Friday, March 21, 2014

Fri Mar 21st Todays News

For twenty two years I have been responsibly addressing an issue, and I cannot carry on. I am petitioning the NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell to remedy my distress. I leave it up to him if he chooses to address the issue. Regardless of your opinion of conservative government, the issue is pressing. Please sign my petition at http://www.change.org/en-AU/petitions/nsw-premier-barry-o-farrell-remedy-the-persecution-of-dd-ball?

It was a strange concept. Simple and straight forward, like all good ideas. It built in complexity. It was placed in a movie and became very popular and well known as the theme for the Exorcist, but Tubular Bells is not a horror track. The second side is a comedy track. It took me a long time to get to the second side, because I liked the first so much, and the second began in a more sophisticated way. Vivian Stanshall, born on this day in 1943, was in his late twenties when he recorded his voice over. He was a party person who got along well with Keith Moon. His voice then was that of an old drunk. Perfect for the concept. 

Also on this day in 1556, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer was burnt at the stake. Mary had had an ax to grind with him over her mother's divorce. Cranmer had approved it in doctrinal terms. But Mary was not in a position to kill him for it. He was accused of heresy and tortured. After two years, when he was said to be reconciled with the Catholic Church, he was executed. At his execution, he recanted his reconciliation. Queen Elizabeth 2nd has not got that authority, but then neither did Mary. Mary had willing supporters engaged in a power struggle. A strange concept.
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Hatches
Happy birthday and many happy returns to those born on this day, across the years, along with
Matches
Despatches
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Confusion, chaos and buffoonery

Piers Akerman – Thursday, March 20, 2014 (8:12pm)

CLIVE Palmer’s buffoonish presence in federal parliament is a continuing indictment of the voters in the Queensland seat of Fairfax. Whatever could they have been thinking last September when they elected the erratic twerker to represent them?

Icon Arrow Continue reading 'Confusion, chaos and buffoonery'
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FAIRFAX ALLIANCE

Tim Blair – Friday, March 21, 2014 (4:04pm)

A point of clarification from Fairfax’s Clementine Ford, who wishes it to be known that the “F**k Tony Abbott” t-shirts seen at the weekend’s March in March protests weren’t the t-shirts she made and sold with some helpful Fairfaxpromotion
I didn’t make the ‘F**k Tony Abbott’ t-shirts white on black. Mine are black on white.

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Those aren’t my t-shirts. Those are the Socialist Alliance ones. 
So Fairfax and Socialist Alliance are marching, so to speak, in lock-step. No story there for Media Watch. No story at all.
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF LABOR’S CARBON TAX

Tim Blair – Friday, March 21, 2014 (10:11am)

In 2010, just prior to that year’s election, then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard promised that there would be no carbon taxunder her government. Then, in 2011, Gillard announced that there would be a carbon tax under her government.
Later in 2011 Gillard and Kevin Rudd kissed in celebration after the carbon tax legislation was passed. Then, once he’d regained the Labor leadership in 2013, Rudd said that Labor did not have a mandate to introduce the carbon tax. Last July, the then-Prime Minister announced: “Today we’ve taken the decision to terminate the carbon tax.”
Earlier this month, Labor senator Louise Pratt told parliament: “We are committed to scrapping the carbon tax.” But yesterday Labor voted in the senate to keep the carbon tax.
And that’s where we are now. Labor is keeping a tax they were committed to scrapping after promising not to introduce it before it was terminated. Simple.
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PEOPLE EXPRESSING HOW UPSET THEY ARE

Tim Blair – Friday, March 21, 2014 (3:34am)

