I shared the screenshots not in the misplaced belief that you'd feel remorse for you've more than shown in your account that you enjoy praising evil, degrading others in replies for a win rather than persuading them of the harm they do to themselves in their immorality, that you do not feel remorse as the average person concerned for the wellbeing of others. I shared so your mutuals who do have soft hearts and spirits for their savior can impress upon you how troubling your account has long been.

My little brother is dying of leukemia and I’d appreciate thoughts and prayers.

I love it when Calvinists dont understand Calvinism....

Where's his wife?

*the* sheep

After getting rich from the money she earned as a sex worker for 11 years, this woman believes that entering holy water has cleansed her of all her sins…

I left Islam. That’s it. That’s the tweet.

Please pray for Lu and her family.

Who exactly is going about “reject[ing ] “God loves sinners””? More engagement bait.

You may have been told a very different story about the Potter, one in which He fashions some for mercy and others simply for destruction. But before we decide what the Potter does with His clay, shouldn't we first listen to the Potter Himself? There is something about the usual treatment of Romans 9 that has troubled me for a long time. We are told that God is the Potter and man is merely clay, and from that perfectly biblical truth an enormous conclusion is drawn: God may unconditionally make one person a vessel of mercy and another a vessel of wrath, withhold from the latter the only grace by which he could ever believe, and then destroy him for remaining exactly what God determined he must remain. If anyone questions that conclusion, “Who art thou, O man?” is supposed to end the conversation. But Paul did not invent the Potter and the clay in Romans 9. He reached back into a biblical story already told, and the strange thing is that when God Himself explains that imagery, the clay is not being arbitrarily destroyed without regard to its response to Him. Jeremiah watched a vessel become marred in the potter's hand, and the potter made it again into another vessel “as seemed good to the potter to make it.” God then said, “O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter?... as the clay is in the potter's hand, so are ye in mine hand” (Jer. 18:4–6). Nobody reading Scripture seriously should quarrel with that sovereignty. Yet God immediately explains what He means. If He pronounces that a nation will be plucked up and destroyed, “IF that nation... turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them.” Conversely, if He announces blessing and that nation turns to evil and refuses His voice, He says He will withhold the good He intended for it (Jer. 18:7–10). He then tells Judah, “Return ye now every one from his evil way,” and their answer is that they will continue after their own devices and evil hearts (vs 11–12). That is important because God's own explanation makes the threatened outcome responsive to the moral condition of the people. The Potter is sovereign throughout, but His sovereignty is not arbitrariness. Destruction is deserved, repentance meets mercy, persistent rebellion meets judgment. The clay being in His hands never means that the clay's response to His warning is irrelevant. Nineveh makes this even clearer. Jonah walked into the city announcing, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown” (Jonah 3:4). If an announcement of destruction necessarily revealed an unconditional decree to destroy, Nineveh was finished. God Himself had announced its overthrow. But the Ninevites believed God, humbled themselves, and turned from their violence. Scripture then says, “God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not” (Jonah 3:10). So God's announcement of destruction told Nineveh what its wickedness presently deserved. It did not mean that God had eternally fashioned those people for destruction and made any other outcome impossible. The warning itself became God's merciful means of bringing them to repentance. That distinction matters enormously when we come to Pharaoh. Yes, God told Moses beforehand that Pharaoh would resist and that He would harden Pharaoh's heart (Exod. 4:21; 7:3–5). But knowing beforehand what a wicked ruler will do does not make God the moral cause of his wickedness. Nor does God's sovereign determination to use Pharaoh's rebellion for His own purposes require us to believe that God first had to create the rebellion He intended to judge. Pharaoh is introduced to us within an Egyptian system already oppressing Israel and murdering Hebrew sons (Exod. 1:8–22). When God's command finally reaches him, Pharaoh answers, “Who is the LORD, that I should obey his voice?... I know not the LORD, neither will I let Israel go” (Exod. 5:2). That defiance is Pharaoh's. What follows is fascinating because Exodus refuses to tell the story in only one direction. Pharaoh's heart is hardened (Exod. 7:13). Pharaoh hardens his own heart (8:15, 32; 9:34). God hardens Pharaoh's heart (9:12; 10:20, 27). We have no right to erase Pharaoh's self-hardening in order to defend God's hardening, any more than we have the right to erase God's hardening in order to defend Pharaoh's responsibility. And while Pharaoh is resisting, God does not stop revealing Himself. Pharaoh receives command after command, warning after warning, plague after plague, relief after relief. The revelation becomes so undeniable that Pharaoh eventually says, “I have sinned this time: the LORD is righteous, and I and my people are wicked” (Exod. 9:27). Yet after relief comes, Scripture says, “he sinned yet more, and hardened his heart” (9:34). There is a small detail in that same chapter that deserves far more attention. Before the hail, God warns the Egyptians to bring their servants and cattle under shelter. “He that feared the word of the LORD among the