mason's journal

Dear Pastor Johnston

2010-08-13T04:30:00.002-04:00

Dear Pastor Johnston (A fictitious name):

A short time back I was waiting for something, I don’t remember what, so I clicked on an I-Tunes freebie named Rise UP. It’s played and sung by a new – at least new to me – artist named Diane Burch. Her voice is clear, crisp, and seems to just draw one into listening. There aren’t many popular “stars” like that anymore. Mostly they make noise, talk dirty, and call what they scream singing.

I don’t know if she wrote the lyrics but they make for a thoughtful poetic kind of tune. Today, finding a popular song with words that have actual meaning is a treat. Much of the popular stuff we are all subjected to is nothing more than sexual innuendo with a thumping guitar rhythm driving it. I wish more of the new worship-choruses we sing were oriented more for poetic, meaningful, God-centered language rather than what appears to be words thrown together to accommodate the off-beat rhythms of a garage-band guitar.

I suppose the younger people enjoy the garage-band sound, at least they pretend they do so we cater to their whims. All of Christendom, at least in the U.S., seems to cater to what people like and not what they need. Forget that boring stuff like sin, repentance, obedience, redemption people don’t like to hear that stuff; It makes them feel bad. Instead let’s continue to lead them to believe they can choose to avoid hell if they're in the mood. Tears of sorrow for the guilt of sin(?), man it’s been a long time since I’ve seen that. But I digress.

Back to Diane Burch. One line that stands out in her tune is “…if it’s happiness you want, life is what you’ll get.” Whoever wrote that actually thinks and is a poet. There is another stanza that deserves comment as well:

Why not say it like it is
Like you know you should
Before they break your little heart
Ooh, break it good
Feelings on the inside
Never let you down
So why not say it like it is
Even if it don't make your mama proud

From our past conversation's you know I’m absolutely against the premise of this song. “Feelings on the inside never let you down,” is the kind of information recent generations of American children have been raised and on which our grandchildren are being raised. Feelings are not the means of cognition, yet we have allowed this irrational, evil concept to insinuate itself into our minds’. We have abrogated our responsibility in that we no longer seem able to make the crucial distinction between our privatized experiences and the reality of God speaking to us through the cognitive message that is the Word.

Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, who, for the most part influences much of American thinking today, made the point long ago that in changing our concepts we will change how we experience the “phenomenal” [reality]. We can see this Kantian philosophy, for example, mirrored in Oprah's push for the Zen-like nonsense of Eckhart Tolle. Little do we realize that Zen Buddhism in disguise is quickly becoming the religion of America. Many Church leaders, no longer able to differentiate God's reality from wishful thinking, preach using nothing but the language of "values" and "feelings," both of which are the mainstay of Zen Buddhism, Oprah, and Eckhart Tolle.

Personal experience is everything in the minds of most Americans. If we have a bad experience we are told all we need do is change how we think about it and we will find peace and harmony. Feelings, rather than thought, are what we use to feed our emotional experiences so as to change our consciousness of reality. We do this because we actually believe "feelings on the inside, never let you down.” So the feelings we have about our experiences is what we preach, teach, and talk about. We live, breath, think, eat, and sleep, feelings. What we fail to recognize is that by buying into this lie we have slipped into the relativistic-realm where truth becomes a matter of personal preference and not the objective absolute Truth that is embodied in Jesus Christ.

Here is the problem in all of this: My feelings about my experiences are indefinable impressions of the past with no basis in the reality of the present moment. They are nothing more than a fleeting emotional response to a moment in time which has passed by the time my autonomic nervous system sends its sensory signals. In other words, as soon as the present moment passes - the feeling passes. A Zen Buddha understands this since it is his life-pursuit to empty his consciousness of God's reality because he believes the empty mindedness of Nirvana is the only true reality.

We do, however, remember what we thought about that fleeting sensation, but as humans we are unable to remember the actual feeling. The result of this inability to remember the actual sensation leads millions of us into addictions, family breakups, crime, narcissism, all the ills of our sinful-humanity as we go on a quest for the Holy Grail of a ethereal feeling which can never be relived in exactly the same way.

Each new moment presents a different situation with a new and different feeling. Therefore, If we do not mediate our emotional response to sensory input through our mind’s we live more like instinctive animals than as creatures made in the image of God. That is why Jesus gave us this as the 1st commandment, “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this [is] the first commandment.” (Mk 12:30).

Too many, maybe most, of America’s citizenry believes feelings are the only legitimate validation for our ethical, moral, teleological, and theological choices. Even pulpit talk is generally about "feelings" and "values" with seldom a word about "character" or "virtue;" and never any about the use of the mind in relation to our physiological makeup as image bearers of the living God.

I realize character and virtue are old fashioned words which suggest living in harmonious communal unity based on shared principles as codified in Scripture: And I realize that using our mind's to actually think is hard work. But, if we continue to let our emotions (feelings) rule our lives as Christians or as a nation, we can only expect more and more evil to prevail as we slowly descend into ever more barbaric patterns of living.

Pastor’s nation-wide should be talking about this stuff. But they won’t. Too many of them were supposedly educated in Universities and Seminaries which have lost the ability to teach our young how to think. They don't know how the mind works, and don't know that they don't know.

The shame is that careful attention to the actual words in scripture taught as fact to our congregations would go a long way toward reversing this travesty. But, I don’t see that happening any time soon.

Good and Evil

2010-08-11T05:00:00.001-04:00

In a discussion with a friend the other day - a good Christian friend - I noted a lack of understanding for the word "sovereign" as we apply it descriptively to God as one of His attributes. (Sovereign is defined as having supreme rule. Note: a synonym is autonomous).

My friend in trying to come to grips with the concept of evil (the eternal problem in the mind's of men) he is confronted with the thought that God had either given Lucifer full and autonomous thought, and power, or God had created evil. My friend cannot wrap his mind around the idea of a loving God creating evil.

The problem of evil, as anathema to a righteous god, is a man-made categorical problem which has existed as long as men have existed. Evil is not a problem for God. It is part of His overall redemptive plan for his Universe and everything in it. We are the ones who have the problem as we struggle to understand with our limited capacity for thought.

Our human problem begins with this thought: God created an entity, Lucifer, who rebelled and became evil. Because he is imortal as an angel we think he was autonomous. He isn't and never was. Is 14:13, "For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: Isa 14:14 I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High." Clearly Lucifer's remarks are nothing more than wishful thinking because that didn't happen. Omnipotent, autonomous, sovereign power has been reserved by the LORD God to Himself alone. (1 Ch 29:11)

I agree with Scripture and centuries of Church dogma, (Rev 19:6) God is sovereign/omnipotent therefore, Satan has only limited power and like us what he has is given him by God. He even had to ask permission to attack Job. (Job 1:11,12) Moreover, scripture tells us (Col 1:17) that it is God who keeps both Satan and his limited power in existence.

What that means at its most basic is that for reasons we may never know, God willed to create a universe in which evil would exist as part of His overall redemptive plan. Gen 3:9 tells us "And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil." Bluntly, Scripture says God created evil. Jhn 1:3 explains it this way, "All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made."

This means God created a Universe in which His Holy plans will be carried to completion regardless of what we think about the category of evil. In the mind of God and in light of what He has revealed of His universal plan for redemption of His creation - the use to which God puts evil is good. Joseph told his brothers, "You meant it for evil but God meant it for good." (Gen 50:20)

Our problem as modern, sophisticated, "religious" people with limited abilities is that we loose sight of the universals; we can't see the forest because of all those trees. By that I mean rather than try to understand the categories -good and evil- the way Scripture tells us God uses them, we assign our own wishful thinking to them. Having done that for centuries we come up with nonsense statements such as "...a righteous loving God cannot create evil."

We have conscripted two attributes which belong to the universal that is God's redemptive plan and in our mind's we have separated them in such a way we view them as universals in themselves. They are not universals, they are just attributes of something else, just as bark and leaves are not the tree.

God's plan is good and for it too come to fruition it must have a tension or a counter-balance, that is how the universe is made. That tension is good vs. evil. Just as we cannot know light without its opposite dark, we cannot know good without evil. We loose sight of the fact that in the Garden of Eden just after God had pronounced everything "very good," evil was already present in the form of the Serpent. We like to think about the "very good" but never stop to ask how the Serpent came to be in the neighborhood.

Do we understand why God made the universe to operate in this manner? Of course not, we are not God. We only have a limited knowledge about God's plan of good and evil because Eve disobeyed God in the Garden and ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (Gen 2:9)

So as my friend wrestles with the idea that God has created what Christians abhor - evil, I can only suggest that we should carefully think about, examine, test, reason through, pray about, and ask the Holy Spirit for guidance as we tackle the really tough issues God has left us to deal with.

Evil is one of those issues. God made it,, named it, and it exists. In God's mind and plan he has categorized it as good because it is used by Him for His good purposes. (Gen 50:20). We must learn to deal Scripturally with this tension and not with our cliches and slogans.

Jos 23:15 Therefore it shall come to pass, [that] as all good things are come upon you, which the LORD your God promised you; so shall the LORD bring upon you all evil things, until he have destroyed you from off this good land which the LORD your God hath given you.

Still the constant question is how could a Holy God allow evil to exist? Perhaps we will get to ask Him someday, but in the interim we must accept that He does what His will demands. Judges 9:23 is very explicit that if it is part of God's plan He uses evil - "Then God sent an evil spirit between Abimelech and the men of Shechem; and the men of Shechem dealt treacherously with Abimelech:"

Christ has given us our hope. He died so that we might live. Thus we know that someday, regardless how much we distort the concepts in Scripture Christ will make us alive with Him as part of His Church or Bride. When that day arrives there will be no more evil. (Rev 21:4).

If we deny God's sovereignty over absolutely everything, we are in fact denying God Himself. There is no middle ground on this issue. God is either keeping me in existence, making my synapeses fire as I type, or He isn't. If He isn't there is no such thing as god.

So, although we are maudlin about the idea that a loving God can't use evil because somehow we have gotten the mistaken notion that He is like us and dislikes bad stuff it is emminently clear God created evil, told us about it via the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and uses it for His purposes when He wills it to be necessary.

In the interim some heavy-duty thinking using the brains that God gave us helps a lot. Wishful thinking and sentimental nonsense about who our God is helps no one. God is God and He is sovereign over all that He has made.

A Great Sign

2010-08-10T06:39:00.001-04:00

Redemption is the plan

2010-08-09T09:57:00.000-04:00

When things fell apart in Eden, God did not trash plan A only to move to plan B. He immediately enacted his plan of redemption. This plan includes the redemption of man and the resurrection of his physical body. Paul tells us in Roman 8:19-20 that God is even going to redeem the present earth. If God is not moving to plan B with man and the earth, it is very possible that God will also redeem the animals.

I'm not linking the above quote. I'm using it to pursue a thought, not to point to a particular person for any reason. As a matter of fact, I got the quote from a blog I read frequently because of the truth and wisdom I find there. The thought I'm wrestling with is this: Is God sovereign or not, and if so what does that mean and what are the ramifications.

The writer above eludes to the idea that God does not have alternate plans for His work of redemption. I agree. What I find curious, however, is in our use of language we often trap ourselves by saying inexact things. I do it all the time: I mean to make a particular point, but when I write down the words the concepts I had in mind come out twisted and garbled. We all do this. It is part of the life we live in a fallen universe. I will probably do it in this post, but I hope not.

In the quote the writer says, "...He immediately enacted his plan of redemption." My understanding of Scripture is that God has revealed to us that creation itself, the universe, me, you, dogs, cats, - everything is encompassed in the concept "plan of redemption." I believe everything that exists was made to be redeemed, in my thinking I can't accept that things "fall apart," as though by accident. Things did come "apart" in the garden but not by accident. God designed everything in that story to happen just exactly as He tells us it happened.

Moreover, I believe redemption is the plan, it is not part of something else. Creation was made to fall which makes it the beginning of the "enact(ment) of redemption." If God subsequently enacted a plan of redemption,..." the implication is that it is subsidiary to something else, or a plan "B."

If Creation wasn't made to fall God got blind-sided by Satan and His - God's - original plan was thwarted. Even sin entering the world is part of the "plan of redemption." It did not happen by accident. If any part of creation or redemption is accidental then God is not sovereign and all this time I've spent worshipping Him has been a waste and lost cause. I refuse to accept that idea.

Sin, the fall, all the stuff we humans face in life, yes, even creation itself is the master plan of a sovereign God - and this plan is good. It is very good. (Gen 1:31) God is sovereign and the implications of this fact are seldom examined by we humans.

Thinking is hard work and we don't like to work. We would rather rely on our limited knowledge which can barely deal with the idea that God would have created us for one purpose and one purpose only - redemption. Yet, that is the fact. (Eph 2:1) We, the elect, were created to be redeemed and given to God's Son to live finally with Him as His chosen. (Jhn 15:16)

In the meantime just trying to understand the concept of sovereign is a challenge we should all come to grips with. The word means absolute rule over everything - not just some things. If we accept that definition we have a lot of thinking to clarify.

Blogger Design Templates

2010-08-09T07:00:00.003-04:00

I curse blogger for their new templates. They are so easy to use, change, manipulate and play with I can't make up my mind which to use.

For today I like this one. On my laptop it is very easy to read and easy on the eyes. I'll probably try a different one tomorrow.

Idiocracy, mindless,whatever...

2010-08-08T07:39:00.003-04:00

I recently posted about the Christian Church, St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox, which New York City is refusing to allow to be rebuilt. I named the leadership of that City the Idiocracy. There is no such word I guess, but there should be. My spell checker goes nuts every time I type it. I think we all know that those in charge on Manhattan Island today have somehow let the stuff that is supposed to be between their ears leak out: at least that appears to be what has happened.

This is not news, this kind of thing happened before. (There must be something wrong with the water on the Island). Gates of Vienna told me about it this morning:

Past as Prologue, 55 years ago? — Elegant statue of Muhammad “quietly” removed from the roof of the Appellate Division Courthouse on Madison Square, New York City in 1955, when seven feckless appellate judges, “encouraged” by the US State Department, needlessly submitted to Islamic supremacist dictates regarding “Tawsir,” or statuary.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Mindless, craven cultural relativism — sadly pervasive in 2010 — has led NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg to capitulate to Islamic supremacism and support the odious Ground Zero mosque projectof the cultural jihadist Imam Faisal Rauf, and his coterie. The rather witless Bloomberg, of course, cynically recasts his moral and intellectual cretinism as championing bedrock American values, notably freedom of religion. However, the ultimately self-destructive Islamic correctness we are witnessing vis a vis the Ground Zero mosque, may be an endemic phenomenon amongst Manhattan elites, dating back to at least 1955.

Ecclesiastes says: (Eccl 1:9) "...and there is no new thing under the Sun." And Edmund Burke said, "those who do not know history are destined to repeat it." So, as much as I hate to see it happening the Bible and Burke both confirm we are going to watch a Mosque be built where there should be a very large, prominent, Christian Cathedral. I think we have all gone nuts!

Who said there are no prophets?

2010-08-07T06:00:00.000-04:00

Peter Schiff was Ron Paul's economic advisor. Everyone laughed at him. I don't hear many laughing today. He said home equity would vanish. It's gone. Everyone was telling us to buy Merrill Lynch, its gone. The U,S. government owns General Motors, the Italians own Chrysler, and China owns the rest. I can understand why the talking heads laugh however, a prophet is not someone any of us like to listen to: especially when he tells us we are not doing the right things.

That's precisely why so many hate Jesus. He tells us do the right thing and we say he is nuts. Oh well, he said that's the way it would be - didn't he? As a matter of fact he was the first one to tell us to quite hanging on to things and neither a borrower nor lender be - or something like that. But, hey! Who knew? Those guys are just crazy prophets. Right?

Hitchens and his cancer

2010-08-07T05:00:00.000-04:00

Christopher Hitchens is the famous Atheist author most people are at least a little familiar with. He has throat cancer and is being treated by the best that science has to offer. In an article about his ordeal I read, "Hitchens is badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste."

For a man who has spent his career arguing for the impersonality and accidental nature of the Universe how is it, I wonder, he has a "sense of waste." If his theories of the evolved nature of everything are true how can whatever happens be wasteful.

According to the atheists the evolutionary process uses what it needs to advance its impersonal agenda regardless whether that is Chris Hitchens' cancer to kill him or the ant I just stepped on. It is not waste it is evolutionary progress to die for the furtherance of this impersonal process. To evolve is to be - isn't it?

Why Hitchens would now consider his contribution to the advancement of evolution as a waste is beyond me. What's more, I question how his evolved brain even came up with the concept of waste.

If evolution is true there is neither good nor bad nor is there accumulation nor waste. There is only the process of mindless change.

It seems to me, now that Hitchens has begun to confront his own mortality, that he may have begun to reason differently. Perhaps he might be thinking there is purpose in the universe after all. If that is so, then he will have to confront where that "purpose" comes from. It certainly cannot exist in an impersonal evolved place of gases which spontaneously coalesced from a singularity to make him.

Do you suppose he might, like Anthony Flew, at some point admit he was wrong and admit there is a God? Probably not! Hitchens has a lot of what we Christians call pride (I don't know what impersonal evolved beings call it) to overcome and I'm not sure he would do that.

It would be nice if Christ would call him to belief. That event, along with Flew's deathbed conversion, might go a long way toward changing the arrogant thought processes of the evolved elites who run our Universities in a manner which is now excluding as much Christian thought as possible.

We need to pray for Chris Hitchens - whether he likes it or not.

