Read my book Why Did Abraham Lincoln Suppress the Los Angeles Star and Jail Editor Henry Hamilton?

Henry Hamilton, editor of the Los Angeles Star, was a critic of Abraham Lincoln, who excluded Hamilton’s weekly newspaper from the mails and had him arrested.

Southern California was a microcosm of the Union and Confederacy as a whole during the Civil War. The sparsely populated area had its pro-Union and rebel elements, each served by a newspaper that suited its needs.

In his first issue, dated June 7, 1856, Hamilton placed at the top of the editorial column the name of Democrat James Buchanan, as the paper’s choice for Presidency. “That is the banner under which we enter the political arena,” Hamilton wrote. “It is our pride to be found contending, humbly but zealously, among the rank and file for the great truths of Democracy—the sacred principles of civil and religious liberty—the charter of equal rights and equal privileges.” Hamilton thought it best “to be thus explicit in defining our position,” adding that “in the struggle which is approaching, we are desirous that our trumpet shall give no uncertain sound.”

Many newspapers were vicious in their attacks against Abraham Lincoln.

“He was publicly called just about every name imaginable by the press of the day, including a grotesque baboon, a third-rate country lawyer who once split rails and now splits the Union, a coarse vulgar joker, a dictator, an ape, a buffoon, and others. The Illinois State Register [published in his adopted home state] labeled him “the craftiest and most dishonest politician that ever disgraced an office in America (Phillips 1992, 66).

Here is a sermon I gave on Philippians 1:6:

He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus

PowerPoint to accompany sermon

Origins of Sunday Worship in the Early Church (the thesis I wrote for my master’s degree in Biblical Studies from Azusa Pacific University

Messages on

Philippians 1:6: Once Saved Always Saved?

Galatians 1

Galatians 2: Gentiles Do Not Have to Become Jews to Become Christians

Galatians 3: Salvation by Grace Through Faith

Galatians 4: You Observe Days and Weeks and Seasons and Years

Galatians 5: Walking in the Spirit

Galatians 6: Bear One Another’s Burdens

From the Life Application Bible: “Using God’s name frivolously or in a curse is so common today that we may fail to realize how serious it is. The way we use God’s name conveys how we really feel about him. We should respect his name and use it appropriately, speaking it in praise or worship rather than in curse or jest. We should not take lightly the abuse or dishonor of his name.”

Lower casing his name or the abbreviation omg doesn’t make it any less evil. Saying L-rd or L-ordy or other such words is taking God’s name in vain.

My favorite C.S. Lewis quote:
“Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s [God’s] will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters.

The eighteenth-century philosopher and critic of Christianity, Voltaire, said, ‘Within a hundred years the Bible will be obsolete and will have gone out of circulation altogether.’ A hundred years later the Bible was more popular than ever. His own house in Paris was converted into a Bible factory, churning out Bibles by the hour! Nicky Gumbel

From the movie War Room: Miss Clara: You say you only attend church occasionally. Is that because your preacher only preaches occasionally?

“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” G.K. Chesterton, 1874-1936

Humanism invariably ends in despair. Francis Schaeffer.