Evil forces are undermining the sacred March in March movement! Margo Kingston is on to it. Meanwhile, angry Marchists take issue with this site’s fair and unbiased coverage: 
• This attempt to paint a few in the crowd as representative of everyone? This is a LIE! … You are a LIAR and you won’t get away with it.
• This is not journalism.  All you have done in this ill written story is pick on people, and ridicule people by belittling what is a very LARGE sum of people dedicating their Sunday to expressing how upset they are … Don’t ridicule them. This is not a job done properly. The same can be said for this government.  Slamming people without investigatiing truths. Very unprofessional work Tim Blair!!!!!!
• Why are you not publishing replies from people who disagree with your opinion? You will find that a large portion of the people that marched that day were highly educated and not the rabble that you imply.
• You jest, because you have probably felt no discomfort in your oh so perfect and care free lives, whereas tens of thousands of people decided to stand up for what is right. You are the enablers of a bigoted and shamelessly bias Prime Minister. Label us “lefties” all you want, but when your own lives are rudely interrupted and your own feet trampled on, you will be in the streets, shoulder to shoulder with the people you mock. So, laugh it up while you still can.
• In my lifetime I’ve never seen Aussies band together like this to say ‘enough’. We now have media that doesn’t even bother to cover it’s bias. We now have govt that doesn’t feel it has to even acknowledge the people and has free reign to do whatever they like.
• I’ve been a rusted on Liberal voter for decades - but as my kids grow and as I see the changes to the world they’ll inherit I’ve become increasingly concerned.
• I will keep attending marches until the Government starts responding in an intelligent manner to our concerns.
• “Lack of focus” ??? Call yourself a journalist?  It was a very focused March Tim. It was “focused” on “No Confidence in Tony Abbott” as PM … Because of the hundreds of good programs Abbott is axing and the mass of atrocious policies this Government is advocating he has too go. 
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I’M ILMARI LAHTI

Tim Blair – Friday, March 21, 2014 (2:53am)

Let’s all be Finnish.
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POETS OR SPEECH-CAPABLE COCKROACHES

Tim Blair – Friday, March 21, 2014 (2:50am)

Our choice, according to Elizabeth Farrelly
Seems to me we have two choices. Either we form an axis of planet-lovers that includes farmers, greens, poets, priests and tourism operators, to protect nature from ourselves. Or we accept that future cockroaches, as the inheritor species, will tell their children parables about the too-clever ape-race, and how the oppressor always becomes the oppressed. 
The “axis of planet-lovers” seems to be missing a few key players. Where are the scrimshaw artists, rune decoders andmattress deliverymen
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Mark Scott breaches ABC code to promote a product - and get even

Andrew Bolt March 21 2014 (5:04pm)

Media

I’ve argued that the ABC is out of control, and managing director Mark Scott must rein in the bias.
Today comes astonishing evidence that it is Scott himself who is out of control.
The ABC has a very firm code of conduct which it insists staff observe - do not use the ABC to flog particular commercial products - either on air or on its interactive platforms.
9.4.21 Consistent with Section 16 (Involvement with commercial organisations, products and services), ABC interactive services must not be used to unduly promote commercial products or services.
One ABC interactive platform is Mark Scott’s Twtitter account; branded as an ABC account - and even carrying a reminder of Scott obligation not to undly promote commercial products:

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Yet today Scott has indeed unduly promoted a commercial product - the third edition of Morry Schwartz’s far-Left The Saturday Paper. I say “unduly” because it’s a general endorsement of the paper and not of any particular read in it ... unless, of course, he wants to promote in a snide and sneaky way a get-even for the apology the ABC was forced to make to me this week:

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See straight through you, Mark.
What was it it that George Brandis said this week of Labor’s no-but-yes smears of Arthur Sinodinos?

Shakespeare defined a coward as someone who was willing to wound but afraid to strike.
Scott should at a very minumum pull down this endorsement of The Saturday Paper. He is personally in breach of ABC standards. And if he refuses to comply, the boatd should make him. Their managing director seems to have let partisanship and spite overwhelm his judgement and his duty.
This is just petty.
(Thanks to reader peter H.) 
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The worst that can be fairly said about Sinodinos

Andrew Bolt March 21 2014 (10:10am)

