It often requires more courage to dare to do right than to fear to do wrong. Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently. Outstanding leaders go out of the way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it is amazing what they can accomplish. If we can no longer live the great symbolisms of the sacred in accordance with the original belief in them, we can, we modern people, aim at a second naivete in and through criticism. I have come a long way and laid a lot of ink on the pulp of dead trees; it is not time to justify this expenditure of nature’s bounty, not to mention the reader’s indulgence. The only way to do this would be to show that what we know about humans tells us about the possibilities for humans, even though we have sketched a rather pathetic portrait of them. If we have really gotten at what makes people act the way they do, at basic human motives, then we have really gotten at what makes people act the way they do, at basic human motives, then we can really talk intelligently to the question that is the most intimate to our heart—what people have always yearned to know, namely, What is possible? As far as the science of humans is concerned, many thinking since the Enlightenment have believed that everything is possible for a science of society. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

Rousseau, Marx, Owens—the whole school of utopian socialists and still today modern revolutionaries in all continents believe that everything is possible for a science of society. All we have to do, they claim, is to change the structure of things and a new society will emerge like a splendid phoenix free of all impurity and evil, because evil lies not in the hearts of humans but in the social arrangements that people take for granted. Humans forget, how things were in the beginning, free and equal under tribalism; they grow up under the news system of kingship and the state and so they imagine that things were always this way and they accept them without complaint. Some even say it is a “sign of the times.” In other words, they are saying dysfunction and deviance is normal and we should get used to it. “And wo unto them who shall do these things away and die, for they die in their sins, and they cannot be saved in the kingdom of God; and I speak in accord to the words of Christ; and I lie not,” reports Moroni 10.26. People live abased under tyranny and self-delusion because they no longer understand the conditions of natural freedom. Revolutionaries still today trumpet this philosophy of history as the fall of pure humans into corrupt social structures. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

The reason the philosophy is so attractive is that people need hopes and ideals to urge them on—they need possibility, belief in themselves in order to even try to make things better. All truths are part-truths as far as creatures are concerned, and so there is noting wrong with an illusion that is creative. Up to a point, of course: the point at which the illusion lies about something very important, such as human nature. If it is false to that, then it becomes oppressive, because if you try falsely to make a new beginning you fail. I know that this bit of wisdom is already stale to our epoch, but even in its staleness we cannot let go of it. We still live in its shadow: the state tyranny is steady, daily, empirical reminder of the costs of ignoring the psychology of humans. Marxism in its traditional form is simply not a correct guide for a new society. However, the irony is that we simply do not know what to do with the stale truth. That is why there is such a crisis in Marxist thought, in leftist-humanist thought. What is a truly mature, sophisticated Marxism? And if we put such a thing together, where does it point on the problems of society? Does the union of Marx and Dr. Freud eclipse the Enlightenment vision for a science of society? If not, what kind of science can we imagine and work toward? These are the vital, aching questions of the contemporary scientific conscience; what kind of answers does our present knowledge suggest? #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

Well, for one thing—one great thing—we now see history as it really has been in terms of overall psychodynamics. Fromm the outside a saga of tyranny, violence, coercion; from the inside, self-delusion and self-enslavement. From earliest times people asked to be mystified, and right away there were those ready to fill the role. People put on the chains imposed by the powers of dead ancestors, then shamans, priests, divine kings, heads of state. Today we understand the inner dynamics of this long history of self-abasement: people need transference in order to be able to stand life. People immunize themselves against terror by controlling their fascination, by localizing it and developing working responses toward the sources of it. The result is that one becomes a reflex of small terrors and small fascinations in place of overwhelming ones. It is a force and necessary barter: the exchange of unfreedom for life. From this point of view history is the career of a frightened animal who has to deaden oneself against life in order to live. And it is this very deadening that takes such a toll of others’ lives. All organisms want to perpetuate themselves, continue to experience and to live. It is a great mystery that we do not understand but observe every day: we are amazed, as we try to club a concerned pest, how frantically he or she wants to live. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