Cultures Collide (2)

2010-08-06T10:00:00.001-04:00

"Precisely because the church does not exist for itself but completely and exclusively for the world, it is necessary that the church not become the world, that it retain its own countenance. If the church loses its own contours, if it lets its light be extinguished and its salt become tasteless, then it can no longer transform the rest of society. Neither missionary activity nor social engagement, no matter how strenuous, helps anymore. …"(1)

Link to Cultures Collide (1)

Runaway Slave

2010-08-06T06:45:00.000-04:00

HT: Grouchy Old Cripple

St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church

2010-08-05T17:56:00.001-04:00

As the Idiocracy running the city of New York debates whether to throw a party or not over the building of a monument to the religious beliefs of those who killed so many on 9/11, what about the little Christian Church that was destroyed on that day? Has any Imam or politician anywhere spoken up to question the delay in rebuilding this Church? Nine years for permission to rebuild seems to me to be slow even for the money-grubbing, thoughtless bureaucrats in New York and New Jersey. But, hey, that's just my Midwestern opinion: I'm not sophisticated like those elites.

[Photo Courtesy of New York Times]

The plans for rebuilding the World Trade Center complex include building a new St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church quite close to the original location.^[1] The church will again house a worshipping congregation. A museum will also be built for the projected large influx of visitors that will come to the site.

On July 23, 2008, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey reached a deal with the leaders of the church for the Port Authority to acquire the 1,200-square-foot (110 m²) lot that the church had occupied for $20 million. $10 million is coming from the Port Authority and $10 million is coming from JPMorgan Chase & Co. (Wikipedia)

[note: JP Morgan was given $25 billion in bailout money].

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is a tax supported government agency. So in essence the taxpayers of New York and New Jersey will pony up $10 million for the replacement of this Church and the taxpayers in the rest of the nation will pony up the other $10 million. Don't forget, JP Morgan Chase took billions in bail out tax money not long ago. And if reports are true they haven't spent any of it on rebuilding this Church.

What I would like to know is who has stopped the Saudi Government from rebuilding this Church? Oh! "There is no Saudi money for this honorable task," you say. I didn't know that. I just assumed since it was Saudi nationals who destroyed it the so-called civilized Muslims in Arabia would have the decency to chip in to rebuild it. Shows you what I know.

I need to get out more often.

Cultures Collide

2010-08-05T12:25:00.001-04:00

In the late 19th century Sunday schools were formed in churches as a means to teach the children in the emerging industrialized world to read so as to be able to access the Christian Bible. From that humble beginning we now find ourselves locked - it seems - in a culture oriented totally around the needs, wants and desires of our young. Fathers are becoming more and more to be viewed as nothing more than superfluous and according to most TV commercials and sit-coms as idiots.

[...] developments began to coalesce to form a new understanding of the "place" of young people in leading industrial societies after the mid-nineteenth century. A period of public education was made mandatory for young people in many parts of Europe and the United States; increasingly, schooling became an expected and routine part of the life course. At roughly the same time, the field of medicine and the emerging discipline of psychology began to differentiate the stages of the human life course more precisely, determining a "normal" standard for biological and social development based on chronological age.[...] (1)

So as the world surrounding the Christian World, a World that is called to be in but not like its surroundings (1 Jhn 2:15,16), the Christian World has slowly remodeled itself on the order of its surroundings. Now the church is almost indistinguishable in its makeup from the rest of society. Far from the Biblical model of Father, Mother, children, all led in unity by Elders as members of the Kingdom of God, we too have now segregated ourselves by age believing we are doing God's work led by the Holy Spirit - as one Deacon recently told me.

The ease with which Satan has been able to bring about this transition is astonishing. There are few, if any, voices raised in protest as the church changes into just another expression of our surrounding culture.

[...]The driving force, the engine, behind youth culture is greed. It is the creation of an entertainment industry lusting after money. From the beginning, the elite controlling the media recognized that sin is profitable—that they could boost sales by creating products which chipped away at moral restraints and standards of decency. So, with purely mercenary motives, they deliberately made their products more and more offensive. The music became noisier, the speech became more insolent and vulgar, and the clothing of teen idols became more and more disreputable. Soon, the media were filled with sex, violence, and rebellion. Through its campaign against morality, the entertainment industry succeeded in opening up a gap between parents and children, the so-called generation gap. Children embraced a way of life that scorned the traditional values of the older generation. Over the years, youth culture has sunk into worse and worse decadence and has enlarged its constituency to include many adults as well as many children. (2)

A critical question facing the child of a Christian home is whether he will identify with his parents or turn against them and join youth culture.[...]

Sad to say my own church has been caught in this trap. Everything we do is now oriented toward "peer" or age group activities. Even in worship service the youth sit apart from parents or are in a segregated "children's church."

The top down family concept so prevalent throughout most of the history of Western Civilization, sustained by the model of God's Kingdom being built on earth, has been destroyed.

But, when the Church believes orienting everything around the secular model is the only way to survive it is time someone actually began thinking about what we are doing. God's Church will survive, but a particular church may not if the leadership is blind to trap it has gotten caught in.

There is nothing I can do about this on a personal level other than what I'm doing here in pointing out that this model is unbiblical, and I believe sinful. Oh! There is one other thing I do and that is sit with my wife, our son and his wife and their children on Sunday mornings in worship service. We take up almost a whole row in the pews.

Who knows maybe our sitting together will be viewed as defying authority and our little rebellion against "peer" group segregation will catch on.

Stuff I’ve Heard

2010-08-04T11:18:00.001-04:00

Not long ago I was listening to a sermon and the man giving it said,”I can’t give you meat, all you can handle is the milk of the word.” This was said to a congregation I presume has been churched for many years. I don’t know their individual spiritual condition but I assume the man speaking does or he would not have said what he did.

My mind immediately questioned why he would say such a thing. I thought if he has been the leader for very long something is drastically wrong somewhere. As the spiritual leader it is his job to make sure his “sheep” can handle the meat of the word. Logically, if they cannot, it is his fault and not theirs. Yet, his remarks were pointedly condemning of his audience for their lack of – what?

Mike Ratliff has posted about this in a spiritual gifts article here:

There is little doubt that there are some in leadership positions in the visible church that are there because of their natural abilities rather than the fact that God has gifted them to lead His people. If the latter were the case, they would not be leading their followers into apostasy as the passage I placed at the top of this post clearly states. Those gifted by God to be true leaders in His Church have the role and responsibility to do what? They are to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of Got, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. Why?

I teach a class on the gifts in my church and one of the things I stress is for the class to always insure that what they think they have as a gift is not just natural ability. It is one thing to be able to have the natural ability to play Cello but it is quite another to play as does Yo Yo Ma. A good player has talent, Ma is gifted. The evidence speaks for itself. So it is with preachers and teachers.

So, when I hear anyone say something derogatory about someone else’s ability, be it musical or spiritual, I can only ask what is the reason – or as Mike asks, “why” is the situation as it is. Teachers are responsible for the education of those in their charge and preachers are responsible for the spiritual lives of their congregations.

The man who scolded his congregation for their lack of maturity in the Word should be very cautious about what he is saying. Someday he will give account for the accusation and he would be well advised to make sure he has done all within his power to insure he has taught them well. If he thinks he has been called to preach but has not been gifted for the task, my opinion is has made a mistake that has eternal implications.

Cheap Imitation

2010-08-01T11:17:00.000-04:00

Here it is Sunday and I'm at home. Health concerns have me at only about 1/2 operational efficiency. That's fancy talk for I'm not feeling well. That's OK! I will get over it; or I won't. Whatever.

Anyway, because I'm home I was wandering around the "web" looking at some of the Churches around the country. (Who said the internet is not useful?) I visited the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Idaho Falls, Idaho. On their web site I read this about their sabbath day worship service:

Substantial, reverent worship:

The apex for every Christian week is Sabbath worship.

It is the duty of all Christians to present themselves with all of the family in the assembly of the saints to render praise to God, submit to the life changing discipline of the Word preached and the Word made visible in the sacraments of baptism and holy communion, sing the songs and Psalms of the Kingdom, confess doctrine, and give of our earthly goods for the support of the church.

We are called out of the world for these few moments to live in a world fragrant with the air of the coming Kingdom of God. Thus, we seek to provide the true laborers of worship (you, the saints) with all of the ordained elements of worship so that we might provide the true audience of worship (not you, but God) with worship that will be pleasing to Him.[emphasis mine]

I have never read a more beautiful description of what worship should be. "...a world fragrant with the air of the coming Kingdom of God." "We are called out of a world...!" How is it that we have come to believe that in the name of pride - we call it relevance - we think our choruses about what we are doing for God, the mind-numbing "modern" hymns we sing, the pointless shallowness of sermons about...about what?, we think are viewed by God as Worship?

The Sabbath should be the day when our entire focus should be on the God who is our savior and the Kingdom he is preparing for us, but what do we do? We drag our secularized desires into this sphere - rock bands and all - call it worship and wonder why we don't attract the unsaved. We don't attract them because the schmaltz passed off as a sermon, the garage-band sounds, and the constant harping about money is what they see on TV every day. Why would they want to spend their day off with a cheap imitation of what they live now?

Why can't we just show them the "fragrance" that is coming and allow God to do what He is going to do?

Post Modern Catechism Q-7

2010-07-31T11:10:00.000-04:00

The Post Modern catechism can be found here. Question 7 and its answer may be of service to some.

Q7: How doth God execute His decrees?

A: God executeth His decrees in the work of watching us exercise our free will.

For those whose religion is a series of cliches i.e., "God didn't make a bunch of little robots, of course we have free will," you may want to add this to your collection.

Newt on Sharia Law

2010-07-30T07:19:00.000-04:00

I don't particularly like Newt Gingrich. Some of the the things he has done in his private life go against what I believe as a Christian. But, then, we are all guilty of doing stuff we don't like from time to time. It's called sin and every human is touched by it.

Gingrich is not stupid, however, and he understands and fights against what he knows to be the real battle confronting those on the planet who desire to live free.

Here is a portion of a speech he gave recently at the American Enterprise Institute. Like him or not he gets my vote for President in 2012.

(HT Gates of Vienna)

The Lord's Supper

2010-07-29T15:31:00.001-04:00

As a Baptist I don't often get the opportunity to participate in more formal kinds of worship services. By that, I mean those services which serve the Lord's supper on a weekly basis. The most familiar of these formats of service to me are Catholic and Anglican. I've always just accepted my church's tradition of approximately every six weeks for this most solemn service as perfectly acceptable since the Bible is not specific concerning how often we should participate.

Lately however, I've been wondering if a more frequent serving of the Lord's Supper might be a means of strengthening the unity of our congregation. Following is a quote from an article that I found most interesting. Perhaps this is something those of who infrequently follow our Lord's command to "do this in remembrance" of Him might want to rethink.

[...]The apostle Paul [...] tells us that the Lord’s Supper signifies the oneness of the body of Christ (1 Cor. 10:17). According to Paul, “We, being many, are one bread and one body; for we all partake of that one bread.” When Christians gather to partake of the same bread and wine, there is no Jew or Gentile, there is no rich or poor, there is no male or female. All are one because all partake of the one body of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. If the faithful teaching of this truth accompanies the frequent observance of the Lord’s Supper, it inhibits division because it repeatedly and forcefully emphasizes the sinfulness of worshipping with an unforgiving heart (cf. Matt. 5:23-24). In fact, it is not beyond possibility that the infrequent observance and corresponding devaluing of this sacrament has contributed to the ongoing division and strife in the modern church. Again, we have to ask why any Christian would not want such a sign of Christian unity to be a part of the regular worship of the church.

Jesus Christ commands that the Lord’s Supper be observed in remembrance of him (Luke 22:19; cf 1 Cor. 11:24). This does not mean that the Lord’s Supper is merely a time for subjective mental recollection. It is a memorial of the saving acts of Jesus Christ by which he inaugurated the new covenant. In the Lord’s Supper, we do not merely recollect these great acts of redemption. We unite ourselves with the new covenant community for which they were accomplished. If the Lord’s Supper is truly to be observed in remembrance of Christ’s mighty saving acts, why would any Christian not want this remembrance to be a part of every Christian worship service?[...]

The entire article can be found here.

Do We Believe What We Say We Believe?

2010-07-19T09:34:00.001-04:00

Sunday our Pastor mentioned in his morning sermon that our church subscribes to a statement of faith generally accepted by most Baptist churches in America. That statement is the 1833 New Hampshire Baptist Statement of Faith.

I have issues with what we actually teach and do and what we say we believe as codified in this statement. I won't get these issues resolved any time soon because there are many among us who say they believe one thing but their actions don't align with what they say.

For instance: This Statement of Faith says, in part, (the full section quote is below) "...the new creation is brought about in a manner above our comprehension, not by culture, not by character, nor by the will of man, but wholly and solely by the power of the Holy Spirit in connection with divine truth...." [emphasis mine]. To my mind that seems plain, clear and simple enough for a literate person to understand. The Holy Spirit changes a person internally - the person is unable to comprehend what happened - but he knows he is different. He has been "born again." Yet, we insist that a person must "choose" of his own "free will" to "accept" Jesus as his savior. My question is this, if the new creation is brought about in a manner above our comprehension how is it that the sinner can be expected to comprehend he must "choose" to "accept" Jesus as "his personal savior" solely on the basis of his "free will?" He has been born again - past tense - there is nothing for him to "choose." (Jhn 15:16)

If that is the actual situation, we are saved by means beyond our comprehension, why do we waste so much time trying to ramp-up emotional responses with the "altar call?" Perhaps we really don't believe what we say we believe.

(I) OF GRACE IN THE NEW CREATION. We believe that in order to be saved, sinners must be born again; that the new birth is a new creation in Christ Jesus; that it is instantaneous and not a process; that in the new birth the one dead in trespasses and in sins is made a partaker of the divine nature and receives eternal life, the free gift of God; that the new creation is brought about in a manner above our comprehension, not by culture, not by character, nor by the will of man, but wholly and solely by the power of the Holy Spirit in connection with divine truth, so as to secure our voluntary obedience to the gospel; that its proper evidence appears in the holy fruits of repentance and faith and newness of life. (John 1:12-13, 3:3, 3:6-7; II Corinthians 5:17 & 5:19; Luke 5:27; I John 5:1; Acts 2:41; II Peter 1:4; Romans 6:23; Ephesians 2:1 & 5:9; Colossians 2:13; Galatians 5:22)

Concern for the Church

2010-07-18T08:05:00.001-04:00

I visited Australia a couple of years ago. Other than the obvious difference in landscape one of the major differences I noticed was the apparent lack of churches. I didn't survey for numbers, but here in the states we seem to have as many churches as we do gas stations. It feels like there is one on every corner, not so in Australia. In fact, I noticed the difference in church numbers more readily there because there appeared to be so few in comparison.

Pastor, teacher, Rowland Croucher who is Australian, has written a good article (here) about the apparent demise of churches in Australia by beginning with some statistics from the states.

According to the latest set of figures for Baptists in the Garden State, not everything is rosy:

* Two thirds of our churches are plateaued
* Just nineteen churches accounted for more than half the baptisms last year “Six churches accounted for just on one third of the total baptisms
* More than 40% of our churches baptised no one
* We are more adept at roll revisions than roll additions

My own church seems to be in a unique situation considering the numbers above. We baptize new believers regularly, but our actual growth seems to be stagnating. For each new believer we loose one or two for various reasons. Part of this is due to economic conditions as folks must move for employment reasons, but I sense a larger part of the stagnation is due to "church-hopping." I know of several young families who have moved to nearby churches for no other reason than someone hurt their feelings. When that happens I wonder why it is we seem unable to bring these folks to Christian maturity. Life happens, people are people, feelings get hurt - get over it.

I'm beginning to wonder if there are not a lot more "goats" among the "sheep" than we care to admit. We don't like to think along these lines because we have so much invested in convincing new converts and older members as well, that all they have to do is believe without teaching them that that belief carries with it certain obligations to the One we believe in.

Croucher's article does not have the sense I have just given but I think in the back of his mind he might agree. He goes on to say;

What is even more concerning is the growing trend reported in many churches: as much as one third of the regulars will be absent on any given Sunday making communication difficult and continuity in preaching and teaching almost impossible. The point is that the local congregation is not seen as the place to be. Worship simply does not belong as a priority activity.

If "worship is not a priority" among a given congregation there is obviously something drastically wrong with our labeling as saved those who are really just looking for temporary relief from some immediate personal problem.

Perhaps we need to seriously consider actually reading what Scripture says about salvation and forget all the gimmicks that have been passed down to us the way "to win the lost."

Something to think about

2010-07-17T09:13:00.001-04:00

The answer to the question of why Jesus underwent John’s baptism is not to deny the fact that it was a baptism of repentance; the answer is to embrace the awesome reality that Jesus’ baptism was precisely a baptism of repentance, as an integral aspect of his fulfilling all righteousness. Here, at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, we see that from first to last ”the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matt 20:28). Christ’s life no less than his death was to serve, in that ‘form of a servant’ in which he performed for our sakes and on our behalf the perfect obedience of the law, even unto death on the cross (Phil 2:5-11). Jesus’ righteousness doesn’t just cover our sins — it covers our repentance, too. [emphasis mine]

When was the last time you thought about Jesus being Baptized as a covering for our repentance? We hear about Christ's death on the Cross and the atonement provided by HIs shed blood, but we don't hear much about our inability to repent as we should thus the need for Him to be Baptized for us as well

You can read this excellent post here.

The Sabbath? Whatever!

2010-07-12T17:57:00.000-04:00

Children’s Catechism, week 28

July 12, 2010

Q. 86. What is the fourth commandment?
A. The fourth commandment is, Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God; in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day; wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath Day, and hallowed it.
Q. 87. What does the fourth commandment teach us?
A. To keep the Sabbath holy.