I cannot believe Arthur Sinodinos was party to corruption, and I note that even Labor cannot make any allegation of impropriety against him.
Tony Walker outlines the only credible case against Sinodinos - one that questions not his morals but his judgment:
Sinodinos may have been line for a windfall $20 million payday if a dodgy deal between AWH and Sydney water was approved by the government of the day…
With his long experience as a public servant, political adviser, and aspiring cabinet minister in a Liberal government Sinodinos should have known better. More than a few sleazy lobbyists will have crossed his threshold in his days as John Howard’s chief of staff. He should have run a mile when dubious characters bearing gifts in the form of easy money hove in sight in a NSW un­detached, as it is, from the traditions of the Rum Corps. Other states have their problems with corruption; in NSW it is endemic.
A charitable explanation for Sinodinos’s lapses of judgment came from colleague Neil Chenoweth in yesterday’s Financial Review.
“Sinodinos’s account of his three-year stint from 2008 [first as a director and then as chairman of AWH] can be summarised as fathomless ignorance,’’ Chenoweth wrote.
What is certainly “fathomless’’ is how Sinodinos could have imagined his reputation would remain untainted by his association with the sorts of scoundrels involved in what has all the appearances of a public utility scam.
Equally mystifying is his apparent ignor­ance of the provenance of some $77,000 in AWH funds that found their way into Liberal party coffers while he was the state Treasurer of the party.
This oversight might be attributed to “fathomless ignorance’’, but whatever the rights and wrongs of Sinodinos’s involvement, all this is a terrible look for a minister of the Crown – and not any minister, but one who served until this week as assistant to the Treasurer. No allegation of criminality has been levelled against Sinodinos, nor of malfeasance or corruption. But his misjudgments have led him to become ensnared in a deeply unpleasant process whose destination is unclear. His political career hangs by a?thread.
On the evidence so far, that is as tough a judgment as could legitimately be made against Sinodinos.
UPDATE
To those Labor MPs and supporters still hounding Sinodinos about not quitting or paying some higher price when he’s simply appearing as a witness, without any allegations made against him, please note the following.
No one in Labor said Greg Combet should step aside until he cleared up certain matters ICAC was investigating:
CLIMATE Change Minister Greg Combet has claimed he was “entitled to trust” a former union boss now under the cloud of a corruption investigation into the awarding of a mining licence that made millions of dollars.
Mr Combet appeared before the Independent Commission Against Corruption in Sydney yesterday to answer questions about his relationship with former CFMEU boss John Maitland, who was a shareholder and director of the proposed Doyles Creek training mine in the NSW Hunter Valley.
Asked why, as a federal MP in the Hunter region, he wrote a letter of support in September 2008 urging then NSW mining minister Ian McDonald to support the Doyles Creek mine, Mr Combet said of Mr Maitland: “I trusted him.”
But he said he did not realise Mr Maitland was seeking an exploration licence that could allow the establishment of a large commercial mine from which he stood to net millions.
No one in Labor said Doug Cameron should step aside from his own responsibilities when he had to explain certain matters to ICAC:

Federal Labor Senator Doug Cameron has told a corruption inquiry he supported former NSW mining minister Ian Macdonald at a key party meeting because he thought he was competent.
The Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) has heard Senator Cameron stood up to Labor Party and union officials when they tried to strip Mr Macdonald of his preselection at a lunch in 2006.
Senator Cameron said Mr Macdonald [since found by ICAC to have acted corruptly] had asked for another two years in parliament because he had family expenses and wanted to go to the Beijing Olympics.
Why a different standard for Sinodinos? 
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The workers’ fiend just gave them more work

Andrew Bolt March 21 2014 (9:17am)

Which means more jobs for Australian workers, thanks to a woman vilified by a union leader in the March in March:
GINA Rinehart has secured backing from a group of global banks and export credit agencies for a new $10 billion ($11 billion) iron-ore mine that can feed Asian steel demand, just as miners like BHP Billiton scale back investments amid a broad decline in commodity prices.
The mining magnate, who is Australia’s richest person, said lenders, including US, Japanese and Australian banks, had agreed to put up $US7.2 billion in debt to build the Roy Hill mine deep in the Australian outback. The deal was signed in Singapore on Thursday. 
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We need PNG so badly we can’t demand reform for our aid

