was ten years old when I first heard of Albert Schweitzer, and I was really impressed by his dedication—to the point that I started contemplating becoming a doctor and following in his footsteps in Africa. Those were the days when in order to know more about something or somebody, you had to look through books, encyclopedias, and most of the time, go to the library. In other words, curiosity didn’t find immediate satisfaction, and there was a certain amount of serendipity and mystery involved.
I was a bookworm, and I started reading about people who had been missionaries, explorers, freedom fighters, and so on. Albert was the first in a long series, followed by Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, Gandhi, Florence Nightingale, and many others. I realized that besides the many awful villains I had to read about in history books at school, this earth has also seen some pretty amazing people!
So at a young age I determined to belong to the category of world-changers. Now, many years later, I’m glad to say that came to pass. I was able to follow my heart and spend years on challenging mission fields, and I still dedicate most of my time to the needy and various worthwhile causes.
It hasn’t been without a price and without mistakes, but here comes the best part. Talking about mistakes, one of the side effects of this new age of “immediately accessible information” was that I got to read more about my many heroes and found out that they weren’t as perfect and sinless as I’d imagined. All of them had feet of clay, and some of the stuff they believed in, said, or did, could be disappointing initially.
But later, it was precisely their “imperfections” and human frailties that encouraged me when I too happened to fall off my pedestal.
The good these world-changers did is proof that you don’t need to be perfect to change your part of the world. After all, none of them were, but they changed their world!—Anna Perlini
*
1 John 1:6 says: “If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.” In other words, how we walk testifies to whether we really have a relationship with God.
He goes on to say, “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7). So he is saying that walking in the light is essential to show that we are being cleansed from our sins by the blood of Jesus.
Now 1 John 1:8: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” So he says, “Walking in the light cannot mean sinlessness”—let that sink in. Walking in the light cannot mean sinlessness because he just said, “You have to walk in the light,” and he just said, “If you say you’re sinless, you’re dead wrong.” Well, what then does walking in the light mean?
So he goes on in one more verse, 1 John 1:9: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” So here is John’s description of the imperfect Christian. The imperfect Christian does not claim perfection, but he does claim to walk in the light—because if you don’t walk in the light, you don’t have fellowship with God, and the blood of Jesus doesn’t cleanse or cover you from sin.
What then does “walk in the light” mean if it doesn’t mean sinlessness (1 John 1:7)? His answer is that it means a pattern of obedience that involves regular, sincere confession of sin. The person who walks in the light has enough light to see sin for what it is, to hate it, to confess it, to receive forgiveness for it with thankfulness and humility, and to press on with fresh resolve to love God and people better. ... Now we need to pray that God would work the miracle of this biblical pattern into our lives.—John Piper2
*
Think about it: If I were perfect, I wouldn’t need Jesus. The whole reason Jesus came to earth and died for me is because I am not able to achieve perfection.
As Colossians 2:13–14 says, “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.”
When I read this verse, I feel such deep gratitude. Christ’s finished work on the cross has canceled the record of our debt. He took upon Himself the punishment we deserved for our sins.
He paid our debt in full. Not because of who we are or what we have done but because of who He is and how much He loves us. Because of this, when God looks at us, He sees Jesus. This is the gospel. This is the Good News!
His death on my behalf allows me to live with freedom and joy—free from having to live life chasing after pleasing other people, being perfect, or managing my reputation.
Whether it’s parenting, marriage, working at our job, or just living life with others, we will never do it all right. And that’s not the goal. Let’s be people who are honest enough to admit our mistakes and imperfections and our need for Jesus each and every minute of the day!—Crystal Paine3
Published on Anchor March 2025. Read by Lenore Welsh. Music by Michael Dooley.
Judge Andrew Napolitano on Trump. Lincoln, and Woodrow Wlison
I have often thought that after Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson was our worst president. By worst is meant least faithful to the Constitution and most destructive of personal liberty.
With the exception of Lincoln's dictatorship — during which the federal government, crushed the states' natural right to secede from a union they had voluntarily joined, and instead brought about the systematic deaths of 750,000 Americans, many civilians — America from its Founding to the early part of the 20th century more or less enjoyed the James Madison model for government.
Under this model, the federal government could only legislate, regulate, spend and govern in the 16 discrete areas of governance that the Constitution delegated to it. All other areas of human behavior and governance were left free to individual choices or governance by the states.