Yesterday our church had "strangers within its' gates." We required them, a manservant, his wife, and their sons and daughters to entertain us. They did a robust job. They, sang and played on their instruments and we were entertained. We sat like royalty clapping when appropriate, laughing when we were supposed to, joining in with them in their singing as required. A jolly good time was had by all. At the end we attended to the money changers table in the lobby and either wheedled discount or paid full price for the proffered CD's, t-Shirts and other assorted paraphernalia. As an aside, it wasn't long ago we were collectively chewed out for arguing doctrine in that same lobby.

The Sabbath appears to be a tricky day to observe in our modern world, but I can't find anywhere in Scripture where its observance has been rescinded. I think what has been rescinded is our reverence toward it and the God Who gave us that fourth ~~suggestion~~ commandment.

We seem to believe that if we can sit still, be quiet and solemn for 1 hour that should pretty much cover all the Sabbath bases for the coming week. In general the only thing we really ask in return is that we get out by noon or shortly thereafter so we can make the heathen wait on us at Bob Evans without our being inconvenienced by waiting in line for very long.

I think we really should consider a return to teaching our children the catechism. At least they, then, should be able to remind us what the Sabbath is supposed to be about. But, of course, that would require the kiddies sit with Mom and Dad leaving their Blackberries and i-Pods in the off position: Without monitoring the kids tend to text - always. I can't envision that happening anytime soon because as I glance around I notice Mom and Dad aren't really there either: They are on their Blackberries. I thought the Stock Market was closed on Sunday. I guess not. Maybe Mom and Dad are reading the on-line Blue Letter Bible.

A Carson Quote

2010-07-12T14:31:00.001-04:00

In the beginning was Diversity. And the Diversity was with God, and the Diversity was God. Without Diversity was nothing made that was made. And it came to pass that nasty old ‘orthodox’ people narrowed down diversity and finally squeezed it out, dismissing it as heresy. But in the fullness of time (which is of course our time), Diversity rose up and smote orthodoxy hip and thigh. Now, praise be, the only heresy is orthodox.

As widely and as unthinkingly accepted as this reconstruction is, it is historical nonsense: the emperor has no clothes.

D. A. Carson, Research Professor of New Testament, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Gotta' love Carson! The man can think and write. The above is from a blurb he wrote for a new book. You can read more about it here.

Christian Music?

2010-07-09T15:17:00.001-04:00

I listen to Darius Rucker, when he's on TV, because my nephew "Q" is his lead guitarist. The First Baptist Church from somewhere in Texas has a lead guitartist who sounds pretty good as well, although not as good as "Q.". The difference in them is that "Q" and Darius do not try to pass off what they do as "Christian" music. Both are Christians but they do not try to use the music they entertain the world with as a front for some kind of "Christian" outreach. They are entertainers and that's what they do - entertain.

Lenny Kravitz' music (I don't listen to him so this is the only song of his I know about) is a not very Christ like - IMHO. Here in the Detroit area this sounds like Em&Em's rap music blaring from some car. Where do we draw the line or do we? Should a church Choir sound just like the latest rap-group to mumble its' way through questionable lyrics? Is this what you want your kids to emulate?

I thought as Christians we were supposed to somehow attempt to be just a little bit different from those in the world around us. (Rev 18:3,4,5) But hey: What do I know?

Some "Christians" just don't believe

2010-07-08T18:29:00.003-04:00

The book of Revelation is the only book in the bible which tells the reader he is blessed if he reads it. Rev. 1:3 says: "Blessed [is] he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keeps those things which are written therein: for the time [is] at hand."

We just completed a study of Revelation in our Wednesday night service at church. One member, an older member, vehemently objects to the parts in which God describes how He will cast many into the lake of everlasting fire at the end of time. She is very vocal about not getting a "blessing" from this passage. (Rev 20:15)

I'm sure she has never thought of the philosophical implications of her position, since most Christians do not think along these lines. However, by stating she is not blessed when she reads Revelation, she is in fact taking a position diametrically opposed to that of God. Her position is, essentially, "I don't like some portions of scripture, therefore I do not believe all of it in contradiction to my stated beliefs in the Holiness, Truthfulness, and Sovereignty of God." Psychologically she suffers from cognitive dissonance, a diagnosable mental illness.

Her problem arises from the fact we are told "blessed" is he that reads the prophecy, hears the word, and keeps the commands in it. Her autonomous pride asserts itself against God and His Sovereignty by her statement that she is "not blessed."

She, like too many Christians today, has taken a position which is antipodal to what God has ordained and revealed to us. Scripture tells us our purpose for existence is to worship the Holy God, but this lady has twisted her belief into the opposite which is a total concern for man's feelings and not what God declares. She, unintentionally, I think, believes that the God who has revealed Himself in Scripture is not fair. (Is 55:8)

Fairness is a man-made concept which has nothing to do with God. God is God and does many things humans cannot understand so in our rebellion we say they are "unfair." Is it "fair" that you and I are sinners because we inherited that status from Adam and Eve. On the human level, of course it isn't fair. But, then, we aren't God are we? So what has fairness to do with anything? (Eze 18:25)

This lady is more concerned with her sentimental human belief concerning the agony of creatures held in an eternal torture chamber than she is in attempting to understand God's purposes for the chamber. Scripture explains we can't know all of God's purposes, but it does demand that we Worship Him and accept everything He has done or is going to do simply because He is God. As his created beings we are to bow and conform our minds' to His for no other reason than He said so.

We will never know His mind fully, therefore when we tell Him "I'm not blessed, even though You said I would be," we might as well tell him "buzz-off, you don't know what your talking about."

When God says to us, "blessed is he that readeth...," and we say "I am not blessed," does it take a rocket scientist to figure out this lady has serious issues with God's authority? Revelation is the book which explains that our time being stuck in bodies that are conflicted with sin and goodness - knowing good and evil - is just about over. That thought should make every human jump up and down, sing and dance, in praise to God. But, no, there are some who say "I'm not blessed" all because they never really believed in the first place.

Worship

2010-07-07T07:34:00.001-04:00

“… our audience in corporate worship is not people. Corporate worship is not about pleasing people, whether ourselves, the congregation, or unbelieving seekers. . Worship in the corporate gathering is about renewing our covenant with God by meeting with Him and relating to Him in ways that He has prescribed. We do this specifically by hearing and heeding His Word, confessing our own sinfulness and our dependence on Him, thanking Him for his goodness to us, bringing our requests before Him, confessing His truth, and lifting our voices and instruments to Him in response to and in accord with the way that He has revealed Himself in His Word.” ~ Mark Dever, The Deliberate Church (HT Gairney Bridge)

When I play one or the other of the keyboard instruments at church, I always try to take a few minutes as people are filling the sanctuary to Worship with music that I think God would like to hear. I play in the "classical" style, which to the untrained is usually more solemn and slow, with a steady pace, or perhaps with a minimum of my own interpretation of tempo and tone. Most people call my playing old-fashioned and too solemn. Some, however, are thankful to be able to sit quietly, prayerfully, thinking about the God who made us and the Grace bestowed on us by His Son.

Music "ministers" or Pastors sometimes tell me to play more upbeat and "happy" kinds of things so that the people will be in a more "happy" mood for "worship." That says it all: We have gotten in the habit of structuring our services for the entertainment value of the congregation and not to pay homage to our loving Creator whose death and resurrection paid for our sin.

I wonder how it is we have allowed ourselves to drift into the idea that our worship audience is people and not God? Shouldn't our worship model be more along the lines of the Cherubim who surround God's Throne crying Holy, Holy, Holy?

I'm just sayin'....!

The sense of Scripture

2010-07-06T10:42:00.001-04:00

"[...]There is a wide-spread desire to appear charitable and liberal-minded: many seem half ashamed of saying that anybody can be in the wrong. There is a quantity of half-truth
taught by the modern false teachers: they are incessantly using Scriptural terms and phrases in an unscriptural sense.[...]"

"[...]True faith is not a mere “mental assent” to certain theological propositions—but a living, burning, active principle—which works by love, purifies the heart, overcomes the world, and brings forth much fruit of holiness and good works. Let us live as if we really believed every jot and tittle of Scripture—and as if a dying, risen, interceding, and coming Christ, were continually before our eyes![...]"

- J.C. Ryle

1816 – 1900 [These quotes were taken from Defending Contending.]

Although these words were written over 100 years ago they sound as though they could have been written yesterday. So much of what we hear and say in church and out, seems to be specifically chosen to somehow resonate with the lost from a human perspective. I don't believe this is intentional all the time, I just believe it is a result of folks repeating what they think sounds religious and profound.

The older I get the more I believe our words to the unsaved (and saved as well) should be either God's Words quoted or at least we should give them the contextual sense of His meaning. As fallen creatures we are capable of so little understanding about our Triune God and His Truth we place ourselves on dangerous ground when we attempt to interpret what we think He meant from our own limited understanding. "Half-truths," are not helpful.

Somewhere this morning I read a church sign which quotes Luke 4:7 as though these words were a positive benefit for mankind. The sign reads: (Luke 4:7) "If thou wilt therefore worship me, all shall be thine."

The problem of course, is that the quote is Satan tempting Christ in the wilderness. Christ answered with a rebuke in the form of "It is written...." I believe that should be the model for all Christians: But then to respond as Jesus did we have to actually read our Bibles and I'm sure, as the church sign quote makes clear, even some of our teachers are lacking in that department.

Ryle's statement still rings true today. "[...]There is a quantity of half-truth taught by the modern false teachers: they are incessantly using Scriptural terms and phrases in an unscriptural sense."

The challenge for the Christian is to know his Bible so that when the "half-truths" are taught those that teach them can be made aware of their error. I wonder what the American Church would be like today if Christians had been doing that all along?

Application of Scripture

2010-07-05T12:20:00.001-04:00

"[T]he Bible is primarily about God, not you. The essential subject matter is the triune Redeemer Lord, culminating in Jesus Christ. When Jesus “opened their minds to understand the Scriptures” (Luke 24:45), he showed how everything written—creation, promises, commands, history, sacrificial system, psalms, proverbs—reveals him. We are reading someone else’s biography. Yet that very story demonstrates how he includes us within his story. Jesus is the Word of God applied, all-wisdom embodied. As his disciples, we learn to similarly apply the Bible, growing up into his image. Application today experiences how the Spirit “rescripts” our lives by teaching us who God is and what he is doing."

I came across the above while reading the blog Creed or Chaos. A chord was struck with me as I read because of certain conversations and events in my life recently. Just this morning I responded to a letter from a friend in which I commented that I am slowly learning (Yes! I still am capable of learning.) to simply tell others what God has said and then just sit back and enjoy watching His Spirit do what He is going to do.

However, that's hard for me to do. My pride wants to have me stick my nose in whatever is going on and "make things happen." But, then I guess that's the American way isn't it? We plan, set agendas, think up programs, set goals, achieve, seek success in everything we do. Then what? As near as I can tell the only way to convince ourselves or anyone else that we have achieved any of this is by doing what Americans do: Consume. We buy new cars, second homes, boats, stuff and things. When we have purchased all our credit cards or cash will allow we begin telling ourselves and others how God has blessed us, that is until reality or bankruptcy sets in.

God's biography, which as stated in the quote above does include you and I personally, but in a much different way than Americanized Christianity has taught so many of us. Little by little I'm learning to accept the Holy Spirits' rescripting of my life. I ain't easy, and often it ain't fun. But, I've never been more at ease or at home in my Christianity than I am when I simply accept the fact that He is the Potter and I am the clay.

Finney's Aftermath

2010-07-03T10:43:00.000-04:00

I recently posted two papers on the legacy of Charles Grandison Finney written by Pastor Tom Chantry. (The link to them is at the top of this blog). Most Christians today haven't a clue who Finney was, or what he was about, let alone the legacy he left us. Not knowing his history has been a costly mistake.

These articles are two of the finest distillations of Finney's disastrous theology I have ever read. If you haven't read them yet you should take the time to do so. Chantry is a Reformed Baptist pastor in Milwaukee.

Pastor Chantry has now written a third article about Finney. You can find it here. Chantry says this:

The one thing Charles Finney thought he knew was the majesty of God. After all, Finney's god was "the moral governor," a severe adherent of absolute standards who demanded absolute obedience of all his creatures. This, to Finney's unconverted eyes, was the majesty of the creator.

The Christian ought to know better.[emphasis mine] The glorious majesty of God is seen most plainly in His remarkable grace. He is a Judge - and a perfectly righteous Judge whose standards are unimaginably pure. Nevertheless, He is no distant tyrant sending random thunderbolts upon the earth. He is rather a true King, One who rules over and defends His people. That defense of His people extended to their salvation, even when that salvation meant the painful and shameful death of His own Son.

Nowhere in all creation is the true majesty of God more in evidence than in His superintendence of the great plan of salvation! Christian people ought to stand in awe of the gospel as the highest revelation of the greatness of God.[emphasis mine].

"The Christian ought to know better," is such a striking statement coming from a Pastor it should give pause to everyone of us to reflect on what we are doing in the name of God. Chantry goes on:

First, he devised all of his cunning methodology in order to produce the "decision" which earlier evangelists had attributed to the moving of God's Spirit. Then, whenever he saw that his hearers had made such decisions, he shamelessly took credit for them. He published statistics of how many had been saved through his ministry and he wrote his Lectures on Revival as a way of telling others how they could save as many people as he had. In other words, the part which the Spirit had played in the ministries of both Wesley and Whitefield was a part which Finney endeavored to fill!

The nefarious effect of this crass substitution of the evangelist for the Spirit has all but killed Christian witness in our day. Whereas Christians once proclaimed a Triune, saving God, today's evangelicals become confused as to why the Trinity matters. Once Christians understood that salvation is all about the Father who ordains redemption, the Son who accomplishes it, and the Spirit who applies. Today we say instead that Jesus saves, so long as the preacher can talk you (or trick you) into letting Him do it. If therefore we would have revival, we must have preachers who, like Finney, can produce extraordinary conversion counts.

We no longer evaluate preachers upon how clearly they express the gospel of Christ and how urgently they call on men to turn to Him. Instead we look at the numbers. If an evangelist can get a good percentage of any congregation to come forward, he is a good evangelist. If a preacher can grow a church (something no preacher should imagine himself doing!) then he is a successful preacher. Of course if a seminary president can double the enrollment of his school, then he is an extraordinary president. What other criteria could possibly matter?

And if his methods are not biblical? If, in fact, he must sin in order to produce such extraordinary results? Who dares condemn him! He is (quite literally) doing the work of God. Paul once said he could wish himself accursed in order to save his countrymen, but he understood that he could save no one. Should we be surprised that when evangelists think they can bring about salvation they do not quibble at a little deceit?

What the church so desperately needs is to remember who God is and who preachers are. God saves; we only glorify Him for His salvation.

There is so much more that I can only hope that everyone who reads this blog will read Pastor Chantry's article. When I read it I thought "my God what have we done?"

History: Islam

2010-07-01T08:39:00.000-04:00

"Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it." This quote attributed to Edmund Burke, British Statesman and Philosopher (1729-1797), is a part of American culture. We repeat the quote in an offhand manner often without real concern for what we are saying.

The recent incident in which Christians were arrested at the Arab Festival in Dearborn, Michigan, points out the need for all Americans to become better informed of the history of Islam.

All of us should at least have a working knowledge of the centuries of conflict between this "Religion of Peace," the rest of the world, and its actual practices when in power.

For this reason, and in the hopes of enlightening those who read this blog, I have been granted permission to post the following short history. The author Baron Bodissey maintains the blog Gates of Vienna which is dedicated to following the incursion of Islam around the world.

The Newest Phase of a Very Old War

by Baron Bodissey

Some people refer to the current war as the GWoT (Global War on Terror). Others call it WWIV (Norman Podhoretz). We at Gates of Vienna prefer to call it GIJ3W: The Great Islamic Jihad, Third Wave.

This conflict of cultures has endured for more than a millenium. The first wave began with the conquest of Mecca by Mohammed in 630 CE. It crested in Al Andalus (Moorish Spain) in 711, only receding in 1492 whenLos Reyes Católicos entered Granada.

The second wave began when Osman raided Western Byzantium in 1299and founded the Ottoman Empire. It crested during the reign of Süleyman I in the 16th century, and receded after the failure of the second siege of Vienna under Kara Mustafa in 1683.

From our perspective at the dawn of the 21st century it is hard to realize that a little more than three centuries ago the whole of Christian civilization was threatened. When the Turks stood at the Gates of Vienna it seemed that all of Europe would be overrun by the legions of the Prophet.

This war never ended. While many individual treaties were made between various states over the centuries, no truce was ever declared between Islam and the infidels, and no permanent peace was established (as General Gordon discovered at Khartoum in 1885).

So when did the Third Wave begin?

Was it with the establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna?
Was it the Iranian Hostage Crisis in 1979?
Or was it on September 11th, 2001?

When will the Third Wave crest? And when will it begin to recede?
The thesis of this blog is that, like it or not, we are in a religious war. We do not define the terms but we should take careful note of them. We are mistaken if we think the Enemy wants merely to kill us. Once again, Jihad offers two choices to the West: conversion or death. Jihad exists in order to annihilate unbelief. Christians, Jews, Hindus, atheists, or Wiccans, it is all the same to him.

Once again, our survival depends on our capacity to unite in a common cause against physical and cultural destruction.

Full disclosure: the authors are practicing (non-evangelical) Christians, staunch supporters of Israel and the Jews, and tolerant of all. Even those who don't agree with us or with one another.
We invite comments and discussion on GIJ3W and related topics.