All animals are this frantic, without even knowing what death means; they probably only sense the danger of crushing opposing power; this is as far as the “instinct of self-preservation” takes them, out of the way of what threatens to overwhelm and engulf them. For all organism, then, opposing and obliterating power is evil—it threatens to stop experience. However, people are truly sorry creatures because they have made death conscious. They can see evil in anything that wounds them, causes ill health, or even deprives them of pleasure. Consciousness means too that they have to be preoccupied with evil even in the absence of any immediate danger; their lives comes a meditation on evil and a planned venture for controlling it and forestalling it. The result is one of the great tragedies of human existence, what we might call the need to “fetishize evil,” to locate the threat to life in some special places where it can be placated and controlled. It is tragic precisely because it is sometimes very arbitrary: people make fantasies about evil, see it in the wrong places, and destroy themselves and others by uselessly thrashing about. This is the great moral of Melville’s Moby Dick, the specific tragedy of a man driven to confine all evil to the person of a white whale. The result is that he pulls down around his shoulders the lives of almost all those he comes in contact with. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

However, remember, God revealed Himself through Israel’s pain as the God Who is the first and the last, the beginning and the end, of history. A complete national breakdown alone made the remnants of Israel ready to receive this revelation in its universal significance. However, whenever the Jewish nation used the revelation as an excuse for national pride, and transformed God into a merely national god, another breakdown followed. For God as a national god is always condemned by God the God of history. The mystery of Judaism today lies in that fact. Our prophet describes two very great figures: Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire, the World-figure of his time, called by the prophet the shepherd and the anointed, the man of God’s counsel; and the servant of God who represents the saving power of innocent suffering and death. The glorious founder of the Empire had to be the servant of the servant of God. He had to liberate the remnants of Israel, out of which the suffering servant arose. I feel that the only solution of the historical problem today lies in the prophetic concept. For there are two forces in our battered World. One is the force of those who, like the suffering servant of God, exist, unseen, in all countries. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

We do not know where these servants live, or what they will make of the future. However, we know that they exist, and that their suffering is not vain. They are the hidden tools of the God of history. They are the aged and the children, the young men and the young women, the persecuted and the imprisoned, and all those sacrificed for the sake of the future, for one small stone in the building of the Kingdom of God, the cornerstone of which is the perfect Servant of God. And the second force of the World is the force of those who, like Cyrus, rules Empires, and incorporate all the shame and greatness of Empires. They are the people of God’s counsel, because they carry through His purposes in the service of the suffering servants of God. However, they are not aware that they are instruments, as Cyrus was not aware that he was God’s man of counsel. They do not know what shall become of their deeds. And if we look to them in our attempts to grasp the future, we shall now know either; if we look to them, we shall always remain in darkness. However, if we turn to the true servants and to the true God whom they serve, the God of history, we shall know the future. We can find the solution of the riddle of history as a whole, and of our particular history, in the figure of Cyrus in the service of the servant of God. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Whensoever a person Transferreth one’s Right, or Renounceth it; it is either in consideration of some Right reciprocally transferred to oneself; or for some other good one hopeth for thereby. For it is a voluntary act: and of the voluntary acts of every person, the object is some Good To Oneself. And therefore there be some Rights, which no human can be understood by any words, or other signs to have abandoned, or transferred. As first a person cannot lay down the right of resisting them, that assault one by force, to take away one’s life; because one cannot be understood to aim thereby, at any Good to oneself. The same may be said of Wounds, and Chains, and Imprisonment; both because there is no benefit consequent to such patience; as there is to the patience of suffering another be wounded, or imprisoned: as also because a person cannot tell, when one seeth people proceed against one by violence, whether they intend one’s death or not. And lastly the motive, and end for which this renouncing, and transferring or Right is introduced, is nothing else but the security of a human’s person, in one’s life, and in the means of so preserving life, as not to be weary of it. And therefore if a person by words, or other signs, seem to despoil oneself of the End, for which those signs were intended; one is not to be understood as if one meant it, or that it was one’s will; but that one was ignorant of how such words and actions were to be interpreted. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