Andrew Bolt March 21 2014 (8:52am)

Stephen Howes is, sadly, right. We are huge donors to PNG but have now lost the ability to demand it reform - or else:
The sad reality, however, is that the bilateral relationship is now focused on asylum-seekers. The detention on Manus Island of those who arrive in Australia by boat ...  has taken away all Australian leverage in the relationship.
Our overriding objective with regard to PNG is now simply to have them on our side. It is impossible to run a $500 million aid program effectively in a country as difficult as PNG without leverage, and it is showing....
Here are four issues that should be discussed by the two prime ministers but probably won’t be…
The first is that PNG has effectively given up on its sovereign wealth fund. Millions of Australian dollars have been spent on advising the PNG government on setting up a SWF…
The second issue that won’t get a hearing is the misprocurement of medical supplies. As part of our aid program, and to combat the longstanding problem of counterfeit drugs, PNG agreed it would select a company with international certification to supply its health clinics…
The third issue is the reform of PNG’s universities… The fourth and final issue is PNG’s expropriation of Ok Tedi, the country’s largest mine, and O’Neill’s continued efforts to get control of the $1.4 billion offshore trust fund of its previous owners ...
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Left dreams big, plans small. Take Rudd and Gillard…

Andrew Bolt March 21 2014 (8:39am)

On Monday, this insight into the Rudd Labor Government:
KEVIN Rudd’s department gave a pair of bureaucrats just two days to secretly draft, cost and assess the risks of its scheme to rush insulation into the roofs of millions of Australian homes.
And his government ignored official advice to roll out the program over five years instead of two and to conduct a trial of the scheme, which ultimately cost four lives and was blamed for causing more than 150 house fires.
On Thursday, this insight into the Gillard Labor Government:
THE agency in charge of the national disability insurance scheme has been likened to “a plane that took off before it had been fully built and is being completed while it is in the air”, in an independent report that questions its ability to roll out the flagship project…
The report’s authors, led by former public service executive Jeff Whalan, point to woefully inadequate IT systems, staff confusion, lack of direction and vague terminology in the crucial assessments, such as the key “reasonable and necessary” supports....
In July 2011, a Productivity Commission report recommended the current design of the NDIS and that it be launched this July, with the intervening time used to prepare. The Gillard Labor government announced it would build the scheme a month later and by December had committed to launching four locations — in NSW, South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria — in July last year, 12 months earlier than recommended and two months prior to the federal election.
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The poor aren’t entitled to live rich on the taxes of others

Andrew Bolt March 21 2014 (8:24am)

How welfare becomes an entitlement, with taxpayers vilified as the greedy rich:
BY any measure of fairness, the situation of public housing tenants facing eviction from 296 harbourside properties in Sydney is an outrage.
NSW independent MP for Sydney Alex Greenwich said the O’Farrell government’s decision to market properties at The Rocks and Millers Point was “social cleansing’’. On ABC radio, Fairfax columnist Elizabeth Farrelly praised the “wonderful, strange idiosyncrasy’’ of Sydney’s poorest people living in the city’s best spots… And deputy opposition leader and federal member for Sydney Tanya Plibersek said the NSW government “may as well have dropped a bomb on the centre of Sydney for the damage they will do to the community that has been there for generations”.
Ms Plibersek’s husband, NSW bureaucrat Michael Coutts-Trotter, who will oversee the relocations, was more realistic. He said the sales in a “very, very expensive area’’ would free up funding for more social housing…
Public tenants in Millers Point receive annual subsidies of $24,832 compared with $8067 in Campbelltown in Sydney’s southwest. No wonder many in Millers Point were not inclined to save for a deposit on a home elsewhere… Some of its pensioner tenants pay $96 a week for Opera House views when the market rate is $655.
[Sydney Lord Mayor Clover] Moore claims the government is robbing the poor to give to the rich. To the contrary, all taxpayers, including those who spend hours commuting on Sydney’s woeful public transport and the 57,000 people waiting for public housing, have been cheated by an arcane and inefficient housing system in dire need of reform. That’s unfair.
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A Professor rages: free speech means never having to say you’re sorry for a false smear