Caner Fired: Finney to Blame

2010-06-30T17:41:00.001-04:00

In my recent post on Finney (Finney's Legacy) I posted two papers by Tom Chantry Pastor of Christ Reformed Baptist Church in Milwaukee. In these papers Chantry exposes Finney for the fraud that he was. Chantry says:

By no stretch of the imagination could Finney's Systematic Theology be considered a Christian book, for Christ is as absent from its pages as is God. Finney's christ is the son of god who became man to show us the way to heaven. There is no actual lecture on christ, so the reader might be understandably confused as to exactly what Finney taught about his nature. There are, however, two lectures on the atonement. Most of the material there is a refutation of the Christian doctrine of atonement, which Finney mischaracterizes as a "commercial transaction."

Finney left us with a legacy of deceit and deception. At the end of his manipulative career "...[he] had to acknowledge two facts. One was that the people in the region of western New York where he mainly preached were exhausted with revival and that converts could no longer be generated. The second and grimmer realization was that for all the excitement, the religious character of the region had noticeably deteriorated during [his] day. This area of frontier America became know as the "burned over district." An apt description for the damage Finney did.
Finney's popularity was such that through the years the truth of what Finney had done has beeb softened and morphed to hide that fact that man cannot "choose" to save himself no matter how emotional he becomes nor how many verses of Just As I Am are sung, while "heads are bowed and every eye is closed."
The larger problem, however, is that exageration, emotionalism, hype, and manipulation have become almost standard fare in too many American churches. Billy Graham popularized much of Finney's man-made religious nonsense which has permeated American churches, but now that chicken has come home to roost.
Ergun Caner former Dean of Liberty Baptist University in Lynchburg, Virginia has been fired. Seems he like Finney, embellished, exaggerated, lied, and generally mislead too many people and could not validate his Resume with facts. His lies caught up with him.
Fundamentally Reformed, a blog I read, has now weighed in on the subject. His analysis is well worth the time needed to read it. You can read his post here. In the article he says:

Without Finney, there could have been no Caner. The reason is that Finney’s influence has created an atmosphere within the Evangelical church in which Caner’s style of preaching, and indeed his multiple deceptions, might flourish.

I have argued that the Caner scandal belongs to all evangelicals. His behavior is a reflection on the state of the evangelical church at large, and we must all take ownership of what has happened.
Finney’s manipulation consisted of the “artful, unfair, and insidious” control of the emotional state of his hearers in order to bring about a “decision” which was anything but. We make decisions when we decide to take a certain course of action, generally after thoughtful consideration. Finney’s “decision” had nothing to do with thought. His hearers were whipped into a terror over the thought of hell. This sudden emotional state was a work of Finney’s art, and he knew how to mold it into a decision to follow God. He utilized every form of pressure to bring about the desired end.

So in typical situational ethical fashion, the ends justify the means if the one doing the manipulating is able to further his own prideful ends. Whether it is the "altar call" used to increase the numerical membership count of a church, or the elevation of a nobody into the status of importance of a University Dean, or even a Revivalist like Finney, these men think whatever seems to work for the moment must be right.
Read what ever you can find about Finney, Caner, revivalism, altar call, etc. It is not a pretty picture.

The Shifts in The Moral World

2010-06-30T06:15:00.000-04:00

In Colossians 2:8, the apostle Paul writes: “Beware lest anyone capture you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ.” In this verse the apostle warns his readers against being taken captive by false philosophies. Rather, he says that they should adopt a philosophy “according to Christ.” This verse does not teach, as some have said, that philosophy itself is unworthy of Christian study. In fact, the verse teaches precisely the opposite.

David Wells, in his book "No Place for Truth," points out the breakdown in our moral world has indicators. He pointed to four major sign-posts, indicating changes that hasten people out of the moral world that the West long inhabited. Thinking has shifted from the objective and/or transcendent, to the subjective and culturally relative. The sign-post shifts are:

* from thinking about virtue, to thinking about values

* from thinking about character, to thinking about personality

* from thinking about nature, to thinking about self; and

* from thinking about guilt, to thinking about shame.

Follow these, Wells observed, and you’ve exited a moral world. The Cross then becomes simply incomprehensible.

Our task today is to tell people — who no longer know what sin is, no longer have the categories to understand it, no longer see themselves as sinners, and no longer have room for these categories in their non-moral universe — that Christ died for sins of which they do not think they’re guilty.

Chantry on Finney

2010-06-29T14:28:00.004-04:00

I was raised in churches which always had altar calls. Like most American Christians I took the word of the preachers and teachers that this is the way Christ had decided to build his church. I didn't question my leaders, I just went along with them as they plied their emotional trade trying my best to "feel good" about my life.

Then something happened. I got into a jam in my life in the midst of which I told God, "I give up. If you don't do it, it doesn't happen." From that point on my life has not been the same. I had admitted to God and to myself - for the first time in my life - that I was not in control of anything. I was at my wits end.

I had to start over and re-think everything about me, particularly my relationship with Christ. I learned the hard way that anything I thought I was doing that might have value to God was viewed by him as "filthy rags." So I began a journey to understand how it was that I thought just by doing certain things, acting in a certain manner, showing up at the church building each time it was open, being polite, and talking religiously had not protected me from what I had done to myself. After all, I was a Christian, and the churches I attended never talked about Christian suffering: they only talked about doing good, tithing and faith-promise giving and that God would bless everything I did.

I was born, bred, and raised a Pelagian and didn't know it. Everything I had been taught told me I was in charge and that if bad things happened then I had done something wrong. So, I began a journey of self-education to learn if what I had been brain-washed with was actually true. To my profound sadness I learned that most of it was Paganism dressed up as Christianity designed to perpetuate the little empires of the preachers and teachers I had learned from.

Eventually my reading and studies led me to investigate the Reformation. I was stunned by the concepts of Scripture alone and Grace alone. How could these thing be? I learned that God's Holy Spirit does everything through the "hearing" of His word. I wasn't told I had to do anything. In fact the exact opposite is the message of the Reformation. Inevitably, as I progressed in my search for truth, I came across a guy named Charles Grandison Finney. I learned from his writings that he withheld full disclosure when he was ordained and that was enough for me. He saw no ethical problem with telling a half-truth but I did. So I decided then and there anything he was associated with had to be corrupt. As I read more about him, dug more into his tactics and beliefs, I have no choice but to stay with my conclusions about him. The guy was a fraud and probably not a Christian. But, his legacy as a fraud lives on in most of American Christianity in the "altar call." He invented it, and Billy Graham via television made it famous to modern Americans. Who hasn't heard "every eye closed, every head bowed..." "your friends will wait for you," followed by "come down the aisle now." Those words are ingrained in Americanized Christianity just as much as "apple pie," and "baseball."

When I have tried to talk to preachers about their use of emotional manipulation begging people to get saved, among other shady tactics, I'm generally blown off as a grouch and trouble-maker. Therefore, I have quietly lived my life - for the most part - putting up with this stuff in the hopes of reaching a friend or two with the truth here and there.

Now comes Pastor Chantry who has written two very good posts about Finney and the legacy he left Christianity in America. Without asking permission, I don't think Pastor Chantry would mind, I have posted his papers under the "Pages" heading at the top of this page as "Finney's Legacy."

I highly recommend everyone read Chantry's papers and finally make an honest "decision." For many it will take a lot of prayer and thinking about things never thought of before, but my prayer is that you will be "quickened" and the truly "narrow way" will be opened to you, as it was for me.

Gun Control

2010-06-28T17:47:00.001-04:00

Well, well. It seems the Supreme Court has learned how to read. They ruled that what the Constitution actually restricts is the liberal nut-jobs who pass laws restricting the ownership of guns for self-protection. The city of Chicago was the impetuous for the ruling. Someone sued it because of its refusal to relax its gun ownership laws.

For whatever reason liberals have always had myopic vision when it comes to guns. They impose bans and restrictions only to have law-abiding citizens be the ones unarmed and in grave danger. Chicago, the city which does not allow guns, murder rate by shooting deaths is out of control. "Citywide, gunshot deaths also were recorded in Hermosa, South Lawndale, West Englewood, West Garfield Park and Woodlawn in the last week...Meanwhile, the city's homicide toll for 2010 surpassed 200 homicides last week,"

Now, I'm not a prophet or anything like that, but I would guess less than .01% of these murders were committed by fully licensed gun owners. But I don't know for certain I'm just guessing.

I do know this - the statistics are overwhelming - where guns are readily available to law abiding citizens the crime rates have precipitous drops. Switzerland, which gives its men between the ages of 21 and 32 an automatic rifle, has such a low gun violence rate it does not bother to keep statistics.

Anyway, I should have my "jump through the hoops" CCW permit soon, and the Mizzus will have hers shortly after that. So, if any screwballs are thinking about harming two old people in Michigan they better reconsider. Here's what they will encounter:

His

Hers

Each of these is loaded with "wad cutters." These are unusual bullets in that they appear to have had their noses shoved in. I've heard what they do to the human body is not pretty. Anyway, we have another surprise for anyone wanting to do us harm and it is one of these.

Ours

So I'm glad to know I am now legal and that any moron dumb enough to try to shoot, rob, steal from, break into my home, hi-jack our cars, or just generally be stupid is in for quite a shock.

It will be interesting to see how fast Chicago's gun crime rate drops once honest people begin arming themselves.

It Matters What You Tolerate

2010-06-25T13:42:00.000-04:00

I know I am not supposed to "covet" (envy might be a better word choice) things I do not have, but sometimes, darn it, I just can't help it. I envy and covet the kind of intellectual prowess of some of the men I read frequently. One of these men is Pastor Doug Wilson, somewhere off in the hinterland called Moscow, Idaho.

He wrote an article about tolerance recently which touches on areas I had never considered. Here is one quick quote:

[...] tolerance cannot be a free-floating virtue. This is because no virtue (or vice either) can be found in a transitive verb. It is not a matter of whether you tolerate, for everyone does, but rather a matter of what you tolerate.

What matters is "what you tolerate." I personally do not tolerate those among us who bask in the freedom given them by Christianity as they work their evil to destroy that freedom and Christianity. (See my recent posts on Sharia Law in Dearborn). Pastor Wilson says this in his article:

Christians invented the most open and tolerant society in the history of the world. Tolerance, as we have known it historically, is a Christian virtue.

Then he says:

Unbelief does not generate free societies. Out of all the explicitly atheistic societies that formed over the course of the last century, how many of them were open and free societies? Ah . . .

For secularists to treat believing Christians as the principle threat to their freedoms would be, were it not so serious, not very serious.

Pastor Wilson has written what I believe is a very important comment on the tolerance of tolerance that now seems to be such a "valued" counterfeit virtue among too many Christians. It is a sin to tolerate the repression of freedom on the streets of Dearborn, Michigan under the guise of toleration. That is irrational, illogical, and one small step from police-state tactics and policies.

I wish I had the brain power to write like Doug Wilson does.

Crucial Distinctions

2010-06-25T07:16:00.001-04:00

This is from "Already Not Yet," the blog of Pastor P.J. Cockrell:

In the twentieth century, liberal Protestants put the Bible on trial and found it guilty of error, abandoned their dependence upon God’s Word, and replaced it with the lifeless lyrics of their own wisdom. What social Gospel theorist Walter Rauschenbusch preached, Charles Sheldon popularized; “What did Jesus do?” became “What would Jesus do?” Morality and social justice supplanted redemption, and the living Christ died again, this time buried beneath unbelieving, yet captivating rhetoric. He was not to rise again in the liberal Protestant Church.

The ability to make crucial distinctions is a gift from God. PJ points this out in his quote above by distinguishing between "what Jesus did" - the Truth - and our distorted desire to be God by deciding for ourselves "what would Jesus do."

Our joy as Christians is to rely only on the revealed Word He left us for guidance and not try to be God-like by speculating about what He would do. That is the hook that Satan used to trap Eve in the Garden: "You shall become as Gods." Because of this distortion many Christians have gotten caught in the postmodern belief system which has twisted the word "tolerance" to mean love or concern for every belief system and every human without the condemnation it and they deserve, Islam is the prime example of a systemic evil.

For example we often hear "love the sinner, but hate the sin." That is not Biblical it is the pacifist Ghandi from his autobiography. Jesus hated sin and he obviously hates those who refuse to repent from it. He sends them to Hell doesn't He? As a matter of fact scripture is pretty clear about this fact as some were created for just that purpose. ( Rom. 9:17 )

So those who condemn others for their "intolerance" of the evil that is Islam make me wonder how it is they can say they are Christian while they themselves are "intolerant" of those who hold to the actual teachings of Gods Word.

Sharia in Dearborn II

2010-06-24T07:09:00.001-04:00

My earlier post on Sharia in Dearborn elicited some reactions. One comment surprised me. My friend and Christian sister Jan said:

What would our response be if Muslims came to our church or a Christian function and started passing out literature? I know that I would call the cops to have them dispersed. Do we have the right to limit other people's freedoms under the law and under God (who gives us all the freedom to choose) because we don't like what they say? We know that it's not truth, but they still have rights.(Read her complete response in the comments to the article below).

What surprised me I think is the apparent misunderstanding about the Arab Festival that is held in Dearborn each year. It is not a private event, it is open to the public, and is held on public property. Streets are blocked off, traffic is rerouted, food and other vendors set up booths from which they sell things, a carnival is on hand, and Muslim mosques and Imams set up tables from which they provide written and verbal information about Islam. They solicit questions and often try to dialog with the curious as they proselytize. This way of doing things is as American as Apple Pie.

The fact that they solicit questions and try to dialog with non-Muslims is an open invitation for literature from other belief systems to be passed out in the free America I knew as a child. Only in Dearborn - to the best of my knowledge - is the power of the Police used to silence this kind of non-aggressive speech, Giving a copy of the book of John to those willing to take it is not aggressive. It is a form of what we are commanded to do as Christians. Give the gospel to the uninformed then allow the Holy Spirit to work in their hearts.

If Americans continue to refuse to confront Islam believing it to be a religion that lives quietly with those who do not believe, we are in serious trouble. I would suggest a crash course in history is needed along with a quick perusal of news from around the world.

A good place to start is by clicking The Gates of Vienna link in my blog list and reading as much as you can stomach from the news of this "peaceful" religion in Europe. The picture is not pretty and its' ugliest manifestation was seen in Dearborn, using the Police to silence dissenting voices. That is not the American way and it should not be condoned nor "tolerated."

Sharia Law in Dearborn, Michigan

2010-06-23T08:44:00.000-04:00

Some things are hard to understand. What is happening in this video is not. Because of multiculturalism - the belief that all cultures are equally just no matter the atrocities they commit - our government no longer believes that unconstitutional activities should be legally prevented. No, what we believe now, apparently, is that any activity which offends a politically correct group is wrong and police power should be used to stop that offense.

The Federal Government refuses to enforce our laws against illegal aliens sneaking into the United States, and now they refuse to enforce the Constitutional right to freedom of assembly and speech if that speech happens to offend a certain religious group.

If Muslims were to be the one's handing out literature on the blessings of enslavement to Sharia Law at a Christian festival I wonder if the police would respond in the same manner. I don't think so. Anyway watch the video then tell me once again about our supposed Constitutional freedoms.

This is not the United States of America I was born into. It is the Peoples Republic of Political Correctness.

I like Driscoll

2010-06-18T13:28:00.001-04:00

Some friends have looked at me with quizzically raised eyebrows from time to time when I mention Mark Driscoll. He is the young (relative to me) Pastor at Mars Hill Church in Seattle. Like me, he occasionally will slip and his language get a little salty. (That means he will swear when he thinks it appropriate).

Unlike me, however, and some folks I know, he was called to preach and it is evident when you listen to him. The following video shows him presenting the complete Gospel message - in ten minutes. He does it coherently, quickly, relevantly to listeners of any age, and with appropriate illustrations. The "Dude" can preach; and, I like him.

Lighten Up!

2010-06-17T14:12:00.001-04:00

Years ago I heard a joke about a young man who wanted to join an order of monasticism which allowed no talking with the exception that every five years he would be allowed to speka two words. The young man was fully cognizant of what life without speech would involve so he joined.

After his first five years had passed, the monk in charge of the monastery summoned the young man to his office. He was told that his fifth year anniversary was up and he would be allowed to say two words. Silently the young man thought for several minutes then said aloud "bed hard." With that he returned to his cell and duties for another five years.

Eventually he was again summoned to the chief monks office. Once again he was informed that another five years had passed and he was granted permission to speak two more words. Again, the young man thought for a few moments then said, "food bad." Again, he was told to return to his cell and his duties.

Time passed and finally after 15 long years he was summoned to the office. The monk in charge told him that he had now been in the order for 15 years and he was again allowed to speak two words. Without hesitation the man replied "I quit." The head monk replied, "you might as well quit, all you've done since the day you arrived is complain."

Although this joke has a certain irreverence about it I still think it is funny. Perhaps I need to do some soul-searching. Anyway a friend sent me another irreverent monkish joke, but this time in video. I think it is a riot. I don't know when I'll stop laughing. (Do I need to go to confession?)

i-Pad steals wife

2010-06-10T11:25:00.001-04:00

At 9 am a Fedex delivery person rang our front door bell. At 9:30 I had my wife's new i-Pad up and running. For all intents and purposes she is gone. Oh she's not gone physically, she's sitting across the table from me. She is so intent on playing with, learning, emailing, facebooking, etc., on this new gadget I'm not sure she will ever return to civilization.

At one point she asked if I would like to try the new toy, but then she immediately was distracted into surfing to some other place in the ether and that was that. I guess all I can do is wait to see if she returns.

I'm getting hungry now so I think I will drive over to Mickey D's for a hamburger. It looks like those will be my steady diet for some time to come. I wonder if I will ever be able to get my wife back.

Horton on Preaching

2010-06-06T07:54:00.000-04:00

Preaching in our post-modern world often seems to be totally unrelated to what God actually says in His Word. Some of the things we hear appear to be designed to manipulate people into making a "decision" for Christ without any kind of explanation of why they have a need for Christ in the first place. The assumption is, as Joel Osteen might say, "people feel bad enough about themselves without me talking about sin."

