The pagans in the media are going after Pete Hegseth for sins he committed before he was saved. They don't understand Ephesians 4. Let's look at a poem from TS Eliot to highlight what it means to be "born again" or "born from above".
Welcome to Politics by Faith, brought to you by the Patriot Gold Group. I don't want to wait and share a Christmas point until Christmas Eve. We'll miss the season. I want to share a poem today, T.S. Eliot's The Journey of the Magi. If we must make a political point to this, we can do that.
On this morning's show on SiriusXM, we talked about Pete Hegseth. Pete Hegseth is the current target of the left right now. And it's not just the left, sorry, Joni Ernst from Iowa is another person, Republican Senator, sort of, from Iowa, is going after Pete Hegseth as well.
My annoyance with the Joni Ernsts and the rest going against Pete is they're not making actual arguments. If you want to make an argument against Pete Hegsteth that he has no experience, I'll rebuttal that argument, and we did this morning. And the quick argument is, okay, we've had all the top generals and all the rest be Secretary of Defense. How's it been going? Not well. Pete has plenty of experience in the things that need experience. He has plenty of vision where vision is needed but if you want to make it out like if
there was an argument that hey I don't like him a secretary of defense because he was for bombing Iran or he was for a preemptive strike against North Korea if there was any foreign policy related criticism we would call that an argument and I would be open to it but it's not all the criticism I've heard against said this, well we need to hear more about the accusations. We need more vetting. No, Joni, these are anonymous accusations and I have no respect for people who will still
be manipulated by the media in this way. You are no longer cut out for the job. The more the media lies and the more you go with it the more they'll lie the more emboldened they will be. If you want to make a critique about him as Secretary of Defense because of his views on Ukraine okay that's totally legitimate but to say well he needs more vetting give me a break. Now personally Pete Hegseth has lived a sinner's life full of infidelity and he'll be the first to tell you and then he was saved
and I believe what I've seen I don't know but I believe he's had a real conversion and I'm not gonna judge someone for what they did when they lived in their old self. I believe he was born again, and I will judge him based off his actions since then. Now, let this be a lesson to all of us. Just because you've repented,
maybe you've been saved since, it doesn't mean that the consequences of your old life will not haunt you possibly forever. Repentance is an act and an ongoing action, but part of that is taking the consequences of your sins, which can be felt for the rest of your life.
Now Pete decided to cheat on his wives and there were major consequences for that. And I bet one of them that he never thought of was, you know, this could really tank my chances of becoming Secretary of Defense one day. In 30 years or 20 years from now.
I don't think he thought that. These are terrible things. Infidelity is a horrible, awful thing. I believe he has been saved and is changed. And I believe that because he's said that. He's talked about his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and how Jesus has changed his life. That being said, I want to quote this poem.
This is a poem about the birth of Jesus from the perspective of the Magi. We know enough about the Magi that we know that they brought royal gifts suitable for a king.
We know they were students of the stars.
They were experts in astrology. That alone, I don't understand how that could ever get them from point A to point B to find
Jesus.
John Calvin said that God fortified the minds of the Magi by his spirit. Sounds about right. And how do you get there? How do you follow the star? They did. And when they saw Jesus, they fell down and worshipped him.
Who is this? A child. It's Matthew 2.11, which says, On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshipped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. God did all of this. God got these pagans to their Savior. So here's the poem from T.S.
Eliot. From the perspective of the Magi, a cold coming we had of it. Just the worst time of the year for a journey, and such a long journey the ways deep and the weather sharp the very dead of winter that beginning of the poem is actually in quotation marks why is it in quotation marks because it is from a sermon given in 1622 by Lancelot Andrews who was one of the translators I think he was actually in charge of the whole operation of the original King James Version of the Bible.
To go back to what we were talking about with the star, and how do you read a star to get to a place, like to find Jesus, he said, the heaven and earth hold a correspondence. That's a nice way of putting that. Another good line from this sermon back in 1622,
their first, excuse me, their faith first, faith, and that they never ask whether he be, but where he is born. For that born he is, that they steadfastly believe. Anyway, so that opening of the poem from T.S. Eliot is a line from this sermon from 1622. Okay, let's get back to it.