Andrew Bolt March 21 2014 (7:45am)

Free speech

The really distressing thing about this inaccurate, abusive and logically incoherent article is that author Dennis Altman is a professor of politics:
It is possible that Bolt would have recourse to the laws of defamation even without the existence of the Racial Discrimination Act. But his actions in demanding an apology [from the ABC] did make rather hollow the constant refrain from the right that they believe in untrammelled free speech and the importance of countering such attacks through discussion rather than the courts.
Let me explain the reality to Altman as simply as I can:
1. I did not threaten to sue the ABC for defamation. Indeed, I have repeatedly declared my determination not to.
2. Asking people to correct a false claim is not contrary to a belief in “untrammelled free speech” or in the principle of countering “attacks through discussion rather than the courts”.  It is indeed exactly how free speech is meant to work. We argue, freely, and in that argument we (hopefully) arrive at the truth - and acknowledge it.
3. I asked the ABC to correct and apologise for false claims it broadcast against me, and I provided the evidence to demonstrate the falseness of those claims. The ABC apologised because those claims were indeed false. That is free speech at work.
I cannot understand why the Left finds this all so shocking. Or is Altman arguing that false claims should never be corrected? For instance, will he refuse now to correct his own? Indeed, is refusing to correct error a principle he teaches his students? 
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What’s the difference between Clive Palmer and a barking cat?

Andrew Bolt March 21 2014 (7:23am)

Here’s a cat that barks for animals but meows for humans:
And here is a political leader who barks at the mining tax to Western Australians, promising he’s the only man to get rid of it…

But here is that same leader meowing at the mining tax to everyone else, claiming he’ll block its repeal unless there’s more welfare:
CLIVE Palmer says his senators will veto the Coalition’s efforts to repeal the mining tax, unless it reverses plans to axe bonus welfare payments to the children of dead or injured war veterans, including orphans.
Is Clive Palmer a barking cat?

UPDATE
But in this case Palmer is rightly meowing and it’s his lead Senate candidate who is the barking cat:
CLIVE Palmer has been pounced on for contradicting his lead candidate for the West Australian Senate election over renewable energy targets.
Palmer United Party’s Dio Wang said on Tuesday that the existing Renewable Energy Target (RET), which requires that 20 per cent of Australia’s electricity be produced from renewable energy sources by 2020, was the right scheme for maintaining and improving the nation’s environment, and should stay as it is…
Mr Palmer said he believed the target should be voluntary. “We don’t agree with people being compelled to do anything,” he told reporters.
(Thanks to readers Gab, CA and lol.) 
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I am not a perfect sphere .. ed
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They're something you earn, not a right.
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=== Posts from Last Year ===

Comet McNaught viewed over the Pacific in 2007. By Sebastian Deiries
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Yesterday my government started construction on the new clinical building at Campbelltown Hospital & opened a 24-hour medical helipad & a new 235 space carpark. This is one of the State’s fastest-growing regions & we are ensuring local families have access to a world class hospital. For more info go here: arry http://ow.ly/jgByY
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Hosting Harmony Day #OneParramatta with the lovely @kristyknowsbest #harmonyday #ABC #kitchenninja #parramatta @alltognow
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Another image from Arizona. 
I call this one Thunder Road.
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www.pinkfloyd.com #DarkSide40

Design : Storm Thorgerson (Storm Studios)
(c) Pink Floyd(1987) Ltd/Pink Floyd Music Ltd.
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Pope Pius VII
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Events[edit]

Births[edit]

Deaths[edit]

Holidays and observances[edit]