Michael Horton disagrees with those who believe that some kind of "felt need" on the part of some people is actually a call to preach. Horton says:

"Surely you're not saying that a preacher has to be a scholar." That's exactly what I am saying. A faithful minister is not someone who crawls out of bed one day and decides that he is called to preach, and gets a few of his friends together to confirm him in his zeal. To be sure, the leading of the Spirit is part of the call to the ministry of Word and Sacrament, but it doesn't stop there. If one believes he is led by God to pursue this calling, he must surrender several years to the serious study of God's Word and the tools necessary for rightly dividing it. He must know the proper rules for biblical interpretation. How many cults have been spawned by untrained zealots who couldn't distinguish figures of speech and different literary genres? Further, he must know the languages and be capable, to some extent, of working through the passages in the original tongue. But that's not all. He must learn church history, to learn from the wisdom and folly of the past. Again, how many strange cults and sects have arisen because Brother Fred thought he was the first person to really understand the Bible, when all he was really doing was reviving a heresy that was over a thousand years old? He must learn the systematic teaching of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, on the most important doctrines, in order to see how they all fit into a constructive unity. Otherwise, he will be unbalanced and confused in his preaching and teaching.

Unbalanced, confused preaching and teaching is causing more harm to the body of Christ than these shallow preachers will ever know this side of Heaven. I sometimes wonder if they care about what they are doing.

The Shack - Again

2010-06-05T15:02:00.000-04:00

One again the book The Shack seems to be on the minds of "Christians," or at least the minds of the Oprah-like spirituality seekers. P.J. Cockrell said this about it: "...its success proves not how much this country loves religion but how far from mainstream faith the nation’s aspirations have shifted."

I couldn't agree more. The sad part of this whole mess is how many I know of in my church who believe the book to be uplifting and good. Whatever happened to discernment?

Towzer On Doing Church

2010-06-05T09:22:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I have problems with what I see in church. Apparently I'm not the only one. A.W. Towzer had this to say:

We of the nonliturgical churches tend to look with some disdain upon those churches that follow a carefully prescribed form of service, and certainly there must be a good deal in such services that has little or no meaning for the average participant—this not because it is carefully prescribed but because the average participant is what he is. But I have observed that our familiar impromptu service, planned by the leader twenty minutes before, often tends to follow a ragged and tired order almost as standardized as the mass. The liturgical service is at least beautiful; ours is often ugly. Theirs has been carefully worked out through the centuries to capture as much of beauty as possible and to preserve a spirit of reverence among the worshipers. Ours is often an off-the-cuff makeshift with nothing to recommend it. Its so-called liberty is often not liberty at all but sheer slovenliness.—God Tells the Man Who Cares.

From time to time I've mentioned to my church leadership that a more formal structured kind of Worship service might be more appropriate. Needless to say my suggestions have not been appreciated. Oh well, I'll keep trying. Who knows, perhaps someday others may agree.

Train Wreck Theology

2010-06-01T19:54:00.000-04:00

From a song by a recent Church soloist: "there are some things my god doesn't know." So much for God being omniscient.

From a man in the pulpit on a Sunday morning: "there are too many (of you) who are saved but spiritually dead." Does this mean heaven will have Zombies in it?

Thinking and Loving God

2010-05-29T06:02:00.001-04:00

Apparently there are others who believe that the anti-intellecualism so rampant in some churches needs to be addressed. Piper's Desiring God conference this year is on that very subject. I'm going to see if I can't figure a way to attend.

Hat Tip to PJ Cockrell.

Illegal Border Crossing Facts

2010-05-28T06:44:00.000-04:00

Rowland Croucher posted this here. This list puts things in perspective.

1. If you cross the North Korean Border illegally, you get 12 years hard labor
2. If you cross the Iranian Border illegally, you are detained Indefinitely
3. If you cross the Afghan Border illegally, You get shot
4. If you cross the Saudi Arabian Border illegally, you will be jailed
5. If you cross the Chinese Border illegally, you may never be heard from again
6. If you cross the Venezuelan Border illegally, you will be branded a
spy and your fate is sealed
7. If you cross the Cuban Border illegally, you will be thrown into political prison to rot
8. If you cross the U.S. Border illegally, you get…………………
1. A job
2. A Driver’s License
3. Social Security Card
4. Welfare
5. Food Stamps
6. Credit Cards
7. Subsidized Rent or a loan to buy a house
8. Free Education
9. Free Health Care
10. A Lobbyist in Washington
11. Billions of Dollars Worth of public documents printed in your language
12. And the right to carry your country’s flag while you protest that
you don’t get enough respect.

We Shouldn't Complain

2010-05-26T10:30:00.001-04:00

A friend of mine is having a pretty rough go of it. He won't be specific about what's going on, but from what little he says I pray the Lord will give him the strength, insight and guidance he needs. Sunday he let some of his complaints be known publicly and he caused more damage than he realizes.

Well, this morning I found Randy Alcorn's new web site and came across an article about this very subject. Here are some of the reasons Randy gives for us not to complain.

7. To complain is to say God is not just.
“Shall not the Judge of all the Earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25)
8. Faith and prayer exclude complaining.
“I sought the Lord, and He answered me, and delivered me from all my fears” (Psalm 34:4).
9. This difficulty is being used by God for my good and it is foolish for me to complain against it.
“And we know that all things work together for the good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28).
10. Those more faithful than I have suffered far worse than I, and did so without complaint.
“…and others were tortured, not accepting their release, in order that they might obtain a better resurrection; and others experienced mockings and scourgings, yes, also chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were tempted, they were put to death with the sword; they went about in sheepskins, in goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, ill-treated (men of whom the world was not worthy), wandering in deserts and mountains and caves and holes in the ground. All these, having gained approval through their faith…” (Hebrews 11:35-39)
11. Complaining denies that God’s grace is entirely sufficient.
“My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

There are a total of twelve of these but I thought these five summed up nicely why we shouldn't complain. I trust the Lord will take my friend out of his "funk" and put him on "higher ground" which is his normal operating mode. He is a great guy and I don't like to see him like this.

We all have complaints and it wouldn't hurt any of us to review this list.

Progressive Theology

2010-05-25T11:39:00.000-04:00

I can't remember where I got this but it is appropriate for so much that goes on in "church" today.

How to Defeat Calvinism

2010-05-20T17:42:00.001-04:00

James White posted this. I think it is funny. As a person who has recently found the Reformed faith (Calvinism to my Arminian Baptist Church friends) I might just memorize it.

As a "newbie" Calvinist I had to have some direction to insure I am what I perceive to be the meaning of "Oh! You're one of those," from some in my church. Thank God for His sovereignty. He supplied Jeff Foxworthy to help me out with this problem. Foxworthy says, "...you might be a Calvinist if your preacher says "turn to Obadiah" and you don't have to use the index..."

Bro. Jeff has supplied many more of these. They can be found here. And, for this link I want to thank The Wittenberg Door. He posted it so I could find it.

Fruit of the Spirit

2010-05-19T14:49:00.003-04:00

I suppose its my age, but I have always believed that when scripture talks about "the fruit of the Spirit" it had to with a person and the effects He would work through us as humans. Although, unseen, He has always been believed, by me at least, to be just as real and important as the other members of the Trinity. As such I have always believed that to say frivolous, unkind, joking kinds of things about Him is not really a good idea. Somewhere I think I read something along the lines that by so doing one would not be forgiven. Apparently I got it all wrong. This Pastor? seems to think selling and promoting commercial products in His name is alright. After all, she say's she is promoting a healthy life-style. Here again my age is telling. I thought we were supposed to tell people about their lost condition under sin and the saving grace purchased by Jesus Christ on the cross. Anyway, watch the video and make up your own mind.

Hat Tip to Covenant Theology

Please Explain

2010-05-19T10:27:00.000-04:00

Would someone be kind enough to explain to me why we adults (?) have gotten the mistaken concept that young children cannot possibly learn or memorize complex and intricate kinds of things, like, you know, uhhh, Spurgeons' catechism, and stuff. Is it because we're brain-dead ourselves? This little guy memorizes and mimics some very complex information for a toddler. My point? All kids should be learning very complex information as they learn to talk.

Spurgeon to his flock in 1858

2010-05-18T11:12:00.000-04:00

Delivered on Sabbath Morning, February 28, 1858 by the REV. C. H. Spurgeon at the Music Hall, Royal Surrey Gardens.

When first it was my duty to occupy this pulpit, and preach in this hall, my congregation assumed the appearance of an irregular mass of persons collected from all the streets of this city to listen to the Word. I was then simply an evangelist, preaching to many who had not heard the Gospel before. By the grace of God, the most blessed change has taken place; and now, instead of having an irregular multitude gathered together, my congregation is as fixed as that of any minister in the whole city of London. I can from this pulpit observe the countenance of my friends, who have occupied the same places, as nearly as possible, for these many months; and I have the privilege and the pleasure of knowing that a very large proportion, certainly three-fourths of the persons who meet together here, are not persons who stray hither from curiosity, but are my regular and constant hearers. And observe, that my character also has been changed. From being an evangelist, it is now my business to become your pastor.(Continue Reading)

I know someone who should read this. He won't, but he should.

How To Win a War

2010-05-14T05:49:00.001-04:00

I don't know who wrote this, a friend sent it to me. It is the best idea on how to win the War on Terror and gain control of our southern border.

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I am over 60 and the Armed Forces thinks I'm too old to track down terrorists. You can't be older than 42 to join the military. They've got the whole thing backwards. Instead of sending 18-year olds off to fight, they ought to take us old guys. You shouldn't be able to join a military unit until you're at least 35.

For starters: Researchers say 18-year-olds think about sex every 10 seconds. Old guys only think about sex a couple of times a day, leaving us more than 28,000 additional seconds per day to concentrate on the enemy.

Young guys haven't lived long enough to be cranky, and a cranky soldier is a dangerous soldier. 'My back hurts! I can't sleep, I’m cold, I'm tired and hungry' We are impatient and maybe letting us kill some one that desperately deserves it will make us feel better and shut us up for a while.

An 18-year-old doesn't even like to get up before 10 a.m. Old guys always get up early to pee so what the hell. Besides, like I said, 'I'm tired and can't sleep and since I'm already up, I may as well be up killing some fanatical you know what.... If captured we couldn't spill the beans because we'd forget where we put them. In fact, name, rank, and serial number would be a real stretch.

Boot camp would be easier for old guys. We're used to getting screamed and yelled at and we're used to soft food. We've also developed an appreciation for guns. We've been using them for years as an excuse to get out of the house, away from the screaming and yelling.

They could lighten up on the obstacle course however. I've been in combat and didn't see a single 20-foot wall with rope hanging over the side, nor did I ever do any pushups after completing basic training.

Actually, the running part is kind of a waste of energy, too. I've never seen anyone outrun a bullet.

An 18-year-old has the whole world ahead of him.. He's still learning to shave, to start up a conversation with a pretty girl. He still hasn't figured out that a baseball cap has a brim to shade his eyes, not the back of his head.

These are all great reasons to keep our kids at home to learn a little more about life before sending them off into harm's way.

Let us old guys track down those dirty rotten coward terrorists. The last thing an enemy would want to see is a couple of million angry old dudes with attitudes and automatic weapons who know that their best years are already behind them.

***How about recruiting Women over 50 ......with PMS !!! You think Men have attitudes !!! Ohhhhhhhhhhhh my Lord!!! If nothing else, put them on border patrol.....we will have it secured the first night.

Share this with your senior friends.

The Great Debate

2010-05-11T06:49:00.000-04:00

I enjoy a good debate. Fortunately I do not live far from the next Great Debate series with Dr. James White. As of this moment I plan to attend each debate. The debates should be very interesting and educational. I live in an area populated by a very large number of Muslims. I don't know enough about their beliefs to carry on an intelligent conversation with them so perhaps after listening to the debates I will be better informed.

Here is some information on the Christians debaters:

Christian Debaters
Dr. James White is the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, a Christian apologetics organization. He is the author of more than twenty books, a professor, an accomplished debater (having engaged in more than seventy-five moderated, public debates), and an elder of the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

Professor David Wood is a teaching professor of philosophy at Fordham University, co-founder of Acts 17 Apologetics Ministry and a member of the Evangelical Philosophical Society. David, a former atheist, became a Christian after examining the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection. He has debated over 25 times with well-known Muslim scholars throughout the United States and England on behalf of “The Center for Religious Debate.”

Apologist Sam Shamoun is a writer and apologist for one of the world's most highly recognized apologetics website Answering Islam. Shamoun has written countless articles dealing with common issues in Christianity and Islam. He has engaged in debates nationwide as an informed apologist refuting the accusations and attacks presented by Islam against Christianity.

Spurgeon Said

2010-05-10T14:49:00.000-04:00

So much for walking an aisle, saying a simple prayer, and being "guaranteed" of heaven by writing the day, date and time in the front of your Bible:

The works which are absolutely necessary are, in brief, these: First, there must be fruits meet for repentance, works of repentance. It is wrong to tell a man he must repent before he may trust Christ, but it is right to tell him that, having trusted Christ, it is not possible for him to remain impenitent. There never was in this world such a thing as an impenitent believer in Jesus Christ, and there never can be. Faith and repentance are born in a spiritual life together, and they grow up together. The moment a man believes he repents, and while he believes he both believes and repents, and until he shall have done with faith he will not have done with repenting. If thou hast believed, but hast never repented of thy sins, then beware of thy believing. If thou pretendest now to be a child of God, and if thou hast never clothed thyself in dust and ashes; if thou hast never hated the sins which once thou didst love: if thou dost not now hate them, and endeavour to be rid of them, if thou dost not humble thyself before God on account of them, as the Lord liveth, thou knowest nothing about saving faith, for faith puts a distance between us and sin; in a moment it leads us away from the distance between us and Christ; nearer to Christ, we are now far off from sin. But he that loves his sin, thinks little of his sin, goes into it with levity, talks of it sportively, speaks of sin as though it were a trifle, hath the faith of devils, but the faith of God's elect he never knew. True faith purges the soul, since the man now hunts after sin that he might find out the traitor that lurks within his nature; and though a believer is not perfect, yet the drift of faith is to make him perfect; and if it is faith to be perfected, the believer shall be perfected, and then shall he be caught up to dwell before the throne. Judge yourselves, my hearers. Have you brought forth the fruits of repentance? If not, your faith without them is dead.

This is interesting

2010-05-10T10:30:00.002-04:00

Time Challies recently ran a poll asking what Bible translation people used for private study. The results are interesting. Of 2222 respondents over 64% use the English Standard Version. The King James Version is used by only 3%. Recently we had a seminar at my Church about the KJV and why it superior to the others. The presenter of the seminar had many apparently scholarly reasons why we should prefer the KJV. I believe most of his points were accurate and have decided that is the version I will stay with. Having said that, there are times when I use the ESV for various reasons. Anyway, here is Challies' chart (I hope he doesn't mind my posting it) and the link to his entire post. Click on the chart to enlarge it.

Link to Tim Challies Article

Oh! Oh!

2010-05-10T08:46:00.000-04:00

When I began using the Internet several years ago, I made a pact with myself in which I assumed anything I posted could be read by anyone in the world with access to a computer. Of course, I always read the privacy promises, etc., but I didn't really believe any of them human nature being what it is, and all. I was right. Wired Magazine now informs us that Facebook has reneged on it's privacy promises and is selling our profiles to whomever.

Facebook decided to turn “your” profile page into your identity online — figuring, rightly, that there’s money and power in being the place where people define themselves. But to do that, the folks at Facebook had to make sure that the information you give it was public.

So in December, with the help of newly hired Beltway privacy experts, it reneged on its privacy promises and made much of your profile information public by default. That includes the city that you live in, your name, your photo, the names of your friends and the causes you’ve signed onto.

This spring Facebook took that even further. All the items you list as things you like must become public and linked to public profile pages. If you don’t want them linked and made public, then you don’t get them — though Facebook nicely hangs onto them in its database in order to let advertisers target you.

Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue/#ixzz0nWsgdgPy

So, after I post this I'm going to close my Facebook account. There's nothing there I wouldn't let anyone read, but the idea that a company is so blatant about it's greed is aggravating.

I have to see this movie

2010-05-07T09:06:00.003-04:00

Why didn't anyone tell me about this? I have to see it!

Kevin Bacon is one of my favorite actors.

Who Chooses Whom?

2010-05-06T16:29:00.007-04:00

Who Chooses Whom in Salvation (from Mike Ratliff)

God wills John 1:12,13; Eph 1:5, Eph 1:11

God draws John 6:44

God grants John 6:55

God calls 1Thes 2:12; 2Thes 2:14; 2Tim 1:9; 1Pet 2:9

God appoints Acts 13:48; 1Thes 5:9

God predestines Rom 8:29; Eph 1:5, 11

God prepares Rom 9:23

God causes 1Cor 1:30

God chooses 1Thes 1:4; 2Thes 2:13; Eph 1:4

God purposes Eph 1:11

God delivers and
transfers Col 1:13

God saves 2Tim 1:9: Titus 3:5

God makes us alive Eph 2:5

God pours out
His Spirit Titus 3:6

God brings us forth James 1:18

God justifies Rom 8:30; Titus 3:7

God sanctifies 1Thes 5:23

God glorifies Rom 8:3

The passages above summarize what Sacred Scripture teaches about God’s role in salvation. If you have taken an honest look at these passages then you have seen that God is the ‘first cause’ or initiator of a believer’s salvation.

Unserious Atheism and Unserious Christianity

2010-05-05T09:05:00.000-04:00

"Unserious atheism with its support of a sinful heart will ALWAYS trump unserious and unscriptural Christianity, because while both are silly, at least the former allows people to embrace the sin they enjoy."