The mutual transferring of Right, is that which people call CONTRACT. There is difference, between transferring of Right to the Thing; and transferring, or tradition, that is, delivery of the Thing itself. For the Thing may be delivered together with the Translation of the Right; as in buying and selling with ready money; or exchange of goods, or lands: and it may be delivered some time after. Again, on of the Contractors, may deliver the Thing contracted for on one’s part, and leave the other to perform one’s part at some determinate time after, and in the mean time be trusted; and then the Contract on one’s part, is called PACT, or COVENANT: Or both parts may contract now, to perform hereafter: in which cases, one that is to perform in time to come, being trusted, one’s performance is called Keeping Of Promise, or  Faith; and the failing of performance (if it be voluntary) Violation Of Faith. When the transferring of Right, is not mutual; but one of the parties transferreth, in hope to gain thereby friendship, or service from another, or from one’s friends; or in hope to gain the reputation of Charity, or Magnanimity; or to deliver one’s mind from the pain of compassion; or in hope of reward in Heaven; this is not a Contract, but GIFT, FREE GIFT, GRACE: which words signify one and the same thing. “This is love for God: to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome,” reports 1 John 5.3. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

One issue believers frequently struggle with is the relationship between living by grace and obedience to God’s commands. However, nothing you ever do or do not do will make God love you any more of any less. Rather, God accepts you strictly by His grace through the merit of Jesus Christ alone. Such an unqualified statement about the love of God sounds exceedingly dangerous, leaving me open to the charge of saying in effect that God does not care whether you sin or not. But consider the alternative: “God loves you if you are obedient and does not love you if you are disobedient. Since God’s love is conditioned on obedience and you are never perfectly obedient, God never loves you perfectly of accepts you completely.” Such a bald description of the all-too-common works/merit way of thinking about our relationship with God puts the issue into focus. We are accepted by God, not only in salvation but also in our present relationship with Him, either on the merit of Jesus Christ or on the basis of our own performance. Are we to conclude, then, that since we are saved by grace and accepted by God continuously by grace He does not care whether we sin or not? To use Paul’s strong exclamation in Romans 6.2, “By no means!” Such a conclusions files in the face of all the ethical commands of the New Testament. Such a conclusion also ignores the very clear relationship that Jesus insisted on between love for Him and obedience to His commands. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

Our love for God, expressed through obedience to Him, is to be a response to His love, not a means of trying to earn it. “We love because he first loved us,” reports 1 John 4.19. It is not clear whether John was saying that we love God because He firs loved us, or that we love one another because God first loved us. It really does not make any difference in this discussion because both are true. Jesus said that love for God and for one another essentially sum up all this commands (see Mathew 22.36-40). So one clear evidence that we are living by grace is a loving obedience to the commands of God. Anyone who thinks, Since God’s love is not conditioned on my obedience, I am free to live as I please, is not living by grace, nor does one understand grace. What one perceives as grace is really a caricature of grace. Jesus said that if we love Him, we will obey His commands. Now a command suggests two things. First, it gives clear direction. We are told what to do or not to do. We are not left in doubt as to how we are to live. The commands in the Bible provide a clear set of moral standards. One very popular philosophy today is “situation ethics,” in which actions are morally evaluated in terms of a “loving” response to the situation at hand rather than by application of moral absolutes. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Situation ethics knows no external, objective standard of behaviour. Rather, it responds to what “seems right at the moment.” The problem with this philosophy is, as Scripture says, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure,” reports Jeremiah 17.9. Therefore, anything can be made to “seem right.” And because of the sinful nature still at work in us, this description of the heart is true to varying degrees even among believers. Through “Christianized” situation ethics, all kinds of sinful actions have been committed in the name of “love.” Christians have engaged in adultery—illicit pleasures of the flesh—on the pretense that they were acting in love toward a “lonely” or “hurting” person. Recently I heard of a man who allegedly conspired to have his incurably ill wife put to sleep because “she would be happier with Jesus.” This is the type of trap even Christians fall into when we do not let the commands of God give definition to love. An objective standard of love such as, “love does not commit adultery,” or “love does not murder,” should at least give people pause and certainly leaves them without excuse. God’s commands provide us this objective standard and, when obeyed, keep us from falling into situation ethics. “Do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is,” reports Ephesians 5.17. His will as used here is not His particular will for us in some issues of personal guidance; rather, it is His moral will as used, for example, in 1 Thessalonians 4.3: “It is God’s will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