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“Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.” - 1 Peter 2:2-3
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Morning and Evening by Charles Spurgeon
March 20: Morning
"My beloved." - Song of Solomon 2:8
This was a golden name which the ancient Church in her most joyous moments was wont to give to the Anointed of the Lord. When the time of the singing of birds was come, and the voice of the turtle was heard in her land, her love-note was sweeter than either, as she sang, "My beloved is mine and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies." Ever in her song of songs doth she call him by that delightful name, "My beloved!" Even in the long winter, when idolatry had withered the garden of the Lord, her prophets found space to lay aside the burden of the Lord for a little season, and to say, as Esaias did, "Now will I sing to my well-beloved a song of my beloved touching his vineyard." Though the saints had never seen his face, though as yet he was not made flesh, nor had dwelt among us, nor had man beheld his glory, yet he was the consolation of Israel, the hope and joy of all the chosen, the "beloved" of all those who were upright before the Most High. We, in the summer days of the Church, are also wont to speak of Christ as the best beloved of our soul, and to feel that he is very precious, the "chiefest among ten thousand, and the altogether lovely." So true is it that the Church loves Jesus, and claims him as her beloved, that the apostle dares to defy the whole universe to separate her from the love of Christ, and declares that neither persecutions, distress, affliction, peril, or the sword have been able to do it; nay, he joyously boasts, "In all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us."

O that we knew more of thee, thou ever precious one!
"My sole possession is thy love;
In earth beneath, or heaven above,
I have no other store;
And though with fervent suit I pray,
And importune thee day by day,
I ask thee nothing more."
Evening
"Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church." - Ephesians 5:25
What a golden example Christ gives to his disciples! Few masters could venture to say, "If you would practise my teaching, imitate my life;" but as the life of Jesus is the exact transcript of perfect virtue, he can point to himself as the paragon of holiness, as well as the teacher of it. The Christian should take nothing short of Christ for his model. Under no circumstances ought we to be content unless we reflect the grace which was in him. As a husband, the Christian is to look upon the portrait of Christ Jesus, and he is to paint according to that copy. The true Christian is to be such a husband as Christ was to his church. The love of a husband is special. The Lord Jesus cherishes for the church a peculiar affection, which is set upon her above the rest of mankind: "I pray for them, I pray not for the world." The elect church is the favourite of heaven, the treasure of Christ, the crown of his head, the bracelet of his arm, the breastplate of his heart, the very centre and core of his love. A husband should love his wife with a constant love, for thus Jesus loves his church. He does not vary in his affection. He may change in his display of affection, but the affection itself is still the same. A husband should love his wife with an enduring love, for nothing "shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." A true husband loves his wife with a hearty love, fervent and intense. It is not mere lip-service. Ah! beloved, what more could Christ have done in proof of his love than he has done? Jesus has a delighted love towards his spouse: He prizes her affection, and delights in her with sweet complacence. Believer, you wonder at Jesus' love; you admire it--are you imitating it? In your domestic relationships is the rule and measure of your love--"even as Christ loved the church?"
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Today's reading: Joshua 4-6, Luke 1:1-20 (NIV)

View today's reading on Bible Gateway

Today's Old Testament reading: Joshua 4-6

When the whole nation had finished crossing the Jordan, the LORD said to Joshua, 2 "Choose twelve men from among the people, one from each tribe, 3 and tell them to take up twelve stones from the middle of the Jordan, from right where the priests are standing, and carry them over with you and put them down at the place where you stay tonight."
4 So Joshua called together the twelve men he had appointed from the Israelites, one from each tribe, 5 and said to them, "Go over before the ark of the LORD your God into the middle of the Jordan. Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites,6 to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, 'What do these stones mean?' 7 tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever...."

Today's New Testament reading: Luke 1:1-20

Introduction
1 Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, 2 just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. 3 With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, 4 so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught....
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There is no new Lent reading today; today is a catch-up day. If you've kept up with the daily readings so far, congratulations! If you've fallen behind, here are the readings from the last week in case you want to go back and catch up:

Monday: 
Matthew 13-14
Tuesday: Matthew 15-16
Wednesday: Matthew 17-18
Thursday: Matthew 19-20
Friday: Matthew 21-22
Saturday: Matthew 23-24

Have a blessed Sunday!

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