More and more I hear good Christian people trying to motivate sinners from a human perspective to accept Christ and Christianity without much success. Scripture teaches we should acknowledge our fallen nature and in the light of our rebellion against a Holy God ask for and receive (repentance) forgiveness and acceptance by Christ. Scripture also teaches this can only be accomplished as God the Father draws us to Jesus Christ His son. (John 6:44).

What I hear so often, however, is that sinners should accept Christ and His free gift of salvation for various reasons all presented as something that as humans we should want. For example, I hear some say that we should accept Christ because we don't want to miss going to heaven. That is not the Gospel that is a sales pitch. One might as well be selling shoes, or a trip to Disney Land.

Selling heaven as the reason for accepting Christ is no different than telling people all they need to do to insure prosperity is to give more money to the church "because it works." The shallowness of this non-intellectual, mushy, thoughtless, presentation of Christianity will in the long run, in my opinion, convert more people to Atheism than it will to Christianity. In our culture we are taught to believe only in the "scientific" provable material Universe around us, not the someday, maybe, reward of an "unprovable" Heaven. To the unregenerate a Heaven someday is much less attractive than a new Cadillac is in the here and now. That's why so many are led astray by the prosperity "gospel."

What ever happened to Biblical idea that we should tell people they were made (not evolved) by a Holy God who, because of the rebellion of our first parents, has been rejected as imaginary and non-existent? That's what the Atheists would have us believe. The Bible says that if we tell people the truth of their rebellious nature, explaining to them how this has separated them from God, He will do all that is necessary to insure His chosen ones are with Him after death in the Heaven He has prepared. We can't "sell" or "convince" people of the idea they are doomed. Only the Holy God can do that. How did we move so far from the factual content of scripture that we now think we can "win souls" for Christ by our own efforts?

Why can't preachers just tell people the Truth of the Gospel and let God do what He is going to do?

Children, Bible, Family

2010-05-03T09:10:00.001-04:00

My church is in the midst of a five day seminar about the Bible. We're learning how it came to be, the manuscripts used to assemble it, etc. I am learning some things I did not know, but that is the point isn't it? We all, even the teachers, can learn if we are open and willing.

Some in my church, even some in leadership, are neither open nor willing to learn. They have cemented thoughts they learned 30 years ago into idealized notions that the world around them has not changed. They believe "there is nothing new under the sun," or that even if there is they don't need to be familiar with it.

Their ideas seem to be the Bible hasn't changed, therefore there is no reason to change the way it is presented. The problem with this reasoning is, of course, that Satan changes his tactics on an almost daily basis. If we are not prepared as Christians to confront his innovations for attack we lose.

One of the areas of ministry that I see as lacking is in the teaching of children. It appears, at least to me, that this is now left almost entirely in the hands of the paid professionals. However, if those professionals see no need to "educate" the children in what they will confront in the world as they grow and develop all of our talk will have been for naught as the secular can quickly undermine the spiritual if we are not prepared.

We all know the statistics of Christian children returning from University as agnostics or even atheists so those stats must indicate a fundamental problem in the way we do things in the church. I believe, and have believed for some time, the problem lies in Christians parents allowing the busyness of our lives to override the necessity for parents to train their children in "way they should go." Here is an excerpt from an article which addresses this problem:

The average Christian receives an education from the Church that presumes that said Christian will never encounter someone with a different worldview or even one that is positively hostile. We educate our youth as though when they go to college their professors will be sympathetic to Christianity.

Now, in my view, spiritual formation is a duty that chiefly resides in the family with the parents being the primary mechanism by which the faith is transmitted from one generation to the next. Assisted and supported, of course, by the Greater Church. I think Church professionals have allowed too much to be delegated to them, willingly taking on duties that should be performed by the father and mother. They ought to work actively to restore parents to their rightful place in the chain.

However, at the same time I am a realist. Many parents don’t know that the Bible lists them as the primary medium for raising godly children. (Prov 22:6, Deu 6:7) They need to be told this, and then equipped for the task.

I'm not sure I see or hear anything on the church horizon to indicate a return to the Biblical notion that parents are to raise and educate their children. Too many seem to have been locked into the secular notion that the State has this responsibility therefore the church doesn't need to educate parents as to their responsibilities.

Personally, I'm enjoying the educational aspects of the "Bible Seminar" we are having, but I believe there are more pressing issues than telling people Origen used the wrong manuscripts. We should be having "seminars" on how to live in a world which hates Christianity and is getting more vocal about hating individual Christians. Who is teaching our children how to deal with these realities?

Instead of Bible Seminars how about Parental Seminars training parents how to train their children at home?

Shallow Gospel

2010-05-02T07:53:00.003-04:00

John McArthur has this to say on a shallow gospel message:

"...A shallow gospel presentation that doesn’t present the reality of eternal judgment, the reality of the Law of God, the reality of condemnation, eternal hell, does not warn of God’s wrath, that does not crush the sinner under the weight of his violation of the Law of God, that does not make him stand before God guilty.

The gospel presentation that doesn’t do that isn’t a faithful gospel presentation. And then to tell someone, “Welcome to the family,” as if you knew; this is fantasy.

I've been trying to say the same thing for some time now, but no one listens. Maybe McArthur's voice saying the same thing will awaken those folks to the reality that a shallow gospel is truly a false gospel.

Watch this video to hear McArthur say it himself:

Doctrinal Relivancy

2010-05-01T13:28:00.002-04:00

From Old Truth: Martyn Lloyd-Jones on Relevancy of Doctrine

How often do we hear it today, "Doctrine really isn't relevant for me; I need something that will help me with my struggles in life". Martyn Lloyd-Jones addressed that sentiment by saying: There is nothing which is so wrong, and so utterly false, as to fail to see the primary importance of true doctrine. Looking back over my experience as a pastor for some thirty-four years, I can testify without the slightest hesitation that the people I have found most frequently in trouble in their spiritual experience have been those who have lacked understanding. You cannot divorce these things.

Much more here.

Ryle on Election

2010-04-24T11:14:00.000-04:00

Quote From Old Truth

First of all let me entreat every reader of this paper not to refuse this doctrine of Election, merely because it is high, mysterious, and hard to be understood. Is it reverent to do so? Is it treating God's Word with the respect due to revelation? Is it right to reject anything written for our learning, and to give it hard names, merely because some misguided men have misused it, and turned it to a bad purpose? These are serious questions. They deserve serious consideration. If men begin rejecting it, they are on slippery ground. There is no saying how far they may fall.

What after all do men gain by refusing the doctrine of Election? Does the system of those who deny Election save one soul more than of those who hold it? Certainly not. Do those who hold Election narrow the way to heaven, and make salvation more difficult than those who deny it? Certainly not.

The opponents of Election maintain that none will be saved except those who repent and believe. Well: the advocates of Election say just the same! The opponents of Election proclaim loudly that none but holy people go to heaven. Well: the advocates of Election proclaim the same doctrine just as loudly!

What, then, I ask once more, is gained by denying the truth of Election? I answer, Nothing whatever. And yet, while nothing is gained, a great deal of comfort seems to be lost. It is cold comfort to be told that God never thought of me before I repented and believed. But to know and feel that God had purposes of mercy toward me before the foundation of the world, and that all the work of grace in my heart is the result of an everlasting covenant and an eternal Election, is a thought full of sweet and unspeakable consolation. A work that was planned before the foundation of the world, by an Architect of almighty power and perfect wisdom, is a work which will never be allowed to fail or be overthrown.

Old Paths, 1878

Another Book to Read

2010-04-17T10:24:00.000-04:00

Readers of this blog know I have been having problems with certain things I hear presented as the "gospel." I think the major problem with much of what I hear is that the speaker(s) assume our culture still shares an inherited belief in there being a god. Sadly to say, this is not so.

American schools have spent the better part of half a century "educating" their charges that the very idea of god is an illusion perpetrated by some men who have an agenda to control the masses of men. So some preachers pretend to preach "the Gospel" by beginning in the middle of the story, Christ died for sinners, with the assumption that the listeners have built-in knowledge to confirm what they are saying. It is a tragedy in the Americanized church and a slap in the face to the God of the Bible.

There is a new book out that I ordering, today, which, according to reviews is one that should be read by all preachers and everyone claiming to be a Christian. It is "What is the Gospel, by Greg Gilbert. You can read about it here.

Here are the main points:

Who made us, and to whom are we accountable
What is our problem? In other words, are we in trouble and why.
What is God's solution to that problem? How has He acted to save us from it?
How do I - myself, right here, right now - how do I come to be included in that salvation? What makes this good news for me and not just for someone else?

I'm going to order the book right now. I may give my copy to someone I know who needs it badly.

Evading reality

2010-04-13T08:21:00.002-04:00

Many years ago I was attempting to witness to a lady who lives near my Baptist church. She looked me in the eyes and said, "that church is a cult." I have never gotten those words out of my mind. Then, I ignored her words and tried to forget them. Now, all these years later I think I am beginning to understand what she was trying to say.

Christianity is a belief system that is given to mankind as the only story of redemption for mankind. Philosophers would call it a narrative, technically it is a meta-narrative, meaning it is the all encompassing story for life. It is the story of redemption given to us by God himself in Scripture. It is the story of God (theology) and man (anthropology) which is all inclusive in describing how we - mankind - are to live in relation to the Holy God.

Given that it is God who has revealed Himself to us, there are no optional choices that can be made concerning our responsibility in our practical application of this narrative in our lives. We are made in such a way that we either must conform to the entire narrative or find in the end that in denying part of it we have become guilty of denying the whole, there is no middle ground.

The reality of the Christian belief system is that its story of redemption cannot be told in part if it is to be affective. If we tell a person he can be saved without explaining to him saved from what and why he needs salvation, the price paid for his redemption is cheapened and thus denied by default. The price paid by Christ was too costly not to be told as the major reason for God's demand that we repent. The gospel (good news) is not good news if any part of it is evaded or omitted in the re-telling. Repentance and redemption are opposite sides of the same coin. One cannot exist without the other.

When we preach "ye must be born again" without explanation of why this "rebirth" is necessary, followed up with explanation of the requirement of repentance, we have effectively nullified a major component of what the Holy God has revealed of Himself. God is a just God and part of His justice demands an acknowledgment from those He is redeeming that they have indeed violated His law and are sorry for their affront to His nature.

The general (overall) narrative in Scripture is a litany of mankind's flouting of God's law and His actions taken to redeem his chosen violators. His plan of redemption began in the Garden of Eden, and ended with the death of Jesus, His Son, on the Cross of Calvary. Without telling others this basic narrative, at some point preaching will deteriorate into a gloss of man-made concepts which quickly slide into no gospel at all. Preaching will become nothing more than psychological manipulation as the Preacher attempts to coerce people into a false sense of security that will soon evaporate - as all of man's desires do.

When someone tells another human being that all they need to do to gain heaven is accept Jesus as their "personal savior," without an explanation of the entire narrative, that person has committed what can only be seen in God's eyes as an usurpation of His authority. Moreover to inform someone that they are "guaranteed" heaven when they die, goes beyond simply usurping authority, it becomes a matter of assuming the role of God. This is a very dangerous enterprise for any human to undertake.

Scripture says that "faith comes by hearing..." but Scripture also says that mankind is born "dead in trespasses and sin." Faith is not something that one man can tell another he has or has been granted. Faith is the ability to believe and only God can give a human that ability. Faith is a change in one's nature that is granted super-naturally by God to His elect after He has "quickened" or regenerated their dead souls. Faith is not something men can casually walk down an aisle and tell a Preacher, "Hey Dude I believe that stuff you said, now what?" Or, more commonly, "I gave my heart to Jesus, what I gotta do now?"

Evading telling the entire story of redemption either for personal or secular reasons, for example, to brag about a tally of numerical conquests, can only be the result of a mind blinded by the particulars of the immediate moment. The particulars of the moment may be as innocuous as a desire to "win the lost," but no matter how one achieves an affirmative response to this kind of spiritual manipulation, it is dangerous work. Whatever the underlying motivation, to imply to another human "you have been granted the faith to believe" is God's prerogative, not ours.

Faith, once it has been given by God is evidenced by a change in desires on the part of the grantee. Scripture calls it "fruit." The evidence of being born again is not in writing the day, date, and time of a "decision" in the front of a Bible; the evidence is shown by a life lived out denying execution to old impulses and desires. It is a costly change for God but for us it is free. Our only job once this faith has been granted is to use it. We do that by taking up our Cross daily as we follow Jesus who gave us the Holy Spirit as our assistant in this endeavor. Anything less than full disclosure of the entire Gospel message is, in my opinion, a terrible sin committed against God. In ethical terms, it is fraud.

Unless we accept the fact that God told us He "added to the church daily those who should be saved," we will continue to have churches in America filled with unregenerate pretenders who are living a reality evading life. Those responsible for this effrontery will, I'm sure, be judged in the end.

For too long I participated in the charade which perpetuates this kind of thing. I have finally learned enough to know that what I was doing was wrong and plan to spend the rest of my life trying to make amends. I've started by trying to educate myself in the meta-narrative as given to us by God and not the particular one men have made up to further their own agendas.

I think I have finally figured out what the neighbor lady meant when she said that church is a "cult." She meant it was mistaken in some of the things it did. I agree and hope to live long enough to see if God will make changes in its narrative to the World.

A New Book

2010-04-11T08:11:00.003-04:00

I love to read and spend more on books than I should. Perhaps that is a curse. I don't know. I do know that the reading I've done over the years has opened World's to me I did not know existed. As a Christian I have been introduced to areas of worship that opened vistas of grandeur that my "Fundamentalist" upbringing was afraid to admit existed.

Now comes a new book that I just heve to have. It is The Trials of Theology. It is reviewed by Nathan Pitchford at Reformed Books. What hooked me is this quote from the review:

For all the differences current Protestant theologians may legitimately have with some of the Church Fathers, there is much that we have forgotten, which we would do well to relearn from them. That is why the brief selection from Augustine, the only representative of the early Church, was one of my favorite parts of the whole book. How he trembled at the thought of entering the high calling of the ministry, and with what earnest words he begged of his superior leave to pursue a greater understanding of the sacred scriptures! The work that he had to do was nothing to him if not frighteningly and eternally weighty, he had so great a fear of the Shepherd that he was terrified to feed his sheep with anything but the truth of the bible. “For what shall I say to the Lord my Judge,” he wonders, if he should not be able to set aside time to pursue his theological education; “Shall I say, 'I was not able to acquire what I needed, because I was engrossed wholly with the affairs of the Church'? What if he replies, 'You wicked servant! … How do you allege that you had no time to learn how to cultivate my field?'”. If many pastors only had that same perspective today, I suspect that “felt needs,” ten-step plans, how-to-be-successful-in-this-life strategies, self-esteem pep talks, etc. ad- nauseum, would not dominate the pulpits of so many “ministries” and churches. The sober, careful exegesis of the scriptures would not be viewed as irrelevant, boring, or inadequate, if the majesty of God and the fearful danger of acting presumptuously in his Name were as pressing a concern today as they have been at times in the past.

I've read some Augustine, but I haven't read him as carefully as I should. I need to go back and really read him again. I love this part because of its pertinence in my understanding of theology at this moment in life:

“For what shall I say to the Lord my Judge,” he wonders, if he should not be able to set aside time to pursue his theological education; “Shall I say, 'I was not able to acquire what I needed, because I was engrossed wholly with the affairs of the Church'? What if he replies, 'You wicked servant! … How do you allege that you had no time to learn how to cultivate my field?'”.

I would not want to be required to answer the question Augustine thought might be asked of him at Judgment if he allowed himself to get so involved with the "affairs of the Church" that he did not take the time to study.

Not long ago I heard a preacher say, "studying doctrine and the Bible are not important. The only truly important thing in life is winning souls." I wonder how that preacher will react if Christ asks him Augustine's question at the judgment? I pray he corrects his thinking before that event arrives.

Agreeing to disagree?

2010-04-10T14:30:00.001-04:00

I read this excerpt on Dr. James Galyon's site 2 Worlds Collide:

Johnny Hunt notes in the foreword to the book Whosoever Will: A Biblical Theological Critique of Calvinism, “As Baptists, we all know that we have Calvinists and non-Calvinists within our ranks. I believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is highly exalted when we can acknowledge our differences but join hands around a gospel-centered message to proclaim its truth to the nations.” He adds, “What I have come to love most about theology is the capacity to agree to disagree but to do it in the spirit of Christ.”

Pasted from <http://drjamesgalyon.wordpress.com/>

Christ said "I am the way the truth and the life." Truth appears to be losing its appeal around the globe as I read more and more statements by "Christians" such as the "…capacity to agree to disagree but to do it in the spirit of Christ."

The dictionary defines truth as

1. Conformity to fact or actuality.

2. A statement proven to be or accepted as true.

3. Sincerity; integrity.

4. Fidelity to an original or standard.

Pasted from <http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Truth>

Truth, facts, fidelity, standards, these are not ambiguous words or categories. These words carry with them the sense that there are no options. An analogy would be speed limits, they are what they are. If you exceed them your wrong. As Aristotle is often claimed to have said, "A is A." A fact is a statement about the reality of something. To say that the reality spoken of may be something other than what it is disqualifies it from being categorized as truth or fact or any category of certainty. To say a standard is a measure of certainty and then say that it may not be all that certain removes it from the category of standard. Truth is a factual statement about the actuality of reality. To say that there may be different perspectives, or ideas, concerning the statement removes the category of truth. Truth, standards, fidelity are black and white issues. They are either what they are stated to be or they are not part of the categories of thought that they claim.