servants of Pharaoh” obeyed the warning, while “he that regarded not the word of the LORD” left them outside (Exod. 9:20–21). The distinction in the text is not between Egyptians whom God arbitrarily decided to warn and Egyptians He refused to warn. The warning went out. Some began to fear God's Word. Others disregarded it. Pharaoh himself continued resisting under an ever-increasing revelation of the God he had originally mocked with, “Who is the LORD?” So when God eventually judicially hardens Pharaoh, He is not turning a humble seeker into a rebel. Pharaoh has repeatedly resisted the light given to him. God's hardening is terrible judgment upon rebellion, and at the same time God makes that very rebellion serve His purpose: “For this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee” (Rom. 9:17; Exod. 9:16). That pattern did not disappear with Pharaoh. Paul describes it in Romans 1. Men suppress truth in unrighteousness, refuse to glorify God, exchange His truth for a lie, and then three times we hear the dreadful judicial response: “God gave them up” (Rom. 1:24, 26, 28). Second Thessalonians says people “received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved,” and “for this cause God shall send them strong delusion” (2 Thess. 2:10–11). “For this cause” matters. Their judicial condition has a moral history. And Paul has already told us the same thing about wrath before Romans 9 ever begins. God shows “goodness and forbearance and longsuffering,” and His goodness “leadeth thee to repentance.” But the person who continues “after thy hardness and impenitent heart” is said to “treasure up unto thyself wrath against the day of wrath” (Rom. 2:4–5). That language is almost impossible to miss once Romans 9:22 comes into view: “What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with MUCH LONGSUFFERING the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction?” The same Paul has already joined longsuffering with repentance, and hardness with wrath. The man under judgment is said to treasure wrath unto himself through his hard and impenitent heart. So there is no exegetical reason to suddenly make “vessels of wrath” mean people whom God created for the purpose of destroying irrespective of their response to His goodness and patience. Even Paul's wording deserves restraint. He calls them “vessels of wrath fitted to destruction,” but when he turns to the vessels of mercy he says, “which HE had afore prepared unto glory” (Rom. 9:22–23). Paul explicitly attributes the beforehand preparation for glory to God. He does not write the corresponding sentence that God “afore prepared” the vessels of wrath for destruction. We should be very careful about supplying words Paul did not. And this is where Paul's later use of the same vessel imagery becomes extremely important. In 2 Timothy 2:20 he writes that in a great house there are different vessels, “some to honour, and some to dishonour.” If “vessel unto dishonour” were itself a technical description of an individual whom God had immutably fashioned for that condition, Paul's next sentence would be very strange indeed: “If a man therefore purge himself from these, HE SHALL BE A VESSEL UNTO HONOUR, sanctified, and meet for the master's use, and prepared unto every good work” (2 Tim. 2:21). Paul has just taken the language of vessels, honour and dishonour and placed moral response right in the middle of it. He does not tell the dishonourable vessel, “Discover which immutable class the Potter assigned you to before creation.” He tells the person to cleanse himself from what is dishonourable, and “he shall be a vessel unto honour.” That doesn't make Romans 9 and 2 Timothy 2 identical passages, but it tells us something we cannot honestly ignore: Paul's vessel language itself does not mean that a person's status as honourable or dishonourable must be an unchangeable identity imposed upon him without regard to his response. In fact, that sounds remarkably like the Potter imagery God had already explained through Jeremiah. The Potter has unquestionable authority over His house and His clay, but what kind of vessel someone becomes is not therefore disconnected from repentance, cleansing, obedience or persistent rebellion. Jeremiah's threatened nation can turn and be spared. Nineveh can hear a sentence of destruction, repent and receive mercy. Paul can tell someone associated with dishonour that if he cleanses himself, “he shall be a vessel unto honour.” So why should Romans 9 suddenly be required to mean that before any response whatsoever God secretly fixes every individual into one of two immutable categories? That isn't even the question driving Romans 9. Paul begins the chapter grieving over Israel (Rom. 9:1–5). The problem is that the people possessing the covenants, promises and fathers have largely rejected their own Messiah. Has God's Word therefore failed? Paul answers, “They are not all Israel, which are of Israel” (v.6). Physical descent never placed God under obligation to save somebody merely because Abraham was his ancestor. That is why Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Pharaoh, mercy and hardening enter Paul's argument. God remains sovereign over the historical course of His promise. Israel cannot claim Him as an ethnic possession, and God's mercy is free to overflow Israel's national boundaries. Hence Paul identifies the vessels of mercy as those whom God called “not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles” (Rom. 9:24), before quoting Hosea's astonishing promise: “I will call them my people, which were not my people” (vs 25). Then Paul himself tells us why Israel stumbled. The Gentiles attained “the righteousness which is of faith,” while Israel did not attain it. Paul asks, “Wherefore?” and answers his own question: “Because they sought it not by faith... For they stumbled at that stumblingstone” (Rom. 9:30–32). That explanation belongs to the same