We should find out what pleases the Lord. To understand what the Lord’s will is and to find out what pleases the Lord are essentially the same; both expressions refer to the specific directions given in the ethical commands of Scripture. However, these verses are themselves commands. That is, we are commanded to know and understand the commands contained in Scripture. And quite obviously, we are to seek to know God’s will to obey it. As my first Bible study leader said many years ago, “The Bible was not given just to increase your knowledge, but to guide your conduct.” A command, however, is more than a set of directions. We have all heard the humorous statement, “When everything else fails, read the directions.” Such a statement suggests that direction are optional, that sometimes we can “muddle through,” sort of figuring out tings on our own without bothering to read the directions. Some Christians seem to think the commands of Christ are nothing more than a set of directions. If we follow them, they will helps us get through life without falling on our face and getting hurt too many times. However, the word command carries the idea of authority. The most basic meaning of the words is “to direct with authority.” A command does not just give guidance that one may accept or reject; a command implies that the one giving it has the authority to require obedience and the intention of doing so. This is true of the commands of God. As the Sovereign God of the Universe, he has the authority to require obedience and He does insist that we obey Him. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

O God, Who didst mitigate the flames of fire for the Three Children; grant, we beseech Thee, that we Thy servants may not be burned by the flame of sins, through Jesus Christ our Lord. O God, Who dwellest in the holy, and forsakes not pious hearts, deliver us from Earthly desires and carnal appetites; that no sin may reign in us, but that we may with free spirits serve Thee, our only Lord; though Jesus Christ. “Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in Him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness; and if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love of God with all your might, mind and strength, then is His grace sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfect in Christ; and if by the grace of God ye are perfect in Christ, ye can in nowise deny the power of God,” reports Moroni 10.33. O Changeless God, under the conviction of thy Spirit I learn that the more I do, the worse I am, the more I know, the less I know, the more holiness I have, the more sinful I am, the more I love, the more there is to love. O wretched human that I am! O Lord, I have a wild heart, and cannot stand before thee; I am like a bird before a man. How little I love thy truth and ways! I neglect prayer, by thinking I have prayed enough and earnestly, by knowing thou hast saved my soul. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

Of all hypocrites, grant that I may not be an evangelical hypocrite, who sins ore safely because grace abounds, who tells his lusts that Christ’s blood cleanseth them, who reasons that God cannot cast him into hell, for he is saved, who loves evangelical preaching, churches, Christians, but lives unholy. My mind if bucket without a bottom, with no spiritual understand, no desire for the Lord’s Day, ever learning but never reaching the truth, always at the gospel-well but never holding water. My conscience is without conviction or contrition, with nothing to repent of. My will is without power of decision or resolution. My heart is without affection, and full of leaks. My memory has no retention, so I forget easily the lessons learned, and thy truths seep away. Give me a broken heart that yet carries home the water of grace. Pour out, O Lord, we beseech Thee, the Spirit of grace upon Thy family, and cast out from them whatever evil they have incurred by the fraud of the devil or by Earthly corruption; that being cleansed within and without, they may never render unto Thee a pure worship, and may the more readily obtain what they fitly and reasonable ask; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Uncommon faith believes above and beyond and gives you a boldness and a confidence to believe for the extraordinary. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH

Plumas Lake, CA | from the mid $300’s

Now Selling!

Mission is an image of a desired state of affairs that inspires action, determines behaviour and fuels motivation.  The key to all motivations is desire, and the master key to creating desire is responsiveness to the needs, desires, and interests of the people you would lead. Cresleigh Meadows is now selling! Found just north of Feather River Boulevard, Cresleigh Meadows is home of the largest neighborhood in Plumas Ranch as well as the popular Bear River Park. With four floor plans available, ranging from approximately 2,000 – 3,500 square feet offering, three to five bedrooms, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle.

Popular design elements include open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Multi-generational living options also available in select homes. The compassionate leader must take action. Compassion implies that you do not walk by on the road of life. When you see a wrong, you try to right it. When you see an injustice, you try to make it just. When you see a child or teenager struggling just to survive each day, you try to help them. The difference between the impossible and the possible is possessed in a human’s determination.  https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/residence-4/