It is just so with statements like, "…What I have come to love most about theology is the capacity to agree to disagree…in the spirit of Christ." Christ never accepted a half-hearted, mistaken, similar, or closely related belief in what He taught. He himself asserted you were either with Him or against Him. He gave no options concerning belief in His "theology." If you do not believe the "son of man" is the Messiah, the Christ, the Savior, then good luck: It's awfully warm where you're headed.

Postmodernism's subtle insinuations into so much that now passes for Christianity has silenced many of those claiming to be followers of Christ. They are getting ever more afraid to say with authority to those preaching "a different gospel" that's not TRUE. Instead they waffle in the politically correct quick-sand by saying things like "agree to disagree."

Personally I don't agree to disagree with anyone. If I'm wrong prove it. If not, then, I will "shake the dust off my sandals," so to speak, and that will be the end of it. Either I believe true-Truth, as Francis Schaffer called it, or I am in error. There is no either or when it comes to eternity. If my beliefs are wrong then I'm in trouble.

My Calvinist belief is that God has elected those He chose to be the Bride for His Son. My job is to tell as many people as I can about that because I haven't a clue as to who is elect and who isn't. Another aspect of my Calvinist belief is that God is Sovereign in this transaction and there is no way I can "win" anyone to Christ. I tell them the Gospel and God either changes them so that they can have the faith to believe; Or not!

Somewhere I read this: " We’ve got just enough God to give our lives a kind of spiritual tint without so much God as to interfere with our running the world as we damn well please." Now, that is truth.

Galaxies and Cremation

2010-04-07T16:54:00.002-04:00

"Sometimes the “culture wars” that really matter aren’t the ones you’re screaming about with unbelievers in the public square; they’re the ones in which you’ve already surrendered, and never even noticed."

Russell Moore, Professor at SBTS, posted the above in an interesting article concerning cremation for Christians. He is opposed to it. I'm not, and intend to be cremated when the Lord takes me home.

My decision is a common sense decision made for practical reasons.They are, in no particular order: 1) Why should my widow or children, who are not rich, spend thousands to enrich people they don't know for unbiblical reasons. That's right unbiblical. My bible says that when I die, I will be absent from the body and with the Lord. 3) My body was made from dust and to dust it returns, according to scripture, it is not me. Moreover, scripture says nothing against expediting this process. 4) I happen to believe that the Potter who made me is not concerned with the clay since He has promised a new kind of body in the end. Do Christians actually think a Holy God would take a smelly, rotted, refurbished, dead thing into Heaven? He made a point of giving Jesus a brand new body in front of eye witnesses, shouldn't that be taken as a hint that the cancerous, diseased bodies we are saddled with now are of no eternal use?

My belief in this regard boils down to an absolute belief in the Sovereign power of God. Colossians 1:17 suggests the very structure of the Universe is in His control at all times. For me to assume that we humans should spend thousands of dollars attempting to preserve something - in this case a rotting corpse returning to dust - for no apparent Biblical reason is beyond my comprehension. As a matter of fact, our apparent obsession with "death" seems to me nothing but a modern pagan cult-like desire to attempt to override God's plan that our bodies should decompose. Where in the Bible does it say we should follow the Ancient Egyptian practice of embalming? I can't find it.

When Christ returns for His own, I believe He is quite capable of manufacturing the necessary components to insure that I will be capable of "meeting Him in the air." You see, I actually trust Him enough to do that; after all, He made Markarian 348 didn't He.

***Informational note: (Largest galaxy) Markarian 348 is a galaxy estimated to be 1.3 million light years in diameter. Our Milky way is 100,000 light years in diameter. The God who made both can certainly deal with my ashes. My argument is not made to tempt Him, its just made to show that at least one person in His Universe actually believes what He says about Himself and His power. If He wants me in heaven He will see to it that I am there. Informational note #2: One light year equals roughly 6 trillion miles.

Westminster Cathedral and Smiley Faces

2010-04-07T08:56:00.001-04:00

Easter is the day Christians remember that our God, Jesus Christ, resurrected from His grave. I always anticipate this special day because the way we celebrate the day in church generally leads to reflection and meditation on Christ. I always anticipate returning from Church with an imagined image of something like the picture below in my mind. For whatever reason man-made attempts to bring into life a sense of what heaven might be like seem to capture my sense of awe. Whenever I am in Cathedrals or Churches I can't help but think of the my Savior and His sacrifice. The photo is the interior of Westminster Cathedral, London, how could anyone think of anything other than the God of the Universe with this in their mind.

This Easter was disappointing for me. Of course I tried to the best of my feeble ability, to retain visions of grandeur in my mind as I went through the day, but the service I attended did not help. For some unknown reason this particular church thinks images like the one below flashed on the worship screens at the front of the church will not distract from the sense of awe we should have for what Christ has done for us.

The church I attended has ordered its' service so that at the end of the service while the offertory is being played a power-point runs supposedly to announce the mundane activities of the church which is designed to entertain and amuse. This church also has a printed bulletin, given to every attendee, but obviously believes we are illiterate and cannot read it. The need for this redundancy escapes me. Having said that, however, I think that most people today are image oriented - thanks to our television oriented culture - and tend to remember bits and pieces of information in reverse order. The last thing we see is the first thing we remember. So, as I left church on Easter 2010 the thing that I couldn't get out of my mind were the animated smiley faces and cartoons of fat babies flashing on those screens.

Here it is Wednesday, and still what I recall most prominently about this service is the above. I wish the last thing I had seen on the screens had been an image of the risen Christ ascending and not a post-modern, idiotic, childish, reminder that our true god appears to be ourselves and our cultural icons.I would rather have seen the picture below as the memorial memory for Easter service 2010.

Friends

2010-04-03T15:20:00.001-04:00

This is Fred. He's lived in this neighborhood for a long time. At least I think he has. I can't seem to tell him from Freda his live-in companion. Anyway one of them, I think this one, comes to our deck door begging for food every now and then. In the past I would throw bread on the lawn of which he would get a couple of nibbles and the birds would steal the rest. So today when he visited I decided to give him some crackers. I gave him three, one of which he is munching on in this photo. He will be back, I'm sure, since I've learned over the years Squirrels are like cats: if you feed them they will not leave. Next time he visits maybe I'll see what he does with ice-cream. Oh! BTW, I did give him water to slake the thirst after eating three "saltines."

Home Depot

2010-04-03T08:12:00.000-04:00

I read a headline this morning that I have to post just so I don't forget it.

Home Depot Theology: You can do it; We can help!

To my mind that pretty much sums up what is so wrong about so much in the church today. In too many instances God appears to be thrown in as an after thought to rationalize why we do what we do.

I could go on, but I won't. I think those who read this blog know what I am talking about.

Books, Study, Knowledge

2010-04-02T09:11:00.001-04:00

All men are different in some aspect of personality. That is a God-given axiomatic assertion. However, when it comes to enterprises all men should participate in, personalities must be set aside. For example we are commanded in Scripture to "put on this mind which is in Christ."

There is only one way for a human to do that and it is study: reading, thinking, contemplating, prayerful supplication for wisdom and more importantly the faith to believe that the Holy Spirit will "guide (us) into all knowledge."

I have a friend who is a Seminary grad and leader in a church. He loves to read as much as I do. He mentions from time to time that he doesn't have the time to read as he would like because of the demands of other things. He, like all of us, has the difficult task of prioritizing his use of time. What eats his time are the secular notions so prevalent in too many churches today that each member has a right to call upon the leadership for consolation in the everyday mundane things that happen to every human on the planet. We all get sick, we all die, my thought is grow up, deal with it; quit demanding the precious time of those who are charged with teaching. Allow them the freedom of time required to become more deeply involved in what it is they are called to do - teach.

Recently I came across this video which is a brief tour of J.Ligon Duncan's study/library. Duncan is the Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Mississippi. The number of books this man has is astonishing in a day in which the written word is becoming an anachronism. It reminds me of C.H. Spurgeon who had over 12,000 books in his library.

An Inside Look at Ligon Duncan's Study
- Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

I heard a man say recently, "you don't need a bunch of books about the Bible, all you need is the Bible," which of course, is an extremely childish thing to say. Christians must do all they can to learn all they can about this Christ person they claim to venerate so much. Telling other Christians they don't need to study to learn from those who have gone before can do nothing but forever doom the listeners to a life of absolute boredom and despair in the life they have been given in Christ. Is it any wonder so many so-called "Christian" churches are dying a slow, painful, death?

Luke 10:27 says: "And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself." That is a command to use ourselves in a totally integrated, cohesive way. Every part of what we have been given is to be strengthened, to the best of our abilities, in the service of Christ. Although the mind is listed last the importance of its contribution to this task should never be minimized by telling people they don't need to study.

Of course, there are those who live by their emotions who will never agree with what I am saying. But, that in no way abrogates the command to use our minds to their fullest regardless of what some people "feel" about this.

Easy Believism on Steroids!

2010-04-01T18:14:00.004-04:00

I thought I had pretty much seen and heard it all during my 70 years! Not! Seems a church in Texas is giving away 1 million dollars in prizes to those who attend services on Resurrection Morning. (Most call this day by its pagan name Eastre (Easter).

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I'm almost a loss for words on this one. But, close doesn't count so here goes. Not only does the Pastor in the video delight in the fact that he has all those prizes to give away - including 16 new cars - he is delighted that he will be able to "give heaven for free" to anyone who wants it on Easter morning. Talk about Pagan religions this one has to be the epitome.

I could have sworn I read somewhere that Jesus went balistic when He came across this same activity in the temple in Jerusalem. But, hey, what do I know? I'm just sayin".

If Jesus were to appear at that monstrosity on Sunday I wonder if the Pastor or any of his followers would recognize Him. I think he and they would be like the disciples were on Resurrection morning when they met Jesus. They didn't know him and according to Scripture these folks in Texas don't either.

Orwell was right!

2010-04-01T16:50:00.002-04:00

Judge Andrew Napolitano is known by most of us from his "legal consultant" stints on the Fox News Network. He is bright, articulate, and a concerned American. In this video he points out some things in the law that most of just do not know exist. It is because of men like Napolitano that our government has not had the nerve to become as dictatorial as some would like it to be.

About halfway into this video Napolitano points out a little know provision of the "Patriot Act." It allows Federal police agencies to hand-write warrents, serve them with full force of law, and make you a criminal if you tell anyone what has transpired.

Talk about Orwelian rule of law. This has to be it. Anyway after watching the video you will know why I carry a gun. (All legal of course - for now at least). I will protect my Constitutional Right to legal counsel no matter what some hand-written note says.

Strange

2010-04-01T08:39:00.000-04:00

Some things humans do just seem strange to me. I don't know why we do some of the things we do - we just seem to do them for no reason. For instance, when Lenin died and we were shown pictures of hundreds of thousands of people lined up to walk past and view his body I thought "don't those people have something better to do?"

As far as I've been able to determine Lenin is still dead. His body hasn't moved of it's own accord and he is still dead. Princess Dina's funeral and cult-like following a few years later produced greater crowds of people trying to get a glimpse of her dead body.

Now, Lenin was an atheist, and those who "worshiped" him were as well. So, I would imagine the only hope they had was either that his ideas would live long after him (some of them do and are embodied in the politicians in Washington DC) or perhaps he would come back to life. But, by default that is out of the question because he and they claimed there is no after-life. So, I can't figure out what all the looking at his dead body is all about.

What is really strange, however, is the idea that so-called Christians would believe there is some benefit to be gained by watching a dead body or in this case the grave of a dead person. Liberty University has a Web-cam streaming live video of Jerry Falwell's grave 24/7. Christians, by default, are supposed to believe that when a person dies his body rots and returns to dust but that his soul is with the Lord. So why in the mind of any thinking Christian would this be thought to be something Christians are supposed to waste God's resources on? The money could be sent to A Place of Hope Africa orphanage in Nigeria where it would feed, clothe, and house some of God's neediest children.

But, then, a Church which builds this kind of "memorial" - eternal flame and all - for a dead man, probably has issues other than using a webcam so that the world can watch a pile of dirt in which is housed a decaying body.

Somethings are just to too strange to comprehend: This is one of them.

Spurgeon calls it "A load of trash."

2010-03-28T15:55:00.002-04:00

On April 28, 1878 Charles Haddon Spurgeon preached at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London. This was Spurgeon's Church and he generally preached to keep his people focused on Christ. He of course, was a master orator and expositor. One of the things I like about his sermons is the fact that he was unconcerned about what outsiders might think. He preached scripture and scripture only. He added nothing to it and took nothing away. Below is an example to make this point:

[...] ”If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed: for he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds.”

He who does not hate the false does not love the true; and he to whom it is all the same whether it be God’s word or man’s, is himself unrenewed at heart. Oh, if some of you were like fathers you would not have tolerated in this age the wagon loads of trash under which the gospel has been of late buried by ministers of your own choosing. You would have hurled out of your pulpits the men who are enemies to the fundamental doctrines of your churches, and yet are crafty enough to become your pastors and undermine the faith of a fickle and superficial generation.

Most preachers today don't have the spine required to say things like that today. Instead they concern themselves with stroking the "felt needs" of those in attendance seldom even bothering to mention that Jesus began his ministry demanding repentance. I wonder what would be the case in American Christianity today if preachers actually preached the Word only instead of layering "trash" on top the Gospel?

Reliability of Bible

2010-03-28T06:55:00.002-04:00

Is the Bible reliable? James White takes the time to explain that it is. Is KJV the only Bible to read? It was copied from printed Bibles not the manuscripts so I suppose one would have to learn Greek to obtain certainty - or at least as much certainty as is possible. I'll just take it as a given that it is accurate. Anyway this is a very interesting talk by Dr. White

Earth Hour

2010-03-27T07:40:00.000-04:00

As I was getting ready this morning I was listening to the Voice of the Midwest, WJR Radio. They were discussing an event planned for 8:30PM tonight called Earth Hour. What it is, I gather, is a movement to "save the earth" from "global warming" by turning off all our lights for 1 hour. Personally I believe the global warming nonsense is just a scam to make some elites very wealthy; Al Gore comes to mind.

In any event I thought these folks should give some kind of medal to North Korea for it's year-round participation in this project. Below is satellite photo of the two Koreas. Obviously the North has been participating in this project for several decades now and appears to have cornered the market on blackouts and turning off lights. But, then again, maybe its because they don't know how to produce large amounts of electricity.

Here's What We Will Get

2010-03-27T06:04:00.000-04:00

Mark Steyn has a very good piece about Obama Care. What he describes is not a pretty picture, but we all sense it is the truth - we just don't want to admit it. Here is a snippet from Steyn's article:

I think of a young man called Gerald Augustin of Rivière-des-Prairies, Québec, who went to the St. André medical clinic complaining of stomach pain. He’d forgotten to bring his government medical card, so they turned him away. He was a Quebecker born and bred, and he was in their computer. But no card, no service: that’s just the way it is. So he went back home to get it, collapsed of acute appendicitis, and by the time the ambulance arrived he was dead. He was 21 years old, and he didn’t make it to 22 because he accepted the right of a government bureaucrat to refuse him medical treatment for which he and his family have been confiscatorily taxed all their lives. “I don’t see what we did wrong,” said the administrator. “We just followed the rules.” No big deal, M Augustin wasn’t anything special; no one in her clinic even remembered giving him the brush.

Here's the link for the article. HT to Doug Groothuis

Doug Wilson on Thinking

2010-03-25T16:51:00.000-04:00

Pastor Wilson has a great post about thinking - particularly thinking correctly. He began the article with a bunch of things he prefers: You know like the taste of butterscotch over that of spinach. I thought; duh! Who doesn't. But then he went on to say things like:

John Stott once wrote that fuzzy thinking was one of the sins of our age, and he was right. And Dorothy Sayers argued in her great essay on the lost tools of learning that we must learn how to make careful distinctions.

In our day, some profound spiritual errors proceed from Christians who have gotten tired of the need to do just this.

There are very good insights in this article. You can read it here.

Towzer Quote

2010-03-23T17:18:00.000-04:00

Not long ago I came across A.W. Towzer's book Knowledge of the Holy. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and I enjoy dipping back into it's insightful teachings about God. Here is a quote from it:

If some watcher or holy one who has spent his glad centuries by the sea of fire were to come to earth, how meaningless to him would be the ceaseless chatter of the busy tribes of men. How strange to him and how empty would sound the flat, stale and profitless words heard in the average pulpit from week to week. And were such a one to speak on earth would he not speak of God? Would he not charm and fascinate his hearers with rapturous descriptions of the Godhead? And after hearing him could we ever again consent to listen to anything less than theology, the doctrine of God? Would we not thereafter demand of those who would presume to teach us that they speak to us from the mount of divine vision or remain silent altogether?” (p. 71).

2010-03-20T18:13:00.000-04:00

My church preaches a form of salvation known generally as "decisional" regeneration. Church leadership believes men have the power and ability in and of themselves to choose, or not, to "accept" Christ as savior.

I have believed for several years now, after much study, this form of belief is flawed in that it does not recognize the Biblical declaration that mankind when born are born "dead in trespasses and sins." To my mind this statement from Scripture is clear, unambiguous, and leaves no wiggle room for the concept of an autonomous free will. My argument is that we choose all kinds of things but those choices are limited by the nature with which we are born and that nature is fallen or spiritually dead. I don't often appeal to science in my arguments but in this case genetics has proven we are what we are as a result of the DNA inherited from our parents regressively back to the first pair of man and woman. Therefore, our natures are derivative of Adam and Eve (if you believe Scripture, as I do) and God said they died spiritually the day they ate of the fruit forbidden to them. Therefore, it is pretty difficult for dead people to choose to something of which they are unaware or even argue coherently from Scripture that they have this capacity.

Scripture teaches than unless and until God "regenerates" our fallen natures we cannot hear, understand or choose to respond to Him.