chapter as “whom he will he hardeneth.” We should allow Paul to retain both statements instead of using one to erase the other. His grief continues immediately into Romans 10: “My heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they might be saved” (vs 1). Israel “have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God” (vs 3). Yet “whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed,” the same Lord is “rich unto all that call upon him,” and “whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (vv.11–13). Did Israel never hear? Paul asks precisely that: “Have they not heard?” His answer is “Yes verily” (vs 18). And he closes with God's own lament: “All day long I have stretched forth my hands unto a disobedient and gainsaying people” (vs 21). Those hands matter when we are talking about the Potter. Romans 11 then explains the present condition of the unbelieving branches in language so plain that it ought to control how we read what came before: “Because of unbelief they were broken off, and thou standest by faith” (Rom. 11:20). Paul does not tell us that they were broken off because they had been eternally manufactured as vessels incapable of anything except unbelief. He says, “because of unbelief.” More remarkably, he says of those very broken branches: “And they also, IF THEY ABIDE NOT STILL IN UNBELIEF, SHALL BE GRAFFED IN: for God is able to graff them in again” (Rom. 11:23). Whatever else Romans 9 means, Romans 11 will not permit us to imagine that the unbelieving Israelite is simply an ontologically fixed “vessel of wrath” for whom movement from his present condition is impossible. Paul contemplates the same unbelieving branches being grafted in again if they do not remain in unbelief. This is why the Old Testament background matters so much. Paul has not created a new Potter in Romans 9. The God who sent Jeremiah to the Potter's house is the God Paul is discussing. The God who warned Nineveh is the God Paul is discussing. The God who endured Pharaoh's resistance and eventually hardened him is the God Paul is discussing. And that God says something astonishing about the wicked: “Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die?... and not that he should return from his ways, and live?” (Ezek. 18:23) Again: “I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth... wherefore turn yourselves, and live ye” (Ezek. 18:32). And finally, God swears by His own life: “As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked TURN FROM HIS WAY AND LIVE: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die?” (Ezek. 33:11). I find it very difficult to read those words and then accept that God's longsuffering toward a vessel of wrath means He is merely delaying the destruction of someone whom He has unconditionally determined never to enable to repent. Paul has already told us what God's goodness, forbearance and longsuffering are doing: they lead to repentance (Rom. 2:4). He has already told us what the hard and impenitent sinner is doing: treasuring up wrath unto himself (Rom. 2:5). Romans 9 then describes God enduring vessels of wrath with much longsuffering. Nineveh shows what happens when people heed that patience and warning: they turn, and mercy meets them. Pharaoh shows the other possibility. Warning follows warning, revelation increases, even Egyptians around him begin fearing God's Word, yet Pharaoh persists in hardening himself. Eventually the God he repeatedly resists judicially hardens him, and his rebellion becomes the very stage upon which God's power is displayed. Those are not two different Gods. That is the same righteous Potter dealing differently with repentance and persistent rebellion. And this is why the question of God's longsuffering cannot be brushed aside with “Who art thou, O man?” If God had already determined that a particular person would never receive the grace without which repentance was possible, what meaningful purpose would His longsuffering toward that person serve? What repentance is the delay giving room for? What alternative to destruction is God's goodness leading him toward if God Himself has eternally determined never to enable him to take it? To tell someone, “Turn ye, turn ye... why will ye die?” while having unconditionally determined never to grant him any possibility of turning would make the revealed appeal extraordinarily difficult to reconcile with the secret intention attributed to God. To say, “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked,” while insisting that God created this particular wicked man for an unavoidable destruction and withheld the only grace by which that destruction could be escaped creates the same difficulty. And to describe God as “enduring with much longsuffering” someone whose destruction He had made unconditionally inevitable would drain longsuffering of the significance Paul himself gave it when he said God's goodness and patience lead sinners toward repentance. I don't need to diminish God's sovereignty to avoid that conclusion. Scripture never asks me to. The Potter remains sovereign when Nineveh repents and He spares it. He remains sovereign when Judah refuses His warning and judgment falls. He remains sovereign when Pharaoh hardens himself, and He remains sovereign when He judicially hardens Pharaoh. He remains sovereign when unbelieving branches are broken off, and He will remain sovereign if those same branches cease from unbelief and He grafts them in again. And Paul settles the question of whether “vessel unto dishonour” must describe an eternally fixed identity with his own words: “If a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a VESSEL UNTO HONOUR.” (2 Tim. 2:21). There is no rebellion against the Potter in saying that. The Potter Himself told us so.

I'm not gonna get into details, I just wanna ask for y'all to pray for my mom.

I'm not gonna get into details, I just wanna ask for y'all to pray for my mom.