About the journey. The camels galled, annoyed, sore-footed, refactory, means unmanageable, lying down in the melting snow. There were times we regretted the summer palace on slopes, the terraces, and the silken girls bringing sherbert. Then the camelmen cursing and grumbling and running away and wanting—see, the thing about the good old days, things were so good back then.
And now look at them, the camelmen cursing and grumbling and running away and wanting their liquor and women, and the night fires going out and the lack of shelters, and the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly, and the villages dirty and charging high prices. A hard time we had of it. At the end we preferred to travel all night, sleeping in snatches, with the voices singing in our ears, saying that this was all folly. It's believed that the journey took months from the Magi. Then at dawn, we came down to a temperate
valley, wet below the snow line, smelling of vegetation, with a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness and three trees on the low sky, and an old white horse galloped away in the meadow. Then we came to a tavern, with vine leaves over the lintel, the part above the door, six hands at an open door, dicing for pieces of silver, and feet kicking the empty wine skins. But there was no information. And so we continued, and arriving at evening, not a moment too soon, finding the place.
It was, you may say, satisfactory. Oh, maybe you had the same reaction I had to that line. magi to call the sight of Jesus satisfactory, that doesn't seem sufficient enough, does it? Satisfactory in our era is like, meh, good enough. Yeah, this'll do.
That's not what it meant back then. I went to the original Webster's Dictionary. Webster's said, giving or producing satisfaction, yielding content, particularly relieving the mind from doubt or uncertainty and enabling it to rest with confidence. And here's their example they give. A most wise and sufficient means of salvation by the satisfactory and meritorious death
and obedience of the incarnate Son of God, Jesus Christ. See that's the original dictionary, 1828. Every time they can, they use a biblical reference. The word satisfactory, the example they give is the satisfactory and meritorious death and obedience of Jesus Christ. That's the people we used to be.
That's the culture we used to have. Okay, here's the last stanza. The Magi are saying, all this was a long time ago, I remember. And I would do it again. But set down, set this down.
This.
this were we led all that way for birth or death? brilliant. were the Magi, the Magi are saying were we led all this way, this whole horrible awful journey, were we there to see the birth of Jesus?
were we there for birth or were we there for death?
Good thing Elliot answers. There was a birth, certainly. We had evidence, and no doubt. I had seen birth and death. But I thought they were different. This birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like death, our death.
What do you mean death? They didn't die when they saw Jesus. Here's the last part. Ready? We returned to our places, these kingdoms, but no longer at ease here in the old dispensation, the old way of things, with an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death."
That's awesome. Seeing Jesus, the Magi were changed. They went back to their kingdoms. But they're sitting in now as they're writing this poem, they're looking around being like, here we are. People clutching their gods, these old idols.
We're back. Our old jobs, our old life, our old relationships All of it revealed to be so foolish People clutching to their old gods This birth of Jesus was a death to their old way of life To the point where they couldn't wait for another death
So that they could go to heaven and be with Jesus and God again, forever Nothing in their life now would ever be the same. They made a difficult journey and then they saw Jesus and their lives were totally different. And nothing else. They came back to their old ways. They're like, what is this?
Nothing else mattered as much as Jesus. It's called being born again. The phrase born again can also be translated as born from above. Have you ever heard that before? Born from above. What the Magi were experiencing was Ephesians 4.24.
They put off their old self. So what happens when you're born again? You put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life, and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. So again, I don't want to make this purely political, but our lead-in was about Pete
Hexeth. All the way, former manner of life, corrupt through and through, deceitful desires, but now born again, renewed in spirit and mind. You put on a new self, and now you have the armor of God. That's all of us. All of us are born again.
That's the deal. So if that's true for you, let us continually sanctify and continue to put to death more of those old dispensations, as the Magi said, the old systems, the old way of things. And we should not feel at ease here. At C.S. Lewis' famous line, he said,
Enemy occupy territory. That is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed you might say landed in disguise and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage let us glorify God while we're here and all the while being glad of that one day another death
Mike Slater dot locals dot com. Transcript and no commercials. Transcript and no commercials. If you go to the website, Mike Slater dot locals dot com.