Because of my beliefs I have found, and am going to begin studying, the writings of Cornelius VanTil. He is the late Westminster Theological Seminary professor who wrote about and taught Presuppositional Apologetics. VanTil said:

This is, in the last analysis, the question as to what are one's ultimate presuppositions. When man became a sinner he made of himself instead of God the ultimate or final reference point. And it is precisely this presupposition, as it controls without exception all forms of non-Christian philosophy, that must be brought into question. ...In not challenging this basic presupposition with respect to himself as the final reference point in predication the natural man may accept the "theistic proofs" as fully valid. He may construct such proofs. He has constructed such proofs. But the god whose existence he proves to himself in this way is always a god that is always something other than the self-contained ontological trinity of Scripture. (Quote)

Thinking about the construction of a god who is not God led me to the conclusion that if we are of the belief that we do in fact choose from an autonomous free-will to follow Christ, we have by a faulty world view, subordinated God in our thinking to something that is subject to our whims. It is this world view that asks questions of God such as, in the case of tragedy, "why me?," or in the case of doubt, "how can I know for certain I am born again."

The Sovereign God in whom I believe will not accept, any form of these kinds of questions from me. The only thing I can find in Scripture that even remotely relates to my questioning God are the verses about the Clay's inability to question the Potter. So, I enjoy His presence and rest in the knowledge that there is indeed a life after human death and I am "elected" to be in Heaven with Him and not in Hell when my time here is up.

I don't have to remember anything about "dates of salvation," or "dates of Baptism," all I have to remember while able, is that even if Alzheimer's eventually eats my brain I am still secure and safe in the Palm of the Saviors hand. If anything should make those who believe a walk down the aisle and a memory jogger written in the front of a Bible is of little comfort if the mind is gone, it should be that most horrible of brain-eating diseases Alzheimer's.

The good news of the Bible, (the Gospel) is that Christ will care for those the Father has given Him no matter what happens.

Tozer Quotes

2010-03-20T12:36:00.000-04:00

Quote A.W. Tozer, "Faith Beyond Reason"

We begin with an explosive text, teaching as it does about a mysterious, invisible birth—a mystic birth. Here is how it reads:

He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. (John 1:11-13)

Such a text cannot be properly handled without getting into areas that some may consider radical. It cannot be handled without considering the fact that there are many people in the world who are God's creation but not God's children.

It cannot be handled without an admission that we do truly believe in the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. (Stay with me and see what the Word of God says about these concepts!)

It cannot be handled without considering the refusal of many "believing Christians" to accept the terms of true discipleship—the willingness to turn our backs on everything worldly for Jesus' sake.

It cannot be handled without discussing the fact that receiving Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord must be an aggressive act of the total personality and not a passive "acceptance" that makes a door-to-door salesman of the Savior.

And it certainly cannot be handled without a warning that evangelical Christianity is on a deadend street if it is going to continue to accept religious activity as a legitimate proof of spirituality.

In this text God informs us about certain people being born. That is significant. God has stepped out of His way to talk about certain persons being born, and we know that He never does anything without purpose. Everything He does is alive, meaningful and brilliantly significant. Why should the great God Almighty, who rounded the earth in the hollow of His hand, who set the sun shining in the heavens and flung the stars to the farthest corner of the night—why should this God take important lines in the Bible record to talk about people being born?

Quote #2,

Why should believing Christians want everything pre-cooked, predigested, sliced and salted and expect that God must come and hold the food to their baby lips while they pound the table and splash? And we think that is Christianity! It is not. Such a degenerate, illegitimate breed have no right to be called Christians.

Those who insist that the Lord God humor them, letting them continue on as they are and still say in the end, "Come, faithful servants," are fools. Someone needs to tell them so now!

—Faith Beyond Reason

Peter Enns on the Ancients

2010-03-19T17:43:00.000-04:00

"A literal understanding of Genesis from an ancient mind frame would not necessarily be the same as what we now think of as a literal reading—where everything corresponds to reality in a one to one fashion."

"Ancients were much more accepting of the language of metaphor and in many cases, expected it. This was the way that complex ideas were often transmitted in terms that people could understand."

"In contrast, modern evangelicals carry very modern assumptions about reality that can be in conflict with the ancient (and therefore metaphorical) way of telling a story. Moderns presume that good communication will be literalistic and accurate and since metaphor departs from linear history and communicates things using imagery, misunderstandings can occur."

From the BioLogos Foundation

Scripture has meaning

2010-03-19T17:22:00.000-04:00

The Pyromaniac in Chief has come up with a novel idea:

Remember: Scripture meant one thing before you were born, means the same now, and will mean the same, should you die.

Preach that meaning.

Peggy Rosenthal wrote a book a long time ago declaring that "words have meaning." Richard Weaver wrote one declaring "ideas have consequences." Now Dan Phillips declares "Scripture has meaning."

I think these learned folks are trying to tell us something.

The Missing Gospel

2010-03-17T17:00:00.000-04:00

Apprising Ministries posted this video and somehow I missed it. The link to the Apprising Ministries page is in my links list, but just in case here is the direct link to this video.

Predicated on much I have been hearing lately from various sources I thought this message would help educate some folks who seem to be losing sight of the task of Christian leadership.

The Sabbath

2010-03-17T10:01:00.001-04:00

Recently we had a guest Evangelist speak at our church. This gentleman is of the "old school" which taught that getting people emotionally involved in what was being said required various body and vocal manipulations to insure his audience did not go to sleep. He exhibited an array of gestures, some of which were so studiously applied they distracted from anything he could have said.

Apparently however, his style worked. I listened to what he had to say. What I remember is his closing remark that he was shortening his harrangue (he chewed us out for complaining, which could only be a result of "insider" information - some call it gossip) because he was hungry and wanted to get to Max and Erma's.

This was spoken on a Sunday Evening to an audience which in this day and age can be assumed to be Christians only. Contrary to popular "christian" belief, lost people are not breaking down the doors "seeking" this Jesus we talk about.

Anyway, the thought struck me: If this gentleman is such a gung-ho Christian why does he insist the folks at Max and Erma's break the Sabbath to wait on him and feed his ego as well as his stomach? Wouldn't the best example, for a Christian to show a fallen world on the Sabbath, be the example of absolute resting from all non-essential activities? I wonder if the wait-person, dishwasher and cook at Max and Erma's might be attracted to a religion which actually believes no one should work on a Sunday?

I'm just sayin'. But, lest you think me overly picky, here's what Spurgeon said on the subject in his Cathecism:

"Question 51

How is the Sabbath to be sanctified?

Answer 51

The Sabbath is to be sanctified by a holy resting all that day, even from such worldly employments and recreations as are lawful on other days, (Leviticus 23:3) and spending the whole time in the public and private exercises of God's worship, (Psalms 92:1,2; Isaiah 58:13,14) except so much as is taken up in the works of necessity and mercy. (Matthew 12:11,12)

Chew on that Mr. Evangelist the next time you preach on how hungry you are. And, on whom you are going to demand break the Sabbath to feed you.

Intellectual Sobriety

2010-03-17T09:17:00.000-04:00

This morning I was relistening to one of my teachers, Doug Groothuis, professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary when I heard him say, "...intellectual sloth and intellectual sobriety."

I thought what a potent phrase that is. Often when I talk to people about Christ or Christianity I hear them say things, which have made me wonder if they were sober. Leave it to the teacher to express the idea so succinctly. I guess that's why we have teachers, isn't it?

Doug says this about 41 minutes into this video in the Q & A portion. The entire video, along with the video for Part 1, is well worth the time it will cost to watch. I recommend it to anyone who might read this.

Understanding Derivatives

2010-03-16T18:51:00.000-04:00

A friend sent this to me but I have no idea who wrote it. It is funny so I thought I would share.

Subject: How to Understand Derivatives

A rather simplified explanation of what has happened to the American economy.
(Easily Understandable Explanation of Derivative Markets )

Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit . She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar. To solve this problem, she comes up with new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later. She keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans).

Word gets around about Heidi's "drink now, pay later" marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi's bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in Detroit.

By providing her customers' freedom from immediate payment demands, Heidi gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages. Consequently, Heidi's gross sales volume increases massively. A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognizes that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Heidi's borrowing limit. He sees no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of the unemployed alcoholics as collateral.

At the bank's corporate headquarters, expert traders figure a way to make huge commissions, and transform these customer loans into DRINKBONDS, ALKIBONDS and PUKEBONDS. These securities are then bundled and traded on international security markets. Naive investors don't really understand that the securities being sold to them as AAA secured bonds are really the debts of unemployed alcoholics. Nevertheless, the bond prices continuously climb, and the securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of the nation's leading brokerage houses.

One day, even though the bond prices are still climbing, a risk manager at the original local bank decides that the time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the drinkers at Heidi's bar. He so informs Heidi.
Heidi then demands payment from her alcoholic patrons, but being unemployed
alcoholics they cannot pay back their drinking debts. Since, Heidi cannot fulfill her loan obligations she is forced into bankruptcy. The bar closes and the eleven employees lose their jobs.

Overnight, DRINKBONDS, ALKIBONDS and PUKEBONDS drop in price by 90%. The collapsed bond asset value destroys the banks liquidity and prevents it from
issuing new loans, thus freezing credit and economic activity in the community.

The suppliers of Heidi's bar had granted her generous payment extensions and had invested their firms' pension funds in the various BOND securities. They find they are now faced with having to write off her bad debt and with losing over 90% of the presumed value of the bonds. Her wine supplier also claims bankruptcy, closing the doors on a family business that had endured for three generations, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately closes the local plant and lays off 150 workers.

Fortunately though, the bank, the brokerage houses and their respective executives are saved and bailed out by a multi-billion dollar no-strings attached cash infusion from their cronies in Government. The funds required for this bailout are obtained by new taxes levied on employed, middle-class, non-drinkers who have never been in Heidi's bar.

Now, do you understand?

(You probably already did).

Reality Catches Up

2010-03-10T06:31:00.000-05:00

Greece is in trouble. America is in trouble. Greece is just a few years ahead of us in being forced to actually begin living in the real world. Here's what the Washington Post says about the two:

To pull Greece back from the edge, Papandreou has promised to cut the deficit to 3 percent of GDP by 2012. For the U.S. government to make an equivalent cut, it would have to shut down the Pentagon and a few other agencies: the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Health and Human Services, Energy, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, the Interior, Justice, Labor, State, Transportation, the Treasury, and Veterans Affairs, plus the Environmental Protection Agency and NASA — and even then we'd come up a few dollars short.

I wonder if we will awaken to the fact that prosperity is not achieved by spending? Probably not.

HT Gene Veith

Al Mohler Speaks

2010-03-09T19:38:00.000-05:00

I got this quote from the Gairney Bridge blog. It's link is on the right in my links list. Mohler is a very thoughtful, insightful, man who often says what I would like to say but can't. I probably say too much as it is. Anyway, I wish I had written this:

In many churches, there is almost no public reading of the Word of God. Worship is filled with music, but congregations seem disinterested in listening to the reading of the Bible. We are called to sing in worship, but the congregation cannot live only on the portions of Scripture that are woven into songs and hymns. Christians need the ministry of the Word as the Bible is read before the congregation and God’s people — young and old, rich and poor, married and unmarried, sick and well — hear it together. The sermon is to consist of the exposition of the Word of God, powerfully and faithfully read, explained, and applied. It is not enough that the sermon take a biblical text as its starting point.

How can so many of today’s churches demonstrate what can only be described as an impatience with the Word of God? The biblical formula is clear — the neglect of the Word can only lead to disaster, disobedience, and death. God rescues his church from error, preserves his church in truth, and propels his church in witness only by his Word — not by congregational self-study.

In the end, an impatience with the Word of God can be explained only by an impatience with God. We — both individually and congregationally — neglect God’s Word to our own ruin.

As Jesus himself declared, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

The entire article can be found here. It should be read by every one who is concerned about his/her Church and its practices.

Piper on Regeneration

2010-03-07T06:15:00.001-05:00

This is clear enough. Nothing here about "decisions," "altar calls," "choosing," "accepting Christ as personal saviour," etc. Just the plain gospel. Anyone can understand it. Boiled down it means God does everything - we do nothing. Clip #1 below is on how "regeneration" happens, the one below is on why it happens.

Calvin Quote

2010-03-04T06:09:00.000-05:00

Ambition is fine if properly constrained. Calvin understood this fact and commented on it. Although he didn't call it "ambition" there is no other name for it. I know some Christians who could learn much from reading this quote:

No single mortal can be sufficient to do everything however many and various may be the endowments wherein he excels. Let then God’s servants learn to measure carefully their powers, lest they should wear out by ambitiously embracing too many occupations. For this propensity to engage in too many things is a very common malady and numbers are so carried along by it as not to be easily restrained. Calvin on Exodus 18:15ff

Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones

2010-03-01T10:57:00.000-05:00

"The mind must be struck first."

Modern day inquisition

2010-03-01T07:51:00.000-05:00

Voddie Baucham says:

2010-02-26T17:30:00.002-05:00

God has designed your family—not the youth group, not the children’s ministry, not the Christian school, but your family—as the principle discipling agent in your children’s lives.

Todd Friel Interviews Paul Washer

2010-02-25T06:59:00.000-05:00

Not many preachers want to hear this

Am I The Center of The Universe?

2010-02-24T06:33:00.000-05:00

Probably not.

HT: The Avenue

I stole this entire post

2010-02-23T10:10:00.000-05:00

I'm ordering another book today. The link for you to order is at the bottom of this post. I don't know if this is legal (probably not) but I'm posting an entire post I stole from The Discerning Reader. It is a review of the book I'm ordering. Tim Challies wrote the review, his blog is here. If the book is even close to what you will read below it will prove to be one of the best purchases I have made in a long time.

The Trellis and the Vine is a metaphor Colin Marshall and Tony Payne use to introduce a mind-shift in ministry that they insist will change everything. That is no small claim. A trellis, of course, is a structure that is used to support, to hold up, a vine. In this metaphor the trellis refers to the administrative work within a church, those tasks that, though important, are not actually directly related to discipling people. Vine work, on the other hand, is those tasks of working with the vine, drawing people into the kingdom through evangelism and then training them to grow in their knowledge of God and their obedience to him. As the authors say, "The basic work of any Christian ministry is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ in the power of God’s Spirit, and to see people converted, changed and grow to maturity in that gospel."

The problem, though, is that trellis work tends to take over from vine work. Perhaps it’s because trellis work is easier and less threatening; perhaps the trellis work looks more impressive. But for one reason or another, many Christians, and pastors in particular, soon find themselves consumed with trellis work, leaving them little time and attention for the vine. "Whatever the reason, there is no doubt that in many churches, maintaining and improving the trellis constantly takes over from tending the vine."

What Marshall and Payne suggest in this book is that most Christian churches need to undergo a radical re-evaluation of what Christian ministry really is. They need to go back to the very basics to understand the aims and goals of ministry, to learn how it proceeds and to see afresh the part we play in it. The authors argue that structures don’t grow ministry any more than trellises grow vines, and that most churches need to make a conscious shift—away from erecting and maintaining structures, and towards growing people who are disciple-making disciples of Christ.

They offer a list of eleven changes of mindset that may be necessary for churches: from running programs to building people; from running events to training people; from using people to growing people; from filling gaps to training new workers; from solving problems to helping people make progress; from clinging to ordained ministry to developing team leadership; from focusing on church polity to forging ministry partnerships; from relying on training institutions to establishing local training; from focusing on immediate pressures to aiming for long-term expansion; from engaging in management to engaging in ministry; from seeking church growth to desiring gospel growth.

Having done this, they show that every Christian is called to be a vine worker. This is not the exclusive domain of pastors or elders, but is the call of God upon all believers: At the most basic level, the Bible says that Jesus doesn’t have two classes of disciple: those who abandon their lives to his service and those who don’t. The call to discipleship is the same for all.

The basic agenda for all disciples is to be a disciple-maker. This does not point us simply to evangelism, but also to assisting other Christians grow in holiness. Whether evangelizing or discipling (or “training” as they prefer), the basic call of the Christian is to speak God’s Word to others. Therefore every Christian is an evangelist and every Christian is a minister. Marshall and Payne point to the concept of “gospel partnership” which they say is the normal Christian life. It means standing together united in the gospel, determined to live as citizens of heaven in the midst of our corrupt generation, longing and striving to see the gospel be defended and proclaimed, and bravely copping the conflict, struggle and persecution that inevitably follow.

Meanwhile, the heart of training “is not to impart a skill, but to impart sound doctrine.” We are to train one another to reject false doctrine, and to conform hearts and lives to sound doctrine. "Good biblical training results in a godly life based on sound, health-giving teaching."

Such shifts in mindset will necessary impact just about every other aspect of church life, extending even to the preaching of the Word and the call of some Christians into full-time service for the gospel. The authors cover such topics within the book, even going so far as to (dangerously and maybe a little mischievously) title a chapter “Why Sunday sermons are necessary but not sufficient.”

The Trellis and the Vine, a book I am sure I will read again very soon, helped me to see, more clearly than ever I think, how much of what passes for ministry within a church is really “mere” trellis work. Of course such work is important but it can so easily taken on undue prominence and become the heart of the church’s work. Meanwhile, the vine, the people, suffer neglect. In the past I have been involved in “trellis” churches and can attest to the grave danger they pose. This book has given me so much to think about, so much to reflect upon.

Mark Dever declared The Trellis and the Vine “the best book I’ve read on the nature of church ministry.” That is no small praise from a man who has dedicated much of his life’s work to that very subject. I am inclined to agree with Dever (who is infinitely more qualified than I am to make such an assessment). This is a very good book and one that offers vast amounts of godly, biblical wisdom. I give it my highest recommendation and would be thrilled to see it in the hands of every pastor and church leader.

Please click to buy it new from WTSBooks.