From and after Wilson's presidency, the Madisonian model was replaced by the Wilsonian one. Under this model, the feds could legislate, regulate, spend and govern in any area of human behavior for which there was a national political will, except for those areas that are expressly prohibited to them by the Constitution.
It would take another generation before the courts fully caught up to this, during which they gradually permitted Congress basically to write any law, regulate any behavior, spend any money, tax any event and intrude upon any relationship so long as it did not confront an express constitutional prohibition.
The Constitution itself — which Madison designed both to establish the federal government and to limit it — has been a dismal failure as an instrument of limitation. Madison himself wrote that only a structure external to the Constitution could effectively keep the federal government in its place.
He was referring to the power of the states to nullify acts of the federal government that the states determined were outside its constitutional authority. He was also referring to secession — the natural right that individuals and political sovereignties and subdivisions have to leave the government.
Just as the 13 colonies seceded from Great Britain, Madison argued, individuals can reject the government; smaller subdivisions can leave larger ones, and states can leave the feds.
In his masterpiece "Democracy: The God That Failed," Hans-Hermann Hoppe articulates the truism that one is not truly free if one cannot leave the government. This applies to persons as well as to political subdivisions. The forced retention of persons and groups under the government's monopolistic jurisdiction is totalitarian.
Without the threat of nullification and secession, there is no effective restraint on the feds.
Now back to Wilson. His governmental sins were many — World War I, the Espionage Act, the federal income tax, the popular election of U.S. Senators, the Federal Reserve; and his government by experts, known today as the administrative state.
This last insidious structure is neither fish nor fowl; it is not clearly in any branch of constitutional government. It writes rules, enforces them and interprets them. As an example, the U.S. Tax Code, enacted by Congress, runs to 2,600 pages. It is an indecipherable monstrosity.
But the IRS's own regulations — written by IRS experts, not by Congress — run to 9,000 pages. And the IRS's experts' interpretations of IRS regulations run to 70,000 pages!
This is Wilson's government by experts.
According to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, giving away regulatory power to experts is an unconstitutional delegation of Congress' legislative powers to entities that are not answerable to the voters. Administrative agency heads are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
But the folks who write the rules are permanent bureaucrats who do not change, no matter who is in the White House.
Until now
Last week, President Donald Trump began the systematic dismantling of government by experts. He rightfully has complained that the administrative agencies answer to no one. They make rules, they enforce them, they prosecute those who allegedly ignored them and they even judge their own prosecutions.
In Administrative Law courts, the judges are not independent. They work for the same boss as the prosecutor — the administrative agency.
He'd be on sounder constitutional ground if he did the dismantling by legislation, not fiat.
But he's fed up with these agencies. In recent times, these unanswerable and unaccountable agencies declared mud puddles to be navigable waters, told all Americans without scientific basis to stand six feet apart in public but not in private, and even forced federal agents onto ships in the high seas to count the number of fish caught — and then billed the fishermen for the salary of their unwanted federal guests!
The courts have rarely interfered with administrative agencies because of a monstrosity called the Chevron Doctrine. This rule told courts that they must show deference to an administrative agency's interpretations of its own rules, because its employees are — channeling Wilson — experts.
Last year, as if a precursor to Trump's second term in office, the Supreme Court finally rejected Chevron.
Hereafter, when a person challenges an administrative agency in court, or is challenged by it, the litigants stand as equals — and the government must prove its case. There is no longer a presumption that the experts were correct.
All regulations interfere with personal liberty. When the government interferes with liberty, not only should there be no deference; there should be a presumption that the government's behavior is immoral, unconstitutional and unlawful.
Why? Because freedom is the default position. Government is the negation of freedom. Freedom is everyone's personal natural birthright.
The sovereignty of the person — made in the image and likeness of the Creator — can never be equal morally and legally to a gaggle of politicians running an artificial monopoly of power in a geographic area.
Our rights are either inalienable or they're not. If they're not, freedom is an illusion. If they are inalienable, the government must leave our freedoms alone.
Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Notre Dame Law School, was the youngest life-tenured Superior Court judge in the history of New Jersey. He is the author of five books on the U.S. Constitution. Read Judge Andrew P. Napolitano's Reports — More Here
